Zenodotus of Ephesus

Zenodotus was the first librarian of Alexandria and the first person to edit Homer. Born at Ephesus around 325 BC, he was a pupil of the poet Philitas of Cos, and was appointed by Ptolemy I or Ptolemy II to run the library attached to the Museum — an institution designed to collect every book in the world, and which by some accounts held several hundred thousand rolls. The problem he faced was that nobody had ever organised a collection on that scale. Texts arrived in multiple copies, in different recensions, wrongly attributed, and sometimes anonymous. His solutions became the foundations of scholarship. He sorted the collection by genre and then alphabetically by author — the first recorded use of alphabetical order as a finding system, applied at first only to the initial letter. He established which works genuinely belonged to which author. His edition of the Iliad and Odyssey was the first attempt at a critical text. He compared manuscripts, divided each poem into twenty-four books, and marked lines he judged spurious with a horizontal stroke in the margin — the obelus, and the beginning of textual criticism as a discipline. His judgements were often made on grounds of taste rather than evidence, and Aristarchus and later scholars criticised him heavily for it, which is how we know what they were. He also compiled a glossary of rare Homeric words. Nothing he wrote survives except in quotations and in the scholia of later commentators. The division of Homer into twenty-four books is his, and every edition since has kept it.

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