Quest Post: Ancient Roman Libraries

By Shotaro Koizumi

For Quest: Subject Scholar

Book Title: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Roman Empire, The Norman Conquest, Julius Caesar

You might get told off for speaking too loud in the SIC, but it was the complete opposite in the libraries of Ancient Rome – it was as loud as the cafeteria! Why? Romans read books out loud. In fact, Plutarch, an ancient Greek historian mentioned it was considered strange to read silently: when Julius Caesar was reading silently, “his friends were astonished” -Life of Caesar.

In the SIC, you can borrow up to 6 books, but in ancient Rome would you really want to? Ancient Roman libraries had scrolls instead of books. Since they can only be written on one side, and couldn’t be folded, they took up a lot of space, so you can barely fit about four in your bag without scrunching them up and damaging them. Though the current form of books: papers bound by a cover on the front, back and side existed since the times of Julius Caesar in the first century BC, (it was a notebook with leather covers called pugillares membranei), these modern-looking books only became popular in the 4th century when Christianity became popular – travelling priests needed a more compact and durable way to carry the bible.

You might visit the 910 section in the SIC for books about different countries, but the Roman libraries went even further. The library was split into two sections: one for Latin and another for Greek, most of the time in completely different rooms! In the Latin section, you might find books on Epics such as the Aenid by Virgil, history such as the 12 Caesars by Suetonius, Poems such as Odes by Horace, myths and legends such as Metamorpheses by Ovid or guidebooks such as On Agriculture by Cato the Elder. In the Greek section, you might find books on myths such as The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer, tragedy plays such as Antigone by Sophocles, and philosophy such as the Symposium by Plato.

Unfortunately, all these Roman libraries have now been abandoned, ever since the fall of the western Roman Empire in the year 476. The oldest continuously running isn’t a Roman one, but a Moroccan library called ‘Al-Qarawiyyin Library’ created in the year 1359. Many scrolls have survived, buried and protected under ash from the famous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79. Scientists are now attempting to use intense beams of light to see through the paper, as the scrolls are now too damaged to open without destroying them.

You can also still visit the ruins of Roman libraries – the most famous one is the ‘Library of Celsus’ in modern-day Turkey.

-Library of Ephesus

In this digital age, physical copies of information such as books and scrolls might be seen as irrelevant. Yet in the worst-case scenario, an event like ‘The Blackout’ from the movie ‘Blade Runner 2049’ may take place, where a great amount of records online was destroyed by a magnetic blast, a disaster for the people who stored all their photos digitally. But as long as there are hard-working repairers like the members of the SIC, physical copies can survive for thousands of years. Rather than throwing away old, damaged books, we should all work hard to restore them to keep them as long as possible.