It may seem surprising that this unpretentious handbook should have survived when the most important works of the ancient mythographers have been lost. Fortune, of course, plays a large part in such matters; all surviving manuscripts of the Libraryderive from a single archetype. But if it is unpretentious to a fault, the Libraryencloses a mass of reliable information in a short space, and it is clear that the scholars of later antiquity found it exceptionally useful for that reason. It is often cited in the scholia (explanatory comments on the works of the classical authors) and similar sources, and in the twelfth century the Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes made extensive use of it. This suggests that the preservation of this particular handbook was not simply a freak of fortune, and that the writers of this later period thought that it had its virtues, at least from a purely practical point of view. As it happens, we know directly what one of the finest Byzantine scholars thought of the Library, for Photius, patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century, registered his opinion in a brief review. While travelling abroad on a diplomatic mission, Photius kept a record of his reading for his brother, and in this record, after summarizing the contents of another mythical work, he noted:

In the same volume, I read a small work by the scholar Apollodorus; it is entitled the Library. It contained the most ancient stories of the Greeks: all that time has given them to believe about the gods and heroes, and about the rivers, and lands, and peoples, and towns, and thence everything that goes back to the earliest times. And it goes down as far as the Trojan War, and covers the battles that certain of the heroes fought with one another, and their exploits, and certain of the wanderings of the heroes returning from Troy, notably those of Odysseus, with whom this history of ancient times concludes. All in all, it is a general summary which is by no means lacking in usefulness to those who attach some value to the memory of the ancient stories.

If the Libraryhad been lost, like so many of the works reviewed by Photius, we might feel some regret on reading these words; as it is, we can refer to the original and judge for ourselves whether for the modern reader too it fulfils the claims that Photius makes for it. These claims are by no means extravagant. It is indeed a useful synopsis of the mythical history of Greece; and, it may be added, it is based for the most part on good early sources, and the author was content to summarize them as he found them without imposing his own interpretations, or attempting to reconcile conflicting traditions, or making any alterations for literary effect.

In the manuscripts, this book is entitled the Library of Apollodorus of Athens, the Grammarian. ‘Library’ was a title applied to compendia; for a compendium, which draws together material from a multitude of other books, could be regarded as a library in itself. Diodorus called his much larger historical compendium the Historical Libraryfor the same reason. In Photius’ copy of the Library, a little poem was placed at the beginning in which the book itself addresses the reader and expresses this thought directly. It ran like this:

Now, due to my erudition, you can draw upon the coils of time, and know the stories of old. Look no longer in the pages of Homer, or in elegy, or the tragic Muse, or lyric verse, and seek no longer in the sonorous verses of the cyclic poets; no, look in me, and you will discover all that the world contains.

Whether this was really written by the original author is impossible to say, but none the less it seems appropriate and suggestive, even if the mixed metaphor at the beginning is not altogether fortunate. Time is pictured as a serpent, and the succession of ages as the serpent’s coils which the learning embodied in the book will enable its readers to ‘draw on’ (as though drawing water from a well). For rather than search through a whole library of ancient poems, they have merely to look within this ‘Library’ to discover all that they could wish to know about the myths and legends of early Greece. And there is some truth in this, even if we would be happy to have the same opportunity as its author to consult all these early poetic sources in the original, and there is a certain philistinism in the suggestion that a work of these dimensions could enclose ‘the world’.

The attribution of the work to Apollodorus of Athens, a distinguished scholar (or ‘grammarian’) who worked at Alexandria in the second century BC, is more problematic. Although Apollodorus had wide interests and also wrote on literary, historical, geographical, and other matters, he appears to have been most highly regarded in antiquity for a treatise on Greek religion entitled On the Gods, which would have contained extensive discussion of divine mythology. Thus the Library, which is largely devoted to heroic mythology, could be seen as a complementary work; and if the attribution were correct, we would possess a book by one of the most learned authors of the greatest age of Greek scholarship. The reference to ‘the scholar (grammarian) Apollodorus’ in Photius’ review shows that he too considered this Apollodorus to be the author, and the attribution was accepted by modern scholars until quite recently, although it was increasingly recognized that it raises serious problems. Not until 1873, when the publication of a thesis on the Libraryby Carl Robert forced a reconsideration of the matter, were these problems fully confronted.

There is one very definite indication that the Librarycould not have been written during the lifetime of Apollodorus of Athens: it contains a reference to the Chroniclesof Castor of Rhodes (p. 59). This was a study in comparative chronology which is said to have contained tables which extended to 61 BC; and the date of its author is confirmed by a report that he married the daughter of Deiotarus, an eastern king who was defended by Cicero in 45 BC. Unless the reference to Castor was added to the text at a later period (and there is no reason to suppose that it was) the Librarymust have been written a century or more after the death of Apollodorus of Athens.

In view of the difficulty raised by this citation, we must ask whether the Libraryis in any case a book which we could reasonably accept as the work of a scholar of Apollodorus’ stature and period. In truth, it is not at all what we would expect from a learned Alexandrian scholar. Rather than an original synthesis achieved through the author’s own research and reflection (as was surely the case with Apollodorus’ treatise on the gods), we have an elementary handbook which the author compiled by consulting and epitomizing standard sources. And the author made no attempt to interpret the myths and explain their meaning in rationalistic terms, as was characteristic of Hellenistic mythographers. In relation to the gods, for instance, many writers of this period would explain that they represented forces of nature, or that they had originally been human beings who later had divine status attributed to them. Although it is explicitly attested that Apollodorus of Athens adopted such an approach, there is not a trace of it in the Library;nor was the author disconcerted by the fabulous element in many heroic myths (unlike Diodorus, who often provides rationalized versions, following Hellenistic sources). He simply accepts the myths as enjoyable stories which formed an important part of the Greek heritage, a characteristic attitude in later times. Furthermore, there are features in the author’s use of language which suggest that the book was written at a later period than the second century BC. In short, there is every indication that the attribution to Apollodorus of Athens can be confidently rejected.