A New History of Libraries and Books in

S.
JOHNSTONE
A New History of Libraries and Books

in the Hellenistic Period
Discarding the unreliable late evidence for the Library of Alexandria in the Hellenistic period, I
establish a new history of libraries and books on more secure primary sources. Beginning in the
second century bce at various places across the eastern Mediterranean, rich, powerful men began
to sponsor collections of books. These new public displays of aristocratic and royal munificence
(euergetism) so transcended earlier holdings of books—which had been small, vocational, and
private—that in an important sense they constitute the invention of the library. As political
institutions, these libraries depended on a revaluation of books, treating them as valuable
irrespective of their content, and in various domains people increasingly attended to books as
formal objects. Romans accelerated the pace and scope of this biblio-political revolution and
extended the revaluation of books, transformations which gave a deeply anachronistic imprint
to the frequently cited late stories about Hellenistic libraries.
Most scholars seem to recognize that the traditional story of the Library of
Alexandria in the Hellenistic period is bogus, but they can’t quite give it up.
Some unwittingly betray their unease with the evidence in the small qualifications
they attach to their narratives: “according to one source,” “whatever the truth
of these stories,” “if Galen is to be believed,” etc.1 Writers don’t typically add
When students in my seminar on “How-to Manuals and the History of Knowledge in Greco-Roman
Antiquity” challenged me to defend Bagnall’s article, that was the beginning of this study. I thank
them for their skepticism. Later, participants in the First Friday History Workshop here at Arizona
offered comments and encouragement. John Bauschatz, Alison Futrell, and Chris Van den Berg gave
me detailed responses. Mike Clover suggested some useful ideas. I thank the Classics Department at
the University of Texas for inviting me to talk and for their observations. I benefitted from the reports
of the two anonymous readers for Classical Antiquity, as well as Mark Griffith’s feedback. I thank
the many scholars who made this article possible. I translated everything unless noted otherwise.
1. I am not going to cite specific instances of the unjustified use of evidence. They are so
common that if I were to cite them all, they would flood my footnotes and useful references might
drown in the catalogue of hedges. But if I were to cite only selected examples, I might seem to
Classical Antiquity. Vol. 33, Issue 2, pp. 347–393. ISSN 0278-6656(p); 1067-8344 (e).
Copyright © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please
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DOI:10.1525/CA.2014.33.2.347.
348 classical antiquity Volume 33 / No. 2 / October 2014
such tells when they trust their sources, and indeed no one seems willing to take
responsibility for the proposition that, for example, Galen should be believed.
Others have followed the path of Roger Bagnall. More than a decade ago Bagnall
offered a devastating assault on the dubious anecdotes, astonishing numbers,
and unverifiable sources on which the received story of the Library2 depends.
Bagnall’s article, “Library of Dreams,” both consolidates and has canonized two
strategies. The first involves a paradoxical juxtaposition of the evidence with the
reality. Bagnall begins:
My title does not intend to suggest that the Alexandrian Library did not
exist, but it does point to what I regard as the unreal character of much
that has been said about it. The disparity between, on the one hand, the
grandeur and importance of this library, both in its reality in antiquity
and in its image both ancient and modern, and, on the other, our nearly
total ignorance about it, has been unbearable.3
Bagnall’s second move is to forego a positive narrative altogether. Thus he

concludes his article with a short list of “valid dreams”—that the Library inspired
scholars to rectify corrupt texts, supported attempts at systematic knowledge, and
animated scholars’ work for centuries—leaving the impression that a skeptical
treatment of the evidence leaves no possibility of a cohesive, sequential history.
Scholars in a recent volume on the history of ancient libraries tend to adopt these
strategies as well.4 I will argue, on the contrary, that the first is insufficiently
critical, that it is untenable to maintain a “reality” despite the absence of good
evidence.5 Indeed, attachment to this “reality” retains the traditional story in
vestigial form that unconsciously blocks better, alternative histories. So I will also
argue that the second move is insufficiently positive, that once you see past the
specter of the Library, the evidence does not scatter in fragments but forms a lucid
history. For the Hellenistic period the disparity between knowledge and reality is
an illusion; the Library had no greater importance than the good evidence shows,
and treating the evidence with rigorous skepticism and minimizing speculation
in fact opens up a compelling and coherent new history of the Library, of libraries,
and of books.
That history begins in the second century bce when at various places across the
eastern Mediterranean rich and powerful men first endowed collections of books.
These products of elite benefaction differed so much from earlier collections
of books—which had been small, vocational, and private—that in an important
discriminate arbitrarily. Although there are exceptions, the great majority of those who have written
about the Library use evidence in the ways I describe.
2. In what follows, I use a capital letter to designate the Library in Alexandria.
3. Bagnall 2002: 348.
4. König et al. 2013.
5. This would be a case of what Barthes (1986) diagnosed as the “reality effect,” treating the
inference from evidence as though it had a reality independent of that evidence.
johnstone: Libraries and Books in the Hellenistic Period 349
sense this constitutes the invention of the library, an institution which, whatever
its scholarly achievements, was essentially an object of aristocratic and royal
display and propaganda.6 Reconstructed on the basis of more reliable evidence,
the history of the Library of Alexandria takes its place as one strand in this
decentralized revolution happening from Athens to Babylon and in many places
in between. These libraries represent the political objectification of the book,
valuing of the form as opposed (or in addition) to the content, and during the late
classical and Hellenistic periods people increasingly attended to books as formal
objects in various ways. Romans, too, accelerated the innovation of libraries and
extended the revaluation of books. They developed an ethical discourse about the
proper relationship to books, diagnosed the compulsive attachment to books, or
bibliomania, and analyzed the ways in which the means of transmitting books
as objects—especially imperial predation and the market—might degrade their
content. These Roman transformations, it turns out, gave a deeply anachronistic
imprint to the frequently cited late stories about Hellenistic libraries. Taken
together, these two transformations in the Hellenistic period—collecting books
for political purposes and revaluing them based on their form—constitute a biblio-
political revolution.
My alternative history differs from the received story in two important ways.
First, because in the second century bce aristocrats and monarchs across the
Greek world began to found and fund libraries as part of the politics of elite
benefaction, euergetism, I treat libraries not as repositories of knowledge7 but as
fundamentally political institutions, shifting the perspective from users to creators.
When scholars treat collections of books from their own vocational viewpoint,
they invoke an important contemporary concern, but this has tended to obscure
the profound transformations in book collecting effected by aristocratic and royal
euergetism. This impulse amplified the number, the function, and the scale of
book collections so much that I would call them collectively the invention of the
library.
Second, the evidence of libraries at various sites around the Mediterranean
in the second century is more consistent with a model of diffuse, if syncopated,
development than with the traditional hierarchical story. This received story posits
that a great man (Ptolemy II or Demetrios of Phaleron) invented the Library at a
single stroke and that others simply duplicated this mature and perfect archetype.
In my revised history, however, the Library in Alexandria, dethroned as the mother
of all libraries, was just one such project among many, even if it later came to
be called the greatest. I argue that the Romans, too, vigorously participated in
6. I have no desire to defend this dogmatically as the real or proper definition of a library,
though as I show below it does seem to track the Greek term bibliotheke. My point is, rather, that this
is how I will be using the term “library” in this study and that this perspective brings out important
historical insights. I will add, however, that my use of the term “library” has a more precise analytical
meaning that just any old collection of books.
7. The perspective adopted by the authors in König et al. 2013.
this widespread revolution, not simply copying Greek forms, but accelerating and
intensifying the pace of innovation.
Because the received story rests on such shaky foundations, it’s important to
approach the sources for the history of libraries in the Hellenistic period not just
one by one, but holistically. Piecemeal appraisals risk interpreting each source
so as to bring it in line with the received history, invoking whatever interpretive
protocol enables this.8 In order to clearly distinguish the stronger from the weaker
evidence, I think it’s important to clearly state my general evidentiary principles.
I will reject evidence which is late, unverifiable, or anecdotal.
I will not use late sources. For the history of the Library almost all the main
sources postdate the events they recount by anywhere from a hundred and fifty
years to more than a millennium. Moreover, the further from events, the more
sources reveal fresh facts and details, a highly suspicious pattern.9 Instead of such
secondary sources historians usually prefer primary sources, sources from the
time of the event with a direct connection to it. In this case, however, the flock of
garish secondary sources has drowned out the humble primary sources that do
exist. I will found my history on these. When a later source explicitly attributes
some information to an earlier source, you can with some confidence do so as
well, but with the Library most late sources simply assert facts without naming an
informant.
I will not use apocryphal sources. In addition to recognizing that a source may
be reliable or unreliable, I will insist on an important third category: apocryphal.
A source which is under reasonable suspicion or subject to great uncertainty, a
source which is neither demonstrably true nor false, is apocryphal. Other historians
8. Note, for example, how scholars deal with Strabo’s statement that Aristotle “is the first
man we know to have collected books and to have taught the kings in Egypt the organization of
a library” (Strabo 13.1.54: πρτος ν
σμεν συναγαγν βιβλα κα διδξας τος ν Αγπτω
βασιλ!ας βιβλιοθ#κης σνταξιν). Since no one believes that the second part is literally true, they
take it to mean that one of the students of one of Aristotle’s students, Demetrios of Phaleron, created
the Library of Alexandria for Ptolemy II Philadelphos, thus bringing it in line with the traditional
story. There are three problems. The metaphorical interpretation is invoked not on principle but
out of desperation (because it produces the desired meaning), and the only metaphorical reading
entertained is the one that fits exactly with the received story. The third problem is that the traditional
story depends on nothing other than the Letter of Aristeas, a source which, as I note below, cannot be
taken as historically accuate.
9. Authors of the Roman era, for example, imagined that kings invented libraries, but as time
went on they located the founding rulers in the ever more remote past. Strabo (early 1st century
ce) made Ptolemy (early 3rd century bce) the first king with a library (13.1.54), Memnon (2nd
century ce) said that Klearchos, the tyrant of Heraklea in the 4th century bce, was the first ruler
to establish a library (Memnon fr. 1 [summarized in Photius 222b]), while Gellius (c. 180 ce) pushed
the origins back to Pisistratus, the tyrant of Athens (mid-6th century bce) (Gellius 7,17, 1–2), to
which Athenaeus (early 3rd century ce) added Polycrates, tyrant of Samos (late 6th century) (Athen.
1, 3 a-b). Though Memnon “probably used” Nymphis (Dueck 2006: 50), a historian of the 3rd
century bce, it requires a leap of faith to attribute the story of Klearchos’ library to that earlier
historian, as some scholars do. Wiseman (1993: 141–46) discusses the tendency to invent detail
to seem plausible.
implicitly rely on this category when they refuse to endorse a source (with the
qualification, for example, “if Galen is to be believed”). But I want to make this
category explicit in order to draw out a methodological consequence: If you won’t
endorse the reliability of a source, you shouldn’t use it as evidence for a historical
inference—that is, you should treat it as if it didn’t exist. To do otherwise is to
dodge a prime responsibility of historians: taking responsibility for their claims.10
I will not use anecdotes. A special class of apocryphal sources, anecdotes
are tempting not only because of their vivacity, but also on the theory that
at least they hold a “kernel of truth.” But as Richard Saller has shown, anec-
dotes are unreliable evidence for the events they purport to recount.11 You can-
not isolate a “kernel of truth” in anecdotes because many elements might be
the “kernel” so the choice of the true “kernel” is always arbitrary. And be-
cause anecdotes aim at verisimilitude not veracity, the “kernel” might amount
to no more than what people at the time of the telling were willing or wanted
to believe.
Nevertheless, there are ways to productively repurpose such evidence. Instead
of treating texts as sources for something else, things or events in the world—
a positivist approach which mines them for empirical content—texts can be
cultivated as objects of historical interest in their own right, a shift to cultural
history. Thus, while Galen’s anecdotes do not provide solid evidence for a history
of the Library in the third century bce, they do offer a valuable foundation to
construct a cultural history of what people in the second century ce thought about
libraries and books.12 By relentlessly treating late, apocryphal, and anecdotal
sources as artifacts of the time they were written as opposed to the time of the
events they purport to recount, dubious secondary sources can become valuable
primary sources. This repurposing makes such sources safer to use, although for a
different enterprise.13 Other scholars have certainly already done this piecemeal
with some of the texts I treat, but what is new here is that I’ve used this repurposed
evidence to build a long-term history of books and libraries in the classical
Mediterranean.
10. Johnstone 2013.

11. Saller 1980. Cf. Mejer 2007: 436–38. Honigman (2003: 138) observes that “Ptolemy”
(whether specified or not) tends to play generic roles in some of these anecdotes. Vollaro (2009)
shows how even in our more historically minded age an apocryphal anecdote—Lincoln’s apophthegm
upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made
this great war!”—was begotten immaculately many years after the fact, elaborated, and repeated
endlessly. Discounting its historicity, Vollaro analyzes the work of the anecdote in the contexts of its
telling, a similar project to mine.
12. In line with my approach, Dover (1988: 45–53) and Pantel (2008) discuss repurposing
anecdotes as evidence for the time of their telling as opposed to the time of the events they relate.
Too’s recent The Idea of the Library in the Ancient World (2010) does not treat stories about the
Library as related to the diverse historical contexts of their telling, but as expressing an essential,
unchanging idea which abided through antiquity. This is a fundamentally unhistorical project.
13. In the same way Maud Gleason (2011) admirably recuperates dubious stories in Cassius
Dio by interpreting them not in terms of the time of their content, but the time of their telling.
In this case, rigorously treating evidence with skepticism does not bereave
us of history but divulges a better account of the past—better because it relies
on fewer assumptions, better because it treats secondary sources as deserving
of historical respect in their own right, better because it’s not a prisoner of the
traditions and received ideas of the sources it uses. Putting aside the flimsy
secondary sources for now, I will found my history on the sturdier primary sources
from the second century bce.
THE INVENTION OF LIBRARIES
During the second century bce at various sites around the Mediterranean, an
unprecedented phenomenon appeared: rich and powerful men began to sponsor
the public display of large collections of books. Inscriptions from four cities
provide solid evidence for this biblio-political revolution; the earliest comes from
the island of Kos dating from the very beginning of the second century:
These men made offerings
for the library.
Diokles son of Apollodoros
and Apollodoros son of Diokles
the library and 100 books.
Hekataios son of Simias 200 drachmas.
—mos son of Epigeris 200 drachmas
and 100 books.
— son of Simos 200 drachmas and 100 books.
—os son of Python 200 drachmas
and 100 books.
—antos son of Parmeniskos
[and] Hagesias son of Hagesias son
of Nikostratos 200 drachmas.
Xenokles son of Xenokles 200 drachmas
and 100 books.
Leonidas son of Euteris —
Eunomos son of Pisikles —
Dara—14
Here the inscription breaks off. (Dashes mark missing parts of the stone.)
14. BCH 59 (1935), 421–25 (#41):

