Kenney_and_Clausen B.M.W.(eds.) - Get a Free Blog

BOOKS AND PUBLICATION
In antiquity there -were no copyright laws and no legal safeguards against
unauthorized copying and circulation of books: therefore there was no such
thing as publication in anything like its modern sense. In practice it was often
possible for an author to confine the circulation of his work in the first instance
to a limited number of friends; 1 but sooner or later the decision would have to
be taken, if it had not already been taken by events, 2 to authorize or at least
acquiesce in general circulation. Publication in this sense was less a matter of
formal release to the public than a recognition by the author that his work was
now, so to speak, on its own in the world: the word usually translated ' publish'
(edere = Greek £K5IS6VCCI) connotes the resignation of rights and responsibilities.
3 Publication might on occasion operate as a protection in that it served
as a formal claim to authorship and constituted some sort of a safeguard against
plagiarism. 4 It did not necessarily connote the making of arrangements for the
multiplication of copies. That might happen on occasion, but a work once
relinquished by its author -was public property, and in that sense published,
whether or not a bookseller was employed to copy and put it into circulation.
What mattered was the author's intention.
Once a book was released in this way the author had no rights in it whatever
(even before publication what rights he had were moral rather than legal), no
control over its fate, and no secure prospect of being able to correct it. 5 As
Symmachus put it: 'Once a poem has left your hands, you resign all your
rights; a speech when published is a free entity' (JSpist. 1.31; cf. Hor. Epist.
1.20, Mart. 1.3). Thus it was open to any private individual to make or procure
for himself a copy of any text to which he had access; and if he could command
the services of a trained scribe the result would be indistinguishable from
a copy obtained through trade channels — and, according to the quality of the
exemplar used, might -well be textually superior. The earliest evidence for the
existence of a trade in books at Rome dates from the Ciceronian period; 6 before
that time the circulation of books must have been almost exclusively a matter
of private enterprise — as indeed it continued in large measure to be down to
* van Groningen (1963) 9, Dziatzko (1899^) 97S; cf. Plin. Epist. 1.8.3, accepting the offer of a
friend to read and criticize one of his compositions and remarking that even when he had corrected it
he could withhold it or publish it as he pleased: erit. . . etpost emendationem liberum nobts uelpublicare
uel continere.
2
As was evidently the case with Cicero's speech In Clodium et Curionem, -which he thought he had
succeeded in suppressing (