books and writing 1. Writing had developed in the Near East and Egypt long before the skill reached Greece. In late Bronze Age Greece a script known as Linear B was used on clay tablets but as far as we can tell only for making official inventories and not for literary purposes, and it did not survive the collapse of this civilization in about 1150 BC. Homer makes an obscure reference to writing (Iliad 6. 166ff.) but seems to have thought of the Homeric world as illiterate and bookless. The classical Greeks believed, certainly correctly, that their system of writing derived from Phoenicia (see CADMUS). Archaeological and literary evidence suggests that writing became widespread in Greece between 750 and 650 BC. See also ALPHABET.
2. Throughout the ancient world the commonest writing material was papyrus. The oldest papyrus roll known to us is Egyptian and is dated to about 3000 BC. We have no firm evidence on when papyrus came into general use in Greece, but it is hard to think that it could be later than the time of the poet Archilochus (c.680–640 BC) when it seems that poetry in general came to be written down. The chief rival to papyrus as writing material was animal skins; Herodotus says that the Ionians used the skins of sheep and goats when papyrus was unavailable. Papyrus was perhaps originally imported into Greece from the Phoenician town of Byblos from which the Greeks took their name for papyrus and thence for book (biblos—hence ‘bible’). It was made from the pith of a water plant which in antiquity grew mainly in the Nile. Sheets, with a maximum width of about 40 cm. (16 in.) and a normal height of about 23 cm. (9 in.), were pasted together side by side so as to form a continuous roll, the joins being virtually invisible in rolls of good quality. The pasted sheets were called in Greek kollēmata. In later times the Greek term for the ‘first sheet’ of a legal document on which was written the authentication for what followed was prōtokollon, hence English ‘protocol’. The Library at Alexandria (see ALEXANDRIAN LIBRARY) was probably responsible for introducing standardization in book production. Papyrus was bought in rolls, not sheets, usually about 10 m. (33 ft.) long. With writing of average size such a roll could contain a book of Thucydides, or two of the shorter books of Homer. The work was written in vertical columns of 5–10 cm. (2–4 in.) wide throughout the length of the roll, with a margin between the columns and a broader margin at top and bottom. Scribes seem not to have been concerned to keep a regular number of lines to a column or of letters to a line. The minimum of help is given to the reader. A short stroke under the line (paragraphos) often indicated where there was a pause in the sense or a change of speaker in dramatic texts (but the name of the speaker was hardly ever given). Accents appear, if at all, only in poetic texts; punctuation where it exists takes the form of a single point level with the top of the letter; enlarged initial letters are not used. Scribes wrote in black ink made from a dense carbon black. (The Athenian orator Demosthenes mocks Aeschines for having to get up early to ‘grind the ink’ for his father's school.) A hard reed pen was used for writing. Titles were written at the end of a roll (the part least liable to damage); a roll was usually identified by a label (Gk. sillybos, Lat. titulus) which hung from it as it lay on a shelf or in a pigeon-hole or box. A roller (Gk. omphalos, Lat. umbilīcus) might be attached to the end of the papyrus, ornamented with projecting knobs. The rolls comprising a long work or the complete works of an author might be kept together in a cupboard (Lat. armārium) or bucket (Lat. capsa). A reader would undo the roll with his right hand, and roll it up, as he proceeded, with his left.
The alternative material to papyrus was vellum (Lat. vellus, ‘skin’, ‘hide’) made from the skins of cattle, sheep, and goats. This material was later known as parchment, a name derived from the city of Pergamum which was famous for its manufacture. (In modern usage, parchment is made from the skin of sheep and goats, vellum from that of calves, lambs, and kids.)
3. Books to the classical Greeks were essentially a substitute for recitation. It is not till the fifth century BC at Athens that we find the beginnings of a book trade, fostered by the large number of prose books written by the sophists for educational purposes. Plato has Socrates say that a book by the philosopher Anaxagoras could be bought in the orchestra (in the agora at Athens) for a drachma or less. In the fourth century BC books became relatively common and the practice of reading seems to have become firmly established; Isocrates certainly wrote for private reading (though in antiquity reading always meant reading aloud). Aristotle and his school formed a large collection of books. In the third and subsequent centuries the output of books greatly increased when educated slaves were employed as copyists and the production of papyrus and later of parchment was organized by the Hellenistic kings. (The story was told that in the second century BC a king of Egypt, jealous of the library at Pergamum, placed an embargo on the supply of papyrus to that city, where parchment was promptly invented.)
