The dramatic force of the New Atheist moral fable of the Great Library of Alexandria not only comes from the Library’s supposed size and unique nature, but also from its supposed cataclysmic and fiery end. The moral of this story has added impact if the Great Library ends in a violent catastrophe, so this is the story that tends to get told by those who use the tale as a stick with which to beat Christianity. The fact is, however, that libraries are delicate institutions and most decline slowly rather than ending in a sudden disaster, or – as in the Great Library’s case – decline slowly while suffering a series of disasters. Anyone who works in library services will tell you that the main enemy of a library’s continuation is a lack of funding. Ancient libraries in particular needed constant financial patronage from their founders and sponsors to survive. Papyrus scrolls decayed and fell apart from use, suffered damage from mice and other vermin and, in a period where artificial light tended to be from open oil lamps, were in constant danger from fires, great and small. The Mouseion, like all ancient libraries, needed a large staff to undertake the constant and unending task of repairing, replacing and recopying books and these staffs, even when made up of slaves, were expensive to maintain.

During the Mouseion‘s heyday in the third and second centuries BC the funding for this labour and the upkeep of the institution generally would have been regular and reliable. The Mouseion was, after all, one of the jewels in the crown of the Ptolemaic kingdom and it sat in the Broucheion or Royal Quarter where the Ptolemies themselves lived. By the first century BC, however, there is some indication that the prestige of the institution had begun to decline. In its first two centuries the Mouseion‘s directors were famous scholars, renowned for their intellects throughout the Greek-speaking world. By the time of the later Ptolemies, however, we find administrators, court favourites and even a former commander of the palace guard taking up the role, which seems to have become, as Lionel Casson puts it, “a political plum” to be awarded to flunkies rather than scholars. This continued under the Romans in the first century AD, with Tiberius Claudius Balbilus being awarded the post by Claudius, though he at least was something of a scholar if not a leading intellect. It is likely that the later Ptolemies began to neglect the institution and Roman imperial patronage of it was probably even less reliable.

But war has always been one of the main destroyers of libraries down the ages and the Great Library’s slow decline was marked by several sacks of the Broucheion which eventually led to the end of the Mouseion. The first and probably the most significant came in 47 BC when Julius Caesar took the side of Cleopatra in her claim on the Ptolemy’s throne and besieged her younger brother, the boy king Ptolemy XIII, in Alexandria. Caesar’s own account mentions that he burned a fleet in the docks of the city, but makes no mention of this fire destroying anything else (Civil Wars, III.11). His account was continued by his lieutenant Aulus Hirtius in his Alexandrine War and he too makes no mention of any fire damaging the city, but he does go out of his way to say “Alexandria is well-nigh fire-proof, because its buildings contain no wooden joinery and are held together by an arched construction and are roofed with rough-cast or tiling” (Alexandrine War, I.1) which could be read as an attempt at a defence against accusations of damage through fire, given his role in the siege. The earliest account of Caesar’s siege damaging Alexandria comes from a lost work by Livy via an epitome by Florus (Florus, II.13) which describes Caesar burning the area around the docks to deprive enemy archers of a position on which to fire on his troops, and this is echoed by Lucan (The Civil War, X.24). It is Plutarch who first depicts this fire destroying the Great Library in an almost casual mention that perhaps assumes this as common knowledge:

In this war, to begin with, Caesar encountered the peril of being shut off from water, since the canals were dammed up by the enemy; in the second place, when the enemy tried to cut off his fleet, he was forced to repel the danger by using fire, and this spread from the dockyards and destroyed the Great Library, and thirdly, when a battle arose at Pharos, he sprang from the mole into a small boat and tried to go to the aid of his men in their struggle, but the Egyptians sailed up against him from every side, so that he threw himself into the sea and with great difficulty escaped by swimming. (Plutarch, Caesar, 49)

Aulus Gellius’ mention of the Great Library says that the collection numbered “nearly seven hundred thousand volumes” and then adds “but these were all burned during the sack of the city in our first war with Alexandria”, referring to Caesar’s siege (Gellius, Attic Nights, VII.17). Dio Cassius gives a slightly longer account:

After this many battles occurred between the two forces both by day and by night, and many places were set on fire, with the result that the docks and the storehouses of grain among other buildings were burned, and also the library, whose volumes, it is said, were of the greatest number and excellence. (Dio Cassius, Roman History, XLII.36)

There is some debate about how literally we can take the reports that the whole Great Library was destroyed, especially given that the docks area of Alexandria were some distance from the Mouseion‘s likely location. The fact that so many writers agree that Caesar’s fire destroyed the Great Library simply can’t be ignored, however, and at the very least the fire seems to have destroyed a substantial portion of the book collection, probably stored in warehouses on the docks. It is clear that the losses were huge, as Plutarch also tells the (probably apocryphal) story of Mark Antony confiscating the whole collection of the Great Library of Pergamon and giving them to Cleopatra to replace the books lost in the fire (Plutarch, Antony, 58). While this was not the end of the Mouseion and not the end of its whole collection, writers from around the end of the reign of Caesar’s dynasty onwards tend to refer to the Great Library in the past tense and any surviving collection was probably greatly reduced after 47 BC.

Scholarship continued in the Mouseion, however, and the Roman emperors seem to have continued its funding under their patronage when the Ptolemaic dynasty came to an end with the death of Cleopatra. Claudius built a new wing or annex to the Mouseion, which was to house his works of history and see the public reading of them twice a year. But it was the calamitous third century AD that saw a succession of military disasters in Alexandria and seems to have seen the final end of the Mouseion.

In 215 AD Caracalla punished Alexandria for mockery of him with a wholesale massacre of its young men, after which his troops plundered parts of the city. It is not known if the Mouseion was sacked in this action, but John Malas records that its funding was stopped by Caracalla at this time (Delia, p. 1463). The real end probably came in 272 AD when Aurelian stormed the Broucheion with Ammianus noting “[Alexandria’s] walls were destroyed and she lost the greater part of the district called Bruchion.” (Ammianus, History, XII.15). If that sack didn’t mean the death blow for the institution, Diocletian probably finished the job when he too sacked the city in 295 AD, and it was later devastated by a major earthquake in 365 AD. The only mention of the Mouseion after this is found in a late source, the tenth century Byzantine encyclopaedia called the Suda, which describes the fourth century philosopher Theon as “the man from the Mouseion“, though it is hard to tell exactly what this means. Given that the Mouseion was most likely long gone by Theon’s time, it could be that some other successor “Mouseion” had been established and Theon studied there or it could be that “the man from the Mouseion” is stylised honorific or even a personal nickname – meaning “a scholar like one from the old days”.

The Mouseion and its library were almost certainly a memory by the late third century, destroyed in a series of calamities after a long period of decline. But what is missing from all this evidence is any howling, pyromaniacal Christian mob. If the Great Library ceased to exist in the century before Chrisitanity came to power in the Empire, how did Christians get stuck with the charge of destroying it? The answer lies not in the evidence about the Great Library, but in the history of its daughter library and annex in the Serapeum.

Tim O’Neill, “The Great Myths 5: The Destruction Of The Great Library Of Alexandria”, History for Atheists, 2017-07-02.