Carl Sagan Was Really Bad at History

Carl Sagan’s thirteen-episode documentary series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which originally aired on PBS in 1980, is the most watched PBS documentary series in history. The miniseries, which is, broadly speaking, about the history and importance of science, has had a massive influence on both our culture as a whole and on individual people’s lives. Many people say that watching Cosmos growing up was what inspired them to go into STEM.

Unfortunately, while Carl Sagan may have been a brilliant scientist and a great science popularizer, he was an unbelievably terrible historian and, in the show, he gets a boatload of facts about history blatantly wrong. Because Sagan was a scientist with an established reputation, though, many people have assumed that everything he says in the miniseries must be correct and, as a result, these misconceptions have spread and become embedded in popular culture.

Perhaps the most influentially wrong segment in the whole series is a twenty-two-and-a-half-minute segment in the last episode about the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria and the murder of the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia. In this one segment, Sagan manages to promote what seems like roughly half of all the misconceptions about the ancient world that I have ever debunked.

I wrote an article in August 2018 debunking misconceptions about Hypatia and another article in July 2019 debunking misconceptions about the Library of Alexandria. In both of those articles, I have noted that many of the misconceptions I debunk originated from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, but, in those articles, I did not address Carl Sagan’s PBS miniseries directly.

I have therefore decided to undertake the ambitious task of going through the entire segment about Hypatia and the Library of Alexandria and correcting all the inaccuracies I come across. This should give you some impression of how historically accurate Carl Sagan’s documentary really is.

Introducing the Great Library of Alexandria

The segment starts out with Carl Sagan visiting the ruins of the Serapeion of Alexandria, a temple to the Greco-Egyptian god Serapis built under the orders of Ptolemaios III Euergetes (ruled 246 – 222 BC), a member of the Ptolemaic Dynasty, a dynasty of Makedonian Greek monarchs who ruled Egypt during the Hellenistic Era (lasted c. 323 – c. 31 BC).

Almost as soon as he starts speaking, Sagan starts spewing out inaccuracies right away. Sagan correctly identifies the Serapeion as having originally been a temple, but he incorrectly claims that it later stopped being a temple and was converted into the “annex” of the Great Library of Alexandria.

It is true that the Serapeion does seem to have been used at one point to house some of the books from the Library of Alexandria’s collection, but, contrary to what Sagan says in the show, it never stopped being used as a temple. It remained in use as a temple to Serapis until its destruction in 391 AD. The Serapeion was only used to house books from the Great Library during one part of its history and its primary purpose was always as a temple to Serapis.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the ruins of the Serapeion in Alexandria today

What the Library of Alexandria looked like

Then there’s the problem with the show’s portrayal of what the Library of Alexandria supposedly looked like. The show portrays the Library of Alexandria as a magnificent structure filled with rooms. The animation quality is terrible because the miniseries was produced way back in 1980 when special effects weren’t very good, but you get the sense of it being a majestic structure. Sagan himself repeatedly references the building he is walking around in as though it were the actual Library of Alexandria as it really appeared.

The truth, though, is that we have no idea what the Great Library of Alexandria really looked like. We don’t even know exactly where it was located other than that it was located in the royal Brouchion quarter of Alexandria. The reconstruction of the Library of Alexandria shown in the show is purely imaginative. The creators of the show basically just took a bunch of Greek and Roman architectural elements and threw them together to create a gigantic, beautiful building.

I don’t necessarily have a problem with the makers of the show using their imaginations, but they should have made it clear that the whole building as it is depicted in the show is completely imaginary and not a real representation of what the Library actually looked like. The way Sagan speaks of the structure makes it sound like he is walking around in an accurate reconstruction of the building itself based on meticulous archaeological information when, in fact, it is no such thing.

The depiction of the façade of the Library in the show seems to be at least partly inspired by the façade of the Library of Kelsos, an ancient library that was located in the Greek city of Ephesos on the west coast of what is now Turkey whose identifiable ruins have actually survived. (None of the books originally housed in it have, though.)

The problem is that the Library of Kelsos was constructed in the 110s AD under the rule of the Roman Empire; whereas the Library of Alexandria was constructed in the early third century BC under the rule of the Ptolemaic kings. Naturally, the architectural styles can be expected to probably be quite different.

ABOVE: Screenshot of how the exterior of the Library of Alexandria is represented in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the reconstructed façade of the Library of Kelsos at Ephesos, on which Carl Sagan’s reconstruction of the exterior of the Library of Alexandria seems to have been based

“All the knowledge of the ancient world”

After showing off the fake library, Carl Sagan claims “all the knowledge of the ancient world was once within these marble walls.” Unfortunately, this obviously hyperbolic claim is often taken a bit too seriously, so it is worth deconstructing it here. As I think most intelligent people have already guessed, the Library of Alexandria did not, in fact, contain “all the knowledge of the ancient world.” Sure, that was the goal that the Ptolemaic rulers who sponsored the Library claimed to aspire to, but it was obviously never a realistic one.

Beyond that, though, the Library of Alexandria actually contained a lot less knowledge than you might expect. Carl Sagan claims later in the segment that the Library of Alexandria “contained at its peak nearly one million scrolls,” but this estimate is wildly unrealistic. The highest scholarly estimate for the number of scrolls the Library of Alexandria might have reasonably contained is roughly 400,000. 400,000 scrolls is equivalent to roughly 100,000 books.

For comparison, the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. is estimated to currently contain roughly sixteen million physical books. That means, if the Library of Alexandria housed the maximum number of books that we reasonably think it could have housed, it still would have housed roughly one one-hundred-sixtieth the number of books that are currently housed in the Library of Congress.

Furthermore, although the Library of Alexandria claimed to be a universal library, in reality, it primarily housed one kind of text: Greek literary texts. We know this because the scholar Kallimachos of Kyrene (lived c. 310 – c. 240 BC) compiled a massive catalogue of all the works in the Library of Alexandria’s collection known as the Pinakes, which is often described as the first library catalogue.

Only fragments of the Pinakes have been preserved, but the main categories of works seem to have been oratory, history, laws, philosophy, medicine, lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, and epic poetry. The lyric poetry, tragedy, comedy, and epic poetry categories seem to have been quite large judging from surviving fragments. The medicine category, by contrast, is barely attested by a single fragment. Nonetheless, it seems to have existed.

ABOVE: Surviving portion of a papyrus scroll bearing a portion of the Aitia, a poem written by Kallimachos of Kyrene, the scholar and poet who also created the Pinakes

Hypatia a scholar at the Library of Alexandria?

Carl Sagan goes on to claim that the mathematician Hypatia was “the last light of the Library, whose martyrdom is bound up with the destruction of this place seven centuries after it was founded.” By this, he means that she was the last scholar to work at the Library of Alexandria. I have thoroughly debunked this false claim before in this highly detailed article I wrote about Hypatia in August 2018, which I highly encourage everyone to read. Nonetheless, I will summarize what I say in that article here.

Hypatia never worked at the Great Library of Alexandria. There is not a single ancient source that ever claims Hypatia worked at the Library of Alexandria; Sagan just pulled the claim that she worked there out of thin air. I guess he assumed that, because she lived in the city of Alexandria, she must have worked at the Great Library there. The problem is that she couldn’t have worked there, because the Great Library of Alexandria that Sagan is talking about had certainly ceased to exist at least seventy years before Hypatia was born, possibly over 150 years before she was born.

