Thestory told by Abulpharagium and doubted by Gibbon is well known : that Atnru applied to his master, the caliph Omar, for a deci sion as to what was to be done with the library, and received the reply, that if the writings of the Greeks agreed with the Koran they were use less, and need not be preserved; if they disagreed they were pernicious, and ought 'to be destroyed ; and that in consequence the books were devoted to the heating of the public baths. This massacre of intellect, if it really took place, was afterwards paralleled, if Arabic historians tell truth, by similar massacres of Mohammedan literature on the part of the Christians. At the capture of Tripoli, in Syria, by the Crusaders under the Count do St. Gilles, in the 12th century, a priest who entered the great library took down one of the books and found it was a Koran, a second and found it was a Koran, a third and fourth with still the same result, on which he exclaimed that the place was full of nothing but Korans, and fire was set to the whole colloction,of which but a few volumes escaped. lie had, in fact, says the Arabic historian, entered the room of the Korans, of which there were 50,000 copies in the library. Without of course accepting the statement of the number of Korans, it may be supposed that there was a large collection of them st Tripoli, and that the library was burned by the Franks on that account. Similar deeds are recorded of the Christian conquerors of Granada, and of Cardinal Ximenes, the patron of the Polyglott The history of the libraries of ancient Greece is singularly obscure, and they seem never to have bad any distinguished prominenee,—a fact which is not in favour of the theory, that the civilisation of a people may be estimated from its public libraries. The of Pisis tratus has already been mentioned, its abstraction and its restoration by Seleucus. Its subsequent stay at Athens must have been short, for Sylla is recorded, on his conquest of Athens, to have carried oil all the libraries to Italy, where, however, he does not appear to have given them to the Roman public, but to have left them to his son, who kept them in his villa at Puteoli. A story which is told by Plutarch in his Life of Alcibiades, affords a strong indirect testimony to the general existence of collections of books in connection with the schools at Athens. Alcibiades, it is said, was upon one occasion desirous of referring, when in a school, to a passage in Homer, and was told by the schoolmaster that he had no copy of the poet, on which, for his sole rejoinder, he gave him a box on the ear.
The honour of founding the first public library at Home was reserved for Asinius Pollio, in the reign of Augustus, though Julius Caesar is said to have entertained the design, perhaps as a compensation to learning for his involuntary destruction of the Alexandrian, and to have intended to nominate Varro as the librarian. Previously to l'ollio, Lucullus is recorded to have been singularly liberal in opening his library to the use of the learned; and after him Augustus added two public libraries to the ornaments of the capital, the Octavian and the Palatine. Many others were added by subsequent emperors, who seem to have had a pleasure in attaching their names to new foundations, the most conspicuous and celebrated of which was the Ulpian, so called from one of the names of Trajan. These libraries appear to have had a great effect in diffusing over Homan society that literary air which is so remarkable a feature in the letters of Pliny, and which occasionally reminds the reader so strongly of the Paris of the 18th century. By some allusions in Ovid's 'Elegies,' written after his
banishment, in which he questions if his new productions will be allowed to take their place beside the old in the public libraries, it appears that the new works of living authors found a place there, and this was probably the most effectual mode of publication. A few copies in the public libraries would probably—like a few copies in the circulating libraries of our own time—diffuse the knowledge of a new book more effectually than hundreds in private hands. At the same time, the frequent censures of Seneca and others of the " bibliomania " prevalent in his time, show that magnificent private libraries were then, as they have again begun to be in the last four centuries, a faourite means of expending and displaying wealth.
It is singular that of the great Roman libraries It is seldom men tioned of how many volumes they consisted or were supposed to consist. Julius Capitolinus, in his Lives of the Gordians,' mentions of the emperor Gordian the Younger, that he inherited the library of Serenus Sammonicus, his preceptor, and that that library amounted to 62,000 volumes, which is spoken of, as it well may be, as an enormous number. Another glimpse into the libraries of the period is given by the dr cunistmice mentioned of the emperor Tacitus, that he commanded by a particular edict that the works of his ancestor, Tacitus the historian, and those of various other historical writers, should be transcribed in ten inks every year, and the copies distributed among the public libraries. In the time of Constantine the Great, the number of these establishments at Rome is stated to have been Dino-and-twenty.
The tradition of the ancient libraries was continued by the Byzan tine emperors through the long and dreary eleven hundred years which elapsed between the transference of the empire to that city, and its capture by the Turks. Constantine the Great founded a library at Constantinople, for the formation of which it is supposed that con tributions were levied on the nine-and-twenty in the heathen temples at Borne. The passage is well known in the writings of Julian the Apostate: "Some are fond of horses, some of birds, and others of wild animals ; but from an infant my mind has been possessed with a vehement fancy for acquiring and possessing books." Julian is recorded to have founded a public library in the grove of Daphne, which was the park of Antioch. Zonaras and Constantine Manasses relate a story of a library founded by the emperor Zeno, to which were attached a prin cipal librarian, bearing the title of the "(Ecumenical Doctor," and a body of twelve assistant-librarians, who were consulted as oracles in affairs of state ; and they narrate that when the emperor Leo the Isaurian, the great iconoclast, found it impracticable to convert them to his opinions in favour of the destruction of images, he caused com bustibles to be secretly laid round the building at night, and, setting fire to the pile, destroyed in one conflagration the library and the librarians. The truth of the narrative is supported by Baronius and some other Catholic writers, but it is now generally considered more than questionable. Photius, the patriarch, the contemporary of King Alfred, who in his Bibliotheca ' of the date of a thousand years age, so curiously anticipated the plan and utility of a modern Review, must at least have had access to the two hundred and eighty authors whom he analyses.