Tradition's Destruction: On the Library of Alexandria Author(s): Daniel Heller-Roazen Source: October, Vol. 100, Obsolescence (Spring, 2002), pp. 133-153 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779096 Accessed: 05/08/2009 07:35 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. 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The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October. http://www.jstor.org Tradition's Destruction: On the of Alexandria Library DANIEL HELLER-ROAZEN RecapitulatinDg isasters "I shall not recapitulate the disasters of the Alexandrian library," Edward Gibbon writes in the fifty-firstc hapter of TheH istoryo f theD eclinea nd Fall of theR oman Empire.1T he historian resolves, with these words, to remain silent about that which distinguishes the Alexandrian library above all else: its "disasters."B ut it would be rash to conclude that Gibbon, therefore, simply fails to address the calamities that he so clearly avoids. With the characteristicallyd ouble gesture of a disavowal,h e at once invokes and distances them. His discussion of the institution and posterity of the library cannot but call to mind the destructions that he passes over in silence; it frames, without recounting, the very "disasters"t hat it will not "recapitulate." Gibbon's words, in this way, register the singular status that the Library of Alexandria still occupies today: that of an institution in which the conservation and the destruction of tradition can hardly be told apart, an archive that, in a ver- tiginous movement of self-abolition, threatens to coincide entirely with its own destruction. The pages that follow consider the structure and sense of this singular archive. The form they take is less that of the modern scholarly article, which aims at the formulation and demonstration of a novel argument, than that of the "mem- ory notices," "textual remarks," and "commentaries" ( rropJvpajaTao)f antiquity, which sought to recall and explicate certain decisive aspects of the texts that pre- ceded them.2 In this case, the remarks and commentaries, which refer to a corpus of classical and late ancient works that is at once literary, historiographical, scien- tific, and philosophical, recall precisely that which Gibbon excluded from his monumental History:t he many "disasters"t hat the Library of Alexandria, in its life and afterlife, simultaneously remedied, incited, and suffered. 1. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,e d. David Womersely (London: Allen Lane [The Penguin Press], 1994), vol. 5-6, p. 285. 2. On the 6rropvVcaTa, see Franz Bomer, "Der Commentarius: Zur Vorgeschichte und liter- arischen Form der Schriften Caesars," Hermes8 1 (1953), pp. 210-50, esp. pp. 215-26; Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship:F rom the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 48-49. OCTOBER1 00, Spring2 002, pp. 133-153. ? 2002 OctobeMr agazine,L td. and MassachusettIsn stituteo f Technology. The Cage of the Muses Ancient visitors to Alexandria often remarked that it bore the form of a chlamys, the mantle worn by Macedonian and Thessalian hunters and soldiers and, later, Greek and Roman warriors.3 Like the chlamys, whose length was double its width, the city founded by Alexander in 331 B.C. was roughly rectangular in shape, bordered by the Mediterranean to the north and by Lake Mareotis to the south. Any reconstruction of the topography of the city must rely principally on Strabo, who arrived in Egypt on a military campaign in the entourage of Prefect Aulius Gallus in 24 B.C., remaining in Alexandria, as he tells us, for "a long time," before describing the Ptolemaic center in detail in the seventeenth book of his Geography.4 The "long sides" of Alexandria, Strabo explains, "are those that are bathed by the two waters, having a diameter of about thirty stadia, and the short sides are the isthmuses, each being seven or eight stadia wide and pinched in on one side by the sea and on the other by the lake."5 Alongside the Great Harbour, which stretched across the north- eastern coast from the promontory of Lochias to the causeway thatjoined the city to the island of Pharos, lay the region Strabo calls "the Palaces" (T p3aoIXEioa),w hich acquired the name "Brucheion" in Roman times. Composing a third or fourth of the ancient city, this area housed the royal grounds and gardens as well as the offices of government and public institutions.6 It was also home to the most celebrated of all 3. Plutarch, Alexander,5 -11; Strabo, GeographyX, VII, 1, 8. 