What Really Destroyed the Library of Alexandria?

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At the beginning of the third century B.C.E., Ptolemy I, successor to Alexander the Great, set out to build something the world had never before seen. The Macedonian general, probable bigamist, and body snatcher turned self-styled pharaoh wanted to make Alexandria the intellectual capital of the world. Having intercepted the corpse of Alexander the Great on its way home to Macedonia, he instead interred it in Alexandria to legitimize his rule. He attracted scholars with promises of royal patronage, dispatched scribes to copy texts from throughout the known world, and allegedly had agents search arriving ships for books. The result was the Library of Alexandria: antiquity’s most ambitious attempt to gather all human knowledge in one place. Then it went up in flames.

Or so we’ve been told.

For centuries the destruction of the Library of Alexandria—whether by Julius Caesar, an angry mob of Christians, or a Muslim conqueror—has been a cautionary tale about the fragility of civilization. Overnight, an inferno erased the wisdom of the ancient world. But everything about the library’s history, from its founding to its stature and especially to its demise, is “myth all the way down,” says renowned papyrologist Roger Bagnall.

But if we’re looking for the villain who brought an end to human knowledge, it’s more likely to have been the armies of the book worm rather than invading arsonists that destroyed the library.

The library was founded by the Ptolemaic dynasty, but it’s unclear if the credit goes to Ptolemy I or his son Ptolemy the II. Ptolemy I was one of Alexander’s tougher generals, but that doesn’t mean that “he should be seen as an uncultured boob,” said Bagnall. “He did, after all, write a book which other people thought was one of the best accounts of Alexander.” His son Ptolemy II had a grand cultural program but also something of a reputation. “He liked wine, women, and song, and his court was full of cultural figures, many of whom were toadies.” In either case, according to our earliest source, the second-century B.C.E. Letter of Aristeas, the idea for the library may have come from Demetrius of Phalerum, a former student of Aristotle who had taken refuge at the Ptolemaic court. And the library itself was not finished until Ptolemy II’s reign. 

Of the library itself we know frustratingly little. It was likely housed within the Mouseion, a larger religious institution dedicated to the Muses. The Greek geographer Strabo mentions that the Mouseion was inside the palace walls. This would mean that it was located on the spit of land sitting across the Great Harbor from Pharos Island. In terms of size, estimates for the library’s holdings range from 40,000 to 900,000 works, all contained on papyrus rolls. While a play by Euripides would not have taken up a whole roll, others, such as Homer’s Iliad, would have filled many book rolls, so we can’t assume a one-book-roll-per-work equation. The success of the library generated a daughter library, known as the Serapion, which sources say contained an additional 40,000 volumes.

When I asked Bagnall how big a library of 700,000 papyrus rolls would have been, he said that depended on how books were stored. But if they used the 30 x 30 cm wine cellar-style storage racks seen elsewhere in antiquity, they could have stored 10 rolls in each box and 100 rolls in each square meter. The racks could be stacked to save space, with labels attached to the end of each book roll to identify it. In the end, Bagnall added, the library only needed “two decent-sized rooms.” If they used other storage methods, the space would’ve been considerably larger.

“The first thing people think about when they think about the library is that it was this icon of Greek knowledge,” said Alexandra Schultz, a classicist at Dartmouth who is finishing a history of libraries in the Greek and Roman world, “but the second thing they think of—sometimes even before they think of the first thing—is that the library was destroyed.”

The most common culprit, Schultz told me, is Julius Caesar. In 48 C.E., during the Alexandrine civil war, Caesar traveled to Egypt to defend Cleopatra against her brother Ptolemy XIV. During the struggle, Roman soldiers set a fire to prevent Ptolemy’s fleet from escaping. The fire then spread elsewhere, including to the library. Seneca writes that 40,000 books were lost. Plutarch claims that the whole library burned. 

Did this fire destroy the library? Possibly, said Bagnall, but the stories about this event place the fire “at a considerable distance from where we believe the library was located. So we don’t know what burned. Was it an off-site storage facility such as we have today? Was it a bookseller’s inventory? Was it a branch?”

Even if something did burn, he added, “there was still a library there [later] in the Roman period, so it wasn’t all destroyed under Caesar.”

The second potential arsonist, said Schultz, is an angry mob of Christian monks. Many know of this “because of the 2009 film Agora, in which this angry Christian mob burns down the library and kills Hypatia.” Schultz can’t say from where the theory originates, but “it’s not an ancient idea.”

The third major candidate, less popular today, said Schultz, is that the library was destroyed in the Arab conquest of Egypt and that “the caliph Omar was responsible not just for setting fire to the library but using the library’s books as fuel for the bathhouses for six straight months.” This would have happened in the seventh century, but the idea is first attested in medieval texts. “Scholars know,” said Schultz, “that this is basically an invented tradition.” 

