A Visit from the Book Burner: Romans burning books

As everyone knows, a lot of Roman books have disappeared. In some cases, every work by authors esteemed in their lifetimes has completely vanished, while some others survive in tiny fragments. What caused that? And why do we have any books at all from this period, other than Christian works, which were generally preserved because of the religious hostilities of the fourth century?

Some of this we can hang on the emperor Valens, whose paranoid behaviour is often seen as setting the whole thing going. We have two clear accusations from Ammianus Marcellinus:

‘throughout the oriental provinces owners of books, through fear of a like fate, burned their entire libraries; so great was the terror that had seized upon all.’ (XXIX. 2.4, p.293)

Here he comments on the misdeeds of Valens persecuting nobles for involvement in prophetic works. Similarly:

‘innumerable writings and many heaps of volumes were hauled out from various houses and under the eyes of the judges were burned in heaps as being unlawful, to allay the indignation at the executions, although the greater number were treatises on the liberal arts and on jurisprudence’ (XXIX. 1. 41, p.292)

 

Bust of Valens

Note that Ammianus is talking about the eastern empire; the context here is Valens’ reaction to the coup of AD371 intended to put on the eastern throne Procopius, a cousin of the recently deceased ‘pagan’ emperor Julian. By denouncing the books possessed by wealthy pagans as prophetic works, predicting his death, he tried them for maestas, treason. 

Burning books is a feature of Daniel Sarefield’s doctoral thesis (Sarefield, 2004). He points out that book burning was not confined to intolerant Christians, but had been applied by supposedly wholesome pagans for several centuries before that, even under the Republic. To burn a book which was deemed contrary to the will of the gods was, Sarefield says, an act of piety. 

American newspaper recording Nazi book burning

 Burning books is something we of course associate with the Nazis and their Feuersprüche, ‘fire sayings’ as they burnt non-Nazi works. Sarefield points out that destruction of literature that failed to conform was a feature of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ of Chairman Mao, where between 1966 and 1976 many ancient Korans, Buddhist scrolls and Confucian books and objects were destroyed. In 1971, Sinhalese militants destroyed 97,000 rare Hindu books in the National Library of Jaffna in Sri Lanka. 

Maoists burning books during the Cultural Revolution

In case we in Europe start to feel superior, in 1992, ‘the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo, home to the region’s largest collections of manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Bosnian Slavic written in Arabic script, and other archival documents from the period of Ottoman rule, was shelled and completely burned to the ground’, destroying 1.5 million rare volumes (Sarefield, 2004, p.7).

Without going into too much tedious detail, there is a human appetite for the destruction of enemies which is probably far worse today than in antiquity and killing the literature of a people is arguably worse than killing individuals: new people will be born, but a culture torched is lost forever, and we needn’t feel that the internet will save us. Even in the US there were book burnings of gay-themed books in the US in the 1990s, while in 2001 an insane Christian minister burnt the entire Harry Potter series of books as ‘an abomination to God’ (Sarefield, 2004, p.10). 

American Christian marks the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks 

 Readers may say that there is no chance of very popular works like the Harry Potter books being destroyed in full, but people probably said that about the Roman popular historian Marius Maximus, a continuator of Suetonius up to the fourth century, whose many books have all been destroyed.

Burning books in Savonarola's 'Bonfire of the Vanaities'

 Arthur Pease (in Sarefield, 2004, p.14) suggests that in antiquity, an author’s writings were considered an extension of their person, so by a process of sympathetic magic, killing the books was killing them. Can we then say if an author or holder of books burnt them themselves, it was an act of suicide, or at least self-immolation? 

As an example of this we have the incidents report by Ammianus above. Sarefield refers to

…letters written to [St] Augustine by a Christian named Consentius living in the Balearic Islands. They detail the case of a monk, Fronto, who uncovered a circle of heretics in Tarragona, Spain, one of whom, a local priest, possessed magical books. In order to bring a speedy conclusion to the inquiry, which threatened to discredit several local bishops and other members of prominent families, a group of seven bishops decided to burn the incriminating books and all other documents related to the case and restore everyone to communion. 