4. P. M. Fraser reckons Strabo's stay in Alexandria to have lasted four years. See Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), vol. 2, pp. 12-13, n. 23. 5. XVII, 1, 8; the text cited here is that of The Geographyo f Strabo,t rans. Horace LeonardJones, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932), p. 33. 6. Strabo, XVII, 1, 8. On Strabo's account and the topography of the city, see Fraser, Ptolemaic Map of ancientA lexandriaa t the timea t which it becamea Roman colony. Tradition's Destruction: On the Library of Alexandria 135 Alexandrian inventions, the Ptolemaic MouoEiov, "shrine of the Muses," or "Museum," which constituted the largest center of learning in the ancient world. Among classical sources there exist two accounts of the foundation of the Ptolemaic Museum. One tradition, whose earliest source lies in the Letter to Philocrates of the second century B.C.,7 identifies it as the creation of the second Ptolemaic monarch, Ptolemy Philadephus, who ruled in Alexandria from 285 to 246 B.c.8 This explanation of the origin of the Museum can be found again in a number of later writers, such as Philo, Josephus, Athenaeus, Epiphanius, and the Byzantine scholiast Tzetzes.9 A second tradition instead attributes the foundation of the Museum to Ptolemy Soter, "the first of the Macedonians to establish the wealth of Egypt," as Tacitus calls him.10 The sole document supporting this tradition dates from the second century A.D., when Irenaeus offers the following account of the institution of the library within the Alexandrian Museum: "Ptolemy the song of Lagos [that is, Ptolemy I] had the ambition to equip the library established by him in Alexandria with the writings of all men as far as they were worth serious attention."1l Since the classical authors who attribute the foundation of the Museum to Ptolemy Philadephus err in their accounts of the administrative history of Alexandria, relating that the second Ptolemaic king was counseled by a scholar who in fact had been exiled at the start of the king's reign, it is generally accepted today that Ireneaus's account is the most probable, and that the fabled "shrine of the Muses" of Alexandria dates back to the time of its first ruler after the death of Alexander, at the very beginning of the third century B.C.12 Strabo devotes two sentences to the workings of the Museum in his account of Alexandria, and they furnish us with the fullest and most detailed account of its nature and organization. "The Museum," he writes, "is a part of the Palaces," has a walkway [rrEpirrTaTov], an arcade [[HE[Spav], and a large house, in which there is the eating hall for the men of learning [piAoX6oycov 6vSp&v] who share the Museum. They form a community with property in Alexandria,v ol. I, "Foundation and Topography," pp. 3-37. 7. On the Letter,s ee its most recent English edition, in which it appears as Aristeast o Philocrates (Lettero f Aristeas),e d. and trans. Moses Hadas (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951). Fraser (Ptolemaic Alexandria, vol. I, p. 696) dates the letter "as early as about 160 BC"; for Fraser's reasoning, see Ptolemaic Alexandria, II, pp. 970-72, n. 121. 8. Aristeas to Philocrates,9 -10, apud Eusebius PraeparatioE vangelica, VIII, 1. It is worth observing, however, that unlike many later texts clearly founded on it, the Letterd iscusses not the Museum but solely the Alexandrian Library. 9. See Mostafa El-Abbadi, The Life and Fate of the AncientL ibraryo f Alexandria( Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1990), p. 79. 10. Tacitus, Histories,I V, 831. 11. Irenaeus, AdversusH aeresesI, II, 21, 2, apud Eusebius, HistoriaE cclesiasticav, ol. 8, 11-15. 