The Library of Alexandria disappears from the historical record in the middle of the third century AD. We don’t know exactly when it ceased to exist, but the last known references to people being members of the Mouseion date to around the 260s AD. In 272 AD, the emperor Aurelian led an attack on the city of Alexandria in effort to recapture it from the forces of Zenobia, the queen of Palmyra, who had seized control of the city.

In the course of the fighting, Aurelian’s men are known to have completely leveled the entire Brouchion quarter where the Library of Alexandria was located. If the Library was still standing at that point, it would have certainly been destroyed in the battle. If some part of the Library did somehow manage to survive, then it certainly would have been destroyed during the emperor Diocletian’s sack of Alexandria in 297 AD, which destroyed most of the Brouchion quarter as well. There is no way the original Ptolemaic Library of Alexandria could have survived into the fourth century.

Now, some may argue that, when she was young, Hypatia could have been involved at the Serapeion. It is true that there were Neoplatonic philosophers affiliated with the Serapeion teaching in Alexandria in the late fourth century, but it is almost certain that Hypatia was not among them, since, as I will explain in a moment, Hypatia and her father Theon both taught a very different form of Neoplatonism from the one that was being taught at the Serapeion. Hypatia would not have fit in at the Serapeion very well at all.

ABOVE: Gold aureus dated to between 270 and 275 AD depicting the emperor Aurelian, whose forces destroyed the Brouchion quarter of Alexandria in 272 AD

Aristarchos of Samos and heliocentrism

Carl Sagan laments at length about how the Greek astronomer Aristarchos of Samos (lived c. 310 – c. 230 BC) discovered heliocentrism in the third century BC, but the book in which he presented his theories has been lost. Sagan makes it sound like Aristarchos’s theory was based on solid evidence and was accepted by Greek intellectuals, but that the book was lost when the Library of Alexandria was destroyed and so heliocentrism never became widely accepted.

There are many inaccurate assumptions here layered within each other. For one thing, as I discuss in this detailed article I wrote about Aristarchos, we have no idea what evidence Aristarchos based his hypothesis on and it is entirely possible he may have proposed it solely on a mystical belief in the primacy of the element of fire. Since none of Aristarchos’s original writings have been preserved, we don’t really know. It is possible he may have had some good evidence to support his hypothesis, but it is equally possible that he didn’t have any good evidence at all and just happened to be right by sheer luck.

We actually know why Aristarchos’s hypothesis didn’t become widely known and it’s not because his treatise was destroyed so no one could read it. On the contrary, Aristarchos’s hypothesis was widely known and rejected by Greek intellectuals. It was because his hypothesis was rejected that people did not copy his treatise and so it was lost. The rejection of his hypothesis came first and the loss of the treatise came second.

Aristarchos’s treatise was certainly not lost because the Library of Alexandria was destroyed. We don’t even know if the Library of Alexandria had a copy of his treatise and, even if it did, there were certainly copies of it elsewhere. We know that at least the mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse (lived c. 287 – c. 212 BC) and probably also the biographer and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – c. 120 AD) had access to copies of the treatise while living far away from Alexandria.

While I am here, I should probably emphasize that we have no evidence that Aristarchos of Samos himself ever worked at the Library of Alexandria either. It is often claimed that he did, but this is the result of confusion between the astronomer Aristarchos of Samos and the literary scholar Aristarchos of Samothrake (lived c. 220 – c. 143 BC). The two men were entirely different people who lived about a hundred years apart; they just happened to have to same name. Aristarchos of Samothrake worked at the Library of Alexandria; Aristarchos of Samos did not.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a modern statue at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki meant to commemorate Aristarchos of Samos. The portrayal here is imaginative; no one really knows what Aristarchos looked like.

Eratosthenes correcting Aristotle?

While talking about the Greek geographer Eratosthenes of Kyrene (lived c. 276 – c. 195 BC), who worked as a head librarian at the Library of Alexandria when the Library was at its height and famously calculated the circumference of the Earth with a remarkable degree of accuracy given the time in which he lived, Carl Sagan says the following:

“Aristotle had argued that humanity was divided into Greeks and everybody else, who he called ‘barbarians,’ and that the Greeks should keep themselves racially pure. He taught it was fitting for the Greeks to enslave other peoples. But Eratosthenes criticized Aristotle for his blind chauvinism. He believed there was good and bad in every nation. The Greek conquerors had invented a new god for the Egyptians, but he looked remarkably Greek. Alexander was portrayed as pharaoh in a gesture to the Egyptians. But in practice, the Greeks were confident of their superiority. The casual protests of the librarian hardly constituted a serious challenge to prevailing prejudices. Their world was as imperfect as our own.”

Here Sagan incorrectly makes it sound like Aristotle invented the Greek term βάρβαροι or “barbarians,” but the use of this term to refer to people and cultures who were not Greek predates Aristotle by many generations. For instance, the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BC), who probably died nearly half a century before Aristotle was even born, already uses the word in this manner in his Histories 1.1.

Unfortunately, Sagan does not cite any sources to support his claim that Eratosthenes criticized Aristotle. Eratosthenes’s work is only known through fragments preserved through quotation or summary by later writers, which makes it very hard to know where Sagan is getting his information about him from.

A person who sometimes leaves comments on my blog under the name Jaojao, however, has very helpfully pointed out to me in a comment that the Greek geographer Strabon of Amaseia (lived c. 64 BCE – c. 24 CE) summarizes a now-lost passage from Eratosthenes in his Geographika 1.4.9. In his summary, Strabon says that Eratosthenes rejects the division of all humans into two categories of “Greeks” and “barbarians” and also rejects the idea that all “barbarians” should be seen as enemies and all “Greeks” as friends. Strabon writes, as translated by Horace Leonard Jones:

“Now, towards the end of his [i.e., Eratosthenes’s] treatise — after withholding praise from those who divide the whole multitude of mankind into two groups, namely, Greeks and barbarians, and also from those who advised Alexander to treat the Greeks as friends but the barbarians as enemies — Eratosthenes goes on to say that it would be better to make such divisions according to good qualities and bad qualities; for not only are many of the Greeks bad, but many of the barbarians are refined — Indians and Arians, for example, and, further, Romans and Carthaginians, who carry on their governments so admirably.”

“And this, he says, is the reason why Alexander, disregarding his advisers, welcomed as many as he could of the men of fair repute and did them favours — just as if those who have made such a division, placing some people in the category of censure, others in that of praise, did so for any other reason than that in some people there prevail the law-abiding and the political instinct, and the qualities associated with education and powers of speech, whereas in other people the opposite characteristics prevail! And so Alexander, not disregarding his advisers, but rather accepting their opinion, did what was consistent with, not contrary to, their advice; for he had regard to the real intent of those who gave him counsel.”

Strabon does not mention Aristotle by name in this passage, but it is abundantly clear that, when he says “those who advised Alexander to treat the Greeks as friends but the barbarians as enemies,” he is thinking of Aristotle.

If what Strabon says in this passage about Eratosthenes is correct, this is indeed quite remarkable. Some Greek authors before Eratosthenes certainly believed that, at least in some cases, Greeks and “barbarians” could be friends. For instance, the Athenian historian Xenophon (lived c. 430 – c. 354 BCE) makes reference to himself becoming a φίλος (i.e., “friend”) of the Persian Kyros the Younger in his Anabasis 3.1.4-5. According to Strabon, though, Eratosthenes went one step further and outright rejected the idea that all non-Greek peoples could fairly be lumped together as “barbarians” at all—an idea that was almost universally accepted among ancient Greek intellectuals.

