Aitia (Jun 2012)
Burned after reading: the so-called list of Alexandrian librarians in P. Oxy. X 1241
Abstract
This article calls into question the value and reliability of the contents of P.Oxy. X 1241, the so-called list of Alexandria Librarians. Rather than treating the list of grammarians at col. i.5-ii.30 by itself, as scholars have done ever since the papyrus was published, this paper considers the document in its entirety. This closer reading of P.Oxy. X 1241 demonstrates that there is clear thematic continuity between the list of grammarians and the military catalogues that follow which has never been observed before, precisely because the two parts have always been treated separately. Challenges to three crucial assumptions of the original editors, B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt emerge: (1) Is the list at col. i.5-ii.30 in fact a list of the heads of the Alexandrian library? (2) Is the work a copy or compilation of some earlier scholarly piece that dates back to the Hellenistic period, and not a product of a circa second century CE scholar/grammarian? (3) Do the contents of the papyrus reflect the work of a competent scholar/grammarian who was well enough informed about the chronology of the Ptolemaic period to produce an historically accurate account of the succession of individuals connected to the Ptolemaic court and the Alexandrian Library? While it is true to say that in its content and use of learned citations P.Oxy. X 1241 shares many similarities with Hellenistic and Imperial prose catalogues, the strategies of learned discourse deployed by the author in the military catalogue do not conform to the norms of reliable scholarly examples. Accordingly, the value of the text as documentary evidence of the history of the Alexandrian library needs to be reconsidered as it seems likely that we are dealing with a failed literary work.
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