12. On the inconsistency in the Lettero f Philocratess, ee Hades's editorial remarks to the relevant pas- sage (Aristeas to Philocrates,p p. 96-97); on the time of the foundation of the Museum, see Fraser (PtolemaicA lexandria,v ol. 1, pp. 321-22), who indicates that the Letter'si dentification of Demetrius of Phaleron as the first Librarian of the Museum is at odds with its ascription of the foundation of the Museum to Ptolemy II, since Demetrius, the advisor of Ptolemy I, was immediately exiled upon Philadephus's rise to the throne. 136 OCTOBER common and a priest in charge of the Museum, who was formerly appoint- ed by the kings but is now appointed by Caesar.13 Strabo's few lines leave no doubt that the Museum was modeled, in its form and func- tion, on the two great centers of learning of classical Athens, the Platonic Academy and the Aristotelian Lyceum.14D emetrius of Phaleron, whom classical authors credit with the establishment of the royal library,15h ad been a pupil in the Aristotelian Academy before ruling as tyrant of Athens for ten years, being expelled in 307 B.C., and arriving in Egypt some ten years later; and the structure of the "shrine to the Muses" he is thought to have instituted under Ptolemy Soter bears the traces of the Attic center at which he studied. We know from Diogenes Laertius that the Academy contained a "shrine to the Muses" (pouoElov) and, like the Alexandrian Museum, had "arcades" (,E'bpacq) in addition to the famous "walkway"( rEpirraTov) from which the Peripatetic school drew its name.16 And the rules of the Lyceum, as we learn from Theophrastius's will, stipulated that its members were to "not to alienate their property or devote it to their private use," but maintain their institution as a "temple,"j ust as the Alexandrian Museum, in Strabo's account, housed a "community with property in common and a priest,"17b ecoming a secular institution only long after its founding, at the time of the Roman Empire.18C ertain questions about the Ptolemaic Museum, to be sure, remain. Were there private quarters, or (as one might infer from Strabo's term for their "community,"o uvoSoq) did the scholars admit no individual property?W as there teaching in the Museum and, if there was, what was its form, and where did it take place? The classical sources suggest no clear answers. More can be said about the activity and achievement of the "men of learn- ing" (cpiXAoX6oy&v vSpcov)w ho dwelt and worked in the Museum. Their profession could not be better expressed than by the epithet that Strabo attributes to Philitas of Cos, perhaps the first great Hellenistic literary figure: "at once poet and critic" (rro01qrq acpa K<a KpITIKOc).19 They were not only dedicated to the composition of literary works; at the same time, they also formulated the principles and practices of the first textual criticism in the West. Their scholarship took the form of a mas- sive project aimed at the conservation and, more radically, the "emendation" and "rectification" (Siop0ouv) of the works of the classical Greek authors: it is here that the many forms of textual criticism still employed by modern literary and historical 13. Strabo, GeographyX, VII, 1, 8. Translation modified. See Gustav Parthey's comments on this passage in Das alexandrinischMe useum( Berlin: Nicolaische Buchhandlung, 1838), pp. 51-56. 14. See El-Abbadi'sh elpful remarks, TheL ifea nd Fateo f theA ncientL ibraryo fA lexandriap, p. 84-90. 15. On Demetrius, see the Aristeast o Philocratesp, p. 9-10; Plut., Apothegmso f Kings and Generals1, 89; Aelian, VariaH istoria,I II, 17; and Diogenes Laertius,V . 77-80, where a list of Demetrius's works is given. 16. See the account of Polemon, who ran the Academy from 314 to ca. 276 B.C., in Diogenes Laertius, IV, 19: "He would withdraw from society, confining himself to the garden of the Academy; his scholars remained in small cells nearby, living close to the shrine of the Muses [pOUOETov] and the arcades [?E,6epc]." 17. Diogenes Laertius,V , 51-52. 18. As Fraser remarks, PtolemaicA lexandriav, ol. 1, p. 313. 