Gli scribi del tiranno, i librai del demos

According to various sources, Peisistratus was the first to have made a public collection of books at athens. it seems likely, how- ever, that such a βιβλιοθήκη was the product of a curious misunderstanding: in archaic athens, βιβλιοθήκη wasn’t yet ‘the library’, but simply the box (θήκη) containing books (βιβλίων). the question is also related to the first athenian ‘edition’ of homer. several testimonia suggest that Peisistratus was the first to order the previously “confused” books of homer. removing additions and variants introduced by rhapsodes, Peisistratus and his son hipparchus, the wisest of the Pei- sistratids, produced an official athenocentric ‘edition’ of homer. it is noteworthy that Plutarch refers to an addition of a line into the odyssey “to gratify the athenians”. all this might suggest that tyrant himself was the sole textual ‘editor’ of a ‘new’ literary product (Iliad and odyssey) per- formed at the Panathenaic festival. as helpers in the transcription of this book collection, Peisis- tratus and hipparchus had surely a group of professional (ionian?) scribes (βιβλιαγράφοι). although it is probable that they worked only at the service of the tyrants, we can argue that, after the expulsion of hippias from athens, in 510 b.c., they continued activities connected to writing in the spaces close to the orchestra of the agora. this orchestra was the place where Iliad and odyssey were performed at the Panathenaic festival, and in which later books were sold, as socrates says in Plato’s Apology. the possibility that the book collection of the Peisistratids was preserved in the large “house of the colonnade court”, as thompson labelled Building F (which many scholars believe to have been the tyrant’s headquarters), erected close to the orchestra gives a clue to explain the reason of the name βιβλιοθῆκαι attested by Pollux for the book-market in athens.