The Ancient Library of Alexandria. A Model for Classical Scholarship in the Age of Million Book Libraries1 Monica Berti (
[email protected]) Virgilio Costa (
[email protected]) CONTENTS — Prologue: the phoenix-library – 1. Aristotle, Demetrius of Phalerum, and the Ptolemies – 2. The Museum and its library – 3. Callimachus and the Pinakes – 4. Remarks on a myth Prologue: the phoenix-library Like the tower of Babel, Atlantis, or the Holy Grail, the library of Alexandria is one of the great archetypes of our civilization. Since antiquity2, legions of scholars, novelists, poets, philosophers, artists, or mere dreamers, have fantasized about a blessed place where all human knowledge, all the books of the world, had been collected; have praised the learned men of the Museum for their conquests in every field of culture; have meditated on the tragic fate of that experience and, more in general, on the fragility of human achievements. The epopee of the Alexandrian library, in fact, had been short: already in the Severan age, a writer like Aulus Gellius could enthuse over its unthinkable dimensions3. The longue durée of the Ptolemies’ library in Western cultural tradition has materialized on different levels. Historiography, for example, has tried to elucidate the circumstances of its foundation, its influence on the other major libraries of Late Hellenism, the trustworthiness of the ancient accounts on its “destruction,” etc.; philology has investigated in composition of its collection 1 This paper is dedicated to the memory of Ross Scaife (1960-2008), a pioneer in the application of digital technologies to classical scholarship. In his many brilliant and important contributions, he showed that today it is possible to recreate, in new forms, the collaborative environment that thirteen centuries ago characterized the Museum of Alexandria.