THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA CENTRE OF LEARNING IN THE ANCIENT WORLD Edited by Roy MACLEOD I.B.TAURIS www.ibtauris.com Reprinted in 2010 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Revised paperback edition published in 2004 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd Paperback edition published in 2002 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd First published in 2000 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd Copyright © Roy MacLeod, 2000, 2002, 2004 The right of Roy MacLeod to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 1 85043 594 5 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset by The Midlands Book Typesetting Co., Loughborough, Leicestershire Printed and bound in India by Thomson Press India Ltd Contents Notes on Contributors VB Map of Alexandria x Preface Xl Introduction: Alexandria in History and Myth Roy MacLeod Part I. Alexandria in History and Myth 1. Before Alexandria: Libraries in the Ancient Near East D.T Potts 19 2. Alexandria: The Umbilicus of the Ancient World Wendy Brazil 35 3. Cloistered Bookworms in the Chicken-Coop of the Muses: The Ancient Library of Alexandria Robert Barnes 61 4. Aristotle's Works: The Possible Origins of the Alexandria Collection R.G. Tanner 79 Part II. Scholarship in the Alexandrian Manner 5. Doctors in the Library: The Strange T,ile of Apollonius the Bookworm and Other Stories John Vallance 95 6. The Theatre of Paphos and the Theatre of Alexandria: Some First Thoughts .f.R. Green 115 7. Scholars and Students in the Roman East Samuel N. C. Lien 127 8. The Neoplatonists and the Mystery Schools of the Mediterranean Patricia Cannon Johnson 143 9. Alexandria and its Medieval Legacy: The Book, the Monk and the Rose J.O. Ward 163 Bibliography 181 Index 191 Notes on Contributors Robert Barnes is a Senior Lecturer in Classics at the Australian National University, with interests in ancient philosophy and religion, and in bibliography and the history of libraries. He has been much concerned to arouse public discussion of the recent narrowing of its collecting policy by the National Library of Australia. Wendy Brazil took her BA at the University of Sydney, MA degrees in Classics and Linguistics at the Australian National University, and a MEd degree at the University of Canberra. She has been a research officer in Parliament House, a librarian at the National Library of Australia, a tutor in education at the University of Canberra, a theatre reviewer, and is currently a Fellow of University House at the ANU. She also is a teacher of Latin and Greek in secondary schools and at the Centre for Continuing Education (ANU). She is the author of articles in the IPA Review and Education Monitor, and has written a new curriculum for Latin, entitled Fabulous Latin. She is also the convenor of the Latin Reading Symposium at University House 'in uino latinitas', and 'Latin with Lunch' at the University of Canberra. J.R. Green is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Sydney and is the author of numerous books and articles on ancient theatre, including Images of the Greek Theatre (British Museum Press 1995; Greek translation, Crete University Press 1996) and Theatre in Ancient Greek Society (Routledge 1994, paperback 1996). He is Director of the University's excavations in Paphos, Cyprus, and a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Classical Studies, London. Patricia Cannon Johnson was born in England, and studied conserva­ tion of antiquities at the University of London Institute of Archaeology. She then worked for thirteen years in the Egyptian and Greek and Roman departments of the British Museum. In 1980, after a period as a freelance, she became Conservator at the Nicholson Museum of the University of Sydney, from which she retired in 1997. She now works as a writer, restorer, and teacher of Mystery studies. Samuel N.C. Lieu is the Professor of Ancient History at Macquarie University, and co-Director of its Ancient History Documentary Research Centre. He was previously Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Warwick University, and Director of its Centre for Research in East Roman Studies. He read Ancient History at VII THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA Cambridge and took his doctorate at Oxford with a thesis on the comparative study of Manichaeism in Rome and China. Since 1990, he has been co-ordinator of the Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum Project - a UNESCO sponsored project which aims to publish 60+ volumes Manichaean texts discovered by archaeologists from sites along the Silk Road in Central Asia and from sites