The Roman Book by Winsbury Rex;

Author:Winsbury, Rex;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

Abandoned – or escaped?

With hand-copying and private handing-around as the main technical means of survival, Roman writers were acutely aware of the wide gamut of hazards that faced their new work once it was launched by means of a recitatio, although some of those hazards lay too far in the future for them to imagine.

Horace wrote, ‘you can always delete what you haven’t handed around: but once your words are sent out, you can’t recall them’.3 Martial warns his own book that it might be safer to stay at home – tutior domi.4 That was the only sure defence against being relegated to what Catullus – referring of course to another author’s work, the Annals of one Volusius, and not to his own – calls cacata charta – crap paper.5 Copies of your composition could just end up as wrapping paper on the market stalls, for fish or incense or pepper.6 Horace warns the bearer of some of his poems to Augustus not to sweat too much onto them, and not to trip over when carrying them – soiled copies in a hot climate and dirty streets can all too easily be imagined.7 Or copies could end up – horror of horrors – as rough-sheets for schoolboys.8

Writers therefore speak of the moment when a work is ‘abandoned’ to the mercy (or otherwise) of readers/users, when control of it is lost in a world without intellectual property rights, as a moment of loss or even sadness, compared by some writers to the abandoning of an infant or the giving over of a child to a tutor, or the putting out of a child for adoption, even the surrendering of a daughter by a father who has hitherto kept her safe at home under lock and key, whether into marriage or, as some hint, into a life of prostitution.9 Indeed, there is a strong sense conveyed sometimes that what we today might, with pride, call ‘publication’ was seen by some Romans as exactly that – an act of prostituting their work.10 Writers also often used metaphors or phraseology deriving from slavery to describe ‘publication’. Pliny talks of verses breaking free of their author like a runaway slave.11 Martial refers to his work as ‘fleeing’ like an escaping slave, and calls his book a verna, the Latin term for a slave born in the house and so born into slavery.12 Such vivid terminology gains its force not only from Rome as a slave society, but also as a literary society in which literate slaves were the enabling infrastructure of book composition itself.

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