In Our Time - The Library of Alexandria

Episode Date: March 12, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Library at Alexandria. Founded by King Ptolemy in the 3rd century BC the library was the first attempt to collect all the knowledge of the ancient world in one place. Scholars including Archimedes and Euclid came to study its grand array of papyri. the legacy of the library is with us today, not just in the ideas it stored and the ideas it seeded but also in the way it organised knowledge and the tools developed for dealing with it. It still influences the things we know and the way we know them to this day.With Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge; Matthew Nicholls, Lecturer in Classics at the University of Reading; Serafina Cuomo, Reader in Roman History at Birkbeck College, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. Had the famous and fabled Library at Alexandria founded at the beginning of the 3rd century BC not existed, it might have been invented by one of the many stories housed within its walls. It's a building of legendary status, a library.

set up to contain all the knowledge of all the world on shelf upon shelf of Egyptian papyri. The legacy of the library is still with us, not just in the ideas it's stored and the ideas it's seeded, but also in the way it organised knowledge and the tools developed for dealing with that knowledge. So this day, it influences the things we know and the way we know them. With me to discuss the library at Alexandria, a Serafina Cuomo, reader in Roman history at Birkbeck College London, Matthew Nichols, Lecture in Classics at the University of Reading, and Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek at Cambridge University.

Simon Goldhill, perhaps the best place to start this programme, is not in Alexandria itself, but with the death of its founder, Alexander the Great, who died in 323 BC. What kind of world did he leave behind him? The world has yet unconquered, but then can you tell us why he made for Alexandra? Alexander changed the world for all time, by spreading Greek culture across all of the East. He conquered the barbarian Empire, as the Greeks called it, of Persia.

He got as far as Afghanistan and India, and across through Egypt as well. And what he spread throughout that world was Greek culture. It meant Greek language and Greek institutions. He founded cities across all of that area. And what that meant was that for the next 800 years, the language of the elite was Greek, and the language, indeed, of a lot of the people became Greek. It's extraordinary to think that the language of a place like Jerusalem for 800 years was Greek,

the Gospels written in Greek. All of this because of the spread of his world. Now, when he died, three generals took control over the massive empire, and the one we're most concerned with was Ptolemy, who took control of Egypt, and so we're left with a new Greek ruling elite over this area of Egypt. His body was taken to Alexandria by General Ptolemy, his favorite general, and became Ptolemy the first of Sotar, wasn't it? Anyway, why did he want to go to Alexandria?

Was it more or less an empty plane? Alexandria was founded by Alexander. It was his favourite Alexandria. He founded several of them, but it was the biggest. And it rapidly became the biggest city in the world. And within 50 years, it had become this massive metropolis. And partly because of the influence of Alexander's body being there and partly because of its unique position

in terms of trade and in terms of possibility. And it brought in this extraordinary polyglot community. So we have a lot of Egyptians going in there. They're being ruled by the small Greek elite, Macedonian elite, which was in charge of the city and spoke Greek. You have other nationalities flooding in. And you have this extraordinary explosion of polyglot,

lots of languages, lots of cultures, lots of mix. What other, it's nice to know. It's in Egypt, we've got the Egyptian, God of the Greeks, who else? Well, you all have had Jews in there. There was a very famous Jewish community in there, speaking Aramaic in all probability. You would have had Syrians coming in from the north. You would have had people from coming up from Africa, from further south in Africa. So you would have seen different skin colours, different races. And above it all, this small elite of Greeks, led by the Ptolemies, focused on the palace and on Greek culture. And what's so hard

for the Greeks at this point living in this place is they're deep. They're recrassinated, they're separated from the central mainland, where all the national cults are and where the homeland. So they have to invent a culture. A little bit like the British in India. You have to invent your own Britishness, your own Greekness here in Alexandria. You have to invent cults. You have to do something to make your culture survive in this world. And the library was part of that.

So we're talking about a city built from scratch here, are we? Yes. Extraordinary thought that he came, he founded it, he must. marked it out. It's rather sweet. It had five quarters that were labelled Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, A, B, C, D.E, which we were said to be for

Alexander the King, descendant of God, founded this city. Now, that's a nice story to tell about how it's put together, but these quarters were laid out. It had a proper structure, and it was part of the way in which Greeks did invent a world, right?