(Sarefield, 2004, p. 15, n. 31)

By contrast, Dirk Obbink, an expert on ancient manuscripts, has commented that a lot of MSS were destroyed not by deliberate fire but by neglect, being devoured by worms, mould and moisture. No doubt this is true, but is does take a perverse attitude to torture a book to death. Failing to copy a book is worse than burning it, if you know it will self-destruct anyway.

Supposedly tolerant pagan authorities in Rome burnt the prophetic works of occult writers under the Republic. Livy, writing about the Second Punic War, tells us (Livy 25.1.11–12) about the decision of the Urban Praetor, Marcus Aemilius decreed that ‘all persons in possession of books containing prophecies, forms of prayers, or written formulae for the performance of rituals must surrender them to him by an appointed date’ (the term is ‘quicumque libros vaticinos’). Such destruction was political – anything that dented Roman ideas of its own manifest destiny. In 213BC, with the suppression of the Bacchic priests at Rome, their books were destroyed too. Over the next decades, thousands of people were killed for their beliefs. 

In 181BC, chests were discovered that claimed to contain the writings of Rome’s claimed Second King, Numa Pompilius (Livy book 40, Pliny the Elder book 13). These were probably not to do with Numa, who lived before the Romans were literate, if he existed at all, and if he did, he was an Etruscan. The Etruscans were literate, if not in the eighth century BC, so if the works were in Etruscan, there were still Etruscan speakers at that time, who might be able to understand those writings. However, half the books were supposedly written in Latin.

Whatever it was that they found, it must have shocked the elite of the second century BC, because they destroyed them. The books, said to have been in good condition, were destroyed by Quintus Petellius, the praetor of that year, by means of victimarii, who would have sacrificed animals, who burnt them on bonfires. We can only speculate about what they said, but one guess is that there was no mention of Romulus. 

Romulus was probably invented in the fourth century BC to be an ancestor for the Romans. He and Remus were probably repackaged out of Parrhasius and Lycastus, joint kings and founders of Arcadia in Greece, sharing their special birth and upbringing by a wolf (discussed by Plutarch Moralia 4.36).  

Sarefield, citing Walter Burkert, considers this to be a ‘ritualised aggression’, creating an antagonistic community brought together by communal book burning (Sarefield, 2004, p.48). Fire, it is noted, is a means of communicating with the gods; the books were being sacrificed to them, expiating their crime by vivicomburium, being burnt ‘alive’.  This seems to be the last recorded book burning at Rome under the Republic. However, Augustus would return to it with gusto.

Augustus, father of the fatherland and bookburner in chief

 Suetonius reports how the emperor burnt 2000 Greek and Latin prophetic texts in the Roman Forum (Augustus31). Burning something in a public square is an act of justification, like killing someone in public because you feel justified. Maybe it’s a sign of insecurity. Vitellius, during his brief reign, expelled booksellers from Rome (Tacitus Histories 2.62; Suetonius Vitellius 14.4). 

It should be noted that the Romans did not only burn books; all records that were no longer immediately useful or required were routinely destroyed; the Vindolanda Tablets were intended to be destroyed, but survived because the ground was too damp. 

A Vindolanda Tablet, preserved due to Britain's damp climate

The idea of preserving all records forever if possible in a late medieval one. In England, it was a decree of King Henry II that from the start of the following reign (Richard I) all governmental records were to be preserved (see Michael Clanchy From Memory to Written Record). The types of document intended to be burnt at Vindolanda ranges from routine records like muster rolls for the army to personal letters. We do need to understand that the maintenance of surplus records in the Roman World was minimalist. While authors like Cicero, Pliny the Younger and Sidonius Apollinaris kept copies of letters for years to permit publication, few others did. While Pliny’s Book X preserves letters of Trajan, nobody else did. Roman Law may have been written, but it didn’t privilege text over speech; you can’t cross examine a book or letter.

