A Companion to the History of the Book (17 page)

The earliest examples of surviving Greek books come from the fourth century bc. As in inscriptions, word division and accents and breathings on the Greek letters are unknown. The scribes wrote their majuscule letters one after another without any indication of where they saw the end of a word and the beginning of the next. All the signs that facilitate the reading of Greek texts for us, such as word division and accents, are, in the form in which we use them, inventions of the Byzantine period.

Two copies rival each other as the oldest extant Greek book. The Derveni papyrus, a roll discovered in carbonized state in a tomb in northern Greece, contains a difficult text which may be by the poet and sophist Diagoras of Melos (Janko 2002: 1–62). Another book roll, with the poem “The Persians” by Timotheus, was excavated near Saqqara in Egypt. Both the Derveni papyrus and the Timotheus papyrus are fragments; we do not know how long the rolls were in their original state. Nor do we know who copied them, or how they found their way to the people who owned them.

The forms of the letters used in these books, and the archaeological context of each, date both rolls clearly to the middle or the second half of the fourth century bc. Both carry a text distributed over columns, although the Timotheus papyrus does not distinguish the verses of the poem. The width of the columns was, it seems, dictated only by a sense for how wide a column should be. Both books show so-called
paragraphoi
, little strokes on the left edge of the column to indicate a new section of the text. The Timotheus papyrus also has a wonderful
koronis
(“crow”), a little bird-shaped mark to indicate the end of a main section of the poem. What we see here for the first time was to become standard in the following centuries; the
paragraphos
is also used to indicate a change of speaker in copies of the great tragedians.

From the period after the fourth century bc, we have a large number of papyrus rolls excavated in Egypt (good pictures of extensive examples can be found in Johnson 2004: plates 6–9 and 14–18). The dry climate of that country preserved organic material that would have decayed almost anywhere else in the Mediterranean. After Alexander the Great occupied Egypt in 332 bc, the language of the upper class and the administration was Greek.

The library in Alexandria (see below) housed copies of all the works of the Greek authors, and scholars were busy in that library and in the museum at Alexandria establishing the best texts, by which they meant the text closest to the author’s original manuscript. The foundation of the library and the museum in Alexandria in the first half of the third century bc, and the work carried out there, had a visible impact on the texts that were copied onto rolls; that is, on the product we call “the book.” From the third century bc onwards, poems are copied
kata stichon
, i.e. verse by verse, for the work of the scholars in Alexandria had made readers aware of metrical patterns. From the second century bc, basic systems of accentuation were tried out to facilitate the reading of difficult dialect words. For instance, signs for long and short syllables found their way into copies that were obviously produced for scholarly use.

Prose was written in shorter lines of between 4.5 and 6 cm, usually half a hexameter in length. The scribes adjusted the right margin, sometimes even inserting little line fillers if rules of syllable division did not allow a straight right margin. Scribes were paid according to the number of lines they had copied, a hexameter line becoming the standard pattern, a prose line counting half of the full line. Stichometric signs, little dots on the left margin, facilitated the calculation of the scribe’s work.

The book market in antiquity was fundamentally different from our modern book trade in two aspects. First, because only a small percentage of the population was able to read and write, the market was restricted to an educated and elite few. Secondly, because the production of a book depended on the skill of a scribe who had to copy the text by hand, the copying process required a master copy from which the scribe could copy his text. This master copy could be provided by the person who wanted the text to be copied for his use or by someone who wanted the text to be copied for sale or at least for distribution. Master copies could come from the private library of a friend or, in the first century ad and after, from a public library.

In the Greek world, the tyrant Peisistratus of Athens (c.600–527
BC
) is said to have been the first founder of a library, but whether his library had the status of a public library is questionable. The idea that a library should provide the opportunity for study of the texts and a means to discover the original words of the authors, even those who had lived long before, first became manifest in the library of Alexandria. This, the most famous library in antiquity, was the workplace of the scholars of the museum, with nearly half a million book rolls. The library at Alexandria was a development of the idea of a book collection that originated in the philosophical school of Aristotle at Athens, the Peripatos. Here, the aim of study had been directed toward the universal knowledge of all the visible phenomena in the world. At Alexandria, alongside medicine and geography, the texts of the Greek authors, too, became a main subject of study.

All the texts of the Greek authors were collected, and the Ptolemaic kings were keen to acquire the best available copies. In the middle of the third century bc, Callimachus, the poet, was employed here, organizing the material and carrying on scholarly work at the same time. The knowledge Callimachus gained through his study of the works of the great poets offered him topics and phraseologies for a poetry, the characteristic feature of which is how it remodels the knowledge of the past into new forms. Callimachus’ so-called
Pinakes
, in which the works of the authors were organized in alphabetical order, was the first ever library catalogue.

Yet another kind of library arose in the Hellenistic period, when they seem to have become the status symbols of monarchs. The foundation of the library at Pergamum in the second century bc can be understood as a conscious act of the king, who wished to found an institution which would rival the library at Alexandria. When Aemilius Paullus dragged the Macedonian king Perseus in triumph through the streets of Rome after defeating him at Pydna in 168 bc, the king’s library was carried as one of the most precious items of booty. At the same time, gymnasia in the cities all around the Mediterranean installed book collections as places of cultural identification in towns and cities where the majority of inhabitants were not Greeks, but Syrians, Egyptians, or Carians. Like knowledge of the verses of Homer, a collection of books in the Greek language provided a means for cultural identification – and status. In the library of the gymnasium at Taormina in Sicily, a book catalogue has been found written on pieces of plaster which come most likely from a
stoa
of the gymnasium. In most libraries of this period, niches and cupboards provided places for the book rolls. A relief from Neumagen on the Mosel (now lost) gives a vivid picture of a book case from the Roman period. The
sillyboi
on these rolls had a triangular shape.

