contemplates, which is to have the books made to order, also implies
recourse to commercial sources. When he describes the level of expertise
required, he is clearly talking about skills not to be found within his own
or Quintus’s household (or in Atticus’s, evidently). He can only be
alluding to professional book copyists. And finally, the strategy that
Cicero adopts for handling his brother’s request is not to dispense with
booksellers, but to deal with them at a dignified remove. No doubt he
himself was hardly more likely to set foot in a bookshop than in a
butcher’s shop. But he intends to turn over the legwork to people know-
ledgeable enough to negotiate purchases in his stead. Chrysippus was an
educated slave whom Cicero manumitted for his learning, whereas Tyr-
annio was agrammaticuswho had already organized two large private
libraries in Rome and was an aggressive book collector in his own right.
16
In a follow-up letter written not long afterward (QFr. 3.5.6), Cicero is still
fretting about the quality of books available from shops and copyists, and
hoping for a capable agent to take the problem off his hands.
For those who, unlike Cicero, preferred to do their shopping in person,
the market consisted of more than books. Because the streets on which
bookstores clustered formed part of Rome’s central shopping district,
books were only one among many commodities available for a shopper’s
inspection. The premise of one of Statius’s poems (Silvae4.9.23–45) is
that the friend who bought him a cheap used book would have pleased
him more if he had stopped at a neighboring stall to buy him tableware or
sausages or figs instead. A visit to the market did not necessarily mean that
one was in quest of a book, or of anything in particular. Both Horace and
Martial describe sauntering among shops and stalls as a pastime for people
with nothing more pressing to do.^17 Bookstores, like barbershops, club-
rooms (scholae), and porticoes, were places in which they were apt to
loiter for a while. As known hangouts, they became points of encounter
where it was possible to locate other people as well as books. Hence in a
poem in which Catullus describes the haunts through which he went
searching for a friend, he included a circuit of the bookshops.
18
Presumably the denizens of bookshops were self-selecting. Certain
people would more readily be found there, for example, and others in
eating and drinking places. But one thing that bookshops had in common
with taverns, and which set them apart from vendors of produce, tools,
more than one juncture, he made them demolish and redo work they had done (QFr. 3.1.1
and 2 and 3.4).
- For Chrysippus, seeAtt. 7.2.8. For Tyrannio, see Wendel 1943. The two libraries
were Sulla’s (Strabo 13.1.54 [609] and Plut.Sulla26.1) and Cicero’s own (Att. 4.4a.1 and
4.8.2); for Tyrannio’s book collecting, seeSuda4: 607.23 Adler. Cicero had at one point
depended on Atticus to assemble a collection for him (Att. 1.7, 1.10.4, 1.11.3). - Hor.Serm. 1.6.111 14 and Mart.Epigr. 9.59.
- Cat. 55.4. Two centuries later, Galen and a fellow physician ran into each other as
they were on their way to shops in the Vicus Sandaliarius (de praecogn. 14.620.1 Ku ̈hn).
274 Institutions and Communities