Books and Readers in Ancient Greece and Rome

I

THE USE OF BOOKS IK ANCIENT GREECE

Beezone note: Some of the Greek script have been left blank due to limitation with transcription limitations.

UNTIL within a comparatively recent period, which may be measured by the lifetime of persons still living, our information with regard to the physical formation and the habitual use of books in ancient Greece and Rome was singularly scanty. Our ancestors were dependent on casual allusions in Greek and Latin authors, intelligible enough to those for whom they were written, but not intended for the information of distant ages, and in no case amounting to formal descriptions. Such results as were obtainable from these sources were gathered together and set out in the well- known handbooks of Birt, Gardthausen, Maunde Thompson, and others. The position, however, has been greatly changed by the discoveries of Greek (and a few Latin) papyri in Egypt during the last half-century. These have not only given us a large number of actual examples of books, ranging from the end of the fourth century b.c. to the seventh century of our era, but have also thrown a good deal of light on the extent of Greek literature surviving in at any rate one province of the Roman Empire, and of the reading habits of the population.

The object of the present book is to present briefly the present state of our knowledge on these subjects. Some of the information is quite new, acquired only within the last few months; some is rather new and has not yet been incorporated in the existing handbooks; while some has been long familiar, and only needs to be reconsidered and restated in the light of the additional evidence. Much of it will only be interesting to those who care so much for books as to wish to know some­thing of the details of their construction; but some of these details also have their value for those who are concerned with textual criticism. Here also some previous conceptions have to be revised in the light of our fuller knowledge.

I propose first to deal with the origins of reading and the growth of the habit in the Greek world, from the earliest times to about the third century after Christ; then to describe the appearance and methods of manufacture of books during the same period; next to consider the practice of reading in the Roman world; and finally to describe the change which came over the methods of book­production in the early centuries of the Christian era, the decline of pagan literature and the growth of that of Christianity, leading up in the fourth century to the general adoption of vellum as the material of books, and the transition from the ancient world to the Middle Ages. For the earlier part of the period under consideration, before about 300 B.c., such additional evidence as we have comes from the increase of our general know­ledge of the ancient world, due to archaeological exploration, and not from concrete examples of actual books. For the later part the discoveries of papyri in Egypt come into play.

Any consideration of Greek literature necessarily begins with the Homeric poems; and in this connexion we have in the first place to take into account what is now known as to the origins of writing in the countries surrounding the eastern Mediterranean. With regard to this subject, it is not too much to say that our knowledge has been revolutionized by modern archaeological dis­coveries. Only about a generation ago it was accepted doctririe that writing was practically un­known to the Homeric age. In Grote’s History of Greece, which then held the field, it is laid down in round terms and without qualification that ‘neither coined money, nor the art of writing, nor painting, nor sculpture, nor imaginative architecture, belong to the Homeric and Hesiodic times’. Few things, he says, can in his opinion be more improbable than the existence of long written poems in the ninth century before the Christian era. He would rather suppose that a small reading class may have come into existence about the middle of the seventh century, about which time the opening of Egypt to Grecian commerce would furnish increased facilities for obtaining the requisite papyrus to write upon.¹ To that period, accordingly, he would assign the commencement of written litera­ture in Greece.

1. Part I, ch. 20 (vol. ii, p. 116, of edition of 1883)

Here we find ourselves at once at a point on which much evidence is available to us which was unknown to Grote. Recent discoveries in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in Crete, and in Asia Minor have vastly increased our knowledge of the practice of writing in the ancient world. I will summarize this evidence quite briefly, beginning first with Egypt.²

2. Ibid., pp. 143, 150

3. The folliwing paragraph is extracted from a book of my own, Ancient Books and Modern Discoveries, issued in a limited edition by the Caxton Club of Chicago in 1927.

The Prisse Papyrus in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris is believed to have been written during the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt (about 2200-2000 b.g.). It contains two ethical treatises, the Teach­ing of Kagemna and the Teaching of Ptah-Hetep. According to the colophon at the end of the former of these treatises, Kagemna lived in the reign of Huni, the predecessor of Seneferu, at the end of the Third Dynasty (about 3100 b.g.), and com­piled this collection of moral precepts for the benefit of his children. Ptah-Hetep lived a little later, in the reign of King Isesi, or Assa, of the Fifth Dynasty (about 2883-2855 b.g.), and his book also was written for his son. We have thus from Egypt an actual manuscript which was written before the end of the third millennium b.c., and the works contained in it, if we are to believe their own statements, were composed respectively in the fourth millennium and early in the third. Nor is there any reason to doubt these statements; for there is confirmatory evidence. The Book of the Dead, of which we have manuscripts on papy­rus dating from the Eighteenth Dynasty (about 1580-1320 b.c.) and portions written in ink on wooden coffins of the Eleventh Dynasty or earlier,¹ certainly existed many centuries earlier, since the so-called Pyramid recension is found carved in the pyramids of Unas, the last king of the Fifth Dynasty, and of Teta and Pepi I of the Sixth Dynasty. It is not unreasonable to suppose that these texts must have been written on some more ephemeral material before being carved on stone. Egyptian tradition would carry them back even further still. A chapter is said to have been ‘found’ in the reign of Semti of the First Dynasty; and the same king’s name is associated with a recipe in a book of medicine which was apparently written or edited in his reign. Further, King Zoser, of the Third Dynasty, is said to have been a patron of literature, and portraits and tombs of persons described as ‘scribes’ exist from the Fourth Dynasty. Certain chapters of the Book of the Dead are said to have been composed in the reign of Men-kau-ra (Mycerinus), the fifth king of that Dynasty, and the medical prescriptions preserved in British Museum Papyrus 10059 ^are assigned to the Fifth Dynasty. The practice of writing is therefore well attested for Egypt at least as far back as the third millennium b.c.

