Demetrius Phalereus, the Admirable Crichton of his time,
the last of Attic orators, statesman, philosopher, poet, warrior, and
each of them in the most graceful, insinuating, courtly way, migrates to
Alexandria, after having had the three hundred and sixty statues, which
the Athenians had too hastily erected to his honour, as hastily pulled
down again. Here was a prize for Ptolemy! The charming man became his
bosom friend and fellow, even revised the laws of his kingdom, and fired
him, if report says true, with a mighty thought--no less a one than the
great public Library of Alexandria; the first such institution, it is
said, which the world had ever seen.
So a library is begun by Soter, and organised and completed by
Philadelphus; or rather two libraries, for while one part was kept at
the Serapeium, that vast temple on the inland rising ground, of which,
as far as we can discover, Pompey's Pillar alone remains, one column out
of four hundred, the rest was in the Brucheion adjoining the Palace and
the Museum. Philadelphus buys Aristotle's collection to add to the
stock, and Euergetes cheats the Athenians out of the original MSS. of
AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and adds largely to it by more
honest methods.
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