The Myriobiblon

Photius’s Bibliotheca, the collection of critical summaries of the books he had read, compiled for his brother Tarasios and one of the great monuments of Byzantine learning. This file describes what the work is, the disputed count of its codices, its uncertain date and the embassy that occasioned it, its incomparable value as the sole surviving witness to many lost works of antiquity, the range of its reading, and the modern editions through which it is now read.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Work

The Bibliotheca — also called the Myriobiblon or Myriobiblos, “the ten-thousand books” — is a collection of reviews and summaries of works Photius had read, set down for his brother Tarasios at the latter’s request when Photius was about to depart on an embassy. Each entry is called a codex (Greek kōdix), and each gives an account of a single book or group of books: a description of its contents, often extensive extracts or epitomes, a note on the author, and very frequently Photius’s own critical judgment of the style and value of the work (Wilson, Photius: The Bibliotheca [1994], introduction; Bibliotheca, dedication to Tarasios, trans. Freese [1920]). It is, in effect, the reading-notebook of the most cultivated mind of the ninth century — but a notebook written with such range, judgment, and fullness that it became a primary source for the whole of Greek literature.

The internal form of the notices is far from uniform, and that unevenness is itself informative about how the work was made. Some codices are no more than a few lines, recording little beyond a title, an author, and a verdict; others run to many pages of close summary, with long verbatim or near-verbatim extracts copied out from the book under review (Wilson 1994, introduction). The longer notices on the historians in particular preserve continuous epitomes that amount to a digest of the lost work, while the notices on theological and conciliar texts often combine summary with Photius’s assessment of the author’s orthodoxy. The word kōdix itself refers to the physical book — the codex, the bound volume — so that the structure of the Bibliotheca mirrors the shelf: one notice answers, roughly, to one book that had passed through Photius’s hands (Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars [3rd ed., 1991]; Wilson 1994). The reader of the Bibliotheca is thus, in a real sense, walking along the bookshelves of a ninth-century Constantinopolitan library guided by the running commentary of its most exacting user.

The dedicatory preface, addressed to Tarasios, gives the number of books treated as 279; the series as actually numbered in the manuscripts and the standard editions runs to 280, a discrepancy that arose in the transmission and numbering rather than from any error of Photius’s. Both figures are correct depending on what is counted, and the work is properly described as containing “279 according to the preface, 280 as numbered in the editions” (Wilson 1994; Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars [3rd ed., 1991]; Bibliotheca, preface, trans. Freese). Discrepancies of this kind, between a round or stated figure in a preface and the count yielded by the divisions as they stand in the manuscripts, are common in the transmission of ancient and medieval collections, where later copyists’ decisions about where one notice ends and the next begins can shift the total by a unit or two; the small gap here is best read as an artifact of the numbering rather than as evidence of lost or added material (Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars; Wilson 1994). Individual entries are cited by codex number — for example, Bibliotheca, cod. 223 (the long notice of Diodorus of Tarsus) — a convention that allows a scholar to point to a precise notice across all editions, since the numbering is stable even where the precise count of the whole is not.

Date and the Embassy

The date of composition is uncertain and debated. The work belongs to the period before Photius’s patriarchate — that is, before 858, when he was still a layman and imperial official — and the preface ties its genesis to an embassy Photius was about to undertake “to the Assyrians,” generally understood as the Abbasid caliphate at Baghdad. The older view dated the compilation to the time of this embassy, around 838–845. But the dating, and even the relation of the work to the embassy, are disputed: Photius states that he is summarizing books he had read earlier, over the course of his studies, so that the embassy is the occasion of Tarasios’s request rather than the time or place of the actual reading and writing; Paul Lemerle and others have argued accordingly against composing the work during the embassy (Lemerle, Le premier humanisme byzantin [1971]; Wilson 1994, introduction). The difficulty is partly one of plausibility: the sheer quantity of reading recorded — hundreds of books, many summarized in detail — could hardly have been done, and the notes hardly compiled, in the conditions of a diplomatic journey, which tells against the literal picture of a man reading and reviewing nearly three hundred volumes while abroad on the emperor’s business (Lemerle 1971; Wilson 1994). The preface’s own language, in which Photius recalls books read in the past and writes so that his absent brother may share something of what they had once read together, points the same way: the Bibliotheca reads as the gathering-up of a lifetime’s reading prompted by an imminent separation, not as a travel journal. No single year is securely established. The safe statement is that the Bibliotheca is a work of Photius’s pre-patriarchal life, occasioned by an embassy to the Abbasid court, with the precise date and the embassy’s exact role left open by the sources.