Although we cannot be certain, Eratosthenes’s rejection of the division of all humanity into “Greeks” and “barbarians” was most likely rooted in his own unique life experience. He was born in Kyrene, a Greek city on the northern coast of what is now Libya, during the Hellenistic Era when the cultural horizons of the Greek world were rapidly expanding. He then flourished for most of his career in Alexandria, a large, cosmopolitan city in Egypt where large populations of Greek, native Egyptian, and Jewish inhabitants all living in relatively close proximity. As a geographer, he was also familiar with many different cultures throughout the known world.

Nonetheless, I still think that Sagan’s description misleadingly makes it sound like Eratosthenes was an anti-racist in the modern mold who stood up alone against all forms of ancient prejudice. In contrast to this portrayal, Strabon makes it sound like Eratosthenes still believed that some cultures are generally superior to other cultures, since he describes Eratosthenes as making the blanket characterization of all Indians and Arians as “refined.”

ABOVE: Eratosthenes Teaching in Alexandria, painted in 1635 by the Italian Baroque painter Bernardo Strozzi. This portrayal is fictional; no one really knows what Eratosthenes looked like.

Heron of Alexandria’s “robots”

Amidst a string of mostly accurate claims about the achievements of ancient Greek scientists, Sagan claims, “Heron of Alexandria invented steam engines and gear trains; he was the author of the first book on robots.” Sagan is not necessarily wrong here about the robots, but it is worth clarifying what he means by “robots” because this is a term that is loaded with all kinds of modern connotations and has great potential to be misleading.

Heron of Alexandria wrote a treatise titled Automata about machines that could move through various pneumatic, mechanical, and hydraulic means. He was not writing about “robots” in any sense involving computers, programming, code, or artificial intelligence; he was writing purely about moving machines.

I am making this clarification because I think it is very important to clarify what exactly we mean when we talk about these kinds of devices. I previously noted in this article from December 2019 that, when popular science promoters like Carl Sagan describe ancient devices using modern sounding labels like “computer” or “robot,” they often mislead people into thinking these devices were far more advanced than they really were.

“Seeds of the modern world”

Carl Sagan declares that the “seeds of the modern world” clearly existed in ancient Alexandria, but, for some reason, they didn’t “take root and flourish.” I have several issues with this statement. First of all, the “seeds” Carl Sagan is talking about here did take “root and flourish”; that’s where the modern world comes from.

Second of all, the “seeds of the modern world”—if we can even meaningfully speak of such things—were certainly sown long before the city of Alexandria was ever founded. I would argue that the “seeds of the modern world” must go all the way back to at least ancient Sumer—and probably even further back than that. Even in the earliest urban societies we see the earliest makings of the modern world.

Ultimately, of course, the modern world is the product of the past and, by that, I mean the entire past—not just the discoveries made by a few people in one city over two thousand years ago. The “seeds of the modern world,” then, were not sown by any one people at any one time at any one place, but rather have been sown continually by all people in all lands throughout all of history.

ABOVE: Image from Wikimedia Commons showing various different kinds of seeds

“Slumber through a thousand years of darkness”

Immediately after this, Sagan claims that the west “slumber[ed] through a thousand years of darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work done here [i.e. in Alexandria].” There are actually several errors here, so I will refute them in turn.

First, as I explain in this article from May 2019, the Middle Ages weren’t totally a period of darkness. The High Middle Ages (lasted c. 800 – c. 1250 AD) and Late Middle Ages (lasted c. 1250 – c. 1450 AD) both produced a great deal of art, literature, philosophy, and even technological development. The term “Dark Ages” is usually reserved by the historians who still use it for the Early Middle Ages (lasted c. 475 – c. 800 AD), the period right after the fall of the collapse of the Roman Empire in western Europe.

Even then, though, the Early Middle Ages weren’t the time of complete darkness and obscurantism that most people imagine them to be. They were, in general, not an especially great time to be alive in western Europe, but people weren’t wallowing around in constant misery. In fact, there were even a few scholars and philosophers—people like Boethius (lived c. 477 – 524 AD) and Isidore of Seville (lived c. 560 – 636 AD).

ABOVE: Illustration from a medieval manuscript of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy from 1385, depicting how the artist imagined Boethius might have looked teaching his students

Second, Sagan’s claim that Christopher Columbus “rediscovered” the work of the Alexandrian scholars is just ridiculous. As I discuss in this detailed article I wrote about Columbus in October 2018, it was actually universally known among educated people in Columbus’s time that the Earth is roughly spherical.

The idea that Columbus was the first to propose that the Earth is spherical was totally made up the American writer Washington Irving (lived 1783 – 1859), the same man who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and “Rip Van Winkle.” Irving published a putative biography of Christopher Columbus in January 1828 titled A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, in which he portrayed Columbus being mocked by scholars for believing in the sphericity of the Earth.

Irving’s biography of Columbus was almost completely fictional. Despite this, it became wildly popular. More importantly, Irving’s book was given as assigned reading for students all across the United States for over a century afterwards, meaning whole generations of people grew up believing that Irving’s story about Columbus was true.

Ironically, Columbus actually completely rejected the nearly perfectly accurate estimate for the size of the Earth made by Eratosthenes of Kyrene, the head librarian of the Library of Alexandria whom Carl Sagan lavished praise upon earlier in the segment. Instead, Columbus believed that the Earth was much smaller than Eratosthenes predicted. As it turns out, Eratosthenes was right and Columbus was wrong.

ABOVE: Daguerreotype photograph from between 1855 and 1860 of the American writer Washington Irving, who completely made up the idea that Christopher Columbus was the first person to propose the Earth was spherical

Not seriously challenging “assumptions of the society in which they lived”

Carl Sagan has a theory for why the west allegedly “slumber[ed] through a thousand years of darkness”; he thinks it was the scholars at the Library of Alexandria’s fault. Sagan declares:

“There is no record in the entire history of the Library that any of the illustrious scholars and scientists who worked here ever seriously challenged a single political or economic or religious assumption of the society in which they lived. The permanence of the stars was questioned; the justice of slavery was not.”

Sagan is probably exaggerating a bit here, but his point that the scholars at the Library of Alexandria were not known for challenging social assumptions is mostly correct. As I talk about in this article from October 2019, it is true that we have very little evidence that anyone in the ancient Greek world ever seriously argued for the abolition of slavery.

The philosopher Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BC), who was, unfortunately, a passionate defender of slavery, does mention in his Politics 1.1253b that there were some people who thought that slavery was “contrary to nature,” but this is all he tells us about them and we have no record of these individuals from any other sources.

We should not blame the scholars who worked at the Library of Alexandria too harshly for not doing more to challenge social norms and conventions, however, since this is not entirely their faults; their freedom to criticize social conventions was severely restricted by the generally very conservative culture in which they lived and by the fact that these scholars never truly had complete freedom of speech.

The poet Sotades of Maroneia, who lived in Alexandria and probably worked at the Library of Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemaios II Philadelphos wrote a rather nasty palindromic epigram mocking Ptolemaios II for marrying his own sister Arsinoë II. The epigram has been preserved in the original Greek through quotation by the later Greek writer Ploutarchos of Chaironeia in his treatise On the Education of Children. Here it is:

“εἰς οὐχ ὁσίην τρυμαλιὴν τὸ κέντρον ὠθεῖς.”

Here is my own English translation of it:

“You are shoving your dick into a hole that is not holy.”

Ploutarchos reports that Ptolemaios II had Sotades thrown in prison for having written this line, but Sotades managed to escape to the city of Kaunos, where he was apprehended by the admiral Patroklos, who shoved Sotades into a lead chest and hurled him into the sea to drown.