19. Strabo, GeographyX,I V, 657. Tradition'sD estruction:O n theL ibraryo f Alexandria 137 scholarship, from the purification of diction to the practice of marginal annota- tion and the division and ordering of metrical sequences, are invented and refined.20 The history of the Alexandrian Museum may well be regarded as the history of the development of classical scholarship as such, from the time of its first "learned man," Zenodotus of Ephesus (ca. 285 to ca. 270 B.c.), who was not only an early lexicographer of literary Greek but also the first critical editor of Homer, to that of its last great figure, Aristophanes of Byzantium (ca. 204 to 189 B.C.), who has been called the "founder of Greek punctuation"21 and is largely responsible for the fundamental definition of the metrical and prosodic units of poetry (rrapaypa(poc, OTpocpq, avTioTpo<poq, and arrob6c) accepted by all subse- quent readers of classical literature.22 Not all the contemporaries of the Museum appreciated the activity that transpired behind its walls. In two of the hexameters of his Silloi, Timon of Phlius, a student of Pyrrhon the Skeptic who lived in the third century B.C., expressed a view of the institution that was hardly flattering: IipAiaKoi XapaKiTTal rrTEipITa sqplovTEq MoUo0Eov ?v TOaxCgJO. Many are feeding in populous Egypt, scribblers on papyrus, incessantly wrangling in the bird-cage of the Muses.23 It is difficult, however, not to read Phlius's reference to the "scribblers"( XapaKiTalo) f the Museum (which archly alludes to the Greek term for the pen behind which rare birds were kept, X&pa,)24a s a document of the prominence and importance of the very institution it mocks. After the "scribbles"o f the many birds "feeding in Egypt," classical letters would never be the same. Works would henceforth be produced and reproduced, throughout the Greek and Roman world, in the form they acquired in Alexandria: introduced by a summary statement (6uro0eois)d escribing their content, accompanied by critical marginal signs (oqpcral) explaining obscure or doubtful pas- sages, their lines (KcoAa), if they were in verse, clearly separated and numbered, the papyrus scrolls on which they were copied bearing the thin strip of parchment (oiAupof3;l, ater called indexo r titulus by the Romans) that recorded their name and author.25T he "cage of the Muses"w ould not leave even that most minimal element 20. See Pfeiffer, Historyo f ClassicalS cholarshipp, p. 87-209. On 6iopOoGva nd ilopO6wairion particular, see ibid., pp. 215-33. 21. Pfeiffer, Historyo f ClassicalS cholarshipp, . 179. 22. On Zenodotus, see "Zenodotus and His Contemporaries," Pfeiffer, Historyo f ClassicalS cholarship, pp. 105-22; on Aristophanes, see "Alexandrian Scholarship at Its Height: Aristophanes of Byzantium," in ibid., pp. 171-209. 23. Fr. 12 Diels (= 60 Wachsmuth);o n Timon's verses, see Pfeiffer,H istoryo f ClassicaSl cholarshipp,p . 97-98. 24. Luciano Canfora, La bibliotecas comparsa( Palermo: Sellerio Editore, 1998), p. 45. 25. See Giorgio Pasquali's incisive remarks on the importance of the Museum for classical letters in his entry "Biblioteca,"w hich appears in the Enciclopediai taliana di scienze,l etteree arti (Milan and Rome: Bestelti & Tumminelli, 1930), vol. 6, pp. 942-47. 138 OCTOBER of writing, the letter, intact: classical paleographers have observed that, during the age of the Museum, the Greek script underwent a series of radical alterations, deter- mining the form it would retain until long after the fall of the Roman Empire.26 TheC osmicL ibrary The treasure of the Museum, of course, was the Library. Its fame in the ancient world was such that when Athenaeus discussed Ptolemaic book collections in the second century A.D.,h e could dismiss the subject of the Library itself, asking: "What reason is there for me even to speak of the number of books, the establish- ment of libraries, and the collection in the Museum, considering how they are in the memories of everyone [rT&oi TOUTO)V OVT7)V KOQT pVpjClvr]?"27 It is precisely on these matters, however, that memory fails us today. The very question of the rela- tion of the Museum to its Library,w hich no account of either institution can avoid, remains difficult to resolve with any precision. It has been observed that, by virtue of "an unusual coincidence,"28 none of the classical texts that have been transmitted to us ever mentions the two Ptolemaic establishments at once. In the third century B.C., the poetry of Herodas, like