detailed history of Alexander’s conquests and studied geometry with no less a mathematician than Euclid. Determined to attract scholars to his young city, Ptolemy offered enormous incentives for learned men to come to his new metropolis at the mouth of the Nile. He invited poets, writers, and scientists to live in the city and work at its famous museum, offering them room and board in the royal palace and a generous tax-free salary, as well as the guarantee of lifetime employment. As a final inducement, he built the world’s first great library (actually called a museum), whose ambitions were nothing short of universal. By the time of Ptolemy’s death, the collection had grown to 200,000 books. By the time Julius Caesar arrived in 47 BC, the library had swelled to 700,000 volumes. The library’s signal achievement was the sheer magnitude of its collection, orders of magnitude larger than any library before it and larger than any library that would follow for more than a thousand years.
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 occasionally 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 question 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
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 occasionally 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 question 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
Similar Books
