An ancient studies librarian’s take on Houston’s Inside Roman Libraries
George W. Houston, Inside Roman Libraries: Book Collections and Their Management in Antiquity. Studies in the history of Greece and Rome. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xvi, 327. ISBN 9781469617800 $59.95.
My name is Zach Rosalinsky and I am currently pursuing an MS in Library Science at Long Island University and an MA in Classics at New York University as part of LIU-NYU’s dual-degree program. One area where these two interests intersect is the history of ancient libraries. In this contribution to the ISAW Library blog, I will approach George Houston’s Inside Roman Libraries (UNC Press, 2014) from the particular perspective of a classicist who is also an academic librarian.
Having recently taken coursework on library and book history, I have seen how sparse the literature on ancient libraries can be on most library school syllabi; my background in the Greco-Roman world made me more interested in Greek and Roman libraries than we had time for in a class meant to survey the entire history of the library: in such courses, ancient libraries are typically only considered for one class session. Library students are often introduced to the Library of Alexandria and then the codex, with almost nothing in between. For example, in my library history course the only ancient library history given were excerpts from Lionel Casson’s Libraries in the Ancient World (a book that has largely been superseded by the last 20 years of research); the other ancient readings introduced the codex, a medium that did not entirely overshadow papyri until well into late antiquity. Perhaps a few hundred words were devoted to the libraries of ancient Rome. In this review I hope to show why Houston’s book should be included, albeit in an excerpted form, on library school syllabi focused on book and library history.
Inside Roman Libraries brings together literary evidence, architectural remains, papyrological evidence, and artistic representations in an attempt to recreate what a Roman library looked like, what it contained, and how it was organized and managed. The introduction provides a helpful basic overview of ancient book rolls. Chapter One delves into how Roman book collections were acquired and assembled. Chapter Two is concerned with book lists, while Chapters Three and Four look at the physical remains of ancient books that survive on papyrus. Chapter Five discusses the physical space of Roman libraries, and Chapter Six asks how Roman libraries functioned and how collections were organized, maintained, and made usable.
In his preface, Houston states that his “chief hope is that the book will be useful to classicists and library historians generally” (xiii). A worthy aspiration. It is therefore disappointing that at no point does he enter the world of modern library studies. (The bibliography contains an impressive amount of sources on ancient art, literature, architecture, and a variety of other subjects; notably absent, however, is anything written on or about library history or library science.) Houston’s book is full of information that is invaluable for a classicist seeking to understand Roman libraries. Library historians, on the other hand, are likely to ask very different questions. Houston’s grounding in the world of classics means that one must actively read between the lines in order to arrive at answers to questions relating to library history and historical practice. But such directed reading will be rewarded, as we shall see.
The most pressing question a library historian might ask is just what a Roman library is. In his introduction Houston tells us what he means by “Roman,” defining it for his purposes as, “the geographical area of the Roman Empire and the four centuries from Cicero to Constantine” (2). Rather oddly, he does not define “library” or explore the philology in Latin or Greek for “library” or “librarian,” leaving unclear whether we and the ancient Romans are speaking about the same things. Did the Romans have a word for what we today mean by “librarian”? Librarians today are generally educated professionals performing a variety of tasks with respect to the stewardship of information and the provision of access to users, whether in person or digitally. Our word “librarian” is in fact etymologically related to the Latin librarius, but this word pertains mostly to booksellers and copyists, and rarely, if ever, to what we would today think of as a librarian. Indeed, according to the Oxford English Dictionary “librarian” is a synonym for scribe or copyist in English until the 18th century, at which point it started to replace “library-keeper.” In point of fact, Latin does not truly have a regular word for what we now call a librarian (though, as Houston discusses in Chapter 6, it certainly had people with official titles who were in charge of imperial libraries).
We are on firmer comparative ground when it comes to libraries themselves, since the Romans indeed had a specific word that seems to correspond fairly well to our noun “library,” bibliotheca, which (like so many other literary things) they borrowed from the Greeks. The article in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae devoted to this term is nearly three columns long. One might therefore think that there would be a lot to say in this book about how Romans conceived of “libraries.” For instance, even though the Romans borrowed this term from the Greeks, they in fact shrunk the ambit of the term to mean only collections of books or spaces that housed such collections, for in Greek bibliothēkē could equally denote what we think of a library or an archive or record office (e.g. the bibliothēkē egktēseōn or property record office of Roman Egypt). In the Latin imperial West, such offices and those who ran them were known as tabularia and tabularii, respectively, words derived from the basic form of documents, tabula, as opposed to “books” or libri. (For a brief but useful discussion, see Sanchez-Moreno Ellart’s article “Archives” in the Wiley Encyclopedia of Ancient History).
