BOOKS AND LIBRARIES
=183. Letters and Writing Tablets.=--The multiplication of schools
presupposes the constant use of books, correspondence, and other forms
of writing. What are these like?
[Illustration: WAX TABLET WITH STILUS ATTACHED.]
“Tablets” are seen everywhere. Upper-class people delight in scribbling
down memoranda. The story even runs that Augustus wrote out his
intended conversations with his wife Livia “lest he should say too much
or too little,” a testimony at once to the need of circumspect dealings
with the lady and to a great mania for writing. Ordinary tablets are
made of two or three thin strips of wood joined together like later-day
book-covers, and spread over the inside with a thin coating of wax. On
this wax, often black and dingy, day accounts and business messages can
be scratched with facility. But really important fashionable letters
demand something better. The leaves can be made of fine citrus wood or
even of ivory. As for very special correspondence, love letters, and
the like, these are written on very small tablets in contrast to the
broad slabs carrying the merchant accounts.
If you want a handsome note book, you can buy one with a number of
folding leaves and with outside covers of finely chased ivory, silver,
or gold, and such handsome note books make very convenient presents
among friends. By a convention attached to the high office, when
Calvus became prætor, he presented his intimates with tablets adorned
with his own portrait in low relief on ivory, and with scenes of the
prætor’s tribunal. If he had been consul, he would have been expected
to give around bunches of tablets even more elegant.
[Illustration: WRITING TABLETS AND STILUS.]
When a letter is written no envelope is needed. The tablets are folded
over upon themselves, fastened with crossed thread and then at the
point when the ends are knotted is placed a round piece of wax, stamped
before it can cool with a signet ring. The name of the person to
whom the letter is going can be written on the outside, and then the
communication is ready. Letters can be transmitted to distant places
usually only with tedious difficulty, but around Rome delivery from
writers of any high position is extremely prompt. The carrying of
letters is one of the commonest duties for otherwise idle slaves, and
from a mansion like Calvus’s it is easy every morning to send off ten
packets each by its own hurrying messenger.
=184. Personal Correspondence and Secretaries.=--Calvus, like every man
of distinction, has a heavy correspondence. It is a fine thing to be a
good letter writer, to make your epistles seem easy, natural, gossipy,
and yet in such faultless language that they can be collected presently
and published in a book. To a few special correspondents, especially to
absent relatives, Calvus writes almost daily in his own hand. But he
dictates even more frequently. He has a couple of slave _amanuenses_
who are with him constantly; they can take down his dictation in a kind
of abbreviated long hand; then write it out in handsome script, always
submitting the final text to their master not for his signing but for
sealing. As a consequence of all this correspondence, the demand for
new tablets in Rome is prodigious. The wax, indeed, can be melted upon
letters which one does not care to preserve, and the wood used a second
time, but the waste inevitably is great.
[Illustration: BOOK CUPBOARD.]
=185. Books Very Common: Papyrus and the Papyrus Trade.=--Nevertheless,
the activity of such secretaries is vastly less important than that of
another set of scribes, the makers of books. Poor is the tenement suite
that does not contain a few musty papyrus scrolls, while a parvenu
freedman will inevitably acquire a large library (which he may never
read) just to show himself a man of fashion. Books are so common that
their divided sheets are wetted, and used in kitchens to keep fish in
fresh condition, or, if dry, to make wrappers for incense and spices.
Paper is unknown, and parchment although not unknown is used mainly for
very important correspondence, public documents, and the like, which
require extremely durable material. Practically all books are written
on papyrus arranged in rolls.[112] The papyrus is strictly an Egyptian
monopoly, and if the importation of this precious article should cease,
apparently all Greece and Italy would be doomed to partial illiteracy.
The papyrus plant grows in the swamps by the Nile to a height of about
ten feet. The pith of its tall stalks is first cut into strips; next
the latter are placed one by another upon a wetted board and smeared
over with a paste. On these there is next laid a second layer forming
a cross pattern or kind of net work. Then the whole combination is
pressed and beaten down into a solid sheet and smoothed with an ivory
knife or a shell. After that it is ready for export from Egypt and to
be put to proper use.
[Illustration: BOOK CONTAINER.]
The papyrus trade is well standardized. There are eight well-recognized
grades of the commodity. The best is _hieratica_, so called because it
is fine and firm enough to be used by the Egyptian priests for their
sacred books. The cheapest is _emporetica_, not fit for writing but
only for wrapping parcels. The intermediate qualities answer for the
run of books. When the papyrus sheets are ready separately, either they
can be pasted together at once into a long scroll making a complete
volume, or first the book can be written off and the sheets pasted
later.
