THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA AND THE SACK OF SERAPEUM
Posted by Denisa Šmid on May 5, 2012 at 8:54 pm
HYPATIA, THE LAST OF THE NEOPLATONISTS OF ALEXANDRIA
Library of Alexandri
The Royal Library of Alexandria, or Ancient Library of Alexandria, in Alexandria, Egypt, was probably the largest, and certainly the most famous, of the libraries of the ancient world. It flourished under the patronage of the Ptolemaic dynasty, and functioned as a major center of scholarship, at least until the time of Rome's conquest of Egypt, and probably for many centuries thereafter.
Generally thought to have been founded at the beginning of the third century BC, the library was conceived and opened either during the reign of Ptolemy I Soter or during the reign of his son Ptolemy II. Plutarch (AD 46120) wrote that during his visit to Alexandria in 48 BC, Julius Caesar might have accidentally burned the library when he set fire to his own ships to frustrate Achillas' attempt to limit his ability to communicate by sea. According to Plutarch's account, this fire spread to the docks and then to the library.
However, this version of events is not confirmed in contemporary accounts of Caesar's visit. In fact, it has been reasonably established that segments of its collection were partially destroyed on several occasions before and after the first century BC. A modern myth (no older than the late eighteenth century) attributes the destruction to Coptic Christian Archbishop Theophilus of Alexandria in 391, who called for the destruction of the Serapeum; but in fact there was no connection between the library and the Serapeum and some historians of late antiquity do not take the claim seriously. Another version of the story, not recorded till the thirteenth century, blames the Muslim sacking of Alexandria in 642.
Intended both as a commemoration and an emulation of the original, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina was inaugurated in 2002 near the site of the old library.
According to the earliest source of information, the pseudepigraphic Letter of Aristeas, the library was initially organized by Demetrius of Phaleron, a student of Aristotle, under the reign of Ptolemy Soter.
Built in the Brucheion (Royal Quarter) in the style of Aristotle's Lyceum, adjacent to and in service of the Musaeum (a Greek Temple or "House of Muses", hence the term "museum"), the library comprised a Peripatos walk, gardens, a room for shared dining, a reading room, lecture halls and meeting rooms. However, the exact layout is not known. This model's influence may still be seen today in the layout of university campuses. The library itself is known to have had an acquisitions department (possibly built near the stacks, or for utility closer to the harbour), and a cataloguing department. The hall contained shelves for the collections of scrolls (as the books were at this time on papyrus scrolls), known as bibliothekai (ß?ß??????a?). Carved into the wall above the shelves, a famous inscription read: The place of the cure of the soul.
The first known library of its kind to gather a serious collection of books from beyond its country's borders, the Library at Alexandria was charged with collecting all the world's knowledge. It did so through an aggressive and well-funded royal mandate involving trips to the book fairs of Rhodes and Athens and a (potentially apocryphal or exaggerated) policy of pulling the books off every ship that came into port. They kept the original texts and made copies to send back to their owners. This detail is informed by the fact that Alexandria, because of its man-made bidirectional port between the mainland and the Pharos island, welcomed trade from the East and West, and soon found itself the international hub for trade, as well as the leading producer of papyrus and, soon enough, books.
Other than collecting works from the past, the library was also home to a host of international scholars, well-patronized by the Ptolemaic dynasty with travel, lodging and stipends for their whole families. As a research institution, the library filled its stacks with new works in mathematics, astronomy, physics, natural sciences and other subjects. It was at the Library of Alexandria that the scientific method was first conceived and put into practice, and its empirical standards applied in one of the first and certainly strongest homes for serious textual criticism. As the same text often existed in several different versions, comparative textual criticism was crucial for ensuring their veracity. Once ascertained, canonical copies would then be made for scholars, royalty and wealthy bibliophiles the world over, this commerce bringing income to the library. The editors at the Library of Alexandria are especially well known for their work on Homeric texts. The more famous editors generally also held the title of head librarian. These included, among others,
Zenodotus (early third century BC)
Callimachus, (early third century BC), the first bibliographer and developer of the Pinakes - the first library catalog.
