I. LIBRARIES AND SCHOLARS
IN every field of Hellenistic life except the drama we find the same phenomenon—Greek civilization not destroyed but dispersed. Athens was dying, and the Greek settlements of the west, barring Syracuse, were in decay; but the Greek cities of Egypt and the East were at their material and cultural zenith. Polybius, a man of wide experience, historical knowledge, and careful judgment, spoke, about 148 B.C., of “the present day, when the progress of the arts and sciences has been so rapid”;1 the words have a familiar ring. Through the dissemination of Greek as a common tongue a cultural unity was now established which would last in the eastern Mediterranean for nearly a thousand years. All men of education in the new empires learned Greek as the medium of diplomacy, literature, and science; a book written in Greek could be understood by almost any educated non-Greek in Egypt or the Near East. Men spoke of the oikoumene, or inhabited world, as one civilization, and developed a cosmopolitan outlook less stimulating but perhaps more sensible than the proud and narrow nationalism of the city-state.
For this enlarged audience thousands of writers wrote hundreds of thousands of books. We know the names of eleven hundred Hellenistic authors; the unknown are an incalculable multitude. A cursive script had developed to facilitate writing; indeed, as early as the fourth century B.C. we hear of systems of shorthand whereby “certain vowels and consonants can be expressed by strokes placed in various positions.”2 Books were written on Egyptian papyrus until Ptolemy VI, hoping to check the growth of the library at Pergamum, forbade the export of the material from Egypt. Eumenes II countered by encouraging the mass production of the treated skins of sheep and calves, which had long been used for writing purposes in the East; and soon “parchment,” from the city and the name of Pergamum, rivaled paper as a vehicle of communication and literature.
Books having grown to such numbers, libraries became a necessity. These had existed before as the luxury of Egyptian or Mesopotamian potentates; but apparently Aristotle’s library was the first extensive private collection. We may conjecture its size and worth from the fact that he paid $18,000 for that part of it which he bought from Plato’s successor Speusippus. Aristotle bequeathed his books to Theophrastus, who bequeathed them (287) to Neleus, who took them to Scepsis in Asia Minor, where they were buried, says tradition, to escape the literary cupidity of the Pergamene kings. After almost a century of this damaging interment the volumes were sold about 100 B.C. to Apellicon of Teos, an Athenian philosopher. Apellicon found that many passages had been eaten away by the damp; he made new copies, filling in the gaps as intelligently as he could;3 this may explain why Aristotle is not the most fascinating philosopher in history. When Sylla captured Athens (86) he appropriated Apellicon’s library and transported it to Rome. There the Rhodian scholar Andronicus reordered and published the texts of Aristotle’s works4—an event almost as stimulating in the history of Roman thought as the rediscovery of Aristotle was to prove in the awakening of medieval philosophy.
The adventures of this collection suggest the debt that literature owes to the Ptolemies for establishing and maintaining, as part of the Museum, the famous Alexandrian Library. Ptolemy I began it, Ptolemy II completed it, and added a smaller library in the suburban sanctuary of Serapis. By the end of Philadelphus’ reign the number of rolls had reached 532,000—making probably 100,000 books in our sense of this word.5 For a time the enlargement of this collection rivaled the strategy of power in the affections of the Egyptian kings. Ptolemy III ordered that every book brought to Alexandria should be deposited with the Library; that copies should be made, the owner to receive the copy, the Library to retain the original. The same autocrat asked Athens to lend him the manuscripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and deposited $90,000 as security for their return; he kept the originals, sent back copies, and told the Athenians to keep his money as a forfeit.6 The ambition to possess old books became so widespread that men arose who specialized in dyeing and spoiling new manuscripts to sell them as antiquities to collectors of first editions.7
The Library soon eclipsed the rest of the Museum in importance and interest. The office of librarian was one of the highest in the king’s gift, and included the obligation of tutoring the crown prince. The names of these librarians have been preserved, with variations, in different manuscripts; the latest list8 gives, as the first six, Zenodotus of Ephesus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Apollonius of Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus of Samothrace; their diversity of origin suggests again the unity of Hellenistic culture. Quite as important as these was the poet and scholar Callimachus, who classified the collection in. a catalogue running to one hundred and twenty rolls. We picture a corps of copyists, presumably slaves, making duplicates of precious originals, and a hive of scholars separating the materials into groups. Some of these men wrote histories of various departments of literature or science, others edited definitive editions of the masterpieces, others composed commentaries on these texts for the enlightenment of laity and posterity. Aristophanes of Byzantium effected a literary revolution by separating the clauses and sentences of the ancient writings with capitals and marks of punctuation; and it was he who invented the accents that so disturb us in reading Greek. Zenodotus began, Aristophanes advanced, Aristarchus completed, the recension of the Iliad and the Odyssey, establishing the present text, and illuminating its obscurities in learned scholia. By the end of the third century the Museum, the Library, and their scholars had made Alexandria, in everything but philosophy, the intellectual capital of the Greek world.
Doubtless other Hellenistic cities had libraries. Austrian archeologists have exhumed the remains of an ornate municipal library at Ephesus, and we hear of a great library being consumed in the destruction of Carthage by Scipio. But the only one that evoked comparison with Alexandria’s was that of Pergamum. The kings of this transient state looked with enlightened envy upon the cultural enterprises of the Ptolemies. In 196 Eumenes II established the Pergamene Library, and brought to its halls some of the finest scholars of Greece. The collection grew rapidly; when Antony presented it to Cleopatra to replace that part of the Alexandrian Library which was burned in the uprising against Caesar in 48 B.C., it numbered some 200,000 rolls. Through this library, and the Attic taste of the Attalid kings, Pergamum became, towards the end of the Hellenistic period, the center of a purist school of Greek prose, which considered no word clean that had not come down from classic days. To the enthusiasm of these classicists we owe the preservation of the chef-d’oeuvres of Attic prose.
It was above all an age of intellectuals and scholars. Writing became a profession instead of a devotion, and generated cliques and coteries whose appreciation of talent varied inversely as the square of its distance from themselves. Poets began to write for poets, and became artificial; scholars began to write for scholars, and became dull. Thoughtful men felt that the creative inspiration of Greece was nearing exhaustion, and that the most lasting service they could render was to collect, shelter, edit, and expound the literary achievements of a bolder time. They established the methods of textual and literary criticism in almost all its forms. They tried to sift out the best from the mass of existing manuscripts, and to guide the reading of the people; they made lists of “best books,” the “four heroic poets,” the “nine historians,” the “ten lyric poets,” the “ten orators,” etc.9 They wrote biographies of great writers and scientists; they gathered and saved the fragmentary data which are now all that we know concerning these men. They composed outlines of history, literature, drama, science, and philosophy;10 some of these “short cuts to knowledge” helped to preserve, some replaced and unwittingly obliterated the original works that they summarized. Saddened by the degeneration of Attic Greek into the Orientalized “pidgin” Greek of their time, Hellenistic scholars compiled dictionaries and grammars, and the Library of Alexandria, in the manner of the French Academy, issued edicts on the correct usage of the ancient tongue. Without their learned and patient “ant industry” the wars, revolutions, and catastrophes of two thousand years would have destroyed even those “precious minims” which have been transmitted to us as the shipwrecked legacy of Greece.