Page:A Brief Outline of the Histories of Libraries.djvu/44

38 of persons who were engaged in making it. It was made, according to Epiphanius, in the seventeenth year of the reign of Philadelphus, in the one hundred and twenty-seventh Olympiad. Demetrius Phalereus had charge of this library. He was an exile from his native Athens, and was renowned both for his writings and his works. The King held him in high esteem and entrusted to his care the library, and other matters of even greater importance.

Philadelphus likewise collected books from the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, and even from the Romans, and had them translated into Greek. I quote Georgius Cedrenus, who says, "