Apollonius of Rhodes (mid-third century BC)
Eratosthenes (late third century BC)
Aristophanes of Byzantium (early second century BC)
Aristarchus of Samothrace (late second century BC)
The Greek term bibliotheke (ß?ß???????), used by many historians of the time, refers to the [royal] "Collection of Books", not to the building itself, nor to the social networks which sustained and operated the collection, which complicates the history and chronology of its destruction. The Royal Collection can be viewed as having begun in the Royal Quarter's building, commonly known as "The Great Library."
Scholars, particularly twenty-first century Arab/Muslim scholars, contest an ambiguous statement regarding Alexander's role in the creation of the library: Alexander, although picking the site and planning the general layout of the city, died before he could have a hand in the erection of the library or academy that was created in his name.
Already famous in the ancient world, the library's collection became even more storied in later years. However, it is now impossible to determine the collection's size in any era. Papyrus scrolls comprised the collection, and although parchment codices were used predominantly as a more advanced writing material after 300 BC, the Alexandrian Library is never documented as having switched to parchment, perhaps because of its strong links to the papyrus trade. (The Library of Alexandria in fact had an indirect cause in the creation of writing parchment - due to the library's critical need for papyrus, little was exported and thus an alternate source of copy material became essential.)
A single piece of writing might occupy several scrolls, and this division into self-contained "books" was a major aspect of editorial work. King Ptolemy II Philadelphus (309246 BC) is said to have set 500,000 scrolls as an objective for the library. Mark Antony supposedly gave Cleopatra over 200,000 scrolls (taken from the great Library of Pergamum) for the library as a wedding gift, but this is regarded by some historians as a propagandist claim meant to show Antony's allegiance to Egypt rather than Rome.[citation needed] Carl Sagan, in his series Cosmos, states that the library contained nearly one million scrolls, though other experts have estimated a smaller number (he also gives a speculative description of its destruction, linking it to the death of Hypatia, again without corroboration). Tommy DiFraia says there were roughly 650,000 scrolls. No index of the library survives, and it is not possible to know with certainty how large and how diverse the collection may have been. For example, it is likely that even if the Library of Alexandria had hundreds of thousands of scrolls (and thus perhaps tens of thousands of individual works), some of these would have been duplicate copies or alternate versions of the same texts.
A possibly apocryphal or exaggerated story concerns how the library's collection grew so large. By decree of Ptolemy III of Egypt, all visitors to the city were required to surrender all books and scrolls, as well as any form of written media in any language in their possession which, according to Galen, were listed under the heading "books of the ships". Official scribes then swiftly copied these writings, some copies proving so precise that the originals were put into the library, and the copies delivered to the unsuspecting owners. This process also helped to create a reservoir of books in the relatively new city.
According to Galen, Ptolemy III requested permission from the Athenians to borrow the original scripts of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, for which the Athenians demanded the enormous amount of fifteen talents as guarantee. Ptolemy happily paid the fee but kept the original scripts for the library. This story may also be constructed erroneously to show the power of Alexandria over Athens.
In 391, Christian Emperor Theodosius I ordered the destruction of all "pagan" (non-Christian) temples, and the Christian Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandria complied with this reques
Socrates Scholasticus provides the following account of the destruction of the temples in Alexandria in the fifth book of his Historia Ecclesiastica, written around 440:
At the solicitation of Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, the Emperor issued an order at this time for the demolition of the heathen temples in that city; commanding also that it should be put in execution under the direction of Theophilus. Seizing this opportunity, Theophilus exerted himself to the utmost to expose the pagan mysteries to contempt. And to begin with, he caused the Mithreum to be cleaned out, and exhibited to public view the tokens of its bloody mysteries. Then he destroyed the Serapeum, and the bloody rites of the Mithreum he publicly caricatured; the Serapeum also he showed full of extravagant superstitions, and he had the phalli of Priapus carried through the midst of the forum. Thus this disturbance having been terminated, the governor of Alexandria, and the commander-in-chief of the troops in Egypt, assisted Theophilus in demolishing the heathen temples.
The Mithraeum was an underground temple for worship of the god Mithras. Hundreds of such temples have been discovered throughout Europe, northern Africa, the Near East, and Great Britain.
