Authors and their public in ancient times

by George Haven Putnam

If Tacitus had only, like Martial, been an impecunious writer, we should probably have found in his correspondence with his friend Pliny, or in other of his writings, some mention of his publishing arrangements and of the receipts secured through the sale of his works. It is evident, however, that his official emoluments were sufficient to free him from any necessity of making close calculations concerning earnings by his pen, and it is even possible that he permitted the fortunate publishers, whoever they were to reserve to themselves the profits, which ought to have been considerable, arising from the sales of these important and popular works.

Notwithstanding the gradual decline of Athens towards the close of the second century as a centre of higher education, Greek continued to be throughout the Empire the language not only for many philosophical and scholarly undertakings, but for not a few works planned for popular reading. I mentioned that Massilia (Marseilles) had been selected as the place where the young Tacitus could secure to best advantage a refined education, but Massilia, although a thousand miles from Greece, was a Greek city. It is probably not too much to say that throughout the Roman world, wherever a town came into distinction in any way as a place of intellectual activity and of literary life, it would be found to have possessed a large Greek element. The Greek brains must have served as yeast for the intellectual substance of the Roman world.

Suetonius, writing, about 150 A.D., his work Ludicra, comprising treatises on the sports and public games of the Greeks and Romans, gave the work to the public in both Greek and Latin. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, written about 170 were issued only in Greek. Simcox says:

“From the reign of Hadrian onwards until the translation of the Empire to the East, the intellectual needs of the capital, such as they were, were supplied by the eastern half of the Empire; all the upper classes learned Greek in the nursery, and it was the language of fashionable conversation ... all people who professed to be serious entertained a Greek philosopher. Their only reason for keeping up Latin literature at all was that the cleverest people who had received a literary education wished to be poets or historians or orators, an ambition which was sustained by the competitions endowed by Domitian and by the professorships which were founded by his predecessors and successors.”

I have already referred to the influence of the French language in Germany during the first half of the eighteenth century as presenting a somewhat similar case; but the influence upon German thought and German literature of the French language and literature, rendered fashionable under the Court of Frederick the Great, was of course slight and superficial as compared with the part played in the Roman world by the language and the thought of the Greeks.

Towards the end of the second century Carthage became of literary as well as commercial importance. Latin was the language of administration, and the literary culture of Carthage took upon itself, therefore, a Latin rather than a Greek form.[277] Among the authors who gave form, each in his own very distinctive manner, to the literary school of Carthage were Fronto and Apuleius, and a generation later the Father of the African Church, the theologian Tertullian.

Fronto’s books appear to have been made in Carthage, but were certainly on sale with Roman dealers, and the same was doubtless the case with the witty and popular Fables and Metamorphoses of Apuleius, but the evidence in regard to a publishing trade in Carthage is purely inferential. Aulus Gellius, writing about 170, speaks of picking up in a second-hand book-shop in Brundisium a volume from which he quotes a pretty story. The incident was probably imaginary, for, as Simcox points out, the story was taken from the elder Pliny; but the reference shows that the business of the bookseller was, at the date specified, already sufficiently systematized to support, even in the smaller towns, second-hand book dealers.

It was evident that by the close of the first century the machinery for the making and the distribution of books was sufficiently well organized to secure for authors the opportunity of a world-wide influence. It seems probable, however, that the works which at this date obtained for themselves the widest circulation and influence were not those of living writers, but were still the classics which Greece had originated, but which were so largely given to the world through Rome.

In the fourth century a certain Firmicus Maternus published an astrological work entitled Mathesis. The work was dedicated to the proconsul Mavertius Lollianus, who had suggested its preparation, and to him also the author appears to have assigned the control of the publication, with the curious instruction that the two final books (out of the eight of which the work was composed) must by no means be permitted to come into the hands of the general public (vulgum profanum), but that the reading of these should be restricted to those who had led holy and priestly lives.[278]

Birt, who is my authority for the incident, does not make clear what means were available for the proconsul by which to enforce this special and difficult discrimination among readers. Birt cites the case, however, as an evidence of the control that could be exercised, and that from time to time was exercised, by the government over the circulation of literature. It is certain, he says, that even the very considerable increase in the facilities for the reproduction of books did not prevent the authorities from undertaking to stop the sale of, and to confiscate, works which, for one reason or another, might work detriment to the State, or which conflicted with the personal interest of the ruler. The earliest example on record of a confiscation dates back to the time when the Athenian Republic was at its height. In the year 411 B.C., as mentioned in the chapter on Greece, the writings of the philosopher Protagoras were burned on the Agora, while the philosopher himself was held to trial for heresy.[279]