Authors and their public in ancient times

by George Haven Putnam

While the Augustan age witnessed a decided development in the literary interests of the Roman community, and while the organization of such bookselling establishments as those of Atticus, Tryphon, and the Sosii gave to authors the needed machinery for bringing their writings before the public, it is probable that for the larger number of the writers of the time the receipts from the books were very inconsiderable.

As before pointed out, question has in fact been raised by more than one student of the subject as to whether the Roman authors secured from the sales of their books any money return at all. Of the writers who find no satisfactory evidence for such returns, Haenny is by far the most important. I am myself, however, inclined to accept the conclusions of Birt, Schmitz, Géraud, and others to the effect that Roman authors, from the time of Cæsar down, were able to secure from the publishers or booksellers through whom their books were sold some portion of the proceeds of such sales. The absence of any protection under the law for either author or publisher, the competition of unauthorized editions, the competition (of a different kind) of books published solely for the amusement or the literary satisfaction of their wealthy or fashionable authors, and written without any desire for money return, and the lack of adequate publishing and distributing machinery, unquestionably all operated to make the compensation of such Roman authors as, like Martial, needed the money, fragmentary, uncertain, and at best but inconsiderable. The weight of the evidence, however, seems to me certainly to favor the conclusion that compensation there was, and that it served as one of the inducements for authorship as a career (or as a partial occupation), and served also to attract to the capital (where alone publishing facilities could be secured) literary aspirants from the rest of Italy and from the provinces. Schmitz gives his views as follows[212]:

Mihi quoque persuasum est, plurimos auctores Romanos gloriæ tantum ac honoris causa scripta sua bibliopolis divulganda tradidisse, quod tamen non impedit, quominus illi interdum pretium a bibliopolis acceperint. Et vere acceperunt.

In Rome, as centuries before in Greece, the compensation for stage-rights and the rewards for playwrights were much more assured and more satisfactory than any that could be secured by writers of books. Comedy writers like Plautus and Terence were able to sell their plays to the Ædiles. Haenny contends that the payments made by the Ædiles ought not strictly to be described as given for the purchase of the plays, but as a recognition on the part of the community, made through its official representatives, of a service rendered—a recognition that took the shape of an honorarium. I imagine the playwrights cared very little what the arrangement was called as long as they got the money. As a fact, however, it was the business of the Ædiles to provide plays for the public theatres, and I do not see why the arrangements made by them with Plautus and Terence did not constitute as definite an acknowledgment on the part of the State of the rights of dramatic authors as was the case with similar arrangements made fifteen hundred years later with Molière or Beaumarchais by the State manager of the Théâtre Français.

Schmitz goes on to say:

Sin autem scripta ab auctoribus cuiusvis generis vendebantur, non video cur non bibliopolæ quoque huic illive auctori pro scriptis certam mercedem solverint.

Is it likely, he contends, that Plautus and Terence, having been paid for their stage-rights (which they practically transferred or sold to the State), would have been satisfied to hand over to the publishers, without compensation, the book-rights of these same plays, the popularity of which had already been tested?

It seems to me possible, however, that in this contention Schmitz proves too much. The publisher might take the ground that a play which had been paid for by the Ædiles for the public welfare had become public property and belonged to the common domain, and that the author had surrendered or assigned to the State such rights in it as he had possessed. Such a theory would have given to the publisher a fair pretext for declining to pay compensation or honorarium for any play that had already been paid for by the Ædiles.

A similar suggestion was made as late as 1892 in the case of the official poems written by Tennyson as poet-laureate. It was contended that the nation paid to the laureate an annual stipend as a specific consideration for the production of poems on certain official occasions, and that the poems thus paid for were the property of the nation. This theory did not prevent the laureate from securing, first from the publication in a monthly, and later from a reissue (with other pieces) in book-form, a large compensation for his royal birthday odes and jubilee hymns. I am inclined to think, however, that if the question had been put to the test, the courts would have decided that the copyright of these productions had become vested in the nation, and that the poems belonged to the public domain.

In calling attention to the frequently quoted twenty-fourth epigram of Martial, Schmitz says: