Müller proceeds to make an analysis of the purport of the references in this passage, pointing out that the experience of old campaigners would help them to the appreciation of the robust and stirring compositions of Æschylus, while the scholarly habits of the lovers of books would keep them in close sympathy with the complex intellectual problems considered by Euripides.

The sharper edge of the comparison is directed against Euripides, who is always referred to by Aristophanes as a book-worm. Müller further contends that the references to each hearer being “provided with his little book” (or book of the play) must be understood as merely a piece of humorous exaggeration, as during the last years of the Peloponnesian war, when the resources of Athens had been seriously diminished, when poverty was general, and men’s minds were agitated with the excitement of the campaign, few people could have had the money for the buying, or the leisure for the reading, of books.

Athenæus concludes, from a fragment of the comedy writer Alexis (a contemporary of Alexander), that it was not until the time of Alexander that the reading of books played any important part in the intellectual life of the Greeks.[73] In the comedy of Prodicus, entitled The Choice of Hercules, portions of which have been preserved in the Memorabilia of Xenophon, Linus, the instructor of Hercules, is represented as directing his pupil to select for his reading one out of a number of books which are lying before him. Among the authors whose works are specified in the list are Orpheus, Hesiod, Homer, Chœrilus, and Epicharmus. (The last named is the first Greek writer of comedy of whom we have any trustworthy account. His first work was produced about 500 B.C.)[74] Hercules, passing by the poetry, seizes a volume on cookery, the work of an actor named Simos, who was also famous as a cook.[75]

Artemon, a grammarian of Cassandria in Macedonia, who wrote shortly after the death of Aristotle and who made a collection of the letters of Aristotle, published a dissertation on the collecting and the use of books, which gives ground for the impression that in his time there was already in Macedonia or Northern Greece a circle of bibliophilists, ready to give attention to the counsels of this forerunner of Dibdin, and possibly able also to pay for the books.

A piece of evidence against the contention that the price of books was high in the time of Plato, is supplied, according to certain commentators, by Plato himself. From a paragraph in the Apology Boeckh[76] understands that some kind of book-trade must have been carried on in the orchestra of the theatre (during the time, of course, when no performance was going on), and that the writings of Anaxagoras were offered for sale for one drachme; and Buchsenschutz[77] takes the same view of Plato’s reference. The words used by Plato are put into the mouth of Socrates, who is represented as contending; first, that the opinions for the utterance of which he has been charged with heresy or impiety, are in substance the same as those already given to the world by Anaxagoras and others; second, that these views have been so widely published that they have become public property, for the quoting of which no single person can properly be held responsible; and thirdly, that they can be obtained in the theatre for a drachme. The particular writings of Anaxagoras to which Socrates here refers, contain his theories concerning the nature of the sun, the moon, the earth, and the creating power of divinity. Schmitz is, however, inclined to believe not that the books containing these doctrines could be purchased in the theatre, but that the theories of Anaxagoras were at the time freely quoted in the popular dramas (such as those of Euripides), and that it was in listening to these plays in the theatre that the public could without difficulty obtain a knowledge of the new views.[78]

The usual price of admission to the Athenian theatres was, in the time of Pericles, two oboli, or about six cents, but on special holidays, when the performance continued three days, this price was often raised to a drachme, or eighteen cents.[79] In the absence of any other references to this supposed practice of turning orchestra stalls into book-stalls, the weight of probability appears to favor the conclusions of Schmitz rather than those of Boeckh.

Schmitz admits that it is not practicable to find in the existing dramas of Euripides examples of such presentation of the Anaxagorian theories of the universe, but he points out that a large portion of the writings of this author was undoubtedly lost in the destruction of the great war, and that this same war prevented any wide distribution of the authenticated copies, although many of the tragedies were so popular that the songs from them were sung throughout the land. By the end of the war the fame of the tragedies had reached Sicily, although very few of the manuscripts could yet have got across the sea. After the defeat of the Athenians before Syracuse, some of those who had been captured or who, escaping from the Syracusans, had wandered over the island, found a temporary livelihood or even purchased their freedom by reciting the plays of Euripides, and on their return to Athens they took occasion to express to the poet their gratitude for the timely service rendered by his genius.[80]

