II · The Great Collection · c. 260s–245 BCE
Apollonius of Rhodes at the head of the Library
Known · Probable: disputed
The poet of the Argonautica, a pupil of Callimachus, is the first name to survive, after a break, in a papyrus list of royal tutors usually read as the Library's heads. The Suda puts him after Eratosthenes instead.
What the evidence supports: P.Oxy. X 1241 never says librarian, and it calls him tutor to "the first king", which most editors emend to the third. The order of the first heads is disputed.
Who and what
- Places
- The royal Library
In the show
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Sources (4)
- P.Oxy. X 1241 (ed. B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri X, London 1914) col. ii (opens in a new tab)
- Suda α 3419
- J. Murray, "Burned after Reading: The So-Called List of Alexandrian Librarians in P. Oxy. X 1241", Aitia 2 (2012) (opens in a new tab)
- P. M. Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) 1:330–333