Everyone should read this book

 Catherine Nixey’s excellent (if intemperate) 2017 book The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical Worlddetails the destruction of many ‘pagan’ works across the whole empire. Besides self-censorship, we come across several acts of destruction for the victims’ own good. Nixey (2017, p.161) quotes Zacharias Rhetor in the late fifth century AD approving of one Severus who went through Berytus (Beirut) seizing and burning private libraries which contained ‘pagan’ works; some were hidden in a secret compartment in a chair (p.161) He was ‘spared the law but forced to burn his books’ with his own hands (p.162). Elsewhere she quotes John Chrysostom and Theodoret gloating over the deliberate destruction of classical literature (p.166). It is clear from the sources that copyists no longer recopied classical works, nor held stock and moved into copying exclusively Christian works; a holder of books, like the man in Berytus, could be denounced by fellow-citizens simply for possessing them and it could be considered that destruction of books was a ‘liberation’.

Why did so many books disappear? A reasonable argument is that people stopped copying them, and that they simply failed to survive due to degradation and damage to MSS. But why did scribes stop copying them? It is hard to suppose that they found no market for the autobiography of Augustus De Sua Vita, or that works being pagan and hundreds of years old were simply not copied; all works by Virgil and most by Ovid and Horace survived, yet the contemporary Ab Urbe Conditaof Livy is mostly lost, apparently due to a decision made by Pope Gregory I who ‘burnt all manuscripts of Livy which he could find, since the author was full of idolatrous superstitions’ (Clark, 1921, p.13).

However,  many orthodox Christian authors of the later empire wrote works which have not survived, including two books by Eusebius, a Father of the Church and favourite of Constantine.

In discussing the survival or otherwise of texts from antiquity, we need to be aware that there was no publishing industry, as we would understand it, at that time, and that we have no idea to what extent works we value now – or wish we had – were valued then. While there has been extensive work on what books have been lost, we might properly ask why anything has survived. 

Books were created to order, sometimes by private subscription. Somehow it would be announced that a new work was available and could be ordered. Older books might be bought second hand and in Rome there was a lively book market. In addition, wealthy people might privately contract to have a copy made of older works from professional scribes. 

There were also expert networks, as discussed in Haines-Eitzen (2000, p.77), who cites the following examples. Cicero’s Letters to Attalus13.8 asks him ‘Please send me Brutus’ Epitome of the Annals of Caeliusand get Panaetius’On Foresight from Philoxenus’. This suggests that wealthy and connected people knew of personal libraries and what was in them and that there was a social expectation that books could be borrowed and perhaps copied, under a principle of reciprocity. This is reinforced by a letter of Pliny (Ep. 8.15.1), where Terentius asks to borrow books. Jordanes in sixth-century Constantinople borrowed the Gothic History of Cassiodorus Senator (now lost), and wrote his Getica as an amended and compressed update, commenting that he had to write mostly from memory, since he had to return the book before copying it.

Similarly Oxyrhynchus Papryrus 2192 has its anonymous author ask his addressee to ‘Make and send me copies of books 6 and 6 of Hypsicrates’ Characters in Comedy, for Harpocration says they are among Polion’s books. But it is likely that others have them too’.

This envisages a professional copyist who seeks out works, travels to someone else’s house, copies the work, and that works could be transmitted in a partial state. This may explain why some works have survived as individual sections and not in full.

Works could be disseminated fast when required. Haines-Eitzen (2000, p.78), cites an early Christian work called The Shepherd, produced in Rome in Greek by Hermas in the late first century AD, which is cited shortly afterwards by writers in both Alexandria and Lyon. It may be the case that the organised nature of Christianity led to the founding of professional scriptoriain leading cities. We learn from a passage at the end of the Martyrdom of Polycarpthat ‘These things Gaius copied from Irene’s, the student of Polycarp… and I, Socrates, copied it in Corinth from the copies of Gaius’ (Haines-Eitzen, 2000, p.81).

Clearly there were scribal networks which preserved works by copying; this self-same text also carries a message from Peonies who had ‘gathered it together when [it] had been worn out with age’ (Haines-Eitzen, 2000, p.81). We can argue that scribal networks which Christians used had also existed in earlier times and that social networks of friends caused works to be copied and disseminated.

