دانلود کتاب تاریخ فلسفه کلاسیک از بنتلی تا قرن بیستم

The anecdote is certainly untrue. However, it is well concocted to evoke a symbolically meaningful scene. In eastern lands – in Persia, in Armenia – the story went that, when Alexander the Conqueror arrived in Assyria, he was shown Ashurbanipal’s great library in Nineveh. Alexander was fascinated by the grand project of gathering the world’s wealth of knowledge in one building and decided that he too would build, in his new capital, a great library that would collect every book ever written, thus creating a new temple to universal knowledge. It is now known that, in reality, the library of Alexandria was founded by his successor, Ptolemy I Soter. However, there is some evidence that it was indeed Alexander who commissioned the first Greek translations of the ancient Chaldean texts (Canfora 1993). Two key desires were entwined behind the creation of the great library: on the one hand, to match and exceed the great libraries of the ancient Near East (Nineveh, Edfu, Sippar); on the other hand, to collect and preserve the heritage of Greek books, which had become the main means of cultural communication within the new Hellenistic world.