THE MUSEUM OF ALEXANDRIA

By the early 290s, Demetrius of Phalerum found himself, as I have just said, in Egypt. Until his death some dozen or so years later, he was Ptolemy’s right-hand man for one of the most ambitious projects undertaken by any of the Successors—the establishment in Alexandria of the Museum (literally, a shrine to the Muses, the goddesses of art, literature, and culture) and its library. ¹¹

Alexandria became Ptolemy’s administrative capital in 313, the tenth anniversary of his regime. ¹²The occasion was probably marked by the removal of Alexander’s body from Memphis to its new home, the shrine known merely as the S

ma, the Tomb. Most of the city had been built by then, and it was already a thriving center of commerce. The city was divided into three sections, according to population: Greek, Egyptian, and other (chiefly Jewish). The first of these was by far the most magnificent, especially since a great deal of it was occupied by the palace compound, strikingly visible on the shoreline as one sailed into the harbor. All the buildings Ptolemy valued most were in close proximity to one another: the palace itself, the S ma, the barracks, the harbor and its warehouses, and the most important temples, including the Museum. No expense was spared on these and other great buildings. Alexandria was designed to display the majesty of the Ptolemies, as Versailles was built by Louis XIV for the Bourbon dynasty. Absolute monarchs have always spent enormously on such displays.

The Museum functioned both as a temple of learning (literally, since its director was also its high priest) and as a residential college for scholars, focusing particularly on science and literature. All expenses were covered by the king. Their major resource was to be the library. This was not a separate building; the book-rolls were stored on shelves in the Museum itself.

Ptolemy’s intentions in establishing the library were typically ambitious: first, to collect a copy of every single book ever written in Greek, wherever possible in original editions, and second, to translate into Greek the most important books written in other languages. The second aim led, most famously, to the translation within the Museum of the Old Testament into Greek. The work was undertaken by a group of about seventy Jewish scholars, which is why the Greek Old Testament, still considered the definitive version, is called the Septuagint, or “Translation of the Seventy,” septuagintabeing the Latin for “seventy.” The project was begun under Ptolemy I—the first five books of the Bible were perhaps already translated in Alexandria during his time—and was completed about 150 years later. The Septuagint then became the body of law for the Jewish community of Alexandria. ¹³

It is impossible to estimate the number of papyrus rolls the library contained at any given time, and many books occupied more than one roll. If each roll held about thirty thousand words, this book, for instance, transcribed onto papyrus, would make three rolls. It is possible that it came to hold well over half a million rolls, little enough by today’s standards (the Library of Congress holds more than thirty-three million books and sixty-three million manuscripts, let alone other forms of media), but an incredible achievement in the ancient world. Even during the reign of Ptolemy I, it probably held about fifty thousand. By the end of the third century the catalogue alone ran to 120 volumes; it contained not only the title of the work, but the name and a brief biography of the author, listing all his other works, the opening line of every work, and the number of verses if the work was poetry. It was an inventory of Greek literature and thought. The library was finally burnt to the ground in 641 ce, but by then it had long been sadly neglected; apart from anything else, the city (and especially the palace compound by the sea) had been devastated by a severe tsunami on July 21, 365 CE. ¹⁴

As soon as the books began to arrive and to be studied, it was clear that there were many different versions even of well-known texts such as Homer’s epic poems, the first and foundational works of western literature. A certain amount of editorial work on Homer had taken place in sixth-century Athens, but it was clearly inadequate; and even though there were standard texts of the major Athenian tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, these texts were riddled with actors’ interpolations. The problem was compounded by the fact that librarians were prepared to pay well for texts, to the delight of forgers and the bane of future scholars. In any case, in Alexandria, the necessity of classifying every work for the catalogue had to be supplemented by the attempt to establish authentic texts of the work of every author, at least partly by drawing up rules for the use of the Greek language. Thus was literary scholarship born. This may be where we can distinguish the signature of Demetrius of Phalerum. He belonged to the Peripatetic school of philosophy, founded by Aristotle, and encyclopedic thoroughness was one of the hallmarks of the school.

The library of Alexandria was not entirely without precedent. It is just possible that scientific research had become institutionalized in Babylonian temples in the fourth century. ¹⁵Certainly, private collectors had begun to accumulate libraries; Aristotle’s in Athens was especially famous (the library in Alexandria went to considerable pains to acquire it), and there were others. What was unprecedented, however, was the sheer scale of the project. As the Hellenistic period progressed, other cities came to establish fabulous libraries—those of Antioch and Pergamum, especially—but none ever compared with the library of Alexandria. Ptolemy’s intention fell little short of an attempt to monopolize Greek literary and scientific culture.

It was always part of the Egyptian mirage that they were an old race, whose scribes kept records of the distant past, ¹⁶but more important to Ptolemy was the fact that Macedonian kings had long patronized Greek artists, philosophers, and scientists. From this perspective, the establishment of the Museum was simply a vast extension of this kingly function. Patronage was no longer to be governed by the particular whims of the king, but institutionalized and passed down from generation to generation of Ptolemies.

All over the Hellenistic world, royal patronage was the main engine of cultural development in science, mathematics, medicine, technology, art, and literature. Philosophers generally stayed away, in horror of the opulence of court life. The kings had the money, and their cultural gestures enhanced their prestige as tokens of the extent of their resources. The painted Macedonian tombs of Vergina and elsewhere, tombs for the rich from the late Classical and early Hellenistic period, vividly show the connection between wealth and the development of fine art.

Patronage was not just necessary but an honor, a sign that a poet or scientist had won or deserved international renown. Hence artists and writers were expected to pay for their privileged and comfortable lifestyles with the occasional work or passage in fulsome praise of the king. ¹⁷And nowhere were artists or scholars treated better than in Alexandria. In due course of time, there even came to be a daughter library in the city, for the use of scholars not settled by the Ptolemies themselves in “the birdcage of the Muses.” ¹⁸

The erudition that the Museum fostered had a powerful impact on the kind of literature that was written in Alexandria. A lot of poems were so incredibly learned that only the author could be expected to get all the allusions. In addition to learned references, obscure words and neologisms abounded. Whereas in the past poems had been written for public performance and accompanied by music, they were written now also for private readers, who had the time to linger over texts and pick up at least some of the allusions and nuances. Shorter verse forms predominated, and so anthologies began to be put together, allowing readers to compare within specific genres. To a certain extent, Alexandrian literature was a kind of refined game between author and reader. It is not surprising that clever tricks such as the use of acrostics and the writing of concrete poetry (poems where the overall shape of the lines on the page make a specific shape—a cup, say, for a poem on a cup) first make their appearance in Alexandrian writers.