=186. Size and Format of Books.=--Books can, therefore, be of all
sizes but everybody usually agrees with the Greek saying, “_Big book,
big evil!_” It is an indescribable nuisance to fumble over a roll of
more than a certain length hunting for a desired passage. Not many
volumes run over 100 pages,[113] and many are much smaller. Each sheet
constitutes a separate page (varying between six to twelve inches
high), with the writing usually in a single column, four to six inches
broad, on each page, and a blank space crossed by a red line before the
next page begins.
[Illustration: DOUBLE INKSTAND.]
It is impossible to read with any convenience writing on more than
one side of the papyrus prepared in this manner. The result is that
discarded books are often used for schoolboys’ exercises or for mere
scribbling “paper”; although, if the papyrus is very firm, often the
writing can be sponged out and a whole new work can be written over the
vanished sentences. Books being of this character, it is impossible
really to prepare the “ponderous tomes” of a later day. “Volumes” are
very short. The Iliad of Homer is ordinarily in twenty-four separate
rolls, one for each of its “books”, and the same arrangement obtains
for other standard works. Very many “books” in the Roman libraries,
therefore, are really little more than pamphlets.
[Illustration: PEN AND SCROLL.]
For writing on parchment, of course, one cannot use the stylus. Reed
pens skilfully cut may suffice, with a thick ink made of lampblack and
gum for ordinary purposes and also a red ink, rich and permanent, for
ornamental lines. In Calvus’s library, as in almost every other, are
two large beautifully wrought ink wells, made of bronze with silver
chasings, and attached together--one for the black ink and one for the
red.
=187. Mounting and Rolling of Books.= The mounting of the papyrus
long roll is a great art, especially if the book is intended for a fine
library. First, the whole long strip of papyrus is dressed with cedar
oil to repel worms--thus giving the pages a pleasing yellow tinge.
Then the last leaf is fastened to a thin cylinder of wood or of rolled
papyrus called the _umbilicus_. The ends of the roll itself are
carefully cut and smoothed with pumice stone, and the ends of the
umbilicus are often gilded. Next a strip of solid parchment bearing
the title of the book in handsome red letters is attached by a string
at one end, where it will hang down when the volume is rolled.
After the book itself is ready a neat cylindrical cover or case must
be made of parchment, colored red or yellow, and also marked with the
title. For really fine volumes additional elegancies are possible; for
example, a handsome portrait of the author can be painted or pasted
upon the first page, and the edges of the entire scroll can be colored.
Handsomely illustrated works grace every good library.
[Illustration: BOOK SCROLL.]
To read these books will seem to persons familiar only with
_codexes_ (flat opening books) extremely cumbersome.[114] You have
to take the volume in both hands, unrolling with the right while you
roll up with the left. It seems nigh impossible to “run through” such a
volume, and hard to trace down a passage; and there are apparently no
indices. However, practice can make almost perfect. Calvus can roll and
unroll his books with remarkable dexterity and by a kind of instinct
hit promptly upon almost any allusion. It will be a real gain for the
world, nevertheless, when the roll is supplanted by the many-leaved
book.
=188. Copying Books: the Publishing Business. Horace’s and Martial’s
Publishers.=--Books abound, although of course all are multiplied
by painful human effort. This is because slave copyists are relatively
cheap. Atticus, Cicero’s friend, seems to have made a real fortune in
the publishing business--that is, he owned a great corps of skilful
slaves incessantly busy transcribing manuscripts. The finest copies
must be made deliberately one by one, but ordinary volumes can be
multiplied more summarily. As you go about Rome you will perhaps come
on large rooms where a great number of scribes are seated in a kind
of lecture hall desperately following word for word some reader who,
in a smooth, monotonous voice, is giving out the text either of an
established classic or the newest essays or epigrams of the successors
of Pliny the Younger or Martial. In this way what is really an
“edition” of say a hundred or even two hundred copies can be produced
in a remarkably short time, without the aid of the printing press.[115]
The publisher, and even more the authors who try to live by their
literary genius, are, however, under a grave handicap. There is no
copyright. What you “publish” to-day, may be flagrantly recopied
and sold under your very nose to-morrow--possibly with errors and
interpolations calculated to drive an author frantic. The average
aspirant for literary fame unless he has personal means is therefore
constrained, as were Horace and Martial, to hunt up a rich patron who
for the joy of being “immortalized” will keep him from starving.