that of Timon, alludes to the Museum, but not to the Library;29l ater, the Lettero f Aristeasd iscusses the formation of the Library in some detail, without ever naming the Museum itself; and when Strabo, in the passage we have examined, describes the scholarly center of Alexandria, he omits any reference to its Library. The Greek and Latin terms for "library"( pipXioO0Kq, bibliotheca) are of little assistance in these matters, for they are defined by classical and late ancient sources as signifying simply "repository of books" (nam p31pAiloeKqr librorum0 rKq repositoi nterpretaturw, e read in the Etymologiaeo f Isidore of Seville):30 "shelf,"" box," or "cupboard,"a s well as "archive"o r "papyrus-rollc ollection" could translate the ambiguous term invoked by the works that refer to the Alexandrian holdings.31 It is impossible, for these reasons, to establish whether the Library constituted a building of its own and, if it did, whether it was physically separated from the Museum; but the lack of any explicit ancient identification of the "reposi- tory of books," as distinct from the "shrine of the Muses," suggests that the Library most probably coincided, to a greater or lesser degree, with the Museum itself.32 26. See C. H. Roberts, GreekL iteraryH ands: 350 B.C.-A.D. 400 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), xv; see diagrams 1-5. 27. Athenaeus, V, 203 E. 28. El-Abbadi, TheL ife and Fate of theA ncientL ibraryo f Alexandria,p . 90. 29. Herodas, Mimes, I, vv. 26-33. 30. Isidore, Etymologiaes ive Originum,V I, 3, 1. 31. On the term and concept of "library" in Greek and Roman antiquity, see the Handbuch der Bibliothekswissenschafetd, . Georg Leyh, vol. 3: Geschichted er Bibliotheken( Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1955), pt. 1, ch. 2: Carl Wendel and Willi Gober, "Das Griechisch-R6mische Altertum," esp. pp. 52-24; see also Canfora, who recalls that the primary meaning of 3IPXXIO06fKirs simply "shelf" (La biblioteca scomparsap, . 86). 32. Fraser, PtolemaicA lexandria,v ol. 1, p. 324. The classical sources provide only , i the most cursoryI t acmco unts of t.h e Library.33The auctort o whom we must turn for a detailed account of the nte Alexandrian institution is neither. I i:e Hellenistic nor Roman but, rather, Byzantine, the twelfth-century com- i i mentator and scholiast Johannes .... Tzetzes, whom the great philologist Richard Bentley, anticipating the judgment of many modern scholars, once dubbed "a Man of much ratm - t bling Learning."34 Two pages of Tztetzes's Prooemium, his introduction i to the study of Aristophanes, contain the fullest known discussion of the operation of the Library, which, although immediately based on late ancient grammatical treatises and lit- Ei erary digests, is thought to reach back "ultimately to some Alexandrian X s sources of the Ptolemaic period."35 The text itself has been transmitted to us in three Greek editions, a Humanist translation, and in the form of a Latin scholium to Plautus, attributed to a certain "Caecius,"w hich was discovered in the first half of the nineteenth century.36T he versions of the text, broadly speaking, concur in all important matters. In each case, the description of the Library opens with an account of the scholarly activity without which it would not have been imaginable. "Under the royal patronage of Ptolemy Philadephus," Tzetzes tells us, "Alexander of Aetolia edited [llcp0ewoav] the books of tragedy, Lycophron of Chalcis those of comedy, and Zenodotus of Ephesus those of Homer and the other poets."37T he work of "editing" (the verb to which Tzetzes has recourse, biopOoUv, indicates at once textual comparison, rec- tification, and edition) thus lay at the foundation of the Alexandrian collection; the Ptolemaic archive collected above all restored works, texts assembled for the first time, far from the time and place of their production, in their totality and purity. At this stage of its development, the acquisition and ordering of the books 33. See the fragments assembled by Friedrich Schmidt, Die Pinakes des Kallimachos( Berlin: Emil Ebering, 1922), pp. 8-15. Schmidt fails to record the passage from Irenaeus cited above, which should also be considered in this context: Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, III, 21, 2, apud Eusebius, Historia EcclesiasticaV, , 8, 11-15. 