But it isn’t just these three, noted Schultz, as numerous generals and leaders have been blamed for burning the library: Caracalla in 215 C.E., Aurelian in 273, Diocletian in 298, and Theophilus in 391. What’s interesting about these stories, said Schultz, is that in each instance the claim dates to about a century after the event. So, in the case of Julius Caesar, she said, the accusation comes from Plutarch, 150 years later. “And as people retell the story, the number of books lost grows from 40,000 to the whole library. It’s all a mirage.”

History loves a villain but perhaps the villain we are looking for is less lofty than a Roman tyrant. What if the culprit was something more mundane like book worms and neglect?

Even if the library did burn, in part or in totality, this doesn’t mean someone lit a match. Buildings often caught fire in antiquity and flames were difficult to put out. In an article published in 2002, Bagnall hinted that perhaps the library declined through the “slow fire” of neglect and disuse.

What does this mean? Schultz pointed me to recent work by classicist Cat Lambert with evidence for book worms and decaying books in ancient Rome. One piece of papyrus (P. Ross. Georg 3.1) contains an urgent letter by a military doctor writing home to his wife, imploring her to shake out his medical texts to “rid them of dust and larvae.” In another fragment an archivist in second-century Arsinoite, Egypt, complained that the documents shown to him by an assistant were damaged and moth-eaten. Another ancient author refers to books as “lodgings for book worms.”  

In an effort to fight back, said Schultz, “Romans went to some crazy lengths to prevent bookworms from eating their texts.” They used cedar oil as insecticide, leaving stains on the manuscripts to this day. Nevertheless, papyri from a famous trove of manuscripts found at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, in the 19th century bear the mark of wormholes. Tracking the vandalism of these book worms is a work in progress. A 2017 analysis of a 12th-century copy of the Gospel of Luke that contained worm excrement allowed scientists to identify the furniture beetles that had laid eggs in the book binding.

Book worms found willingly accomplices in mice, which ancient authors had accused of nibbling away at book collections. These aren’t empty accusations. My friend AnneMarie Luijendijck, a Princeton papyrologist who has written on insecticide and ancient texts, told me that when she visited the Oxyrhynchus collection in Oxford in 2020, the curator showed her the bones of a dead rodent—probably a hamster or mouse—that had been found among the papyri.

In the case of the Library of Alexandria, “it may not have gotten that far,” said Bagnall. “In conditions of humidity, practically any organic product is going to mildew or mold or just rot.” This is one reason manufacturers use silica gel packets in their packaging. Schultz agreed, arguing it’s likely “that people weren’t copying books over and over,” meaning “that they fell apart.”

We can’t excavate the Library of Alexandria; If it is not under water, then the other place on the peninsula where it was said to be located is currently occupied by the Egyptian military. But we do know that insects, mice, and mold were major issues for Egyptian book collectors that could only be counteracted by recopying texts. And we also know that the third century C.E. was a period of military crisis and financial upheaval that disrupted funding streams in the Roman Empire. Given the instability and currency devaluation of this period, Bagnall said, along with the rapid turnover of Roman prefects, budget cuts, staff losses, and ample opportunities for theft, “it’s not difficult to imagine the whole enterprise just falling apart.” 

It would have happened slowly over time, and therefore not necessarily been documented. But there’s a powerful lesson here, said Schultz, about the need to fund and sustain public libraries.

The real boogeyman, then, is just neglect. It’s not as exciting as marauding monks or power-hungry generals, but it might be more dangerous. 

Did They Have a Firefighter Calendar?

While we are on the topic of ancient fires, archaeologists in Rome announced this month that they have uncovered one of the seven stations of the Vigiles, the watchmen who served as the firefighters of ancient Rome, on the Caelian Hill near the Colosseum. Excavations conducted at the Villa Celimontana under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture (part of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan) unearthed eight stunning rooms that belong to an Imperial-era building.

The remarkable mosaics at the site might suggest this was once the home of a Roman aristocrat, but the building stands close to the known location of the station of the Fifth Cohort of the Vigiles. These firefighters/night police maintained barracks throughout the city. Previous excavations in the area have revealed small, modular rooms that were likely used as quarters for the watchmen themselves. And in 1820, inscriptions listing members of the cohort were found at the entrance to the Villa Celimontana. The only other known Vigiles barracks are those of the Sixth Cohort in Trastevere. 

The Mystery of the Attica Mass Burial Deepens

In 2016 archaeologists discovered a mass grave at the Phaleron burial ground outside Athens. The remains of 79 men were found in three distinct rows, with some of the deceased still shackled together. The discovery sparked many questions. Who were they? And why had they been killed? The prevailing theory was that they were outsiders: prisoners of war or intruders who—as was common in antiquity—had been tied up and killed.

New isotopic analysis of the men’s teeth published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science shows that this isn’t the case. A comparison of the strontium isotopes in the teeth of 66 men in the mass grave with the isotopes in almost a hundred locals buried in the area revealed that the majority of men were local. They all came from Attica, the region around Athens. Only two of the individuals sampled from the mass grave seem to have hailed from elsewhere.

Now that we know they are local, the mystery of their deaths only deepens. The research team, led by Julianne Stamer, hypothesizes that the men ended up on the losing side of a power struggle in the 7th to 6th centuries B.C.E.