A Window onto Lost Antiquity

The supreme value of the Bibliotheca is that, of the roughly four hundred works it treats, a great many are now lost in their original form and survive only — or chiefly — through Photius’s summaries and extracts. For whole tracts of ancient Greek prose, the Myriobiblon is the single surviving witness. Among the classical authors known to a significant degree only through Photius are the historian Ctesias of Cnidus (the Persica and Indica), Memnon of Heraclea (the history of his city), Olympiodorus of Thebes, the mythographer Conon, lost portions of Arrian (the Parthica and the Events after Alexander), books of Diodorus Siculus now missing from the direct tradition, and Phlegon of Tralles, together with summaries of several of the ancient Greek romances and of numerous theological and anti-heretical treatises that have otherwise perished (Wilson 1994; Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars). The loss of these works since Photius’s day is a reminder of how narrow the channels of transmission were: a book that Photius could still read in ninth-century Constantinople might exist in only a handful of copies, and once those perished in the centuries that followed, his notice became the last trace of it. In such cases the modern editor of the “fragments” of a lost historian is often editing, in large part, the relevant codex of the Bibliotheca — Photius’s epitome and extracts standing in for the vanished original. For the historian of ancient literature the Bibliotheca is therefore not merely a Byzantine curiosity but an irreplaceable instrument of preservation: a large part of what we can say about certain lost authors, we can say because a ninth-century Byzantine scholar described their books and copied out what he found striking.

The Range of the Reading

The reading the Bibliotheca documents is staggering in its breadth. It ranges across classical Greek historians and orators, philosophy and rhetoric, medicine and the natural sciences, the acts of church councils, theology and biblical commentary, hagiography and saints’ lives, grammars, and the prose romances (Wilson 1994; Mango, The Homilies of Photius [1958], introduction, on Photius’s learning). The selection is markedly weighted toward prose and pays little attention to poetry — Photius the critic was a reader of argument and narrative more than of verse, and the great poets of antiquity, presumably because they were the common stock of every schoolboy’s education and needed no review, are largely absent from his pages (Wilson 1994). The notices vary from a sentence to many pages, and the critical remarks — on clarity, on Atticism, on the reliability of a historian, on the orthodoxy of a theologian — give the work the character not of a mere catalogue but of an extended exercise in literary and theological judgment. What distinguishes the Bibliotheca from an ordinary epitome or table of contents is precisely this evaluative cast: Photius does not merely report what a book contains but ranks its prose, weighs its truthfulness, and notes where an author falls into heresy or error, so that the work amounts to a sustained record of one cultivated reader’s verdicts (Wilson 1994; Reynolds and Wilson, Scribes and Scholars). It is from these judgments, as much as from the summaries, that Photius’s reputation as the most discerning reader of his age derives.

The Modern Editions

The standard scholarly edition is that of René Henry, Photius: Bibliothèque, with the Greek text and a facing French translation, published in the Collection byzantine of Les Belles Lettres in nine volumes between 1959 and 1991 (volumes I–VIII, 1959–1977; the ninth, an index by J. Schamp, in 1991). The principal English access is the selection translated by N. G. Wilson, Photius: The Bibliotheca. A Selection Translated with Notes (London: Duckworth, 1994), the work of the leading authority on Byzantine scholarship; an older and only partial English translation is that of J. H. Freese, The Library of Photius, vol. 1 (London: SPCK, 1920), which never advanced beyond the early codices. The Bibliotheca is also reprinted, with the Latin version of Andreas Schott, in Patrologia Graeca 103–104, though the Migne text is superseded by Henry’s edition (Wilson 1994; the editio princeps was that of David Hoeschel, Augsburg, 1601, and the first modern critical text before Henry that of Immanuel Bekker, 1824). The progress of these editions traces the work’s modern career: from Hoeschel’s editio princeps of 1601, which first put the Greek into print, through Bekker’s text of 1824, to Henry’s nine volumes that at last set the Bibliotheca on a secure critical footing with a facing translation and full apparatus (Wilson 1994). Through these editions a work conceived as a private gift to a brother has become one of the most consulted reference books in the study of Greek antiquity — read today less for Photius’s own sake than for the lost authors he alone preserves, yet bearing throughout the impress of the single critical mind that made it.

References

Photius. Bibliothèque, ed. René Henry. 9 vols. Collection byzantine. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1959–1991. The standard critical edition (Greek and French).
Wilson, N. G. Photius: The Bibliotheca. A Selection Translated with Notes. London: Duckworth, 1994. The standard English selection, with introduction on the work, its date, and its value.
Freese, J. H. The Library of Photius, vol. 1. Translations of Christian Literature. London: SPCK, 1920. The older partial English translation; the dedication to Tarasios and the “279” count.
Reynolds, L. D., and N. G. Wilson. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. On the Bibliotheca’s codex count and its role in preserving lost works.
Lemerle, Paul. Le premier humanisme byzantin. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971. On the date of the Bibliotheca and the embassy question.
Mango, Cyril. The Homilies of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople. Dumbarton Oaks Studies 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. Introduction, on Photius’s learning.