Ancient Libraries

The circulation of books was the motor of classical civilization. However, books were both expensive and rare, and so libraries - private and public, royal and civic - played key roles in articulating intellectual life. This collection, written by an international team of scholars, presents a fundamental reassessment of how ancient libraries came into being, how they were organized and how they were used. Drawing on papyrology and archaeology, and on accounts written by those who read and wrote in them, it presents new research on reading cultures, on book collecting and on the origins of monumental library buildings. Many of the traditional stories told about ancient libraries are challenged. Few were really enormous, none were designed as research centres, and occasional conflagrations do not explain the loss of most ancient texts. But the central place of libraries in Greco-Roman culture emerges more clearly than ever.

About the Author

Jason König is Senior Lecturer in Greek at the University of St Andrews. He works broadly on the Greek literature and culture of the Roman Empire. He is author of Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire (2005) and Saints and Symposiasts: The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Culture (2012), and editor, jointly with Tim Whitmarsh, of Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire (2007).

Katerina Oikonomopoulou is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the programme 'Medicine of the Mind, Philosophy of the Body: Discourses of Health and Well-Being in the Ancient World' at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is co-editor, with Frieda Klotz, of The Philosopher's Banquet: Plutarch's 'Table Talk' in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire (2011).

Greg Woolf is Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. He currently holds a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship and is editor of the Journal of Roman Studies. His books include Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (1998), Et tu Brute: The Murder of Julius Caesar and Political Assassination (2006), Tales of the Barbarians: Ethnography and Empire in the Roman West (2011) and Rome: An Empire's Story (2012). He has also edited volumes on literacy, on the city of Rome and on Roman religion, and has published widely on ancient history and Roman archaeology.