Bibliotheca (Photius)

The Bibliotheca (Greek: Βιβλιοθήκη) or Myriobiblos (Μυριόβιβλος, "Ten Thousand Books") was a ninth-century work of Byzantine Patriarch of Constantinople Photius, dedicated to his brother and composed of 279 reviews of books which he had read.

[1] Reynolds and Wilson call it "a fascinating production, in which Photius shows himself the inventor of the book-review,"[2] and say its "280 sections... vary in length from a single sentence to several pages".

Some older scholarship had speculated that Bibliotheca might have been composed in Baghdad at the time of Photius' embassy to the Abbasid court, since many of the mentioned works are rarely cited during the period before Photius, i.e. the so-called Byzantine "Dark Ages" (c. 630–800),[3] and since it was known that the Abbasids were interested in translating Greek science and philosophy.

[4] However, modern specialists of the period, such as Paul Lemerle, have pointed out that this cannot be the case, since Photius himself clearly states in his preface and postscript to the Bibliotheca that after he was chosen to take part in the embassy, he sent his brother a summary of the works he had read previously "since the time that I learned how to understand and evaluate literature," i.e. from his youth.

Their interest in Greek texts was confined almost exclusively to science, philosophy and medicine.