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The journey from mythic to analytic thought was hardly a smooth one. Socrates was put to death for lack of reverence toward the gods, and Aristotle later faced the same accusation. But slowly, inexorably, the old mythologies began to make way for a more systematic way of understanding. The process of demythologization that started in ancient Greece continues to this day. While we may live in a highly analytic, systematized culture, oral myths continue to exert a strong pull. Orality has hardly disappeared; indeed, with the rise of electronic media, it may be reemerging. Ong has suggested that we are witnessing the birth of a “new orality” in the form of electronic communications. Just as the Greeks of the classical Dark Age saw new forms of thought emerge when oral and literate cultures began to
interpolate each other, we may be witnessing a similar period of cultural renegotiation today, a process whose outcome we probably cannot yet predict.

If the Greek journey from mythic to analytic thought tells us anything, however, it may point to the sheer durability of mythological thinking. Today, most of us still know more about Greek mythology than we do about classical logic. Elementary school students can still tell you stories about Zeus, Hera, and Apollo (while very few of them could tell you anything about Aristophanes). The sheer longevity of these stories, even in our technologically advanced society that ought to be well along the path to demythologization by now, suggests that the enduring resonance of myths may stem from a deeper affinity in the human psyche. Perhaps the ancient epigenetic rules governing folk taxonomy (see
Chapter 2
) equip us with a subtle longing to understand the world in terms of gods and their families.

As Greek civilization spread throughout the ancient Near East, so too did its books. Long before Alexander established his great eponymous library in Egypt, the Greeks had established great halls of learning at Antioch and Pergamum, a library said to contain more than 200,000 scrolls. Athens was the bibliographical center of the Greek world, playing host to a bustling book trade that fueled the rise of personal libraries among a growing class of literate citizens. As public literacy flourished during the age of Sophocles, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Euripides, Aeschylus, and the other great secular writers of ancient Greece, private citizens began to amass growing book collections. By the fourth century BC, a typical Athenian library might contain works by Homer and Hesiod, tragedies, histories, works of poetry and philosophy, and even cookbooks. The largest and most famous of Athens’s personal libraries belonged to Aristotle, who not only amassed great numbers of books, but also developed a keen fascination with the question of how to organize his collection. As the scholar Strabo wrote, Aristotle “was the first to have put together a collection of books and to have taught the kings in Egypt how to arrange a library.”
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Aristotle’s interest in organizing books grew out of his passion for mapping the structure of human thought. He devoted enormous energy to questions surrounding the organization of knowledge, postulating theories of logic and taxonomic models that would reverberate for millennia. Aristotle’s work on categorization would provide the foundation for a contribution to the heritage of Western thought too vast to be addressed in remotely adequate detail here. Suffice it to say that students of philosophy and the social sciences have spent thousands of years pondering Aristotle’s categories.

Aristotle took a special interest in the organization of knowledge about the natural world, devoting a great deal of his work to the search for logical order in the world of visible phenomena. He grounded his work in an exhaustive program of scientific observation, gathering vast amounts of first-hand data about plants and animals, which he then labored to situate in a larger categorical framework. While Aristotle’s writings about plants have been lost altogether, his works on the animal kingdom constitute a seminal contribution to biology. He proposed a comprehensive taxonomy of animal life that distinguished mammals from nonmammals, vertebrates from invertebrates, even recognizing that whales and dolphins differed from fish (although he failed to recognize them as mammals). He also introduced the convention of binomial naming: that is, describing a species by its genus (e.g., “felis”) and species (“catus”). Reflecting the dominant view of his day, Aristotle mistakenly believed that animal species did not change over time, but rather that they represented instances of fixed, immutable ideal forms stretching back into time immemorial (Darwinian evolution would have been a thoroughly alien concept to the ancient Greeks).

Although Aristotle is often credited as the first great taxonomist, his system almost certainly relied on earlier folk taxonomies that had persisted for thousands of years in earlier oral traditions (see
Chapter 2
). Although his naturalist writings would have a lasting impact on the subsequent course of biology, he receives perhaps a little too much credit as the world’s first taxonomist. Aristotle did not invent the concept of genera and species; he simply adapted and codified the ancient oral traditions of folk taxonomies. His great contribution was to make the old implicit structures explicit, and therefore available for inspection and improvement. In so doing, he extracted an analytic system of thought from the remnants of oral traditions shrouded in myth. If we understand Aristotle’s categories not just as the insights of a great thinker, but also as the fruition of ancient folk taxonomies long in the making, then perhaps we can also speculate as to why his system (flawed though it was) persisted for thousands of years. By invoking the structure of folk taxonomies, Aristotle’s categories may have resonated with epigenetic rules lodged deep in the prehistoric mind. While Aristotle’s landmark writing on the natural world owed a great deal to the heritage of folk taxonomies, it also signaled the beginning of the end of the old folkways and the inauguration of a new, systematic approach to scholarship.