We don’t know if Ploutarchos’s story about Sotades being imprisoned and later drowned just for writing a satirical epigram making fun of the king is true, but it does illustrate the fear that some Greek intellectuals during the Hellenistic Period must have had that they could be imprisoned or even brutally killed if they wrote something the king didn’t approve of.

Naturally, people don’t tend to criticize social institutions when they know there is every possibility their royal patron could have them locked in a lead chest and thrown into the sea at any time just for saying the wrong thing. If Hellenistic scholars did criticize the assumptions of the society around them, they most likely did so mainly in secret. Of course, none of this changes the fact that, contrary to what Carl Sagan says, the “seeds of the modern world” that existed in antiquity did, in fact, “take root and flourish.”

ABOVE: Cameo of Ptolemaios II Philadelphos and his sister-wife Arsinoë II. The poet Sotades mocked Ptolemaios II for marrying his own sister; he was reportedly imprisoned and later locked in a lead chest and thrown into the sea as punishment.

“The mob came to burn the place down”?

Carl Sagan claims that the Library of Alexandria was destroyed by an angry mob of militant obscurantists, whom he heavily implies were Christians. He says:

“The intellectual achievements of antiquity had few practical applications. Science never captured the imagination of the multitude. There was no counterbalance to stagnation, to pessimism, to the most abject surrender to mysticism. So when at long last the mob came to burn the place down, there was nobody to stop them.”

I addressed this claim in my article about the Library of Alexandria, but I will address it again here along with the other claims. The idea that the Library of Alexandria was destroyed by a mob of militant, obscurantist Christians in late antiquity arises from Sagan’s conflation of the Library of Alexandria with the Serapeion.

The Serapeion was demolished in 391 AD by a mob of Christians led by the bishop Theophilos I of Alexandria, who was known as a militant opponent of traditional, non-Christian religious practices. Carl Sagan portrays the mob as destroying the temple because they hated knowledge and thought it was useless, but, in reality, the reason why the group of Christians led by Theophilos demolished the Serapeion was because it was a pagan temple where a pagan god was openly worshipped.

According to the Christian accounts, there was also a group of militant pagan guerilla fighters hiding out in the temple. Whether these accounts are accurate is difficult to assess. There are several different surviving accounts of the destruction of the Serapeion, which vary widely. We have accounts by the Christian writers Theodoret, Sozomenos, and Tyrannius Rufinus and an account by the non-Christian writer Eunapios.

It is worth noting that none of the surviving accounts of Serapeion’s destruction mention anything about it having contained any kind of library at the time of its destruction. Eunapios, one of our main sources of information about the destruction of the Serapeion, was a philosopher who was strongly opposed to Christianity. If he had heard that the Christians had destroyed a large collection of books, we must imagine that he surely would have mentioned this in his account.

Furthermore, the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who was writing shortly before the Serapeion’s destruction in 391 AD, describes the Serapeion’s collection of scrolls in the past tense as though the collection no longer existed. All of this evidence strongly suggests that, at the time of its destruction, the Serapeion probably did not contain any large collection of scrolls.

ABOVE: Color illumination from the Alexandrian World Chronicle, dating to the fifth or sixth century AD, illustrating the destruction of the Serapeion in 391 AD

“The school of Neoplatonic philosophy”?

Carl Sagan calls Hypatia the “head of the school of Neoplatonic philosophy in Alexandria.” This is partly true. Hypatia was the head of a school of Neoplatonic philosophy in Alexandria, but what Carl Sagan fails to make clear is that there were actually several different schools of Neoplatonic philosophy in the city at the time and these schools were in fierce competition with each other.

Hypatia was the head of a school that taught a very moderate, mathematics-focused version of Neoplatonism based primarily on the teachings of Plotinos of Lykopolis (lived c. 205 – 270 AD). Hypatia was very tolerant of Christians and, in fact, every single student she is known to have taught was a Christian.

She maintained a close relationship with her student Synesios, who became the Christian bishop of the city of Ptolemaïs. After he became bishop, Synesios and Hypatia continued to exchange letters. Synesios’s letters to Hypatia have survived, although her letters to him have not. He speaks extremely fondly of her, praising her greatly for her wisdom.

There were other schools of Neoplatonism in Alexandria, though, that did not align with Hypatia’s tolerant views. These schools were based on the teachings of the philosopher Iamblichos (lived c. 245 – c. 325 AD), who emphasized teachings explicitly linked to traditional polytheistic religion, especially theurgy—the study of rituals. Many of these Iamblichean Neoplatonists were associated with the Serapeion. While Hypatia’s school was tolerated by the Christian bishop of Alexandria Theophilos, the other Iamblichean schools were singled out for persecution.

ABOVE: Photograph of a late Roman marble head identified as a possible depiction of the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinos of Lykopolis, on whose teachings Hypatia’s school seems to have largely been based

When Hypatia was born

Carl Sagan states that Hypatia was born in 370 AD, which would make her only forty-five at the time of her death in 415 AD. In actuality, we don’t know exactly when she was born and there are scholars who think she may have been born perhaps as early as around 350 AD, which would make her more like sixty-five at the time of her death.

I strongly suspect that an earlier birthdate is far more likely, considering the immense level of respect with which ancient sources say she was afforded. Sokrates Scholastikos (lived c. 380 – after c. 439 AD), a Christian historian who was a contemporary of Hypatia, says that her students came from all over the Mediterranean world to study under her and I highly doubt that a philosopher only in her mid-forties would have built up enough of a reputation to attract students from far and wide.

Carl Sagan’s estimate of when Hypatia was born is plausible, but I don’t think it is the most likely estimate. It would have been better if he gave some indication that we don’t know exactly when she was born rather than just saying she was born in “370 AD” without any kind of qualifier.

A remark concerning Hypatia’s beauty

Carl Sagan says that “by all accounts” Hypatia “was a great beauty.” This statement is correct, but it is worth inserting an important qualifier here. As I discuss in much greater detail in this article from October 2019, our only primary source of information about Hypatia’s appearance is a fragmentary description of her written by the Greek Neoplatonist philosopher Damaskios of Syria (lived c. 458 – c. 538 AD) in his Life of Isidoros and preserved through quotation in the Souda, a tenth-century AD Byzantine encyclopedia.

Damaskios rather vaguely says that Hypatia was “exceedingly beautiful and fair of form.” The problem is that Damaskios was not even born until nearly half a century after Hypatia died. He certainly never saw Hypatia in person and it is highly unlikely that he ever met anyone who had known her who could have described her to him. Furthermore, we have no indication that Damaskios was relying on any kind of written record of what Hypatia looked like or any kind of accurate depiction of her.

It therefore seems that Damaskios was simply relying perhaps on rumor or perhaps his own imagination. My point is, we really know nothing at all about what Hypatia looked like. There is every possibility that she really was every bit as extraordinarily beautiful as Damaskios and Carl Sagan make her out to be, but it is equally possible that her alleged beauty is just the result of how male authors have chosen to imagine her in their fantasies.

ABOVE: Fictional illustration by Jules Maurice Gaspard for Elbert Hubbard’s 1908 fictional biography of Hypatia. This illustration is purely how the artist imagined Hypatia might have looked. We actually have no idea what she really looked like.

Slavery sapping the classical world of its vitality?