To the coast cities of Asia Minor, as well as throughout the Greek colonies of the Mediterranean, had come the fame of the new tragedian, although here also copies of the plays themselves appear to have been very scarce. Plutarch relates[80] that the inhabitants of Caunus (a city of Caria), when besought for shelter by an Athenian vessel chased by pirates, wanted first to know whether the Athenians could recite for them the songs of Euripides.[81] It is to be hoped that the Caunusians did not insist upon being paid in advance, and upon having the recitations made before they permitted the hard-pressed vessel to gain the shelter of the harbor. In all places and among all classes where Greek was the language, the songs of Euripides appear to have secured an immediate popularity, while by the scholars also was given an appreciation no less cordial. Both Plato[82] and Aristotle[83] ranked Euripides above Sophocles and Æschylus.

Alexander the Great entertained the guests at his banquets by reciting long passages from Euripides.[84] Throughout Greece these tragedies appear for many years to have been the compositions most frequently selected for public readings. Lucian relates[85] that the Cynic Demetrius, who lived in Corinth in the first century, and whom Seneca refers to as a new friend, heard an “uneducated man” read before an audience The Bacchantes of Euripides. As the reader came to the lines in which the messenger announces the “terrible deed” of Agave and the fearful fate of Pentheus, Demetrius snatched the book from his hands with the words: “It is better for poor Pentheus to be murdered by me than by you.” The point of interest for Lucian (who wrote about 150 A.D.) was the play on the term “murdered,” and for us the example of the practice, in the first century, of the public reading of standard literature, so general that an audience (rather than not to hear the composition) would listen even to an “ignorant reader.”

Returning to the question of the distribution and price of books, we find a reference by Xenophon[86] to some “chests full of valuable books” having been saved “with other costly articles” from the cargo of an Athenian vessel shipwrecked at Salmydessus, a city on the Euxine.

This appears to be the earliest reference on record to any sending of supplies of books from Greece to the colonies, but even here there is no evidence that the volumes were forwarded by dealers, and it is probable that the “chests” contained the private library of some wealthy Athenian collector who had migrated to Pontus. There is no question, however, but that in the time of Xenophon (445-355 B.C.) Athens was the centre not only of the literary activity of Greece, but of any book-trade that existed.

It seems evident that in Greece, as later in Rome, the earliest booksellers were the scribes, who with their own labor had prepared the parchment or papyrus scrolls which constituted their stock in trade.

The next step in the development of the business was a very natural one, namely, the introduction of the capitalist, who, instead of working with his own hands, employed a staff of copyists and sold the products of their labor. It is only surprising that the continued high price paid for fair copies of noted works and the steady demand for such copies, should not have tempted dealers more rapidly into the business. The principal obstacle was for many years the difficulty of securing a sufficiency of skilled copyists the accuracy of whose work could be trusted. According to Schmitz, there is no mention of the appearance of booksellers in Athens earlier than the fifth century B.C.

The Athenian comedy, which touched with its keen raillery every phase of life, whether public or private, did not overlook this new mode of occupation. The references are as a rule not complimentary, but, as the comedians spared nothing in their mockery, the fact need not stand to the discredit of the first booksellers. Possibly the earliest mention of the trade is by Aristomenes, who, in a comedy entitled The Deceivers (performed about 470 B.C.), speaks of a “Dealer in Books.” Cratinus, in his play The Mechanics (written about 450 B.C.), mentions a copyist (βιβλιογράφος)[87]; Theopompus, writing about 330 B.C., uses the term “bookseller”[88] (βιβλιοπώλης); Nicophon gives a list of “men who support themselves with the labor of their hands” (χειρογάστορες), and in this list groups the bibliopoles in with the dealers in fish, fruit, figs, leather, meal, and household utensils.[89] It would seem as if in this instance the term βιβλιοπώλης must have been used as synonymous with or at least as including βιβλιογράφος, the scribe and the seller of the manuscripts being one and the same person. Antiphanes, born in Rhodes B.C. 408, who is credited by Suidas with having written over three hundred dramas, which were very popular in Athens, refers to “book-copyists,” and also to books which had been “sewed and glued.”[90] The comic writer, Plato, who was a contemporary of Socrates, makes first mention of “written leaves,” i. e., papyrus. The term used by him, χάρται, was, according to Birt, when standing alone, more usually applied to leaves of papyrus prepared for writing, but still blank; χάρται γεγραμμένοι standing for the inscribed leaves.

