Catullus, Cicero, Horace, Martial, Quintilian, Pliny, Gellius, and Galen. As
writers, they had engagements with the literary culture that put them on a
different footing from their contemporaries who were not so intimately
involved with books. They more than any should have been in a position
to discern connections between the commerce and the culture of the book.
My approach to this subject will be organized under three headings:
bookshops in the Roman cityscape, bookshops as businesses, and book-
shops and literary performance. But first, it is necessary to acknowledge
the difficulty of pinning down the activity of booksellers in our sources.
The surest criterion is, of course, the Greek wordbibliopola. But that
word occurs fewer than a dozen times in sources concerned with Rome, it
was not picked up by Latin writers before the time of Martial, and it
eventually faded from use as a loan word.
3
In Latin, the most common
term for someone who sold books waslibrarius.
4
Unfortunately, that
word also covers a wide range of service providers who are not all, or
even mostly, concerned with books or with commerce. For example, it
denotes the private secretary to whom one dictates a letter, as often in the
correspondence of Cicero. Another sort of functionary comes into view in
a passage in which Cicero says that as consul he instructed severallibrarii,
evidently not his own, to make him a copy of a bill that had been
posted by a tribune.^5 In these cases, neither a book nor a sale is involved.
By itself, then, the wordlibrariuscannot pinpoint a bookseller unless the
context supplies independent evidence that books are being offered for
sale. Yet even when both those elements are present, they do not neces-
sarily imply a book dealer, because the owner of a book can bypass
the market and sell directly to another individual.^6 Apart from the occur-
rence of the wordbibliopolaitself, there is no simple test for identifying
- Strabo 13.1.54 [609], Mart.Epigr. 4.72.2, 13.3.4, 14.194.2, PlinyEpist. 1.2.6,CIL
6.9218, Porphyrio and Pseudo Acro on HoraceSat. 1.4.71,Epist. 1.20.2, andArs345. (Pliny
Epist. 9.11.2 and Sid. Apoll.Epist. 2.8.2, 5.15, and 9.7.1 concernbibliopolaein Gaul.)
́ØâºØïðøºåEïíis the word for ‘‘bookstore’’ at GalenLib. Propr. 19.8.4 Ku ̈hn and Athenaeus
1.1 d e, both referring to Rome.
4.Librariusunmistakably refers to someone we would call a bookseller at Cat. 14.17,
Sen.Ben. 7.6.1, Mart.Epigr. 2.8.3, Gell.NA5.4.1, 18.4.1, Pseudo Acro on Hor.Epist.
1.1.55, and Sulpic. Sev.Dial. 1.23.4, as does its disparaging by formlibellioat Stat.Silvae
4.9.21, and probablylibrariolusat Cic.Leg. 1.2.7.Libraria(forlibraria taberna) is clearly a
bookshop at Gell.NA5.4.1 and 13.31.1. I have found no case in which the termscribais
applied to someone engaged in the ancient book trade, probably because from an early date
that word was reserved for the higher status category of those who clerked for Roman
magistrates (compare Festus’s remark ‘‘scribas proprio nomine antiqui et librarios et poetas
vocabant; at nunc dicuntur scribae equidem librarii, qui rationes publicas scribunt in tabu
lis,’’ 446.26 9 Lindsay). - Cic.Agr. 2.13. The range of meanings in literary sources can be seen from Collassero’s
TLLarticle (7.1347 8); an even more elaborate array of meanings can be found in Rossi’s
survey of the epigraphic evidence inDizionario Epigrafico(4.955 65). - As for example at PlinyEpist. 3.5.17 and Suet.Gr. 8.3.
Bookshops in the Literary Culture of Rome 269