Description:
<jats:p>As Chapter 1 ended, with questions of collecting and reception, so Chapter 2 begins. The imperial physician and prolific medical writer Galen (second to third century CE) was particularly interested in books and how people used, or misused, them. In the course of a discussion of how a particular set of annotations found their way into the Library of Alexandria's copy of a classic medical text, the third book of Hippocrates' <jats:italic>Epidemics</jats:italic>, he tells an interesting story to illustrate just how avid Ptolemy Euergetes, king of Egypt in the third century BCE, was as a book collector. He ordered that, whenever ships put in at the harbour of Alexandria, any books their passengers were carrying should be confiscated and copied; the copies were returned to the owners, and the originals were placed in the Library. Ptolemy went further than that, though: he borrowed the official copies of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from the Athenian authorities on the security of a large deposit (fifteen talents), promising to make copies and return the originals.</jats:p>