We may conclude from Nicophon’s having included the booksellers in his list of traders that they had their shops or stalls on the market-place. Eupolis also speaks of the “place where books are sold,” (οὗ τὰ βιβλία ὤνια),[91] and it appears therefore that as early as 430 B.C. a special place in the market must have been reserved for the book-trade—an Athenian Paternoster Row, or, more nearly perhaps, a Quai Voltaire. It was, however, not until the time of Alexander the Great that the business of making and selling books—that is, attested copies of the works of popular writers—appears to have developed into importance.

Until the business of book-making had become systematized, the admirers of a poet or philosopher were obliged to supply themselves with his works through their own handiwork, unless they were fortunate enough to possess slaves educated as scribes. This test of the reader’s admiration was assuredly rather a severe one. It is certain that the number of disciples of modern authors would be enormously limited if, as a first condition for the enjoyment of their writings, the would-be readers were under the necessity of transcribing the copies with their own hands. Imagine the extent of the task for the admirers of Clarissa Harlowe, or for those who absorbed their history through the ninety odd romances of G. P. R. James!

As the supply of educated slaves increased, there was, of course, less need for individual scholars to devote their own handiwork to copying of manuscripts for their libraries. It was cheaper to employ the labor of slaves, and to use their own time for more important work. The names of some of the slaves who did good service as scribes have been preserved in history. Mention has already been made of Cephisophon, the slave, secretary, and personal friend of Euripides. One of Plato’s dialogues is distinguished by the name of Phædon of Elis, who had been sold as a slave in his youth and had been employed as a scribe. The attention of Socrates was attracted by his capable work, and he persuaded Crito to purchase his freedom.[92]

The poet Philoxenus of Cythera was sold as a slave to Melanippides (the younger), whom he served as a scribe, and whose poetry he was said to have surpassed with his own productions. There are many similar instances both of slaves who succeeded in securing an education and in doing noteworthy literary work, and of men of education who had, through the fortunes of war or through the loss of their property, fallen into the position of slaves, and who were then utilized by their masters for literary work.

There is also evidence that the state caused intelligent slaves to be instructed in writing in order to be able to use them for work on the public records or as clerks for the officials.[93]

It is to be borne in mind that the (to us) extraordinary extent to which the Greeks were able to develop their power of memorizing enabled them often to trust to their memory where modern students would be helpless without the written (or the printed) word. “My father,” says Niceratus in The Banquet of Xenophon, “compelled me to learn by heart all the poetry of Homer, and I could repeat without break the entire Iliad and Odyssey.”[94] The boys in school were given as their daily task the memorizing of the works of the poets, and what was begun under compulsion appears to have been continued in later life as a pleasure.

Such an exceptional development of the power of memory, making of it almost a distinct faculty from that which the present generation knows under the name, may properly be credited with some influence upon the slowness of the growth among the ancients of any idea of property in an intellectual production. As long as men could carry their libraries in their heads, and when they desired to entertain themselves with a work of literature, needed only to think it to themselves (or even to recite it to themselves) instead of being under the necessity of reading it to themselves, they could hardly have the feeling that comes to the modern reader (if he be a conscientious person) of an indebtedness to the author, an indebtedness which is in large part connected with the actual use of the copy of the work. In the early Greek community, a very few copies (or even a single copy) of a great poem were sufficient in a short space of time to place the work of the poet in the minds of all the active-minded citizens, such men as would to-day be frequenters of the bookstores. In the Homeric times it proved, in fact, to be possible to permeate a community with the inspiration of the national epics without the aid of any written copies whatever. For the service rendered by these early bards, the community might, and very possibly did, feel under an obligation of some kind, but the individual reciter who had absorbed the poems into the possession of his memory, and the readers to whom he transmitted the enjoyment of these poems, could not have suggested to them any such feeling of personal obligation to the poet as is experienced by the reader of to-day who is called upon to buy from the author, through the publisher, the text of any work of which he desires the enjoyment. The Greek of these earlier times needed no texts and dreamed of no bookseller. He inherited from his ancestors the poetry of the preceding generation with the same sense of natural right as that with which he took possession of his ancestral acres; and he absorbed into his memory for his daily enjoyment the poetry of his own day with the same freedom and almost the same unconsciousness as that with which he took into his lungs the air about him. In this way the literature with which he had to do became really a part of himself, and he may be said to have become possessed of it in a way which would hardly be possible for one who was simply a reader of books. It is not easy to realize how much we have lost in these days of printed books in losing this magnificent power of memorizing our literature and carrying it about with us, instead of going to our libraries for it and taking it in by scraps. How much more to us, for instance, would Shakespeare’s plays stand for, if they could be stored in our heads ready for use when wanted, instead of being available, as at present, only in the occasional reading circle, or the still less frequent Shakespearian revival.

An author who seems to have taken exceptional pains to secure a circulation for his productions was Demosthenes, but it is to be borne in mind that his interest as a politician, or perhaps it is fairer to say as a statesman, desiring to arouse public opinion in behalf of his policy, was probably even keener than his ambition as an author hoping for a popular appreciation of his eloquence. Whatever the motive or combination of motives, it appears that after the delivery of an oration he would act as his own reporter, writing out revised copies and distributing the same among his friends for distribution.[95] He had a special interest in securing a wide popular circulation for his speeches in the matter of the guardianship, and for those against Æschines and in behalf of Phormion, and the copies of these,[96] prepared by his own hand or under his orders, certainly came into the hands of many readers. Copies of the speeches made by Demosthenes against Philip must have been brought to the latter by some of the orator’s opponents. Such at least is the interpretation given by Schmitz to the well known exclamation of Philip: “If I had heard him speak these words, I should myself have been compelled to lead the campaign against Philip.”[97]

An early reference to the practice of making publication of a book in any formal manner (as distinguished from the permission accorded to friends to make transcripts for their own use) is given by Isocrates, writing about 400 B.C. He speaks of hesitating to publish his Panathenaicus (φανερὰν ποιῆσαι, διαδιδόναι). He began the work, says Birt, when he was already ninety-four, was obliged to leave it on account of illness, but took it up again three years later, and it was then that (conscientious author as he was) he hesitated to give the volume to the public, because some friend to whom he had read it was not fully in accord with its conclusions.[98]

The development of the trade of making and selling books came but slowly, but received no little impetus through the taste for literature implanted by Aristotle in his royal pupil Alexander. The latter appears to have given frequent commissions to his friend Harpalus for the purchase of books. From the mention by Plutarch[99] it has been thought Harpalus must have been sent from Asia with instructions to procure for Alexander a long series of works whose titles are given. Schmitz points out, however, that Alexander could hardly have been in a position during his Asiatic campaigns and journeyings to collect a library, and these commissions to Harpalus must have been made at an earlier date, before Alexander had left Macedonia and while the “friend of his youth” was sojourning in Athens.

The one point that is clear and that is of interest to us in this connection is that, at about 330 B.C., Harpalus was able to purchase in Athens, which was already referred to as the centre of the book-trade of Greece, “many tragedies of Euripides, Æschylus, and Sophocles, dithyrambic poems by Telestes and Philoxenus, the historical writings of Philistus of Syracuse, together with a number of rare works.” From Athens also, at about the same time, Mnaseas, the father of Zeno, brought to his son, in the course of “various business journeys,” copies of all the “published writings of Socrates.”[100] There is also a reference in Dionysius of Halicarnassus[101] to the many volumes of Isocrates which had been published (literally “placed among the people”) by the Athenian booksellers. Schmitz speaks of the great impetus given to the production of books, that is, to the reproduction of copies of the works of the writers accepted as standard, by the literary taste and ambition of many of the successors of Alexander, notably the Ptolemies in Alexandria and the Attali of Pergamum. He mentions further that as one result of the greater and more rapid production of manuscripts there was a considerable deterioration in the quality and standard of accuracy of the copies. The complaints of readers and collectors concerning the errors and omissions in the manuscripts begin from this time to be very frequent. It would, in fact, have been very surprising if the larger portion of the manuscripts that came into the market had not been more or less imperfect. As soon as their production became a matter of trade instead of, as at first, a labor of love on the part of scholars, the work of copying came into the hands of scribes working for pay, or of slaves, and partly from lack of literary interest, partly also doubtless from pure ignorance, the many opportunities for blunders appear to have been taken full advantage of. Fortunately it was only the readers who suffered, and the authors, long since dead, were spared the misery of knowing how grievously their productions were mutilated. Different sets of copyists naturally came to have varying reputations for accurate or inaccurate manuscripts. Diogenes Laërtius[102] speaks of skilled scribes sent from Pella by Antigonus Gonatas to Zeno, the Stoic, to be employed in making trustworthy transcripts of that philosopher’s works, for which the Macedonian king had a great admiration. Diogenes tells us further that when Zeno, who came from Citium in Cyprus, first arrived in Athens, he had suffered shipwreck and had lost near the Piræus, just as he was reaching his journey’s end, both his vessel and the Phœnician wares which constituted its cargo. Discouraged by his misfortune, he strolled gloomily along the avenue from the harbor (“by the dark rows of the olive trees”) toward the city in which he was now a poverty-stricken stranger. As he reached the market-place and passed a bookseller’s shop, he heard the bookseller read aloud. He stopped to listen, and there came to him words of good counsel from the Memoirs of Xenophon. “Cultivate a cheerful endurance of trouble and an earnest striving after knowledge, for these are the conditions of a useful and happy life.” Cheered by this hopeful counsel, Zeno entered the bookseller’s shop and inquired where he should find the teachers from whom he could learn such wise philosophy. In reply, the bookseller, evidently well informed as to the literary life of his city, pointed out the cynic Crates who happened to be passing at the moment.[103]