The Serapeum once housed part of the Great Library, but it is not known how many, if any, books were contained in it at the time of destruction. Notably, the passage by Socrates Scholasticus, makes no clear reference to a library or library contents being destroyed, only to religious objects being destroyed. An earlier text by the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus seems to indicate that, whatever books might have been housed at the Serapeum in the past, none were there in the last decade of the fourth century. The pagan author Eunapius of Sardis witnessed the demolition, and though he detested Christians, and was a scholar, his account of the Serapeum's destruction makes no mention of any library. Paulus Orosius admitted in the sixth book of his History against the pagans:
Today there exist in temples book chests which we ourselves have seen, and, when these temples were plundered, these, we are told, were emptied by our own men in our time, which, indeed, is a true statement.
However, Orosius is not here discussing the Serapeum, nor is it clear who "our own men" are (the phrase may mean no more than "men of our time," since we know from contemporary sources that pagans also occasionally plundered temples).
As for the Museum, Mostafa El-Abbadi writes in Life and Fate of the Ancient Library of Alexandria (Paris 1992):
The Mouseion, being at the same time a 'shrine of the Muses', enjoyed a degree of sanctity as long as other pagan temples remained unmolested. Synesius of Cyrene, who studied under Hypatia at the end of the fourth century, saw the Mouseion and described the images of the philosophers in it. We have no later reference to its existence in the fifth century. As Theon, the distinguished mathematician and father of Hypatia, herself a renowned scholar, was the last recorded scholar-member (c. 380), it is likely that the Mouseion did not long survive the promulgation of Theodosius' decree in 391 to destroy all pagan temples in the city.
John Julius Norwich, in his work Byzantium: The Early Centuries, places the destruction of the library's collection during the anti-Arian riots in Alexandria that transpired after the imperial decree of 391 (p. 314).
Several historians told varying accounts of an Arab army led by Amr ibn al 'Aas sacking the city in 642 after the Byzantine army was defeated at the Battle of Heliopolis. Some historians, including Alfred J. Butler, argue that, when the commander Amr ibn al-Aas asked the Caliph Umar on what to do with the library he gave the famous answer: "They will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, in which case they are superfluous[citation needed]." It is said that the Arabs subsequently burned the books to heat bathwater for the soldiers.[21][22] Burning and destruction of the Library of Alexandria was reported to be the first act of sacking after Amr ibn al 'Aas forces entered the city.[1] It was also said that the Library's collection was still substantial enough at this late date to provide six months' worth of fuel for the baths.
The first Western account of the book destruction was in Edward Pococke's 1663 translation of History of the Dynasties, and it was dismissed as a hoax or propaganda as early as 1713 by Fr. Eusèbe Renaudot. Over the centuries, numerous succeeding scholars have agreed with Fr. Renaudot's conclusion, including Alfred J. Butler, Victor Chauvin, Paul Casanova and Eugenio Griffini.[19] More recently, in 1990, Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis argued that the original account may not be true, but that it survived over time because it was a useful account for the great twelfth century Kurdish Muslim Sultan of Egypt and Syria, Saladin who found it necessary to break up the Fatimid caliphate's collection of heretical Isma'ili texts in Cairo following his restoration of Sunnism to Egypt. Lewis proposes that the story of the caliph Umar's support of a library's destruction may have made Saladin's actions seem more acceptable to his people.
AD 360. The Serapeum is ransacked by Artemius, prefect of the City, on the orders of the Arian heretic George of Cappadocia. (Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, Bk III. Ch. 3). We are told that George “brought an army into the holy city [Alexandria] and the Prefect of Egypt [Artemius] seized the most sacred shrine of the God [the Serapeum] and stripped it of its statues and offerings and of all the ornaments.” (Julian, Letters, ‘To the Alexandrians’). Did that include the library in the colonnade? Perhaps. Julian will write to Ecdicius, the new Prefect of Egypt, and ask him to confiscate George’s large private library and send it to him at Constantinople (Julian, Letters, 'To Ecdicius'). Julian knows that George has a lot of books because they had known each other earlier in life. So George is a book-lover and, since he ordered the temple ransacked, he might very well have taken the books in the Serapeum for himself. It is certain that the books were no longer there when Ammianus Marcellinus, later writes of its library in the perfect tense [fuerunt]. The temple “once had” many books. The perfect tense in Latin denotes an action that is over and done with.