Going back to Plato, going back all the way into the sophistic movement of the 5th century, this idea that you could create a new world for yourself. And that's very much part of that Greek colonising spirit. Matthew Nichols, can you take us into the library itself? Could you place the library in the city? We totally grew up with the largest city by Simon in 50 years. It was built on a very grand scale.

Perhaps you could elaborate a little and that a little and then tell us about the library. Certainly. The city, rapidly growing in the period at which the library was founded, contains in its northeast corner a palace district called the Bracayon district. Sadly, that's now beneath the sea. It subsided into the sea and we don't know very much about it archaeologically, though increasingly we're finding out details. So the library was located within that palace district associated with, in some senses, inside the royal palace. It's something that the kings keep

absolutely close to themselves and they're caught. We don't have the library buildings, but by analogy with other libraries and by some educated guesswork about the organisation of the library, we might think that the library bookrooms, which must be substantial, because we're talking about up to half a million books, if we believe the ancient sources, stored in a series of rooms. Those rooms may be divided somehow by subject,

maybe with some alphabetization within the holdings, so that's conjecture. And the library associated with, perhaps, connected to physically the museum, which you do know a little bit more about, because ancient authors described that to us directly. A museum, can you? Certainly.

A museum... No, no, just let's say over the library. We can't give us there in a minute. So we're in this library. Can you give us some other size of it and what's going on, though? In Enn't Rush, what's it like? And how did, sorry, to include in this question, comparing you with other libraries that we know about the liby at Err

and the contemporary library at Antioch and Pergammon and so on, just give us some, if you could give us some context. The best preserved library, not quite contemporary to it, but about a century later is the library at Pergammon, which we have found archaeologically, I think we have. And that consists of a series of four rules, off the colonnade of the sanctuary of Athena. So these are rooms, medium to large rooms.

We're not talking about vast marble halls, but pretty substantial rooms. In Pergamum, around the room runs a U-shaped podium, about a metre high. On that podium, we think, stood wooden bookcases. There are attachment points in the top of this podium wall that are conjectured to be for wooden bookcases, with the books stored in them,

and separated from the wall slightly to prevent the permeation of damp into the books. What about earlier library like Err and Babylon? Those libraries contain clay tablets, not papyrus scrolls, or clay tablets which survive in wooden writings which don't. And the fine contexts of those are pretty poorly understood because they were dug in the 19th century, and the clay tablets are now not very far away in the British Museum.

So those were tablets stored again on wooden shelving, which doesn't survive, but the clay tablets do. So how then is Alexandria distinguished, both from that which followed it, Pergammon, and those which preceded it? By scale, by scope and ambition. and we think by the way it started systematically to organise its books, to classify them, list them, probably housed them in a way that reflected a sort of scholarly order.

That's the unique contribution of Alexandria. To be literal-minded, what about the scale? You've given us some idea of permanent. Can you give us some idea of, I know there isn't much left, but you know you can dig away? The ancient literary sources which we rely on for any testimony of what books were there or how many books are for various reasons not wholly reliable, but they centre in on a figure of roughly half a million papyrus scrolls. One papyrus scroll would hold about 2,000 lines of writing,

so a book or a couple of books of Homer, one attic tragedy, something like that, which gives you the idea of the scale of the library's holdings. A papyrus scroll is going to be... And is this much bigger than anything that it happened? A hugely bigger, yes. And the authors agree that it was massively ambitious and that it held a large number of books, even if we don't take the numbers literally, and we probably shouldn't.

The fact that they're unanimous in talking about enormous scale of holdings is suggestive of the ambition of the library and its librarians. And now it's on to this museum, which became our museum, what's significant about that? That is one of the things that transforms this library from being merely a royal curia cabinet, stuff full of books, into being a working resource, an actual scholarly institution.

