These Romans were selfish assoles, for sure. Imagine writing massive encyclopaedias, detailing how people saw the world at the time, to only read them at family gatherings in best case, or just have them hidden away and eventually burned.
The reason the Romans were so weirdly stingy when it came to books is because they were a bitch to make and expensive as hell so unless it happened to be in a library you had to find someone with a specific book in their collection. It wouldn’t be until the early medieval period when scriptoriums started to appear that you see large numbers of books being reproduced for relatively cheaply.
Oh also if a book wasn’t well liked or just wasn’t copied frequently then it had a pretty good chance of being lost. This is how the works on the Etruscans by Augustus was lost, note it was multiple volumes yet I’m pretty sure we have none, from what citations still exist is seems to have been a proper historical and anthropological work.
Pretty sure if you went back in time and started spouting the things Mac A wrote about, he’d invite you to dinner and ask you to see yours and he’ll show you his ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
I actually don’t know jack shit about ancient Rome’s library system, if any.
I miss that damn Pug.
But it wasn’t uncommon a trend in antiquity for the learned and educated to maintain private memoirs and journals relating to their interests.
They just never got to figure out Wikipedia.
And most of them probably sucked, we’re kinda lucky with Meditations.
I doubt that there was any sort of commonality to the rigors applied by the educated wealthy towards their “look at me, I can write and ponder about stuff because I don’t need to worry about food” projects.
These Romans were selfish assoles, for sure. Imagine writing massive encyclopaedias, detailing how people saw the world at the time, to only read them at family gatherings in best case, or just have them hidden away and eventually burned.
The reason the Romans were so weirdly stingy when it came to books is because they were a bitch to make and expensive as hell so unless it happened to be in a library you had to find someone with a specific book in their collection. It wouldn’t be until the early medieval period when scriptoriums started to appear that you see large numbers of books being reproduced for relatively cheaply.
Oh also if a book wasn’t well liked or just wasn’t copied frequently then it had a pretty good chance of being lost. This is how the works on the Etruscans by Augustus was lost, note it was multiple volumes yet I’m pretty sure we have none, from what citations still exist is seems to have been a proper historical and anthropological work.
Pretty sure if you went back in time and started spouting the things Mac A wrote about, he’d invite you to dinner and ask you to see yours and he’ll show you his ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
I actually don’t know jack shit about ancient Rome’s library system, if any.
I miss that damn Pug.
But it wasn’t uncommon a trend in antiquity for the learned and educated to maintain private memoirs and journals relating to their interests.
They just never got to figure out Wikipedia.
And most of them probably sucked, we’re kinda lucky with Meditations.
I doubt that there was any sort of commonality to the rigors applied by the educated wealthy towards their “look at me, I can write and ponder about stuff because I don’t need to worry about food” projects.