Regarding education, it is important to note that Hellenistic cities were almost all organized as formal democracies, with the general citizen body sovereign and meeting regularly throughout the year to discuss and vote on matters of public policy and interest. The evidence for this is overwhelming, in the form of numerous publicly voted decrees from cities all around the Hellenistic world. And for the citizens to function democratically, debating public issues in a sensible way, they needed to be informed. That meant, in effect, that they needed to be able to read, since proposals, decrees, and laws were publicized by being written up and exposed publicly in the agora and/or other public spaces. Schooling was therefore a public need, and schools at which the sons (and sometimes daughters too) of citizens could learn the basics of literacy are well attested. Though most such schools were private ventures, there was a perceived public interest in making sure that the schoolmasters running these schools knew their job and provided value for the fees they charged. It was not uncommon, consequently, for cities to have a magistrate whose task it was to oversee the schooling of the young: the usual title was paidonomos or child-warden. In some cities we happen to know that schooling was provided free of charge: a wealthy citizen might establish a trust fund to pay the fees of teachers whose job would be to educate the children of the citizens. I shall close this section with one such example, from the city of Teos on the west coast of Asia Minor (see map 5):
So that all the free children may be educated just as Polythrus son of Onesimus in his foresight promised to the people, wishing to establish a most fair memorial of his own love of honor, he made a gift for this purpose of 34,000 drachmas.
Every year at the elections, after the selection of the public secretaries, three schoolmasters are to be appointed, who will teach the boys and the girls. The person appointed to the top class shall be paid 600 drachmas per year; the person appointed to the middle class shall be paid 550 drachmas; and the person appointed to the lowest class shall be paid 500 drachmas. Two physical trainers are also to be appointed, and the salary of each is to be 500 drachmas (Austin The Hellenistic World doc. 120 = Dittenberger Syll. no. 578).
The inscription goes on to require the appointment of a music teacher and to lay out how exactly the paidonomos shall assign children to each of the three classes by age and/or suitability, and to regulate what is to be taught and how and where. The point here is that Teos had, thanks to the generosity of a wealthy citizen, a public trust fund which paid for a free three-year education in literacy and music, as well as some physical training, for all the sons of the citizens, and remarkably their daughters too. This literacy was not just important as a political matter, to enable the citizens to function politically in an informed way. It was also important culturally: because Hellenistic culture was a reading culture, a culture of the book. And this is illustrated by another well known feature of Hellenistic urban civilization: the development of public libraries.
4. THE LIBRARY AND HELLENISTIC CULTURE
In the early decades of the third century BCE, Ptolemy I Soter and his son Ptolemy II Philadelphus established in Alexandria one of the great cultural institutions of western history: the Mouseion. This term, the origin of the English word museum, literally means a sanctuary of the Mousai (Muses), the goddesses who oversaw literature, music, and culture generally in Greek religious thought. But the Mouseion at Alexandria was far more than a religious sanctuary: it was a great research institute that offered housing and allowances to writers, philosophers, and scientists of all sorts, who could live at the Mouseion free of all the usual cares of life and just concentrate on their writing and/or research. And at the heart of the Mouseion, as its greatest resource and research tool, lay the great Library of Alexandria, the first great public library of the western tradition and one of the greatest libraries in western history. Libraries of a sort had already existed in Athens for decades: there were book collections at Plato’s Academy and at Aristotle’s Lyceum, and the Athenian public archive kept official copies of the tragedies and comedies performed each year at the Dionysia and Lenaea festivals. Not surprisingly, therefore, Ptolemy I brought to Alexandria from Athens a pupil of Aristotle named Demetrius of Phalerum to oversee the establishment of his great institute and library. Demetrius had governed his home city of Athens for ten years (316–307) as a kind of “philosopher-king” on behalf of the Macedonian ruler Cassander; but was seen by pro-democracy Athenians as a tyrant and driven out into exile, so Ptolemy’s offer came to him as a godsend. And he was ideal for Ptolemy’s purposes: besides his cultural and literary attainments as an Aristotelian philosopher, he had the leadership and organizational skills needed to get the Mouseion up and running.
