The Library At Ancient Alexandria

I like that movie with Rachel Weisz, I like it a lot,



but it's not a strictly historical documentation, it's a work of imagination. There is no evidence that Hypatia was interested in the theory of heliocentrism. She certainly could have been. But we don't have any evidence of it.

We know for sure, though, that the destruction of the library at Alexandria and the murder of Hypatia did not happen in the same big riot. In AD 391 the Coptic Pope Theophilus (who was not one of the Roman Catholic Popes, the title "Pope" was used separately by Copts) ordered the destruction of the Serapeum, a pagan temple in Alexandria which may or may not have still contained a part of the great library's collection of manuscripts. No contemporary accounts of the destruction of the Serapeum mention the library. Hypatia was killed in 415 or 416, and contrary not only to Agora but also to many other films, novels, paintings and pseudo-historical books, she was likely around 60 years old at the time.

The Library might have been gone long before Hypatia was born. It might have been destroyed once, or badly damaged and then restored several times. Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, Ammianus and Orosius all claim that Julius Caesar destroyed the library in 48 BC when he was besieging Alexandria and set fires to his own ships and the fire spread first to the docks and then further into the city.

The next major candidate, chronologically, for the destruction of the library is the war in the 270's when the Emperor Aurelian suppressed a revolt led by Queen Zenobia of Palmyra. In the course of this war parts of the city which may have contained the library were badly damaged.

Then comes AD 391 and the closing of the Serapeum.

Then there was the Muslim conquest of Alexandria in 642. Several Muslim accounts of that conquest state that the great library was still there when the Muslims arrived, and was destroyed by them. However, the earliest of these accounts was written more than 500 years after the fact.

I think I can sum this up very nicely for you: anyone who says that they know when and how the library at Alexandria was destroyed, is wrong.

I might as well add: anyone who says that they know how big that library was, and how great the culture loss was when it was destroyed, is wrong also. Yes, it's quite reasonable to envision it as a very great and very regrettable loss. But there have been a very great number of losses of ancient Classical literature, occurring over many centuries, from Ireland to India. The cultural loss at Alexandria is just a small part of the overall loss.

But chin up, because some of that stuff is being re-discovered! Most spectacularly in the papyri found at Oxyrhynchus.

I'm Sorry, Lisa Simpson, But Latin Is Not The Language Of Plutarch

It's the language of the Lapis Niger, the Twelve Tables, Livius Andronicus, Naevius, Plautus, Ennius, Terence, Lucilius, Caesar, Lucretius, Catullus, Sallust, Vergil, Horace, Livy, Ovid, Phaedrus the fable-teller, Velleius Paterculus, Valerius Maximus, Curtius Rufus, The Plinys, Elder and Younger, Persius, Lucan, Silius, Quintilian, Martial, Statius, Tacitus, Caecilius Secundus, Suetonius, Apuleius, Gellius, Hyginus, Symmachus, Macrobius, Claudian, Ausonius, the Augustian Histories, Ammianus, Corippus, Isidore of Seville, Boethius, Gregory of Tours, Gregory the Great, Columbanus, Bede, Alcuin, Einhard, Nithard, Johannes Scotus, Ekkehard, the Ruodlieb, the anonymous Gesta Francorum et Aliorum Hierosolimitorum, Raymond of Aguilers, Henry of Huntington, John of Salsbury, William of Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis, Walter Map, William of Tyre, the anonymous Expugnatione Terrae Sanctae per Saladinum, Saxo Grammaticus, the Magna Carta, Albert the Great, the anonymous Vita Merlini, the Carmina Burana, Siger of Brabant, Matthew Paris, Roger Bacon, William of Occam, Nicholas of Cusa, Walter Bower, Alberti, Valla, Pius II, Poliziano, a very popular translation of Columbus' letter to Isabelle describing his first voyage, More, Bembo and Spinoza and one of the primary languages of Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Elizabeth I of England, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Milton, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer (who compared a person with no knowledge of Latin to someone stumbling around in a fog) and Nietzsche, to name only a few. I intentionally left a few very prominent names off of that list, so prominent that their omission will surely outrage a few fellow Latinists, because I have my own ideas about who is grotesquely overrated and who is not. And surely a few more names simply slipped my mind.

But, Lisa, Plutarch wrote in Greek. I wouldn't even bother to mention it so many years later except that I have always greatly admired how learned you are and how seriously you take scholarship.