The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

A further area associated with a literate culture is that of the library. By the seventh
century, the boast of Petronius‟ Trimalchio in second-century Italy to have had two libraries,
one Greek and one Latin, is indicative of a different era from the Visigothic period; 182 the
public libraries that appear in the ancient sources were by now certainly no longer in
existence and it is doubtful whether they had ever existed in Roman Hispania at all. 183
Private libraries, however, are a different matter altogether. They were popular throughout
the ancient world; Seneca, for example, had commented that, “inter balnearia et thermos
bibliotheca quoque ut necessarium domus ornamentum expolitur”. 184 Some early Christians
would have maintained small collections for their communities and there are even records for
specifically Christian libraries in the period after Constantine (Tanner 1979; Gamble 1995:
144-203). In Visigothic Iberia, private collections of books were still in existence. For
example, a collection of books brought to Iberia by the African monk Donatus in AD 569 is
mentioned by Ildefonsus, 185 and Isidore likewise seemed to have possessed a substantial
private collection (Escolar 1990: 152-159). Braulius also mentions a certain Laurentius, who
182 Satyricon 48.
183 Lançon (2000: 149) comments on the dedication of two public libraries in the sixth century in the
Forum of Trajan. However, public libraries were rare outside Rome throughout Imperial history; see
Kenyon (1932); Wendel (1949); Casson (2002). For a specifically Iberian study, see Hanson (1989)
and Díaz y Díaz (1995: 169-180). Harris (1989: 228) is nevertheless hesitant about the extent to
which public libraries would have influenced literacy levels amongst the general public: “It would,
however, be crudely anachronistic to suppose that the sum of these efforts had any large-scale effect
on the diffusion of the written word”.
184 De Tranquilitate 9.7.
185 De uiris illustribus 3, “Hic uiolentias barbararum gentium imminere conspiciens, atque ouilis
dissipationem et gregis monachorum pericula pertimescens, ferme cum septuaginta monachis
copiosisque librorum codicibus nauali uehiculo in Hispaniam commeauit”.
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