• Coffins of Amanu and Mentu-Hetep in the British Museum.

From Mesopotamia we have evidence of the use of writing of at least equal antiquity, and a much greater wealth of actual specimens. The archives discovered by the American excavators at Nippur in 1888-1900 include tablets bearing literary texts (notably the’ Sumerian version of the Deluge story) which are assigned to about 2100 b.c. or earlier.^[1] A fragment of the same narrative, previously dis­covered, bears an actual date equivalent to 1967 b.c. The texts themselves, being in the Sumerian language, must have been composed much earlier. Nor would there have been any difficulty about recording them in writing; for the evidence of the existence of cuneiform writing now goes back well into the fourth millennium. Thousands of tablets discovered at Telloh, at Ur, and at Warka show (hat writing was in constant use for the preserva­tion of accounts, contracts, business archives, foundation tablets, building records, and other purposes of daily life throughout the whole of the t hird millennium b.c. and probably earlier. Writing was therefore available for literary purposes as early as it was wanted; but to what extent it was actually used there is at present no evidence to determine.

From the Hittite Empire also, which dominated eastern Asia Minor in the second millennium, we have ample evidence of the use of writing. The archives of Boghaz-keui contain the records of the Hittite sovereigns, written in both Semitic and Hittite dialects in Babylonian cuneiform. These have only recently been deciphered and some progress made in the interpretation of the Hittite language. As will be seen presently, they have a direct bearing on the Homeric question; but in any case they are decisive evidence of the habitual use of writing at this period. There is also writing in Hittite hieroglyphics, but they have not yet been deciphered.

Coming yet nearer to the Greek world, we have the Cretan tablets discovered by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos. These are in two forms of script, pictographic and linear. They have not yet been deciphered, but certainly include accounts. So far

8 The Use of Books in Ancient Greece as is at present known, there are no literary texts among them; but they prove the existence and free use of writing in Crete at least as far back as 2000 B.C.

It is therefore now amply proved that writing was in habitual use in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, in Asia Minor, and by the Minoan predecessors of the Greeks in Crete at dates far preceding the beginnings of Greek literature; and the question naturally arises, Is it likely that a people such as the Greeks, of lively intelligence, of ready initia­tive, and with literary tastes, would have remained ignorant, or have made no use, of an invention currently practised among their neighbours, and even their Minoan ancestors, and of such obvious utility for their own purposes? The natural pre­sumption must clearly be to the contrary.

Two objections may possibly be made at this point. First it may be asked how it is that no specimens of early writing have survived in Greece, as they have in the adjoining countries that have been mentioned. The answer is that the Greeks did not use baked clay tablets, as did the Sumer­ians, Babylonians, Hittites, and Cretans, while skins and papyrus, which they did use in later times, and which must be taken to be the materials which they would naturally have used in earlier times, could not survive in the Greek climate and soil, as they have survived in the drier soil and climate of Egypt. It has further been argued that if the early Greeks had been acquainted with the practice of writing, some trace of it would have survived in the form of inscriptions on stone, This is an argument which may any day be invalidated by new discoveries; but in any case it is far from being conclusive. No inscriptions have so far been discovered among the extensive remains of Minoan Crete; yet we know from the isolated discovery of the archives of Knossos by Sir Arthur Evans that the Minoans were familiar with the use of writing. The absence of inscriptions is therefore not a valid argument against an acquaintance with letters on the part of the Mycenaean Greeks; and the pre­sumption to the contrary, based on the general use of writing in the countries around the eastern Mediterranean, appears to hold good.

Let us look now at the earliest remains of Greek literature, and consider the probabilities as to the method of their composition and preservation.

