Imagined Histories: Hellenistic Libraries and the Idea of Greece

Abstract

How did libraries develop from small, private collections into monumental, public libraries in the Greco-Roman world? The standard view is that the Library of Alexandria, founded in Egypt around 300 BCE, was the first great library in antiquity. Modern scholars view its creation as a watershed moment that changed the course of intellectual history: in the following centuries, kings and aristocrats imitated the Library of Alexandria by founding libraries at Pergamum, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Rome. Moreover, this ancient library remains a powerful symbol of knowledge today, both as an embodiment of the classical tradition at the heart of ‘Western Civilization’ and as a model for information technology, from projects aimed at collecting the world’s knowledge (Wikipedia, Google Books, the Internet Archive) to Amazon’s virtual assistant “Alexa,” named after the Alexandrian Library. However, almost everything we know about the Library of Alexandria was written centuries after its foundation by people who reimagined and romanticized the past. Could one of the most important symbols of classical antiquity be a mirage? My dissertation radically rethinks the history of libraries in the Greco-Roman world, and with it the legacy of classical antiquity today. Starting from a simple observation—that material evidence for other, less famous Hellenistic libraries predates evidence for the Library of Alexandria—I explain how libraries actually developed during the Hellenistic period (323–31 BCE), and why ancient authors subsequently rewrote this history. Through close readings of literary texts and reconstructions of epigraphic and archaeological evidence, this interdisciplinary study contends that the histories of Hellenistic libraries, actual and imagined, have shaped ideas about Greece, Rome, and the supposed origins of Western civilization.