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.