Fifty years ago the Homeric and Hesiodic poems stood out by themselves as an island, separated by a gulf of centuries from the mainland of Greek literature; and the Trojan war and all the tradi­tional early history of Greece were regarded as legendary, down to about the time of Solon. Now, as the result of the discoveries of the last fifty years, the gaps in our kriowledge are being filled up, the origins of Greece are being brought into connexion with the histories of the surrounding countries, and we are beginning to form a general picture of the whole course of development in the countries around the eastern Mediterranean. We know that there was a great civilization in Crete in the third and second millennia, which came to an abrupt end, while still in great splendour, in the fourteenth century. We know that the civilization to which we give the name Mycenaean was a descendant and offshoot from the Minoan stem, and out of this, after the break caused by the Dorian in­vasion, comes the full Hellenic culture which we know. Further, we have lately learnt from the Hittite records, now being painfully interpreted, that contemporaneously with the Hittite Empire of about 1300-1200 b.c. there was a considerable power on both sides of the Aegean whose princes and dominions bore names in which we can recog­nize names familiar to us in Greek history and legend—Eteocles, Aegeus, Achaeans, Lesbos, and so on.¹ The general tendency in this, as in other provinces of knowledge, is to vindicate tradition, as containing at least a substantial modicum of truth. Let us consider therefore the Greek tradi­tions as to both facts and dates.

1 Forrer’s equations of Greek and Hittite forms of names, though possibly open to question in detail (as to which I am not competent to judge), seem to me too striking and too numerous to justify disbelief in general.

Greek tradition assigned the origin of Greek literature to the introduction of the alphabet by Cadmus from Phoenicia; and the traditional dale of Cadmus is about 1350-1300. The traditional date of the fall of Troy is 1184 or 1183 B.C. and this accords sufficiently well with the indications of the Hittite records. The traditional dates lor Homer vary from 1075 to about 875. Clinton accepts an intermediate date, about 975, whit h is that favoured by Aristotle. The latest writer on the subject, Mr. Bowra, after saying that ‘the state­ment of Herodotus that he lived in the lat ter part of the ninth century and was a contemporary of Hesiod may not be far from the truth’, proceeds in the next sentence to place him late in the eightli century. The latter date is surely too late, and is perhaps merely a slip of the pen: for (here is good evidence for placing Arctinus, the author of the Aethiopis, in the first half of that century (c. 775~75°); and if one thing is more certain than another, it is that the Iliad and Odyssey preceded the poems of the Epic Cycle.

If, then, we take the ninth century as the latest date for Homer which suits the evidence,^[2] what sort of picture can we make of the manner of the formation and preservation of his poems? (I am assuming that there was a personal Homer, who was mainly responsible for both Iliad and Odyssey, but those who prefer the older view, now less prevalent than it once was, that they are the work of a syndicate, or grew by themselves out of a number of detached lays, botched together by an incompetent editor, have only to substitute the phrase ‘the Homeric poems’ for ‘Homer’.) As I have already shown, there is no a priori reason why they should not have been written down. Writing had been in common use for centuries in the lands adjoining the Aegean and Mediterranean on the east; and if Cadmus or any one else intro­duced writing to Greece about the fourteenth century, that gives plenty of time for the establish­ment of the practice, and for the production of those earlier efforts in verse which must surely have preceded the consummate technique of Homer.

1 It might have been wiser to imitate the prudence of ——— ‘Though I have investigated very carefully the dates of Hesiod and Homer, I do not like to state my results, knowing as I do the carping disposition of some people, especially of the ——– poetry at the present day’ (ix. 30. 3, Frazer’s transl.). But it could hardly be avoided.

Looking at the matter from the point of view of internal probability, the argument for a written Homer appears to me overwhelmingly strong. It is difficult even to conceive how poems on such a scale could have been produced without the assistance of written copies. It is not that the feat of memorizing poems of such length is incredible. On the contrary, one of the speakers in Xenophon’s Symposium¹ says that his father compelled him to learn the whole of the Homeric poems, and that he could still recite the entire Iliad and Odyssey. Parallels are quoted from various primitive peoples; and it is on record that in the nineteenth century one young Wykehamist (afterwards the defender of Silistria in the Crimean War) learnt the whole of the Iliad, and another the whole of the Aeneid, in the days when such feats of memory were en­couraged at Winchester.¹ The poems, once com­posed, could have been recited; but could they have been carried in the memory of the poet dur­ing the process of composition? And are we to picture the poet, after completing his magnum opus, as assembling a corps of rhapsodists around him, and reciting his work over and over to them until they had committed it to memory? It is difficult to believe. And if there was one original author’s copy, why should not each rhapsodist, or at any rate each school of rhapsodists, have possessed one also? It seems easier to believe this than the contrary.

• Symp, iii. 5

Moreover, even if we are prepared to believe that Homer and the Homeridae could have com­posed and memorized the Homeric poems without book, what are we to say of Hesiod? Rhapsodists might indeed think it worth while to learn the Catalogoi, which contained the popular legends of the gods and heroes, and for which listeners could readily be found; but can we suppose that there would have been much of a public for the Works and Days, with its combination of a purely per­sonal quarrel with agricultural precepts? It seems to me incredible that such a poem should have survived unless it had been written down, whether on lead, as shown to Pausanias on Helicon, or in some other fashion. The same might perhaps be said of the poems of the Epic Cycle. The poets who produced them must have been familiar with the Iliad and Odyssey, not only generally but in detail. They must have been rhapsodists them­selves or habitual frequenters of rhapsodists; and they must have acquired corps of rhapsodists to learn their own poems in turn and recite them. But Hesiod was either the contemporary of Homer, as was held by many in antiquity, or not much later; and the later one brings down Homer, the nearer he comes to the earliest of the Cyclic poets. And if the works of Hesiod and the Cyclics were written down, it is surely straining at a gnat to refuse to allow the same to Homer. Now that the general antiquity of writing in the world of the Homeric age is established, it is impossible to maintain that writing was practised in the Greek lands in the seventh and eighth centuries, but could not have been known in the ninth, or even earlier. The basis for the old belief is cut away.

