To: average joe who wrote (49482 ) 3/12/2014 9:50:52 PM From: Brumar89 Read Replies (1) | Respond to You shouldn't take youtube videos as legitimate history.Plutarch and Dio Cassius - Life of Caesar and Roman History After this, the references become more explicit. Plutarch (died 120AD), in his Life of Caesar throws in a reference to the destruction of the library almost casually. Now Plutarch does not seem to carry a brief against Caesar, although he is happy to criticise him, so we should take this reference seriously. Additionally, he had visited Alexandria and presumably might have noticed if the library was still in existence. Dio Cassius (died 235AD) tells us that warehouses of books near the docks were accidentally burnt by Caesar's men. His words are difficult to pin down and have led some scholars to suggest that only books waiting for export were destroyed. This reads far more into the text than it allows and I do not think that Dio saying that the books 'happened' to be in the path of the flames means that usually they were kept somewhere else.Aulus Gellius - Attic Nights Gellius (died 180 AD) included in his Attic Nights contain a brief passage about libraries where the destruction of the Royal Library is mentioned as taking place by accident during our first war against Alexandria when auxiliary soldiers started a fire . This first war was Caesar's campaign and the second was when Octavian took Egypt from Mark Anthony and Cleopatra. In The Vanished Library, Luciano Canfora claims that this passage is an interpolation on the strength that the introduction does not mention it but again the evidence for this seems flimsy. Gellius claims 700,000 books went up in smoke.Ammianus Marcellinus and Orosius - Roman History and History against the Pagans One of the final pagan Roman historians, Ammianus Marcellinus (died 395AD), tells us about the fate of the library during an aside about the city of Alexandria in his Roman History . He relates the story of the fire started by Julius Caesar is 'the unanimous belief of the ancient authors' but confuses the library building with the Serapeum and increases the number of scrolls destroyed to 700,000 (perhaps Gellius is his source). The story is repeated with the figure of 400,000 scrolls destroyed by Orosius (died after 415AD), an early Christian historian, in his History against the Pagans The verdict on Caesar Taken together we can conclude a number of things from these sources:The earliest descriptions of the Alexandrine War, written by Caesar or his crony, deliberately cover up anything that reflects badly on the great man. Their silence about burning down the world's greatest library, even by accident, is not surprising. The library as a separate building did not exist by the time of Strabo's visit in 20BC. The belief that Caesar had destroyed the library was widespread by the time his family no longer occupied the throne of the emperors in the late first century AD. Plutarch, Gellius and Seneca are all evidence for this. We must therefore assume that the library did not exist at this time. Plutarch, a Greek, would certainly have known if it did. no explicit mention of the Royal Library after Caesar's ill-fated visit. Indeed as Athenaeus of Naucratis (died after 200AD) mournfully wrote in the Deipnosophistai "And concerning the number of books and the establishment of libraries and the collection in the Museum, why need I even speak when they are all the the memory of men."bede.org.uk