Besides inviting to Alexandria, to stay at the Mouseion, leading men in every field of cultural endeavor, one of the key projects in establishing the Mouseion was building up its library. The learned Byzantine man of literature Johannes Tzetzes tells us that the aim of Ptolemy and Demetrius was to gather into the library “the books of all the peoples of the world”. The Christian heresiologist Epiphanius of Salamis knew of a letter written by Ptolemy to “all the sovereigns on earth” requesting that they have sent to him the writings of authors of every kind: “poets and prose writers, rhetoricians and sophists, doctors and prophets, historians, and all the others also.” Stories and legends accrued around this book-collecting. Supposedly the king sent to Athens offering a fantastic sum of money for the right to make copies of the original manuscripts of the great tragic dramatists, stored in the state archive of Athens. The copies were to be made at the Mouseion itself, and the story has it that Ptolemy in the end kept the originals for his library and sent the copies back to Athens. There was a law that every ship that put into Alexandria’s great harbor was searched by Ptolemaic agents, and any books on board were seized. They were copied by the scribes at the Mouseion, and the copies were returned to the ships, while the originals were placed in the library. Supposedly Ptolemy would visit the library regularly to receive updates from Demetrius on how the book-collecting was going. Demetrius would report on how many volumes were present, and on plans to acquire more. The goal, reputedly, was to acquire half a million volumes, at which point Demetrius calculated that every book in the world worth having would be present.
Ptolemy was not content to sit back and wait for books to come or be sent to Alexandria: purchasing agents were sent out around the Hellenistic world to track down and acquire rare books of every sort, whatever the cost. One book collection that eluded Ptolemy’s agents, however, was the writings of Aristotle. During his lifetime, Aristotle had published various writings in dialogue form, like those of his old master Plato. But his key writings that formed the basis of his philosophical teaching at his school in Athens, the Lykeion (Lyceum), were kept private. Aristotle left them to his pupil and successor Theophrastus, who in turn bequeathed them to the man he expected to succeed him, Neleus of Scepsis. But Neleus did not become head of the Lyceum, and in anger at being passed over he returned to his home town of Scepsis in the Troad, taking Aristotle’s writings with him. Ptolemy’s agents were alerted and showed up to purchase the writings; and the polymath Athenaeus of Naucratis, writing in the early third century CE, in fact reports the acquisition by the library of “the books of Aristotle and Theophrastus, from Neleus of Scepsis.” But whatever Neleus sold Ptolemy’s book-buyers, it was not the prized writings of Aristotle himself: those remained buried in a chest in Neleus’ ancestral home for nearly two hundred years until an Aristotelian enthusiast of the first century BCE finally tracked them down, enabling the world at last to read Aristotle’s true thoughts.
The library was not restricted to Greek texts. A learned Egyptian priest from the temple-city of On-Heliopolis named Manetho made a translation/adaptation of Egyptian chronicles and sacred writings into Greek for his patron Ptolemy II. The sacred writings of the great Iranian prophet Zarathustra—that is the texts sacred to the Zoroastrian religion, whoever their true authors—were rep
ortedly collected and translated into Greek, totaling some two million lines of text. Most famously, there is the legendary story of the translation for the library of the Hebrew scriptures. The early Ptolemies ruled Palestine and it was easy for them, when Demetrius alerted them to the existence of these writings, to have the high priest at Jerusalem send copies of the texts along with religious experts to translate them into Greek. According to the legend, seventy-two translators were sent, who each labored independently for exactly seventy-two days to translate the texts, miraculously producing at the end of the seventy-two days translations that were word for word the same. However it was really produced, a well translated Greek version of the scriptures, known as the Septuagint (from the Latin word for seventy), did come about and is still the standard Greek version of the Old Testament to the present day.
