From dadams@caci.com Fri Sep 1 06:25:43 2000 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id GAA41750 for ; Fri, 1 Sep 2000 06:25:42 -0700 Received: from cissco.hq.caci.com (cissco.caci.com [209.117.168.111]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id GAA14950 for ; Fri, 1 Sep 2000 06:25:40 -0700 Received: by cissco.hq.caci.com; id JAA20668; Fri, 1 Sep 2000 09:28:43 -0400 (EDT) Received: from mtaoutbound.hq.caci.com(198.135.9.87) by cissco.hq.caci.com via smap (V5.0) id xma020661; Fri, 1 Sep 00 09:28:29 -0400 Subject: Notes on Porphyry and the Library of Alexandria (Or, "To Burn or Not To Burn") To: classics@u.washington.edu From: "Danny Adams" Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 09:30:14 -0400 Message-ID: X-MIMETrack: Serialize by Router on CACIMTA/CACI(Release 5.0.4 |June 8, 2000) at 09/01/2000 09:25:21 AM MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii As is probably needlessly stated by this point, with or without the recent discussion of sources, let me know if any of the info presented here or in other posts is dubious. Porphyry: In Phanes Press' edition of Porphyry's Letter to His Wife Marcella (trans. Alice Zimmern), David Fideler writes in the introduction that there were two officially sanctioned religious-based burnings of his Against the Christians: the first by the Council of Ephesus in 431, and the second by Theodosius II in 448. (My memory of subsequent burnings of his other works seems to indicate non-official ones; or at least I can't find any evidence to the contrary.) Robin Lane Fox adds in Pagan and Christians that ATC was banned from the time that Christianity became acceptable in the Roman Empire (he leaves open whether this means Galerius' Edict of Toleration or Constantine's supposed conversion, but I would assume the latter). The Library of Alexandria: Luciano Canfora presents two major stories of the Library's burning in his book The Vanished Library. The first relates the burning of at least the Serapeum in 391 by Christian zealots. He sounds pretty sure of himself in this account, although admits at other places in the book that the sources aren't necessarily wholly reliable. The second story is the account of the Muslim burning in 640 by the Caliph Omar. In this he recounts the Dialogue of John Philoponus with the Emir Amrou (or Amr)--the copy we have dating to 874, he says, which is well prior to the early 12th-century account I'd remembered in an earlier post. Even if this account is true, however, Amrou relates that an Alexandrian himself had said most of the great works of antiquity were gone by then, lost to a combination of Christians and neglect, and most of what comprised the 7th-century Library were works related to Christianity. There were also highlights of other burnings with discussions of their authenticity, ranging from the infamous story of Caesar's attack on Alexandria to Diocletian. Sappho has enough material of her own to merit her own post. Danny Adams .