LIBRARIES 



The OM*t ancient library of which we hro any authentic account it 

 that of Onrnandyaa. king of Egypt, supposed by modem Egyptian 

 aholars to bare reigned about fourteen centurion before Christ 

 Dindoro* ttteuliu, who give* a minute description of the monument of 

 this M"*, mention* that there wa* in it a room containing a " "acred 

 UbrarrT and bearing an ineeription translated into Oreek by V*w 

 ImMr. which hat been playfully rendered "the Apothecaries' Hull of 

 UM Soul" ChampoUion believed that he had discovered thin hall in the 

 nake* near Thebes, from which the " Memnon's Head " now in the 

 British Museum wa* taken. It baa been supposed that all the libraries 

 of ancient Egypt were merely collections of sacred books ; but a con- 

 trary inference may be drawn from the circumstance mentioned by 

 EusUthius, the commentator on Homer, that Homer was absurdly 

 accused by some ancient calumniator of having stolen hia * Iliad ' and 



Odyssey * from a library in Egypt. It is singular that it was on the 

 oil of Egypt that the most famous library of all antiquity afterwards 

 row. The Ant public library in Greece was formed at Athens by 

 the enlightened tyrant PisUtratus, the supposed collector of the 

 scattered poems of Homer ; but according to the not very probable 

 statement of Aulus Uellius, it was taken away to Persia by Xerxes, and 

 only subsequently restored to Athens by Seleucus Nicanor, one of the 

 ucMssnn to the Asiatic kingdoms of Alexander the Great Another 

 of Alexander's successors Ptolemy, king of Egypt established in 

 Alexandria a great library, which continued under all vicissitudes the 

 most famous library in the world for about 900 years. The most 

 extraordinary statements are made by the writers of antiquity respect- 

 ins; the number of volumes it contained. Joeephus relates that, on the 

 question being put by Ptolemy, the founder, to Demetrius Phalereus. the 

 famous Athenian exile, who had the superintendence of the library, what 

 was the number of volumes, Demetrius replied that there were at that 

 time 200,000, but that he hoped there would soon be 500,000. Aulus 



i speaks of the number of volumes at a subsequent period as 

 700,000. There can be no doubt that, in this instance of counting, the 



* book* * in a poem are taken as " volumes," and that the 'Iliad ' 

 would therefore be reckoned as 24, in which caoe it might be near the 

 mark to assume that 700,000 volumes of the ancient library would 

 contain about as much reading as 60,000 of a modern one. Even then 

 the number is remarkably high for the early period of the history of 

 literature at which the collection was made ; and to account for it 

 with any degree of probability, it is necessary to suppose that many 

 copies of the same work were admitted, as was subsequently stated to 

 be the ease in the Mohammedan libraries of Egypt, and as was pro- 

 bably the case in all ancient libraries. This supposition is strongly 

 supported by the subsequent labours of Aristarchus and the Alexan- 

 drian school of critics, who would naturally ground their improved 

 readings on the collection of many copies of the same work. Allowance 

 must alao be made for that besetting sin in the enumeration of 

 libraries, exaggeration ; still the existence of exaggeration shows that 

 there wa* something not too obviously scanty and limited to expend 

 it upon. In the libraries of the middle ages we never hear of tens 

 of thousand*. Sixteen hundred years after the library of the kings 

 of Egypt bad been tpoken of as possibly of half a million volumes, 

 the library of a king of France was stated to contain 910. At the 

 tine that Josephus wrote, the library formed by Demetrius Phalereus 

 and his (accessor* no longer existed. In the wars of Julius Cicsar 

 in Egypt, in ome desperate struggles with the mercenary soldi, -rs, 

 the building in which it was kept accidentally caught fire, and tliu 

 whole collection was consumed. The calamity was probably deeply 

 felt by the most literary of conquerors, and in his ' Commentaries,' and 

 those of hi* freedman Hirtius, there is no allusion whatever to the 

 fact, which is however sufficiently established by the testimony of 

 Heneca, Plutarch, Dion Caasius, Aulus Oellius, and Ammianus Marcel- 

 linn*. Seneca, who refer* to one of the lost books of Livy, speaks of 

 400,000 volumes as having perished. It seems, however, from various 

 indication*, that the library bad increased so enormously previous to 

 this conflagration, that the later part of it wa* kept in a separate 

 building, in another part of the city, and thus escaped. Mark Antony, 

 in |hk subsequent passion for Cleopatra, endeavoured to repair the 

 loss of the early library of the Ptolemies by presenting to her tl,. 

 library of Pergamus, the collection next in celebrity to theirs. The 

 kings of Pergamu* bad entered into a rivalry with the kings of 

 Egypt in the collection of book*, and the contact had been carried on 

 *.. warmly that, according to tradition, the Egyptian* forbade the 

 exportation of papyrus, to which the Pergainenian* responded by tin; 

 invention of parchment, called from them Pergamena the name from 

 whkh the Enflkh one i. derived. When Mart Antony presented the 

 library to CWntn it amounted, according to Plutarch, to 200,000 



. 

 forth UM new library of 



collection, formed thence- 

 which continued the first in the 



ubsequent history is involved in 



much obscurity, and indeed many of the circumstance, which have 

 already been narrated art not **tabU*bl upon the most solid ban*. 