The museum, Greek word, just means a place where the muses are active. Philosophical schools have museums. It's where we get our English word museum. So it's in some sense a temple of the muses, that is, of the arts. and the museum is a place, it's an institution and it's a community. So it's attached again to the palace. We know a little bit more about its physical layout because we have the testimony of a Greek geographer called Strabo

who says that it contains an Exedra, which is a room like a lecture hall with seats for lectures and debates, we presume. It contains an oikos or hall where the scholar community takes its meals in a common table. And it contains a covered walkway or peripatos, which derives from the covered walkways of Greek philosophical schools and which lends its name, for example, to the peripatetic branch of philosophy. It simply means somewhere where you walk up and down. So the scholars would walk under the shade with their books from the bookrooms,

debating and reading and talking. Saravina Cuomo, we have this heavily subsidised, as the contemporary word would use, library by Ptolemy. They obviously wanted this to be a striking place. They wanted it to be of great significance. They wanted the world to take notice. Why were they so determined to do that? For more than one reason, one of the reasons that may have been behind Ptolemy's decision

to invest so much in the library and the museum, relates to what Simon was saying earlier, trying to forge a Greek identity in new territory, in a land that has centuries, millennial history, as an Egyptian history. and try to impose a new government which is very different, which has a different language, different institutions, different religions. So it's taking on the Egyptian, as it were, in one respect.

It's saying Egypt stops here, Greek starts now. I think there may have been it initially. I think as the library and the museum carry on their intellectual and cultural life, we go more and more in the direction of maybe integration, the tomb or doing something that becomes Greek-Egyptian. So later on you see a translation of Egyptian works into Greeks, as if the Greeks were interested in actually knowing about Egyptian history and relying on their tradition.

Another reason, as well as forging and imposing of Greek identity, has to do, I think, with political competition. The Ptolemy was not the only successor of Alexander. Again, as Simon said, there were three of them. The Hellenistic kingdoms, as they're called, were continuously at war with each other. War can take place in more than one battlefield. One is the real battlefield, the military one,

the battle with catapults and soldiers and all done. But another battlefield is cultural competition. So there are stories about how the library at Alexandria competed with the library at Pergamon, for instance. There's even a story in Vitruvius, which is probably false, that says that the library at Alexandria started because there was already a library at Pergamon, and Ptolemy the King of Egypt was jealous of that. Alexander was famously a pupil of Aristotle.

Is more than the ghost of the hand of Aristotle evident in this library? More people would say yes. One of the most famous stories about the foundation of the library is that a pupil of Aristotle called Dimitrius of Falerun was involved as a consultant of sorts. Dimitius had had a very active political life in Athens. Then times changed and he was basically he fell in this grace. So he had to move and he seems to have moved to Alexandria where he was instrumental in helping. with founding the library, telling the king what to invest in, organizing it to begin with. It is a story, but it seems to have some basis in reality.

So what would that effect be seen in the categorization, the classification at Aristotle was one of the things he was famous for? Aristotle seems to have had a very ambitious project. He was interested in all branches of knowledge, together with his students, he produced the treatises on practically every form of knowledge, from logic to biology, from physics to metaphysics, which includes

what we could call theology. And it seems to have been rather systematic about it. So it was interested in classification, it was interested in definition, it was interested in how the system of knowledge is put together. Now, if Demetrius shared that

view, that may have been carried into how the various parts of the library were organized. Can I ask you, Simon Golden, the library himself became very important, the chief librarian. Can we pick out one, Aristosanese of Sirene,

famous geographer and so on? And what function did the chief librarian have? He seems to appear in history at this point, but appear in a very important way. Did he decide, he alone, decide, what was in the library. Can you just give us some... Using our... Erastonis...

And we'll start again. Using eratosthenes. Eratosthenes. Yes, yes. The geographer. Yeah, the librarian is a rather shadowy figure at one level, because we don't know what he did institutionally at any one point. He must have had some say

in the collection policies, but the king was also directly involved and there must have been a lot of other people, too. Most importantly, he was a sort of superior academic who would write technical treatises of various sorts, to do with books, to do with ordering knowledge, but could also be a poet.