4. The Latin word for book, liber, ‘bark’, originated at an early time when books in Rome were written on bark, but the introduction of Greek literature into Rome in the third and second centuries BC propagated the papyrus roll. Very few papyrus fragments of Latin books have survived compared with Greek because the climatic conditions which allow survival are found in Egypt, a Greek-speaking area. On the other hand, Latin literature is much richer than Greek in information about books and the book trade. From the first century BC we hear of booksellers with their staffs of copyists. Cicero had his writings published by Atticus, and Horace mentions the Sosii as booksellers. The demand for books increased and it became the fashion for rich Romans to have a library. The price of books seems to have been moderate. There was no law of copyright and authors did not profit directly from the sale of their books.
5. A papyrus roll (Lat. volumen, English ‘volume’) was not very convenient to use. It had to be manipulated by both hands and rewound after use. Athenian vase-paintings show readers getting into difficulties with twisted rolls, and they were easily torn. From Homer onwards sets of wooden tablets hinged on a ring or leather thong had been used for notes or letters. The tablets were either whitened and written on in ink or, more usually, coated with wax and the writing scratched on with a stylus (the wax could be smoothed again with the blunt end); thus the Latin verb ‘to write’, exarare, meant originally ‘to plough up’, because the stylus furrows the wax like a ploughshare. From these tablets there slowly developed from the first century AD the book in modern form, known as a codex, made from folded sheets of papyrus or parchment, put together quire by quire (eight leaves, sixteen pages), stitched at the spine and bound with wooden boards. The codex had several advantages over the papyrus roll: it was very easy to consult, since the pages could be turned forwards or backwards at will; both sides of the pages could be written on; it could hold four or five times as much text as a roll; and it was longer-lasting. By the fourth century it had superseded the papyrus roll, and parchment was preferred to papyrus. From this and the following century come the earliest surviving manuscripts of classical authors. The roll form was retained for public documents through the Middle Ages to modern times. Paper was introduced from China by the Arabs in the ninth century, but its use did not become common until the twelfth century.
6. Writing. Greek books were written with remarkably little change from the time of the early papyri down to the manuscripts of the mid-ninth century AD in a majuscule (‘large letters’) script known as uncial. The letters, resembling capitals, were large, rounded, and individually formed. A well-written manuscript in this hand possessed a dignified beauty, but the script was slow to write and took up a lot of room. In the mid-ninth century a new bookhand, minuscule (‘small letters’), was introduced which could be written more quickly and economically; see TEXTS, TRANSMISSION OF ANCIENT
The writing of Latin manuscripts followed a similar pattern. During the classical period Latin books were written in majuscule, either in square capitals (for luxury books) or (more usually) in rustic capitals; the latter was a more fluid or careless-looking variety of the former, and it continued in use until the early sixth century AD. Meanwhile, in the fourth century, the uncial form of majuscule emerged as a bookhand, along with a less formal version known as half-uncial, which included some letter forms employed in the everyday business hand. Uncial and half-uncial writing continued until well into the ninth century AD and beyond. Meanwhile in the late seventh and eighth centuries experiments had been taking place in many parts of Europe to find a fast, neat, economical script. In continental Europe a minuscule script developed out of the old Roman cursive handwriting used for business and official correspondence, whereas in Ireland such a script developed rather out of half-uncial. However, it was in France that a particularly fine and lucid minuscule hand evolved in the eighth century which became the bookhand of Europe. The letters were regular, rounded, and separate. This hand slowly came to predominate, reaching England in the tenth century, and was in use everywhere by the end of the twelfth. See also EPIGRAPHY, LIBRARIES, and TEXTS, TRANSMISSION OF ANCIENT
