Ancient Greek and Roman Libraries
Gresham College Lectures
00:00
The Library
bernard shaw did not know that by the late twentieth century, there would emerge a powerful feminist and post colonial suspicion of universal, monolithic repositories of knowledge. Ancient creators of libraries were always either very powerful, ptolemy or trajan, or just rich, like pliny. Cicero greatly valued his own enormous collection of books and called the library the mind, or brain of a household. In universal chorus with shaw's hyper intellectual professor rhetoric, theodotos, most of the voices we hear from antiquity talked about libraries only in ways that implies they improved and refined the quality of their own literary outputs.
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