This book, a collection of nine original essays by Australian classicists and archaeologists, is informative, assiduously researched and exhaustingly stimulating. I did wonder, on approaching this book, what more could possibly be written on the great library of Alexander, but I now know we have been living under many illusions and questionable assumptions. Be prepared, therefore, to have some myths shattered. Be prepared also, to ask yourself some big questions. Are enormous libraries inevitably doomed? Can everything be kept? Are libraries, by nature, reactionary and enemies of experiment? To take just one nugget of wisdom to set the grey matter tingling:
Not only did the destruction of late antiquity reduce ancient literature to a small and manageable corpus, but it improved its overall quality as only canonised school classics survived.
And there was I, thinking it a pity that the great library of Alexandria was destroyed. Or was it? Maybe people just lost interest and it withered away from neglect – another theory.
The book is in two parts. The first focuses on Alexandria itself. Chapter One sets the library history scene by noting the appearance of archives as early as 3,400 BC and that the Alexandrian library followed in the tradition of earlier Babylonian and Assyian libraries, the most notable one being that of Assurbanipal at Nineveh. This account is followed by a lyrical description of the early Alexandria – the “umbilicus of the ancient world” – through the eyes of Strabo, Lawrence Durrell, and other authors. Chapter Three gets down to the detailed history and description of the Great Library and its satellite, the Serapeum. There are accounts of its foundation, how many books it had, where they came from and how acquired, arrangement and cataloguing, the librarians, and when, and how, the library was destroyed. The burning by Julius Caesar and the later destruction of the books by the Arabs are two myths strongly challenged, while the baleful influence of the Christians to Greek scholarship and apathy of later Alexandrians are other possibilities mooted. The last chapter in this part revisits a great classical conundrum: did knowledge of Aristotle’s corpus come to us via the Lyceum of Athens and Rome, or were they part of the foundation collection of Alexandria via Mieza where Aristotle taught Alexander and Ptolemy Soter, the library’s founder? The answer put forward is “both”; an answer that helps to resolve a few outstanding problems in Aristotelian scholarship.
Part Two considers the wider issue of the place and legacy of Alexandria in classical and medieval scholarship. Alexandria was important in the history of medicine, but there is little evidence that the library played a part in the creative advances in anatomy, and rather more evidence of its negative role in the development of the lexicographical and empiric schools of medicine. Both relied on the textual authority of the past and discouraged research and open enquiry. There is a brief discussion on how the theatre at Paphos and beyond may have derived their architectural ideas from Alexandria, and then we come to the scholars and students of the Roman East. Rival professors using strong‐arm tactics to attract potential students (and their money); the slavery of teachers; fast‐tracking Roman civil servants; the high cost of books; the difficulty of finding good copyists how familiar it all seems!(An earlier chapter considers a pre‐Christian era copyright dispute!) Another chapter considers Alexandria as the centre of new religious cults. The mystery religions based on the ideas of Pythagorus and Plato; the work of Clement and Philo to unify Hebrew and Greek philosophy; the Neoplatonism of Plotinus, Longinus (“a living library and a walking museum”), Origen and Proclus; the Cabala; and the Christian Mysteries of Dionysius the Aeropagite; all these owe much to the influence of Alexandria as a centre of learning. Finally we return to libraries. “Alexandria and the Medieval Legacy” starts by de‐bunking Umberto Eco’s library of 1327 described in The Name of the Rose: “Eco’s 85,000 books might have required the skins of between two and eight million calves.” The general paucity of the classical legacy is stressed, and the smallness of what few “libraries” existed at that time. It is likely, indeed, that the library at Alexandria contained little of what we thought it did. Yet Eco gets the last laugh if we consider his library as symbolic!
The book has an excellent bibliography (in addition to the detailed chapter notes) and an index. And a final thought:
… the Alexandrian experience should warn us of the risks we take – especially if we replace libraries with the Internet.
There is still time to learn from the past!