ο%δε παγγελα&ν'[το]
ες τ(ν βυβλιοθ#καν)
vacat(?)
Διοκλ+ς Απολλοδ-ρου
,
κα Απολλ.δωρος
, Διοκλε/ς
τ(ν βυβλιοθ#καν κα ββλι-
α ρ´) 0Εκατα2ος Σιμα
The inscription records that several members of the upper class on Kos
contributed to establishing a library. (The verb of the initial sentence, “made
offerings” (παγγελα&ν'[το]), is implied for the following sentences.)15 While
most offered money or books,16 because the first two men named offered “the
library,” this text seems to record the establishment of the institution.
This inscription provides the earliest evidence for the invention of the li-
brary in the classical Mediterranean. This invention depends on three related
things. First, the aristocrats of Kos treated books as physical objects whose
value depended not on their content but primarily on their form. Here, that
means that books were merely counted, each one worth the same as any other,
and the worth of each derived from their agglomeration first in packets of
a hundred and then into a larger project of aristocratic benefaction and dis-
play. Books functioned as standards or units of value, like cattle in Homer.17
The total quantity mattered, and when you discard the fantastic numbers of
books attributed to imperial Hellenistic libraries, the collection of at least
500 books described here rivals the largest private book collections known
earlier.18
(δραχμ(ς) ς´.
[— —]μος ,Επιγ#ριος (δραχμ(ς) ς´
[κ]α ββλια ρ´.
[— —] Σμου (δραχμ(ς) ς´ κα ββλια ρ´.
[— —]ος Πθωνος (δραχμ(ς) ς´
κα ββλια ρ´.
[— —]αντος Παρμενσκου
[κα] Αγησας
0 Αγησα
0 το/
Νικοστρτου (δραχμ(ς) ς´.
[Ξ]ενοκλ+ς Ξενοκλε/ς (δραχμ(ς) ς´
κα ββλια ρ´.
Λεωνδας Ε:τηρδα [— —]
Ε;νομος Πισικλε/ς [— —]
ΔΑΡΑ[— — — — — — — —]
)ΜΕ[— — — — — — — —]
[— — — — — — — — — —]
Scholarly analysis has largely centered on establishing the provenance of the inscription
(Robert 1935; Migeotte 1992: 161–63).
15. Although it literally means they promised the donations, Migeotte (1992: 325–26) argues
that it means they fulfilled their vows.
16. “Book” means not the codex form we use, but a scroll, a length of papyrus wound around
two rods with writing in columns parallel to the rods.
17. Peacock (2006: 640–42) discusses cattle as standards of value in the epics.
18. Diogenes Laertius’ lists of philosophers’ works (discounting duplicates and spurious at-
tributions) suggests that each of the most prolific authors, Aristotle and Theophrastus, wrote less
than 200 titles in four or five hundred books. (Sollenberger 1992: 3849–55 discusses the lists for
Peripatetic philosophers. White 2002 analyzes the longest list of titles, that of Theophrastus.) The
idea that the Lyceum gradually accumulated a collection of all these writers’ works, a collection
that might have included several thousand books, though common in late sources, cannot directly
be verified from the philosophers’ wills which Diogenes preserves. While Theophrastus willed his
books to Neleus (D.L. 5.52), Aristotle’s testament is silent on the disposition of his works. Strangely,
Strato bequeathed the books he owned of which he was not the author to his successor without
Second, this library was essentially a public institution. This is not so much
because the general public could use the library at Kos, though that is possible.
(Polybius says a historian might use libraries for research, implying some sort of
access was possible in many cities.)19 Rather, it’s because publicity was essential
to the process of creating it and because it became the property of the city.
The contributions to the library at Kos followed the usual logic of aristocratic
euergetism: a public promise and its fulfillment, followed by a reciprocal act of
publicity by the city, an acknowledgement in the form of the inscription itself.
In this case the inscription recognizing the gifts does not explicitly describe
the process, but Migeotte has argued that it followed the usual practices, with
the assembly authorizing the project.20 A third-century bce inscription from
Halicarnassus would provide a parallel:
In order that everyone might know who lent money for the stoa which
the demos is dedicating to Apollo and King Ptolemy, the comptrollers
in office when the stoa is finished will inscribe on the walls of the stoa
the names and patronymics of those who lent more than 500 drachmas
without interest. They will inscribe at the beginning: “These people gave
to the demos money without interest for the construction of the stoa.”
They will inscribe first the name of whoever gave the most.21
The logic of euergetism in the Kos inscription’s verb, “made offerings” (παγγε-
λα&ν'[το]), entails that the library and its contents were a gift to and became the
property of the city.
Third, the inscription marks the library’s compound relationship to politics.
On the one hand, the founding and endowing of the library at Kos was a political
act. In the Hellenistic culture of aristocratic benefaction, the inscription and the
library itself stood as monuments to the wealth, status, and power of particular
individuals. While anyone might make an offering to support a public institution,
only the most generous benefactors were recognized by having their names
inscribed, and the most generous was the most honored. (I presume that the
father and son pair who offered “the library” itself were making a gift worth
more than 200 drachmas, which seems to be the minimum recognized gift.) But,
on the other hand, the library functioned as a symbol of the public spirit of
the wealthy only because it operated independently of the immediate political
aims of any faction. The inscription demarcates the library as a separate and
autonomous institution, with its own funds and supplies, the common property of
the city. Simultaneously depoliticized and repoliticized, the library was indirectly
but essentially political.
making provision for his own works (D.L. 5.62). Bagnall (2002: 351–56) discusses the unbelievable
numbers of books attributed to the Library of Alexandria.
19. Polyb. 12.25e.4; 12.27.4.
20. Migeotte 1992: 162.
21. OGIS 46 [= McCabe Halikarnassos 26].
At nearby Rhodes, a second century inscription shows a library as the product

of a similar political exchange. Although highly mutilated, a stone records two
texts concerning a library.22 Initially, a law (it uses imperatives two or three times)
outlines a process which involves making dedications (?νατιθ!–), some form of
publicity (νφανιζ.ντω), registration by one of the Gymnasiarchs ([ε κ τις τν
γυμν]ασιρχων μB ?ναγρ[φηι]), and a library ([βυ]βλιοθ#καν). The text that
follows (separated by a space from the previous one and beginning with larger
letters) mentions things going to the library (ες τ(ν βυβλιοθ#καν) and a couple
lines later begins to list names.23 The political calculus at Rhodes mirrored that
at Kos: in exchange for gifts to a library, the city offered publicity. The names
at the bottom of the inscription would be these donors.
A library similarly functioned as a site of aristocratic political culture in late
second-century Athens. As revealed in a series of inscriptions honoring ephebes,
the class of young men who underwent a year-long public education, and the
Kosmetes, their supervisor, beginning in 116/5 the city required the ephebes to
collectively donate 100 books to a library.24 Although toward the end of the
fourth century the state had required ephebic training of all citizens, by the late
Hellenistic period it functioned more as a venue for inculcating the culture of
elites who dominated its ranks. The ephebes visited important sites around Attica,
participated in festivals and rituals, and repeatedly commemorated the Persian
wars.25 They practiced a range of military skills (from rowing and marching to
firing a catapult), took part in athletics, and studied philosophy, rhetoric, and
literature. If all these could be described as broadly civic, there was still an
aristocratic inflection. In these decrees, the city praised the ephebes for their good
order, piety, kindness to their Kosmetes, and philotimia to the Boule and Demos.26
Philotimia was the engine of elite philanthropy to the city27 and the ephebeia
trained young men in euergetism. In this the Kosmetes served as their model since
22. Maiuri, NSER 4. Because some of the usual restorations assume what one would like to
know, I rely on only those which are certain. The bibliographies, layouts, texts, and translations in
Platthy’s collection (1968) are so often misleading or wrong that I have not included cross references
to his numbers.
23. Reports of another second century inscription from Rhodes—the left half of which is lost,
much of which is damaged, and which has not been fully published—confirm the Gymnasiarchs’
involvement with a library as well as the presence of books that had been dedicated (τ( βυβλα τ(
?νατεθ!ντα). Papachristodoulou 1986 (SEG 37.699) does not give a full text, but quotes some better
preserved phrases. Papachristodoulou 1990 discusses this inscription even more briefly. Although
both articles contain a photograph of the stone, neither is very detailed.
24. Hesperia 16 (1947) #67 lines 30–32 [= P-S T30], IG II2 1029 lines 24–25 [= P-S T33], and
IG II2 1030 lines 35–36 date from the late second and early first centuries. From the middle of the 1st
century come Hesperia 34 (1965), 255–58 (line 30) [= SEG 22.111], IG II2 1041 (lines 23–24), IG
II2 1042 (frag. D, line 1), and IG II2 1043 (line 50). IG II2 1030 and SEG 22.111 mention books only
in restored passages which, though plausible, are not certain. (For texts in Perrin-Saminadayar 2007,
I have used the abbreviation P-S.)
25. Nagy 1991: 303.
26. E.g. IG II2 1028 lines 46–47 [= P-S T32].
27. Whitehead 1983.
he personally underwrote many of the expenses of the ephebeia.28 He encouraged

philanthropy in his wards, and one of the decrees honors him for persuading the
richest ephebes to join him in sponsoring oil for the other ephebes.29 The decrees
note that the ephebes collectively paid for some of their activities, particularly
sacrifices, and the decree of Theodorides specifically required them to dedicate
a ceremonial bowl (phiale) to Demeter and Kore and to the mother of the gods and
a hundred books to the library.30 From the perspective captured in these Athenian
inscriptions, books and the library function not as tools in a literary education
(though one might guess that they could have been used that way) but as currency
in the aristocratic system of public benefaction into which the youths were being
trained, comparable to a phiale, a bowl whose primary use was to be displayed
as an offering.
Finally, two extremely fragmentary inscriptions from Pergamum from the
end of the second century or later refer to “libraries” (βιβλιοθηκν). What
these exactly were is unclear, but the beginning of the second inscription, “The
people honored” ([C δ+μος ]τμησεν), would seem to locate these libraries in
the aristocratic economy of honor.31
In an important sense, the inscriptions from these four cities document the
invention of the library, an innovation tracked by the Greek term bubliotheke.32
A word which might bear a range of meanings—from a thing to put books in,
a bookcase, to a collection of books, to an institution—bubliotheke is hardly
attested earlier than in the inscription from Kos. Kratinos the younger used it in a
comedy in the middle of the fourth century, though we have no idea of the context
or meaning.33 The word appears, too, in Diodoros’ paraphrase of Hekataios of
Abdera (c. 300 bce). In discussing the “House of Life,” an Egyptian archive
staffed by priests, Diodoros calls it a “sacred library.”34 But since Diodoros (third
quarter of the first century bce) references Hekataios in indirect discourse, it
would be risky to assume that the earlier writer used the very word. My point,
however, is not that the word was absolutely new, but that for the first time we
can see a library as an institution. Contemporary with these inscriptions, literary
sources (as I will show in what follows) also began to use the term bubliotheke to
refer to the political institutionalization of book collecting. In Kos, in Athens, and
in various places around the eastern Mediterranean, the bubliotheke came to mean
28. Gauthier 1985: 162.

