Roman and Christian antiquity

Abstract

With the beginning of the golden age of Roman literature, in the time of Cicero and Caesar, an organised system of book production appears in Rome. The book trade used slaves to make multiple copies of books; at that time the first public libraries were established in Rome. Besides the spread of literature through the book trade the custom may have come about that also in houses of the well-to-do, slaves were engaged in enlarging libraries, and in the same way private copies were certainly produced. In Herculaneum, destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, a library has been preserved whose founder (probably L. Calpurnius Piso Caesonius) assembled principally Greek philosophical literature; alongside roughly 1800 Greek papyrus rolls only about thirty Latin ones are attested. On the basis of what has become known in recent times from photographs about the state of the Latin texts — despite the desolate state of the charred rolls — they are written partly in a canonical, partly in a somewhat freer capitalis (as in the Carmen de bello Actiaco ). That papyrus rolls in canonical capitalis (as in this library) represented a standard form of Latin literary transmission during the first three centuries is confirmed by a few papyri from Egypt, amongst them Sallust (Hist, and Jug.). But the notion of an exclusive or even preponderant transmission of the literary texts in this classical calligraphic form can no longer be maintained.