Accepting that the traditional attribution reveals nothing about the author, can we infer anything about his time of birth, or his origins, or perhaps even his character from the book itself? It must be stated from the outset that a compilation of this kind is of its very nature unlikely to reveal much about its author, and in the present instance some features which might be of help in that regard are lacking. There is no dedication, and there are no incidental allusions to things that the author has seen or experienced. Nor does he make any reference to recent or contemporary events; indeed, the only historical event mentioned by him is the Phocian War (p. 163), which took place in the fourth century BC. It is possible, however, to draw some conclusions about when the Librarymay have been written, and perhaps about the origins of its author.
The reference to Castor (the latest author to be cited) shows that the Librarycould not have been written before the first half of the first century BC. To establish a later limit with equal certainty, it would be necessary to find a reference to the Libraryin another work which could be dated to a sufficiently early period. In practice, however, this approach is unproductive. Although, as was remarked above, the Libraryis cited quite frequently in the scholia and elsewhere, all the relevant sources are either hard to date or were certainly written at a much later period. We must therefore rely on internal criteria. Let us consider first the author’s use of language, which might be expected to provide the most definite indications.
Although the author’s Greek is generally unexceptional, there are features in his vocabulary and idiom which are more characteristic of later Greek. He occasionally uses words in senses which are not attested before the early Christian era, and sometimes the verb forms and minor points of grammar and expression are suggestive of later usage (even if they are not entirely unparalleled in the works of earlier authors). On these stylistic grounds, it is commonly agreed that the Librarywould be best dated to the first or second century AD (although some would place it somewhat earlier or later); and the author’s general attitude and approach is consistent with such a dating. It has been remarked that in contrast to many Hellenistic writers, he is uncritical in his approach to myth. This is not because he accepts all the stories as being literally true, but because his approach is that of an antiquarian, so the question of truth or falsity is no longer relevant. This antiquarian approach, accompanied by a taste for the archaic and picturesque, and the desire to take stock of aspects of the Greek heritage, were characteristic of authors writing under the early empire. One has only to think of Plutarch or Pausanias. In preparing this summa of Greek myth, the present author was writing on a lesser scale in a work that belonged to an inferior genre; but the literature of epitomes and popular handbooks was itself characteristic of the age, and in its way, witnessed to the same tendencies.
To pass from the question of chronology to that of the author’s origins, we must consider whether he shows any special interest in (or disregard for) particular areas of the Mediterranean world. Here a measure of caution is required; in a handbook devoted to the main early myths, there will inevitably be an emphasis on stories associated with the heartland of Greece and the Aegean. None the less, many readers have felt that the author is curiously neglectful of myths relating to Italy and the west; and some have detected a bias to the east. Apollodorus’ account of the life history of Heracles is broadly similar to that in the historical compilation by Diodorus of Sicily. Yet his coverage of Heracles’ adventures in Italy when returning with the cattle of Geryoneus (pp. 80–1) is very scanty when compared with the full account in Diodorus; and he makes no allusion to the tradition that Heracles was supposed to have visited the site of Rome. Indeed, he never mentions Rome or the Romans, and disregards the aspects of Greek mythology which were of most concern to them. Thus he tells how Aeneas escaped from the sack of Troy carrying his father on his back, but we would never gather from the Librarythat there were traditions connecting him with Latium and the origins of Rome. Although a similar attitude can be detected in other authors at that time and the matter raises questions of wider interest, with regard to the specific question of the author’s origins we can surely conclude that it is most unlikely that he came from Italy or the west. Some have tried to draw more positive conclusions, but it is doubtful whether there is sufficient evidence to support them. Robert suggested that the author was an Athenian (like the Hellenistic Apollodorus); but the coverage of Athenian mythology, although quite extensive, is not disproportionate in terms of the place that Athenian myth occupied in the general tradition, and it can hardly be accepted that references to topographical features like the ‘sea’ of Erechtheus (p. 130) are explicable only on grounds of local knowledge. Again, it could be argued that Apollodorus shows a special interest in the east, and it is quite possible that he lived there, but we cannot say more than that.
There is no suggestion in Photius’ review that he regarded the Libraryas an introductory work for schoolchildren or the uneducated, and the citations in the scholia show that in late antiquity at least it was used by scholars as a reference work. We have no corresponding evidence of how it was viewed in earlier times, or whether it was widely used. It may be suspected, however, that readers of much education would have preferred more solid fare, and scholars at that period would surely have found little use for an elementary work of this kind when they could refer to more scholarly and comprehensive handbooks by the Hellenistic mythographers.
A modern reader leafing through the Libraryis likely to gain conflicting impressions about its general level and the kind of audience that the author would have had in mind when writing it. Unlike many of the mythographical works which survive from antiquity, this is not a specialist study, and the author is happy to recount the most familiar stories; and most of them are summarized quite briefly. If the Libraryis used merely as a mythological dictionary and consulted for the stories associated with the main heroes, the reader may feel that it is very elementary, containing little that any moderately educated ancient reader would not have known already. Thus the story of Perseus is summarized in three pages, that of Oedipus in about a page, and the plot of Sophocles’ Antigonein two sentences. Many have concluded that the Librarywas written as a primer for schoolchildren, or perhaps for semi-Hellenized adults in the eastern reaches of the Roman empire; such a view has been held by scholars whose opinion is worthy of respect (and some have advanced specific arguments in its favour, suggesting, for instance, that certain stories have been bowdlerized for a youthful audience).
On the other hand, if the Libraryis read consecutively, the reader may feel that it is not as elementary as all that. Within its brief confines it contains a remarkable quantity of information, and much that a reader with a fairly comprehensive knowledge of Greek mythology would not expect to hold in mind. Perhaps the work was intended not as a primer, but as an epitome of mythical history for a general if unsophisticated readership. As we have already observed, there was an extensive literature of this kind in the Roman period, and the part that popular handbooks and epitomes played in transmitting many aspects of Hellenic culture to a broad public should not be underestimated. For their knowledge of philosophy, for instance, many Greeks of that period would have relied on handbooks summarizing the opinions of the different schools on each of the standard questions. Works of such a kind may have been aimed at a relatively uncultivated audience, but they were not written specifically for use in schools.