understand the importance of the Alexandrian collection.
The volumes had to be collected in great numbers, since the magnificent purpose of the library was to
encapsulate the totality of human knowledge. For Aristotle, collecting books was part of the scholar’s
labours, necessary “in the way of memoranda”. The library of the city founded by his disciple was simply
to be a vaster version of this: the memory of the world. According to Strabo, Aristotle’s collection of books
was passed on to Theophrastus, from him to his relative and pupil Neleus of Scepsis, and from Neleus
(though his generosity has been questioned) it finally reached Ptolemy II, who acquired it for Alexandria.
By the reign of Ptolemy III, no single person could have read the entire library. By royal decree, all ships
stopping at Alexandria had to surrender any books they were carrying; these books were copied, and the
originals (sometimes the copies) were returned to their owners while the duplicates (sometimes the
originals) were kept in the library. The established texts of the great Greek dramatists, stored in Athens
for actors to transcribe and study, were borrowed by the Ptolemys through the good offices of their
ambassadors and copied with great care. Not all the books that entered the library were genuine; forgers,
noting the passionate interest with which the Ptolemys collected the classics, sold them apocryphal
Aristotelian treatises that centuries of scholarly research later proved false. Sometimes the scholars
themselves produced forgeries. Under the name of a contemporary of Thucydides’, the scholar Cratippus
wrote a book called
Everything Thucydides Left Unsaid, in which he made happy use of bombast and
anachronism — quoting, for instance, an author who had lived four hundred years after Thucydides’
death.
Accumulation of knowledge isn’t knowledge. The Gallic poet Decimus Magnus Ausonius, several centuries
later, mocked the confusion of the two in his
Opuscules:
You’ve bought books and filled shelves, O Lover of the Muses.
Does that mean you’re a scholar now?
If you buy string instruments, plectrum and lyre today:
Do you think that by tomorrow the realm of music will be yours?
It was obvious that a method was required to help people make use of this bookish wealth — a method
that would enable any reader to trace a specific book to which his interest led him. Aristotle no doubt had
a private system for retrieving the books he needed from his library (a system of which, alas, we know
nothing). But the number of books shelved in the Alexandrian Library would have made it impossible for
an individual reader to find a particular title, other than by an amazing stroke of good luck. The solution
— and another set of problems — appeared in the guise of a new librarian, the epigrammatist and scholar
Callimachus of Cyrene.
Callimachus was born in North Africa around the beginning of the third century BC and lived in
Alexandria for most of his life, first teaching at a suburban school and then working at the library. He was
a wonderfully prolific writer, critic, poet and encyclopedist. He began (or continued) a debate that hasn’t
reached its end even in our time: he believed that literature should be concise and unadorned, and
denounced those who still wrote epics in the ancient manner, calling them garrulous and obsolete. His
enemies accused him of being unable to write long poems and of being dry as dust in his short ones.
(Centuries later, his position was taken up by the Moderns against the Ancients, the Romantics against
the Classicists, the Big American Novelists against the Minimalists.) His main enemy was his superior at
the library — the head librarian, Apollonius of Rhodes, whose six-thousand-line epic,
The Voyage of the
Argos, is an example of everything Callimachus detested. (“Big book, big bore,” was Callimachus’s laconic
summation.) Neither has found great favour among modern readers:
The Voyage of the Argos is still (if
discreetly) remembered; examples of Callimachus’s art survive faintly in a translation by Catullus (“The
Lock of Berenice”, used by Pope for his
Rape of the Lock) and in William Cory’s version of an elegiac
epigram on the death of Callimachus’s friend Heraclitus of Halicarnassus, which begins “They told me,
Heraclitus, they told me you were dead”.
Under the no doubt watchful eye of Apollonius, Callimachus (it remains uncertain whether he himself
ever became head librarian) began the arduous task of cataloguing the covetous library. Cataloguing is an
ancient profession; there are examples of such “ordainers of the universe” (as they were called by the
Sumerians) among the oldest vestiges of libraries. For instance, the catalogue of an Egyptian “House of
Books” dating from
circa 2000 BC, from the excavations in Edfu, begins by listing several other
catalogues:
The Book of What Is to Be Found in the Temple, The Book of the Domains, The List of All
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