11
Bookshops in the Literary Culture of Rome
Peter White
—In grateful appreciation of Joseph O’Gara and Jack Cella
Our knowledge of the ancient book trade has benefited little from modern
discoveries of inscriptions and papyri. The evidence remains mostly asitwas
when Theodor Birt and others compiled it a century and more ago: a few
dozenallusions scatteredinpredominantlyliterarysources.^1 Butonefeature
of it that isunderappreciated is that the majority of references to the activity
of booksellers happens to be tied specifically to the city of Rome. This
coincidence carries two advantages. The first is that, instead of having
to synthesize data from disparate places and periods, we gain a view of the
book trade in one city over several centuries, as Rome became the Mediter-
ranean center of that trade. The second advantage is that Rome is also the
cityfor whichwehavethemostabundantinformationaboutschools,public
libraries, literary entertainment, and other text-based institutions of ancient
life.Wethereforehaveareasonableexpectationofbeingabletoconnectour
information about bookshops with a broader literary culture. That possibil-
ity is further enhanced by the fact that our informants tend to be the same in
all cases. Booksellers themselves have left almost no testimony. The only
exceptions are a laconic tomb marker commemorating Sextus Peducaeus
Dionysiusbybliopolaand an even more laconic subscription in a Greek
papyrus that was arguably produced by Horace’s bookseller Sosius.^2 For
knowledge of the book trade, as for all other aspects of ancient culture, we
depend on the authors who were the first-order producers of books, like
- The standard treatments are Birt 1882, 353 60, and Birt 1913, 307 12, Dziatzko
1897, Haenny 1885, 24 88, and Schubart 1921, 146 70. Comparison with more recent
compilations such as Kleberg 1967 an Italian translation of which is incorporated into
Cavallo 1989 or Blanck 1992, 113 29, will show how little the evidentiary base has
changed. - The inscription isCIL6.9218. The subscription ofÓøóıïıis found at the end of a
papyrus containing Apollodorus’s grammatical study ofIliad14, Vogliano 1937, 174 5,
no. 19 [P. Mil. Vogl. I.19]; Turner 1968, 51, and n. 21 endorses the suggestion that the
subscriber is one of Horace’s Sosii.