 Then Mm* to be reason to believe that a great destruction of the 

 library took place in the a~ai.lt of the Christians on the temple of 

 , on UM triumph of Christianity over heathenism, A.D. 36D ; and 



LIBRARIES. ?" 



the collection i* asserted to hare finally perished in A.I). CSS, when the 

 Mohammedans, under A mm, conquered Egypt 



The story told by Abulpharagius and doubted by Qibb.ni is well 

 known : that Amru applied to his master, the caliph Omni 

 sion as to what was to be done with the library. and received the reply, 

 that if the writings of the Greeks agreed with the Koran they wet 

 leas, and need not be preserved; if they disagreed they were pern 

 and ought to be destroyed ; and that in consequence the books were 

 devoted to the heating of the public baths. This massacre 

 if it really took place, was afterwards paralleled, if Arable hi,-- 

 toll truth, by similar massacres of Mohammedan literature on the part 

 of the Christians. At the capture of Tripoli, in Syria, by the Crusaders 

 under the Count de St Gilles, in the 12th century, a priest who entered 

 the great library took down one of the books and found it was a K 

 a second and found it was a Koran, a third and fourth with still the 

 same result, on which he exclaimed that the place was full of nothing 

 but Korans, and fire was set to the whole collection, of which but a few 

 volumes escaped. He had, in fact, says the Arabic historian, entered 

 the room of the Korans, of which there were 60,000 copies in the 

 library. Without of course accepting the statement of the number of 

 Korans, it may be supposed that there was a large collection of them 

 at Tripoli, and that the library was burned by the Franks on that 

 account. Similar deeds are recorded of the Christian conquerors ef 

 Granada, and of Cardinal Ximenes, the patron of the Polyglott Bible. 



The history of the libraries of ancient Greece is singularly obscure, 

 and they seem never to have had any distinguished prominence, a 

 fact which is not in favour of the theory, that the civilisation of a 

 people may be estimated from its public libraries. The library of Pisis- 

 tratus has already been mentioned, its abstraction and its restoration 

 by Seleucus. Its subsequent stay at Athens must have been short, for 

 Sylla is recorded, on his conquest of Athens, to have carried off all the 

 libraries to Italy, where, however, he does not appear to have given 

 them to the Roman public, but to have left them to his son, who kept 

 them in his villa at Puteoli. A story which is told by Plutarch in hi.s 

 Life of Alcibiades, affords a strong indirect testimony to the general 

 existence of collections of books in connection with the schools at 

 Athens. Alcibiades, it is said, was upon one occasion desirous of 

 referring, when in a school, to a passage in Homer, and was told by the 

 schoolmaster that he had no copy of the poet, on which, for his sole 

 rejoinder, he gave him a box on the ear. 



The honour of founding the first public library at Rome was reserved 

 for Asiuius Pollio, in the reign of Augustus, though Julius C.usar is 

 said to have entertained the design, perhaps as a compensation to 

 learning for his involuntary destruction of the Alexandrian, and to 

 have intended to nominate Varro as the librarian. Previously to Pollio, 

 Lucullus is recorded to have been singularly liberal in opening his 

 library to the use of the learned ; and after him Augustus added 

 two public libraries to the ornaments of the capital, the Octavian 

 and the Palatine. Many others were added by subsequent emperors, 

 who seem to have had a pleasure in attaching their names to new 

 foundations, the most conspicuous and celebrated of which was the 

 Ulpiau, so called from one of the names of Trajan. These lib 

 appear to have had a great effect in diffusing over Roman society that 

 literary air which is so remarkable a feature in the letters of 1'lin 

 which occasionally reminds the reader so strongly of the Paris of the 

 18th century. By some allusions in Ovid's 'Klc;;ics,' written after lu's 

 banishment, in which he questions if his new productions will In- 

 allowed to take their place beside the old in the public libraries, it 

 appears that the new works of living authors found a place thei 

 this was probably the m..-t ell. . tual mode of publication. A few 

 copies in the public libraries would probably like a few copies in 

 the circulating libraries of our own time diffuse the knowledge of a 

 new book more effectually than hundreds in private hands. At 

 the same time, the frequent censures of Seneca and others of the 

 " bibliomania " prevalent in his time, show that magnificent private 

 libraries were then, as they have again begun to be in tho last four 

 centuries, a faourite means of expending and di..pl.i\ in-.- wealth. 



It is singular that of the great Roman libraries it is seldom men- 

 tioned of how many volumes they consisted or ere supposed to consist 

 Julius Capitolinus, in his 'Lives of the (Jordians,' mentions of tin- 

 emperor (Jordian the Younger, that he inlj, i it. d the library of Suronns 

 SammouicuH, his preceptor, and that that library a- -.J.OOIP 

 volumes, which is spoken of, as it well may be, as an enormous number. 

 Another glimpse into the libraries of the period is given by tin- cir- 

 cumstance mentioned of the emperor Tacit us, that he < imandcd by a 



particular edict that the works of his ancestor, Tacitus tin- historian, 

 and those of various other historical writers, should bo trans, -ribcd in 

 ten copies every year, and tl distributed among the public 



libraries. In the time of Constantino the Great, the number of these 

 establishments at Rome is stnt id twenty. 



The tradition of the ancient libraries was continued by tho Byzan- 

 tine emperors through tho long and i years which 

 elapsed between the transference of the empire to that city, and its 



capture by the Turks. ' " the Great foui I a binary at 



Constantinople, for the formation of which it in supposed that con- 

 tributions were levied on the nine anil-twenty in the heathen temples 

 at Koine. The passage is well known in the writings of Julian the 

 Apostate : " Some are fond of horses, some of birds, and others of 