in Egypt. In 1996 he was awarded a grant by the Australian Research Council for a project on Manichaean texts. His research interests include the comparative study of historiography in Rome and Chain, the military history of Rome's eastern frontier, the conflict of paganism and Christianity in Late Antiquity, and the use of computers for research and teaching in ancient history. He is a l<'ellow of the Society of Anti­ quaries (London) and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Roy MacLeod is the Professor of History at the University of Sydney. Educated at Harvard, the London School of Economics, and Cambridge, he has written extensively on the history of European science, technology and medicine, and on the history of European expansion overseas. He has taught in England, France, the Nether­ lands and the United States, and has held senior appointments at several universities. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and of the Academy for the Social Sciences in Australia. He is currently writing on the transmission of ideas from Europe to the 'periphery', as seen through the idea, ideology and architecture of the modern museum. D.T. Potts is Edwin Cuthbert Hall Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology at the University of Sydney. He has excavated exten­ sively in the United Arab Emirates in recent years and has written extensively on a wide range of topics in the archaeology and early history of Iran, Mesopotamia and Arabia. He is best known for his two volume work, The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, published by Oxford University Press in 1990; for his two volumes on the Pre-Islamic Coinage of Eastern Arabia, published in Copenhagen in 1991 and 1994; for his recent Mesopotamian Civilization: The Material Founda­ tions, co-published by Athlone (London) and Cornell University Press in 1997; and for The Archaeology of Elam published by Cambridge University Press in 1999. He is the founder and editor of the interna­ tional journal Arabian Archaeology & Epigraphy published by Munksgaard in Denmark, as well as the founder and co-editor of ABIEL, a monograph series focusing on Arabian archaeology and epigraphy, published by Brepols in Belgium. He is l<'ellow of the Society of Antiquaries (London) and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. V III NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS R.G. Tanner is Professor Emeritus of Classics and Lecturer in Sanskrit at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. He graduated from Cambridge in 1952, and subsequently taught at Melbourne University, 1953-5, and at The King's School Parramatta, 1957-1959, before moving to Newcastle as a Senior Lecturer in 1960. He was Foundation Professor of Classics at Newcastle from 1964 to 1993. He was Commonwealth Fellow at St. John's, Cambridge, 1967-68, and Presi­ dent of ASCS, 1992-95. He has published widely in ancient drama, Latin literature, Greek philosophy, patristic studies and Sanskrit. His publications on Artistotle include 'Aristotle as a Structural Linguist' TPS (London, 1969), 94-164, and 'Form and Substance in Aristotle', Prudentia, Xv, 2, (1983), 87-108. John Vallance is Head master of Sydney Grammar School. He read Classics at the University of Sydney, and St. John's College Cambridge. Between 1986 and 1993, he was a Fellow and Tutor of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, lecturing in Classics and the History of Science. He is the author of articles on ancient philosophy, science and medicine, including many in the third edition of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (1996), and is an editorial adviser and contributor to the Enciclopedia Italiana. His publications include The Lost Theory ofAsclepi­ ades of Bithynia (Oxford, 1990). He is completing a Source Book in Greek Science for Cambridge University Press. J.O. Ward is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. He has written a number of books and articles on medieval intellectual life, general medieval history, monastic history, witchcraft, the crusades and the Templars. He has an international reputation for his work on Ciceronian rhetoric in the Middle Ages. He has recently published Ciceronian Rhetoric in Treatise, Scholion, and Commentary (Brepols, 1995) IX THt: l.fIlRARI' O~· AI.f.XA~' IJR . A < -cr:: oz ~ <...J , PREFACE When Julius Caesar captured Alexandria in 47 Be, the ancient library that bore the Macedonian's name was in ruins. In the fires that raged along the harbourside, and ravaged Ptolemy's fleet, thousands of scrolls collected and composed by nine generations of resident scholars and philosophers were consumed.