After introducing Hypatia, Carl Sagan begins talking about the time period in which she lived. He declares: “Slavery, the great cancer of the ancient world, had sapped classical civilization of its vitality . . .” While I certainly agree with Carl Sagan that slavery is evil, there is currently no compelling evidence that it “sapped classical civilization of its vitality.”

The gradual collapse of the Roman state in the west was an extremely complicated process that took place over several centuries with many different factors involved. I wrote about it a little bit in this post from July 2020. The historian Bret Devereaux, who has a PhD in ancient history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has a whole three-part series of posts about the collapse of the Roman state in the west on his blog A Cabinet of Unmitigated Pedantry, of which part three goes into the most detail talking about what caused the collapse. For those who really want to delve into it, the historian Kyle Harper has written an excellent book about what caused the fall of Rome in the west titled The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, published in 2017 by Princeton University Press.

Just a few of the major factors that arguably contributed to the Roman Empire’s decline include: a large number of incompetent leaders from the late second century onwards, major recurring civil wars throughout the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, devastating epidemics such as the Antonine Plague (lasted c. 165 – c. 180 AD) and the Plague of Cyprian (lasted c. 249 – c. 262 AD), climate change, various foreign invasions by the Goths, Vandals, and Huns in the fifth century, and the establishment of smaller, self-governing kingdoms in former Roman territories such as the Visigothic Kingdom in Spain and southern France and the Vandal Kingdom in Libya.

As much as I’d like to blame slavery for the fall of the Roman Empire, the evidence just isn’t really there. We can’t just blame the fall of the Roman Empire on aspects of the Roman Empire that we don’t like without any kind of evidence. That’s simply not how history works.

I do think someone could make a very serious argument that slavery held classical civilization back by forcing people who could have potentially become thinkers and innovators to work as slaves, but that’s different from saying that slavery “sapped classical civilization of its vitality” and caused it to collapse.

ABOVE: Attila and his Hordes Overrun Italy and the Arts, painted between 1843 and 1847 by the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix

The Christian church wanting to eradicate “pagan culture”

Immediately after this, Carl Sagan says, “…the growing Christian church was consolidating its power and attempting to eradicate pagan influence and culture.” There is some degree of truth to this statement, but it is also false to a large extent. Christians in general certainly did want to eradicate certain religious ideas and practices that they considered “pagan,” but, generally speaking, most early Christians were not opposed to the study of pre-Christian philosophy, literature, or science and many early Christians actually embraced these things.

There were a few especially militant Christians who were opposed to the philosophy, literature, and science of pre-Christian cultures. The Christian apologist Tertullian (lived c. 155 – c. 240 AD), a Church Father who lived in North Africa, wrote in the Latin language, and was of Berber heritage, was one such individual. Tertullian famously deplored Greek philosophy as a source of heresy in chapter seven of his apologetic treatise De praescriptione haereticorum (“On the Proscription of Heretics”), writing, as translated by Peter Holmes:

“Whence spring those ‘fables and endless genealogies,’ and ‘unprofitable questions,’ and ‘words which spread like a cancer?’ From all these, when the apostle would restrain us, he expressly names philosophy as that which he would have us be on our guard against. Writing to the Colossians, he says, ‘See that no one beguile you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, and contrary to the wisdom of the Holy Ghost.” He had been at Athens, and had in his interviews (with its philosophers) become acquainted with that human wisdom which pretends to know the truth, whilst it only corrupts it, and is itself divided into its own manifold heresies, by the variety of its mutually repugnant sects. What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? what between heretics and Christians? Our instruction comes from ‘the porch of Solomon,’ who had himself taught that ‘the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart.’ Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel! With our faith, we desire no further belief.”

People like Tertullian, though, were a small minority. The vast majority of Christians that we have record of believed that Greek philosophy and literature should continue to be studied. For instance, the Church Father Klemes of Alexandria (lived c. 150 – c. 215 AD)m who was a Greek-speaking convert to Christianity, was deeply steeped in the study of Greek philosophy and literature. Indeed, he was such an ardent fan of Greek philosophy that he regarded it as nothing short of a secondary revelation.

In his treatise Stromateis 1.5, Klemes gives a famous description of what Christianity is like. He writes, as translated by William Wilson, “The way of truth is therefore one. But into it, as into a perennial river, streams flow from all sides.” The “streams” in this simile represent many different ideas from many different cultures. Certainly, Klemes saw Greek philosophy as one of those streams.

ABOVE: Fictional illustration of Klemes of Alexandria from the book Les vrais pourtraits et vies des hommes illustres grecz, latins et payens, published in 1584

Later Christian authors were not quite so extreme as Klemes, but they nonetheless saw great value in classical writings. The Christian theologian and scholar Origen of Alexandria (lived c. 184 – c. 253 AD) was, like Klemes, deeply learned about Greek philosophy and literature and he taught ideas from all different schools of Greek philosophy to his students. Jerome (lived c. 347 – 420 AD), the translator of the Latin Vulgate, was also an avid reader of Cicero. It is worth noting that even Tertullian himself was highly trained in classical rhetoric.

There is a popular story claiming that early Christians intentionally burned all the writings of the Greek poet Sappho, but, as I talk about in this article from December 2019, there is no evidence to support this story, which originated among classical scholars during the Renaissance. In fact, there is a lot of strong evidence against this idea. The real reason why so many of Sappho’s poems have been lost is because of the dialect she wrote in, which many later authors regarded as archaic and hard to understand.

As I discuss in this article from January 2020, the vast majority of the ancient Greek texts that have survived to the present day have survived because they were copied throughout the Middle Ages by the Christian Byzantines. Even that Archimedes Codex that New Atheists love making a big deal out of was originally copied by Byzantine scribes.

Indeed, even pagan art was appreciated by many Christians; as I discuss in this article from last month, Constantine I and later Byzantine emperors actually decorated the city of Constantinople with ancient statues of Greek and Roman deities collected from various temples. Many of these statues remained standing as decorations until the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204.

To correct Carl Sagan, then, Christians were generally opposed to traditional polytheistic religion and the practices associated with it, but most Christians were not opposed to Greek and Roman philosophy, literature, or science.

ABOVE: Jerome in his Study, painted in 1480 by the Italian Renaissance scholar Domenico Ghirlandaio

Why Hypatia was killed

Carl Sagan claims that Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, hated Hypatia primarily because she was a symbol of learning and science, which he claims early Christians despised. Sagan says:

“Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, despised her—in part because of her close friendship with a Roman governor, but also because of what she symbolized. She was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early church with paganism.”

There is not much evidence to support the assertion that Christians in general or even Cyril in particular hated Hypatia because they identified “learning and science” with paganism. Cyril certainly hated Hypatia, but it probably wasn’t because she was a scholar.

One fact that Sagan strangely chooses to omit is the fact that Hypatia wasn’t she just perceived as a “pagan”; she actually was one. As I talk about in my Hypatia article, modern portrayals have tried to make Hypatia out to be irreligious or even an outright atheist, but this is totally inconsistent with everything we know about her. As it happens, Hypatia’s religious views were probably a lot closer to those of her own Christian contemporaries than those of the modern-day secularists who champion her.

The basis of Neoplatonism is the idea that there is a single, all-encompassing, incorporeal principle called “the One,” or, in Greek, “τὸ Ἕν” (tò Hén), of which all the traditional Greco-Roman deities are but manifestations. Neoplatonists believed that the goal of all philosophy was metaphysical union with the One. It is very safe to say that the reason why Hypatia studied mathematics so intently was because she believed doing so would bring her closer to the Divine, since this was very much a Neoplatonist doctrine.