29. IG II2 1028 lines 79–80 [= P-S T32].
30. Hesperia 16 (1947) #67 lines 30–32 [= P-S T30]: ?ν!θηκαν δD κα φιλ[ην τε2 τε] Δ#μητρι
κα τε2 Κ.ρει κα τε2 μητρ τ[ν] θεν κα[ βυ]βλα FκατGν ες τBν βυ[βλιοθ#κη]ν πρτοι κατ(
τG ψ#φισμα I Θεοδωρδη[ς] Πειραι[ες] εKπεν.
31. Ath. Mitt. 33, 1908, pp. 383 and 408. Mielsch (1995: 771) discusses them. Scholars have
recently raised fatal doubts about the traditional identification of the royal library in Pergamum.
Coqueugniot (2013) summarizes the historiography and provides details.
32. The vowel in the initial syllable could be bib- or bub-.
33. Fr. 11 (= Pollux 7.211).
34. D. S. 1.49.3–4. Shubert (1993: 153–59) discusses the “House of Life.”
neither the storage container nor the books, but a political project of aristocratic
euergetism. In the second century, the increasing use of the term bubliotheke
marked this biblio-political revolution.
During the same century writers were elaborating back stories to account for
the creation and genealogy of the new institution of the library. The earliest narra-
tives about the creation of libraries—The Letter of Aristeas, Second Maccabees,
and a pair of Late Babylonian cuneiform letters, all probably dating to the last
half of the second century bce—associated them with the political economy of
prestige and with great rulers of the past who founded or perfected states. In
these stories, rulers built libraries through royal benefaction, the same system of
euergetism that operated on Kos, but on a much grander scale. Although none
of these texts can be treated as a solid source for the earlier history of libraries,
all reflect a second-century understanding of a library as an essentially political
creation, one which kings too were now willing to adopt as an emblem.
The Letter of Aristeas, the earliest source for the Library at Alexandria, should
be treated as an apocryphal source for the events it relates. “Aristeas” claims that
as an official in the court of Ptolemy II Philadelphos (284–46 bce) he worked with
Demetrios of Phaleron to get the Jewish law translated into Greek for inclusion in
the Library. Historians largely agree, however, that a Jewish Greek inhabitant of
Alexandria composed this in the middle to late second century bce, a century and a
half after the events it purports to recount.35 The obstacle that this fiction presents
to anyone who would use it as a source for the events it relates is not merely that it
is difficult to trust a secondary source masquerading as a primary source, but more
precisely that it gives no account of the actual sources—if any—it might have
used, so there is no secure way to separate out and evaluate these.36
Historians’ attempts to isolate a historical core to this apocryphal text do not
succeed. With increasing sophistication, scholars have analyzed it as a product
of the time of its composition, the second century bce.37 Importantly, they agree
that we should treat the text not as a forgery but as a fiction, that it mixes facts
and imagination in conformity with common literary and historical forms. This
is an important step in understanding this text sympathetically and critically, but it
doesn’t provide any straightforward or reliable way of using it as evidence for
the events it relates. The text seems to establish an etiology for a current fact
35. O. Murray (1987) surveys the issues and scholarship on the date, author, and argument of
the work. Honigman (2003: 3–9) reviews the general historiography and (129–30) the tendency of
recent scholars to date its composition to the mid- to late second century bce.
36. O. Murray 1975: 123.
37. Gruen 1998: 206–22; Honigman 2003; Rajak 2009: 24–63. Scholars likewise continue to
disagree about why the Pentateuch was translated into Greek. Some (e.g., Honigman 2003) persist in
arguing for some version of the reason offered in the Letter. Others have followed different leads:
Mélèze-Modrzejewski (1997) argued that the Ptolemaic government commissioned the translation so
that Jewish subjects could use the texts as laws in legal proceedings with other Jews. Wright (2006),
among others, argues that the language of the text shows that the Greek was meant to reference,
depend on, and be used originally in relationship to the original Hebrew (as in teaching situations).
(at a minimum, that there was a Greek version of the Torah, probably also that
it could be found in the Library), but isolating an additional specific kernel of
truth in the historical events of the etiology is an arbitrary act of faith. There is no
clear way to separate truth from fiction in this text.
Both Honigman and Rajak, however, attempt to verify a historical core of
the Letter by appealing to an independently existing collective memory in oral
tradition and ritual.38 While Honigman makes an explicit assumption of an oral
tradition behind the Letter, Rajak uses later written accounts of the same story
to demonstrate its existence.39 Since none of these later texts say they rely on
an oral tradition, however, and since it’s uncertain that texts later than the
Letter demonstrate that an oral tradition existed before it, making that claim
in fact requires multiplying the same original assumption. It’s simpler to as-
sume that these later texts derive from reading the Letter, though in fairness
they don’t explicitly say so.40 Philo, however, seems to provide a confirma-
tion of the core events in a collective memory in ritual: He reports that in his
day Jews and Greeks celebrated a yearly festival commemorating the transla-
tion on the island of Pharos, just off Alexandria.41 But this, too, is far from
decisive. It’s entirely possible that by Philo’s time (probably early first cen-
tury ce) the story in the Letter may have influenced the festival. Moreover,
the only explicit confirmation Philo’s account offers of the events in the Let-
ter, that is, the only verified kernel, is that the translation happened on the
island—everything else (Ptolemy Philadelphos, Demetrios, the Library) needs
to be imported by way of assumption. Although Gruen treats the Letter as his-
torically false, my point is slightly different: You can’t reliably untangle the true
from the false. But this means that, like Gruen, I won’t use it as evidence for
the events it relates.42 There may be a kernel of earlier history in the Letter, but
it’s impossible to tell—beyond mere plausibility and without being arbitrary—
what it is.
Although the Letter is an illusory primary source for the early third century and
a jittery secondary source for the events it purports to recount, as a historical fiction
it’s an important and solid primary source for people’s ideas about the Library in
the middle to late second century. The function of the Library in the text shows it as
an object of political prestige. The text creates a kind of political utopia through a
nostalgic representation of the past. The sordid political conditions in Alexandria
38. Collins’ intricate attempt to carve out a historical kernel in the Letter seems to have met
with little assent (Collins 2000).
39. Honigman 2003: 91; Rajak 2009: 49.
40. As to the supposed confirmation of the basic facts (Ptolemy II and Demetrios being involved
in the translation) by Aristoboulos, there are real difficulties as Hadas (1951: 26–27) and Gruen (1998:
209) note briefly and Carbonaro (2008) spells out in more detail.
41. Philo Moses 2.41–42.
42. Honigman allows that the evidence is insufficient to endorse or refute the narrative of the text
(e.g., 90, 118, 141), but still wants to redeem it somehow. Rajak (2009: 42) is similarly conflicted.
at the time this text was probably composed contrast starkly with the idealized
situation the Letter describes. Under the rule of Ptolemy VIII Physcon (170–
163, and 145–116) Egypt’s foreign influence was considerably circumscribed
and internal civil strife raged, especially in Alexandria whose population, the
visitor Polybius reported, Physcon “destroyed.”43 In particular, he banished
intellectuals.44 Contrast this with the Ptolemy II Philadelphos described in the
Letter as just, wise, and wealthy: He frees the Jews taken captive when his father
conquered Judea (§§12–27); he recognizes the wisdom in each of the translators’
responses to his questions at a symposium (§§ 18–294); and he freely dispenses
his considerable wealth. A similar nostalgia guides Kallixeinos, probably a near
contemporary of the author of the Letter, in his exuberantly detailed description of
the fabulous extravagance of Philadelphos’ grand procession.45 To readers of the
second century, even those who hadn’t suffered the worst, the reign of Philadelphos
must have seemed like a distant golden age. The Library contributed to that myth.
The author of the Letter projects onto the third century at least two aspects of
the second-century biblio-political revolution. In the first place, by treating the
Library as an object and institution of political prestige, “Aristeas” offers one of
the political allegories of mutual respect between sovereign and Jews that Erich
Gruen has analyzed.46 The fate of a book, the Pentateuch, parallels the fate of
the Jews. Just as Ptolemy puts the book in his Library, so he frees the Jewish
slaves in his kingdom and inducts the best of them into positions in the army
and bureaucracy.47 The king extends his extravagant generosity to Jewish slaves,
scholars, and the high priest as much as to his Library.48 The Library functions as a
two-way node of prestige: both king and book are honored through it.49 The Letter
also relies on the formal revaluation of books. The initial impetus to include the
Jewish law derives from the dynamics of the Library: it aims to include “all the
books in the world” (§9: Lπαντα τ( κατ( τBν οκουμ!νην βιβλα). As a library,
its criterion of inclusion is purely formal: anything that is a book. But the Letter
immediately introduces a second motive, the special virtues of this particular
text which is, Demetrios tells the king, “worthy of being in your library” (§10:
Mξια . . . τ+ς παρ( σο βιβλιοθ#κης εKναι.). This criterion pertains to the content.
Although the formal criterion alone would be enough to set in motion the plot (the
translation of the “law”), the substantive one allows the author to himself write
43. Polybius 34.14.1–7 (as summarized in Strabo 17.1.12 [C 797]).

44. Menekles of Barka (FGrH 270 F 9 = Athen. 4.184b-c). Josephus (c. 100 ce in Ap. 2.51–55)
says he also specially persecuted Jews, but I hesitate to rely on a late story that involves trampling by
drunken elephants, a seeming doubling of 3 Maccabees.
45. Hazzard (2000: 62–64) dates Kallixeinos’ work On Alexandria to after 140/39 based on its
use of royal titles. Criscuolo’s identification (2001: 328) of Kallixeinos with a man of the same name
given a royal estate in Egypt 156/5 is possible, but far from certain.
46. Gruen 1998: 189–245.
47. The Letter itself puts these side by side at §§37–38.
48. §§19–20 (slaves); 33–34, 51–82, 320 (the High Priest); 319 (scholars); 9–10 (the Library).
49. Cf. Honigman 2003: 106.
a text which replicates and refashions the content of the Pentateuch.50 Although
the dynamics of the Letter involve focusing on the content of the Torah, the author
still recognizes and exploits the way libraries objectified books, allowing their
form alone to carry political prestige.
Two other texts from the second century also situate the foundation of libraries
in the past, link them to prominent rulers, and embed them in projects of building
states or empires. The second letter at the beginning of 2 Maccabees discusses
Nehemiah (late fifth century bce), who founded the second temple in Jerusalem;
along the way it also mentions that
The same things are described in detail in the records and memoirs
concerning Nehemiah, and that by founding a library (βιβλιοθ#κην) he
collected together the books about the kings and prophets, the books about
David, and letters of kings about votive offerings. In the same manner
Judas, too, collected together all the books which had been lost to us by
the war which happened, and we have them.51
Steven Weitzman may be right to understand Judas Maccabeus’ collecting of

books as an attempt to link the incipient Hasmonean dynasty to tradition,52 but
it was an invented tradition of the second century. Menahem Haran argues that
Nehemiah’s library is a fiction and that “the author of 2 Maccabees . . . portrayed
Nehemiah as an enlightened Hellenistic ruler of his own time. In this respect, he
attributed to Nehemiah a feature typical of one of the Ptolemaic kings, the founders
and owners of the Alexandrian library.”53 I would add that the language used in this
letter to describe a collection of books, βιβλιοθ#κην, implies a political project
which links amassing books with power—in this text, Nehemiah’s and Judas’ care
for the temple parallels their work on libraries—and that the word and concept
would be anachronistic for the fifth century bce.
A third body of evidence, two Late Babylonian letters, not only links a
library to a remarkable ruler of the past who magnified the state, the Assyrian
king Ashurbanipal (668–627 bce), but represents the growth of a library as
propelled by a system of royal generosity. The two cuneiform letters (the first
from the scribes of Borsippa to Ashurbanipal promising to send him copies of
“all scribal learning,” the second a less complete letter to the king on behalf of
the scholars of Babylon54 answering a similar request) date from the second
50. As Honigman (2003: 53–59) shows, the plot of the Letter rewrites the story of Exodus.
But some of the digressive sections (the description of the table Ptolemy had made for the temple
[§§2–72] or the defense of purity laws [§§128–71]) rework or expand on parts of the Pentateuch.
Hadas’ commentary (1951) discusses particulars.
51. 2 Macc. 2.13–14.
52. Weitzman 2004: 232.
53. Haran 1993: 59. I would qualify this only by reiterating that the earliest evidence for a
Ptolemaic Library is more or less contemporary with this source.
54. Or, as Frahm (2005: 43) suggests, from the king to the scholars.
or first century bce but purport to copy texts of the seventh century bce.55
Ronnie Goldstein has argued, however, that while they may contain a core of
historical fact—Ashurbanipal collected tablets in Nineveh56 —the letters bear the
cultural imprint of the Hellenistic period, as seen in their many similarities to
the Letter of Aristeas.57 Goldstein follows Eckart Frahm who suggests that they
are part of a Late Babylonian genre of letters to or from kings of the ancient
past, a genre that mixed invention with historical fact as a way of implicitly
reflecting on historical change, particularly “the downfall of mighty states.”58
In building on Goldstein’s argument, I will shift the emphasis somewhat. First,
whereas Goldstein suggests that the Ptolemies’ Library lay behind both the Late
Babylonian letters and the Letter of Aristeas, I’m arguing that you can see a
parallel development of libraries and stories about libraries at multiple locations
across the Hellenistic world, and that both accounts should be seen as invented
traditions that linked the foundation of libraries with the acme of states, a kind of
utopian vision. Second, Goldstein compares the great expense of the acquisitions
described in both the letter of the scholars of Babylon and the Letter of Aristeas.59
But the enormity of the cost marks at least two important characteristics of the
stories. Initially, the stories link the acquisition of books to royal generosity.
While “Aristeas” allows that Ptolemy allocated “large sums” for buying and
transcribing books (§9), the enormous cost of acquiring the Greek translation of
the Jewish laws derives from gifts: the initial act of spontaneously paying for the
freedom of Jewish slaves held in Egypt (§27), the offerings and sacrifices sent
to Jerusalem when requesting translators from there (§33, 40, 42, 51–82), and the
parting gifts to the translators (§319–20). (During Ptolemy Philadelphos’ reign,
Egypt ruled Judea.) Notes the high priest Eleazar (§44): “You have conferred
benefits (ε:ηργ!τηκας) both great and unforgettable on our citizens in many
ways.” The text thus represents Ptolemy’s mode of acquisition as a form of
royal benefaction, euergetism, the reciprocation in this case being not a statue
or an honorary decree, but sacrifices, prayers, and the service of translators (§45–
46).60 The rewards promised to the scholars by Ashurbanipal look somewhat
55. Frame and George (2005) first published the texts with translations. Frahm (2005) discusses
several details, including the date. I should note that I cannot read the originals and rely on the
translations and notes of the editors, Frahm, and Goldstein (2010).
56. Fincke (2003/2004 and, more briefly, 2004) presents an overview of the thousands of tablets
in the British Museum associated with Ashurbanipal. Most of the “literary texts” concern divination
or ritual and were collected to support the king’s power (Fincke 2003/2004: 117–18; Lieberman
1990: 319–27), not unlike the practice I discuss below of Greek rulers collecting texts the content
of which had direct political uses. This differs from the compound relationship to politics of the
institutions I’ve called libraries. Nineveh and its collections of texts were destroyed in 612, lost until
the 19th-century excavations.
57. Goldstein 2010.
58. Frahm 2005: 44.
59. Goldstein 2010: 204–205.
60. Gardner (2007) discusses Jewish participation in the system of euergetism.
more like wages because of their timing—coming after the scholars’ labors, not
before—but their enormous size and the fact that he promises not just silver
but status elevation and exemptions from government impositions mark them
as royal largesse, a fact acknowledged by the crowds of thousands who are
said to cheer when news of these promises is announced.61 The other way the
enormity of the rewards marks these stories is by distinguishing the events in
the narratives from the world of the second century in which royal euergetism
had plunged. Polybius describes in detail the gifts given to Rhodes to aid it after
an earthquake in 224 bce (5.88.5–90.2), doing so, he says, to show the penny-
pinching (μικροδοσας) of contemporary kings and what small gifts countries
and cities receive (5.90.5). A survey of inscriptions has confirmed this slump in
the number and value of kingly benefactions beginning around 150 bce.62 These
stories, then, invested libraries with a nostalgic glamour of great and extravagant
rulers of the past.
HISTORY OF THE ALEXANDRIAN LIBRARY
The story of the invention of the library in the second century bce was one
of dispersed innovation—in Kos and Jerusalem, in Babylonia and Pergamum,
in Rhodes, in Athens, and in Alexandria, too. Unfortunately, the charms of the
received story, which posits the Ptolemaic kings as inventors of the library and
charts a copying of their form outward, have turned historians away from the
stronger, if less colorful, primary sources for the Library’s history. These show
the Alexandrian enterprise as one among many, though one for which preeminence
was eventually claimed.
So far I have argued that although the Letter of Aristeas is an unreliable source
for the history of the Alexandrian Library in the third century, it can ground a
history of the representation of the Library in the second. It can also, however,
provide limited but solid evidence about the Library itself in the second century;
from it I would make three basic inferences: the Library existed, it was large,
and it held some version of the Jewish “law.” If any of these easily checkable
facts were untrue, it would undermine the verisimilitude of the Letter, which
relied, as I noted previously, on an immediate impression of factuality to fortify
its fictions.
Beyond this, Galen’s report of a scholarly controversy provides some of
the best evidence for the Library in the Hellenistic period—mixed with some
of the weakest. The most unsound, unfortunately, has been the most quoted.
Over the course of a couple hundred years, Hellenistic medical writers debated
about the meaning and origin of clusters of alphabetic signs (letters and ligatures)
61. BM 28825 lines 32–38 (Frame and George 2005: 275, with their comments on 276–77);
Goldstein 2010: 204.
62. Bringmann 1993: 11.
attached to the twenty eight case histories that constitute Book 3 of Hippocrates’
Epidemics. Galen, the only source for this controversy, discusses the challenges
of interpreting specific sets of signs several times in his commentary on this text of
Hippocrates, but twice he offers general accounts of the debate in the Hellenistic
period, both of which refer to the Library.63 These two accounts differ in important
ways that pose serious (but so far unrecognized) evidentiary challenges.
One of Galen’s reports is sequential, describing the stages in the debate as
it developed:
For, as I also said before, Zenon [c. 225–150] had written a large book
about the signs, and then Apollonios the Empiricist [fl. 175] had written
another book, longer than Zenon’s, contradicting him, and then later
Zenon had answered him. After all this Apollonios nicknamed Byblas
[fl. 150] wrote; he not only refuted the book of Zenon (who had died
in the interim) about the signs by showing that they had been added in
a revision [subsequent to Hippocrates], but he also made the so-called
super-refutation against Zenon about them. This was Apollonios Byblas’
response: because Zenon was unable to offer a good interpretation of
Mnemon’s revisions [i.e., of the signs] but was at a loss for even a
probable meaning, he altered the signs to fit his exegesis, and Apollonios
Byblas alleged that [no copy],64 neither that discovered in the royal library
nor that from the ships nor that from the edition of Baccheios has the
signs in the way that Zenon wrote in the account of the young man under
discussion. I don’t know how Herakleides of Tarentum stooped to this
idle talk, although he’s always trying to lead the exegesis to the useful.65
Galen’s other report is schematic, laying out some of the arguments against
the Hippocratic authorship of the signs:66 Some say (Galen relates) that Mnemon
took a manuscript out of the great Library in Alexandria, forged the signs,
and then put it back. But others say that before he even arrived in Alexan-
dria he’d jotted the signs in his own copy and that the king, Ptolemy III Eu-
ergetes (246–221),67 was so ambitious for books (φιλ.τιμον δD περ βιβλα)
that he had all arriving books confiscated and copied, so that he could keep
the originals and return the duplicates. Galen reports a disagreement about
whether the manuscript in question bore the inscription “Of those from ships
according to Mnemon of Side, the editor” or left off the last two words, in-
cluding just his name, since the king’s agents added the original owner’s name
63. Hanson (1998: 38–42) nicely lays out the disparate passages in which Galen discusses the
controversy.
64. Von Staden (2009: 152n.82) discusses this lacuna.
65. Galen Hipp. Epid. III (K 17A, 618–19).
66. Galen Hipp. Epid. III (K 17A, 606–608). For the sake of brevity, I have summarized this
long passage.
67. Specified earlier in 604.
to the confiscated books when they put them in storage awaiting placement
in the libraries. Here Galen halts his examination of the arguments about
Mnemon; in order to show that Ptolemy was so eager about the acquisition of
old manuscripts, he tells the often quoted anecdote about the king’s theft of
the original copies of the Athenian dramatists’ works.68 Returning to Mnemon
(N δO οPν Μν#μων—and no longer presenting this as what others say), Galen
writes that since Mnemon obviously inserted the mysterious characters so that
he could earn money by interpreting them for others, it’s more plausible that he
added them to a copy already in the Library. Galen concludes: “I would hesitate
to talk about even the written demonstrations of the interpolation of characters
of Herakleides of Tarentum and Herakleides of Erythraios, if I did not think
that this is clear to those with sense and I hasten quicker to depart from such
excessive talk.”69
These reports present formal challenges to using them as evidence for the
Library. The sequential report lists authors, but specifies the content of only Apol-
lonios Byblas’ argument. The schematic report lists no authorities—everything
is what “they say”—for the specific arguments it rehearses. The anecdote about
Ptolemy’s book collecting is a digression out of place, reverting to a subject
earlier in the report. This lack of integration makes it seem like Galen’s own
addition.70 It, too, lacks a source (“they say”), and the way Galen transitions out
of it—“Mnemon, at any rate . . . ” (N δO οPν Μν#μων)—marks the anecdote as
of dubious veracity even in Galen’s mind.71 Galen introduces the schematic report
by saying: “What I will say was related by Zeuxis (c. 250–175) in the first book
of the commentaries to the book before us,” meaning Hippocrates’ Epidemics
Book 3.72 While some have taken this to mean that Galen read Zeuxis and that the
information in both reports derives directly from him, he doesn’t actually say that
and for various reasons some scholars think it more likely that Galen derived his
information from Herakleides of Tarentum (first half of first century bce), who
he mentions at the end of both reports.73 (Galen sometimes cited authors as though
he had read them directly when his information came through an intermediary
source.)74 In terms of evidence about the Library, then, the arguments of Byblas
can be dated to the middle of the second century because they’re attributed to a
specific person. All of the arguments in the schematic report, however, untethered
as they are from any specific authority, can be dated only as early as Galen’s proba-
68. I discuss this anecdote in more detail below.

