The Lives of Books

The ancient entomological bookworm was a bibliographical phenomenon that book users encountered largely through its mysterious traces. This paper argues that the material circumstances of the bookworm shaped the poetic landscape of Roman Imperial literature.

Roman literary culture depended on slavery, not only for the wealth and leisure to read and write, but also in practical terms: Romans relied on enslaved secretaries, copyists, and readers to facilitate their encounters with the written word (Winsbury 2009). In particular, authors used amanuenses to conduct research, take dictation, and assist with revision (Horsfall 1995, Habinek 2005). But when Roman poets imagine their own authorship (Frampton 2019) in material terms, they do so exclusively through the image of another tool: the waxed tablet.

Few of us nowadays would expect to find a translation of Photius’ Bibliotheca or Alcuin’s De Fide Sanctae Trinitatis among the red and green Loeb Classical Library volumes, as Byzantine Greek and Carolingian Latin are often relegated to different research areas than ‘classical’ Greece and Rome. A first draft of the project, however, dating to 1910, reveals the original intention to include both of these ancient authors and to extend its overall scope to the fall of Constantinople. Why were these objectives abandoned?