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“Beware of promising your library to anyone”: Assembling a private library at Rome
Abstract
Cicero's letters chart the growth of his library through a period of about twenty years, from the height of his public career until almost the end of his life. Combining the evidence in the letters with other sources, we gain a more complete picture of how aristocrats and men of letters at Rome assembled, housed, and used substantial libraries in the first century BC, as well as how those collections might be dispersed. I organize the evidence for acquisitions under the headings of purchases, gifts and inheritances, and miscellaneous acquisitions, then consider two instances of losses suffered by Cicero; I examine Cicero's patterns of library usage and conclude with speculation on the fate of his collection. The earliest references come in four letters of 67–66 BC from Cicero to Atticus, then in Greece. In the first letter, dated before the Ides of February, 67, Cicero says: “Please consider how you can obtain a library for me, just as you promised. All hope of the pleasure which I want to have when I come into some leisure, I have placed in your kindness.” By May, it seems, Atticus had the library in hand, for Cicero says, “Beware of promising your library to anyone, however passionate a lover you find. For I am reserving all my little grape harvests for it, in order to prepare that prop for old age.” Then in August, Cicero writes, “Beware of handing over your books to anyone; save them for me, as you write. The greatest enthusiasm for them holds me, just as disgust for all other things.” Finally, in 66, Cicero says “Save your books and don't despair that I am able to make them mine. If I accomplish that, I will surpass Crassus in riches and I despise the hamlets and meadows of all.”.
... The need for individuals to collect private research libraries, which were often quite considerable, makes the preservation of private documents among the elite vanish under a more traceable concern with acquiring copies of rare books. 7 However, the practice of preserving ancestral masks provides an unexpected door into the memorialization of previous generations through objects and text, but one that the current literature does not consider in terms of family archives. 8 For our second historical case study, which focuses on family heirlooms in the early Anglo-Saxon and medieval periods in Britain, the term archive is rarely applied, certainly in domestic contexts, although it can be used to describe ecclesiastical or royal collections. ...
How have individual families maintained their own archives outside institutional structures? With what meanings are these archives imbued and how has this changed over time? Using an interdisciplinary research methodology across three archaeological and historical case studies of early Imperial Rome, Britain between the fifth and fifteenth centuries, and Britain in the first half of the twentieth century, this paper explores the value of research focusing on ‘family archives’. Four interlinked themes are used to illustrate the ways in which the objects held in family archives, curation practices and associated intergenerational narratives reinforce a family’s sense of itself: people-object interactions, gender, socialisation and identity formation and finally, the ‘life course’. We argue that the family archive, defined broadly as in this research, is a useful concept for historians to engage with, not least because it encourages a more egalitarian approach to history that values the informal as well as the institutional. We also suggest that a multi-period analysis offers potential as a method to help draw attention to historical forms of knowledge and meaning making practices over time. Furthermore, we conclude that the themes drawn from our long-chronological approach provide a helpful framework for professional archivists to assist communities and individuals wishing to make sense of their own family archives.
This article explores Poggio Bracciolini's letters to Niccolò Niccoli from a variety of perspectives: it looks at what imitation meant for Poggio, examines the letters’ commentary on the manuscript culture of the early Quattrocento, discusses Poggio's efforts to craft a personal voice, and traces the interplay of optimism and pessimism in the letters, an interplay common to humanist texts of this period. By bringing together these different perspectives, the article articulates the range of ways in which one scholar used his epistolary collection to shape his own persona, connect himself to Ciceronian precedents, and create norms and expectations for a developing intellectual community.
The value of the prohoemia or ‘prefaces’ to Cicero’s later philosophical works, composed in the last years of his life, has not yet been settled. Two schools of thought have emerged somewhat more clearly in recent times: one places a greater value on the prefaces as tools for understanding Cicero’s philosophica as a whole, the other applies a more skeptical approach, using a degree of caution as to the nexus between the prefaces and the treatises to which they were affixed. The article advocates for the latter camp, however not only to temper the recent emphasis the optimists have placed on the prefaces as key interpretive elements to the dialogues, but to refocus their importance as extensions of Cicero’s personal and social networking with other Roman elites of his time. I rely on two main lines of argument: the anecdotal evidence from Cicero’s volumen prohoemiorum , “book of prefaces”, mentioned in a letter to Atticus in 44 bce , as well as a broader analysis of a deeper disconnect between Cicero’s prefatory rhetoric regarding Latin philosophical vocabulary compared with Greek and his translation practices in his treatises.
Several decades of scholarship by now have demonstrated that Roman thinkers have developed in new and stimulating directions the systems of thought they inherited from the Greeks, and that, taken together, they offer a range of perspectives that are of philosophical interest in their own right. This collection of essays pursues a maximally inclusive approach, covering not only authors such as Augustine but also poets or historians. It pays attention to the mode in which these works were written (giving rhetoric too its due) and their often conscious reflections on the process of translating, or transferring Greek ideas to Roman contexts.
The writings of Cicero contain hundreds of quotations of Latin poetry. This book examines his citations of Latin poets writing in diverse poetic genres and demonstrates the importance of poetry as an ethical, historical, and linguistic resource in the late Roman Republic. Hannah Čulík-Baird studies Cicero's use of poetry in his letters, speeches, and philosophical works, contextualizing his practice within the broader intellectual trends of contemporary Rome. Cicero's quotations of the 'classic' Latin poets, such as Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius, and Lucilius, are responsible for preserving the most significant fragments of verse from the second century BCE. The book also therefore examines the process of fragmentation in classical antiquity, with particular attention to the relationship between quotation and fragmentation. The Appendices collect perceptible instances of poetic citation (Greek as well as Latin) in the Ciceronian corpus.
La historia de las subscriptiones latinas revela alteraciones tanto en su frecuencia como en el tipo de informacion que transmiten, y en consecuencia tambien en su funcion. En un primer momento proporcionan datos escuetos con una finalidad practica: la identificacion del contenido de un libro concreto. En la Antiguedad tardia su numero aumenta y transmiten mayor volumen de informacion, pero sobre todo adquieren relevancia los individuos que las firman, convirtiendose en un instrumento de autorrepresentacion social. Sin embargo, en epoca posterior estas subscriptiones tardoantiguas se siguen copiando en nuevos manuscritos y pierden su relacion inicial con un ejemplar concreto; se transforman en paratextos que contribuyen a dar prestigio, ya no a un libro singular, sino a un autor o una obra.
Libraries of the ancient world have long held a place in the public imagination. Even in antiquity, the library at Alexandria was nearly legendary. Until now there has been relatively little research to discover what was inside these libraries, how the collections came into being and evolved, and who selected and maintained the holdings. In this engaging and meticulously researched study, Houston examines a dozen specific book collections of Roman date in the first comprehensive attempt to answer these questions. © 2014 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
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