· · · ·
De primo dabit alterove nido
Rasum pumice purpuraque cultum
Denariis tibi quinque Martialem.[234]
Birt finds evidences that before the close of the first century, the book trade in Rome and through many portions of the Empire had developed into large proportions. Each week the packets from Alexandria brought into Rome great cargoes of papyrus from the paper-makers of Alexandria. These papyrus rolls, first stored in the warehouses, speedily find their way to the workrooms of the publishers, where hundreds of skilled slaves follow with swift pens the rapid dictation of the readers, who relieve each other from time to time. Others occupy themselves with the work of comparison and revision, while a third group, the glutinatores, cover the completed manuscripts with appropriate bindings. In the book-shop, taberna, are attractively presented for the attention of the scholars, the dilettanti, the real collectors, and their fashionable imitators, the collections of the accepted classics and of the latest literary novelties. Here a cheap edition of the Æneid is sold for school use for a few pennies; there great sums are expended for a veritable “original” text of some work by Demosthenes, Thucydides, Cato, or Lucilius[235]; while a third buyer is placing a wholesale order for a “proper assortment” of literature to serve as an adornment for a new villa.
From the Roman bibliopoles large shipments of books are also regularly made to other cities, such as Brundisium, fasces librorum venalium expositos vidimus in Brundisio,[236] or Lugdunum[237] (Lyons), or Vienna (in Gaul).[238]
It seems also to have been the practice (which has not been abandoned in modern times) to ship off to the provinces the over supplies or “remainders” of editions of books which had in the capital gone out of fashion. Aut fugies Uticam aut vinctus mitteris Ilerdam.[239]
Notwithstanding this extreme activity of the business of making and selling books, Birt is inclined to conclude that the lot of the poor student must have been a difficult one.
Such libraries as existed in Rome and Italy had not been instituted with reference to the work of students, as had been done with the collections in Alexandria, and the Roman State appears in fact to have given very little attention to the requirements of higher education.
An author, named Diogenian, writing in the time of Hadrian, undertook to supply the needs of the impecunious student of philology, the πένης πεπαιδευμένος of Lucian, with his book entitled περιεργοπένητες, which was so comprehensive in its information as to enable its fortunate owner to “do without any other work on its subject.”[240]