Another fact that Sagan leaves out is the fact that Hypatia—far from being hated by the Christian population—was actually widely beloved. In fact, all of our surviving contemporary Christian accounts of Hypatia are remarkably positive. The contemporary Christian historian Sokrates Scholastikos (lived c. 380 – after c. 439) praises her in absolutely glowing terms in his Ecclesiastical History 7.15, calling her the greatest thinker of her time. Here is Sokrates Scholastikos’s description of Hypatia, as translated by A. C. Zenos:

“There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time. Having succeeded to the school of Plato and Plotinus, she explained the principles of philosophy to her auditors, many of whom came from a distance to receive her instructions. On account of the self-possession and ease of manner, which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not unfrequently appeared in public in presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in coming to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more.”

Sokrates Scholastikos was a devout Christian and yet he lavishes praise upon Hypatia and says that everyone admired her. Another Christian church historian, Philostorgios of Borissos (lived c. 368 – c. 439 AD), mentions Hypatia and has only the best things to say about her. Indeed, he says that she excelled even her own father Theon, a renowned mathematician, at mathematics.

The only source we have that even suggests that Hypatia’s mathematical studies were regarded by Christians as nefarious is an account written by the Coptic bishop John of Nikiû, who lived in the late seventh century AD—over 200 years after Hypatia’s death. John of Nikiû describes Hypatia as an evil sorceress in league with Satan and portrays her murder as justified.

John of Nikiû, though, was writing centuries later in a world very different from the one in which Hypatia lived and there is no reason to assume that his portrayal of Hypatia is an accurate representation of what people in Hypatia’s own lifetime thought of her.

Sokrates Scholastikos, who gives us our earliest and most reliable detailed account of Hypatia’s murder, portrays the murder as basically a political assassination. He tells us that Hypatia was an advisor to Orestes, the Roman governor of Egypt, who was a convert to Christianity. Orestes was involved in the midst of a bitter and violent feud with Cyril.

According to Sokrates Scholastikos, false rumors started circulating accusing Hypatia of preventing Orestes from reconciling with Cyril, so a group of Cyril’s supporters ambushed her while she was travelling in her carriage, dragged her to a church known as the Kaisareion, where they stripped her naked and murdered her. Whether they were acting under Cyril’s orders is unclear.

ABOVE: Eastern Orthodox icon intended to represent Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria. The portrayal here is imaginative; we don’t know what he really looked like.

“Abalone shells”

Carl Sagan’s description of the process of how Hypatia was actually murdered is mostly fairly accurate, but his statement that her skin was flayed off with “abalone shells” is dubious. The Greek word that is used in the historical account of Hypatia’s murder by Sokrates Scholastikos is ὄστρακα (óstraka), which could refer to some kind of shells, but more likely refers to some kind of tiles or broken ceramicware.

“Her works obliterated, her name forgotten”?

After giving a largely accurate description of the actual process of how Hypatia was murdered, Carl Sagan claims that Hypatia’s “remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten.” In reality, the exact opposite of this happened. The story of Hypatia’s brutal murder actually spread across the empire, shocking and horrifying nearly everyone.

The contemporary Christian church historian Sokrates Scholastikos, who gives us our most complete surviving account of Hypatia’s murder, writes in his Ecclesiastical History 7.15, as translated by A. C. Zenos:

“This affair [i.e. the murder of Hypatia] brought not the least opprobrium, not only upon Cyril, but also upon the whole Alexandrian church. And surely nothing can be farther from the spirit of Christianity than the allowance of massacres, fights, and transactions of that sort.”

The contemporary Christian church historian Philostorgios also mentions Hypatia’s murder. So does the late fifth century AD lexicographer Hesychios of Alexandria and the late fifth and early sixth-century AD Neoplatonic philosopher Damaskios of Syria. All of the authors writing within a hundred and fifty years of Hypatia’s murder deplore the act as a horrible crime. The first surviving written account defending Hypatia’s murder and condemning Hypatia is from John of Nikiû, who was writing in the late seventh century—over two hundred years later.

In fact, Hypatia’s murder was so shocking it seems to have prompted a law to be issued specifically forbidding Christians from harming non-Christians who were not disobeying the law. A version of a law from 423 AD, eight years after Hypatia’s death, specifically states:

“We especially command those persons who are truly Christians, or who are said to be, that they shall not abuse the authority of religion and dare to lay violent hands on Jews and pagans who are living quietly and attempting nothing disorderly or unlawful.”

This law seems to have been specifically written to prohibit events like the murder of Hypatia from happening again.

Meanwhile, Carl Sagan’s claim that Hypatia’s works were “obliterated” is also false; a substantial portion of Hypatia’s school text of Diophantos’s Arithmetika has been preserved through Arabic translation. The reason why you haven’t heard of this commentary is mostly because it was written to aid Hypatia’s students in learning about mathematics and the mathematical teachings presented in it are deemed by most mathematicians to be extremely simple and not at all groundbreaking.

“Within a year of Hypatia’s death”?

Carl Sagan says, “The last remains of the Library were destroyed within a year of Hypatia’s death.” This is completely wrong and it’s genuinely hard to fathom where he even got this impression from. As I explained earlier in the article, the Great Library of Alexandria that Sagan is talking about here ceased to exist at some point in the third century AD—long, long before Hypatia was even born.

Even if Sagan is talking about the Serapeion here, the chronology is still wildly wrong. The destruction of the Serapeion occurred in 391 AD. Hypatia died in March 415 AD, meaning the destruction of the Serapeion took place twenty-three years before Hypatia’s death. If Hypatia was really born in 370 AD as Sagan claims, she would have been only twenty-one years old at the time of the Serapeion’s destruction.

Sagan’s dating is so wildly wrong that the 2009 film Agora, directed by Alejandro Amenábar, actually corrects the chronology, portraying the destruction of the Serapeion as occurring decades earlier than Hypatia’s murder. The film still incorrectly conflates the Serapeion with the Great Library, but at least it actually gets the date of the destruction right.

The alleged loss of classical learning as a result of the Library of Alexandria’s destruction

Here is where we get to the part where Sagan really starts to be wildly misleading. Describing the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, he says:

“It’s as if an entire civilization had undergone a sort of self-inflicted radical brain surgery so that most of its memories, discoveries, ideas, and passions were irrevocably wiped out. The loss was incalculable. In some cases, we know only the tantalizing titles of books that had been destroyed; in most cases, we know neither the titles nor the authors.”

I’ve already written an entire article debunking popular misconceptions about the Library of Alexandria, which I highly recommend everyone reading this read. Nonetheless, I will summarize what I say in that article here.

The Library of Alexandria was not the only library in the ancient world. Basically every major city had a library. There were dozens of libraries all across the Mediterranean world containing all kinds of different texts. There were personal libraries and public libraries. The Library of Alexandria was one of the largest and most prominent, but it was far from the only one. It even had rivals; the Library of Pergamon is said to have held close to the same number of scrolls as the Library of Alexandria, but yet no one ever talks about the Library of Pergamon for some reason.

The vast majority of the texts that were held in the Library of Alexandria were held in dozens other libraries as well. There were probably only a few texts that were held in exclusively in the Library of Alexandria and those texts were probably mostly just less popular works written by scholars who studied at the Library themselves.

The destruction of the Library of Alexandria is comparable to what it would be like if the Library of Congress were destroyed today. Sure, if the Library of Congress were just destroyed we’d lose a lot of rare manuscripts and artifacts, but very little actual knowledge would be lost from the destruction of that library alone.