Aristotle did a great deal more than simply categorize plants and animals, of course. Building on his research into the natural world, he went on to postulate a metaphysical world view that drew the crucial distinction between matter and form, or what he called “primary” and “secondary” substances. Primary substances referred to the individual instances of particular phenomena; secondary substances referred to their ideal forms, the disembodied templates of human thought.

By recognizing the distinction between form and matter, Aristotle believed the human mind could aspire to penetrate higher realms of Truth. In his
Categories
, Aristotle enumerated a comprehensive set of classes and subclasses that he believed could reveal the structure of nature’s creation. He believed that any phenomenon in the world could be described in terms of a particular set of characteristics: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and passion. He further believed that the relationships between phenomena could be explained in terms of a web of semantic relationships: causality, equivalence, identity, similarity, family, inside of, bigger than, and earlier than. By weaving the universe of forms together with these relational threads, Aristotle conceived of human knowledge as a vast interconnected web that extended even beyond the observable world, into incorporeal realms. His famous Great Chain of Being classified all life into a grand cosmic hierarchy, from the lowest realm of minerals to the highest realm of the gods. Unlike the traditional folk taxonomies that concerned themselves with the observable world of plants and animals, Aristotle’s taxonomy stretched into the otherworldly domains of gods, angels, and demons:

Aristotle’s categories would cast a long shadow over the subsequent development of the Western intellectual tradition, influencing the trajectory of European thought, especially during the Middle
Ages, when scholars rediscovered Aristotle and elevated his writings to the level of canonical truth second only to the Bible and the church fathers. Aristotle’s taxonomic conventions would persist for more than 2,000 years, until Linnaeus embraced and improved on the Aristotelian system to create the familiar modern Linnaean taxonomy still in use today (see
Chapter 9
). Aristotle’s work on categorizing the phenomenal world reflects his deeply systematic worldview, his conviction that the world could be described in terms of ideal forms. His quest for logical order led to his conviction that the world was ultimately knowable. That conviction not only drove Aristotle’s personal ambitions, but also served—along with his personal library—as the intellectual foundation for the greatest library of the ancient world.

By some accounts the Great Library at Alexandria literally began with Aristotle’s own personal collection (other accounts insist that the library only took its conceptual inspiration from Aristotle and that his book collection was buried in Athens after his death, later to be dug up and sold to book collectors). Whether or not the library contained Aristotle’s actual books, there is no question that it embodied his ideals. The Great Library at Alexandria was the first library with a truly comprehensive ambition to gather all the world’s knowledge under one roof. Established around 300 BC, the library marked an achievement of vast intellectual proportions, ultimately growing to house more than 700,000 items. Unlike the royal libraries that preceded it, the Alexandria library was open to the public.

The structure of the library followed Aristotle’s division of knowledge into observational and deductive sciences. The library was also built specifically with Aristotle’s peripatetic ideal
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of scholarship in mind, with wide colonnades and open spaces to encourage scholars to stroll around and converse about topics of scholarly interest. We can imagine scholars strolling the grounds, papyrus rolls in hand,
debating the politics of the day or perhaps a fine philosophical point. In keeping with the great teacher’s insistence on open inquiry, the library encouraged “walking around”—both physically and metaphorically. To Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, intellectual freedom was a paramount civic value (they would surely have bristled at the scholarly territorialism and narrowcast specialization of the modern academy), and the architecture of the library reflected that point of view.

Today, Alexandria occupies a special place in the popular imagination as a symbol of the lost era of classical scholarship and as the site of one of history’s great biblioclasms, the place where the great tide of classical learning rose, crested, and finally crashed into oblivion. But the real story of Alexandria turns out to be considerably less tidy than the myth. Its birth was less idealistic, its life less peaceful, and its death less cataclysmic than the popular fable suggests.

When Ptolemy I established the royal library, Alexandria was a new city, populated by military people, traders, and assorted hangers-on. As an intellectual center, it could scarcely hold a candle to Athens. But the city’s first ruler, Ptolemy, fancied himself a scholar, having composed a detailed history of Alexander’s conquests and studied geometry with no less a mathematician than Euclid. Determined to attract scholars to his young city, Ptolemy offered enormous incentives for learned men to come to his new metropolis at the mouth of the Nile. He invited poets, writers, and scientists to live in the city and work at its famous museum, offering them room and board in the royal palace and a generous tax-free salary, as well as the guarantee of lifetime employment. As a final inducement, he built the world’s first great library (actually called a museum), whose ambitions were nothing short of universal. By the time of Ptolemy’s death, the collection had grown to 200,000 books. By the time Julius Caesar arrived in 47 BC, the library had swelled to 700,000 volumes. The library’s signal achievement was the sheer magnitude of its collection, orders of magnitude larger than any library before it and larger than any library that would follow for more than a thousand years.