The material beauty of the book is frequently evoked in Roman poetry.
Thus Catullus (22.1–11) gives a meticulous description of the materiality
of a splendid book with pitiful contents, even though the author is
charming (uenustus), cultivated (urbanus), and witty (dicax):
Suffenus iste, Vare, quem probe nosti,
homo est uenustus et dicax et urbanus,
idemque longe plurimos facit uersus.
puto esse ego illi milia aut decem aut plura
perscripta, nec sic ut fit in palimpsesto
relata: cartae regiae, noui libri,
noui umbilici, lora rubra membranae,
derecta plumbo et pumice omnia aequata.
haec cum legas tu, bellus ille et urbanus
Suffenus unus caprimulgus aut fossor
rursus uidetur:(That Suffenus, whom you know so well, Varus,
is a charming, witty, and cultivated man;
he also makes by far the greatest number of verses.
I think he’s written out ten thousand or more
and not, as is usually done, set down on palimpsests.
Royal sheets, new books,
new rollers, scarlet binding cords, parchment covers,
everything ruled with lead and smoothed with pumice.
But when you read them, this handsome and cultivated
Suffenus seems to be a goat milking yokel or ditch digger.)Suffenus is a prolific poetaster (4–5). He has written (perscripta) thou-
sands of lines. But when one reads these verses (cum legas), the author
(Suffenus) seems a goat milker or ditch digger. This dissociation between
the contents of a text and its appearance—so odd in the eyes of antiquity,
because for them speech (parole) is the continuation of the man—insists
precisely on the fact that writing isnotspeech. As in this case, a Roman can
publish verses without subjecting them to social control. They will not to
have to undergo the test of any ritual, not have to be engaged in any perfor-
mance, unless the author voluntarily offers himself to the criticism of his
friends by publicly reading them in front of a chosen public at arecitatio.
16
A bad book does not disqualify its author socially. Suffenus remains a man
whoisadelighttovisit.Theauthorofabookthusdoesnothaveasocialreality
as such, and the authorial figure that the book creates will have the status
that the social, and variable, practice of the book allots to him.
If the book (volumen) at Rome is an object whose material reality is
ceaselessly recalled, that is because it is so often integrated into the social
practice of the gift. Its value then lies as much, if not more, in its material
beauty as in the texts that it contains. Like any symbolic gift, a book can
- Valette Cagnac 1997, 111 70.
The Corrupted Boy and the Crowned Poet 149