ABOVE: Photograph of the main reading room of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

The real reason why so many texts have been lost

The real reason why so many writings from the ancient world have been lost is not because one library was destroyed, but rather because the texts that have been lost weren’t copied. In ancient times, the only way a work could be reproduced was if it was copied out by hand by a scribe. This was a very time-consuming, very labor-intensive, and often very expensive task.

Ancient texts were mainly written on papyrus, which is not at all a very durable material in any sense. It usually breaks down quickly, much like modern acid paper. This means texts had to be copied frequently in order to be preserved. All the ancient texts that have been passed down to us through the manuscript tradition have been copied not once or twice but dozens of times at the very least. In order to destroy a text, you didn’t have to burn it; all you had to do was not copy it.

There are additional compounding factors that have led to many texts being lost. Every major library in the ancient world eventually either shut down or suffered some kind of catastrophe, with the Library of Alexandria being just one of countless libraries to suffer this fate.

Meanwhile, there have been multiple format shifts since antiquity. Most notably, in late antiquity, there was a switch from writing on papyrus scrolls to writing on parchment codices. Although parchment is much more durable than papyrus, after people switched over to writing on parchment, papyrus became seen as outdated.

If a text written on a papyrus scroll wasn’t copied over onto a parchment codex by around 600 AD or thereabouts, it was probably done for. There were later shifts in things such as writing styles which led to lots of old texts having to be recopied just to keep up with the times. Each time a shift like these occurred, more and more classical texts were lost forever.

It was the invention of the movable type printing press in around the late 1430s that finally allowed classical texts to be mass-produced and thereby preserved. With the invention of the printing press, for the first time in history, it was possible to produce hundreds of copies of the same text within a relatively short amount of time.

ABOVE: Illustration from the Codex Amiatinus dating to c. 700 AD depicting an early medieval bookshelf containing around ten codices

Amazing technology in the Middle Ages

Also, while there are a lot of classical texts that have been lost, surprisingly little scientific knowledge was really lost. You know those automata designed by Heron of Alexandria that Carl Sagan made such a big deal over? Yeah, well, people were still making those in the Byzantine Empire during the Middle Ages. The technology to make them was never completely lost. Here’s a detailed description by the Italian historian Liuprand of Cremona (lived c. 920 – 972 AD) of the automata he encountered when he visited the throne room of the Byzantine emperor in 949 AD, as translated by G. Brett:

“In front of the emperor’s throne was set up a tree of gilded bronze, its branches filled with birds, likewise made of bronze gilded over, and these emitted cries appropriate to their species. Now the emperor’s throne was made in such a cunning manner that at one moment it was down on the ground, while at another it rose higher and was to be seen up in the air. This throne was of immense size and was, as it were, guarded by lions, made either of bronze or wood covered with gold, which struck the ground with their tails and roared with open mouth and quivering tongue. Leaning on the shoulders of two eunuchs, I was brought into the emperor’s presence.”

“As I came up the lions began to roar and the birds to twitter, each according to its kind, but I was moved neither by fear nor astonishment … After I had done obeisance to the Emperor by prostrating myself three times, I lifted my head, and behold! the man whom I had just seen sitting at a moderate height from the ground had now changed his vestments and was sitting as high as the ceiling of the hall. I could not think how this was done, unless perhaps he was lifted up by some such machine as is used for raising the timbers of a wine press.”

The automata in the emperor’s throne room are also mentioned by other writers who describe them similarly, so we know they definitely existed. This is the kind of technology that, according to Carl Sagan, should have been lost in the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, but it clearly was never really lost at all.

Basically, the whole idea that the destruction of the Library of Alexandria set humanity back centuries is completely wrong.

ABOVE: Illustration from the website The History of Byzantium of the astounding automata kept in the Byzantine emperor’s throne room, based on accounts from historical sources

About all those playwrights

Now we must return to Cosmos, because there is still much more that needs to be debunked. After saying everything quoted in the previous section, Carl Sagan goes on to say:

“We do know that, in this library there were a 123 different plays by Sophocles, of which only seven have survived to our time. One of those seven is Oedipus Rex. Similar numbers apply to the lost works of Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes. It’s a little as if the only surviving works of a man named William Shakespeare were Coriolanus and, um, A Winter’s Tale—although we had written some other things which were highly prized in his time, plays called Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet.”

It is true that the vast majority of all the plays written by Aischylos, Sophokles, Euripides, and Aristophanes have been lost. Sagan is absolutely right about that much. It is also true that some copies of most of the plays by these authors that have now been lost were probably at some point housed in the Library of Alexandria. The Greek medical writer Galenos of Pergamon (lived 129 – c. 216 AD) claims that, at its height, the Library of Alexandria held all the original autograph manuscripts of Aischylos, Sophokles, and Euripides’s plays, but I suspect this claim is not entirely accurate.

In any case, it is highly unlikely that any more than a few of the plays written by the classical Athenian playwrights that we no longer have were lost during a destructive event at the Library of Alexandria. We know for certain that dozens of copies of these plays were held in other libraries across the Mediterranean world and in personal collections; the Library of Alexandria was certainly not the only place where copies of these plays were kept by any means.

The real reason why so many plays written by the classical Athenian playwrights have been lost is because the less popular plays were not copied very often and, over time, they were gradually lost. Meanwhile, the plays that were more popular were carefully copied and preserved. For the most part, the Greek plays that have survived aren’t random; most of these plays have survived specifically because they are the ones that were deemed the best

We have seven surviving complete plays that are definitely by Sophokles, six surviving complete plays that are definitely by Aischylos, one complete play (Prometheus Bound) that is attributed to Aischylos but may not have been written by him, eighteen complete plays that are definitely by Euripides, one complete play (Rhesos) that is attributed to Euripides but definitely wasn’t written by him, and eleven complete plays that are definitely by Aristophanes.

The seven complete surviving plays attributed to Sophokles, the seven complete surviving plays attributed to Aischylos, and ten of the nineteen complete surviving plays of Euripides have survived because these plays were handpicked as examples of each playwright’s finest work and circulated together in “select” editions. These plays, in other words, are ones that were seen as the greatest.

We can actually gauge what quality of works may have been lost by looking at the plays of Euripides because, as it turns out, the other nine surviving plays of Euripides have survived mostly due to random chance. At some point, there was a complete alphabetized collection of all Euripides’s plays that spanned multiple volumes. For some reason, a single volume in this collection containing nine plays was separated from the rest of collection. The other volumes were destroyed, but this single volume survived and was copied.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of the Athenian tragic playwright Euripides. Ten plays attributed to Euripides have survived because they were part of a select edition of his best works; the other nine have survived mostly due to random chance.

What is interesting is that nearly all the most famous plays of Euripides that people still read come from the select edition of the ten plays that were considered Euripides’s best—not from the alphabetical collection of nine random plays. These are the ten plays attributed to Euripides that have survived through the select edition:

• Alkestis
• Medeia
• Hippolytos
• Andromache
• Hekabe
• The Trojan Women
• The Phoinikian Women
• Orestes
• The Bakkhai
• Rhesos

Notice that all Euripides’s most beloved plays are on this list: Alkestis, Medeia, Hippolytos, The Trojan Women, and The Bakkhai. Now here is the list of all the plays that survived from alphabetical collection:

• The Children of Herakles
• The Suppliants
• Elektra
• Herakles
• Iphigeneia in Tauris
• Ion
• Helene
• Iphigeneia at Aulis
• Kyklops

Now, be honest: Did you even know these plays existed before I listed them here? Did you know Euripides even wrote a play called The Children of Herakles?