• Learch, History of Winchester College, p. 427

I believe therefore that sober criticism must allow that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed in writing, and that written copies of them existed to assist the rhapsodists who recited them and to control their variations. It is much more difficult, however, to say what was the form of these written copies, or in what manner they circulated. There is no evidence of the existence of anything that can be called a reading public. I do not attach any importance to the fact that writing is not men­tioned in Homer, except in the reference to the a^para Xvypd carried by Bellerophon. There was little occasion for the mention of it in such poems of war and adventure; and I do not think it would be difficult to find modern poems, describing a primitive age, which are equally devoid of refer­ences to it. But we do have references to the recital of poetry, and if reading had been a common practice, we might have found some allusion to it. At any rate, without evidence which we certainly have not, I do not think we are entitled to assume its existence.

I imagine, therefore, that written copies of poems, though they existed, were rare, and were the property of professional reciters, from whom alone the general public derived their knowledge of them. On what material they were written it is impossible to say. Papyrus would have been obtainable from Egypt, and we know from Hero­dotus that skins were used at an early date in Asia Minor; but beyond that we cannot go, in the present state of our knowledge. It is, however, fairly certain that poems of such length, whether written on skins or on papyrus, could not have existed in single volumes, but must have occupied a number of separate rolls. Such a division into rolls might naturally lead to the division into books * with which we are familiar. As will be seen later, a book of Thucydides corresponds with the con­tents of a papyrus roll of the largest size in ordinary use; and the natural presumption is that the twenty-four books of the Iliad represent a stage in its history when it occupied twenty-four rolls. When this division was made is unknown; but it may be worth observing that this theory of its origin would appear to point to a date earlier than the Alexandrian age. From that age we possess a number of specimens of Homeric manuscripts, and it is clear that a normal roll could easily accommodate two books of the Iliad. It would seem, therefore, that the division into twenty-four books may go back to a period when rolls were shorter or handwritings larger; in which connexion it may be observed that the earliest extant literary papyrus (that of Timotheus’s Persae, of the end of the 4th cent, b.g.) is in a much larger hand than later manuscripts. The Odyssey could, of course, easily have been written in fewer rolls than the Iliad, but the division into twenty-four books was obviously made to correspond.

While on the subject of the tradition of the Homeric poems, it may be permissible to refer to a phenomenon, of which there is considerable evidence among the papyri of the third century b.g., namely the existence of copies containing a considerable number of additional lines, which do not appear in our standard text. These lines are not substantial additions to the narrative of the poems, but are rather of the nature of verbal padding. There is no reason to regard them as authentic, and it is easy to account for their existence. When copies were scarce and means of inter-comparison almost non-existent, it would have been easy for a rhapsodist who fancied him­self as an inventor of Homeric phrases to produce an edition of his own, which might obtain local currency. Only when copies from various sources were brought together in a single place, as at Alexandria, was comparative criticism possible, and then such excrescences as these were speedily removed. They are rare in papyri of the second century b.c., and unknown later.

With the beginning of the seventh century, or possibly a few years earlier, we reach the lyric age of Greek poetry, when the circulation of litera­ture must be taken definitely to have passed from the rhapsodes to manuscripts. The recitations of the rhapsodes, at least of the Homeric poems, no doubt continued to be a feature of the Pan- hellenic festivals; and the setting of poems to music, as in the case of the odes of Terpander or Aleman, or later the epinician odes and dithyrambs of Pindar, Simonides, and Bacchylides, provided a new form of publicity for the poets. But the more personal compositions, such as the satires of Archi­lochus, the political verses of Solon, and many of the lyrics of Sappho and Alcaeus, were quite un­fitted for musical accompaniment or public per­formance, and must have circulated, so far as they circulated at all, in manuscript. Throughout the seventh and sixth centuries the circumstances must have been very much the same. Poems, epic, elegiac, and lyric, were being produced in con­siderable quantities. The poets were acquainted with one another’s works, and enjoyed reputations among their contemporaries. Their poems must have been written down, and must have been accessible to those who desired them: but we have no evidence to give precision to our picture of the methods of publication. Lyric and elegiac poems, each composed for a particular purpose, may often have circulated singly; but whether their authors gathered them together into collected editions we do not know. Later, we know that they were so gathered; that the odes of Alcaeus formed six volumes,¹ that Sappho’s were arranged in nine,² that the epinicia, dithyrambs, and paeans of Pindar and Bacchylides were brought together in separate groups; but we do not know that this arrangement was made in the lifetimes of the respective poets, and it is more likely to be attri­butable to the scholars of Alexandria. An or­ganized book-trade at this time is highly im­probable: at the same time it is evident that copies of the works of all these poets must have existed and have circulated in sufficient numbers to secure their continued preservation, and to make it possible for them to be gathered into libraries when libraries came into being.

