US Edition WHEN the Roman dictator Sulla invaded Athens in 86 BC, he brought back to Rome a fantastic prize - Aristotle's library. Books then were papyrus rolls, from 10 to 20 feet long, and since Aristotle's death in 322 BC, worms and damp had done their worst. The rolls needed repairing, and the texts clarifying and copying on to new papyrus (imported from Egypt - Moses' bulrushes).
The man in Rome who put Aristotle's library in order was a Greek scholar, Tyrannio. Cicero also used him, and in a letter (56 BC) urges his old friend, the scholar Atticus, to visit: "you will see Tyrannio's marvellous arrangement of my library . . . Could you send me a couple of your library people? Tyrannio could use them for gluing and other jobs. Tell them to bring some parchment for the labels".
Cicero is referring to gluing papyrus pages together to make the rolls, and sticking labels on the ends for identification. Atticus had a fabulous, well-staffed library. Cicero frequently borrowed books from it for his own clerks to copy.
And that is the point: in the absence of printing, publishers and sometimes booksellers too, and with no system of royalties, let alone copyright, anyone who needed a book could only beg, borrow or steal a version from somewhere, and get one of his clerks to copy it. So the main job of the ancient library, public or private, was reproducing existing texts, whether to preserve a crumbling text or get one in the first place.
The earliest libraries that we know of, as Lionel Casson explains in his absorbing survey of libraries in the ancient world, are Middle Eastern - Babylonian and Syrian (c 2300 BC) and Hittite (c 1200 BC). These contained texts, mostly to do with religious ritual and produced by trained experts in complex scripts, written in cuneiform (wedge-shaped writing on clay). Already there are signs of cataloguing and content summaries.
Archaeologists have dug up the library of Ashurbanipal of Assyria (c 650 BC) with its 1,500 titles and warnings against theft, maltreatment and late return. But these were not public libraries: they were, probably, sacred reference libraries for the diviners and magicians who guarded the king.
Libraries of the sort we would recognise begin with the ancient Greeks. Intellectual curiosity and relatively widespread literacy (thanks to a simple consonant plus vowel alphabet that anyone could learn) were the main reasons. There is evidence of booksellers in fifth century BC Athens and therefore for the growth of personal libraries (the comedian Aristophanes mocks the tragedian Euripides for being a bleedin' intellectual and book collector).
The world's first and greatest scholarly library was founded in Alexandria in Egypt in the 3rd century BC by the Greek king Ptolemy. Ptolemy's purpose was to outdo Athens as the intellectual centre of the Mediterranean, and his money ensured that he did. The acquisition and copying of texts went on at a phenomenal rate. Eventually the library held nearly 500,000 rolls. One of its directors, Zenodotus, was the first man we know of to order books alphabetically; his successor Callimachus was the first to produce a detailed bibliography of all Greek literature - author, brief biography, works and shelf-number. Other Greek kings got the idea, and rival scholarly libraries sprang up in Antioch and Pergamum, poaching top directors.
The Romans, martial conquerors of Greece but Greece's cultural captives, took the library story on. Julius Caesar planned, but did not live to see, Rome's first public library (39 BC). Emperors endowed them in large numbers, and by AD 350 there were 29 libraries in Rome alone (many attached to the public baths, the Roman leisure centres).
Casson's tale ends with the great monastic libraries, with the change from papyrus to durable parchment and (most important of all) from the roll to the codex - the book with pages familiar to us (1st century AD onwards).
Christians were prime movers in the spread of the codex, perhaps because rolls had pagan associations, more likely because books were far less bulky (one can write on both sides of the page, unlike the roll) and so more portable and, of course, much easier to refer to, all vital requirements in sacred texts. This is a fascinating story, superbly told - a must for all book-lovers.