Inside Roman Libraries: Book Collections and Their Management in Antiquity

by George W. Houston

Oh, what fun! Houston carefully weighs the evidence for libraries and book collections in Ancient Rome. To be safe, he limits most of his study to a few places which we are absolutely certain were libraries. There are two building, one at Ephesus and the other at Timgad, where inscriptions still in place announce that this is The Library. There is one villa at Herculaneum in which hundreds of carbonized scrolls were found; we know that this was some sort of private library because we have (at least part of) the collection, most of which was found on the shelves of Room V but some of which was lying here and there about the house. We have two or three piles of papyrus from Oxyrhyncus in which a bunch of literary papyri seem to have been discarded together, and these seem to be the remains of libraries or private collections that were thrown out because they were no longer wanted, or perhaps because they had been copied to codex books and the scrolls were worn out. We have some pictures and sculptures of people reading and writing; Romans sat down to read, but while they liked to have a low table on hand for writing implements, candles and the like, they don’t seem to have used tables for either reading or writing. A really delightful book.