Hic meret æra liber Sosiis, hic et mare transit,
Et longum noto scriptori prorogat ævum.[181]
A complaint so worded is of course perfectly compatible with the existence of a publishing arrangement under which Horace was to receive an author’s share of any profits accruing. Precisely similar complaints are frequent enough to-day when all new books are issued under the protection of domestic copyright and under publishing agreements, and while sometimes an indication that the publisher has managed to secure more than his share of the proceeds of literary labor, they are much more frequently simply the expression of the difference between the author’s large expectations concerning the public demand for his books and the actual extent of such demand.
If publishing statistics could be brought into print, they would show numberless instances in which the author’s calculations concerning the number of copies of their books which the public “could be depended upon” to call for, or “must certainly have called for,” were as much out of the way as have been the estimates of defeated generals as to the numbers of the forces by which they had been overwhelmed. It is certainly to be regretted that the brothers Sosii have not left us some records from which could be gathered their side of the story of their dealings with the court poet. There are instances in later times of firms which have found the honor of being publishers for a poet-laureate bringing more prestige than profit.
The shop of the Sosii was in the Vicus Tuscus, near the entrance to the temple of Janus. In the first book of Horace’s Epistles we find the lines:
Vertumnum Janumque, liber, spectare videris,
Scilicet ut prostes Sosiorum pumice mundus.[182]
Horace finds occasion to inveigh against plagiarists as well as against publishers, and here his indignation is probably better founded. The literature of Rome was, as before pointed out, based on a long series of “appropriations” and adaptations from the Greeks, and the habit, thus early initiated, doubtless became pretty deeply rooted. Virgil complains:
Hos ego versiculos feci; tulit alter honores,
Sic vos non vobis nidificatis aves.[183]