However, every aspiring author tries to find some bookseller, who will
turn his works over to a corps of competent slaves, and then vend the
products. There is a regular booksellers’ quarter in Rome down by the
Forum of Cæsar in the heart of the commercial district. Here Horace’s
old publishers, the Sosii, had their stalls; and Martial’s publishers,
the firm headed by the clever freedman Allectus, are still there in the
business.
At Allectus’s shop they will tell you how the epigramist used to drop
in with pardonable vanity to see how from “the first or second shelf
they would hand down a ‘Martial,’ well smoothed with pumice stone and
adorned with purple--all for five denarii (80 cents).” On the columns
by the entrance to this and the rival shops are plastered up long lists
of new publications--often with sample extracts to prove their wit or
learning; or announcement of new or old copies of standard works from
Homer down to that clever Greek litterateur Plutarch, who has recently
died in Bœotia; or in Latin from old Nævius and Ennius to the recent
biographies of the Cæsars by the imperial secretary Suetonius.
Considering the labor of copying, the price of books is moderate; a
small volume of poems by a popular writer can be had for as little as
two denarii (32 cents), although such a scroll would probably be only
equivalent to a thin pamphlet of later-day printing, and the works of
a really voluminous author like Pliny the Elder might appear ruinously
expensive.
=189. Passion for Literary “Fame.”=--Expensive or cheap, by men of
education a certain number of books must be had. Perhaps the Age of
Hadrian will fail to leave a great mark in the history of either
Greek or Latin letters, but that will not be because _literary fame_
is not passionately sought after. Everybody is anxious to dabble
in authorship. Everybody (in the upper circles) seems incessantly
compounding formal “epistles,” memoirs, essays, rhetorical and
sentimental histories, and last but not least great quantities of
verses which pass as “poetry.” Pliny the Younger (not long dead) was
incessantly urging his correspondents to write: “to mould something,
hammer out something, that shall be known as yours for all time.”
The same pathetic desire for immortality which leads to ostentatious
funeral monuments and to endowed funeral feasts, perhaps puts a premium
upon this mania.
The fine gentlemen and ladies who share these tastes boast that nothing
can interrupt their furious pursuit of “letters.” Senators like to
inform their friends that even while hunting boars in the Apennines
they keep their writing tablets and stylus near them when watching for
the beaters to drive the game into the nets--what precious sentences
might escape them otherwise! They like also to have freedman or
slave “readers” always at their elbows to keep up a flow of poetry
or philosophy apparently all the time when they are not eating,
exercising, or conversing.[116]
It is also a kind of etiquette for all members of the gilded literary
circle to keep sending their unpublished effusions around among their
friends with demands for “entirely frank and severe criticism”;
the response always being a long letter of praise even for very
mediocre efforts. “Terse, lucid, brilliant, stately,” or even “keen,
impassioned, graceful”--these are grievously overworked adjectives,
although perhaps at the end of the answers there are a few polite hints
suggesting a slight improvement.
The Latin-speaking provinces are said to follow Roman literary
celebrities intently. Nothing delights the latter more than to learn
that their fame has spread to distant parts. Tacitus was certainly
a great historian, but he was a man of his time and also a very
warm friend of Pliny the Younger. Oft repeated is the story of a
conversation he had in the circus, where on the front benches for
notables he met a “certain learned provincial.” The twain, without
introduction, fell into a delightful literary conversation, until the
stranger who manifestly was very up-to-date asked: “Are you from Italy
or the provinces?” “Ah,” said Tacitus, “you know me very well from
my books that you’ve read.” “Then,” cried the other, “you are either
Tacitus or Pliny!”
[Illustration: OLD FORUM: looking towards northern
side, with the Curia shown behind the high columns in
foreground; restoration by Spandoni.]
=190. Zeal for Poetry: Multiplication of Verses.=--Prose
compositions in smooth and fastidious Latin, or in very passable
Greek are common enough, but even the authors of genuinely superior
histories or literary essays, often desire to become something more
magnificent--they wish to be poets. Very famous Romans have put forth
their energies over iambics, elegiacs, or hexameters; Sulla, Cicero,
Hortensius the Orator, Julius Cæsar, Brutus, Augustus, Tiberius,
Seneca, Nerva--the list of such celebrities could be made much longer.