As long as such networks of friendship and reciprocity were maintained, classical literature could be maintained too. It is feasible that professional scribes might keep stocks of works they knew they could sell, such as the works of Virgil. The number of MSS of some authors’ works that have survived may reflect not only the value placed upon them, but also the number of copies made. 

Another feature of the destruction of ancient books is the Byzantine edict of AD691 forbidding the creation of palimpsests from Christian religious texts. This meant that Christian writers turned to ‘pagan’ texts. The conquest of Egypt by Islam in AD640 had ended the supply of papyrus, so scraping vellum and reusing it was the only option. We should note that in many cases the scraped vellum was turned sideways and recut to the desired size. I consider that to be the equivalent of making a cross on the forehead of a pagan bust, baptising the text. Ironically, sometimes the later works put onto the palimpsest were themselves scraped off to create a double palimpsest. New works might even be placed over multiple older works, such as a work by St Severus of Antioch, written on top of portions of the Iliad, the Gospel of Luke and a manuscript of Euclid. Here we can can see the effects of severe resource depletion rather than wilful destruction.

It seems then that the Roman process of burning books and other records created a market for new papyrus, which became in short supply in the West with the loss of control of the western Mediterranean after the Vandal conquest of Carthage. Instead of burning a resource they couldn’t replace, it became acceptable to reuse the papyrus as a palimpsest. The East continued to have plentiful access to Egyptian papyrus until the Persian Wars in the early sixth century, culminating with the permanent loss of Egypt to the Muslims in AD640, and finally the decree of 691 made sure only ‘pagan’ texts were scraped. It’s a marvel any pagan work survived, and I will return to the survival and recovery in a later posting.

How Did Romans Obtain Books and What Did They Read?

In a world without printing, how did the Romans obtain books? How did authors get paid? What exactly did the average Roman read? Whilst there have been countless studies of Latin literature and its most famous authors, what did people actually do to obtain and dispose of books?

Bookshops certainly existed in Rome in the centuries after empire, so we might assume that they had already existed. The Anglo-Saxon book Lives of the Abbots of Jarrow and Wearmouth, anonymous but written by a fellow-monk to Bede, tells of a visit to Rome by Benedict Biscop in the 650s AD. He bought books and brought them back to Jarrow. An analysis of Bede’s sources suggest he had a book of poems by Virgil, possibly only a school primer for children to learn good Latin by emulating Virgil’s style and a copy of Priscian’s Institutes of Grammar. Most of what Biscop brought back would have been works of Christian exegesis and saints’ Vitae.

The bookshop quarter of Rome seems to have been on the Vicus Tuscus, once the area in which Etruscans lived. It is tempting to think of London’s Charing Cross Road before it was taken over by coffee shops and other tat. Books were sold from a shop (horreum) and a number of horrea librorum congregated in that area. According to Horace, some books were sold in front of a statue of Vertumnus and one of Janus Geminus as well as in the Roman Forum. Perhaps we should think of stalls selling books on market days, something like the Sunday bouquinistes along the Seine in Paris today. At a guess, they sold second-hand volumines. Horace says they sacrificed to Vertumnus, suggesting that the sellers were Etruscans. The same street was also the centre for male prostitution, indicating that book selling was a marginal trade too. (Interestingly, Charing Cross Road leads up to both intellectual Bloomsbury and to the site of St Giles Rookery, once deemed the worst slum in Europe; Dickens went there with four policemen to guard him.)

Horrea Epagathiana et Epaphroditiana, Ostia

What did the bookshops of Rome sell? What, physically, was a book? Scores of Hollywood movies have portrayed emperors and others reading scrolls. These certainly existed, but weren’t read as they are shown in films. There, they are opened up from top to bottom and read left to right, starting at the top of the scroll, which is then unravelled downwards to reveal more text.

Esther Scroll in Hebrew

However, surviving Roman pictures show the scroll (volumen) was not held with hands positioned at ’12 and 6’, but at ‘9 and 3’. That is, the scroll was opened from the left, the handwritten block of text was read, and then the left side was rescrolled and the right side opened.  When the scroll was returned to its wound position, it was placed in a wooden tube or in a pigeonhole (columbarium) with a tag on it to say what it was. The volumen was often positioned on a desk with side rollers.

