they controlled information that the readers of books did not. Apart from
knowing their own inventory, they knew something about the private
collections of those they had bought from or sold to, and they must have
been familiar with the range and quality of books in neighboring shops.
The concentration of shops in certain areas can only have enhanced the
function of the market as a clearing house of information. The earliest
report about booksellers in Rome shows them mobilizing to take joint
advantage of commercially relevant news. When they heard that the
remnants of Aristotle’s library had been installed in Sulla’s house in
Rome, they smuggled in copyists to transcribe the texts and started
marketing them.
22
Bookshops were thus able to pool information possessed by merchants,
by individual sellers and purchasers of books, and by professional scholars.
In the period before Rome’s first public library opened in the 30sB.C., they
formed the deepest institutional reservoir of bibliographic knowledge in
the capital. And after that, they were in a position to draw libraries as
well into their network of intelligence. The streets on which bookshops
were located passed close to four of the most important: Pollio’s library on
the Forum, the library of the Temple of Apollo above the Vicus Tuscus,
the library of the Temple of Peace at the northeast corner of the Forum,
and the Ulpian Library in Trajan’s Forum (see figure 11.1).^23 Moreover,
the administrators who organized and ran the libraries were sometimes
recruited from the ranks ofgrammaticiwho haunted bookshops.^24
- Strabo 13.1.54 [609] and Plut.Sulla26.1. Tyrannio appears to have been
peripherally involved in this escapade. - For the location of Pollio’s library, I follow Purcell 1993, who argues that the Atrium
Libertatis in which the library was housed should be identified with the building commonly
known as the Tabularium. According to the traditional view, it stood no great distance away,
behind the Temple of Venus on Caesar’s Forum.
So far as I am aware, no ancient source links Roman bookshops with the public libraries,
but it is not merely their physical proximity that suggests a cooperative relationship. The
libraries must have acquired the bulk of their holdings through purchase, as Cicero expected
to do in the case of his brother’s new library, and as Julius Caesar expected when he charged
Varro to ‘‘purchase and organize’’ a collection of Greek and Roman books for the public
library he hoped to found (Suet.Jul. 44.2). Whether the copies already existed or had to be
newly made, it is hard to imagine how the librarians could have procured them without
the services of booksellers. - Three library heads are identified asgrammatici: Hyginus (Suet.Gr. 20.2), Melissus
(Suet.Gr. 21.3), and Dionysius of Alexandria (Suda2: 109 10D1173 Adler). TheSudais
probably mistaken in claiming that Suetonius, who also gained a library appointment, was a
grammaticus, because there is no evidence that he ever taught school. But Suetonius’s
scholarly profile is otherwise indistinguishable from that of agrammaticus, and so it was a
natural mistake. See Wallace Hadrill 1983, 30. By late antiquity if not before, the presence
of important schools of rhetoric and grammar around the imperial fora gavegrammatici
another link to the area: see Marrou 1976.
276 Institutions and Communities