THE LIBRARY IN THE MUSEUM OF ALEXANDRIA:
READING FOR WRITING
The Alexandrian book, like that of classical Greece, is a papyrus roll,
which is a simple support and accommodates a text preformed according
to rules of production independent of that support. What was new to the
Hellenistic era is, first, the multiplication of books and the mania for
preservation of writing; and secondly, the establishment of primary
texts from which future generations are supposed to write in their turn.
The reason for the creation of libraries—of which the one at Alexan-
dria would go on to accumulate bookrolls by the thousands (500,000 at
the time of Callimachus)—is to preserve in this form all the knowledge of
the world. This foundation is integral to the general project of the Ptol-
emies, who want to make their capital ‘‘a city-museum’’ gathering the
intellectual heritage of Hellenism, and a ‘‘mirror city’’ which will reflect
the whole world. The king gives a concrete form to the dream of univer-
sality of Aristotle, called ‘‘the Reader.’’
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Alexandria puts the ‘‘world into
scrolls’’
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in the course of the third centuryB.C. under the first three
Ptolemies. They order copies made of all the books that arrive in the
port of Alexandria, and have them translated if necessary, and they send
for every possible version of the Greek authors.
The library is inseparable from the Museum, an invention of the first
Ptolemy on the advice of Demetrius of Phaleron, a disciple of Aristotle
and statesman (governor of Athens from 317 to 307B.C.). What changes,
then, is not the relationship with the book but the relationship with
the text whose letter is made sacred and definitively fixed, instead of
being, as previously, a stage between two oralities and thus a variable
stage. The collected texts for the most part are no longer intended for
a ritual oralization, any more than they are the monumental traces of
those performances. They become autonomous objects, which need to be
preserved in an authentic and unique form.
Alexandrian scholars perform textual criticism to recover ‘‘the true
text.’’ They classify the texts according to genre, establish the biographies
of the authors and set up their busts. The text, having become autono-
mous, is not always understandable by itself, and it needs to be com-
mented on. The book thus merges with its author.
Nevertheless, the bookrolls of the library of Alexandria continue to be
no more than a support for a text that owes them nothing. There are
translations of foreign texts such as the Septuagint, poems that are ori-
ginally oral, or finally recopied inscriptions such as epigrams. Of course,
beginning with this first generation of books, new books are written, but
- Aristotle, nicknamed ‘‘the Reader’’ by Plato (Vita Marciana, 6), was a great collector
of books; see Athen. 1.3a b. - Canfora 1992, 49.
The Corrupted Boy and the Crowned Poet 145