In the very early third century B.C. Demetrius of Phaleron was summoned by Ptolemy I to Alexandria to establish a library there. The library was to be modeled on extensive private collections of papyrus rolls and especially on the collections of the Academy and the Lyceum, schools founded by Plato and Aristotle at Athens. The aim of the library at Alexandria was to house a complete collection of Greek literature under one roof, and soon, as one might expect, this collection grew quite large -- how large we are not sure, but a good estimate places the number of volumes at somewhere between 200,000 and a half million. The texts treated everything from entomology to epic. Some of the volumes obtained by the early curators of the library were quite good, like the official text of Attic tragedy that Ptolemy himself pirated from the Athenian government. Many, however, were corrupt to varying degrees due to inconsistencies in orthography and infidelities in transcription that were part and parcel of the new and rapidly developing bookmaking industry of the late fourth and early third centuries B.C. And at least a few volumes in the library's collection were wholly bogus, since the whole Mediterranean world was responding to Alexandria's demand for books, and forgers were out to get a piece of the action.
The librarians at Alexandria were faced with the unique task of having to make sense out of this variously heterogeneous body of texts. New systems of categorization were developed, and the discipline of textual criticism was born as scholars attempted to restore corrupt texts to their pristine state. Moreover, a new eclectic literary style emerged in Alexandria, aided by unprecedented access to written texts and characterized by innovative combinations of formal and thematic elements of disparate Greek poetic traditions. The proponents of this movement celebrated their irreverence to the traditions they were distorting and confounding. At the same time, many of them were laboring away in the catacombs of the library at Alexandria at restoring and preserving those same traditions.
In some ways, we've created another Alexandrian library on the World Wide Web. Here anything that can be recorded in zero's and one's is being collected at an alarming rate. Here there are spectacular resources, and there is trash, and anyone with an internet connection and a html browser has access to all of it. New methods of scholarship are emerging in response to the new presentation of information. And in the hypertext document, and through its facility at juxtaposing different textual formats in the same virtual space, a new poetic is coming to light. The challenge of the netsurfer, like that of those first librarians, is to organize in some meaningful and useful way the growing millions of html documents that are smoothly linked to one another on the web. This home page represents my latest successes in this.
For those who are interested, James O'Donnell offers some enlightened words on how the Internet is not like the library at Alexandria.
Now, on with the show.
These are links I've found useful in my own studies. I've culled them for the most part from the following major classics resources on the Internet:
Links of General Scholarly
Interest
Go here for library catalogs, college and university home pages, academic links outside of classics, etc...
This page created and maintained by Andrew J. Wiesner
awiesner@ccat.sas.upenn.eduThanks for stopping by!
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This page was last modified on September 20, 1996.