December
26
/ 2016
Many years after the destruction of the great libraries of the ancient world, such as the libraries of Pergamum and Alexandria, the Imperial Library of Constantinople preserved precious Ancient Greek and Latin texts for almost 1,000 years. Located in the capital city of the Byzantine Empire, the library was constructed circa 357-353 CE by the emperor Constantius II, as he became aware of the deterioration of the early text which had been written on papyrus. In the library’s scriptorium, he entrusted scribes with the arduous process of copying out the volumes from the papyrus rolls to more stable materials such as parchment or vellum. The man in charge of the scribes was thought to have been Themestios, working directly under
