Authors and their public in ancient times

by George Haven Putnam

“Are you troubled with the fear that your hearers lack the intelligence to appreciate the fine points of your analyses? Let such fear vanish, for there can be no lack of understanding with these hearers. Some of them are men of experience in campaigns; others are in the habit of instructing themselves from books, and have come to the performance each furnished with a scroll with which to freshen his memory, while each also is fully armed with mother-wit. Have no fear therefore. They will have full understanding of all that you may wish to discuss before them.”

Müller proceeds to make an analysis of the purport of the references in this passage, pointing out that the experience of old campaigners would help them to the appreciation of the robust and stirring compositions of Æschylus, while the scholarly habits of the lovers of books would keep them in close sympathy with the complex intellectual problems considered by Euripides.

The sharper edge of the comparison is directed against Euripides, who is always referred to by Aristophanes as a book-worm. Müller further contends that the references to each hearer being “provided with his little book” (or book of the play) must be understood as merely a piece of humorous exaggeration, as during the last years of the Peloponnesian war, when the resources of Athens had been seriously diminished, when poverty was general, and men’s minds were agitated with the excitement of the campaign, few people could have had the money for the buying, or the leisure for the reading, of books.

Athenæus concludes, from a fragment of the comedy writer Alexis (a contemporary of Alexander), that it was not until the time of Alexander that the reading of books played any important part in the intellectual life of the Greeks.[73] In the comedy of Prodicus, entitled The Choice of Hercules, portions of which have been preserved in the Memorabilia of Xenophon, Linus, the instructor of Hercules, is represented as directing his pupil to select for his reading one out of a number of books which are lying before him. Among the authors whose works are specified in the list are Orpheus, Hesiod, Homer, Chœrilus, and Epicharmus. (The last named is the first Greek writer of comedy of whom we have any trustworthy account. His first work was produced about 500 B.C.)[74] Hercules, passing by the poetry, seizes a volume on cookery, the work of an actor named Simos, who was also famous as a cook.[75]

Artemon, a grammarian of Cassandria in Macedonia, who wrote shortly after the death of Aristotle and who made a collection of the letters of Aristotle, published a dissertation on the collecting and the use of books, which gives ground for the impression that in his time there was already in Macedonia or Northern Greece a circle of bibliophilists, ready to give attention to the counsels of this forerunner of Dibdin, and possibly able also to pay for the books.

A piece of evidence against the contention that the price of books was high in the time of Plato, is supplied, according to certain commentators, by Plato himself. From a paragraph in the Apology Boeckh[76] understands that some kind of book-trade must have been carried on in the orchestra of the theatre (during the time, of course, when no performance was going on), and that the writings of Anaxagoras were offered for sale for one drachme; and Buchsenschutz[77] takes the same view of Plato’s reference. The words used by Plato are put into the mouth of Socrates, who is represented as contending; first, that the opinions for the utterance of which he has been charged with heresy or impiety, are in substance the same as those already given to the world by Anaxagoras and others; second, that these views have been so widely published that they have become public property, for the quoting of which no single person can properly be held responsible; and thirdly, that they can be obtained in the theatre for a drachme. The particular writings of Anaxagoras to which Socrates here refers, contain his theories concerning the nature of the sun, the moon, the earth, and the creating power of divinity. Schmitz is, however, inclined to believe not that the books containing these doctrines could be purchased in the theatre, but that the theories of Anaxagoras were at the time freely quoted in the popular dramas (such as those of Euripides), and that it was in listening to these plays in the theatre that the public could without difficulty obtain a knowledge of the new views.[78]

The usual price of admission to the Athenian theatres was, in the time of Pericles, two oboli, or about six cents, but on special holidays, when the performance continued three days, this price was often raised to a drachme, or eighteen cents.[79] In the absence of any other references to this supposed practice of turning orchestra stalls into book-stalls, the weight of probability appears to favor the conclusions of Schmitz rather than those of Boeckh.

Schmitz admits that it is not practicable to find in the existing dramas of Euripides examples of such presentation of the Anaxagorian theories of the universe, but he points out that a large portion of the writings of this author was undoubtedly lost in the destruction of the great war, and that this same war prevented any wide distribution of the authenticated copies, although many of the tragedies were so popular that the songs from them were sung throughout the land. By the end of the war the fame of the tragedies had reached Sicily, although very few of the manuscripts could yet have got across the sea. After the defeat of the Athenians before Syracuse, some of those who had been captured or who, escaping from the Syracusans, had wandered over the island, found a temporary livelihood or even purchased their freedom by reciting the plays of Euripides, and on their return to Athens they took occasion to express to the poet their gratitude for the timely service rendered by his genius.[80]

To the coast cities of Asia Minor, as well as throughout the Greek colonies of the Mediterranean, had come the fame of the new tragedian, although here also copies of the plays themselves appear to have been very scarce. Plutarch relates[80] that the inhabitants of Caunus (a city of Caria), when besought for shelter by an Athenian vessel chased by pirates, wanted first to know whether the Athenians could recite for them the songs of Euripides.[81] It is to be hoped that the Caunusians did not insist upon being paid in advance, and upon having the recitations made before they permitted the hard-pressed vessel to gain the shelter of the harbor. In all places and among all classes where Greek was the language, the songs of Euripides appear to have secured an immediate popularity, while by the scholars also was given an appreciation no less cordial. Both Plato[82] and Aristotle[83] ranked Euripides above Sophocles and Æschylus.

Alexander the Great entertained the guests at his banquets by reciting long passages from Euripides.[84] Throughout Greece these tragedies appear for many years to have been the compositions most frequently selected for public readings. Lucian relates[85] that the Cynic Demetrius, who lived in Corinth in the first century, and whom Seneca refers to as a new friend, heard an “uneducated man” read before an audience The Bacchantes of Euripides. As the reader came to the lines in which the messenger announces the “terrible deed” of Agave and the fearful fate of Pentheus, Demetrius snatched the book from his hands with the words: “It is better for poor Pentheus to be murdered by me than by you.” The point of interest for Lucian (who wrote about 150 A.D.) was the play on the term “murdered,” and for us the example of the practice, in the first century, of the public reading of standard literature, so general that an audience (rather than not to hear the composition) would listen even to an “ignorant reader.”