Now, was a bibliotheca a “library”? That is an excellent question, and to answer one that requires us both to define what we mean by a “library” (is it a place, a collection of books, a repository of information, a set of services, a community center, does it have an ideological orientation? Etc.) and to explore what the Romans meant by bibliotheca. Given that Houston ranges across the entire Empire, we might even wonder if the concepts were the same, or if these institutions occupied the same cultural space, in the Latin West and the Greek East. Again, was there, in the final analysis, something identifiably “Roman” about libraries spaces and book collections across the Empire, or perhaps specifically in Rome, or in imperial foundations? If so, what was it? This problem of translation or comparative institutional or cultural practice becomes only more acute when it comes to “librarians,” as we have seen above. It is true that the word bibliothecarius is attested in Classical Latin, but it is comparatively late (its first appearance is in the letters of Fronto ad M. Caesarem 4.5 [61 Hout; 1.178 Haines], mid-second cent. CE) and very rare, a fact which suggests that unlike librarius, “librarian” was not seen as a common occupation, much less a profession, in the Roman world.
The reason to dwell at such length on these points of terminology is that it is Houston’s assumption of the self-evidence of his main object, the library, which not only makes his book less useful that it might otherwise have been for someone approaching it from library studies, but also less incisive overall, since he forestalls entire lines of inquiry that come from minding the gaps between modern libraries and Roman bibliothecae. So, Houston asks very specific questions about space, personnel, and the like, but does not consider what it meant to have or use a “library” in the ancient world. No real distinction is made between “public libraries” and private ones; he acknowledges that public libraries in some sense existed in the Roman world, but gives no insight into what exactly that meant for the users — were these spaces open to absolutely anyone, or did “public” simply mean kept in a state-owned building (that letter of Fronto above is revealing in this regard, because it seems that the bibliothecarius required a bribe or tip, if you wanted his help)? Indeed, were ancient public libraries just private (that is, imperial or otherwise municipal) libraries on a grand scale, or were they genuinely of and for the people? Literacy rates may have been so low that these libraries, even if theoretically open to the public, just would not have been of use to them. All interesting questions, none of them asked in Inside Roman Libraries.
Among the next most pressing questions a library historian might have in picking up this book are ones that concern ancient library spaces and staff; that is, what did library buildings look like, how were collections ranged or disposed, who ran them, and how? Houston’s final two chapters are the most directly useful parts of his book, at least for library students looking to understand these aspects of Roman libraries. The chapter on space is much more readable for the library historian, and Houston comes to surprising and interesting conclusions about the library space; for example, that Romans did not seem to use tables very much, and likely wrote with their texts with their papyri in their laps. While Houston does a good job helping the reader create a picture of the library space, the architectural and urban contexts for the libraries he discusses are entirely lacking. What did these structures mean in the social and architectural contexts of Rome and the other cities of the empire? How did people view these buildings? Did opinions differ by class? By literacy? By occupation? By gender?
Regarding library staff, Houston’s chapter on the people who ran the libraries (Ch.6 “Personnel and their Activities”) provides a thorough discussion of the slaves, freedmen, and equestrian elites who made these libraries work. Particularly useful, for example, are the biographies he constructs of known imperial librarians and the inferences he draws about who would have been needed to do the various jobs of running these collections. That said, Houston assumes his reader has a certain level of basic knowledge about Roman history and social structures, which represents something of a barrier for those readers coming to this chapter from outside Classics. With proper context and framing by a teacher, however, the reader is likely to find that Houston has recreated a plausible hierarchy of equestrian careerists and sometimes scholarly managers overseeing freedmen, with slaves doing the most basic work.