In the fifth century we reach the culminating point of Greek literature, with Pindar, Simonides, and Aeschylus in its earlier portions, followed by Sophocles and Euripides, Herodotus and Thucy­dides, Aristophanes and his rivals’in comedy, and all the great band of poets and prose writers who survive for us only in quotations and allusions. It is a period of intense literary creativeness on the highest scale, and yet, so far as we can judge, of very limited book-production. Oral methods of publicity continued. The odes of the ceremonial lyrists were no doubt produced with musical ac­companiment on the occasions for which they were written; the tragedies and comedies were performed on the stage; even the works of the historians may have been read at the great festivals, as that of Herodotus is said to have been. It stands to reason that even for these purposes a certain amount of production in manuscript form was necessary. The performers must have had copies from which they learnt their parts; the authors and reciters must have had their copies to read from. What is to some extent doubtful is the circulation of copies of books among the general public, and the growth of a habit of reading.

Contemporary references to the reading of books are very rare during the golden age of Greek litera­ture. In Plato’s Phaedo Socrates is represented as referring to a volume of Anaxagoras, which he heard read and subsequently procured; and in the Apology he says that copies of Anaxagoras could be bought by any one for a drachma. In the Theaetetus Eucleides of Megara recalls a conversa­tion between Socrates and Theaetetus which he wrote down at the time, and which he now causes a slave to read aloud to himself and his com­panion.¹ In the Phaedrus, on the other hand, Socrates speaks contemptuously of a dependence upon books in comparison with memory;² and his attitude is the same in his conversation with Euthydemus recorded by Xenophon.³ More valu­able for our present purpose is the statement’ of Xenophon’s Socrates that he was accustomed to unroll the treasures of the sages of old time which they had left in books written by them, and to study and make extracts from them with his friends.⁴ This proves the existence of the practice of consulting books in a study or library; but it must be admitted that the general picture which we have, both in Plato and in Xenophon, is of oral instruction and conversation, not of reading and private study.

It would be a mistake, however, to overstress this scantiness of evidence as an argument against the existence and even the abundant existence and free use of books in the latter part of the fifth century. The very casualness of these allusions is a proof that there was nothing extraordinary about them, and that the accessibility of books might be taken for granted. A minute acquaintance with, Homer was assumed as part of the equipment of every educated man, and allusions to Hesiod, to the Cyclic poets, or to the lyrists are made with an assurance which implies that they would be understood. Aristophanes has a verbal knowledge of the works of Aeschylus and Euripides which could not have been derived from stage representa­tion alone. Thucydides knew and refers to the works of his predecessors in history; and the works of the physical philosophers and of the medical schools that followed Hippocrates could only have been known through circulation in manuscripts. Euthydemus, the younger contemporary of So­crates, possessed while still quite young a collection of the works of the best poets and philosophers: and the cheapness and ready accessibility of the works of Anaxagoras, referred to above, cannot have been confined to that philosopher.

More illuminating, perhaps, is a line in the Frogs of Aristophanes, in which the chorus, inciting the rival poets to bring their wares to the test, assures them that they need have no fear lest the audience should be unable to follow and appreciate them (as had apparently been the case at the first per­formance of the play); for they are now all men who have seen the world in the course of their military service, and each of them has his own copy of the play in his hand and can understand the points.¹ This seems to imply that a certain amount of book-knowledge of literature could now be presumed, though formerly it was not the case. And this is the general conclusion to which all the evidence seems to point.

A final reference may be made to a passage in Xenophon’s Anabasis, where among the cargoes of ships wrecked near Salmydessus, on the north coast of Asia Minor, ‘many books’ arc said to have been included.²

Of the formation of libraries there is practically no evidence. Athenaeus,³ at a much later date, does indeed refer to traditional libraries formed by Pisistratus and Polycrates of Samos in the sixth century, but these are separated by two and a half centuries from the next collections that he can mention, and may be little more than mythical. His next example is Eucleides, who may be identi­cal with the Megarian philosopher already referred to, though Athenaeus calls him an Athenian. His list also includes the name of Euripides. These libraries, however, like that owned by Euthydemus, as mentioned above, would have been small private collections of books, amounting at most to a few score rolls; and even they seem to have been exceptional.

The general conclusion would therefore seem to be that at the end of the fifth century and in the early part of the fourth, books existed in Athens in considerable quantity, and were cheap and easily accessible. A habit of reading was growing up, but was not yet very firmly established. The general opinion did not rate reading highly as a means of mental training, in comparison with the play of mind upon mind in oral discussion. The lively Athenian mind accepted Bacon’s distinction, and preferred the ready man to the full man. The age of the full man was, however, approaching.

