than on the substance of a book acknowledges the reality that a book in
a shop is, before anything else, a commodity.
Nevertheless, it seems unmistakable that in the scenes described by
Galen and Gellius, a commercial situation has been transformed into some-
thing else. Perhaps in part because the venue is quasi-public, and because
commerce is intrinsically competitive, a personal exchange turns into a
contest. The preoccupation with bibliological details steers talk toward
arcana that can only be the province of specialists. As Gellius and Galen
present it, the literacy of bookshops is a hyperliteracy that is not equally
shared by all, and which can therefore be exploited to develop a social
advantage. And although grammarians come off badly in most of the
stories Gellius tells, our evidence about bookshops suggests that from
the beginning, they found there a microenvironment in which they could
shine by advertising and applying their peculiar knowledge of books. Book-
shops may thus hold part of an answer to the question, how didgrammatici
gain entry into Roman literary circles? Suetonius’s De grammaticis
shows that many did in fact gain entry, and yet apart from the lessons they
taught to children, they seem to have had no obvious venue in which
to engage the cultured public. They did not offer show performances of
oratory like rhetors, for example, or have the support of institutions like
thecollegium poetarumand the recitation that supported poets.^47 But
in bookshops they discovered a social niche in which they could be
challenged only by those—like Gellius—prepared to try to top them at
their own game.
Finally, I want to suggest that each of the situations I have described in
this section is a case of hyperliteracy converted into social performance.
To be sure, the tone and style of the respective interactions vary greatly.
But in each case, the principals possess a level of literacy far exceeding
anything that would be captured in a standard definition of the term, and
they operate in settings that privilege their expertise: the segregated space
of recitations, the hothouse Hellenism of Lucullus’s library, and the
commerce in books. That literacy is a tool with many uses is an unre-
markable fact. But one thing that is interesting about its use in Roman
society is how often the practitioners I have been describing—as well as
others like rhetors, stenographers, and the clerical category known as
scribae—were able to convert niche skills into positions of broader public
or social authority.
- Kaster 1988, 208 9, has emphasized the problem: ‘‘[The grammarian’s] expertise
did not lend itself to public displays from which stellar reputations could be won, and in fact
the evidence for such displays of the skills and knowledge specific to his profession is virtually
non existent. Instead, his expertise lent itself to displays in private settings and accumulated
its reputation less dramatically through contacts made face to face.’’
Bookshops in the Literary Culture of Rome 285