Bibliotheke

The Bibliotheca (Ancient Greek: Βιβλιοθήκη Bibliothēkē, "Library"), also known as the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, is a compendium of Greek myths and heroic legends, arranged in three books, generally dated to the first or second century AD.

The author was traditionally thought to be Apollodorus of Athens, but that attribution is now regarded as false, and so "Pseudo-" was added to Apollodorus

The Bibliotheca has been called "the most valuable mythographical work that has come down from ancient times". An epigram recorded by the important intellectual Patriarch Photius I of Constantinople expressed its purpose:

It has the following not ungraceful epigram: 'Draw your knowledge of the past from me and read the ancient tales of learned lore. Look neither at the page of Homer, nor of elegy, nor tragic muse, nor epic strain. Seek not the vaunted verse of the cycle; but look in me and you will find in me all that the world contains'.

The brief and unadorned accounts of myth in the Bibliotheca have led some commentators to suggest that even its complete sections are an epitome of a lost work.

A certain "Apollodorus" is indicated as author on some surviving manuscripts (Diller 1983). This Apollodorus has been mistakenly identified with Apollodorus of Athens (born c. 180 BC), a student of Aristarchus of Samothrace, mainly as it is known—from references in the minor scholia on Homer—that Apollodorus of Athens did leave a similar comprehensive repertory on mythology, in the form of a verse chronicle. The text which did survive to the present, however, cites a Roman author: Castor the Annalist, a contemporary of Cicero in the 1st century BC. The mistaken attribution was made by scholars from Photius onwards. Since for chronological reasons Apollodorus of Athens could not have written the book, the author of the Bibliotheca is conventionally called the "Pseudo-Apollodorus" by those wishing to be scrupulously correct. Traditional references simply instance "the Library and Epitome".

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