Why the Romans Stopped Reading Books [10:25]

YouTube ^ | March 21, 2025 | Garrett Ryan, Ph.D (as toldinstone)

[SunkenCiv]

This video explores how books were published and distributed in ancient Rome. 

Why the Romans Stopped Reading Books | 10:25 
toldinstone | 555K subscribers | 71,742 views | March 21, 2025

 

Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:30 Literacy and texts
1:19 Libraries
2:09 Scrolls and codices
3:13 Bookstores and booksellers
4:07 Helix
5:13 Publication
6:17 Luxury and vintage books
7:14 Bestsellers
8:10 The end of the book trade

[SunkenCiv]

The Roman Empire didn't have a public school system (or a banking system per se, or a postal system...) and was a polyglot entity that spanned the time period from 500 BC (conquest of Ostia) to 1453 (the Fall of Constantinople). Spoken Latin was quite common, although one wag claimed he had to leave Rome and go into the provinces to hear it spoken.

Most people had a minimum working knowledge, probably acquired through hearsay, of written Latin (or any other language). There's a surviving restaurant in Ostia Antica (that is, it's still standing, it hasn't been in operation all this time) that has a mosaic on the wall, higher up, behind the serving counter, analogous to how the burger chains do it. The mosaic has images of their three or four most popular entrees, for pointing, and the price information will have been expressed verbally.

As with most functions in posh houses, education of the young was performed by slaves. Learning to read and write was for both genders (there are only two, after all, the Romans knew that) and the tutor was a higher-status slave, often more of an indenture who sold himself out for limited periods of time (logical, the kids only have to learn for a set number or years).

The Bodleian Library has a long section of a scroll that is the oldest surviving text of the Iliad, and it came from a mummy wrapping.

[linMcHlp]

The Roman Empire began with Caesar Augustus, the first Roman Emperor, in 27 BC.

[SunkenCiv]

Formally maybe, but the conquest of Ostia was the lowly beginning of the Roman Empire. It became more convincingly an empire with its conquest of Italy and the early-3rd century defeat of Carthage and Roman annexation of its European territories.

There was never a Roman Republic, there was a bunch of mafia-style crime families that ruled as an oligarchy.

[Red Badger]

Hold still! I'm not through with the front page yet!....................

[SunkenCiv]

I’m guessing they had a sports section, gladiator 1 vs gladiator 2, 2 victorious, 1 kaput.

[Netz]

Most of humanity could not read.

Only the Power Elite and later, religious leaders would tell the masses whatever suited their interests.

It would be interesting to gather recent data on how cellphone usage has reduced the actual reading of real books.

One would think that readership (and penmanship) has died and that might be the case but from my own experience most people only read what they must.

Anybody out there able to shed light on this transitional period?

[Chickensoup]

Our history in Western Civ leaves me breathless at times.

[Sirius Lee]

Thread goes on forever. Couldn’t be bothered to read it.

[PLMerite]

I didn’t think “Kindle” would be the answer...

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Lack of cheap paper.

Think if the only books you could get were leather bound hard covers with gilt edges. Pretty yes, but expensive.

While the ones we have left are mostly on parchment most of the books of the time, especially the pop fiction, was written on papyrus. No cheap paper, no pop fiction to sell to the masses. No cheap pop fiction for the masses, no profit. Writers would have gone back to story telling. Which would have meant no new books for the publishing houses to put out.

[null and void]

A good story is always worth a drink and maybe a meal...

[GingisK]

Introduction
Over the past few years, American bookstores have staged a comeback. Creative marketing and the social media phenomenon of BookTok are partly responsible. But in the end, the appeal of bookstores will always come from the simple pleasure of browsing shelves – and this was a pleasure that the Romans knew very well. Across the empire, according to the usual estimate, only about one in ten Romans could read. The literacy rate was lowest in rural areas, among slaves, and for non-elite women. Freeborn urban men, by contrast, were reasonably likely to possess at least the basic literacy required to keep records and sign their names.

Literacy and Texts
The Roman elite defined themselves by a sophisticated literary education and filled their cities with texts. Some were inscribed: on the tombs that lined the highways, on the triumphal arches and statue bases of forums, on the notice boards that carried copies of the acta diurna, Rome's newspaper. The texts most important to the Roman elite, however, were in books.

Libraries
From the reign of Augustus onward, the city of Rome boasted an impressive array of public libraries. Libraries were attached to the Temple of Apollo by the imperial palace, to Vespasian's Temple of Peace, to the vast Forum of Trajan – where there were two collections, one Latin and one Greek – and to the great imperial baths. The private libraries of the aristocracy, arranged in dedicated rooms on shelves of rare wood, were almost equally extensive. The only example found intact – in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum – was only about ten feet square, with shelves along the walls and a double-sided case at the center. But even this modest room, almost certainly not the villa's primary library, contained upward of a thousand scrolls.