When we pass on another stage, from the genera­tion of Plato to that of Aristotle, a very distinct change is marked. Whereas in the earlier period, while books must have been produced in consider­able numbers, a reading public could hardly be said to exist, we have now reached a period of readers and libraries. Even if it were not actually

The Use of Books in Ancient Greece 25 related that Aristotle possessed a library, the fate of which after his death is on record,^[3] it would be obvious from the mere list of his works that it must have been so. His great compilations, whether of physical science or of political constitu­tions, could not have been produced without a reference library; and his practice set an example which was followed by his disciples, such as Theophrastus and Menon, and which profoundly influenced the course of Greek literary history. It is not too much to say that with Aristotle the Greek world passed from oral instruction to the habit of reading. The history of libraries in the Greek and Graeco-Roman world is rightly taken to start with the foundation of the Museum at Alexandria; but the foundation of the Museum and of the great Alexandrian Library was made possible by the change of habit which took form in the time, and largely under the influence, of Aristotle.

From the date of the foundation of the Museum and Library of Alexandria we are at last on firm ground in dealing with the book-world of Greek civilization. We have no longer to depend on deductions from casual allusions or from abstract probabilities. We have records on a fairly ample scale; and more than that, we have actual speci­mens of the books of that period, and know how they were manufactured, and what they looked like. The credit of the foundation of these institu­tions is variously assigned to Ptolemy I (Soter) and Ptolemy II (Philadelphus). The truth would ap­pear to be that the deliberate collection of books to form a library and a centre of study was begun by Ptolemy I, as a step in the hellenization of Egypt, while the complete establishment of both Library and Museum was accomplished by Phila­delphus. Ptolemy I was himself an author and the friend of authors, and he entrusted the formation of the library to Demetrius of Phalerum, a disciple of Theophrastus and an encyclopaedic writer, who for ten years had given Athens experience of the rule of a philosopher-tyrant. Expelled from Athens, he was glad to find an asylum with Ptolemy (290 b.c.) and to confine himself to the more harmless task of collecting books.

That books were by this time plentiful is shown by the size which Ptolemy’s library almost im­mediately attained. According to one account, 200,000 volumes had been collected by the end of his reign, i.e. within about five years. Such figures are, however, totally unreliable, and another story speaks of 100,000 at the death of Philadelphus, and yet another of 700,000 when the Library was burnt in the time of Caesar; but in any case it is clear that a substantial collection was formed by Soter, which was transferred by his son to the Museum of which he was the founder. This ‘Temple of the Muses’ was the first great library after those formed by the kings of Nineveh; and besides being a library, it was an Academy of Letters and Learning. Eminent men of letters and scholars, such as Callimachus, Apol­lonius Rhodius, and Aristarchus, were placed in succession at its head; students gathered round it; a corps of copyists was employed to multiply manuscripts; and Alexandria became the centre of the literary life of the Hellenistic world.

We have now reached a state of things which is comparable with our own times. Greek culture had broken the bounds of the old Greek world, had spread over the Near East and the Mediter­ranean basin, and absorbed Rome as soon as Rome had awakened to intellectual life. The formation of the Alexandrian Library, and of other libraries elsewhere, of which that of Pergamum, to be men­tioned later, is the most notable, encouraged the production of books, much as the British Museum Library encourages and facilitates it to-day. The output of books of learning, or of what desired to pass as learning, was enormous. The standard of works of the highest literature might have fallen woefully since the generations of Aeschylus and Thucydides and Plato; but the trade of bookmaking prospered exceedingly. Commentators, compilers, popularizers swarmed, as they do to­day; and it is evident that there was a great quantity of minor literature which has disappeared with hardly a trace.

In estimating the extent of the habit of reading in the Greek world, we have to remember that the literature in the Greek language which has survived to our own day is only a small fraction of that which existed in the three centuries on either side of the Christian era. It may be of interest to adduce evidence on this head, some of which is the result of recent discoveries.

There are two methods by which some idea could be obtained of the total extent of Greek literature. One is an examination of the references to lost works which appear in authors who still survive. It would be a laborious, but not un­interesting or uninstructive task to compile a cata­logue of lost Greek books from the references to them in extant literature. I can only give a few indications here. We know that, with the excep­tion of a substantial part of Pindar and a smaller fraction of Bacchylides, all Greek lyric poetry has disappeared as a collected whole, and is known to us only through casual quotations. We know that only 7 plays of Aeschylus have survived out of at least 70, only 7 of Sophocles out of 113, only 18 of Euripides out of 92, only 11 of Aristophanes out of at least 43; and that of all the other tragic and comic poets of Greece we have nothing. In the great anthology compiled by Stobaeus about the end of the fifth century, the quotations from lost works far exceed those from works that have survived, although the latter are naturally the most famous works of their respective authors, and therefore the most likely to be quoted. A rough count shows that in the first thirty sections of Stobaeus, 314 quotations are taken from works still extant, and 1,115 from works that are lost. Out of 470 names in Photius’s list of authors quoted by Stobaeus, 40 at most can be said to exist in any substantial form to-day. And this is from a collec­tion which draws naturally from the best works and the best authors, and takes no account of the much larger mass of inferior literature, from which no quotations are taken, and much of which had already disappeared at the time when the antho­logy was made.

