Literature and Literacy in Ancient Greece

Abstract

THE FIRST appearance in literature, in the fragment of the Erechtheus of Euripides discussed at the end of the first part of this paper (Phoenix 16 [19621 156), of the man who looks forward to drowning his sorrows by reading, is naturally followed by the appearance of the bookseller. The earliest dateable reference to a booksellers' quarter in any Greek city is in the Birds of Aristophanes, produced in 414; from line 1288 of that play it seems that the stock in trade must have been at least partly provided by the Athenian equivalent of Her Majesty's Stationery Office (decrees are expressly mentioned as forming part of the mental pabulum available there).' At about the same time, though the references are not exactly dateable, bookshops are mentioned by the comic writers Aristomenes (fr. 9), Eupolis (fr. 304), Theopompus (fr. 77), and Nicophon (fr. 9 Edmonds = 19 Kock); Eupolis speaks of the place where books are to be bought, and the others actually use the word tOXroirc(X7s-it may be assumed that the human prototypes of Aristophanes' Dionysus (Frogs 52-53) acquired their copies of the Andromeda and other books for shipboard reading from these booksellers. Negatively we may suppose that the outbreak of the war with Athens had starved Syracuse intellectually, by cutting off the supply of play-books, and that it was this which made recitations from Euripides worth a soldier's ransom (Plut. Nic. 29). This suggestion is not entirely fantasy, since by 401 the book trade with the Black Sea cities was so active that Xenophon (Anab. 7.5.12-14) could include crates of books among the wreckage of ships washed ashore at Salmydessus (already notorious as a maritime graveyard more than a century earlier).2 By the end of the fifth century, then, bookselling had become an export industry; and it is time for us to look at some of the consumers of the products of the industry (we cannot look at the products themselves yet, though a specimen is not far away). As might have been expected, the first of our bibliophiles is Euripides. His books are a joke to Aristophanes in the weighing scene of the Frogs (1409; is it to be supposed that they, like his tragedies, had died with him?), but his was no doubt primarily a professional library (his lowering treatment for tragedy includes gruel of babble from out-of-the-way

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 40 citations exist upstream.