The Bibliotheca has been called "the most valuable mythographical work which has passed down from ancient times.". An epigram recorded by the important intellectual Patriarch Photius I of Constantinople expressed its purpose:Victim of its own suggestions, the epigraph, ironically, does not survive in the manuscripts. For the classic examples of epitomes and encyclopedias substituting in Christian hands for the literature of Classical Antiquity itself, see Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae and Martianus Capella.