The point I’m trying to really hammer home here is that all the surviving plays of Aischylos and Sophokles and just over half of the surviving plays of Euripides have survived precisely because they were deemed the greatest of all those authors’ works. It’s actually the less popular plays that haven’t survived. This doesn’t mean that we haven’t lost any really great plays, but it does mean that the plays we have aren’t just random; they’re works that, for the most part, were deliberately selected to be copied because people liked them better than the others.

In other words, to borrow Sagan’s Shakespeare comparison, the situation with the great tragedians is more comparable to what it would be like if the only surviving works of Shakespeare were Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest.

Sure, if that was all that survived, you would miss out on some popular plays that were just not quite popular enough to make the canon like Richard III, The Twelfth Night, and As You Like It, some underappreciated plays like Timon of Athens, The Winter’s Tale, and Troilus and Cressida, and some widely hated plays like The Taming of the Shrew, but you’d have all the most popular, canonical plays. Oedipus Rex has survived precisely because it was seen as Sophokles’s greatest work—his Hamlet, if you will.

ABOVE: Painting of the famous scene with the gravediggers from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, painted in 1839 by the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix. Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet is the one that is least likely to be lost in the immediate future, since it is usually seen as the greatest and people would go to the greatest efforts to preserve it.

People destroying stuff

Carl Sagan signs off with the following words:

“History is full of people who, out of fear or ignorance or the lust for power have destroyed treasures of immeasurable value which truly belong to all of us. We must not let it happen again.”

The false assumption here is that, if something is ever destroyed, it must automatically be someone’s fault. The reality, though, is that knowledge is constantly being destroyed just by nature. That’s just the way the universe works. If you leave a book lying in a garage or in an attic somewhere, it will rapidly deteriorate. After only a few decades or so of just sitting in that kind of environment, the book will be unreadable. You’d think that a great scientist like Carl Sagan would recognize the second law of thermodynamics at work here.

Other resources

This whole article I have written has been exclusively focused on debunking the false claims made in one single twenty-two-and-a-half minute segment of one episode of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Unfortunately, Sagan makes other errors in other segments from his series that I haven’t even mentioned here.

Cosmos has had such a massive role in promoting misconceptions about ancient history that Peter Gainsford, a professor of the classics at Victoria University of Wellington, has actually written a series of blog posts commenting on and correcting various errors the series makes on the subject:

• “Cosmos #1. Erastosthenes”
• “Cosmos #2. The Ionians (and others)”
• “Cosmos #3. Hypatia and the library” (covering the same material as this article, albeit not in as much depth)

You know your series has some problems when you have an expert on the subject you talk about taking the time to write not one, not two, but three lengthy articles debunking everything you say.

If you want to know more about the actual history of Hypatia, the Library of Alexandria, and intellectual life in Alexandria in late antiquity, I highly recommend the book City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria, written by the eminent classical historian Edward J. Watts, published in 2006 by the University of California Press. It’s an excellent, well-researched book and Watts is a very readable author whose more recent books have actually met with popular acclaim.

ABOVE: The unfortunately rather nondescript cover of Edward J. Watts’s book City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria

A much larger problem

I think it is fine if not all scientists are historical experts. The problem, though, is that our society has so much respect for scientists that people assume that anything a famous scientist says must be true. They think, “Well, Carl Sagan says this is true and Carl Sagan is a very brilliant scientist, so, clearly, it must be true.” People are far more willing to trust what scientists say about history than what actual historians say about history.

Carl Sagan is far from the only respected scientist who has publicly made wrong statements about history. Another example of such an individual is Neil deGrasse Tyson. Ironically, Neil deGrasse Tyson has complained in the past about he thinks how humanities scholars don’t know enough about science and boasted that he thinks most scientists know vastly more about the humanities than humanities scholars know about science. Here’s a clip of him from 2010 complaining about how humanities scholars don’t know science. Here’s a transcript of what he says:

“I can tell you, for what it’s worth, that scientists, by and large, are actually quite knowledgeable in areas outside of science. If you go to any of the homes of most scientists, there’ll be Bach and Beethoven and Shakespeare on the shelves. [someone in audience shouts “Woo!”] And they might not know as much as the ‘literary scholar,’ but one thing that I think we as a nation we should be embarrassed by is that the scientists—you can do this experiment yourself, I’ve done this experiment—the scientists, by and large, know more liberal arts than the science that is known by liberal artists. [someone in audience shouts “Yes!”] And that needs to change.”

“If you go to a science cocktail party and someone talks about Shakespeare, no one’s gonna say, ‘Oh, I was never good at Shakespeare. I was terrible at nouns and verbs!’ No. You’ll never hear that. But you can go to a liberal arts party and artists’ parties and someone starts talking about math and someone says, “Oh, I was never good at math! I hated math!” [giggling in the audience] And they all chuckle. And they all agree! [more giggling in the audience] And they all, like, sip the next sip of champagne and go on talking about the art! And that’s somehow ok. No! That’s not ok! You don’t have to be a scientist, but at least understand what’s going on…”

Tyson himself, however, has gotten facts about history wildly wrong on many occasions. Without going into his reboot of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos in which he repeats many of the exact same claims that I have just debunked, Tyson has also claimed things such as that people in the Middle Ages thought the Earth was flat.

In 2016, Tyson got into a Twitter argument with a rapper by the pseudonym B.o.B. who thinks the world is flat. Obviously, Tyson was right and B.o.B. was wrong, but, in the course of the argument, Tyson called B.o.B. “five centuries regressed in [his] thinking.” When someone commented that knowledge of the sphericity of the Earth goes way back before five hundred years ago, Tyson replied that the knowledge that the Earth is spherical was “lost to the Dark Ages.”

Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a very intelligent man and he certainly knows far more about astrophysics than I ever will, but he still makes errors about history that I could have easily pointed out when I was in middle school. (Just for those who aren’t completely on board with the idea of people in the Middle Ages knowing the Earth was a sphere, here’s an article I wrote in which I specifically debunk the misconception that educated people in the Middle Ages thought the Earth was flat.)

Again, I’m not doing this to pick on Carl Sagan or Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I don’t have a vendettas against either of them. In fact, I actually have great admiration for them both because of their efforts to promote science and science education. I’m doing this to illustrate the problem that so many brilliant scientists think they know a lot more about subjects that are outside their area of expertise than they really do.

Scientists need to use their reputations more responsibly. They shouldn’t make statements about history in books or documentary films unless they have checked the information with multiple historians specializing in the area of history they are talking about to make absolutely sure all their information is correct. If scientists can’t get history right, they shouldn’t make public pronouncements about history at all.

I will freely admit that I am not an expert on astrophysics, but that’s why I’m not writing articles or making documentaries about astrophysics. I wish famous scientists had the wisdom and humility to realize that they aren’t historical experts themselves and to consult actual historical experts rather than just going with whatever they think sounds right.

At the same time, I feel like, in some sense, we need celebrity historians. We have plenty of celebrity scientists, but historians don’t get nearly as much attention. I think Mary Beard is perhaps the closest thing that exists nowadays to a celebrity historian, but there is no one with her level of popularity in the United States.

I think that this glaring absence of recognizable historians in the public eye may be part of the problem. And I think this is a problem that ought to be resolved, since history has just as much impact on people’s lives and decisions as any science—probably more impact in some cases, since the entire world we live in is the result of all the past events that led us here. Nothing that exists in the world today is not the product of history.