The Library That Antony Stole and Gave to Cleopatra

The single passage that has shaped the modern reputation of the Pergamon library is one paragraph in Plutarch’s Life of Antony, written approximately a hundred and fifty years after the event. Plutarch is summarizing accusations made against Mark Antony by his political enemy Calvenus Sabinus: that Antony had stripped the great library of Pergamon — one of the two largest collections in the Hellenistic world — and given the books to Cleopatra to replace what had been lost in the 48 BC fire at Alexandria. Plutarch’s figure for the gift was 200,000 volumes.

The accuracy of the figure is doubted. The figure was almost certainly inherited from Sabinus’s political pamphlet rather than from administrative records, and it is precisely twice the conventional figure of 100,000 volumes Plutarch elsewhere uses for the original holdings of the Library of Alexandria. The round-doubled number is suspicious. What is not in doubt is that the Pergamon library was substantially emptied during the late Republican period and that its books were transferred — at least in significant part — to the Ptolemaic library at Alexandria.

What the Pergamon library was

Pergamon was the capital of the Attalid dynasty, the Hellenistic kingdom that had emerged from the collapse of Alexander the Great’s successor states and ruled western Asia Minor from approximately 282 BC. Its kings were ambitious patrons of Greek high culture. Eumenes II (reigned 197–159 BC) and his brother Attalus II (159–138 BC) deliberately built up the Pergamon library as a rival to the Alexandrian collection. The kingdom’s wealth — derived from the agricultural surplus of western Anatolia and the silver mines of the interior — funded substantial book-acquisition programs across the eastern Mediterranean.

The library was located on the upper terrace of the Pergamon acropolis, in a complex of rooms attached to the temple of Athena. The largest surviving room — partly reconstructed in the German Pergamon excavations of the late 19th century — was approximately 16 by 14 metres, with walls of carved cedar shelving, and capable of storing approximately 17,000 scrolls at conventional storage densities. The full library, with multiple rooms, may have held between 100,000 and 200,000 scrolls at peak. The figures are estimates; no contemporary catalogue survives.

The Pergamon collection was famous for two specific things. First, its scholarly tradition: the Stoic philosopher Crates of Mallus, his pupils, and a long subsequent line of grammarians produced a Pergamene textual-critical tradition that competed with the Alexandrian Aristarchean school. The competition produced substantial advances in classical literary scholarship — and substantial bad scholarly behaviour, including fabrication of attributions, falsification of textual variants, and the wholesale plagiarism that ancient critics of both schools regularly complained about.

Second: parchment. The Latin word pergamentum, the English word parchment, and the Italian pergamena all derive directly from the city’s name. The traditional ancient explanation — preserved by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History — is that the Ptolemies of Alexandria, jealous of the rival library, imposed an export ban on Egyptian papyrus to constrain Pergamon’s book production. The Pergamenes responded by developing the alternative of treated animal skin. The story is partly true (parchment-style writing surfaces existed earlier; what the Pergamene period contributed was substantial refinement of the preparation technique) and partly inaccurate (no documentary evidence of a Ptolemaic papyrus embargo survives). The basic fact remains: parchment as a major Mediterranean writing surface became commercially viable through the Pergamon innovations of the 2nd century BC, and parchment would gradually replace papyrus as the standard book-production medium across the Mediterranean by the early Christian period.

The bequest to Rome

The Attalid dynasty ended in 133 BC when the last Attalid king, Attalus III, died childless and bequeathed his kingdom to the Roman Republic. The bequest was politically novel; Rome had not previously inherited a major Hellenistic state by testamentary devise. The Roman Senate accepted the inheritance and organized Pergamon’s territories as the new Roman province of Asia the following year.

Roman administration of the province was substantially extractive through the late 2nd and 1st centuries BC. Provincial tax-farming under the publicani impoverished Pergamon and most of the western Anatolian cities. The library probably survived the provincial reorganization but its institutional functions — the salaried librarians, the scholarly community, the visiting writers, the politically motivated book-acquisition programs — were progressively reduced through the period.

By the time Mark Antony arrived in Asia Minor in the late 40s BC, the Pergamon library was a substantial physical collection housed in a building whose institutional support had been hollowed out for nearly a century. Antony’s command of the Roman eastern provinces (after 42 BC under the Second Triumvirate, and increasingly independently through the 30s BC) gave him substantively unlimited authority over the inherited Attalid royal property. The library was effectively the personal property of whichever Roman commander was governing the relevant province.

The gift

Plutarch reports the gift to Cleopatra as occurring during one of the various Antony-Cleopatra travels through Asia Minor in the late 40s or 30s BC. The exact date is not fixed. The political logic is plausible. Cleopatra was substantially invested in rebuilding the Alexandrian library after the documented Caesar-period damage of 48 BC; Antony controlled a major rival Greek library; the transfer of substantial books from Pergamon to Alexandria was simultaneously a personal gift, a political signal of Antony’s commitment to Cleopatra’s projects, and a symbolic merger of the two great Hellenistic library traditions.

The 200,000-volume figure is probably an exaggeration. A more probable transfer would have involved a substantial selected portion of the Pergamon collection — perhaps tens of thousands of scrolls of works that were not duplicated in the Alexandrian collection, or that were judged especially valuable. The transfer would have required substantial logistics; surviving Roman administrative practice for transporting books used standardized portable wooden cases (scrinia) that held approximately 30–40 scrolls each. A 200,000-volume gift would have required approximately 5,000 such cases and would have been one of the largest single book-transport operations of antiquity.

The Antony-Cleopatra political alliance was over within a decade — both were dead by August 30 BC. The library at Pergamon does not appear substantively in subsequent imperial Roman writing; its function as an institutional library had effectively ended by the early empire. The books transferred to Alexandria perished — at some unspecifiable point in the long, gradual decline of the Alexandrian collection through the Roman, Christian, and Arab periods.

The site

The Pergamon library building survives in foundation. The German archaeological excavations of the 1880s and 1890s — led by Carl Humann at the great altar and Alexander Conze at the upper acropolis — exposed the library complex and recovered substantial portions of its sculpture. The recovered material is on display, with the Pergamon Altar, at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin (currently undergoing major reconstruction; the Altar will not be on public display until 2027 at earliest).

The modern Turkish town of Bergama sits at the foot of the ancient acropolis. The acropolis ruins are a UNESCO World Heritage site. The carved limestone shelving of the library room is gone — the wood and stone were almost certainly stripped progressively from late antiquity onward. The room remains visible as an empty rectangle on the upper terrace.

The medieval and modern history of European book-production has been dominated by parchment — the writing surface that the Pergamon innovators named, that medieval European monastic scriptoria perfected, and that survived as the standard book-production material until paper imports from the Islamic world progressively replaced it after approximately 1300. The library that gave the writing surface its name was emptied by a Roman triumvir for a queen who would be dead within fifteen years of receiving the gift. The name survived where the books did not.