Horace writes:[184]
O imitatores, servum pecus ut mihi sæpe,
Bilem, sæpe jocum vestri movere tumultus.
It seems probable that by this stage in the development of literature, the indignation of an author against plagiarists was not merely on the ground of interference with literary prestige or of the wrongfulness of a writer’s securing honor falsely, but because plagiarism might involve an actual injury to literary property. The first application to literary theft of the term plagium (from which is derived the French plagiaire and the English “plagiarism”), was made by Martial. In the legal terminology of Rome, plagium was used to designate the crime of man-stealing, and a plagiarius was one who stole from another a slave or a child, or who undertook to buy or to sell into slavery one who was legally free. The use of so strong a term to characterize literary “appropriations” is sufficient evidence of the opinion of Martial that such a proceeding was a crime. Martial’s word has been adopted, but later generations of writers do not appear to have fully accepted his views of the criminal nature of the practice.[185]
Simcox is of opinion[186] that the poets of the Augustan age certainly expected to make a certain profit by the sale of their books. They also had expectations of profiting by the gifts of the emperor or of other rich patrons of literature, but there must have been not a few writers who were not fortunate enough to secure the favor either of the court or of the grandees who followed the fashion of the court, and to whom the receipts from the booksellers would have been a matter of no little importance and might frequently have provided only the means for continued sojourn in the capital. It could only have been the receipts from sales that Horace had in mind when he wrote that mediocrity in poets is intolerable, not only to gods and men, but to booksellers, as if to the poets the approval of the booksellers was of more importance than that of either the gods or their fellow-men.[187] It would seem as if either the gods or the publishers must have been too lenient during the past eighteen centuries in their treatment of the poets, for the amount of mediocre verse turned out from year to year is certainly no smaller, considered in proportion to the entire mass of poetry, than it was in the days of Horace.
The scanty references which can be traced in Latin literature of the first century to the relations of authors with the book-trade appear, as might be expected, almost exclusively in the writings of the society poets. In such chronicles as those of Sallust and Livy, narratives written for other purposes than for literary prestige or for bookselling profits, and which had perhaps almost as much to do with the politics of the day (“present history”) as with the history of the State (“past politics”), there was naturally no place for such an insignificant detail as the arrangements of the authors for placing their books upon the market. References to booksellers would have been equally out of place in such a national epic as the Æneid or a great didactic poem like the Georgics.
What little is known, therefore, concerning the bookselling methods of the time must be gathered from the casual allusions found in the verses of such writers as Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, and Martial, and particularly of the last-named.
When (about 7 A.D.) Ovid was banished by the aged Augustus to Tomi, a dreary frontier town somewhere near the mouth of the Danube, he complains that he finds there no libraries, no booksellers. He is surrounded by the din of weapons and the tedious talk of soldiers. He has no single associate who is interested in literature, or whose taste or judgment he could call upon for literary counsel.
Non hic librorum, per quos inviter alarque,
Copia; pro libris arcus et arma sonant,