We're told that Colimachus, one of the most famous poets of the ancient world, who had a huge influence on Latin poetry as well as on Greek, was actually the librarian at Alexandria, and was writing from within the library. Eratosthenes himself was remarkable as a geographer, wasn't he? His measurement of the past... ...theirthage of the past...

...and he was also a supreme rationalist who talked about the impossibility of following Homer's version of the world, in various ways and famously said if you can show me the cobbler who sowed the sack of the winds I'll show you where it is he's travelled so yeah

but what was in so we've got the library Alexandria inspired Ptolemy built it the biggest city in the world in 50 years placing itself as a cultural force against Egypt in the past against the other Hellenistic kingdoms the mainland is over there

then we'll devire with that as well what's in it? Can you give us some idea of what they collected? All knowledge. It's a fantastically ambitious project. The aim is to collect in an imperial way the sum total of what humans know and to catalogue it and to organise it. So parallel to Alexander trying to conquer the whole world, here we've got as well the intellectual equivalent of trying to conquer the whole world of knowledge. They also collected people.

the people that revolved around the museum, the intellectuals we could call them, but also the scientists, the doctors, the poets, the grammarians, were part of the collection and they interacted with the collection. It was this kind of hybrid collection of texts and people that then interacted with each other. It was fortunate, Matthew Nichols.

Was it or was it deliberate that the city was on a place that was near these marshy read? beds which gave the papyri and paparine gave them something to write on. It's certainly fortunate. The kings, we're told in another one of these attractive stories, used it to their advantage at one point by

completely embargoing the export of papyrus. There are lots of stories about the desperate acquisitiveness of the Ptolemies in this project to acquire everything and to be a non-parai library. So we're told they banned the export of papyrus to stop the Purgamine kings amassing their rival library.

And further, these kings in Pergamon then invented parchment as a writing surface in order to dodge round that ban. Now I don't think that story is wholly true, but it does indicate the importance of the papyrus industry to the creation of books. Can we just develop the content of the more? Simon has very

brandly said, like Alexander, having conquered the terrestrial world, and conquered the intellectual world, and there it is. But can we go into it a little more, Serafina, and what Homer has been mentioned, but other writers, there's mathematicians, the engineers, it's a place where technological ideas are advanced and so on.

Can we have a bit of detail? Homer is, I think, one of the most important and interesting cases there. I could mention Euclid, the writer of the elements, which was the main textbook for geometry and also arithmetic, even in British schools until 50 years ago, wrote, Euclid wrote the elements apparently within the cultural

context of the Library of Alexandria. The elements is a collection of previous mathematical knowledge. Euclid may have added something to it, but what he seems to have done is looked at what was there and systematized it in a way that makes it

very logically organized. So if he was working within the library, it makes sense to see him as going to the section of the library where the mathematics is, looking at it, and then putting it together in what becomes a canonical text. And again, we're talking about these people being drawn there because the tolerance were putting money into it. They would get the equivalent.

Well enough paid, or we must assume, or they wouldn't have gone, would they? Well, enough, looked after, given great opportunities. Can we do a little about even more, Simon? Well, we know it was a place for research in science. We know about anatomical research. but perhaps the most interesting one is what happens to poetry in this period that's what I'm most interested in

and that's to say that when you start to write from within the library you start to create this sort of elitist privileged world of superior knowledge and one of the ways that you show off your status is by knowing things that people don't know and consequently poetry becomes this

very very specialized individual competitive genre we move away from the great public literature as a matter of interest than mathematics. It's not more important. It's one of the ways in which you see cultural change. I'm just fascinating. Why did they want to show off with poetry

rather than with mathematics or philosophy or engineering or the other things? Why did they go for poetry? They showed off with all of those areas. But the reason why we know poetry to be so important is because it gets picked up by so many people in later generations. So the Latin poets picked it up in the same way. But it's undoubtedly the medical text

as Serapino can talk about were hugely influential at the same time as were the engineering ones as well. Matthew? The first four Ptolemies, at least, were all intellectual figures themselves. So these poets...