The intellectual life of Athens, which a century before had centred about the dramatic poets, appears at this time to have been principally devoted to the study of philosophy. Among the other noteworthy changes that had been brought about during the hundred odd years since the death of Euripides, was the evolution of the bookseller or publisher who had now evidently become a permanent institution, and whose shop is recognized as a centre of literary information.

We can imagine some European student landing, two thousand years later, in Boston and applying, with an inquiry similar to that put by Zeno, at the corner shop of Ticknor & Fields. How easy would have been the answer if at the moment had passed along Washington Street the slender figure of Emerson!

The question has been raised whether the passage from Diogenes, above quoted, might not indicate that booksellers or others, owning manuscript copies of popular works, made a regular business of reading aloud to hearers paying for the privilege. Such a practice would apparently have fitted in very well with the customs of the time, and would have met the needs of many of the poorer students for whom the purchase of manuscripts was still difficult. It would also have formed a very natural sequence to the long-standing custom of the recital from memory of the works of the old poets. While it seems very possible from the conditions that public readers found occupation in this way, there is no trustworthy evidence to such effect.

While Zeno was teaching in Athens, a certain Callinus appears to have won distinction among the scribes of Athens for the accuracy and beauty of his manuscripts. The Peripatetic philosopher Lycon, who died about 250 B.C., bequeathed to his slave Chares such of his writings as had already been “published,” while the unpublished works were left to Kallinus “in order that accurate transcripts of the same might be prepared for publication.”[104]

As the rivalry which continued for some time between the Ptolemies and the Attali in the collecting of libraries caused the price of books in Athens to remain high, a further result was the establishing of other centres of book-production, of which for a long time the island of Rhodes was the most important. By about 250 B.C., the literary activity of the Alexandrian scholars, encouraged by Ptolemy Philadelphus, to whom the founding of the great library was probably due, caused Alexandria to become one of the great book-marts of the world.

After the first conquest of Greece by the Romans had been practically completed by the capture of Corinth in 146 B.C., there appears to have been a revival in Athens of the trade in books, owing to the increased demand from the scholars of Rome, where Greek was accepted as the language of refined literature and where Greek authors were diligently studied. Lucullus is said by Plutarch[105] to have brought from Rome (about 66 B.C.) many books gathered as booty from the cities of Asia Minor, and many more which he had purchased in Athens, together with a great collection of statues and paintings.

