The library in Alexandria
What really happened?

The mythical fire

The Arabs did not burn the library. That is a medieval myth. One more version of Orientalism: bad Arabs versus good Christians.

Both the myth and the truth starts with Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian empire. Alexander died in 323 BC. His generals divided the empire. Ptolemy became the ruler of Egypt - and his descendants ruled the country for almost three hundred years. The name he took as a king was Ptolemy I Soter - or Ptolemy the Saviour. It was this Ptolemy who established the great scientific academy - the Museion - in Alexandria, with the associated library.

The library was organised around 320 BC. Very few libraries survive for a thousand years. When the Arabs conquered Egypt in 640 AD, almost one thousand years later, the library had vanished a long time ago.

The real fire

But there was a famous fire - and it did destroy large parts of the collection. But the person behind the fire was Julius Cæsar, the year was 48 BC, and the damage was accidental.

In 48 BC, Egypt had been a client kingdom under Rome for several generations. In Alexandria, two late Ptolemies, a brother and a sister, were fighting each other. The brother was Ptolemy XIII. The sister was Cleopatra VII (see note 1). Cæsar intervened in the quarrel.

In this power struggle, Cæsar supported Cleopatra. But Cæsar had rought only a small military force to Alexandria: 3 200 foot soldiers and 800 cavalry. For several months he was surrounded in the royal palace by the much larger army of Ptolemy XIII - about 20 000 men. At one point - we do not know the details - he used fire as a defence. And the library was badly damaged.

This fire was, in any case, not the end of the library. It was still active 150 years later.

How much was lost?

The Arab destruction is a myth. But the library in Alexandria has still disappeared - not with a bang, but a whimper.

Before the fire in 47 BC the library may have contained 700 000 books, primarily in Greek, but also in other languages, like Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Coptic. The collection of Greek literature, from "great-browed Homer" (c. 700 BC) to the Alexandrian scholars and poets (after 300 BC), was nearly complete. And we may ask: how much has been lost?

At first sight, nearly everything. If we take the greatest collections of ancient Greek literature today, such as the Loeb Classical Library, the French Collection Budé and the German editions from Teubner, and add them all together, we end up with less than a thousand volumes, by a few hundred authors.

But the answer is not that simple. The 700 000 books were book rolls rather than books proper, or codexes. Each roll contained twenty or thirty of our pages. In modern terms the library contained maybe 50 000 books. In the classical world this was unique. The library was vast. In the modern world it corresponds to the collections of a public library in a small provincial town.

If only a thousand volumes from fifty thousand still exist, we could speak of a survival rate of 2%. But that is clearly misleading - we have not lost 98% of Greek literary culture. Many thousand Greek authors survive only as fragments. But the really great works had a better chance. The Greeks had only one Homer, one Sophocles and one Plato. The greatest authors survive, in whole or in part.

The scholars in Alexandria had access to the full range of Greek literature. But they seldom mention lost authors of the same stature. It is mainly the writers of secondary and tertiary rank that have disappeared (2).

Cæsar and Cleopatra

The story is romantic. During the siege, Cleopatra arrived in Alexandria from Syria. She was intelligent, sophisticated, intensely political - and only 21 years old. Young enough to be Cæsar`s daughter, in fact. He was born in 100 BC.

Cleopatra had herself rolled up in a carpet and delivered to Cæsar at night. He unrolled the carpet and liked what he saw. Their son, Cæsarion, was born on June 23, 47 BC.

Cæsar was no enemy of books. He wrote two books about his military campaigns - one on his brutal conquest of Gaul - today`s France - and one on the civil war that followed in Rome. Cæsar is a great stylist, clear and forceful: De bello Gallica has been used as a beginner`stext for two thousand years. When Cæsar returned from Egypt to Rome, one of the many things he did was to fund a public library. With money from Egypt, surely.

After Cæsar was assassinated in 44 BC, Cleopatra stayed on as ruler of Egypt. But she chose the losing party (the anti-Cæsarians) and the wrong lover (Marcus Antonius) in the civil war that followed. When Antonius was defeated at Actium in 31 BC, she escaped to Alexandria. The winner was Cæsar`s grand-nephew and adopted son Octavian - a cool and cruel man, but also a great statesman and politician. We know him better under another name: emperor Augustus (3).

The last Ptolemy

Octavian wanted to exhibit Cleopatra as a captive in his triumph at Rome. She was too proud to accept this fate. Shakespeare tells the story of her death, at the age of 39, in Alexandria (1). She was the last of the Ptolemies to reign in Egypt. After 30 BC the country became a Roman province - the "jewel in the crown" of the Roman empire.

The library continued as a centre of learning under the Romans, but on a lesser scale. Alexandria had been reduced to the capital of a province. Rome was the centre of the Mediterranean world.

Notes

1. Much more at Cleopatra VII
2. See Lesky, Albin. Geschichte der Griechischen Literatur (reprinted München: K.G. Saur, 1999), especially the first chapter on the transmission of Greek literature.
3. More about Augustus in Verdens bokdag for to tusen år siden (in Norwegian)
4. In Antony and Cleopatra