Scrolls and Codices
Until late antiquity, virtually every book with literary pretensions was written on papyrus scrolls. A scroll had about the same height as a modern hardcover. The length ranged from 10 to 50 feet, the equivalent of about 20 to 100 pages of printed text. Longer works were divided; each of the 142 books in Livy's Roman History, for example, originally occupied a single scroll. The text was written as a continuous stream of letters, with no spaces and minimal punctuation. The codex – the book as we know it – appeared early in the imperial era. Although it was initially used for works of practical reference, Martial, writing at the end of the first century, noted that Roman booksellers were experimenting with travel editions of his poems in book format. But it was only over the course of the third and fourth centuries, and thanks in large part to a Christian preference for codices, that scrolls were finally eclipsed.

Bookstores and Booksellers
Although a small book market existed in Classical Athens, and a more substantial one in Hellenistic Alexandria, it was in Rome that the book trade truly emerged. The business was still in its infancy during the last days of the Republic, when Cicero relied on his friend Atticus – who had a staff of slaves trained as copyists – to supply his libraries. But by the early imperial era, Rome had several well-established tabernae librariae – bookstores. One of these, owned by a man named Atrectus, stood in the high-rent district around Caesar's Forum; the titles of bestsellers were painted on the pillars that flanked its entrance. Like most of his competitors, Atrectus had likely been a slave copyist or librarian before gaining his freedom and entering the business of selling and publishing books.

Publication
Publication in the Roman world was an informal process. Most authors – like artists in later centuries – were either wealthy or attached to wealthy patrons. Roman authors, therefore, usually had no need to support themselves through their work. For some, "publication" consisted simply of reciting their works in public. Others gave copies to friends, with the understanding that these would be shared. An extreme example of this strategy was adopted by a wealthy orator who produced and distributed no fewer than a thousand copies of a speech commemorating his son. Authors with a keener interest in financial benefit used booksellers to publish their works. Quintilian, for instance, addressed the preface of his Institutes of Oratory to the bookseller Tryphon, who was acting as the work's publisher. There was no equivalent of copyright or royalties: the bookseller paid a lump sum for the author's manuscript, and kept all profits from sales of the copies he produced. Luxury and Vintage Books
Many booksellers seem to have stocked and copied a wide range of texts. Alongside Quintilian's weighty treatise on rhetorical education, Tryphon also sold Martial's light-hearted epigrams. Some books were packaged for the luxury market. One edition of Martial, bordered with expensive purple dye, cost five denarii – more than most Romans made in a week. But shops also stocked cheap and re-used scrolls. By the second century, there were sellers who specialized in antique books. Aulus Gellius records browsing vintage works of fantastic fiction at a bookstall in Brundisium and finding – in a shop at Rome – a history that dated to the beginnings of Latin literature. One of Gellius' acquaintances discovered an antique manuscript of the Aeneid, supposedly in the hand of Virgil himself, for sale at a street fair.

Bestsellers
Educated Romans consumed a wide range of literature in both Greek and Latin. Besides the amateur productions of their friends – Pliny the Younger, for example, subjected dinner guests to his poems – they read or listened to everything from edifying aphorisms to titillating Milesian tales. Although works by popular authors like Martial sold thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of copies, they were eclipsed by the classics of the Augustan era. Of these, the most successful was Virgil's Aeneid. Like the Iliad in the Greek world and the Bible in early modern Europe, the Aeneid was the book from which children were taught to read, and the one book that any family with a library owned. It was probably the only Roman book that existed, like modern bestsellers, in hundreds of thousands of copies.

The End of the Book Trade
During late antiquity, the Roman book trade declined with the educated elite that had supported it. The copying of secular texts slowed, and finally ceased. The books in Roman libraries, public and private, crumbled on their shelves; only a small contingent of survivors found their way into monasteries. Of all the millions of books that existed in the last days of the Western Roman Empire, we have – leaving aside papyri from Herculaneum and Egypt – physical fragments of only a few hundred. Perhaps the most impressive of these is the Vatican Virgil, an illustrated edition of the poet's works produced around the end of the fourth century. Written on fine parchment in a tidy rustic capital script, the codex had hundreds of illustrations, some occupying an entire page. Today, however, only about a sixth of the leaves survive. The rest, like almost all the products of the Roman book trade, are gone.