Any library student or historian would almost certainly be curious about how Roman libraries were cataloged and what metadata was of interest to Roman librarians or those who used Roman libraries. Houston, for the reasons above, does not address the practice of cataloging or access points from this perspective (for example, “metadata” does not appear as a lemma in the index), and so does not discuss the running of Roman libraries in a discourse familiar to librarians. Despite this, the careful reader can glean much from Houston’s discussion of book lists in the second chapter and from the later discussion of surviving book rolls. For instance, we learn that ancient librarians (or people who made book lists) alphabetized by titles, author’s names, both, or neither, and valued recording titles, authors, book numbers, and stichometric counts (counts of lines written on papyri, added by scribes to calculate fees, not for reference by readers or scholars). A modern librarian might expect data on publisher, year of publication, and edition, to give just a few examples; but the conditions and practices of publication, book production, and book ownership in the ancient world (i.e., before the printing press) rendered such categories of metadata all but meaningless from a discovery and citation perspective. In any case, information on Roman metadata is present in Houston’s scholarship to be found, but it is left to the interested reader to supply this lens to his discussion and abstract it.
The library student asking which books ancient readers collected and read is likely to be somewhat underwhelmed by Houston’s findings on this point, depending on their knowledge of ancient reading habits: Houston does not really break new ground here. He concludes his discussion of book lists by stating that a certain few books were likely to be owned by most readers (e.g., individual books of Homer’s Iliad), but that, for the most part, different people collected different kinds of books for specific reasons, with some collections aiming for general coverage, while others represented the collections of specialists in, say, medicine or philosophy. That said, this discussion may still be useful for library students, again with proper framing. For instance, how many readers from outside Classics will know that comparatively few people in antiquity ever seemed to have owned all 24 books of Homer’s Iliad (the equivalent of modern chapters, with two “books” likely filling a typical papyrus roll in the Roman period), a book – with all its “books” – currently available on Amazon.com for less than $3.00? It is worth having library students asking why this was and what this means for how well most ancient readers knew what was clearly considered a “classic” in Greco-Roman antiquity. While Houston may not add much to our knowledge of ancient reading or collecting preferences, his combing through the papyrological evidence and synthesizing the scholarly discussion in a clear and readable way is commendable and particularly useful, as much of that literature is not in English. Similarly, his appendices and plates recreating the layout of ancient books and documents, like book lists, is a useful resource for all of his readers, regardless of background.
Finally, any reader, I think, would expect a book of this sort to give some idea of the people who used these library spaces: who were they, how did they use libraries, in what social and political contexts did these spaces exist? Sadly, Houston either did not find enough evidence to respond to these sorts of questions, or perhaps did not see them as vital as librarians do, since we are professionally conditioned to think about access. He assumes that Roman public and private libraries functioned similarly. Why people used libraries is not examined; indeed it is not even clear who these users were, particularly of the “public” imperial libraries (and what precisely did “public” mean in practice?). Rich élites like Cicero definitely used their own libraries and from his letters we know that they shared their literary pursuits – and collections – with other rich, educated men; but who, precisely, was allowed to use the imperial libraries? Cicero’s imperial descendants? Again, perhaps the fact that only élites were sufficiently educated to find the contents of such libraries interesting or useful meant that the patron population was effectively self-selecting? Houston does not say, but if this is true, it would fit a pattern of Roman public amenities being directed toward the citizen upper classes – and one could not get much further away from the basic democratic ideological positioning of public libraries in the United States today. Ultimately, the image Houston leaves us with is one of these libraries eerily devoid of users.
To sum up, the classicist reading this book learns something about what texts were being read in specific parts of the Roman Empire at specific times, how these texts were likely stored, and a variety of other pieces of information; further, the classicist gains access to a wealth of papyrological data that would certainly take a good deal of time to chase down, and Houston deserves to be applauded for this service, and particularly for his excellent appendices that make some of the core papyrological documents and data accessible to classicists and general readers alike. That said, he falls well short of making this book useful to library historians. His lack of engagement with the history of libraries and current library scholarship means that his findings — some of them relevant and interesting — are not connected to these important discussions. Regrettable though that is, with the proper framing, a competent library history instructor can and should make good use of this book: the introduction and first chapter, as well as the final two chapters, are worthy of close reading to understand the library before the codex. They give us a strong grounding in the papyrus roll, the collecting and assembling of book collections, ancient libraries’ internal space, and the staff that made them function. The middle chapters will likely be more inaccessible and less rewarding for a non-classicist, but they nevertheless contain valuable information, particularly on metadata, if one reads for it through a lens of library history and science. While this book may not be likely to find itself on most library history syllabi, it absolutely deserves to be included in excerpted form. Houston leaves it to others to put Roman libraries in a global and broader historical context, but once this work is done, the information contained within Inside Roman Libraries gives an important context for how libraries evolved and where they came from.