69. Galen Hipp. Epid. III (K 17A, 608).
70. Nutton (2009: 29–30) remarks on Galen’s tendency to go off on “slight tangent[s].”
71. Smyth 1956: §2959.
72. Galen Hipp. Epid. III (K 17A, 605).
73. Manetti and Roselli (1994: 1594–1600) argue based on this book and others that you can
demonstrate that Galen directly read Herakleides only, not Zeuxis. Zeuxis died too early to write
about anything after the death of Zenon (c. 150), including, therefore, Byblas’s second attack, the
“super-refutation.”
74. Von Staden 2009: 150–52.
ble source, Herakleides. Since in the sequential report Byblas treats Mnemon as an
editor, not a con man, the whole tale of his intrigue at the Library (which is found
only in the schematic report) seems to be a revelation many decades—even up to a
couple centuries—later. A report of a secret fraud exposed so long after the fact
should be treated as apocryphal. The date for the anecdote about Ptolemy’s
theft of the dramatists’ texts, finally, cannot be safely pushed earlier than
Galen himself.
Scholars have tended to treat the sequential report, the schematic report, and
the anecdote as epistemologically equivalent, flattening their differences to bring
them into agreement.75 But, for example, Byblas’ statement that he could not
find a copy “from the ships” (in the sequential report) does not seem to refer
to the procedures of confiscation some of the critics of Mnemon described (in
the schematic report). The placement of the article differs: While Galen says
that books seized by the agents of Ptolemy III were labeled “of those from ships”
(Τν κ πλοων), Byblas looked for a copy “from the ships” (κ τν πλοων). The
former is a kind of accessioning note describing which group of books a particular
one comes from; the latter describes one of three places Byblas looked. Byblas’
phrase also does not fit easily into the details of the book confiscations as Galen
relates them. Galen attributes the practice specifically to Ptolemy III, at least 75
years before Byblas, and although Galen says that confiscated rolls were heaped in
a storehouse before being added to the Library’s collections, it seems unlikely that
they would have been neglected for nearly a century so that Byblas would have to
rummage through overstuffed warehouses. Absent the impulse to harmonize the
sequential and the schematic reports, to bind Byblas’ phrase (“from the ships”) to
the details of the later story involving Ptolemy III, Byblas’ language would seem
to mean something like imported books,76 a perfectly reasonable complement to
the books in the Library for a resident in Alexandria trying to make an exhaustive
search.
While treating evidence skeptically undermines the received story about
the Library’s methods of acquisition, in compensation it leaves more secure
knowledge. From this evidence, I make three inferences.
First, Byblas’ reference to the Library confirms that it existed in the middle
of the second century and that its collection was thought to be large, though not
comprehensive. (He did, after all, look elsewhere for a copy of the book, too.)
Second, at this time scholars might use the Library for research, as Byblas
did. Although scholars usually assume that libraries were used for research, this is
the earliest direct evidence for such a practice.
Third, the Library’s denomination seems to mark its growing reputation in
the first century bce. Although Byblas referred merely to “the royal Library,”
75. I have previously criticized this strategy when applied to editing texts (Johnstone 2002).
76. Gellius reports that while strolling around the harbor of Brundisium he saw bundles of books
put out for sale (9.4).
the same designation used in the roughly contemporary Letter of Aristeas (§9), a
first-century inscription honoring Onesandros, its director, refers to it as “the
great Library in Alexandria” (τ+ς ν ΑλεξανδρεαR
, μεγλης βιβλιοθ#κης).77
Herakleides’ first century report about the writers who described Mnemon’s
supposed swindle used the same name. Although there might have been multiple
royal libraries around the Mediterranean in the second century, writers of the first
century asserted the unique and preeminent status of this Library. And while the
second-century institution drew prestige from the monarchs who sponsored it, by
the first century it had become, in a way, autonomous in its celebrity. A library
had become the Library.78
From the perspective of a user like Byblas, the Library may have looked
something like what we understand a research library to be, but from the perspec-
tive of its sponsors it was and remained an essentially political institution. The
political nature of the Library at Alexandria stands out in what we know about its
leadership. However much those in charge may have been intellectuals, they were
fundamentally political operatives. In fact, the inscription I just mentioned, from
Paphos on Cyprus from sometime around 88 bce, honors
Onesandros son of Nausikrates [the k]insman and priest for life of the king
Ptolem[y the God and S]avior and of the temple of Ptole[my] founded
by him, the secretary of the city of Paphians and director [of the] great
library [in] Alexandria, because of his goodwill.79
While two of Onesandros’ positions (founding the temple of Ptolemy and city
secretary) had been local, the others involved service to Ptolemy IX Soter II in
Alexandria, and his position as the king’s “kinsman” and as a priest for life in
his temple in Alexandria had preceded his selection as director of the Library.80
This inscription does not reveal whether Onesandros had other, intellectual quali-
fications, but the appointment of a henchman as head of the Library marks the
position as fundamentally political.
Scholars, however, usually dismiss this evidence as exceptional, tarnishing,
so it’s claimed, the intellectual status of the Library. Thus Fraser says that
Onesandros was just a political appointee, not a scholar (consider the assumptions
behind this dichotomy) and that his appointment shows that the Library and the
research program it supported had gone into decline.81 Historians committed to the
77. I discuss this inscription below.

78. Although I would love to know more about how this happened—whether through imperial
propaganda or spontaneous recognition of the impressiveness of the library—no evidence reveals it.
The best analogy may be Michael Jackson’s coronation as “The King of Pop,” manipulative but true.
79. Mittford 1961: #110 (OGIS 172). ,Ον#σανδρον Ναυσικρτους, [τGν σ]υνγεν+ κα Tερ!α δι(
βου βασιλ!ως Πτολεμα[ου Θεο/ Σ]ωτ+ρος κα το/ Tδρυμ!νου UπO α:το/ Tερο/ Πτολε[μαεου, τG]ν
γραμματ!α τ+ς Παφων π.λεως τεταγμ!νον δD [π τ+ς ν] Αλεξανδρεαι
, μεγλης βυβλιοθ#κης,
ε:νοας Wνεκεν.
80. Bagnall 1976: 70.
81. Fraser 1972, i: 334.
traditional history of the Library rely on late and apocryphal sources, especially a
papyrus of the second century ce, which put a series of leading intellectuals at
its head.82 But as Jackie Murray has recently argued, this messy text becomes safe
for history only by ignoring and changing inconvenient and contradictory parts
of the papyrus and by wrenching part of it out of its actual context and inventing a
hypothetical one.83 This late text is so troubled it should be treated as apocryphal.
Ancient writers, however, fully understood the political nature of libraries.
The Letter of Aristeas, the earliest source to discuss the supervision of the Library,
represents this as an administrative post given to a career politician. This text
imagines Demetrios of Phaleron in charge of the initiative to build the Library.
Scholars usually emphasize Demetrios’ intellectual qualifications: a historian and
philosopher, he was a student of Theophrastus (himself the pupil of Aristotle),
thus linking Demetrios (and the Library) to the acme of the Athenian intellectual
tradition. Such an account, however, omits too much. Although Demetrios was a
prolific writer, he was a vapid philosopher. But he was a prominent and successful
Athenian politician whom Kassander (ruler of Macedon) made absolute governor
of the city, over which he ruled for a decade (318–307). He then went to the
court of Ptolemy I Soter where (according to Hellenistic sources) he attempted
to influence the king’s choice of successor.84 This Demetrios, the friend of power,
looks a lot like Onesandros. But the real question for the Letter, since it’s unsound
to accept it as reliable history, is how it represents Demetrios in terms of these
two aspects of his resume, the intellectual and the politician. While the Letter
makes no mention of his philosophical pedigree, Demetrios does appear as the
king’s lackey. He does what’s ordered, reports to his boss, and answers questions
(§§9–11, 308–17), but the closest he comes to a philosophical claim is his guarded
remark to the king that “‘I have been told that the laws of the Jews, too, are worthy
of translation and of placement in the library under you.’”85 I do not intend to
perpetuate the false choice between the intellectual and political, but to point out
that the Letter emphasizes Demetrios’ political side.
Similarly, the leadership of the Mouseion, a parallel institution, was also
a job for an astute, seasoned operator. An inscription from Delos from 166–
145 bce honors “Chrysermos son of Herakleitos of Alexandria, the kinsman of
king Ptolemy and Exegete and (supervisor of) the doctors and superintendant of
the Mouseion.”86 From a prominent family with connections to the Ptolemies
82. P. Oxy. 10.1241. The online Catalogue of Paraliterary Papyri (CCP number 0060) contains
the Greek text (of Van Rossum-Steenbeek 1998). J. Murray 2012 includes a Greek text and translation.
83. J. Murray 2012.
84. Diogenes Laertius 5.78–79 paraphrases Hermippos and Sotion.
85. §10. Demetrios’ servility contrasts with Aristeas’ active persuasion of the king; the two
seem to be paired in the opening of the letter. It is not, of course, surprising that the purported author
should emphasize his own agency; my point is that he does this partially by implicitly contrasting
himself with Demetrios, the functionary.
86. ID 1525 lines 1–4 (= Samama #111): Χρσερμον 0Ηρακλετου Αλεξανδρ!α , / τGν συγγεν+
βασιλ!ως Πτολεμαου / κα ξηγητBν κα π τν ατρν / κα πισττην το/ Μουσεου. There
over generations,87 Chrysermos like Onesandros was a “kinsman” to the king

