Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

62 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
credits Aristotle with being the first serious bibliophile, describes
in detail how successive private collectors kept it intact after his
death, despite efforts by public libraries to acquire it. The anecdote
reminds us that, even though rolls were relatively inexpensive, they
were never plentiful, and once there had been an initial run of any
work, copies were hard to come by.
Public libraries first came into being in the Hellenistic Period.
They represented a claim to cultural status on the part of the dynasts
who, for the most, part financed them. Strabo credits Aristotle with
taking the initiative in “teaching the kings of Egypt how to organize
a library.” The largest library in the ancient world was, in fact, the
Mouseion, or House of the Muses, in Alexandria, from which the
word museum derives. Founded in the early third century b.c.e. by
King Ptolemy I, it is said to have contained over half a million rolls,
perhaps the equivalent of 100,000 books. (To give an indication of
the sheer quantity of learning that existed in antiquity, we may note
that when the first Bible rolled off Johannes Gutenberg’s press in
1456, it is estimated that there were fewer than 30,000 books in all
of Europe.) For several hundred years, the Mouseion remained the
foremost repository of learning in the world. Among its famous
librarians were Aristophanes of Byzantium, who annotated the
earliest editions of Greek literature, and Aristarchos of Samos, who
established the definitive text of both The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Although the library was accidentally burned down, perhaps during
Julius Caesar’s siege of Alexandria in 48 b.c.e. , it continued to
function until c.e. 641, when it was closed on the orders of an Arab
general.
Eventually, libraries became a feature of all Hellenistic cities and
many medium-sized towns. The nearest rival to Alexandria, said
to have possessed 200,000 rolls, was Pergamum, modern Bergama,
about sixteen miles from the northern Turkish coast. (Pergamum,
by the way, was celebrated for its parchment—the writing material
that eventually replaced papyrus.) As they do today, libraries
instituted rules governing the use of their rolls. A library in Athens,
which was the gift to the city of a Romanized Greek named T. Flavius
Pantainos around c.e. 100, contains an inscription that states:
“No roll shall be taken out, since we have sworn an oath. It shall be
opened from the first hour to the sixth.” In the absence of barcodes
and an alarm system, it seems that the honor code prevailed.
Somewhat paradoxically, what has survived of Classical literature
owes nothing to the great libraries of antiquity and everything
to the fact that manuscripts were copied and recopied, initially dur-