conquered Athens, we hear no more of the Athenian libraries,
but the seat of ancient learning was transferred to Alexandria, where
were gathered under the liberal sway of the Ptolemies, more books than
had ever been assembled together in any part of the world. Marc Antony
presented to Cleopatra the library of the Kings of Pergamus, said to have
contained 200,000 rolls. There is no space to sketch the ancient
libraries, so scantily commemorated, of Greece. Through Aristotle's
enthusiasm for learning, as it is believed, the Ptolemies were fired with
the zeal of book-collecting, and their capital of Alexandria became the
seat of extensive libraries, stored in the Brucheion and the Serapeum.
Here, according to general belief, occurred the burning of the famous
Alexandrian library of 700,000 volumes, by the Saracens under Omar, A. D.
640. If any one would have an object lesson in the uncertainties of
history and of human testimony, let him read the various conflicting
accounts of the writers who have treated upon this subject. The number of
volumes varies from 700,000, as stated by Aulus Gellius, to 100,000 by
Eusebius. The fact that in ancient times each book or division of an
author's work written on a roll of papyrus was reckoned as a volume, may
account for the exaggeration, since the nine books of Herodotus would
thus make nine volumes, and the twenty-four of Homer's Iliad, twenty-four
volumes, instead of one. So, by an arbitrary application of averages, the
size of the Alexandrian Library might be brought within reasonable
dimensions, though there is nothing more misleading than the doctrine of
averages, unless indeed it be a false analogy. But that any library eight
hundred years before the invention of printing contained 700,000 volumes
in the modern sense of the word, when the largest collection in the
world, three centuries after books began to be multiplied by types, held
less than 100,000 volumes, is one of the wildest fictions which writers
have imposed upon the credulity of ages.

I cannot even touch upon the libraries of the Romans, though we have very
attractive accounts, among others, of the literary riches of Lucullus, of
Atticus, and of Cicero. The first library in Rome was founded 167 B. C.
and in the Augustan age they multiplied, until there were twenty-nine
public libraries in Hadrian's time, 120 A. D. The emperor Julian, in the
fourth century, was a founder of libraries, and is said to have placed
over