Literary Sources

Sources

Roman Culture, Roman Writers. What is known about the vanished civilization of ancient Rome, aside from the monuments and material culture that remain, comes primarily from literary sources. The range and character of Roman literature is best recognized by considering the work of Rome’s most important writers. In some of the topical entries listed, one will read who wrote, what of their writings survives, how it was passed down through time, and who read it.

Ancient Books. Romans accessed their literature on handmade, handwritten papyrus scrolls. (The word “volume” comes from the Latin word for a scroll, which is volumen, or, something “rolled up.”) These were expensive to produce and cumbersome to use. The “book” as people know it, with turnable pages sewn to a spine, is of the type known as the codex; this format gained popularity over the scroll between 200 and 400 C.E. Public libraries had opened in the age of Augustus. The texts we have were taken from these libraries to the monasteries at the end of the Roman era. There they were copied for centuries. Modern text-editions therefore include a “critical apparatus,” which list all the major variations (variant readings that the editor deems to be mistakes) in the most important manuscripts.

Sources

Gian Biagio Conte, Latin Literature: A History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

Edward Courtney, Archaic Latin Prose (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999).