In what sense? I mean, did they write stuff? They were... Yeah, they were interested in branches of learning like the fourth Ptolemy was a playwright. I think the second was interested in the zoology. They were all of them keen to present themselves as intellectual figures and to collect scholars around them to display themselves as such and to interact

with them. We know that the Ptolemy's right down to the last one, Cleopatra, went and attended debates in the museum. So it's an important part of royal self-presentation at this date. The man, Caramarcus of Sirene, he produced Alexandria, the library's first catalogue. Can you give us some notion of the impulse behind this huge feat? It's a really significant moment in the history of scholarship

because rather than just being a catalogue with shelf numbers on it, which it isn't quite, it's a vast bibliographical project whose aim is to categorise, list, and make accessible and knowable the complete gamut of literature, as Simon was saying. So it's called the Pinnaker's. It's in 120 books, five times the size of Homer's Eliad, for example.

It's an enormous work. And it divides literature up by form and by genre. It's an interesting question about the interaction of those two. So it starts with a division between poetry and prose. Within poetry, there'll be epic, lyric, dramatic. Within dramatic, there'll be comic and drama. tragic. Within each of those sub-sub-genres, there'll be a list of authors

alphabetically. Each author will have a little biographical entry. I have one here and could read it if you wanted. For example, Eudoxus, whose father was Iskinnis, from Canidas, astronomer, geometer, physician, legislator. He studied geometry under

Architas and medicine under Philistion of Sicily. So a little potted sketch, and then a list of that man's works alphabetically. So it immediately makes this vast mass books, it's 500,000 books, accessible and comprehensible, and also it establishes a canon, which is important. Simon, can we dig into the significance and importance of this great catalogue, this category of at the time, but then since then, ever since then? Well, it organises knowledge

in a way that it hadn't been organised before, as a way it took the principles of Aristotle and applied them on a vast scale so that now literature falls into, genres, we can put them in these areas, and we start to do scholarship on them. And what's so interesting about the catalogue is that it's actually, as we're a meta-text. It's above the, it's not a piece of literature, it's commenting on literature. And this is the great period of grammatical commentary, of the beginnings of literary criticism, of commentary on all sorts of texts, on writing in the margins of all sorts of texts. So it's not just that you produce literature, but you actually have to produce things that you talk about literature.

And so it's one of the great periods for the organisation of scholarship, as we know it. So Homer becomes one of the founding texts, not because it's epic poetry and we read about it, but because we have to do commentary on it, we have to learn how to do literary criticism, and that's the basis of a scholarly education. Sarah Vina, can I ask, sorry, you were saying? I was just going to add that, of course, it's a very rational process that it's susceptible to human reason. These are not sacred texts of which not one letter can be changed. They can be improved, edited, organised and categorised.

Seraphina, this is a place of active scholarship. You've mentioned Euclid. We understand Archimedes went there to, and so did Galen. Can you, on his way back to Popem, nevertheless he went there? Can you give us some idea of what they might have? You've talked about Euclid, but what Archimedes might have got from there, and what Galen might have got from there, and other scholars. just what sort of work they could do because of this library.

Alexandria became a bit like Athens was in its golden age. So it started to attract intellectual scientists, doctors, from all over the Greek world. Even those who didn't deceive the patronage of the Ptolemish directly, even after the Ptolemish went, which is the case of Galen, the idea that Alexandria was the place to be, if you wanted to learn and be at the cutting edge of research remained. So they went there because they had resources in the library.

They went there because there were other people they could interact and discuss with. They went there because they could cross-pollinate with other people. So we find a lot of research that borrows ideas from other fields of knowledge. We find quite a bit about literature. but the engineering and technological invention was supposed to be considered to be very important, as time when people said, how important that had been to the development of engineering technology. Equally, Galen, who lasted for 1800 years with his anatomy and so on, he got something from that. Can you talk a little about that and give us a steer in those directions?

