Authors and their public in ancient times

by George Haven Putnam

The publishers of Greece appear to have been characterized by modesty, for not one of those who did their work at the time of the greatest prosperity of the book-trade in Greece has left his name on record for posterity. The days were still to come when every book would bear its imprint bringing into lasting association the name of its publisher with that of the author. The Greek publishers appear not to have assumed, like the later Tonson, an ownership in their poets, nor do we, on the other hand, find in the utterances of the poets any expressions corresponding to the famous “My Murray” of Lord Byron. Curtius speaks of a reference in an inscription to the “Ptolemy” or “Ptolemaic” bookstore, but the name of the bookseller is not given. It is only later, when the Greek book-trade was in its decline, that we come across the names of two dealers in books, Callinus and Atticus. They are mentioned as famous during the lifetime of Lucian (about 120 to 200 A.D.), the former for the beauty and the latter for the accuracy of his manuscripts. It is an interesting coincidence that this Callinus, noted for the beauty of his texts, bears the same name as the scribe commended three centuries before by Zeno for the beauty and accuracy of his manuscripts. Their copies were much prized and brought high prices, not in Athens only, but in scholarly circles elsewhere. It is evident that each of these booksellers began business as a scribe, selling only the work produced by his own hands, but that as their orders increased it became necessary for them to employ a number of copyists, whose script, receiving a personal supervision and doubtless a careful collation with the original texts, could be guaranteed as up to the standard of their own handiwork. Of the other booksellers who were in Athens in his time Lucian speaks very contemptuously. “Look,” he says, “at these so-called booksellers, these peddlers! They are people of no scholarly attainments or personal cultivation; they have no literary judgment, and no knowledge how to distinguish the good and valuable from the bad and worthless.”[112] Lucian had evidently a high standard of what a publisher ought to be.

Some of these Athenian booksellers whom Lucian thus berates for stupidity, appear also to have borne a poor reputation for honesty. Among other misdeeds charged against them was one, the ethics of which might have belonged to a much later period of bookmaking. In order to give to modern manuscripts the appearance of age, and to secure for them a high price as rare antiquities, they would bury them in heaps of grain until the color had changed and they had become tattered and worm-eaten. Lucian also satirizes the ambition of certain wealthy and ignorant individuals to keep pace with the literary fashion of the time, and to secure a repute for learning by paying high prices for great collections of costly books, which, when purchased, gave enjoyment “to none but the moths and the mice.”[113] It was partly due to the competition of wealthy collectors of this kind that, notwithstanding the great increase in the production of copies, the price of books remained high, much to the detriment of all impecunious students.

The beauty of the calligraphy of the manuscripts of Callinus is known to us only through Lucian, but there are several writers who bear testimony to the accuracy of the transcripts prepared by his rival Atticus, who must, by the way, not be confused with the Roman Atticus, the friend of Cicero. Harpocration of Alexandria, known principally as the author of one of the first Greek dictionaries, makes several references to the authority of the Atticus editions of the speeches of Æschines and Demosthenes. The famous Codex Parisinus of Demosthenes is believed by Sauppe to be based upon the excellent textual authority of a manuscript of Atticus, and Sauppe further contends that, if Atticus did not work from an absolute original, he must have had before him a very well authenticated copy. In the fragment of a work by Galen (who wrote in Rome about 165 A.D.) upon certain passages in the Timæus of Plato which had to do with medicine, Galen makes Atticus his authority for the passages quoted by him, as if we were indebted to this bookseller for the text of the Timæus that has been preserved.[114]

From the time of Lucian the interest in books steadily increased, book-collecting became fashionable, especially in Rome, and bibliophiles and bibliomaniacs were gradually evolved. At this time the beautifully written and carefully collated manuscripts which emanated from Athens bore a high reputation as compared with the much cheaper but less attractive and less trustworthy copies, which were produced in Alexandria and in Rome. In the book-shops of these two cities, during the first two centuries, a swifter and less accurate system of transcribing appears to have prevailed, the work being largely done by slaves or by scribes who did not have accurate knowledge of the literature on which they were engaged, while the necessity of a careful collating of each copy with the original appears frequently to have been overlooked. Origen, writing about 190 A.D., speaks of confiding his works to the “swift writers of Alexandria” in order to secure for them a speedy and a wide circulation. He was looking for no other return for his labors than a large circle of readers, and a large influence for his teachings, and the proceeds of the sales of these “swiftly written copies” were in all probability entirely appropriated by the booksellers who owned or who employed the scribes.

After the conquest of Greece by the Romans the centre of book production passed from Athens first to Alexandria and later to Rome. For centuries to come, however, the book production of the world was chiefly concerned with the works of Greek authors, and the literary activity of successive generations drew its inspirations from Greek sources; and the writers of Greece, whose brilliant labors brought no remuneration for the laborers, gave to their country and to the world a body of literature which at least in one sense of the term can properly be called a magnificent literary property.

CHAPTER III.

Alexandria.

DURING the middle of the third century before Christ, the centre of literary activity was transferred from Athens to Alexandria, which became, under Ptolemy Philadelphus, and for more than three centuries remained, the great book-producing mart of the world. The literature of Alexandria was not, like that of Athens, and later that of Rome, something of slow growth and gradual development; the literary ambition and the resources of the second Ptolemy proved sufficient to bring together in a few years’ time a great body of writers and students and to place at their disposal the largest collection of books known to antiquity.