Nobody reads books anymore. Whether or not that notion strikes you as true, you’ve probably heard it expressed fairly often in recent decades — just as you might have had you lived in the Roman Empire of late antiquity. During that time, as ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan explains in the new Told in Stone video above, the “book trade declined with the educated elite that had supported it. The copying of secular texts slowed, and finally ceased. The books in Roman libraries, public and private, crumbled on their shelves. Only a small contingent of survivors found their way into monasteries.” As went the reading culture of the empire, so went the empire itself.
Some may be tempted to draw parallels with certain countries in existence today. But what may be more surprising is the extent of Roman reading at its height. Though only about one in ten Romans could read, Ryan explains, “the Roman elite defined themselves by a sophisticated literary education, and filled their cities with texts.”
Those included the Acta Diurna, a kind of proto-newspaper carved into stone or metal and displayed in public places. But from the reign of Augustus onward, “the city of Rome boasted an impressive array of public libraries,” filled with texts written on papyrus scrolls, and later — especially in the third and fourth centuries — on codices, whose format closely resembles books as we know them today.
Rome even had tabernae librariae, which we’d recognize as bookstores, whose techniques included painting the titles of bestsellers on their exterior columns. Some of them also published the books they sold, setting an early example of what we’d call “vertical integration.” Roman readers of the first century would all have had at least some familiarity with Martial’s Epigrams, but even such a big contemporary hit would have been outsold by a classic like the Aeneid, “the one book that any family with a library owned.” With 99 percent of its literature lost to us, we’re unlikely ever to determine if, like modern-day America, ancient Rome was really saturated with less-respectable works, its own equivalents of self help, business memoir, and genre fiction. Who knows? Perhaps Rome, too, had romantasy.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The cost of papyrus, writing utensils, and leisure time to maintain and learn went sky high due to the political instability of the empire in its later stages. It had less to do with culture than with shear economics.
A good listen. Thanks. Did you mean titillating?
What a fucking retarded article. Get a real job you fucking bum. Loads of people read books.
“books”
Mmhm
Kanyelius Westicus destroyed Rome?
You sound as though you’ve read none
What language were they reading?
“Romans” covered a very wide area
The Lingua Franca of Ancient Rome was LATIN , so Obviously their Books would have been Mostly written in Latin . .
* Some Scientific & Medical Texts would have also been written in Ancient Greek..
The Romans did not have books. They had scrolls.
So… why did they stop??
Why did they stop, because of television and radio.
OR the Catholic church came along and said you can stop reading now we will do the thinking for you.
Ur right