For all the fascination of this acquisition process, the physical accumulation of books is only the first step in the creation of a great library, however, and it is the follow-up stages of analysis, categorization, and evaluation that made the library at Alexandria one of the great cultural institutions and changed Hellenistic culture dramatically. What happened at the Mouseion library over the centuries was the creation of library science, of textual scholarship, of literary theory, of new styles of literature that prized erudition as a key component of literary creation, and of a culture of the book as a prized component of a well rounded person’s life more generally. The process may be said to have begun with the analysis of multiple copies of Homer’s epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and with the first formal head of the library per se, Zenodotus of Ephesus.
Copies of Homer’s great epics were widely available around the Greek world, and the library acquired a significant number of such copies. When these were analyzed, problems emerged: there were all sorts of differences from one copy to another. Missing or added words, words that made no sense and appeared to have been misspelled, whole lines or passages found in one copy but not in another: what was one to make of such anomalies, and how was one to discover the “true” text of Homer? Zenodotus set himself the task of analyzing the various copies of Homer and solving the problems. In doing so, he began to establish the basic criteria of textual scholarship. Homer’s characteristic style and vocabulary were analyzed, and words or passages that did not fit or seemed anachronistic were stigmatized as possible interpolations. Similarly, passages that seemed intrusive to the narrative, or not to fit in terms of Homer’s narrative method, were questioned. For example, Zenodotus famously questioned the authenticity of the description of Achilles’ shield in Iliad 18 as being unique and so un-Homeric. While Zenodotus himself may have been rather cavalier in his method, what came out of this work was true textual scholarship. Eventually Zenodotus’ successors produced lexica of the Homeric vocabulary, treatises on Homeric language and style, commentaries on Homer’s works explaining obscurities and difficulties, and official cleaned-up texts of the Homeric epics that are the source of all modern texts. And once this process had gotten under way with Homer, the works of other authors of all sorts were naturally subjected to the same analytical investigation.
Besides the work of analyzing and explaining, there was also the business of categorizing and ordering texts, because the texts collected could not just be piled higgledy-piggledy on shelves or in boxes. They had to be arranged in some rational manner, and a key role in this business was played by one of the most remarkable literary figures of the Hellenistic era: the poet Callimachus. Originally a schoolmaster in the city of Cyrene in modern-day Libya, Callimachus was brought to Alexandria to work in the library, and was eventually given the charge of producing a catalogue. After what must surely have been decades of labor and study, Callimachus produced the Pinakes, a catalogue of the books in the library ordered by distinct categories of literary work and with some account of each work. This work itself filled 120 book scrolls, and it in Callimachus established eleven different categories of literature, six of poetry and five of prose: lyric and epic poetry, tragic and comic drama, history and philosophy and oratory, and so on. Callimachus—building to be sure on the work of predecessors like Aristotle—established the criteria for these genres and divided the works of Greek literature among them. Eventually this work of classification also came to include judgements of quality, and one began to get lists of the best writers and works in each category. There were the nine lyric poets, the three great tragedians, and the ten orators, for example. Not every genre lent itself to such generally accepted lists: in history there was wide consensus that Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon were at the top, and almost all critics accepted Theopompus of Chios, Philistus of Syracuse, and Ephorus as the next three, but after that lists became more idiosyncratic: whether one should include Timaeus or Polybius or Timagenes were matters of dispute. But what came out of this work was a universally accepted sense that in every genre there were “classic” or “canonical” authors and works which established and illustrated the very best of what could be done in each genre.
