The Invention of the Greek Library

Abstract

summary: The form of the “Greek library” is distinguished from the “Roman library,” and these forms are seen as the product of the library’s historical development (from the Lyceum to Alexandria to Pergamum to Rome). I argue that this history is a scholarly fiction. Instead, the increasing role of literacy in society resulted in increasingly institutionalized book collections during the third century b.c.e. , which by the second were thought of as libraries. I examine the changing relationship of books to the places where they were housed and the contexts in which those places began to be described with the word βιβλιοθήκη.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.