The Roman use of a bound book (codex) seems to date from about the time of Augustus and may have been brought back from Egypt. In basic form, it’s a block of text from a volumen, cut up and held at one side. The incipit, the nearest thing Roman books had to a title, would be written on the spine, and books were kept spin-inward on shelves and probably lying down, not upright.

If the stalls which Horace refers to sold second-hand books, they would have been volumines, not codices, as those were the latest thing. This presupposes a book trade, at least for older works, and therefore individuals who knew enough about books to know what buyers wanted and who had the means to source such works. Authors then as now went in and out of fashion, so over time the sort of books sold would change. We can imagine Benedict Biscop paying out for books in such a setting. Although, since England had no coins at that time, the payment must have been gifted locally.

If I can divert for a second, I have always been surprised that the Romans with their extensive empire and thousands of schools teaching a standardised curriculum did not feel impelled to invent printing. The principle of reverse type was well understood, since it underpins the signet ring, known for millennia, the pottery stamp, seen on billions of fragments at sites such as Monte Testaccio, and the woodcut, used for illustrations such as those which accompany the Notitia Dignitatum. We know from recent published research at Herculaneum that metal-based permanent inks existed before AD79. An extensive book trade would have been fuelled by such simple technology, but the only labour it saved would have been that of slaves, so the scriptorium endured.

How did booksellers acquire their stock? Authors, if paid at all, were sponsored, so it’s feasible that sponsors might have copies made of works, which is why so many had dedications to nobles; Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia is dedicated to the emperor Titus, who probably had some copies run off after Pliny died at Pompeii! The large amount of manuscripts of the Aeneid suggests knock-off copies were made.

The proscriptions of the second Triumvirate probably led to the seizure of the offenders’ libraries, which would then be auctioned off to booksellers at so much per pound of scrolls. When rich men left half their estate to the emperor, he probably didn’t want their books, so the heirs might need to sell books in order to maintain some lifestyle. One wonders if Ovid’s books slipped back into the stockroom when (and if) he was exiled, or if they sold better for it, just as the disappearance of Agatha Christie did not harm to her sales a jot.

Other than knock-off copies, would booksellers have any new stock to sell? According to Robert Knapp in his excellent Invisible Romans, there was a vast literature of popular subjects including proverbs, such as the Sayings of Publius Syrus, interpretation of dreams (Artemiodorus Interpretation of Dreams, the Oracles of Astrampsychus), books of fables, astrology, joke books (such as Philogelos, recently discussed by Mary Beard); the only book by Ovid mentioned in the lifetime of people who might have known him is a work on fishing, suggesting he needed to supplement fame with cash; we can imagine Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, dedicated to empress Julia Domna, was a bestseller (it’s about a wonder working conjuror of the first century AD).

Take Marius Maximus, a popular author, author of Caesares, the story of the twelve Caesars from Nerva to Elagabalus, clearly a potboiler sequel to Suetonius.. Ammianus comments of the Roman nobility of his day that ‘Some of them hate learning as they do poison, and read with attentive care only Juvenal and Marius Maximus, in their boundless idleness handling no other books than these, for what reason it is not for my humble mind to judge.’  (28.3.14). His work survived to be criticised by St Jerome, but not a word survives. We can imagine that Suetonius’ Lives of the Famous Prostitutes was a bestseller too, and that hasn’t survived, probably due to wholesale burning of books in the late 300s AD by Christian zealots.

As every new technology seems immediately to lead to a new means to produce pornography, there may well have been a trade in that too (‘Were you looking for something a little stronger, splendissimus? I might have just what you’re after.’). It might well be in Greek, so that the average Roman bigot couldn’t read it anyway. Works like Petronius Satyricon, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (the Golden Ass), novels like Heliodorus’ An Ethiopian Tale, Xenophon’s An Ephesian Tale and Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon. The Myriobiblos of Photius (in ninth century Byzantium) references 279 books, most of them lost, but they would have been those worthy of a Patriarch, so thousands of works have been lost and never noted.