Did Julius Caesar burn the Library of Alexandria?

A street war in 48 BC

Caesar reached Alexandria in 48 BC on Pompey’s trail and stayed to settle the quarrel over the throne between the boy king Ptolemy XIII and his sister Cleopatra. Soon he was besieged in the palace quarter by the Egyptian army and the city’s crowds, with only a few thousand men. When the enemy tried to cut off his fleet, he set fire to the ships in the harbor. Caesar’s own account of the war mentions the burning ships and nothing more. Later writers are less quiet.

What the ancient writers say

They disagree, and the further they stand from the event, the bigger the loss becomes:

• Seneca, in the first century AD, cites the historian Livy: 40,000 books burned at Alexandria.
• Plutarch, around AD 100, says the fire spread from the dockyards and destroyed the great library.
• Aulus Gellius, in the second century, says nearly 700,000 volumes burned, not on anyone’s order but by accident, set by auxiliary soldiers.
• Cassius Dio, in the early third century, lists the docks and the storehouses of grain and of books. Many scholars read that as warehouses near the harbor, not the Library itself.
• Ammianus Marcellinus, late in the fourth century, repeats the 700,000, though he places the libraries in the Serapeum, a temple in another part of the city.

Livy’s figure is the earliest and the most modest. The Library was part of the Museum, Alexandria’s royal research center inside the palace quarter, and many historians think what burned in 48 BC was a store of scrolls by the docks rather than the main collection.

The Library after Caesar

The evidence that it survived is good. Around 20 BC the geographer Strabo described the Museum as a working institution: a walkway, a hall with seats, a dining room shared by its scholars, and a priest in charge, once appointed by the kings and now by Rome’s ruler. In 32 BC one of Octavian’s friends accused Antony of giving Cleopatra the 200,000 scrolls of the library of Pergamum; Plutarch reports the charge and says most people thought it false. A century after the fire, the emperor Claudius added a new wing to the Museum named for himself, where his own histories in Greek were read aloud from beginning to end every year.

So who destroyed it?

No single villain. The decline began before Caesar: in 145 BC King Ptolemy VIII drove the scholars out of Alexandria, and the head librarian, Aristarchus, fled to Cyprus. In the 270s the emperor Aurelian, retaking the city from the forces of Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, wrecked the palace quarter where the Library had stood. In 391 Christians demolished the Serapeum, the great temple that had held a second collection. The tale that the Arab conquerors of 642 burned the books on the caliph’s order first appears some five centuries later, and historians reject it.

Caesar’s fire was one loss among many: an accident in a street war, and the most famous. The modern Bibliotheca Alexandrina, opened on the waterfront in 2002, stands as a tribute to what was lost over all those centuries.