Library of Pergamon

By Gregory Nagy

The Library as a garden of the Muses

2020.06.05 | By Gregory Nagy §0. In the Candide of Voltaire, first published in 1759, the last words famously read: mais il faut cultiver notre jardin ‘but we must cultivate our garden’. Following such a mandate, I return here to cultivate a garden of my own delights—the idea of the ancient Library of Alexandria as a garden of the Muses. The occasion for my return is a feast day of… Read more

By Gregory Nagy

The Libraries of Alexandria and Pergamon as Classical Models

2020.06.03 | By Gregory Nagy §0. This essay, about the Library of Alexandria in Egypt and the Library of Pergamon in Asia Minor, is an online rewriting-in-progress of an earlier essay, written over two decades ago and published both in print (Nagy 1998a) and online (Nagy 2011). In that essay, as also in two abbreviated rewritings (Nagy 1998b/2001 and Nagy 2001), I argued that these two ancient libraries represented, each… Read more