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The library’s stated acquisition policy was simple: Acquire everything. The Alexandrian rulers built the great library not just as an act of imperial generosity but also through fiat, confiscation, and occa
sionally subterfuge. According to one story, Ptolemy III sent to Athens for a collection of tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, giving them a substantial cash deposit along with a promise to copy the manuscripts and send the originals back to Athens. Upon receiving the prized volumes, the king promptly reneged on his promise, keeping the originals and sending back copies instead. As the library acquired new volumes, it stored them in a vast warehouse where they awaited cataloging (library acquisition backlogs are nothing new).

Like other great libraries of history, the Alexandria library mirrored the struggles of the empire that begat it. Its rise and fall rested entirely on the stability of its patron empires, and like all institutional knowledge systems, it ultimately proved no more durable than its imperial patrons. The Greek heyday of self-organized scholarship was over, and the new imperial age after Alexander would give birth to a great institutional consolidation of knowledge. The emperors’ intentions were not, in other words, purely Arcadian. They recognized the political value of intellectual capital. Ptolemy I’s advisor Demetrius saw the importance of a library not only in promoting the flourishing of scholarship but also ensuring the newly relocated empire a competitive advantage over neighboring rivals in terms of science, technology, and statecraft. Toward that end, the library implemented history’s most aggressive collection development program: confiscating books from private citizens and insisting that all ships harboring at the docks yield whatever books they carried as the price of entry to the port. And while the scholars at the library enjoyed near-total academic freedom, with a wide mandate to roam where their minds would take them, in truth they were a little less free than we might like to imagine. While scholars were under no obligation to pursue any particular discipline, they were nonetheless beholden to the patronage of the emperors. As the Alexandrian institution grew, it began to suffer from the curse of many a state educational organ: intellectual conservatism. The residents of the so-called museum were putatively free to pursue their intellectual interests, but royal patronage exerted a subtle and ultimately stultifying influence. None of the Alexandrian scholars, so far as we know, felt quite so free as to ques
tion the imperial system of government. Alexandria became a haven for scholarly sycophants or, as Timon of Philius put it, a “chicken coop of the muses.” As library historian Leslie W. Dunlap writes, “The Museum typified the derivative culture of Alexandria: significant original creations were rare indeed, but here the laurels of Greek civilization were kept green for seven centuries.”
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Indeed, given hundreds of years’ worth of munificent imperial support, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the library is how little original scholarship it actually ever produced.

Alexandria’s first librarian was a scholar named Zenodotus, who had won fame for his efforts at standardizing the old Homeric texts. A pioneering figure in library science, Zenodotus introduced the first library classification scheme, a rudimentary subject scheme that assigned texts to different rooms based on their subject matter. At first the library had no catalog; the collection was its own catalog. Curators attached a small tag to the end of each scroll, describing the work’s title, author, and subject. Although this elementary bibliographic data constituted the first systematic abstraction of metadata, those data remained physically affixed to the material book. During the library’s initial period, this approach worked well enough, as long as the collection remained small enough that readers could peruse its contents simply by walking around the room. One of the early librarians, Aristophanes of Byzantium, is said to have read the entire collection himself.

While the library served as, in effect, its own catalog during the early years, eventually the collection reached a size of such magnitude that readers needed a better way to navigate it. The poet and librarian Callimachus was the first to undertake the job of creating a separate catalog of the collection, a comprehensive bibliography known as the
Pinakes
, or “Tables of Persons Eminent in Every Branch of Learning Together with a List of Their Writings.” Although he succeeded in cataloging only one-fifth of the entire collection, his catalog was an impressive undertaking, filling no less than 120 scrolls and earning Callimachus a place in history as not only Alexandria’s greatest poet but also the world’s first great bibliographer. Alas, the
Pinakes
failed to survive the library’s destruction, but thanks to descriptions by con
temporary writers, we know something of its structure. It consisted of a set of tables, broken down in a top-level distinction between poetry and prose, further divided into subcategories. Interestingly, the
Pinakes
was not a classification of works but of authors (apparently, the Alexandrian librarians saw no problem with literary typecasting). From what we know of its structure, the classification broke down as follows:

Within each table, authors’ names appeared in alphabetical order, accompanied by a brief biographical description. The catalog was the library itself, with each room representing a broad subject area: verse, prose, literature, science, and so forth. As the Alexandrian collection mushroomed to over 500,000 volumes, the task of maintaining the catalog by hand outstripped the ability of the librarians to keep pace. Over time the library began to institute a two-tiered system that gave preference to major authors, ensuring their historical longevity at the expense of lesser scribes.

The story of Alexandria’s demise has long been the subject of competing myths. One story lays the blame for its death at the feet of Julius Caesar, who is said to have burned the library as a defensive ploy against a storming Alexandrian mob. Another story sets the blame 700 years later, at the feet of the Muslim conqueror Amr, who is said to have followed the advice of a caliph who advised him: “Touching the books you mention [at Alexandria], if what is written in them agrees with the Book of God, they are not required; if it disagrees, they are not desired. Destroy them therefore.”
²⁹
Other scholars believe the library persisted in some form until about 270 AD, when the emperor Aurelian laid waste to the city while fighting a
rabid insurgency. Whatever the circumstances of its demise, we know the library’s end came as a result of armed conflict; its fate was inexorably tied to the fate of its empire.