To start from the engineering, one of the most direct references we have in the literature to the patronage of the Ptolemies is a passage in a treatise which is about building catapults, war engines. The author is called the file of Byzantium and he writes in the late 3rd century BC and he says explicitly that the engineers in Alexandria made enormous leaps forward in the construction of war machines

because of the kings there who he says, were ambitious and loved technology. So he makes a very direct correlation between putting money into research and research actually progressing. And we know that Galen was Galen of Pergamum and he went back to work with his gladiators' work

whom he could look at very closely for what he needed to find. But what do he get out of Alexandria? What was there for him to come? What was there for him was, I think, the presence of a lot of other doctors with very different ideas. So he found ideal ground for developing his ideas in competition with others,

in opposition sometimes with others. What he found there was the accumulated knowledge of centuries, which was not just about anatomy and physiology, but also about the pharmacology, what kind of drugs you can use. There's another very nice passage in one of Galen's treatises, where he talks about going down to the arbor, the port. the port of Alexandria to talk to the sailors and see what they've brought in

and whether what they have can be used in curing diseases or putting together drugs that can be useful to heal sick people. Matthew O'Nekels. Galen, as well as being a doctor, is a man of letters. There's no distinction between two at this date, of course, and he is almost obsessed with the quality of the text

that he's reading because ancient texts are handwritten, they're susceptible to error and corruption. And Galen spends a lot of time talking about the authenticity and accuracy of his text. And what he really wants to get is a manuscript copy, an old copy that hasn't had a chance to accumulate errors. So one of the things he finds at Alexandria, as he does in libraries elsewhere, like at Rome, are these authentic, premium, well-kept copies of books. For example, in a pharmacological recipe, even a minute scribeller can be disastrous. If you prescribe 10 grams of a drug rather than one gram, it can be appalling.

so Galen really has to get an accurate text. Simon, I think it was you who spoke earlier about the... It was, about the... No, it was Seraphina, no matter, about the different sorts of war, and one was the cultural wars, and there's something called the acquisitions candles. The toll it was by hook and by crook, wasn't it?

I will get your book. We want to, yes, absolutely. The desire to get everything and to get the best text is very important. The most famous story is that in Athens, there was an authorised, text of the great tragedians, is Scholosopheles and Euripides.

And this was kept under lock and key in Athens and was the one text from which you could copy to make plays to spread around the world. Ptolemy was very keen to see this, as he said. And Athens said under no circumstances, we're not letting this book out of us. They'll pay. He said, we'll

pay a huge amount of money. I mean, talent upon talent of silver, I mean, really, millions. In order, just to have a look at it, please. Could you just send it over so we can make a copy? And we'll give you this deposit. And Athenians thought, well, that's such a huge deposit, we'll risk it. And of course, the book never

came back, and they could never get it. And similar stories abound that he was just very good. They were kind enough to send a... They sent back a copy, of course. Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes. Yes. And, for example, the Ptolemy's also confiscated books on ships passing

through the harbour. So much so that Gaelan again says that some books in the library were marked from the ships on their little tickets because they'd been pinched from passing merchantmen. I should never forget that the imperial project of the library was very much an imperial project. When we're talking about intensity, you're talking about getting the correct text,

can you give us an example of how intensely they did work at it? Let's take home, everybody knows home. We've got Iliad the Odyssey, the key text, the great Greek key text. Now, you've already mentioned that those were under lock and key in Athens, but how corrupted had they been? What did they do at Alexandria? What did they do about getting Homer, pushing it back to what they thought was its original pure form? Well, they spent absolute hours looking at the text.

They would start to find, are there any anomalies? Does the story make perfect sense? Is there a little gap? And if there was a problem, they would excise the lines. They didn't throw anything away, but they would mark on the text that they thought this line was corrupt or obscure. Then there was the question of Homeric language that was already antique by the 5th century BC, let alone the 3rd century. And so people couldn't quite understand it. So you had to do a lot of grammatical work to discuss,

was this the right form? Could we change this word or not? And as soon as we start doing this work, we develop obsessiveness. We get these pictures of these obsessive academics working away, arguing with each other, and at the same time parody. There's a wonderful poem that talks about the academics of Alexandria

as gonioboques, people who sit in the corner and mumble about whether the right word in Homer is meant. min or nin. And this sort of parodying of the obsessive academic starts exactly the same time as the academic start. Seraphina, was there, it's already been mentioned because obviously there was, but how did the

dominating imperialistic nature of Ptolemy's cultural policy affect other cultures? I mean, were they sort of putting down the Egyptian, take the one that's nearest, the one on whose soil they sit? Can you tell us about that? I think that's a really controversial point. I think for many years, scholarship has focused on the opposition between the Greek Ptolemies and the rest of the population.

