Come, no more single lines—let him bring all,
His wife, his children, his Cephisophon,
His books and everything, himself to boot—
I'll counterpoise them with a couple of lines[9].
With regard to Aristotle Strabo has preserved a tradition that he "was the first who made a collection of books, and taught the kings of Egypt how to arrange a library[10]"—words which may be taken to mean that Aristotle was the first to work out the arrangement of books on a definite system which was afterwards adopted by the Ptolemies at Alexandria.
These notices are extremely disappointing. They merely serve to shew that collections of books did exist in Greece; but they give us no indication of either their extent or their arrangement. It was left to the Emperor Hadrian to build the first public library at Athens, to which, as it was naturally constructed on a Roman design, I shall return after I have described those from which it was in all probability imitated.
But, if what may be termed Greece in Europe declines to give us information, that other Greece which extended itself to Asia Minor and to Egypt—Greater Greece it would be called in modern times—supplies us with a type of library-organisation which has been of far-reaching influence.
After the death of Alexander the Great (b.c. 323) a Greek dynasty, that of the Ptolemies, established itself at Alexandria, and another Greek dynasty at Pergamon. Both were distinguished—like Italian despots of the Renaissance—for the splendour and the culture of their courts, and they rivalled one another in the extent and richness of their libraries; but, if we are to believe Strabo, the library at Pergamon was not begun until the reign of Eumenes II. (b.c. 197-159), or 126 years after that at Alexandria[11].
The libraries at Alexandria (for there were two)—though far more celebrated and more extensive than the library at Pergamon—need not, from my point of view, detain us for more than a moment, for we are told very little about their position, and nothing about their arrangement. The site of the earliest, the foundation of which is ascribed to Ptolemy the Second (b.c. 285-247), must undoubtedly be sought for within the circuit of the royal palace, which was in the fashionable quarter of the city called Brucheion. This palace was a vast enceinte, not a separate building, and, as Strabo, who visited Alexandria 24 b.c., says,
Within the precincts of the palace is the Museum. It has a colonnade, a lecture-room, and a vast establishment where the men of letters who share the use of the Museum take their meals together. This College has a common revenue; and is managed by a priest who is over the Museum, an officer formerly appointed by the kings of Egypt, but, at the present time, by the Emperor[12].
That the older of the two libraries must have been in some way connected with these buildings seems to me certain from two considerations. First, a ruler who took so keen an interest in books as Ptolemy, would assuredly have kept his treasures under his own eye; and, secondly, he would hardly have placed them at a distance from the spot where the learned men of Alexandria held their meetings[13].
At some period subsequent to the foundation of Ptolemy's first library, a second, called the daughter of the first[14], was established in connexion with the Temple of Serapis, a magnificent structure in the quarter Rhacôtis, adorned so lavishly with colonnades, statuary, and other architectural enrichments, that the historian Ammianus Marcellinus declares that nothing in the world could equal it, except the Roman Capitol[15].