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BOOKS AND READERS IN THE ROMAN WORLD
fact will miss much that is essential to the poetry.' But the style of interpretation
favoured by most ancient critics and commentators was conditioned by
a basic premiss which a modern critic cannot accept, though he must be aware
of it, that literary studies were a part of rhetoric and subservient to its social,
political and moral ends. Of all the ancient critics whose works have survived
the only one who transcended these limitations was the author of the treatise
On the sublime, who was concerned exclusively with Greek literature.
The student of Latin will find that the most valuable guidance to the appreciation
of Latin literature is that which emerges from close study of the texts
themselves. The insistence by the poets that they wrote for a restricted and
specially qualified readership, mentioned earlier in this discussion, was not
a conventional pose. To read Latin literature so as to extract from it the greatest
possible profit and enjoyment is a very demanding undertaking. It calls for
a combination of detailed knowledge, linguistic and factual, and educated
sensibility, that can only come from laborious application. The books in which
we read our Latin authors are much more convenient than those which a Roman
reader had, and our texts are probably purer than his often were. In other
respects, even after allowing for the fact that Latin was his native language, we
are not at such a disadvantage as might be thought. Literary Latin was an artificial
dialect, quite distinct from the spoken idiom. Moreover a Roman reader
must have been to a considerable extent the prisoner of his own age. To a
Roman of the second century A.D. the language of Lucretius must have presented
many puzzles to which solutions were not easily available even to a scholar with
access to a good library. The main advantage that we enjoy, the ready availability
of a vast apparatus of accurate scholarship in the shape of commentaries,
dictionaries, reference books and other secondary literature, can be attributed
directly to the invention of printing and what it made possible in the way of
cooperative effort. If we try to imagine ourselves without these aids to understanding
of literature we may begin to comprehend something of the situation
of the reader in the world of the hand-written papyrus book.
Excursus I. THE SENSE OF 'LIBER* (P. 15)
Sense (iii) of liber and also of fliPMov was denied by Birt (1882) 29—34. Unambiguous
examples of this sense are indeed not easy to find. At Gell. 18.9.5, cited both by
Dziatzko (1899a) 940 and Wendel (1949) 51, the predominant sense is (i), almost =
' copy'. At Juv. 3.41—2 librum | si malus esty nequeo laudare etposcere ' I am incapable of
praising and asking for a bad book', the sense 'work of literature' is uppermost;
but even this passage does not prove that Juvenal •would have described (e.g.) the
Thebaid of Statius as a liber. Similar reservations are in order when considering the
other examples cited at OLD liber* 2.a. Cicero twice refers to his De gloria, a work in
1
Cf. on (e.g.) Lucan's rhetoric Getty (195 s) xliv—lxvi.
30
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