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6. The Development and Character of Kallimachos's Lists of Greek Authors and Their Works THE IMAGE of the Pinakes by Kallimachos which we have formed in our mind on the strength of quotations has been verified and complemented by conclusions drawn from later lists. It remains now to clarify how the Pinakes were compiled. To be sure, that process has not been transmitted to us, but it is possible to reconstruct it in part. It need not be stressed that every reconstruction is hypothetical. The edition of the Pinakes was the final stage in a process of library work which could not have been entirely different in Alexandria from those performed subsequently in later libraries. It is, however, not clear how far this process had already advanced when Kallimachos began to take part in it, and what were his own contributions to it. Four phases can be distinguished in this process.1 1. The scrolls acquired since ca. 295 B.C. by Demetrios of Phaleron were probably only roughly sorted in some way. Only Zenodotos, who had become the director of the book collection, began to sort them systematically and to store them accordingly. Prior to that he had,· however, to find out the contents of each scroll and had to list the entry of each work, i.e. its author and title, on a syllibos (title tag); this has generally not been recognized. When the scrolls were placed in heaps on the shelves of book cases2 it was easy to read the sillyboi and to find out what they contained. It was, however, not always easy to determine what was contained in a scroll, because in many scrolls the author and title of a work were either not listed at all or only incompletely. Some data were also unreliable. But as long as the mass of scrolls was not sorted out, Zenodotos did not have time for investigations into literary history. He and his aides probably decided in such cases on an author and title as well as this could be done without thorough research, but otherwise they simply accepted the data found in the scrolls. It was probably only seldom possible to distinguish between namesakes mentioned in the scrolls without any additions to personal names. We may assume that Zenodotos shelved the provisionally identified copies of Greek works of literature by author classes (epic, lyric, etc. poets, philosophers, orators ...) and within each class alphabetically by author, that is to say, the sequence of works in the pinakes, the lists of books, was the same as that of the scrolls in the bibliothekai, the book cases. If the principles according to which the scrolls were shelved had shown themselves to be useful, there was no reason for Kallimachos to record works according to different principles; besides, one could then have found the works listed in the tables only by "call numbers" in the book cases. It is likely that Aristotle arranged the scrolls of his library by classes of authors, but presumably he arranged the authors within the classes chronologically. It was indeed obvious to follow the course of the history of literature, and not only to list the epic poets, whose works represented the oldest literary genre, before the lyric poets, but also to arrange them by their age. 226 If Zenodotos tried this method at all, he must soon have understood that it was not feasible in the Alexandrian library which was much larger. The period of flourishing of many authors was not exactly known, their chronological arrangement would therefore have been difficult, and even more so their retrieval. The alphabetical arrangement of authors within the classes, which was introduced by Zenodotos, was apparently an innovation. Earlier examples are unknown. In the Egyptian archives, which were also called bibliotheka~ certain documents were perhaps already at that time shelved by places and then alphabetically by persons.3 Kallimachos arranged the dramatists in his Pinax of Attic playwrights chronologically according to their first appearance; this was possible, because in this case the dates were known thanks to Aristotle's Didaskaliai. But a pinax was not a library; Zenodotos was forced by the mass of authors in all classes to choose a mechanical principle of arrangement.4 The importance of this procedure is not insignificant, even though Zenodotos arranged the authors only by the first letter of their names. He knew probably that a more precise order was not worthwhile. Since the scrolls were placed in heaps which grew...

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