Adventures in Ancient Greek and Roman Libraries

Edith Hall

Libraries are commonly regarded as serious, even austere environments, so it may come as a surprise that it is in a comedy, indeed our earliest surviving and rather raucous Aristophanic comedy, that the first certain literary response to a library occurs. The library belongs to Euripides, one of the three great tragedians of Athens, and the play is Aristophanes's Acharnians, first performed in Athens in the late winter of 425 B.C. Athens and Sparta have been fighting the Peloponnesian War for six long years. The hero of the comedy, like many in his audience, is a peasant farmer who has suffered intensely as a result. His name is Dikaiopolis, which roughly translates as "the right way to run a city-state," and he wants to put the case that the Athenians need to make immediate peace with Sparta. He has decided that the most rhetorically effective outfit in which to address his fellow citizens and appeal to their pity consists of a poor man's rags. Since the famous dramatist Euripides was well known for writing tragedies in which royal heroes suffered from straitened circumstances and appeared in rags, Dikaiopolis's first port of call is the house of this tragic poet.

He knocks on the door and asks Euripides's slave—who turns out to be phenomenally intellectual—where his master is. The poet is apparently upstairs, hard at work writing a play. With the aid of some kind of stage machinery, Euripides, sitting elevated in his study, is "rolled out" into view and appears seated in the upper storey of his house. It is time for Dikaipolis to make his request. But what he actually asks for is not a stage costume as such, but "the tatters of some old drama" ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]); as he says to Euripides, "I have to treat the chorus to a long oration ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), and if I do it badly it will mean death for me" (415–17).

The comic action that ensues plays on the double meaning of the word for "tatters" here, rhakion, which alludes both to scraps of papyrus and to ragged old theatrical costumes. Euripides seems to be sitting in a paper jungle constituted by papyri containing his own plays and tells his slave to get the "strips" (spargana, 431) of the play featuring the most ragged hero of them all, his famous (and alas, lost) Telephus: they are to be found, he says, close to the scraps of two other plays, "on top of the tatters of Thyestes, mixed up with those of Ino" (432–4). While Dikaipolis does collect a hat and other theatrical props from Euripides, the scene only makes sense if he also departs with a papyrus roll containing a famous speech from the tragedy Telephus. It is a comic and topicalized subversion of this oration that he shortly performs before the Athenian people.

In this wonderful theatrical episode we can see the invention of the type of Western comedy that creates laughter at the expense of tragedy. We can also see the very birth of the comic image of the library as a place inhabited by cerebral individuals who seem inherently funny to ordinary people of common sense. But the scene also demonstrates how the very idea of book assemblage could stimulate artistic inventiveness: the notoriously bookish Euripides's papyrus collection inspires a dazzling scene of comic metatheater. This scene may actually be the ultimate source of the ancient tradition, recorded in Euripides's Hellenistic biography, that he was the first recorded owner of a large personal library, and that this informed the very nature of his plots and poetry (see also Aristophanes's Frogs 943, 1049). In this tradition, we can see that the ancient Greeks were aware that the invention of book collections inevitably affected the contents of books, at least where dramatic poetry was concerned.

Since I am a scholar who has specialized in literature, my discussion in this essay will mainly address the relationship between the ancient library and ancient poetry rather than ancient geography, science, or philosophy. Unlike many accounts of ancient libraries, it will not be addressing the nuts and bolts—although they are inherently fascinating—of the cataloguing systems that the poet and librarian Callimachus pioneered more than two millennia before Melvil Dewey created decimal classification. I will not be discussing explicitly the parallels between the ancient library and modern digital projects such as Google Books and Europeana, although excellent examples of such discussions, by classical scholars, are available. It is the idea of the library, which we inherit more or less directly from the ancient Mediterranean and near Eastern worlds, that constitutes my primary concern. I would have liked to write about the depiction of libraries in ancient Greek and Roman drama, poetry and fiction, along the lines of Debra Castillo's The Translated World: A Postmodern Tour of Libraries in Literature (1984), but there are, sadly, few enough libraries actually evoked or even described in surviving ancient literature. But the dearth of literary representations of ancient book collections is out of all proportion to the vast amount of factual information we possess about them. The finds at Qumran alone have revealed far too much about the physical, material realities of the painstaking ancient process of book reproduction to discuss in a single essay—not just in the Dead Sea Scrolls themselves, but in the ink wells and even the plaster coverings of the desks at which the scribes labored. The subject matter is enormous, even if we focus exclusively on the libraries of the pagan Greeks and Romans, to the exclusion of the Babylonians and Assyrians from whose library organization systems they learned, or of the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Jews, let alone the early Christians, who inherited their basic library building plan from their pagan precursors.

One man in antiquity was brave enough to attempt to write a comprehensive three-volume...