Dioscore was actively involved in building up his own library. In addition to works copied by others, we find texts copied by him, including a small anthology of documents (a request by the famous philosopher and grammarian Horapollon and three letters) collected to serve as models. This leads us to question the very notion of the library at the heart of these lectures, downplaying the difference between real books produced by professional copyists and private copies - a difference that the printed book deepened in modern times, but which the digital age is tending to reduce again.
The common denominator of all the books in Dioscore's library is their practicality. This goes without saying for the metrological and verbal tables, the glossary and the rhetorical papyrus. But what about literary works such as the codex of Homer or Menander ? It's likely that they were used as lectures by Dioscorus. But not only : given the strong " literarisation " of prose to which the documents written by Dioscorus bear witness, and which corresponds to a strong trend in the Byzantine period, it is not illegitimate to think that they also and above all served as manuals designed to inculcate the rules of rhetoric and good writing. The echoes of these authors in Dioscorus' poems and in the documents he composed as a notary confirm this analysis, and explain why Dioscorus insisted on possessing these works.
One mystery remains to be clarified : the absence of a copy of the Bible or other Christian books in the library of a man whose faith cannot be doubted (curator of the monastery founded by his father, he probably retired there at the end of his life). It can be explained by the selection made after Dioscore's death. The Aphrodite jar contained only those texts that Dioscorus' heirs did not wish to keep: secular Greek literature was relegated to the jar, certainly deemed obsolete by his wife or descendants, while Christian books, still useful, were kept.