34. Dr. RichardB entley'sD issertations upon the Epistles of Phalaris, ThemistoclesS, ocrates,E uripides,a nd Upont heF ableso f AEsope, d. Wilhelm Wagner (Berlin: S. Calvary and Col, 1874), p. 85. 35. Fraser, PtolemaicA lexandria,v ol. 1, p. 321; see Fraser's note on this subject, II, p. 474, n. 108. 36. The Greek texts are published in Georg Kaibel's ComicorumG raecorumF ragmenta,a uctoreU dalrico de Williamowitz-Moellendocrofl lectae t edita, vol. 1 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1899), pp. 17-34; an English trans- lations and a commentary, which is not always reliable, may be found in Edward Alexander Parsons, TheA lexandrianL ibrary:G loryo f the Hellenic World( New York:E lsevier Press, 1952), pp. 106-21. 37. Kaibel, ComicorumG raecorumF ragmentav, ol. 1, 28, pp. 31-32. TheP apyrusp lant. FromF W Hall, A Companion to ClassicaTl exts (OxfordC: larendoPnr ess,1 913). 140 OCTOBER was therefore overseen by a director who was at once an editor of texts and a bibli- ographer of works, a "Librarian"w hom Tzetzes refers to as Pip3Aiocpuaol,i,t erally, "guardian of books" (a term that in Ptolemaic Egypt acquired the acceptation of "keeper of archives"38)a nd whom the tenth-century Byzantine lexicon Suda calls simply rrpooTaTqr, "director." The history of the Library, as Tzetzes presents it, is largely the tale of the succession of its directors, from Zenodotus, at the beginning of the third century B.C., to Aristarchus of Samothrace, who is thought to have resigned from his position in 145 B.C.39 In most cases, little is known of the librarians that does not concern the Alexandrian collection itself. Vitruvius left us the follow- ing portrait of Aristophanes of Byzantium, in which the life of the man can hardly be separated from that of his archive: "Everyd ay,"V itruvius writes, "he did nothing other than read and reread all the books of the Library,f or the whole day, examin- ing and reading through [perlegeret]h e order in which they were shelved."40 Tzetzes relates that the Alexandrian holdings were collected in two separate Libraries, one outside the Palace and the other within it.41E piphanius, a source from the fourth century A.D.,t ells us more: the first Library,h e writes, was situated in the Brucheion and was the larger and more important of the two; the "outer library"w as founded later, located in the temple of Serapis, and called the "daughter"( OuyaTqp) of the principal collection.42 According to Tzetzes, the "outer library" contained 42,800 papyrus rolls, which he simply calls "books" (Pip33ol)H. e is more precise in his description of the holdings of the royal collection, which, he reports, consisted of 400,000 "composite rolls" (ouppIyeKq)a nd 90,000 "single rolls" (aPilyET).4E3 verything, of course, depends on the sense of the bibliographical terms employed here. The most likely interpretation of the Hellenistic expressions is that the "composite"b ooks (ouppIyeTk)w ere rolls containing several works, while the "single" books (&pIyeKI) instead consisted of one work alone.44T ogether, the holdings of the two Alexandrian collections were to represent the entirety of the literary tradition, gathered, Tzetzes 38. See Fraser's comments on the Alexandrian nomenclature, PtolemaicA lexandria,v ol. 1, p. 322. 39. El-Abbadi, The Life and Fate of the Ancient Libraryo f Alexandria,p p. 93-94. In addition to the edi- tions of Tzetzes, an Oxyrhynchus papyrus (P. Ox. 1241) provides important information about the suc- cession of the Alexandrian librarians. 40. Vitruvius, De architectV, II, prooem. 8-9. 41. Kaibel, ComicorumG raecorumF ragmenta,P b, sec. 20, p. 19; Mb, sec. 29, p. 29. On ms. Ma, see Fraser, PtolemaicA lexandria,v ol. 2, pp. 477-78, n. 130. 42. Epiphanius, De mens. et pond., 166 B (12, 24ff. Dind), reproduced in Schmidt, Die Pinakes des Kallimachosp, p. 11-12. 43. Kaibel, ComicorumG raecorumF ragmenta,P b, section 20, p. 19; the corresponding passage in Mb (in ibid., section 29, p. 31) gives the same account. 