Of course, every loyal subject knows that the reigning Hadrian is
the author of clever epigrams, which would really deserve a certain
fame even if their author had lived in the Subura and not upon the
Palatine.[117]
Probably if there could be physical measuring rods wherewith to
determine it, the sheer quantity of Latin, and also of Greek verses,
being thrust upon the world every year would seem prodigious. At
Allectus and Company they will tell you that Romanus has just brought
out some very acceptable “Old Comedies” in the style of Aristophanes,
and some other “New Comedies” in iambics worthy to be classed with
Plautus and Terence. The noble Caninius, too, has at last completed
and published a remarkable Greek epic: “The Dacian War”--celebrating
Trajan’s victories in a manner quite worthy, let us say, of Homer and
Hesiod. True, the uncouth names of Dacian barbarians do not fit well
into the hexameters, and especially that of their king, “Decebalus,”
is metrically almost impossible, but ingenious poetical license has
overcome the difficulty. Who can doubt that Caninius’s “long poem” will
live across the ages?[118]
Such a practical man of affairs as Calvus does not take all the
smooth compliments proffered his efforts over-seriously; but even our
friendly senator can feel a thrill of pleasure when he dashes off a
dozen elegiacs in praise of his mountain villa, and hears the “_Euge!
Euge!_” (he hopes not _too_ insincere) of his guests as he
reads them at a dinner party.
=191. Size of Libraries.=--With such an affectation for books
and literary fame there are inevitably great libraries. Long ago
the old Hebrew gloomily recorded, “Of making of many books there is
no end,” and his sighs would have increased could he have seen the
collections in Rome. The small size of the volumes indeed makes it
hard to compare these libraries with those of other ages. The largest
library in the world is that at Alexandria with some 400,000 rolls,
but there are public collections in Rome not very much smaller. As for
private libraries, a certain rich and learned senator has about 60,000
rolls.[119] Calvus and his friends make no such boast, and he contents
himself with some 4000 volumes. This is respectable, but nowise an
unusual collection for a man of refined tastes, and it has plenty of
counterparts all over the city.
=192. A Private Library.=--The library in the house of Calvus is
small but sumptuously furnished. Around a large part of the walls
extend great tiers of large pigeonholes made of finely carved wood,
and in each hole is a group of rolls, either the complete works of
a voluminous author, or a collection of smaller books on a single
subject. The bright red lettering on the dangling labels, the gilt ends
of the rolling rods, the pleasing soft yellow of the end of the papyri
(if these are not also colored red) give a luxurious appearance to the
collection.
Set above the tiers of books in such a room is a long array of fine
busts in bronze and marble of nearly all the distinguished literary
figures of Greece or Italy. Calvus has just added a handsome bronze of
the comedian Menander. The careful frescos on the exposed walls have to
do with learned mythological subjects; there is also a fine life-sized
statue of Minerva the patroness of letters, and on a long shelf stand
really beautiful silver statuettes of all the Nine Muses. Along one
side of the library there are also tables where Harpocration, Calvus’s
truly learned and capable freedman librarian (_librarius_), who
assists in all his patron’s studies, can spread out rolls for patching,
rewinding, or even for recopying; also a convenient writing couch for
the senator himself when he wishes to take his tablets and compile
those fine “extracts” which the literary world delights to cull from
every possible author, or to try his own hand at original composition.
Calvus is not a virtuoso, however, and does not imitate such wealthy
enthusiasts as the poet Silius Italicus who collected all kinds of rare
editions, crammed his house with every imaginable writer, and “kept
Virgil’s birthday more carefully than he did his own.” For all that
Harpocration has been commended for hanging a small wreath around the
bust of Sophocles, this day being the reputed anniversary of the death
of the great tragedian.
=193. The Great Public Libraries of Rome.=--Into the Public
Libraries of Rome we cannot enter. They exist nevertheless as great
and beneficent institutions although probably only a favored few are
permitted to read their treasures except inside their ample halls.[120]
The oldest public library is that founded by Asinius Pollio (an officer
of Julius Cæsar) and is located on the rather distant Aventine. Cæsar
himself projected two very grand Greek and Latin Libraries but did not
live to create them; Augustus founded a very fine library in the Temple
of Apollo on the Palatine (making it virtually the imperial palace
library), and his sister Octavia created another. There is still a
fourth good library in the Temple of Peace founded by Vespasian; but
all these are now overshadowed by the relatively new “Ulpian Libraries”
established by Trajan at his new Forum. These enormous collections
of Greek and Latin rolls make Rome by far the greatest repository of
literary treasures in the entire world, barring always the famous
collection in Alexandria.