A day in old Rome

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?

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!”

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.