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Reviewed by:
  • Ancient Libraries ed. by Jason König, Katerina Oikonomopoulou, and Greg Woolf
  • Susan Stephens (bio)
Jason König, Katerina Oikonomopoulou, and Greg Woolf, eds., Ancient Libraries
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 500 pp.

Whether public facilities housing accessible materials for young and old or collections for specialized research, libraries are a ubiquitous feature of modern life. Ancient Libraries describes a different world, in which libraries were exclusive if not secret and were for and about elite self-representation. Egyptian libraries, for example, were attached to temples and devoted to collecting and maintaining sacred books of ritual, magic, and astrology. Hellenistic libraries, most famously those at Alexandria and Pergamon, came into existence to display the acquired cultural capital of the Greek-speaking past and were meant to display imperial power. Roman libraries, although often housed in public buildings, were likewise spaces for elite gathering and erudite display, rather than educational resources for the masses. Reading, writing, and public performance converged in these Roman spaces, but little is known about how these libraries organized their holdings or how decisions were made about what to collect or exclude. In any case, as these essays make clear, few ancient books survived. The essays clarify as well how the gathering of books into libraries led to the production of compendia like Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights and Pliny’s Natural History. Scholars attached to these libraries developed habits of collating, editing, and commenting on texts and variants that, though they are some distance from the standards of modern textual criticism, contributed in important ways to later Byzantine culture, the Carolingian renaissance, and Islamic science.

Susan Stephens

Susan Stephens, Sara Hart Professor in the Humanities and professor of classics at Stanford University, is the author of Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria, as well as coauthor (with Benjamin Acosta-Hughes) of Callimachus in Context: From Plato to Ovid. Trained as a papyrologist, she has published literary and documentary texts belonging to the Oxyrhynchus and Yale collections and (with Jack Winkler) is coeditor of Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments.

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