Once this process was well underway, it became understood that to be a person of taste and discrimination one had to be familiar with “the classics,” and getting access to and reading these classic works was thus expected of every citizen of the Greek cities who prided himself (or herself) on being well educated. The literature written during the Hellenistic era adapted itself to this taste for erudition, and to the existence of a large literate audience. At the top level of culture writers began to produce works which displayed their own erudition. The poet Callimachus, mentioned above, pioneered a new kind of poetry that was highly polished and full of tags from and allusions to the classic works. In order to fully appreciate Callimachus’ poems, one needed the near encyclopedic knowledge of classical writings that Callimachus himself had, thanks to his labors in the library. A modern comparandum would be poems of T. S. Eliot—”The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” or “The Wasteland,” for example—which are similarly full of quotations and allusions and require a good commentary to appreciate fully. In a somewhat different way, there is the epic Argonautica by Callimachus’ rival Apollonius of Rhodes, stuffed full of geographical and ethnic details drawn from the latest historical works such as Nymphis of Heraclea’s history of his home town and of the southern Black Sea region generally. In one way or another, erudition was the order of the day for such Hellenistic writers.
Alongside this rather “highbrow” literature, Hellenistic writers also responded to the existence of a wide readership by producing more “popular” works: poetry reflecting rural nostalgia, for example, or humorous mimes and romantic novels. The Syracusan poet Theocritus composed “idylls”, many of which were set in an imagined countryside where shepherd lads lazed under spreading oak trees and competed musically with each other for the attention of winsome shepherd lasses. One can imagine the type of city-dwellers who enjoyed reading or listening to this. Herondas wrote short stories called “mimes” which portrayed humorous (and sometimes erotic) vignettes from everyday life, clearly aimed at readers seeking a break from their perhaps somewhat monotonous existences. And after about 200 BCE the first romantic novels began to appear, starting with the highly fictionalized Alexander Romance, and continuing with stories of piracy, kidnappings, magic, travel, and love triumphing in the end in the face of all adversity. Greeks living in fifth- and fourth-century Athens or Corinth or Sparta had plenty of adventure in their lives: real wars, with real battles on land and at sea, real travels, and all too often real adversity. In the safer but more humdrum existence of the Hellenistic citizens, fictional adventures had to take the place of real ones, which was all to the good, of course. The point is that reading material was being created for a wider reading audience than the highly educated elite, making it likely that many citizens were now reading or attending public readings of books. Already in the early fourth century Plato tells us a book could be bought in the agora of Athens for a drachma—a day’s wage for the average skilled worker. With papyr
us production in Ptolemaic Egypt ramping up, the price of books went down, and it was not so unusual for a citizen to own a few books. But as long as books were produced by being copied out by hand, books would remain relatively expensive and relatively rare. And that of course is where libraries came in.
Naturally, the great library of Alexandria did not remain unique. In the late third century BCE Antiochus III sponsored the creation of a great royal library at Antioch in Syria, employing the poet and grammarian Euphorion of Chalkis as chief librarian. The Macedonian kings also collected a royal library at Pella: Plutarch tells us in his biography of the Roman commander Lucius Aemilius Paullus that when he defeated the last Antigonid king Perseus and conquered Macedonia in 169, he kept the books of the royal library as his personal share of the booty, on behalf of his sons. Most famously, the Attalid kings of Pergamon in the early second century created a great library to rival the Ptolemaic library in Alexandria. At its height, we are told that the library of Pergamon held upwards of two hundred thousand book scrolls. The Roman polymath Pliny the Elder tells us that, not wanting to rely on the importation of paper from Egypt, the only place where the papyrus reed was known to grow in abundance, the Attalid kings sponsored the production of an alternative writing material made from animal hides and known today as parchment, a word which derives from the name Pergamon (as may be seen more clearly in the Dutch form of the word parchment—perkament). Eventually other cities began to copy these royal libraries by developing libraries of their own, for the use of their citizens: such libraries flourished around the Hellenistic world in the Roman period, as we will see below in section 6 of this chapter. Libraries collected and owned by private citizens also became a thing in that era, as we shall see. Hellenistic culture was truly a culture of the book.
Before and After Alexander Page 32