44. See Fraser, PtolemaicA lexandria,v ol. 1, p. 329, who, following Birt (Das antike Buchwesen[ Leipzig: 1882], pp. 486-90), rejects the reading of the terms suggested by Friedrich Ritschl in his Die alexan- drinischenB ibliothekenu nter den erstenP tolemdernu nd die Sammlungd erH omerischenG edichted urchP isistratus nach Anleitung eines Plautinischen Scholions( Breslau: G. P. Aderholz, 1838), pp. 21-34. See also Luciano Canfora, "Le biblioteche ellenistiche," in Le bibliotechne el mondoa ntico e medievalee, d. Guglielmo Cavallo (Rome: Editori Laterza, 1989), pp. 5-24, esp. pp. 12-13. Cf. the remarks of Rudolf Blum, who follows the same interpretation, in Kallimachos:T he Alexandrian Librarya nd the Origins of Bibliographyt, rans. from the German by Hans H. Wellisch (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 107. Tradition' sD estruction:O n theL ibraryo f Alexandria 141 writes, "from everywhere" (&r ravTaxXoEuvb, iquet erraruma s we read in the anonymous Humanist translation)45f or the purposes of study and critical attention. The sources of the collection became, already in the ancient world, the subject of much discussion. Many of the works housed in the Alexandrian collections, to be sure, would have constituted reproductions of texts that would not have been diffi- cult to obtain during the centuries of its operation. But books also arrived in Alexandria by more circuitous routes. Galen, who was himself intimately familiar with the textual history and criticism of the Hippocratic corpus and who often com- mented on the Library,f urnishes us with two striking accounts of the procedures by which the Ptolemaic rulers and librarians acquired the works they wished to collect. Explaining how the copy of the Epidemicst hat once belonged to the physician Mnemon of Side came to be housed in Alexandria, Galen recounts that the Ptolemies issued an edict ordering all ships arriving at the port to be searched for books that might be aboard them. If any were found, they were to be immediately confiscated and copied; the originals were then to be added to the collection, while the duplicates were to be returned to the owners. Such books, Galen remarks, were marked as such in the Library,w here they bore a specific label: "from the ships"( iK rrTAoicv).46T he Ptolemaic acquisitiveness also turned, in a more dramatic case, against the state whose own production constituted the greatest part of its holdings. The Athenian authorities granted Ptolemy III permission to borrow the manu- scripts of the dramatic works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, to reproduce them in Alexandria; once transcribed in Egypt, the copies were then sent back to the Athenian state archives, while the originalsjoined the Ptolemaic collection.47 All of the sources, classical and postclassical, attribute the same aim to the Alexandrian accumulation of books: to constitute an archive in which the totality of literary works would be meticulously ordered and secured. The terms by which Greek and Roman authors explain the Ptolemaic project differ, but these are vari- ations on a theme; the purpose of the monumental collection, in each case, remains unchanged. "To collect... all the books in the world" (TO ouvayEv ... irrCaVTCTar KOTa TQV oiKOUpEvqv p1i1Aia),48e xplains the Lettero f Aristeas,t he oldest document that bears witness to the existence of the Library. The explanations offered by the later sources are, in some sense, only echoes: the Library was meant "to collect all the books of the inhabited world," writes Flavius Josephus, in the first century A.D.;49 it sought to constitute "a collection of all men's writings," aim- ing to "assemble the writings of all men," recountJustin and Irenaeus, a hundred years later; its creators wanted nothing else, affirms Saint Cyril ofJerusalem in the fourth century, than "to collect books that were in every place."50 45. In Schmidt, Die Pinakes des Kallimachosp, p. 9-10. 46. Comm.i n Hipp. Epidem.i ii (xvii a 606-7) (=Corpusm edicorumG raecorumv,o l. 10, 2, 1, pp. 78ff.). 47. In Hpp. de Natura Hominis I, 44-105 (=Corpusm edicorumG raecorumv,o l. 5, 9, 1, p. 55). 48. Aristeast o Philocratesp, . 9. 49. AntiquitatesJudaicaeX, II, 12, 14. 50. Adv. Haer., III, 21, 2.