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Books in the Hellenic and Roman Worlds

Until the 2^nd century C.E., the majority of reading material available in bookshops and libraries was in the form of rolls, i.e.twenty sheets of papyrus joined together with a flour paste. The size of a «sheet» of papyrus varied, the heighth being determined by that of the stalk of the papyrus plant used, anywhere from 30 to 40 cm. Width depended on the manufacturer or on the request of the buyer ; anything from 11 to 24 cm. Writing was done on one side only, and the book was rolled with the writing facing inside. There were also different qualities of papyrus : dark, light, unpolished, smooth, first-class, second-class, third-class, etc.

The ink used was usually of lampblack in water, and the pens were sharpened reeds split at the tip like modern fountain pens. Writing was confided to scribes, who wrote parallel columns. Rolls and columns were read from left to right, the left hand rolling what was written/read, the right hand unrolling. Another variable entered here : calligraphy. A «quick» edition with quickly scrawled letters cost less than an elegant edition on expensive paper and drawn and eventually illuminated by with more careful script.

Letters and short notes were written on fragments of a roll, or even on the back of a discarded piece of papyrus. Whole works - a Greek play - could fit a single roll ; longer works like Thucydides’s history required several. Multiple-roll works were kept together in a basket. Leather or wooden cases were later made to make an elegant case to hold single rolls. Wealthy Romans ordered cases decorated with precious stones or made from rare exotic and fragrant wood. The books found in the grottos of Qûmran in Palestine were rolls of papyrus wrapped in linen, stored in stone jars.

Lengthy works were divided into sections that the ancients called «books» rather than chapters. Herodotus’s history, for example, is divided into nine books. The length of a book varied according to content.

Bookshops are known to have existed in Athens at the end of the fifth century B.C.E. This scriptorium was a place where one or more scribes copied out texts or wrote letters for illiterate clients. The texts available depended either on the head scribe or the buyer. Authors usually had no say in the matter ; the concept of intellectual property was inexistent. Books were usually «mass produced» : one person read from an existing roll while two, three, four or more scribes wrote down what they heard. Popular works were «published» more often than the less popular. If someone wanted to buy a copy of an obscure work, he would first have to find someone who already owned a copy and who would surrender it to be copied.

Availability and length also determined the price of a book. Socrates remarks that the works of the philosopher Anaxagoras could be bought for a drachma at most, with the implication that it was a bargain, a short or second-hand (read undesirable) roll. In Socrates’s day, a drachma was the average pay for a day’s work.

Those who could afford it were soon putting together personal libraries, collections of their favourite books ; they could then entertain dinner guests by giving a reading from a variety of works for the pleasure of debate, critique and learning. This private luxury was eventually converted into a major event in human history when one private citizen in particular, Ptolemy I Soter of Alexandria, decided to create the Mouseion, and his successor the Great Library of Alexandria, the definitive library of the world, to house at least one copy of every book known to humankind in any language, open to the literate public, with a staff of erudite servants to facilitate learning from books (the great libraries of the Kings of Assyria, Tiglath-Pileser I, 1115-1077 and Ashurbanipal, 668-627 B.C.E., on the other hand, were compiled for their own personal use). In a sense, the notion of the public library was the child of the Lagide dynasty. It was also especially for the Library at Alexandria that two new sciences were invented : the science of organising a library, invented by Callimachus of Cyrene, and the science of authentifying editions. Deceit had long been a plague in the world of books, with unscrupulous merchants who wished to make quick profits from popular works printing «false editions» : incomplete or even entirely fictitious editions. Zenodotus of Ephesus, the first Director of the Library of Alexandria, established the authoritative text of Homeric poems. He also invented the method of cataloguing books in alphabetical order according to the author’s name. But it was Callimachus who compiled the Tables of Persons Eminent in Every Branch of Learning together with a List of Their Writings - the Pinakes for short. That is, he further classified the works not only by author but by content, distinguishing between prose and poetry for a start. These were then subdivided : prose into works of philosophers, of orators, of medicine, of history, and even the «miscellany» (where he placed cookbooks, for example).

The Great Library disappeared in flames through the irresponsibility of Julius Caesar. On the other hand, credit is due to the Romans for making reading easier thanks to the codex, that is, putting pieces of papyrus together not in rolls but similarly to the way clay or wooden tablets had once been attached. Sheets of papyri were placed one on top of another, folded in half, pierced in the crease and attached by passing a cord through the holes. Scribes could thus begin writing on both sides of the sheet, effectively reducing the size of the book and its cost. The same method was also applied to parchment (membranae) which was made from animal skins. The word parchment comes from Pergamon, the city in Asia Minor credited with turning to animal skins for writing as a way to emancipate itself from the Ptolemies’s virtual monopoly on papyrus production. However, papyrus was for centuries the preferred material for books. Among the hundreds of books found in the sands of Egypt, over 70 percent are made of papyrus. Of the ones made of parchment, only 1.5 percent can be dated to the first and second centuries C.E., 17 percent to the third, 50 percent to the start of the fourth century.

Finally, the codex also altered the physics of bookselling and book collecting. Rolls were often stacked one on top of another in pyramidical piles. Extracting one or more from the bottom of a pile caused havoc or, worse, the misplacement of parts of a stack. Codices were arranged in more manageable piles, and it was much easier to maintain the order of books in any given pile. Furthermore, even when labels were attached, the veracity of a label on a scroll could only be tested by unrolling the book. With a codex, one had only to flip to the title page, as today.

Source : Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World, Yale Univ. Press, New Haven, 2001.

Mauricius Fabius

Books in the Hellenic and Roman Worlds

Incense in the Ancient World
Who Is My Brother ? The Greek Myths of Castor and Pollux
What Did They Do For Saturnalia ?
Penelope, Plato and Juno Pronuba : Consolidating Society with Cloth
A Pyramid in Rome : Caius Cestius’s Tomb
Was Apollo Lovable ? Love, Theology and Divine Beauty
The Temple of Castor and Pollux in Seleucia Pieria -
An Historical Notice
Travels Through Sabine Lands