BOOKSHOPS AS BUSINESSES
Having traced the pattern of human traffic set up by Roman bookshops,
let me return now to the fact that they were businesses. Their commercial
aims in one way or another color much that is reported about them,
which can make it difficult to distinguish between prejudice and fact.
For the most part, our informants belong to an elite educated to think the
worst of all who engaged in commerce, including booksellers. Nowhere
does the stigma emerge more plainly than in the valedictory Horace
attached to his first book ofEpistleswhen he sent it to market (1.20).
The poem is conceived as a farewell to a house-born slave boy eager to
escape the master’s protection and to attract admirers in the world
outside. Horace characterizes the move from private to commercial dis-
tribution as prostitution, and his booksellers as pimps.
25
One thing that lent itself to the prostitution metaphor was that books
had to be physically manipulated in order to be read. As Horace tells his
own book, ‘‘you will be mauled and sullied by the hands of the rabble’’
(‘‘contrectatus. .. manibus sordescere volgi / coeperis’’).
26
A bookroll
suffered wear every time it was pulled open and coiled up again, and
that concern perhaps contributed to a characteristic form of advertising
that booksellers practiced. A shop consisted of inside and outside space.
Whereas inside, the closed rolls were stacked on tables and shelves or
in cabinets or scroll cases,^27 the storefront was plastered with excerpts
that passersby could browse at a glance. One of Martial’s poems directs a
book seeker to a shop whose doorposts, he says, ‘‘are covered in writing on
right and left, so that you can scan all the poets quickly’’ (‘‘taberna /
scriptis postibus hinc et inde totis, / omnis ut cito perlegas poetas,’’
Mart.Epigr. 1.117.10–2). Horace alludes to pillars appropriated for dis-
plays of the latest poetry.^28
That merchants advertised only confirmed their vulgarity in the eyes of
the elite. Seneca complained that their advertising was deceptive as well.
He says that the eye-catching samples (ocliferia) they hung out were only a
lure, and that customers found nothing inside a shop to equal what they
- The prostitution metaphor again lurks in Horace’s reference to a book which ‘‘meret
aera... Sosiis’’ atArs345. The equation of publication with prostitution is discussed by
Oliensis 1995 and Myers 1996, 16 17.
26.Epist. 1.20.11 12; similarly ‘‘nulla taberna meos habeat neque pila libellos, / quis
manus insudet volgi Hermogenisque Tigelli,’’Serm. 1.4.71 2. Mart.Epigr. 1.66.8 speaks of
bookrolls being rubbed by readers’ chins, with a still more salacious insinuation. - Tables: Pseudo Acro on Hor.Epist. 1.20.2; shelves: Mart.Epigr. 1.117.15; cabinets:
Porphyrio and Pseudo Acro on Hor.Serm. 1.4.71 and Sid. Apoll.Epist. 2.9.4; scroll cases:
Cat. 14.10 and Stat.Silvae4.9.21. - Hor.Serm. 1.4.71 andArs373. As Brown 1993, 133 comments, ‘‘the pillar belongs
to a public building or arcade, and is either the site of a bookstall or stands in front of a
bookshop in the arcade and is utilised to advertise its wares.’’ But it was not only booksellers
who posted verse: compare Prop. 3.23.23 24 and Gell.NA15.4.3.
Bookshops in the Literary Culture of Rome 277