Today, the library stands as an idealized symbol of scholarship and learning. But the tale of its rise and fall also tells an instructive story about the inherent instability of institutional systems. And its burning, while surely a great historical tragedy, marks only one in a long progression of historical biblioclasms.

While Alexandria occupies a special place in the popular imagination as the iconic library of the ancient world, libraries flourished throughout the Greek and Roman worlds. As Rome began appropriating Greek culture starting in the fourth century BC, Roman citizens populated their private libraries from the great book markets in Athens, Rhodes, and Alexandria. Wealthy citizens collected decorative books to ornament their homes, while less affluent Romans could buy small unadorned books for a few coins. Prominent Roman citizens like Cicero built vast personal libraries. The fashion for book collecting reached such a height that the poet Ausonius satirized the folly of citizens who increasingly purchased books for ornamental purposes:

Shortly before his death in 44 BC, Julius Caesar decreed that a great public library should be built. A statesman named Pollio picked up the imperial charter after Caesar’s assassination and started building the first great Roman public library with the support of no lesser public intellectuals than Catullus, Horace, and Virgil. Located near the Roman forum, the library consisted of two distinct collections: one block for Latin works and another for Greek. This precedent of
dividing the library into two parallel collections would persist in subsequent Roman libraries, as generations of Romans built new public libraries modeled on Pollio’s original. Centuries later, early Christian libraries would follow this model of bibliographical bicameralism, splitting their books into collections for Christian and pagan works.

By the fourth century AD, Rome had no fewer than 28 public libraries. While none of these libraries came anywhere close to approximating the vast Greek collections at Alexandria and Pergamum, they played a visible role in everyday Roman life. The typical Roman library stood in close proximity to a temple or palace, usually conjoined by rows of columns. Walking inside, the citizen would traverse a front entryway with busts of famous poets and authors, arranged into their separate chambers for Latin and Greek. The larger libraries featured bookcases with numbers corresponding to entries in a master catalog listing. As in Alexandria, each scroll bore a tag identifying its author and title. The bookcases opened out onto reading rooms, where library users could peruse a chosen manuscript; some libraries permitted private borrowing.

Roman libraries also served as intellectual salons, housing literary, social, and political groups. While only a fraction of Rome’s residents would likely have availed themselves of these services, the public mission of the library nonetheless signaled a continuation of the Greek commitment to public scholarship. In many Roman communities, libraries were attached to the public baths. The library system was administered by a
procurator
, with each individual library headed by a librarian with a staff of assistants and copyists who made up the preponderance of the library staff. Librarians enjoyed high esteem during this period. Martial describes Sextus, the librarian of the Palatine, as having “intelligence approaching that of a god.”
³¹

By the fourth century AD, Roman libraries had spread throughout the empire, from Africa to Britain. Roman scribes distributed their copied manuscripts throughout the conquered territories; these far-flung collections would later prove instrumental in preserving the heritage of classical literature. By the latter days of the Roman empire, however, public love of learning began to degrade into an all-out embrace of Greek Epicurianism. Libraries languished as citizens
increasingly devoted their energies to sensory pleasures. Coupled with the pacific influence of Christianity, a love of the good life overwhelmed the old farmer-soldier ethic of the early Republic, and the old ideals—including the long tradition of civic bibliophilia—began to diminish. By 378 AD, Ammianus reported an empire whose citizens had relinquished their former love of knowledge in favor of pleasures of the flesh:

In our age of pop music, TV dramas, and Broadway musicals, perhaps some of us can identify with Ammianus’s lament. Just as the old hierarchies of the Roman Empire started falling into decay, so too did its libraries. By the fifth century, Rome’s great public libraries had all but disappeared, either destroyed at the hands of the Vandals or carted away to the new capital in Constantinople. By the sixth century they were gone. The old hierarchies of the Roman empire—and its imperial libraries—gave way to a period of intellectual chaos, creating a fallow ground from which new forms of knowledge would soon emerge.

An Irish legend holds that one night in the middle of the sixth century, Saint Columba borrowed a manuscript from his guest Saint Finnian, staying up all night inside the church to copy the rare text. According to the legend, Columba’s fingers shone like candles, lighting up the whole church.
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With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, Europe lost more than just its imperial government; it also lost thousands of texts—Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil—the intellectual foundation of the
Pax Romana
. As the Goths and Vandals swarmed into the city, they burned the libraries and government archives, annihilating the empire’s collective intellectual capital. During the so-called Dark Ages that followed, the scorched earth of the old empire gave way to the reemergence of smaller, close-knit societies not far removed from the tribal chiefdoms of old. While the institutional template of the old imperial bureaucracies persisted in the form of the growing Roman church, daily life for most Europeans reverted to a more tribal mode of existence. The old hierarchies of the state collapsed, and Europe entered a period in which literacy waned, while older oral traditions and kinship networks reasserted themselves. To
invoke the evolutionary metaphor, the Dark Ages were a period of mutation and drift. Across Europe this seemingly regressive period provided fertile ground for a series of new technologies that would soon begin to take shape. Most of this innovation would happen in a few isolated corners of Christendom, within the cloistered walls of early monasteries.