[Chapter I]
Beginnings of the Bibliography of Bibliographies
The introduction to St. Jerome's De viris illustribus written in A.D. 392 may contain the first bibliography of bibliographies. Here we find a list of nine men who had written bibliographies of various kinds. St. Jerome writes as follows:
You urge me, Dexter, to arrange ecclesiastical writers in imitation of Suetonius[1] and to do for men of our faith what he has done in listing men famous in heathen letters. Among the Greeks some have done the same thing: Hermippus Peripateticus,[2] Antigonus Carystius,[3] the learned Satyrus,[4] and Aristoxenus, the musician,[5] who was by far the most learned, [and] furthermore, among the Romans, Varro,[6] Santra,[7] Nepos, Hyginus, and Suetonius, whom you cite as a model.[8]
After a brief digression St. Jerome refers to Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, which he has found very useful, and then concludes with an allusion to Cicero, whom few would now think of as a bibliographer. In this passage he makes it clear that bibliography was not highly esteemed even in A.D. 392:
And so I pray to the Lord Jesus Christ that, since your master Cicero, who stood at the pinnacle of Roman eloquence, has not disdained to compile a list of orators in the Latin language in his Brutus, I may execute such a task worthily, pursuant to your request, by listing the writers of His church.
St. Jerome's list is an altogether acceptable bibliography of bibliographies. It includes Antigonus Carystius and Satyrus who wrote general biobibliographies, and Aristoxenus who listed the pupils of Isocrates or the writers of tragedy. We can infer that St. Jerome saw a common element in the works of all these men. This common element is the idea of a list or bibliography. Had he cited only writers of general biobibliographies, we might imagine that he thought of them as historians or chroniclers. In the context of an introduction to his own bibliography of Christian writers he must have thought of them as bibliographers. He neglected to mention many other early bibliographers with whom he was probably familiar.
Almost thirteen centuries later Philip Labbé, whom we shall learn to know as the first author of a bibliography of bibliographies to be published as a separate work, found St. Jerome's list and after making some additions, put it in alphabetical order. He could not find a proper place for it in his own bibliography of bibliographies, the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum of 1664, and buried it without any apparent reason immediately after a reference to a book by Constantinus Felicius that dealt with Cicero's exile and glorious return. I suspect that the slip containing this information had been misplaced in his manuscript. Labbé wrote as follows:
Besides Damastes Sigiaeus,[9] many have written on the lives of scholars, for example, Agatharcides of Cnidus,[10] Amphicrates,[11] Antigonus Carystius, Aristoxenus, Artemon of Magnesia,[12] the Carthaginian Charon,[13] Clearchus of Soli,[14] Hermippus of Smyrna, Satyrus, Timagenes of Miletus,[15] and others, and among Latin writers, Varro, Santra, Nepos, [and] Hyginus, whom St. Jerome cites along with Suetonius on p. 62.[16]