But I would say in the last 15 years or so, we're looking more and more at the ways in which the two cultures were meshing with each other. So I've mentioned the translations from Egyptian into Greek. Recent work has been done on the way in poetry, in Greek poetry, images taken from Egyptian culture. Typically, Egyptian themes are used, as if there really was an effort at some point to put the two together rather than just oppose them. one of the easiest ways to think about that is that the Ptolemies as rulers started to marry their sisters now that was not normal in Greece

to have brother-sister marriage but it was normal amongst the Egyptians and the fact that the ruling elite could pick up that cultural model shows how deeply they did at some level absorb Egyptian culture and to talk about another neighbouring culture there's a text called the Letter of Aristaeus

that implies it states that the Ptolemies were responsible for commissioning the first Greek translation of the Hebrew Pentateuch, the translation that came to be known as the Septuagint, we're told was commissioned and translated in the museum at Alexandria. Can we turn to the demise of the library? It seems to have taken a long time and many false reports. We've talked about the Ptolemies going right through to Cleopatra,

everyone will know about Cleopatra and Marcanter and Julius. So they go on to about three centuries there. And there's a feeling that the library sort of comes on ender, but it goes on for many more centuries after. Can we explore that and the reasons for its tenacity and the influence it continued to have or did not continue to have? Starting with you, Matthew Nichols, there were reports that Julius Caesar, went to Alexander, have burnt it down, burnt the library down as well. That's wrong. Yes, it is. It's a short answer. I think it tells us something about the nature of stories circulating around the library and around Julius Caesar, that the library is big enough that its destruction becomes a seismic event. Caesar as a sort of figure that these stories get imputed to.

The story is that he chased his enemy Pompey to Alexandria, found that he was already dead, got involved in a local succession dispute between the last straggling lines with the Ptolemaic dynasty, was holed up in the harbour and decided to fire the harbour and the fleet to fight his way out. And in that fire, the flames spread to some books which were destroyed. And that story, over time, becomes the story

that Julius Caesar burned down the entire library. So the figure of books destroyed escalates from 40,000 in the first century AD up to 500,000 a few centuries later. The story keeps getting amplified. So Caesar didn't do it, Saraphena Como. What's the next... Who's the next supposed culprits

already used this colloquial term? The Christians are supposed to have burned libraries in Alexandria. But when... What date are we talking about that? About the 3rd century AD, that's all the 5th century AD. We know that once Christian... Christianity becomes definitely the dominant religion in Egypt. Riots break out in Alexandria at various points, led by bishops and involving monks.

It's all a bit murky because the literature about Christianity is always biased one way or the other. But Christians are involved in killing one of the most prominent Alexandrian intellectuals in late antiquities. in later antiquity, the famous Hypatia of Alexandria is lynched by a Christian mob. There are reports that they burned a library which was more likely to be

not the big library of Alexandria but a smaller library around the Temple of Seraphis. And with Christianity taking over, it could be argued that the predominantly

non-Christian contents of what may have been in the library at this stage were not as valued as they used to be. Can we develop that? Because this is another theme that Christians, after Constantine, that becomes the imperial religion, and there is a pagan library there. Gods that the Christians have rejected, they want their one god,

and that it gives them a focus for unity on their own sense. and for attack on the other, and the library becomes an objective attack. Is there a truth in that? Well, what there is a truth of is that in Egypt was particularly well known for its absolute violent riots and its violent fundamentalism in early Christianity in these centuries. There were the monks of the desert who came in who were not particularly well educated, but were extremely unpleasant, according to a lot of the local sources. and Hypatia wasn't...