An earlier work which consists mainly of ex­tracts is the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus, which as a rag-bag of quotations may be compared with Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. I have counted the quotations or references in a single book, and (though I cannot guarantee the absolute accuracy of the enumeration) I find that out of 366 quota­tions (mainly from the comic dramatists) only 23 are from works that have come down to us. It is as though of all the works quoted in Burton, only those had survived which are included in the World’s Classics or Everyman’s Library.

The second line of investigation into the extent of Greek literature is to be found in an examina­tion of the fragments of literary works which have been brought to light among the papyri discovered in such quantities in Egypt during the last fifty years. The vast majority of these fragments are derived from the rubbish heaps that surrounded the towns and villages of Graeco-Roman Egypt, and especially those of Oxyrhynchus. They are the debris of the books which the Greek-reading population of Egypt used and possessed. They are theretore specially valuable for our present pur­pose. Any scrap of papyrus sufficiently large to make it possible to ascertain the character of its text is evidence of the existence of a complete manuscript at the time when it was written. It is therefore possible for us to determine the propor­tion between the manuscripts of works that have otherwise come down to us and those which have been lost. We can see, further, what authors were the most popular, and in what centuries there was the greatest activity in the production (and there­fore presumably the study) of books.

The latest inventory of literary papyri (including under this term the fragments of vellum manu­scripts, tablets, and ostraca which have been found in the same conditions) is that of C. H. Oldfather, compiled in 1922.¹ The ten years since that date have added appreciably to the totals, but have not affected the general character of the results. Omit­ting Biblical texts and Christian works, as forming a category apart, Oldfather lists 1,189 literary manuscripts, represented sometimes by the merest scraps, sometimes by substantial rolls or codices. Of this total, no less than 315, or more than a quarter of the whole, are Homeric, 282 being actual copies of parts of the Iliad or Odyssey, while 33 are commentaries, lexicons, or the like. Of the remaining 887, 237 are from works which have come down to us otherwise; 650 are from works wholly lost or known to us only by quotations or references. It is fair to add that among these are included a number of school exercises, brief extracts, and some works which are barely on the fringe of literature. Nevertheless the disproportion is marked, and completely confirms the conclusions indicated by the evidence of Stobaeus and Athe- naeus. It is clear that the lost works of Greek literature very greatly exceeded in number those which have survived. Every student of the collec­tions of ‘fragments’ of Greek authors will agree in this conclusion.

• University of Wisconsin Studies, no. 9 (Madison, 1923).

It is interesting also, as indicating the literary tastes and educational practice of Graeco-Roman Egypt, to observe the distribution of the known authors and the dates from which the remains are most numerous. Homer, as already indicated, predominates quite enormously. He was the in­dispensable subject-matter of education, and just as a knowledge of the Bible is regarded as an essential part of the equipment of every one with any tincture of culture in this country, so it was with Homer in the Greek world. But it is note­worthy that the predominance of the Iliad over the Odyssey is just as great as the predominance of Homer over all other authors. Of the 282 manu­scripts of Homer represented in Oldfather’s list, 221 are from the Iliad, and only 61 from the Odyssey. Of the other great writers, Demosthenes is the most fully represented, with 48 copies of one or other of his orations, besides three commen­taries and the more extensive work of Didymus, of which a substantial papyrus exists at Berlin. Next to him, as is only natural, comes Euripides, with 32 manuscripts; and after him Menander, with 26, though the attribution of some of these is doubtful. This, in view of the popularity of Menander and the extent to which his comedies lent themselves to quotation, is only what one would have expected. Since the discovery of the Cairo codex, which contains substantial portions of four comedies, Menander may be reckoned with Bacchylides, Hyperides, Herodas, and Timotheus as an author who has, at least to some considerable extent, been restored to us from the sands of Egypt. To them one should perhaps add Ephor us, if, as seems probable, he is the author of the historical work discovered at Oxyrhynchus, and Aristotle as a historian, in virtue of the ’A9t]vomov iroXt/rela.

After these follow Plato, with 23 manuscripts, Thucydides with 21, Hesiod with 20 (mostly from the Catalogues and the Theogonia, only four being copies of the Works and Days), Isocrates with 18, Aristophanes and Xenophon with 17 each, So­phocles with 12, and Pindar with 11. That Sappho also retained popularity is shown by the appear­ance of eight manuscripts, one of which is as late as the seventh century. The most noticeable gaps in the list are Aeschylus, Herodotus, and Aristotle. Aeschylus is represented only by a single fragment, which has been doubtfully assigned to his Carians or Europa, of his more famous works no trace has been preserved. Of Aristotle there is only the ——–, the Posterior Analytics, and the ———-, nothing of the Ethics, the Politics, the Rhetoric, or the Metaphysics, or of the collections on natural history. In view of the difficulty of both these authors, it is perhaps not surprising that they did not form part of the curriculum of a small provincial community; but it is remarkable that Herodotus, who is both easy and attractive, and has a special interest for Egyptian readers, should be represented only by i o examples. Other authors of whom there is some substantial representation are Aeschines (8), Apollonius Rhodius (8), Calli­machus (9 and 2 commentaries), Hippocrates (6), and Theocritus (6).