These libraries could be called public in the sense that all the members of the gymnasia certainly had access to the books housed there. Private individuals also became interested in using the foundation of a library as a monument of their generosity, offering to share their collections with other interested individuals. The first public library in Rome was planned by Julius Caesar, who wished to install the polymath Varro as the purchaser of books and organizer of the institution, a choice that meant Roman literature would have prevailed here. Celsus, a rich man in Ephesus, founded a library in which he also wanted to be buried. The library had become not only a public space but also a sacred place.

Antiquity had no publishers in our modern sense. T. Pomponius Atticus, who is sometimes called Cicero’s “publisher,” provided a wide distribution of the works of his friend Cicero in Greece by having his slaves copy it many times and passing the copies on to other friends, this being intended more as a gesture of friendship than as a form of commercial activity. There were bookshops whose owners had to provide copies to sell by keeping slaves who copied the texts onto new rolls. It is most likely that it was the booksellers who were the focus of the distribution of books, as well as private circles of interested scholars. This kind of publication caused no problems because of the lack of any copyright. Very specialized titles, however, were certainly not available in bookshops. Also, a man like Cicero collected books for his libraries (which contained both Greek and Latin works) from friends or through the mediation of friends as well as from bookshops, even if he deplored the low quality of the Latin texts offered in the bookshops of Rome (
Ad Quintum fratrem
iii. 5, 6). In the later first century ad, Martial advises the potential buyers of his books to go to the bookshop of Secundus, a freedman of an educated citizen, which was located behind the Temple of Peace.

It seems that booksellers also traveled to smaller places where they had clients. In a papyrus letter from the second century ad found in the Fayum, the great oasis southwest of modern Cairo, we hear from a certain Julius Placidus who writes to his father about the traveling bookseller Deius (
P
.
Petaus
30): “Deius came to us and showed six parchments, of which I did not buy any. However, I collated eight other ones for which I have paid 100 Drachmai.” Besides the fact that the mention of parchments is noteworthy at this early date, it is striking that Julius Placidus, without doubt a member of the upper class with a full Roman name, collated texts from the copies of a bookseller. This means that he compared the texts the bookseller provided with texts already in his possession. In this way, he tried to establish the best text in the tradition of the great scholars in Alexandria. The bookseller acted as a traveling library for scholars who did not have constant access to the main collections.

Another papyrus from the second century ad shows how scholars procured from their friends the copies they needed for their work.
P
.
Oxy
. 2192 is a private letter in which an obviously very literate person asks a friend in Alexandria to send him copies of a work on “Characters in comedy,” of which there is a copy in the library of another mutual friend. The letter was returned with the answer that the bookseller Demetrius had the required copy, so that the book would not have to be copied anew. The names of the friends involved in this circle of highly educated readers and writers include some whose work was famous in antiquity, such as Harpokration who compiled a lexicon on the works of the ten great Attic orators. The papyrus letter was written at Oxyrhynchus, where members of this circle owned houses and land. As for Cicero, the procurement of books was a highly private matter, depending on the circles of friends and booksellers who were available.

Since our evidence of real books from the Greek or Roman areas is so limited, it is difficult to give a coherent picture of what was copied, sold, or exchanged and what was read around the Mediterranean. Egyptian papyri provide a welcome source for statistics. Naturally, this evidence depends largely on where excavations have taken place, and which layers of an abandoned settlement have been searched. But the overall evidence from excavated pieces is corroborated from what we know from literary sources that describe reading and educational practices. The author most frequently read was Homer. He was studied in schools, and to know parts of the Homeric epics by heart was considered essential to the education of a respectable man. Books and their contents were indications of belonging to the higher social and economic ranks in societies in which only a few could read and write. Homer was the greatest author, and the
Iliad
the noblest work of literature. The over one thousand fragments of papyrus rolls from Egypt with Homeric texts vary widely in quality. There are luxury copies in wonderful book hands with wide spaces between the columns on the one hand and, on the other, verses whose clumsy writing betrays the hand of an inexperienced scribe.

The texts read in schools determined the taste and reading habits of adults. After Homer, most literary papyri are fragments of books containing the tragedies of Euripides and the speeches of Demosthenes, both authors being part of the educational curriculum. For these authors, too, the quality of books varies greatly. The place in Egypt where most of these book fragments were excavated is Oxyrhynchus in Middle Egypt, about 220 kilometers south of modern Cairo. This provincial capital was not very important in the Ptolemaic period, but became a flourishing center of Hellenized life in the Roman period, counting numerous highly educated people among its inhabitants. It is the libraries of these people that were excavated from the end of the nineteenth century by the British scholars B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt. So far, no public library has been identified in Oxyrhynchus, but we see that time and again it is the same scribes who copied the texts on papyrus rolls in Oxyrhynchus, most of whom copied prose texts as well as poetry (Johnson 2004: 16–37 ) .

Oxyrhynchus may count as a typical Hellenized city where writing and reading was part of the daily life of a higher percentage of inhabitants than in rural areas and less Hellenized towns. What we find here may be comparable to the situation in cities like Ephesus, Pergamum, and Corinth in other parts of the Roman Empire, where public libraries existed and have been excavated, the most famous example being the library of Celsus in Ephesus. Here, inhabitants who regarded themselves as educated and aimed at belonging to a certain class, were reading Homer, the tragedians, and the orators. They were made acquainted with these texts while attending the gymnasium, and a thorough knowledge of them became a form of social distinction. The many representations of individuals holding papyrus rolls on tombstones and frescoes from around the Mediterranean show the importance of the book as a marker of education and class. In such contexts, the content of the book is not important; its outer form alone is enough to imply social status. Books had indeed become a status symbol.