and held other offices. This does not seem to have been a world where a man’s
scholarship alone—despite Vitruvius’ later fantasy about Aristophanes (which I
discuss below)—could elevate him to control of the Library. Political connections
mattered.
OTHER COLLECTIONS OF BOOKS
People had long collected and valued books, of course, but the innovations
of the second century departed from these practices. People held these earlier
collections privately, not as public ornaments in a political economy of display,
and they valued the books for their content, not as prestigious objects.
Evidence from the fifth and fourth centuries shows that rulers sometimes
tried to acquire books whose content they thought could directly help them
rule. So Herodotus relates that king Kleomenes of Sparta took oracles from
the Athenian acropolis, where the Athenian tyrants had gathered them in the
temple—oracles the Spartans used in planning their imperial strategies.88 In a like
vein, Alexander the Great so valued the Iliad that he kept it with his dagger under
his pillow.89 He did this, Plutarch says, paraphrasing his source, Onesikritos, a
companion of Alexander, because he thought it was “the ephodion of military
excellence.” The ephodion was the travelling supplies of an army, money and
provisions. Onesikritos seems to have originated the metaphor,90 and it rests on an
understanding of the poem as a practical manual of conquest. There is, however,
no reliable evidence that rulers built libraries, nor that they valued books for
anything but the knowledge they contained.91
is some doubt about whether the last two items refer to one office (superintendant of the doctors
of the Mouseion), but the κα between them seems to mark them as separate items.
87. Samama 2003: 208.
88. Hdt. 5.90. The events recounted happened in the late 6th century bce, seventy years or more
before Herodotus wrote.
89. Plut. Alex. 8.2.
90. Pearson 1960: 91.
91. The one possible earlier instance of a royal display of books comes from the description
of the Syrakusia, an enormous grain ship built around 240 bce for Hieron II, king of Syracuse. This
200-foot behemoth not only freighted an estimated 1700–3650 tons of grain, but swaggered with
stables, cabins, staterooms, mosaic floors, towers, a chapel to Aphrodite, and a “scholasterion, five
couches in size, built with the walls and the doors from boxwood, having a bibliotheke in it, and
a concave ceiling copying the sundial in Achradina” (Athen. 5.207e). The bibliotheke here is not
a library but a bookcase (one of several built-ins in the study room) but presumably its contents
would have contributed to the pomp. Two problems, however, impair this evidence. First, with a
capacity at least an order of magnitude greater than the largest Greek shipping vessel so far found, the
Alonnesos wreck (Hadjidaki 1996), some have doubted the vessel existed at all. Page 1981: 26–27
finds the parallels with later literature suspicious; Turfa and Steinmayer (1999), however, defend the
internal consistency of the description. (Still, their defense is mitigated because consistency doesn’t
prove veracity, and because the description of the parallel enormous grain vessel from antiquity,
the Isis in Lucian, is probably bunk as Houston 1987 argued.) Second, while Athenaeus (early 3rd
Private individuals in the classical period likewise valued and collected books
as vocational or educational tools. A speaker in an inheritance lawsuit in Aegina (c.
394 bce) described how his father, Thrasyllos, had inherited from his guest-friend
Polemainetos “his books on divination,” a legacy which had allowed Thrasyllos
to practice the art.92 The playwright Alexis (late fourth to early third centuries
bce) scripted a scene of the education of Herakles (in comedy often shown as
a boneheaded glutton) in which his instructor urges him to start with whatever
book pleased him—he points out scrolls of poetry, tragedy, and history—and
Herakles chooses a cookbook.93 Xenophon (first half of the fourth century bce)
recounted how Socrates confronted a young man, Euthydemos, who believed he
had learned much from his large collection of the writings of poets and wise
men, and who aspired to possess as many writings as possible.94 Finally, the
philosophers Theophrastus (d. c. 288 bce), Strato (d. 268 bce), and Epicurus
(d. 280 bce) had collections of books which they each bequested to one of their
followers.95 These instances demonstrate that some people considered a collection
of writings to have a vocational, educational, research, or practical value, but none
of them points to the politicization of book collections, that is, to libraries in the
sense I mean it.
The libraries of the second century and later were not unrelated to such private,
utilitarian collections of books. Even very early in the history of libraries people
used their books for practical ends. In Rhodes the Gymnasiarchs’ association
with the library implies it had a place in the education of young men, Apollonios
Byblas did research in the Library in Alexandria, and Polybius allowed that one
might investigate history in libraries in various cities—all in the second century.
Though books had long been collected and used, however, the advent of political
sponsorship in the second century marked a fundamental transformation.
A collection of books, therefore, does not entail a library. The failure to mark
this distinction undermines Annette Harder’s recent attempt to show that the third
century Alexandrian poets Apollonios of Rhodes and Kallimachos, though they
never mentioned the Library in Alexandria in their works, implicitly pointed to
it.96 She gives examples of their use of rare and poetic words, of their references
to works in different genres, and of their deployment of items of myth, history,
and geography, and she argues that each “suggests wide reading . . . in works
century ce) quotes the account of the original author, “some Moschion,” he apparently knew nothing
about who this was or when he wrote—nor do we. It is thus impossible to evaluate Moschion as
a source. I would disqualify this testimony as apocryphal.
92. Isoc. 19.5–6.
93. Alexis fr. 345 (K).
94. Xen. Mem. 4.2.1–40.
95. D. L. 5.52, 5.62, and 10.21.
96. Harder (2013: 96) adopts the strategy of paradoxically juxtaposing her evidence with the
supposed reality: “Given the apparent prestige and importance of the library, it is striking that, as
far as we can judge by the evidence, none of the Hellenistic poets refers to it explicitly.”
they may well have found in the library.”97 The problem is not just the entirely
impressionistic nature of the idea that these writers’ reading exceeded the bounds
of their own collections of books (and of their friends and colleagues from whom
they might have borrowed)98 ; it’s also that no number of books demonstrates
the direct and public sponsorship of the kings, an essential component not only
of the invention of the library as I mean it, but even of the usual idea of the
Library in Alexandria. The same problems dog the common attempt to link the
Library and Kallimachos’ monumental prose work, the Pinakes, which collected
and categorized basic information about authors and their works.99 Most scholars
assume that the Pinakes were intimately connected to the Library: if not exactly
the Library’s catalogue, then surely based on research in its extensive collection.
But however many books Kallimachos may have consulted, indeed however
“bookish” the work of third-century Alexandrian scholars may have been, there is
no evidence that books functioned in an aristocratic or royal economy of prestige
as objects of value independent of their contents. Following the precedent of
earlier monarchs, of the kings of Macedon or the tyrants of Syracuse, the first
Ptolemaic kings lured poets and scholars to their court, a project the Mouseion
probably served. These kings furbished themselves with writers, not books.
THE OBJECTIFICATION OF BOOKS
The invention of the library in the second century bce—that is the appro-
priation of collections of books as displays of political status, which entailed the
proliferation and magnification of such collections—was part of and depended on a
larger cultural phenomenon, the objectification and revaluation of books. Across
various domains—the political, but also the religious, aesthetic, and ethical—
people began to more clearly differentiate the form of the book from its content
and to attend to and value the form in and of itself. Although the physical technol-
ogy of book scrolls remained constant through the Hellenistic period, there was
a cultural revolution in the way people attended to this.
Because of the shortage of evidence for the third and early second centuries
bce, it is difficult to chart the origins of the objectification and revaluation of the
book. I suspect it did not happen at a single place for a single reason. Peter Scholz
has noted that evidence for public libraries associated with education does not
appear in Greek cities until the second century, which coincides with the growth
in the desire for education by richer city dwellers that began in the previous
97. Harder 2013: 100. Although the quotation comes only from her argument about the items of
myth, etc., the logic is the same in the other sections.
98. As the Romans did: Starr 1987a: 217–18.
99. As reported by the Suda in the 10th century, the title was Pinakes of those who were
conspicuous in every branch of learning, and of what they wrote, in 120 books. Witty 1958 collects,
translates, and briefly discusses the 25 paltry fragments and possible references, none of which date
from before the age of Augustus, 250 years after Kallimachos (= Pfeiffer 1968: 429–53).
century.100 This may certainly have been part of the dynamic of development,
but as I’ve shown there is no good primary source evidence for any kind of
public, politicized collection of books—a library in my sense—before the second
century, and the needs of education won’t account for the appearance of all of
these. Moreover, the appearance of libraries depended on the objectification of
the book, so that the more fundamental historical question is how books began
to be treated as objects across different domains.
The earliest evidence for books as objects comes from the literary domain in
the Hellenistic period. One might point to the general “bookishness” of Hellenistic
poets, writers who, as Bing has shown, represented themselves as readers of
texts and writers not performers.101 More particularly, Hutchinson has traced the
emergence of the book as a literary object.102 The book began as an accidental
object, an arbitrary part of large works which had to be copied onto multiple
scrolls. But at some point, writers began to anticipate such physical divisions
and use the “book” as a conceptual division when they created their works.
The historian Ephoros (fourth century bce) is the first known to have done this.
Diodoros says he divided his text into 30 books by area of the world103 and wrote
an introduction for each, but because his work is not preserved, we don’t know
what these prefaces said.104 The historian Timaeus (first half of third century)
followed him in using books as analytical parts of his work. But not until the late
third century and after—Apollonios of Perga’s Conics is the first substantially
extant work to be built out of carefully elaborated and distinct books—can you
see whole works beginning with an outline of the content by books, individual
books beginning with a prospectus and ending with a summary, and dedications
or epistolary prefaces attached to individual books. No longer a cut of meat from a
larger beast, the book had become literary animal in its own right.
Limited evidence also shows that people began to treat books as religious
objects, with particular importance for libraries. Although no Hellenistic evidence
conclusively links a Greek library with a temple (to which, for example, several
later Roman libraries were connected), books do seem to have been treated as
ritual objects. Panachristodoulou reports that line 7 of an unpublished inscription
from Rhodes (second century bce) reads: “no one is allowed to take out the books
which have been dedicated. . . .”105 The verb here, anatithemi, points to something
100. Scholz 2004: 125–27.

101. Bing 1988: 10–48. Bing explains this bookishness by the (supposed) great Hellenistic
libraries, saying that only with these libraries was the world of books “sufficiently ample . . . to assert
itself as the essential fact of the poet’s life . . . ” (45). By my revised chronology, however, cause
and effect should probably be reversed: the ways in which poets treated books as objects of their
literary art preceded and enabled the later political objectification of books in libraries.
102. Hutchinson 2008: 3–4, 230–31.
103. Sacks 1982: 440–41.
104. Pownall 2004: 138–39.
105. Papachristodoulou 1986: 268: τ( βυβλα τ( ?νατεθ!ντα μηθεν ξ!στω κφ!ρειν Zξω. . ..
NSRC 4, a second-century decree from Kos uses the verb anatithemi and the word “library,” but
which has been given to the gods, a votive. The inscription from Athens in 116/5
uses the same word: The ephebes undergoing civic training “dedicated (?ν!θηκαν)
a phiale (bowl) to Demeter and Kore and to the mother of the gods and a hundred
[bo]oks for the li[brary]. . . .”106 Although this is not a lot of evidence, it’s possible
to say two things about how the sanctification of books affected their use. First, it
accounts for the prohibition on taking them out—a similar prohibition is recorded
(100 ce) for the library of Pantainos in Athens107 —because the gods’ property
remained theirs forever.108 Second, the dedication of books as religious objects
dovetailed with the political donations. However future readers may have used
books dedicated in a library, their function as offerings depended not so much
on their content as on signifying the correct behavior of those who offered them.
A hundred books dedicated by the ephebes are in the same class as a phiale,
peerless as a votive object. The action is as important as the object, part of the
ephebes’ training in piety and civic virtue. The practice of dedicating books likely
developed at different times in different places—the evidence from Rhodes is
probably the earliest,109 with Athens later—but in broad terms the objectification
of books in the political and religious realms was roughly synchronous in the
second century.
The scraps of actual books preserved from Hellenistic Egypt provide some
evidence to support the idea that books became uniquely aestheticized as beautiful
objects during the Hellenistic period.110 Since complete scrolls haven’t survived,
it isn’t possible to say much about them as whole objects. And while some
scholars have posited Hellenistic illustrated editions of literary works, if they
existed none survive.111 The one physical aspect of books that can be charted in
some detail is the development of book hands, scripts used especially for writing
in books of literature or science, as opposed to in quotidian documents. Cavallo
and Maehler argue that in the classical period there was a general script derived
it’s so fragmentary the sense is impossible to recover. Even the minimal restorations of Maiuri seem
to presume what you would like to know.
106. Hesperia 16 (1947) #67 lines 30–32 [= P-S T30].
107. SEG 21.500.
108. Linders 1987: 116.
109. Since books are perishable, there is a kind of sampling bias in the archaeological record
of preserved votives. While inscribed inventories are also selective (Linders 1987: 116) a search
of Rouse 1902 for books as votives turns up only the inscription from Athens. (In a grabbag of
late stories like Diogenes Laertius’ [9.6] that Heraclitus deposited his book in a temple and of
dedications of texts on various media, the only Hellenistic evidence Rouse offers [pp. 64–65] of
the consecration of a book is Plutarch’s statement that Polemon [c. 190 bce] said that Aristomache of
Erythrai dedicated a “golden book” in the treasury of the Sicyonians at Delphi [Table Talk 675B].) ID
1400 line 7 (repeated in ID 1409, B a, II, line 39), the only other instance of a dedicated book I
have found, dating to sometime after 166 bce, was a scroll of poetry in a triangular casket shelved
with various other votives, not a book in a library with other books.
110. W. Johnson (2010: 21–23) describes the aesthetic aspects of books during the Roman period.
111. Horsfall 1983 gives a circumspect assessment of the inferences that can be drawn from the
evidence.
from inscriptions, but that late in the third century bce literary scripts began
to be differentiated from specifically documentary hands.112 Thus in the second
century both ornamental scripts (featuring especially the addition of serifs) and
more efficient cursive ones (with the letters connected) began to develop. Cavallo
and Maehler link the appearance of calligraphic book hands to the large amount of
copying done in the Library of Alexandria, which they say would have impelled
both standardization and speediness. They attribute the appearance of cursive
script to the needs of the Ptolemaic bureaucracy.113 Aside from the presumption
about the Library and its size, the reasons they offer for the appearance of book
hands in the third and second centuries don’t make sense. Cavallo and Maehler
have already shown that there was a de facto standard in the classical period,
so what needs to be explained is why a new standard developed—one which
differentiated literature from documents. Moreover, if the Library demanded
speed in copying, the new proto-cursive would have been more efficient. In fact,
it looks like book hands developed toward less efficiency (as with adding serifs) at
the same time that documents were being written with greater speed. So if you
ask why books of literature started being written with a different hand than (say)
tax receipts—a less efficient one—the answer cannot be the Library’s need for
voluminous copying; rather, it seems to derive from the increasing objectification
of books, now formally differentiated from quotidian documents. What you see
here is in another way the objectification of the book—an object which signifies
content by recognizable aesthetic distinctiveness.
I might conjecture, then, that a small number of elite culture producers,
writers, first began to treat books as distinct objects and that others gradually
picked up this attitude. This happened, I would hypothesize, broadly through
reading but perhaps also more specifically through the practice of dedicating
books—that is, sending a manuscript to a patron, friend, or colleague114 —a
practice that seems to have developed at about the same time. Books also began
to be treated as unique aesthetic objects in the late third century, as book hands
became differentiated from bureaucratic scripts. So when aristocrats and kings
began to endow libraries in the second century, their essential element, books,
had already acquired a distinctive status as objects that could be put to political
use.
ROMAN ACCELERATION AND INNOVATIONS
Although the revaluation of books based on their form began in the Hellenistic
period in the eastern Mediterranean, some of the best evidence comes from
112. Cavallo and Maehler 2008: 7.

