Authors and their public in ancient times

by George Haven Putnam

As the rivalry which continued for some time between the Ptolemies and the Attali in the collecting of libraries caused the price of books in Athens to remain high, a further result was the establishing of other centres of book-production, of which for a long time the island of Rhodes was the most important. By about 250 B.C., the literary activity of the Alexandrian scholars, encouraged by Ptolemy Philadelphus, to whom the founding of the great library was probably due, caused Alexandria to become one of the great book-marts of the world.

After the first conquest of Greece by the Romans had been practically completed by the capture of Corinth in 146 B.C., there appears to have been a revival in Athens of the trade in books, owing to the increased demand from the scholars of Rome, where Greek was accepted as the language of refined literature and where Greek authors were diligently studied. Lucullus is said by Plutarch[105] to have brought from Rome (about 66 B.C.) many books gathered as booty from the cities of Asia Minor, and many more which he had purchased in Athens, together with a great collection of statues and paintings.

The great hall or library in which his collections were stored became the resort of the scholarly and cultivated society of the city, and its treasures of art and literature were, according to Plutarch, freely placed at the disposal of any visitors fitted to appreciate them. Sulla, without claiming to be a scholar, was also a collector of Greek books. He secured in Athens the great library of Apellicon of Teos, which included the writings of Aristotle and of Theophrastus. Apellicon, who died in Athens in the year 84 B.C., had a mania for collecting books, and was reputed to be by no means scrupulous as to the means by which he acquired them. If he saw a rare work which he could not purchase, he would, if possible, steal it; and once he was near losing his life in Athens in being detected in such a theft. His Aristotle manuscripts, which were said to be the work of the philosopher’s own hand, had been found in a cave at Troas where they had suffered greatly from worms and dampness.[106] After the manuscripts reached Rome they were transcribed by Tyrannion the grammarian. He sent copies to Andronicus of Rhodes, which became the basis of that philosopher’s edition of Aristotle’s works.[107] Pomponius Atticus utilized his sojourn in Athens (in 83 B.C.) not only to familiarize himself with the great works of Greek literature, but to cause to be made a number of copies of some of the more popular of these, which copies he afterwards sold in Rome “to great advantage.”[108]

There is a reference in Pliny to a miniature copy of the Iliad prepared about this time, which was so diminutive that it could be contained in a nutshell. He speaks of it as Ilias in nuce. Pliny refers to Cicero as his authority for the existence of this manuscript, in which he is interested principally as an evidence of the possibilities of human eyesight. Its interest in connection with our subject is of course as an example of the perfection which had been attained in the first century before Christ in the art of book production.[109]

Notwithstanding the stimulus given to the production of manuscripts by the increasing demand for these in Italy, books continued to be dear, even through the greater part of the first century. The men of Ephesus who were induced under the teachings of Paul to burn their books concerning “curious arts” counted the price of them and found it to be fifty thousand pieces of silver.

The history of Greek literature presents few other instances of the destruction of books, whether for the sake of conscience or for the good of the community, or under the authority of the state. There are, however, occasional references to the exercise on the part of the rulers of a supervision of the literature of the people on the ground of protecting their morals or religion. Probably the earliest instances in history of the prosecution of a book on the ground of its pernicious doctrines is that of the confiscation, in Athens, of the writings of Protagoras, which were in 411 B.C. condemned as heretical.

All owners of copies of the condemned writings were warned by heralds to deliver the same at the Agora, and search was made among the private houses of those believed to be interested in the heretical doctrines. The copies secured were then burned in the Agora. Diogenes Laërtius, by whom the incident is narrated, goes on to say that the destruction was by no means complete, even of the copies in Athens, while no copies outside of Athens were affected.[110] The attempt to suppress the doctrines of the philosopher by means of putting his books on an index expurgatorius was probably as little successful as were similar attempts with the doctrines of other “heretics” in later centuries.

The fact that high prices could be depended upon for copies of standard works ought to have insured a fair measure of accuracy in the manuscript. Complaints, however, appear repeatedly in the writing of the time (i. e., the century before and that succeeding the birth of Christ) of the bad work furnished by the scribes. Much of the copying appears to have been done in haste, and with bad or careless penmanship, so that words of similar sound were interchanged and whole lines omitted or misplaced, and the difficulties of obtaining trustworthy texts of the works of older writers were enormously and needlessly increased. In order to enable a number of copyists to work together from one text, it appears that the original manuscript was often read aloud, the work of the scribes being thus done by ear. This would account for the interchanging of words resembling each other in sound.

Strabo, writing shortly before the birth of Christ, refers to an example of this unsatisfactory kind of bookmaking.

The grammarian Tyrannion, in publishing in company with certain Roman booksellers his edition of the writings of Aristotle, confided the work to scribes, whose copies were never even compared with the original manuscript. And, says Strabo, editions of other important classics, offered for sale in Alexandria and Rome, had been prepared with no more care.[111] The reputation of the manuscripts transcribed at this period in Athens appears to have been but little better. The making, that is to say the duplication and publishing of books, had come to be a trade, and a trade of considerable importance, but the men who first engaged in it appear to have had little professional or literary standard, and not to have realized that profits could be secured from quality of work as well as from quantity, and that for a publisher a reputation for accurate and trustworthy editions could itself be made valuable capital.