Bibliotheca
composition: secureauthorship: secure
A patriarch summarises and judges some two hundred and eighty books he has read, and thereby preserves the only trace of many works that did not survive.
- contents, extracts and critical verdict given for each work read
- the sole surviving evidence for roughly half the books described
- independent stylistic judgement rather than deference to reputation
- reading recorded systematically as an intellectual project
The Bibliotheca gives, for each work, an account of its contents, often extended extracts, and Photios's own verdict on the style and reliability of the author. Roughly half the works he describes are otherwise lost, so his summaries are the sole evidence for large parts of Greek historiography, fiction and theology. The critical judgements are independent and sometimes severe, and the whole is the earliest sustained work of literary criticism to survive from Byzantium.
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