113. Cavallo and Maehler 2008: 9.
114. Alexander 1986: 56n.30. Alexander 1993: 23–101 treats the development of prefatory
material in detail.
Rome in the first century bce and later. Romans are often represented as people
who copied Greeks (sometimes faithfully, sometimes not),115 but I would rather
understand them as one among many participants in a broadly Mediterranean
culture. Chronologically, it’s true, relying on the soundest evidence would date
the earliest Roman libraries to the first century bce.116 But the second century
bce in the eastern Mediterranean was little other than a Roman century, beginning
with the Roman war against Philip V, the Macedonian king, and ending with
Roman control of much of the region. Thus, the Greek Hellenistic world in which
the second century biblio-political revolution happened was already significantly
Roman. Besides, as I have suggested, the evidence doesn’t support the original-
copies model when it comes to libraries; rather than a full and complete invention
in a single place, it looks like there was a diffuse network of innovations,
a process the Romans participated in. Even if they arrived a little later, the
Romans seem to have radically accelerated the pace of the innovation of libraries
and the revaluation of books. This is important to consider since much of the
evidence for earlier periods comes from the age after the Romans had altered and
normalized ideas about libraries and books. Roman writers tended to retroject
their contemporary ideas and assumptions onto the past.
While a full history of books and libraries in ancient Rome would go beyond
the scope of this article, a general understanding helps to evaluate how that history
inflected the late evidence for Hellenistic libraries. The history of Roman libraries
began in the first century bce and rapidly accelerated as Romans became leading
participants in the innovations surrounding books and libraries. You can measure
the Roman participation by the proliferation of state-sponsored libraries in the city.
Julius Caesar envisioned a large library among his ideas for improving the city;
within a few years of his assassination, Asinius Pollio built the first public library.
Soon Augustus added two more libraries, then Tiberius built a pair, Vespasian
another.117 The extent to which such projects multiplied demand for books can be
gauged by what Suetonius says of Domitian: “he took care to restore at the greatest
expense the libraries destroyed by fire: copies of books were sought everywhere
and those trained to transcribe and correct texts were sent to Alexandria.”118
Even before the earliest evidence for a Roman library as an act of public
munificence, Roman aristocrats had already effected a significant innovation:
They assembled personal libraries as sites and symbols of their political power.
These libraries owed less to the private book collections of the past (whether the
how-to manuals of a diviner or Theophrastus’ scrolls) than the ornaments of later
Hellenistic monarchs. The famous library of Lucius Licinius Lucullus (protégé
115. Kunst 2005: 54.

116. As I argue below, there are strong reasons to doubt the commonly accepted story that
Aemilius Paullus first brought a library to Rome in 168 bce.
117. Dix (1994: 283) provides the sources and bibliography.
118. Suet. Dom. 20. Cf. Dio. Cassius 66.24.1–2. As an imperial librarian himself (Bowie 2013:
251–52), Suetonius was in a position to know what had happened earlier in his lifetime.
of Sulla, consul in 74 bce, commander of the war against Mithradates, and rival to
Pompey) was certainly a site of culture, but the intellectuals attracted to his villa
outside Rome by the bait of books—he was known for the special care he took
in entertaining Greek scholars—paraded his wealth and importance as much as
his impressive collection of art did.119 While libraries became normal features
in the houses of Roman elites (Vitruvius’ mash-up model of a “Greek house”
had one),120 they were not public in that the state neither founded, received, nor
controlled them. But they were not strictly “private,” either, since Roman houses
were the setting for politics in the form of patronage, and a library could signify
status and wealth, lure important intellectuals (including statesmen like Cicero),
and provide a setting for the networking of power.121
Unlike the Hellenistic aristocratic display of books which had typically
involved collective projects of euergetism, individual Roman noblemen made
the political institution of the library their own personal property. But by the first
century bce Romans effected four further changes in libraries and books. First,
Romans made books and indeed whole libraries the objects of imperial predation.
Books became booty. Second, the objectification of books developed under the
Romans to the point where a person’s desire for books, irrespective of their
content, began to be understood as a particular and overwhelming psychological
state, bibliomania. Third, Romans elaborated an ethical discourse on books which
opposed the proper relationship to them (one based on their content) to an aberrant
one (one based on their form). Finally, a greater demand for books—driven by the
founding of both aristocratic and imperial libraries, by seizing books as trophies,
and by desiring books as objects—began to significantly affect the market for
books and, ultimately, even their content. These changes in the world in turn were
elaborated as cultural tropes which deeply affected the ways Romans understood
and represented the previous history of libraries and books.
A curious and extended story in Strabo represents the confluence of all
these trends. Treated not in terms of the events it describes (which are mostly
apocryphal) but as a cultural object in its own right, this story illustrates some
particularly Roman characteristics in its representation of the world of books and
libraries:
The Socratics Erastos, Koriskos, and Neleus the son of Koriskos were
from Skepsis. Neleus was a student of Aristotle and Theophrastus and had
received the library of Theophrastus [τBν βιβλιοθ#κην το/ Θεοφρστου]
which also included that of Aristotle. Aristotle at any rate gave his to
Theophrastus, to whom he also left his school, and Aristotle is the first
man we know to have collected books and to have taught the kings in
Egypt the organization of a library. Theophrastus gave it to Neleus, and
119. Dix 2000 provides a thorough analysis.

120. 6.7.3.
121. Tutrone (2013: 158–59) discusses the “semi-public” nature of these libraries.
he took it to Skepsis and gave it to his family, ordinary folks who kept the
books locked up and not even carefully stored [ο\ κατκλειστα εKχον τ(
βιβλα ο:δO πιμελς κεμενα]. When they heard about the zealousness
[τBν σπουδBν] of the Attalid kings who ruled the city to search out books
to supply their library in Pergamum, they hid [the books] underground in a
kind of tunnel. Dampness and moths damaged them and after a long time
the descendants sold the books of both Aristotle and Theophrastus for a
lot of money to Apellikon of Teos. Apellikon was a bibliophile rather than
a philosopher [φιλ.βιβλος μ^λλον _ φιλ.σοφος], so when he searched
for a restoration of parts that had been eaten, he changed the text to a new
copy, did a bad job filling the gaps, and published the books filled with
errors. Older Peripatetics who followed Theophrastus had no books at
all (except a few, especially those widely circulated to the public) and
they weren’t able to engage in philosophy with any effectiveness but only
to pontificate about clichés. After these books appeared, later Peripatetics
were better able to engage in philosophy and in Aristotelian thought than
earlier philosophers, but they had to speak mostly about probabilities
because of the abundance of errors. Rome also contributed greatly to
this problem: right after Apellikon died, Sulla removed his library when
he captured Athens. Here, Tyrannion the literary scholar, a devotee of
Aristotle [φιλαριστοτ!λης], got his hands on it by cajoling the librarian
[θεραπεσας τGν π τ+ς βιβλιοθ#κης]. So too did some book dealers
who used careless copyists and did not collate manuscripts. (This also
happens with other books which are copied for sale, both here and in
Alexandria.)122
There is little hope of verifying this saga. Although Strabo knew Tyrannion
and there is evidence that Theophrastus left his books to Neleus, other parts of
it contradict what we know.123 In terms of its content, other than what Strabo
knew firsthand or what can be verified independently, it should be treated as
apocryphal.
Putting aside the truth of the events, the story proves to be in its own right
a rich cultural artifact of the age of Augustus, an epic of sorts which relates
the past in the categories and preoccupations of Strabo’s day.124 The opposition
between those who value books for their content (generally, philosophers) and
those who value them as objects runs like a spine through the whole narrative.
On top of this, Strabo identifies four modes of transmission—gift by inheritance,
imperial predation, sale in the market, and access through patronage—each of
which can endanger the content of books because each ultimately functions
122. Strabo 13.1.54 . Plut. Sulla 26.1–2 tells a slimmer version of the same tale.
123. Gottschalk (1972) and Grayeff (1974) pretty much demolish this anecdote, though the latter
does counter nonsense with speculation. Barnes’ fear (1997: 20–21) that to doubt the whole story
is to doubt all of ancient history seems overblown.
124. Schubert (2002) analyzes this story as Strabo’s implicit commentary on the reliability of
competing sources.
according to its own logic.125 Although each of these modes had long existed,
Strabo demonstrates the way that Romans first articulated them as problems
in relationship to books. Finally, Strabo provides evidence for a new, intense,
psychological relationship to books, bibliomania, which might manifest in any
of these modes of acquisition.
Understanding this story requires considering its place in Strabo’s text. Strabo
(who was born near the middle of the first century bce and died sometime after
23 ce), a Greek from an aristocratic family in the town of Amasia in northern Asia
Minor, travelled widely and spent considerable time at Rome. His Geography, a
description in Greek of the known world, attends to the culture of places more than
their physical features, and has a political and philosophical tint. Highly laudatory
of Augustus, his work reflects both his Greek background and his Roman context,
orientations which did not always align.126 Strabo’s story of Aristotle’s books
occurs in his description of Skepsis, a town not too far from the site identified as
Troy. He begins with the Skepsians’ own account of their city’s origins, first ruled
jointly by the sons of Hektor and Aineias, two Trojan heroes.127 He reports that
Demetrios says that Aineias’ palace was in Skepsis. But then he notes that this
local tradition doesn’t agree with what is commonly said of Aineias, and Strabo
records different reports of Aineias’ wanderings after the fall of Troy, concluding
with his settling in Latium. He adds that Homer contradicts the story of Aineias’
roaming, ending with a comment on a passage in the Iliad (20.306–307). Strabo
quotes Homer’s line, “Now indeed strong Aineias will rule the Trojans as king / as
will his sons’ sons”—a line that contradicts both the Skepsians’ and the Romans’
claims to have been ruled by him—but then Strabo adds that some people write,
“the house of Aineias will rule over all as king / as will his sons’ sons,” by which,
Strabo notes, they mean the Romans will rule.128 He immediately launches into
the passage quoted above about Aristotle’s books.
Strabo’s abrupt juxtaposition of the legend of Aineias as the founder of
Rome—immortalized in Virgil’s Aeneid by 19 bce—with the epic progress of
Aristotle’s library suggests parallel stories. Aristotle’s books represent a Greek
philosophical inheritance (literally at first), which eludes the kings of Pergamum,
125. Tutrone (2013: 160–66) analyzes the ways that the market and patronage affected the book
trade in Rome of Strabo’s day, but because he treats not the full saga but only the events after
Aristotle’s books arrive in Rome (presumably because these are the ones Strabo could verify as
true), he does not discuss imperial predation or inheritance. Jacob (2013: 67–74) reads this passage
as a cultural genealogy of libraries, but because he writes as if the events are true, he does not treat
the text as rooted in the time of its writing. Although it has events in sequence, it’s difficult to see this
as a genealogy because later aspects of libraries don’t supplant earlier ones (so it’s not a succession)
and because there is no necessary or structural development in the sequence (so one mode doesn’t
grow out of the previous). My strategy of analyzing the whole saga in terms of its role in Strabo’s text
and as a cultural artifact of the time of its writing differs from these two scholars’ readings.
126. Dueck 2000: 115.
127. Strabo 13.1.52.
128. Strabo 13.1.53.
is reappropriated by the Athenians, and after many wanderings arrives at Rome.

