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College and Research Libraries
May 2002, Vol. 63, No. 3

Book Review

Casson, Lionel. Libraries in the Ancient World. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Pr., 2001. 177p. $22.95, alk. paper (ISBN 0300088094). LC 00-11668.

I recommend this delightful history to any reader with an interest in the classical world. Perhaps only a veteran such as Lionel Casson, Professor Emeritus of Classics at New York University, could produce a book that wears its learning so lightly. In this age of the 500-page behemoth, what a pleasure to read a book that weighs in at a mere 177 pages, including illustrations, scholarly notes, and index! Casson discusses not only physical libraries and their collections, but also methods of acquisition (mostly copying, donation, and looting), funding, staff, readership, and services.

In eight chronological chapters, Casson surveys the history of libraries—as well as literacy, books, and reading—from about 3000 B.C. to the early Middle Ages. The first chapter describes the clay tablet collections of the Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians. Three chapters are devoted to classical and Hellenistic Greece, and three to republican and imperial Rome. There is a chapter on the change from the papyrus roll to the codex and a brief concluding discussion of the early Christian era. Although books and reading had flourished in ancient Egypt, too, little is known about them. Casson does not deal with the ancient civilizations of India or China. He is masterful within his chosen field of Greece and Rome, with an obvious affection for the Greeks, whom he describes as “endowed with a high level of literacy and an abiding interest in intellectual endeavor.”

Ancient historians draw on many types of evidence to piece together a story: literary works, inscriptions, graffiti, papyri, visual arts, and archaeological excavations. Because of the durability of clay tablets, we can reconstruct the contents and organization of libraries in the ancient Near East, where basic classification and cataloging began. The first systematically collected library was that of the Assyrian ruler Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, around 650 B.C. The invention of alphabetic writing by the Phoenicians (c. 1000 B.C.) paved the way for broader literacy and the development of libraries as collections for research, enlightenment, and recreation. Increased schooling produced an audience in Athens for books of poetry, drama, philosophy, history, science, and even cookery.

Aristotle’s large, well-organized private collection is said to have influenced the Library of Alexandria (founded c. 300 B.C.), which attempted to acquire all known works in the Greek language, some 500,000 papyrus rolls. Casson describes with relish the cultural ambitions of the Ptolemies, who lured the intellectual stars of the ancient world to the raw new city of Alexandria to form an ancient think tank, the Museum. Zenodotus (“pioneer of library science”) was the first to arrange a collection by subject and then alphabetically by author. Callimachus of Cyrene was a great bibliographer who invented the shelf list.

Smaller public libraries also arose in the Hellenistic world (the Greek-speaking world created by the conquests of Alexander the Great). They served average readers, including women. Such libraries were located in gymnasia (ancient community centers). In Roman times, small libraries could be found in the public baths (something akin to the early Carnegie libraries with swimming pools). Casson provides fascinating details and anecdotes about popular books and reading in Rome, where educated people were bilingual and libraries had separate Greek and Latin sections. Classics such as Homer and Euripides were the most popular authors, but libraries also had holdings of contemporary writers. Casson speculates that theater managers owned large collections of Greek New Comedy, from which they supplied scriptwriters such as Plautus with texts for adaptation into Latin.

Later, Roman emperors vied with each other to build more and more sumptuous libraries, and they created a bureaucracy to manage and staff them. Greek-style libraries had consisted of small storage rooms with adjoining colonnades for reading. Roman-style libraries had niches containing wooden bookshelves around the walls of their reading rooms, with tables and chairs in the center. These sumptuous libraries were as much for show as they were for reading. But smaller libraries did exist throughout the empire, usually gifts of wealthy patrons. All this was destroyed as the western empire was “ravished and impoverished,” and although some pagan texts were preserved in the palaces and university libraries of the eastern empire, it was in monasteries that a dedication to reading and libraries was reborn.

The big technological breakthrough in ancient books was the adoption of the codex, which developed from wooden writing tablets bound together to form a notebook. Parchment soon replaced wood, although papyrus codexes also existed for a time. The Roman satirist Martial (first century A.D.) refers to the new format in the lines:

This bulky mass of multiple folds
all fifteen poems of Ovid holds.

The codex was more compact, durable, and convenient to use but did not completely replace the traditional roll for several centuries. The fact that Christians used the codex exclusively probably expedited its victory.

Casson’s is not the first history of ancient libraries. James Westfall Thompson’s Ancient Libraries (1940) is a standard, and H. L. Pinner’s The World of Books in Classical Antiquity (1958) is a charming little work for the general reader. But Libraries in the Ancient World is surely the best current work on the subject. Several studies of the Library at Alexandria have appeared lately, and the British Library recently published a gigantic illustrated work, The Great Libraries: From Antiquity to the Renaissance, by Konstantinos Sp. Staikos. But Casson’s book would be the choice for the reader who wants not only to learn about ancient libraries, but also to experience the humanity of the people who lived in societies so different, and yet so close, to our own.—Jean Alexander, Carnegie-Mellon University.