These are the... Antenine monks in the desert. Yeah, they were celibate. They were aggressively anti-woman. They were aggressively anti-intellectual in certain ways. And they didn't just lynch Hypatia. They ripped off her flesh with oyster shells. And the flesh still quivering was thrown into the crowd, according to the contemporary sources. I don't know if we need to know that.

But it gives a sense of... And so they destroyed Greek temples. The Serapain was destroyed. They destroyed all sorts of artifices. They really wanted to get rid of the signs of paganism. And in that context, it's quite likely that there would have been destructiveness of the library, but we still hear stories of the library after this. So it is unlikely that the library itself was destroyed.

There's also just this little footnote before you pile into this, Matthew Nicola, the footnote that the Christian's way of presenting knowledge was different in its form, in its physical form, from the papari. Can you just bring that to bear? Certainly. It's less picturesque than the oyster shells, but the technology of the book changes. Pagan authors write, broadly speaking, on papyrus scrolls. Christian authors, broadly speaking, use parchment codices,

a sown leaf folding book, similar to our own modern book. Because all books have a shelf life, literally, and papyrus is brittle, and the ink fades and worms eat it, what the Christian authors are interested in copying changes, and so as the papyrus scrolls of the library come to the end of their natural lives, they're not recopied. So it needn't be a single conflagration destruction event. It's also a shift in book technology and a shift in taste

that accounts for the loss of much of this stuff. So what's your thing? But the libraries go, we're in about the fourth and fifth century idea, and we still have a very big library there, as I understand it. There's a reasonable consensus around the table. So what significance, is it obviously losing its significance because of Christianity and empire, but it's still enormously powerful library,

yet there's still this idea that it came to an end, it was destroyed. So can we ferret away about it? that a bit more. The last story that we have is the Muslim story, which is probably also untrue. But the story is that the Bashar, who turned up, said either the works there are the Koran, or they're not in the Koran.

If it's not in the Quran, they're of no use to us. If it's the Quran, we already have it. So let's burn this lot. Now, that is, again, one of those stories that gets associated with a powerful ruler turning up, just like the Caesar story, and there's no reason to assume that that is actually true. But at some point or another,

in those centuries, it's quite likely that the library fell into such disuse that it just sort of faded away rather than was destroyed in some cataclysmic event. Now that's not historically so exciting. People always want the foundation of the library was a genuinely massive event. I think most people don't want it to be destroyed at all.

That's also true. But if it's going to be destroyed, since its foundation was so exciting and such a world-changing event, people would like its destruction to have been a world-changing event. And I'm afraid, I suppose, dissuery to just not using it

is a sadder, quieter way of it ending. Not with a bang with a whimper, that's. Matthew. I think that's true, and long before that, the last reported destruction event is AD642 when the Arabs take Alexandria, long before that the centre of gravity in the classical intellectual world had shifted off to Pergamum,

to Rome, to Byzantium, to Milan, and the library, I'm afraid, probably just faded away into the sand or the sea. A moment's silence, I think, should be observed here. So give us the legacy of that. Did it have an immediate legacy, are we amplifying the legacy from our own perspective now? Sarafina. I think it did have an immediate legacy. I think late antiquity was a much more lively period than we usually read.

So to the extent to which a lot of cultural life was going on in the 4th, the 5th, the 6th century AD and beyond, the legacy of the Library of Alexandria hasn't stopped because one way or the other a lot of the texts have come down to us. A lot of the literature was produced in late antiquity during a period of supposed decline. And a lot of this literature consisted in the commentating, annotating, discussing meta-texts that Simon was describing. So the meta-text practice continues.

Finally, Simon, what do you think? The influence ripples through at the time and still goes through? First of all, without the survival of those texts, thanks to Alexandria, we don't get the Renaissance. So we don't get modern Western culture as we know it. And more specifically, without the practices of the library, we wouldn't have the university in the form we have it today, we wouldn't have the organisation of knowledge we have today,

we wouldn't have the whole institutions of scholarship that we recognise. And that seems to me to be the sort of legacy that is really profound. Well, thank you very much. Simon Goldhill, Sarapina Cuomo, Matthew Nichols. Next week we were talking about the Boxer Rebellion in China around 9. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.

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