On the whole, when it is remembered that these papyri come mainly from the rubbish heaps of small provincial towns, the range of literature represented must be regarded as fairly substantial. It shows that Greek literature was widely current among the ordinary Graeco-Roman population; that it held a prominent place in education, and that there was a reading public of considerable size. It can have no relation to the extent of literature that was available in a great literary centre such as Alexandria, Antioch, Athens, or the other important towns of the Greek world. Of this a better idea may be obtained from the collections of Athenaeus or Stobaeus, and the numerous quotations scattered about in other Greek authors. The papyrus discoveries dispose, however, of the suggestion that such compilations were derived mainly from anthologies; for if so much literature existed in the small towns and villages of Egypt, there is no ground for question­ing the much wider comprehensiveness of the great libraries, to which scholars had access.

The distribution of the papyri in time is also instructive. It will be understood that conclusions on this head are necessarily precarious, partly because of the element of chance that attends the discoveries of papyri, and partly because datings of manuscripts can seldom be exact. Palaeo­graphers differ in their opinions as to date, and often can venture only on approximate dates, such as ‘ 1st—2nd century’.

The period of greatest dissemination of reading was in the second and third centuries of our era. This is the period when the Graeco-Roman occu­pation of Egypt was at its height. During the Ptolemaic period the infiltration of a Greek popu­lation, and the assimilation of Greek culture by the natives, were steadily growing. (The higher figures for the third century b.c., as compared with those for the second and first, may be ac­counted for by the larger discoveries of papyri of that century, especially in the form of mummy car tonnage.) After the Roman conquest, the Graeco-Roman population, which was mainly Greek-reading, greatly increased; and the first three centuries of the Empire mark the climax of Graeco-Roman culture in Egypt. The drop that takes place in the fourth century is very marked, and is to be accounted for partly by the general decline of Roman civilization, and partly by the spread of Christianity, which diverted attention from pagan literature. From this decline there was no recovery, until the Arab conquest in the seventh century extinguished Christian and pagan literature at once.

These figures of course relate only to Egypt, but there is no reason to doubt their general applica­bility to the Hellenistic world. The causes which operated in Egypt operated also in Syria and Asia Minor, and may be assumed to have produced similar results. We are entitled therefore to draw general conclusions as to the dissemination of books and the practice of reading in the Hellenistic world. During the last three centuries before Christ, Greek literature was spreading over the wide regions administered by the successors of Alexander. The main centres, notably Alexandria, but also Antioch, Pergamum, and the other great cities of the Near East, were the seats of libraries and the homes of scholars; and Greek literature was the natural heritage of the Greek-speaking population throughout the Hellenistic kingdoms. There was a large output of literature, much of it in the shape of commentaries and collections, a good deal of it scientific and medical. There was also a general habit of reading the great works of previous ages, especially Homer, and after him Demosthenes, Plato, Euripides, and Menander. During the first three centuries of the Roman Empire the same habits continued; then, with the spread and official recognition of Christianity, came an abrupt decline of humanistic culture. Christian literature increases, but pagan literature declines, until both alike are submerged in the rising flood of Mohammedanism.

***

Beezone note:

The Tension in Kenyon’s Argument: Writing vs. Memory

Kenyon argues strongly for the early use of writing, especially in the composition and preservation of the Homeric poems. He critiques the romantic idea of purely oral transmission by emphasizing the practical and logistical implausibility of memorizing and composing epics like the Iliad and Odyssey without written aids.

But later in the chapter, Kenyon acknowledges that in actual cultural practice, memory and oral methods continued to dominate well into the classical period—even into the fifth century BCE and beyond.

He writes, for example, of Socrates’ contempt for books in Phaedrus, and notes that:

“The general opinion did not rate reading highly as a means of mental training, in comparison with the play of mind upon mind in oral discussion. The lively Athenian mind accepted Bacon’s distinction, and preferred the ready man to the full man.”

So yes—he’s presenting both sides:

1. On the one hand, writing must have been used to compose, preserve, and circulate long poems and philosophical texts.

2. On the other hand, oral performance, memory, and recitation remained the dominant modes of intellectual engagement, especially in elite education.

Memory in Greek Culture

Kenyon points to a deeply rooted tradition of trained memory that endured alongside the rise of writing:

• He references Xenophon’s Symposium, where a character memorizes all of Homer.

• He compares this to 19th-century English students memorizing Iliad or Aeneid in their entirety.

• He notes that rhapsodes and performers were still the principal medium through which literature reached the people.

Even in the 5th–4th centuries BCE, texts existed, but oral discourse was the standard of learning, especially in philosophical and rhetorical settings.