Whatever the cause, virtually every scroll in the library was destroyed. In Greek drama alone, the losses were devastating: 83 of Aeschylus’s 90 plays were lost, along with 62 of Euripides’s 80, and 113 of Sophocles’s 120. Some books, though, including those backstreet bootleg copies, found their way into collections in Greece, the Levant, and especially Constantinople. Today, the editions pirated by booksellers account for a high proportion of the surviving texts from Alexandria.