The great hall or library in which his collections were stored became the resort of the scholarly and cultivated society of the city, and its treasures of art and literature were, according to Plutarch, freely placed at the disposal of any visitors fitted to appreciate them. Sulla, without claiming to be a scholar, was also a collector of Greek books. He secured in Athens the great library of Apellicon of Teos, which included the writings of Aristotle and of Theophrastus. Apellicon, who died in Athens in the year 84 B.C., had a mania for collecting books, and was reputed to be by no means scrupulous as to the means by which he acquired them. If he saw a rare work which he could not purchase, he would, if possible, steal it; and once he was near losing his life in Athens in being detected in such a theft. His Aristotle manuscripts, which were said to be the work of the philosopher’s own hand, had been found in a cave at Troas where they had suffered greatly from worms and dampness.[106] After the manuscripts reached Rome they were transcribed by Tyrannion the grammarian. He sent copies to Andronicus of Rhodes, which became the basis of that philosopher’s edition of Aristotle’s works.[107] Pomponius Atticus utilized his sojourn in Athens (in 83 B.C.) not only to familiarize himself with the great works of Greek literature, but to cause to be made a number of copies of some of the more popular of these, which copies he afterwards sold in Rome “to great advantage.”[108]

There is a reference in Pliny to a miniature copy of the Iliad prepared about this time, which was so diminutive that it could be contained in a nutshell. He speaks of it as Ilias in nuce. Pliny refers to Cicero as his authority for the existence of this manuscript, in which he is interested principally as an evidence of the possibilities of human eyesight. Its interest in connection with our subject is of course as an example of the perfection which had been attained in the first century before Christ in the art of book production.[109]

Notwithstanding the stimulus given to the production of manuscripts by the increasing demand for these in Italy, books continued to be dear, even through the greater part of the first century. The men of Ephesus who were induced under the teachings of Paul to burn their books concerning “curious arts” counted the price of them and found it to be fifty thousand pieces of silver.

The history of Greek literature presents few other instances of the destruction of books, whether for the sake of conscience or for the good of the community, or under the authority of the state. There are, however, occasional references to the exercise on the part of the rulers of a supervision of the literature of the people on the ground of protecting their morals or religion. Probably the earliest instances in history of the prosecution of a book on the ground of its pernicious doctrines is that of the confiscation, in Athens, of the writings of Protagoras, which were in 411 B.C. condemned as heretical.

All owners of copies of the condemned writings were warned by heralds to deliver the same at the Agora, and search was made among the private houses of those believed to be interested in the heretical doctrines. The copies secured were then burned in the Agora. Diogenes Laërtius, by whom the incident is narrated, goes on to say that the destruction was by no means complete, even of the copies in Athens, while no copies outside of Athens were affected.[110] The attempt to suppress the doctrines of the philosopher by means of putting his books on an index expurgatorius was probably as little successful as were similar attempts with the doctrines of other “heretics” in later centuries.

The fact that high prices could be depended upon for copies of standard works ought to have insured a fair measure of accuracy in the manuscript. Complaints, however, appear repeatedly in the writing of the time (i. e., the century before and that succeeding the birth of Christ) of the bad work furnished by the scribes. Much of the copying appears to have been done in haste, and with bad or careless penmanship, so that words of similar sound were interchanged and whole lines omitted or misplaced, and the difficulties of obtaining trustworthy texts of the works of older writers were enormously and needlessly increased. In order to enable a number of copyists to work together from one text, it appears that the original manuscript was often read aloud, the work of the scribes being thus done by ear. This would account for the interchanging of words resembling each other in sound.

Strabo, writing shortly before the birth of Christ, refers to an example of this unsatisfactory kind of bookmaking.

The grammarian Tyrannion, in publishing in company with certain Roman booksellers his edition of the writings of Aristotle, confided the work to scribes, whose copies were never even compared with the original manuscript. And, says Strabo, editions of other important classics, offered for sale in Alexandria and Rome, had been prepared with no more care.[111] The reputation of the manuscripts transcribed at this period in Athens appears to have been but little better. The making, that is to say the duplication and publishing of books, had come to be a trade, and a trade of considerable importance, but the men who first engaged in it appear to have had little professional or literary standard, and not to have realized that profits could be secured from quality of work as well as from quantity, and that for a publisher a reputation for accurate and trustworthy editions could itself be made valuable capital.