There the library suffers a mixed fate, falling into the hands of someone who
cares about its content, Tyrannion who loves Aristotle, as well as the booksellers
who are indifferent. For better and for worse, Romans now control and reproduce
Greek culture and learning.
By the end of the story, then, Aristotle’s library functions as both a symbol
and mechanism in an intellectual genealogy on an imperial scale. But it begins in
this way, too, in a smaller way. In the first two transactions that move Aristotle’s
library, it represents the passing of philosophical authority from teacher to student
(Aristotle to Theophrastus, Theophrastus to Neleus), a philosophic genealogy.
(Anecdotes in later writers added that Aristotle bought up the books of Speusippos,
Plato’s nephew and head of the Academy, thus using Aristotle’s book collecting
to mark his close intellectual relationship to Platonism.)129 But when the non-
intellectual heirs of Neleus gain the inheritance, both imperial predation and
market forces seek the library as their object.
Strabo almost makes imperial predation look harmless—except that it twice
indirectly damages the books. First, the Attalid kings’ attempt to get the books
makes the owners hide them underground. Then Sulla’s looting puts the library
at the mercy of the Roman system of patronage, where both those who respect the
content of books and those who don’t care can gain access. Without explicitly
criticizing any rulers, Strabo has offered a story that is not entirely optimistic
about the fate of books in imperial systems. Contrast this with Gellius’ story (c.
180 ce) about the destiny of the Athenian public library: Invented by the tyrant
Pisistratus in the sixth century bce, it was said to be looted by Xerxes in the
fifth century, and eventually returned to Athens by Seleucus I in the late fourth
or early third century.130 Although this invokes some streamlined similarities to
Strabo’s tale, what is notable is the care each of the rulers shows for the library:
Pisistratus for inventing it, Xerxes for sparing it when he burned the rest of
Athens, and Seleucus for returning it to its home. Strabo’s imperial saga ends
less happily.
Strabo represents the market, however, as invariably destructive to the mean-
ing of the text because of the way it constitutes the book as a physical object.131
In the first sale, Apellikon gets his hands on the library because of his “love of
books.” Posidonius (c. 135 - c. 51 bce) reported that the wealthy Apellikon—an
aesthete he characterized as having a “most various and fickle life”—not only
bought Aristotle’s library and other books, but also that “he was continually
129. According to Diogenes Laertius (4.5), Favorinus (c. 85–155 ce) said that Aristotle paid
three talents for Speusippos’ books. Gellius, a pupil of Favorinus, reported (3.17.3) that “they say
that Aristotle as well paid three Athenian talents for a handful books of Speusippos the philosopher
after he died. . . .”
130. Gellius 7.17.1.
131. Dupont (2009: 153–56) discusses the ways Roman poets imagined markets corrupting
books.
acquiring by underhanded means both the originals of ancient decrees from the
Athenian archives and anything old and special from other cities.”132 Posidonius’
report provides the earliest evidence for an obsession with the formal aspects
of books. Apellikon’s mania for old documents and books depends not on their
content but their form; as Strabo says, he doesn’t love wisdom, he loves scrolls. In
Strabo’s story Apellikon’s lack of concern for content turns noxious when he has
an edition prepared (for sale, presumably). The second market exchange in the
story is equally detrimental to the content of the books. Here Strabo explicitly
blames the goal of selling books as promoting slipshod production. In both cases,
a primary concern for the books as physical objects—in one case as aesthetic
objects, in the other as economic—damages the contents. The legend ends with a
general denunciation of the market’s pernicious effects on all book production
everywhere.
Apellikon, whose habits are confirmed by a contemporary source, Posidonius,
represents two related novelties: the form and the intensity of his attachment to
books. As I noted earlier, the evidence of book hands suggests that people began
to objectify books as beautiful objects at least as early as the third century, but
Apellikon is the first person we know to crave ancient and autograph manuscripts.
He is also the first for whom the passion for the form of the book was a kind
of compulsion. Apellikon was the first to suffer bibliomania.
Many people in the Roman world after Apellikon developed a similar attach-
ment to old books, and the rising demand seems to have corrupted the supply. In
“The Ignorant Bookcollector,” Lucian says that such a man makes up for his lack
of education by buying autograph copies of Demosthenes’ speeches, manuscripts
of Thucydides that Demosthenes copied himself, and the books Sulla looted from
Athens (§4). To prove the durability of papyrus made with a particular glue, Pliny
the Elder claimed to have seen autograph copies of documents by Tiberius and
Gaius Gracchus in the possession of the poet Pomponius Secundus; “indeed,” he
adds, “we commonly [saepenumero] see writings in the hand of Cicero, the deified
Augustus, and Virgil.”133 Gellius, too, says that purported autograph manuscripts
of the Aeneid circulated in his day.134 Autograph manuscripts, like anecdotes,
seem to proliferate over time, and one measure of the general willingness to
believe in the antiquity of documents is Strabo’s acceptance of the story of the
miraculous reappearance of Aristotle’s own texts after a couple hundred years
out of sight underground. Of course, some people were aware of the possibility
of fakes: Lucian, for example, was willing to slander an enemy with the charge
that he forged a handbook of rhetoric by Tisias, the fifth-century bce teacher,
swindling an old man out of a lot of money.135 At our remove it’s difficult to gauge
132. Athen. 5.214d-e. Bugh (1992) discusses this excerpt from Posidonius in Athenaeus.
133. Pliny NH 13.26.83.
134. Gellius 2.3.5.
135. Lucian Mistaken Critic (Pseudol.) 30.
how many of these manuscripts were authentic,136 but faked or not, some buyers
treasured old, rare manuscripts.
By the time of the principate, the contrast between valuing books by their
content and by their form had been embedded in a critical ethical discourse
about wealth. Romans sometimes treated books—as formal objects—as ethical
problems. Already apparent in Strabo’s characterization of Apellikon as “a
bibliophile rather than a philosopher,” this discourse contrasted a genuine concern
for knowledge and moral betterment with an ostentatious but ignorant display of
books. This contrast sometimes grounded critical satire—as when Petronius has
the pretentious but rich former slave Trimalchio announce that he has two libraries,
one Latin, the other Greek137 —but it also underwrote an ethical discourse which
can be found in Seneca, Lucian, and Plutarch, and represented a real dynamic
tension in the ways Romans valued books, even if it stereotyped the alternatives.
It’s important to attend to the ways Romans objectified books in the ethical
domain not only as part of the cultural history of the Roman period,138 but also
because it saturates the stories Roman writers told about books and libraries of the
Hellenistic past.
Seneca expresses the basic patterns of this discourse about books in a pas-
sage in his “On Tranquility of Mind”139 which offers ethical advice to a young
man. Even in intellectual pursuits, Seneca says, where spending money is most
honorable, it’s justified only to the extent that it’s useful. So he refuses to praise
the kings who built the Library in Alexandria: “They collected not for learn-
ing but for display, like the many who are ignorant of even children’s litera-
ture keep books not as tools of education but as embellishments of the dining
room.”140 He berates the man who “obsesses about bookcases of citrus wood and
ivory, collects the works of obscure and scandalous authors, and loafs among
thousands of books, who is pleased most by the outsides and labels of his
books.”141 Such men are not driven by excessive zeal for learning; they buy
these things “for splendor and the luxury of their houses.”142 Seneca uses a clus-
ter of contrasts concerning books—learning versus ignorance, content versus
form, use versus display—to distinguish the proper from the improper ethical
orientation.
136. Zetzel’s (1973) claims of specific forgeries have been contested by McDonnell (1996).
137. Petr. Sat. 48.4. Starr (1987b) and Horsfall (1989: 80–82) discuss this passage.
138. Dupont’s perceptive analysis (2009) of the “autonomy” of books in the early principate
overlaps to some degree with my concern for their status as objects. But because she works primarily
from the evidence of Augustan poets, her account tends to replicate their experience as authors rather
than giving an analysis of the whole cultural system of books and libraries.
139. 9.4–7. Seneca wrote this c. 50 ce.
140. 9.5.
141. 9.6.
142. 9.7.
A century later, Lucian relied on the same contrasts and expanded them in
his diatribe “The Ignorant Bookcollector.”143 Lucian begins his attack against
his unnamed quarry by contrasting learning and ignorance: “You think that you
appear to be a person of education because you fanatically buy up the most
beautiful books, but your plan has gone south and this is certainly proof of
your ignorance.”144 This sentence outlines the important themes of this work.
Collecting is a kind of frenzy (σπουδ#, §19, 22, 25), a compulsion manifested in
others by collecting objects belonging to writers (a lamp, a staff, a tablet) as though
they could transmit through physical contact the genius of the previous owners
(§13–15). The collector’s relationship to books is merely one of ownership,
which brings no benefit because the owner doesn’t have the knowledge or skill
to properly use what he owns (§4–5, 12). And the collector obsesses about the
beauty (τG κλλος) of the books, which derives from their appearance and cost.
For Lucian, however, the true beauty of a book is in its content (§2, 28). People
of education, Lucian suggests, “are happy with the advantage they get not from
the beauty and excessive expense of books but from the language and thought
of the authors.”145
Plutarch invoked the ethically proper use of books at one point in his flattering
portrait of Aemilius Paullus, the man who defeated Perseus the Macedonian king
in 168 bce.
People praised his nobility and idealism more than anyone’s. He didn’t
care even to look at the silver and gold which had been collected from the
royal [storehouses], but handed it over to the quaestors for the state’s
treasury. The only thing he allowed was his sons to pick out the books
of the king, since they were committed to their literary studies.146
Polybius, a friend of Aemilius Paullus, had related these events some 250
years earlier than Plutarch, with a notable omission:
After he had control of the Macedonian kingdom, in which besides other
fixtures and stockpiles they found in the treasury more than six thousand
talents of silver and gold, Aemilius hadn’t the slightest desire for any of
143. Lucian wrote this c. 170 ce. Jones (1986: 108–10) and W. Johnson (2010: 158–71) discuss
Lucian’s essay. Parallel to my briefer analysis here, Johnson describes how Lucian attaches moral
meanings to proper and improper modes of reading.
144. §1: ο
ει μDν γ(ρ ν παιδεαR κα α:τGς εKνα τις δ.ξειν σπουδ+` συνωνομενος τ( κλλιστα
τν βιβλων) τG δ! σοι περ τ( κτω χωρε2, κα Zλεγχος γγνεται τ+ς ?παιδευσας πως το/το.
145. §28: ?π.χρη aφελε2σθαι ο:κ κ το/ κλλους τν βιβλων ο:δO κ τ+ς πολυτελεας α:τν,
?λλO κ τ+ς φων+ς κα τ+ς γν-μης τν γεγραφ.των.
146. Plut. Aem. 28.6. ο:δενGς δO bττον α:το/ τBν λευθερι.τητα κα τBν μεγαλοψυχαν π#`νουν
οT Mνθρωποι, πολ μDν ?ργριον, πολ δD χρυσον κ τν βασιλικν cθροισμ!νον ο:δO δε2ν
θελ#σαντος, ?λλ( το2ς ταμαις ες τG δημ.σιον παραδ.ντος. μ.να τ( βιβλα το/ βασιλ!ως
φιλογραμματο/σι το2ς υT!σιν π!τρεψεν ξελ!σθαι. . . . Plutarch adds that Paullus gave his son-
in-law a bowl (φιλη) weighing five pounds of silver.
it—indeed, he didn’t even want to see it—and he made others manage

the disposition, even though in his private life he was hardly rich, but
in fact rather deficient.147
The difference between these two somewhat similar accounts raises ques-
tions about the changing valuation of books and about the historicity of the
transaction. The two authors are making slightly different ethical points: Poly-
bius about Aemilius’ resistance to corruption, to enriching himself based on his
position, Plutarch about his nobility and idealism (τBν λευθερι.τητα κα τBν
μεγαλοψυχαν). Plutarch’s addition of the detail about the books does not so much
deprecate Paullus’ rectitude as inflect it. Plutarch’s telling of the story depends
on understanding how the competing ways of valuing books in Plutarch’s own
time could express ethical orientations: Because Aemilius meant these books for
study not display and valued them for their content not as precious objects, his
grant to his sons demonstrates his probity.148 This detail would be inappropriate in
Polybius not only because his point is that Aemilius refused to take anything,149
but also because there is not much evidence at that time for the ethical freighting
of polarized ways of valuing books. The appearance of this detail in a source
two and a half centuries after the fact raises suspicions about its veracity,150 but
however you settle that, Plutarch does not provide evidence that Macedonia had a
library (in the sense that I mean it, as opposed to some books the king owned),
as is sometimes claimed.151
The novelty of the Romans’ ethical freighting of books emerges when you
contrast the Roman ethical discourse about books, which depended on distin-
guishing form and content as modes of valuing, with the “Socratic” critique of
147. Polyb.18.35.4–5. κριος γεν.μενος τ+ς Μακεδ.νων βασιλεας, ν b` τ+ς Mλλης χωρς
κατασκευ+ς κα χορηγας ν α:το2ς εUρ!θη το2ς θησαυρο2ς ?ργυρου κα χρυσου πλεω τν
Fξακισχιλων ταλντων, ο:χ οdον πεθμησε τοτων τιν.ς, ?λλO ο:δO α:τ.πτης cβουλ#θη γεν!σθαι,
διO Fτ!ρων δD τGν χειρισμGν ποι#σατο τν προειρημ!νων, κατοι κατ( τGν
διον βον ο: περιττεων
τ+` χορηγαR, τG δO ναντον λλεπων μ^λλον.
148. Similarly, Plutarch places his report about Lucullus’ library (§42) at the end of a long
section (Luc. 36–42) in which he censures Lucullus’ private life, especially his monkeying around
(παιδιν) with the immense wealth he brought back from his eastern command. Although he furnished
his libraries lavishly, Plutarch praises this as serious and honorable because they were the site of
scholarship and philosophy.
149. Polybius later reiterates Aemilius Paullus’ unusual virtue: although he controlled the
Macedonian treasure, he desired none of it (31.22.7: μηδενGς πιθυμ+σαι π.σω θαυμαστ.τερον).
150. Pelling (2002: 94–95) shows how Plutarch sometimes fabricates details. This instance
shows the difficulty for a historian in Pelling’s claim (156) that Plutarch really only fudged the
details: sometimes a detail incidental to Plutarch’s biography is central to a modern reconstruction
of events, like when the Romans first imported a library.
151. Isidoros (7th century ce) amplified the story so that “Aemilius Paullus was the first to bring a
mass of books to Rome” (Etym. 6.5.1). These two rickety pieces of evidence underwrite the common
statement that Aemilius Paullus brought the royal Macedonian library back to Rome (e.g., Affleck
2013: 124). In their accounting of the plunder from Macedonia, neither Diodoros (31.8.9–12) nor
Livy (45.33) mention any books. (This part of Polybius has not survived.)
books of the fourth century bce.152 In Xenophon’s version,153 he represented the

young Euthydemos as someone who had many works by poets and sophists and
so considered himself wise (§§1, 8). While Socrates praises the young man’s
commitment to wisdom (§9), he proceeds to show Euthydemos repeatedly that
his attachment to books has not allowed him to understand anything important.
Xenophon here is not critiquing writing so much as one-way communication.154
Euthydemos’ ethical failure, as Xenophon analyzes it, is not the way he relates
to books (he values their content, precisely the relationship Roman moralists
like Seneca would praise!), but that he attempts to gain wisdom through unilat-
eral communication (which in this case is written, but could be verbal as well,
as a lecture). This critique does not depend on a sharp differentiation of the
form and content of books. And while it doesn’t show that there weren’t peo-
ple who purchased books out of a compulsion to collect them,155 it does show
that for some Greeks books were a very different kind of ethical problem than
for the Romans.
The Roman discourse about the proper ethical relationship to books consti-
tuted two social stereotypes of book owners, the collector and the intellectual,
one valuing them simply for their form, the other just for their content. This
points to an important step in the cultural history of books, not just because it
recognizes the bibliomaniac, but also because it acknowledges a reinvestment in
the content. In opposition to attachment to the form, dedication to the meaning of
a book became an ethical imperative abstracted from any particular content. This
discourse, however, does not directly describe social realities; despite the sharp
contrast between two stereotyped characters, in practice most Romans probably
exhibited some mix of both relationships to books.
The best historical illustration of this mix is a man known as an avid reader
and writer, someone who thought deeply about the contents of books: Cicero.
But Cicero, it must be admitted, showed a keen interest in the aesthetic aspects
of his books. In a letter to Atticus, he mentioned that Tyrannion had imposed
a marvelous arrangement on his library, and he asked his friend to send two
trained slaves whom Tyrannion could use to glue pages together and attach tags
with titles to the scrolls.156 Only if convenient, he added, though he ended the
letter: “if you love me be attentive about the library slaves.” Title labels may
have helped in the practical task of finding particular books, but Cicero later
152. I call this “Socratic” because both Xenophon and Plato attribute a version of it to Socrates,
but I remain agnostic about whether Socrates himself espoused it.
153. Xen. Mem. 4.2.1–40.
154. D. Johnson (2005: 50–55). Johnson notes that this corresponds to Plato’s position as well.
155. As Lampe (2010: 200–203) has argued, Socratic authors posit compulsiveness as an
important stage in the developing relationships of young men with Socrates. Euthydemos abandons
his sterile attachment to books and comes to spend as much time as possible with Socrates, even
imitating his lifestyle (Xen. Mem. 4.2.40).
156. Cic. Att. 4.4a.
gushed to Atticus about the aesthetic aspect: “Your [slaves] adorned [pinxerunt]
my library with repairs and title tags.”157 Cicero found in the beauty of his books
a kind of spiritual peace: “Really after Tyrannion arranged my books, a soul
(mens) seemed to have been added to my house. . . . Nothing is more elegant than
those bookshelves since the books were embellished with tags for me.”158 One
may have a certain sympathy for Cicero here, since when he wrote these letters
(56 bce) he was attempting to rebuild his life and property after his return from
exile.159 Still, he both fussed about and found joy in the physical and aesthetic
aspects of books, an attitude consistent with the compulsion to acquire books
he expressed earlier in his life (67 bce), whether through repeated needling of
Atticus about how much he wanted his books160 or his open-ended request of his
friend to get him a library from Greece.161 One measure of Cicero’s bibliomania
is the language he used (however playfully) a few years later when he asked
Atticus to help him get the books of the deceased Servius Claudius, which had
been willed to Lucius Papirius Paetus: “Now, if you love me, if you know I love
you, get to work and use your friends, clients, guests, former slaves, and your
slaves if you have to, so not even a page is lost. I have a desperate need [mihi
vehementer opus est] for the Greek books which I believe he left, and the Latin
books which I’m sure he did.”162 I’m not denying that Cicero cared primarily about
the contents of books, but like other Romans he also exhibited a particular kind
and intensity of attachment to them—an ability to take pleasure or consolation
in their physical presence and aesthetic properties, and a compulsive desire to
acquire them which transcended their contents—which is unattested before the
biblio-political revolution.
Several of these passages have already linked bibliomania to the market,
and Roman stories about books and libraries show a persistent concern for the
ways in which extreme demand could affect the production of books, particularly
through problems of ascription, correctly matching the author and his works. In
linking this problem to the acquisitive impulse of Hellenistic kings, Romans of
the imperial age constructed a history that replicated the dynamics of their own
market in books. A mania for manuscripts might confuse ascription in two ways.
First, it could lead to forgeries, modern writers creating new texts that purport
to be ancient. When refuting the authenticity of a work attributed to Hippocrates,
Galen claims that
157. Cic. Att. 4.5. This adornment may have included coloring the tags (Dorandi 1984: 189–90).
158. Cic. Att. 4.8. Although the manuscripts don’t include the word for “tags,” the consensus
of editors is to restore it here.
159. Dix 2004.
160. Cic. Att. 1.10; 1.4; 1.11.
161. Cic. Att. 1.7. Atticus was also shopping for sculpture for Cicero, a subject he raised even
more in his letters. Marvin (1989: 29–33) discusses Cicero as an art collector.
162. Cic. Att. 1.20 (60 bce).
before the kings in Alexandria and Pergamum became ambitious for the
possession of old books, no text was ever ascribed163 falsely. But when
those delivering to them the writings of any ancient man began to get
paid, from that point on they delivered many books which had been
falsely ascribed.164
Through the mechanism of the market, the kings’ insatiable demand for an-
tique manuscripts creates a market in forgeries. Whether this accurately rep-
resents the situation in the Hellenistic period is impossible to say (though
the categorical claim that before this no text was ever ascribed falsely seems
highly implausible), but it corresponds to the market for old books under the
principate.165
The second way that Roman stories linked the desire for books with the
problem of wrong attribution was through the phenomenon of plagiarism. Here
the problem wasn’t putting ancient authors’ names on modern manuscripts, but
modern authors stealing ancient writers’ words and presenting them as their
own. Thus Vitruvius tells the following story (which I have abridged and
paraphrased):
Motivated by the delights of literature (magnis philologiae dulcedinibus),

