Fig. 8. Part of the internal wall of the Record-House of Vespasian. Reduced from a sketch taken in the 16th century by Pirro Ligorio.
The whole building was mercilessly mutilated by pope Urban VIII. in 1632; but fortunately a drawing of the interior had been made by Pirro Ligorio in the second half of the sixteenth century, when the original treatment of the walls was practically intact. I give a reduced copy of a small portion of this drawing ([fig. 8]). As Lanciani says:
The walls were divided into three horizontal bands by finely cut cornices. The upper band was occupied by the windows; the lower was simply lined with marble slabs covered by the bookcases ... which contained the ... records ...; the middle one was incrusted with tarsia-work of the rarest kinds of marble with panels representing panoplies, the wolf with the infant founders of Rome, and other allegorical scenes[58].
I explained at the beginning of this chapter that my subject is the care of books, not books themselves; but, at the point which we have now reached in regard to Roman libraries, it is necessary to make a few remarks about their contents. It must be remembered, in the first place, that those who fitted them up had to deal with rolls (volumina), probably of papyrus, but possibly of parchment; and that a book, as we understand the word, the Latin equivalent for which was codex, did not come into general use until long after the Christian era. Some points about these rolls require notice.
The length and the width of the roll depended on the taste or convenience of the writer[59]. The contents were written in columns, the lines of which ran parallel to the long dimension[60], and the reader, holding the roll in both hands, rolled up the part he had finished with his left hand, and unrolled the unread portion with his right. This way of dealing with the roll is well shewn in the accompanying illustration ([fig. 9]) reduced from a fresco at Pompeii[61]. In most examples the two halves of the roll are turned inwards, as for instance in the well-known statue of Demosthenes in the Vatican[62]. The end of the roll was fastened to a stick (usually referred to as umbilicus or umbilici). It is obvious that this word ought properly to denote the ends of the stick only, but it was constantly applied to the whole stick, and not to a part of it, as for instance in the following lines:
... deus nam me vetat
Inceptos olim promissum carmen iambos
Ad umbilicum adducere[63].
... for heaven forbids me to cover the scroll down to the stick with the iambic lines I had begun a song promised long ago to the world.