The publishers of Greece appear to have been characterized by modesty, for not one of those who did their work at the time of the greatest prosperity of the book-trade in Greece has left his name on record for posterity. The days were still to come when every book would bear its imprint bringing into lasting association the name of its publisher with that of the author. The Greek publishers appear not to have assumed, like the later Tonson, an ownership in their poets, nor do we, on the other hand, find in the utterances of the poets any expressions corresponding to the famous “My Murray” of Lord Byron. Curtius speaks of a reference in an inscription to the “Ptolemy” or “Ptolemaic” bookstore, but the name of the bookseller is not given. It is only later, when the Greek book-trade was in its decline, that we come across the names of two dealers in books, Callinus and Atticus. They are mentioned as famous during the lifetime of Lucian (about 120 to 200 A.D.), the former for the beauty and the latter for the accuracy of his manuscripts. It is an interesting coincidence that this Callinus, noted for the beauty of his texts, bears the same name as the scribe commended three centuries before by Zeno for the beauty and accuracy of his manuscripts. Their copies were much prized and brought high prices, not in Athens only, but in scholarly circles elsewhere. It is evident that each of these booksellers began business as a scribe, selling only the work produced by his own hands, but that as their orders increased it became necessary for them to employ a number of copyists, whose script, receiving a personal supervision and doubtless a careful collation with the original texts, could be guaranteed as up to the standard of their own handiwork. Of the other booksellers who were in Athens in his time Lucian speaks very contemptuously. “Look,” he says, “at these so-called booksellers, these peddlers! They are people of no scholarly attainments or personal cultivation; they have no literary judgment, and no knowledge how to distinguish the good and valuable from the bad and worthless.”[112] Lucian had evidently a high standard of what a publisher ought to be.

Some of these Athenian booksellers whom Lucian thus berates for stupidity, appear also to have borne a poor reputation for honesty. Among other misdeeds charged against them was one, the ethics of which might have belonged to a much later period of bookmaking. In order to give to modern manuscripts the appearance of age, and to secure for them a high price as rare antiquities, they would bury them in heaps of grain until the color had changed and they had become tattered and worm-eaten. Lucian also satirizes the ambition of certain wealthy and ignorant individuals to keep pace with the literary fashion of the time, and to secure a repute for learning by paying high prices for great collections of costly books, which, when purchased, gave enjoyment “to none but the moths and the mice.”[113] It was partly due to the competition of wealthy collectors of this kind that, notwithstanding the great increase in the production of copies, the price of books remained high, much to the detriment of all impecunious students.

The beauty of the calligraphy of the manuscripts of Callinus is known to us only through Lucian, but there are several writers who bear testimony to the accuracy of the transcripts prepared by his rival Atticus, who must, by the way, not be confused with the Roman Atticus, the friend of Cicero. Harpocration of Alexandria, known principally as the author of one of the first Greek dictionaries, makes several references to the authority of the Atticus editions of the speeches of Æschines and Demosthenes. The famous Codex Parisinus of Demosthenes is believed by Sauppe to be based upon the excellent textual authority of a manuscript of Atticus, and Sauppe further contends that, if Atticus did not work from an absolute original, he must have had before him a very well authenticated copy. In the fragment of a work by Galen (who wrote in Rome about 165 A.D.) upon certain passages in the Timæus of Plato which had to do with medicine, Galen makes Atticus his authority for the passages quoted by him, as if we were indebted to this bookseller for the text of the Timæus that has been preserved.[114]

From the time of Lucian the interest in books steadily increased, book-collecting became fashionable, especially in Rome, and bibliophiles and bibliomaniacs were gradually evolved. At this time the beautifully written and carefully collated manuscripts which emanated from Athens bore a high reputation as compared with the much cheaper but less attractive and less trustworthy copies, which were produced in Alexandria and in Rome. In the book-shops of these two cities, during the first two centuries, a swifter and less accurate system of transcribing appears to have prevailed, the work being largely done by slaves or by scribes who did not have accurate knowledge of the literature on which they were engaged, while the necessity of a careful collating of each copy with the original appears frequently to have been overlooked. Origen, writing about 190 A.D., speaks of confiding his works to the “swift writers of Alexandria” in order to secure for them a speedy and a wide circulation. He was looking for no other return for his labors than a large circle of readers, and a large influence for his teachings, and the proceeds of the sales of these “swiftly written copies” were in all probability entirely appropriated by the booksellers who owned or who employed the scribes.

After the conquest of Greece by the Romans the centre of book production passed from Athens first to Alexandria and later to Rome. For centuries to come, however, the book production of the world was chiefly concerned with the works of Greek authors, and the literary activity of successive generations drew its inspirations from Greek sources; and the writers of Greece, whose brilliant labors brought no remuneration for the laborers, gave to their country and to the world a body of literature which at least in one sense of the term can properly be called a magnificent literary property.