Ancient Literacies by Johnson William A.; Parker Holt N.;

Author:Johnson, William A.; Parker, Holt N.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2009-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

Part III

INSTITUTIONS AND COMMUNITIES

10

Papyrological Evidence for Book Collections and Libraries in the Roman Empire

George W. Houston

Working primarily with literary, archaeological, and epigraphical evidence, modern scholars have recovered a great deal of information about Roman libraries and book collections. From Ephesus, Timgad, and other sites, we have an idea of their physical appearance; inscriptions and literature provide information on staffing and management; and we know something of the existence, building history, or both, of dozens of libraries in Rome, Italy, and the provinces of the Roman Empire.1 From the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, we have the actual contents of a private library, and some (not very helpful) information about its physical arrangement.2 Apart from the collection of volumes in the Villa of the Papyri, however, our knowledge of the contents of Roman book collections—what exactly was in them, how they were organized, and how they came to be—is, so far, very limited.3 In this chapter, I will set out and analyze various types of papyrological evidence—materials not previously exploited in this context—in an attempt to shed further light on the question of the contents and organization of Roman book collections. As we will see, the evidence pertains largely to personal, rather than to more or less public collections, and the nature of the evidence imposes a number of other limitations as well.4 We will deal primarily with two kinds of evidence: first, lists of books that appear in papyri and have some claim to represent the contents of actual book collections; and second, concentrations of papyrus fragments that were found together and so probably belonged originally to the same collection. No attempt will be made here to provide an exhaustive treatment of this material. Instead, my goal is to set out the evidence and provide some examples of ways in which it can be exploited.

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