II Epigram in the Hellenistic World

Extract

As Chapter 1 ended, with questions of collecting and reception, so Chapter 2 begins. The imperial physician and prolific medical writer Galen (second to third century CE) was particularly interested in books and how people used, or misused, them. In the course of a discussion of how a particular set of annotations found their way into the Library of Alexandria's copy of a classic medical text, the third book of Hippocrates' Epidemics, he tells an interesting story to illustrate just how avid Ptolemy Euergetes, king of Egypt in the third century BCE, was as a book collector. He ordered that, whenever ships put in at the harbour of Alexandria, any books their passengers were carrying should be confiscated and copied; the copies were returned to the owners, and the originals were placed in the Library. Ptolemy went further than that, though: he borrowed the official copies of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from the Athenian authorities on the security of a large deposit (fifteen talents), promising to make copies and return the originals.