Scribes, Script, and Books by Leila Avrin

Author:Leila Avrin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: American Library Association

In Cicero's day, the first century b.c.e., bookstores were located in the Roman Forum. Authors sometimes came to these shops to recite their works, and readers as well as writers came to browse, gossip, and buy. Even provincial towns like Brindisi, Ilerda (Lérida, Spain), Carthage, Lyons, and Reims had bookshops, anxious to keep up with what was being read in the capital. Both new and secondhand books were sold, more of the latter as the empire declined. Advertisements and book lists were posted on pillars or circulated. Not all readers had their heads in the books of Virgil, Pliny, or Julius Caesar; Romans wrote and read grade B and X-rated books as well. There were many private libraries and about twenty-eight public ones in Rome by the fourth century; the largest one in the Forum housed Greek and Latin collections, shelved separately. Children were taught to read and write, not to become scribes but to grow up to become "intelligent readers." Most families of means had a library in their suburban villas and in Rome, whether they read their books or not.

Because Rome admired Greek culture so much in the first centuries after conquest of the Hellenistic kingdoms, the government had no objection to the continuation of Greek language and script in the eastern provinces and in Egypt. And so these areas were never Latinized as were the European provinces. Political and religious distinctions between the two parts of the empire became more exaggerated as time went on, but differences in language, script, and culture were a basis for the eventual division, which was hastened by Constantine's establishment of the "new Rome" at Byzantium in the fourth century.

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