the Attalid kings established a library for general pleasure. Spurred by
boundless envy and acquisitiveness (infinito zelo cupiditatisque incitatus
studio), Ptolemy did the same. When it was finished, he wanted to increase
its holdings so he established prizes for writers on the model of those for
athletes, consecrating games in honor of the Muses and Apollo. For the
contest, at the last minute a seventh judge was needed, and the officials in
charge of the library suggested Aristophanes, who’d been reading through
the entire collection scroll by scroll. The games opened with the contest
for poets, and both the audience and most of the judges agreed on the best.
But Aristophanes ranked as the best the poet who was least approved by
everyone else, surprising the crowd and inciting the king’s skepticism.
Aristophanes explained that the other poets had stolen their works, which
he then proved by pulling many scrolls off the shelves from memory.
The plagiarists were caught and Ptolemy made Aristophanes head of the
Library.166
163. The verb here (πεγ!γραπτο) has a general meaning of “write” but also a more specific
one of “ascribe” or “claim credit for.” The question in this passage is about whether Hippocrates
wrote a particular work—that is, ascription.
164. Galen In Hippocratis De natura hominis librum commentarii iii (K15, 104).
165. Zadorojnyi’s claim (2013: 392) that Galen represents this as a failure of libraries seems to
oversimplify Galen’s analysis. Galen’s point is that the excessive desire for old books as emblems of
political power (these would, admittedly, be lodged in libraries) when channeled through the market
undermined authentic production.
166. Vitr. 7. Pref. 4–7.
Some 175 years after the events it recounts, an anecdote appears which in
important ways contradicts the received narrative of the Library.167 Scholars
sometimes try to save the traditional story from this awkward evidence by
dismissing deviant parts as due to pro-Attalid propaganda, but this arbitrary
assumption ends up burning the village to save it.168 I will simply treat it as
apocryphal and examine how it operates on three levels: as an explicit analogy
by Vitruvius, as an implicit analogy for Vitruvius, and as part of a larger Roman
discourse about books.169 First, Vitruvius tells this story explicitly to ground
his claim that in his book he has not stolen the ideas of others, that is, used
them without credit, but acknowledged his many debts to previous writers (1.
Pref. 10).170 In this reading, the poets who recite the work of others correspond
directly to writers who have stolen previous authors’ ideas (1. Pref. 3), all of
whom should be sanctioned. In a second and implicit way, however, Aristophanes
appears as a double for Vitruvius’ ideal architect, indeed for himself.171 Like
Aristophanes, Vitruvius’ architect must be a man of broad learning who can
competently judge fields not his own, possessing an astonishing memory.172 In
his relationship with the king, Aristophanes replicates Vitruvius’ with Caesar and
Octavian: a man of quiet talent recognized by the discerning ruler, a man who
doesn’t ostentatiously seek elevation to high authority but accepts it when it’s
offered.173 Third, the anecdote relies on (and therefore expresses) particularly
Roman ideas about books and libraries. It begins with the typical Roman contrast
of two orientations to books: those who love their contents, the Attalid kings, and
those who seek them for extraneous reasons, Ptolemy.174 In this case Ptolemy aims
to collect books which are unique not because of their antiquity but because of their
novelty; he wanted, Vitruvius says, to “tend to the library’s expansion by planting
seedlings.”175 As with Galen’s Ptolemy, however, the incentive backfires, and the
king’s excessive desire distorts the market. The anticipated original compositions
turn out to be pastiches of older work. The problem of proper ascription reappears
167. This story contradicts the usual history of the Library on at least three important points.
First, it makes the Attalids the inventors of the library and Ptolemy the imitator. Second, it makes the
Ptolemy who founded the library the king who appointed Aristophanes; in the traditional chronology,
that would be Ptolemy V Epiphanes. Third, it puts a committee in charge of the Library before
Aristophanes’ tenure as head.
168. If this story shows that the history of libraries could be part of a propaganda campaign,
then in fairness you have to allow that all the other (pro-Ptolemaic) sources could be as well. As,
indeed, the Letter of Aristeas seems to be!
169. Novara (2005: 49–57) interprets this anecdote primarily in terms of a rivalry between
Alexandria and Pergamum, a rivalry both historical and representative of models of scholarship.
170. McGill (2012: 34–46) discusses how Vitruvius uses this story to present an ethics of how an
author should relate to writers of the past.
171. McGill 2012: 45.
172. Vitr. 1.1.16; 1.1.12.
173. Vitr. 6. Pref. 5.
174. Novara (2005: 49–51) notes Vitruvius’ critical portrait of Ptolemy.
175. propagationibus inseminando curaret augendam.
in a transposed form: rather than ancient names being attached to modern work
(forgery), modern authors steal ancient language (plagiarism). The satisfying (to
scholars, certainly) irony of this anecdote is that the Library’s resources provide
the evidence of the fraud, at least when used by the lone man “who with the greatest
study and perseverance every day read through the books one after the other.”176
In this way, the anecdote ends by resolving the initial opposing ways of relating
to books by putting a man of learning in charge of the Library, recuperating an
enterprise of initially questionable motive and effects.177
Many Romans narrated the past in their own contemporary terms. Two
related features of the Roman culture of books in particular—bibliomania, an
obsessive attachment to the form of the book, and the ethical judgment of this
attachment—flow consistently through the representations of the Ptolemaic kings
as book collectors. Vitruvius, Seneca, and Galen represent the Ptolemaic kings’
relationship to books as excessive, destructive, and ethically suspect. Take, for
example, Galen’s anecdote about the ravenous acquisition of books by Ptolemy
III Euergetes (246–21 bce): Ptolemy borrows the Athenians’ official versions
of Sophocles’, Euripides’, and Aeschylus’ plays (putting down an enormous
deposit of 15 talents as collateral), has beautiful copies made—and keeps the
originals for himself, returning the copies and forfeiting the deposit.178 As I
noted above, this anecdote cannot serve as reliable evidence for the events it
relates. Galen represents Ptolemy, in fact, much like a Roman. He values the
manuscripts not for their content (copies won’t do) but for their form, because
they are the actual official versions held by the Athenians. This is another parable
on the problem of bibliomania on an imperial scale. Modern scholars, however,
impose an anachronistic motive: “The possibility that errors might have been
introduced when manuscripts were copied,” writes one, “explains the Ptolemies’
desire for the oldest exemplars.”179 This unimpeachable motive may make sense
to scholars, but it’s not what Galen says. Much as Strabo described Apellikon
(who lifted documents from the Athenian archives), Galen diagnoses Ptolemy’s
need for these unique books as a kind of psychological compulsion: “he was crazy
for the acquisition of old books.”180 In the Roman understanding of bibliomania,
176. qui summo studio summaque diligentia cotidie omnes libros ex ordine perlegeret.
177. Novara (2005: 54) attempts to align the end of the anecdote with its initial critical stance
toward the king by noting that any educated Roman reader would have known that Ptolemy later
imprisoned Aristophanes when he tried to leave for Pergamum. There are two complications. First,
only the Suda (10th century ce) provides the information about Aristophanes’ detention, in a passage
with a particularly corrupt text (Pfeiffer 1968: 172). Second, even if this happened, it’s uncertain
how knowledge of “the real” should affect the meaning of a self-contained anecdote. It may lard
the anecdote with an additional complexity, but it seems to go too far to claim (reductively) that
it ironically negates the explicit narrative of the story.
178. Galen Hipp. Epid. III (K 17A, 607–608).
179. Handis 2013: 365; cf. 396.
180. Galen Hipp. Epid. III (K 17A, 607): σποδαζε περ τBν <eπντων> τν παλαιν βιβλων
κτ+σιν.
such a motive is sufficient and needs no further rationalization—in fact, that

would misconstrue the meaning. Attributing a noble scholarly motive to Ptolemy
fails to appreciate that the anecdote presents him as morally dubious: not just an
overeager bibliomaniac, but a king-sized bunco artist. In line with the Roman
ethical discourse about books, Ptolemy relates to books in the wrong way. This
modern treatment of this anecdote thus commits a double error: it treats it as
reliable evidence for the third century bce and it fails to appreciate it as a cultural
artifact of the second century ce.
This analysis of the Roman cultural history of books and libraries shows how
later people wrote their accounts of earlier periods as if later transformations had
already happened. As if books had already become valuable political objects,
as if bibliomania were a recognized affliction, as if one’s relationship to books
had been incorporated into an ethical discourse. There’s no good evidence for
any of this in the third or second centuries bce. To those who lived after the
biblio-political revolution—to Romans and to modern historians alike—it seems
entirely reasonable that a king would invest enormous resources in creating an
unprecedented library, but from the perspective of the late fourth or early third
century, this makes little sense.181 In already presuming the political value of
books and libraries, the consensus story is a history that knows too much.
So, someone may still and finally be wondering, if libraries appeared as
political projects at various places around the Mediterranean in the second century
bce, when exactly did the Library in Alexandria get created? Throughout this
article I have tried to frame my inferences carefully to avoid making an argument
from silence: Primary source evidence for the Library of Alexandria first appears
in the middle of the second century bce, evidence for libraries elsewhere appears
only a few decades earlier, and all the later evidence which purports to account
for the period earlier than this is unreliable. The question, as a sage once put
it, is when does the absence of evidence become evidence of absence? On the
one hand, the third century is not especially well documented, so the lack of
evidence may not be indicative. On the other, and despite this, by the early
third century there is evidence—good, primary sources—for the existence of
the Alexandrian Mouseion, the community of scholars organized as a religious
fraternity devoted to the Muses.182 This suggests that we shouldn’t simply expect
silence. Personally, I don’t think there was a Library—a project to politically
181. Erskine (1995: 40–41) points out that citing precedents (like Theophrastus’ collection of
books) doesn’t explain the value of book collecting for the Ptolemies. I agree with Erskine’s
conclusion that libraries had significant political value, but because I have treated the evidence more
skeptically, I date the advent of this phenomenon at least a century later than he does.
182. Timon of Phlius (320–230 bce) ridiculed rival writers who received the patronage of the
Egyptian kings as birds wrangling in the nest of the Muses (fr. 12). The sentence is slightly obscure
and difficult, and Mineur 1985 (whom I follow in my periphrase) has argued against part of the
received interpretation, but the reference to the Mouseion seems secure. Herodas 1.31 (sometime
after 272/1 bce) also mentions the Mouseion.
glorify the king by collecting books—until sometime toward the middle of the
second century, though any argument from silence ends in a likelihood not a
certainty. I am sure, however, that the traditional story is untenable. You can’t
keep the inference and simultaneously disavow the evidence. The received story
of the Library suffers the predicament of Wile E. Coyote: the only thing keeping it
from falling is the refusal to look down to see there’s nothing holding it up.
University of Arizona
sjohnsto@email.arizona.edu
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A New History of Libraries and Books

Bagnall’s second move is to forego a positive narrative altogether. Thus he

10. Johnstone 2013.

THE INVENTION OF LIBRARIES

14. BCH 59 (1935), 421–25 (#41):

At nearby Rhodes, a second century inscription shows a library as the product

he personally underwrote many of the expenses of the ephebeia.28 He encouraged

28. Gauthier 1985: 162.

43. Polybius 34.14.1–7 (as summarized in Strabo 17.1.12 [C 797]).

Steven Weitzman may be right to understand Judas Maccabeus’ collecting of

HISTORY OF THE ALEXANDRIAN LIBRARY

68. I discuss this anecdote in more detail below.

77. I discuss this inscription below.

over generations,87 Chrysermos like Onesandros was a “kinsman” to the king

OTHER COLLECTIONS OF BOOKS

THE OBJECTIFICATION OF BOOKS

100. Scholz 2004: 125–27.

ROMAN ACCELERATION AND INNOVATIONS

112. Cavallo and Maehler 2008: 7.

115. Kunst 2005: 54.

119. Dix 2000 provides a thorough analysis.

is reappropriated by the Athenians, and after many wanderings arrives at Rome.

it—indeed, he didn’t even want to see it—and he made others manage

books of the fourth century bce.152 In Xenophon’s version,153 he represented the

Motivated by the delights of literature (magnis philologiae dulcedinibus),

such a motive is suﬃcient and needs no further rationalization—in fact, that

Honigman, S. 2003. The Septuagint and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria: A Study

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