Rome’s Booksellers Row and the Rise of the Codex

Marcus Valerius

Step out of the mud of the Subura with me for just a moment. Mind that mule cart, watch the cabbage leaves rotting in the gutter, and turn right, right where the alley squeezes tight before opening toward the marble paving of Caesar's Forum. Listen to that clatter. You hear the shoemakers pounding leather, the moneychangers rattling copper, and then, right there in the Argiletum, the noise suddenly changes pitch. It, it turns into voices reciting verse. Welcome to the booksellers' row, my friend. Look at those doorposts. Look at them closely.

Marcus Valerius

Opposite Caesar's Forum there is a shop with its doorposts completely covered by advertisements. Every single inch of the stone, top to bottom, is plastered with papyrus slips, scribbled extracts, and poets' names. If you stand right there on the sidewalk among the idlers, dodging the elbows of pickpockets, you can read half of an epigram before the proprietor even spots you. A poor fellow who cannot spare a single as can lean against the fluting of the pillar and get his morning laugh for free.

Marcus Valerius

Step inside the threshold of Atrectus's taberna. Take a deep breath. You smell that? That is Rome's intellectual grease. It hits your throat all at once. There is the bitter tang of fresh atramentum, that rich black ink made from boiled pine soot and gum, mixed with the sharpness of sour vinegar. And behind it, sweet and heavy, is the cedar oil. They paint the backs of the rolls with cedar oil to keep the damp and the bookworms from chewing up the verses, stained with cedar oil, imparting a faint yellow color and perfumed scent. Underneath it all, the scrape, scrape, scrape of dry pumice stones taking off the rough burrs from the Egyptian reeds.

Marcus Valerius

Old Atrectus sees us staring. He knows a middling wine merchant when he sees one, but he still reaches up high, right into the upper pigeonholes, what he calls the nidi. Out comes a fresh roll of Martial. And oh, he holds it like a relic. Shaved to the quick with pumice, dyed in royal purple murex along the outer edges, fitted with twin ivory bosses gleaming at the ends. He thrusts it under my chin and smiles. Five denarii, he says. Twenty whole sesterces. Five denarii! A common day laborer breaks his back hauling stones from dawn to dusk for a single denarius. A legionary out on the Danube front earns three hundred in an entire year! Why would a sane man hand over almost a week's wages for twenty feet of reed and ink?

Marcus Valerius

If you have land valued at four hundred thousand sesterces like our fine gentlemen, sure, twenty sesterces is pocket change. But for the rest of us? I point down to the floor baskets. Down there, sitting in plain unadorned boxes, are the cheap copies, yet unpolished by pumice, no purple cover, no ivory knobs, just good black letters. A man can bargain Atrectus down to four sesterces, or even two if the edges are a little frayed. The words of the poet don't change just because you bought the pig in fancy harness.

Marcus Valerius

Behind the low counter, you can see where the magic, if you want to call it that, actually happens. Five young scribes, Greek slaves with ink stained thumbs, sitting hunched on stools. They have reed calami between their fingers, dipping into double bronze inkwells. The paper they work on comes up the Tiber from Alexandria, twenty sheets joined together with boiled wheat paste spiked with vinegar to choke out the mold. Watch the boy's hand fly. No spaces between the words, no commas, no stops. Pure scriptura continua, letters marching across the pale fibers like soldiers in formation.

Marcus Valerius

And reading one of these things, let me tell you, is practically gymnastics. You hold the scroll with both hands. You unfold with the right, you wind up the read portion with the left. You cannot read while eating an olive or adjusting your cloak. One clumsy jerk, one careless rip, and twenty feet of Homer or Virgil tears clean across the seam. Then you have to roll the whole thirty foot monster all the way back to the start before putting it back into its beechwood capsa box.

Marcus Valerius

Now, Atrectus sees me eyeing the awkward length of the roll, and he leans forward with a conspiratorial grin. He pulls something from under the counter that looks completely foreign. Not a roll. A block. Folded sheets of thick sheepskin, stitched together along the spine between two stiff covers. He tells me Secundus, that freedman who keeps shop just behind the Temple of Peace, has been selling them to travelers. A codex, he calls it. Made of membrana, parchment. You can open it with one hand, flip the leaves back and forth, read on both sides of the skin, and stuff it right into the folds of your cloak on a long coach ride.

Marcus Valerius

But the traditionalists, oh, the senators and the rhetoric teachers, they look down their noses at it. To them, a stack of stitched sheepskins is what an estate bailiff uses to track bushels of barley, or what a schoolboy scratches his alphabet on before he graduates to real letters. An uncouth butcher's notebook, they sneer. Who could entrust the grand cadence of the Aeneid to bits of sluggish wood and animal hide? And yet, you hold it in your hand, and you realize you don't need two hands to keep it from snapping.

Marcus Valerius

I buy the modest papyrus roll anyway, tuck it into the folds of my tunic, and walk out into the sunlight on the steps of the forum. Listen. Right across the portico, a crowd has already circled around a fellow in a woolen mantle. He has a scroll spread wide between his arms, and his voice booms across the travertine pavers, reading aloud so the cart drivers and the bakery boys can hear every line. In our Rome, reading is never a quiet, private whisper behind closed doors. It is noise. It is drama. It is meant for the ear, shouted into the dust and the great roar of the city.