Paul Orosius, writing some forty years afterwards (ca.AD 417), will say that “in some of the temples there remain up to the present time book chests, which we ourselves have seen, and that, as we are told, these were emptied by our own men in our own day when these temples were plundered.” Perhaps he is referring to George and his looting of the Serapeum in AD 360. Notice that he does not say the books were destroyed, only that they were grabbed by looters. It was then not uncommon even for emperors and governors to loot older institutions in order to furnish their own endowments.
Six months later, while on his way to Persia, Julian will write to Porphyrius that that George’s book collection was “very large and complete and contained philosophers of every school and many historians.” Julian, Letters, 'To Porphyrius'). Alas, we don’t know whether Julian ever received George’s books. They may have reached the capital after Julian left for Antioch and were incorporated into the Imperial Library.
AD 365 July 21. An earthquake, estimated to have been magnitude eight, centered near Crete, created a tsunami that swept across Alexandria. The wave deposited ships up to two miles inland. Ammianus Marcellinus described how the earth shook and then the ocean receded and came back as a great wave that inundated the city with seawater, killing thousands. I don't know if it swept through whatever remained of the library.
...Like Hypatia, the students are all high-class. They are “connected.” The mysteries of Plotinus are not for the vulgar. Also, most of Hypatia’s students are Christians (including three future bishops!) This may sound odd to those who believe more modern myths, but the Schools of Old Alexandria were not segregated by “tribe.” Despite the occasional riots by the lower classes, the pagans of the Upper City could and did attend the lectures of Christian philosophers, and vice versa. Pagans may even have attended the famed Catechetical School. They might not believe in the crucified god, but they knew scholarship – in texts, grammar, and rhetoric – when they heard it. The great sermonizers of Alexandria were heirs to the long tradition of Greek rhetoric. The emperor Julian would hardly have found it necessary to forbid Christians from teaching and interpreting Greek literature if they were not in fact doing so.
This group of initiates became an intensely loyal family around Hypatia; they called each other "brother," maintained their contacts over a lifetime, and would only hint to the outside world at what secrets they had heard in Hypatia's house. But this was not a crypto-pagan cult, not simply another band of disinherited priests reminiscing over the old days like the embittered Palladas. Nor were they the augurs and fortune-tellers that Theon counted among his friends. They instead represented both the old and the new in the empire and the city - and as such represented perhaps a chance for Alexandria to reinvent itself, and so save itself, one last time. (Justin Pollard and Howard Reid, The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern World)
Synesius wrote many letters, some of which survive and give us a sketch of life among the upper classes at the end of an age. (They are numbered by their order in the surviving manuscript, but scholars have reconstructed a chronological sequence from internal references.) When Herculian and Synesius parted company, probably in AD 395, Synesius wrote a farewell letter to him in which he said.
If Homer had told us that it was an advantage to Odysseus in his wanderings that he saw the towns and became acquainted with the mind of many nations, and although the people whom he visited were not cultured, but merely Laestrygonians and Cyclopses, how wondrously then would poetry have sung of our voyage, a voyage in which it was granted to you and me to experience marvelous things, the bare recital of which had seem to us incredible! We have seen with our eye, we have heard with our ears the lady who legitimately presides over the mysteries of philosophy. (Synesius, Letter 137)
“The lady” of course was Hypatia.
Hypatia seems to have gotten along with Theophilus. Synesius, in his letters, appeals to both to help out some friends of his in a legal problem. Nor is there any surviving record of a conflict. Theophilus remains on good terms with Synesius while the latter is a student of Hypatia. He later presides at Synesius’ wedding, anoints Synesius bishop, and so forth. He would hardly have done so if he was hostile to Hypatia’s teachings.
AD 392. When Hypatia, is already a well-known philosopher, and Synesius has just begun his studies in Alexandria, the temple of Serapis was destroyed.
The pagans who bunkered up in the Serapeum are led by Olympius the Neoplatonist, the grammarians Ammonius and Helladius, and the poet Palladius.
The Emperor orderS the destruction of the temple in the Serapeum. When his letter is read in the plaza outside, the Christians react with cheers at the first page, and the pagans either slip away or blend in with the cheering crowd. Olympius flees to Italy, Palladius stays in Alexandria, but finds his city salary cut off. The two grammarians go to Constantinople.
Imperial troops acting under lawful government orders carry out the demolition, though no-doubt with the enthusiastic aid of the local Christians.
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