- Why The Romans Never Invented Printing.
- "Rome? The city of all time, and of all the world."
- -Nathaniel Hawthorne
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- The Roman empire dominated the world for over five hundred years. They excelled in art, architecture, science, philosophy, and law. Mighty Roman Legions conquered the known world. It's engineers built the straightest roads and most serviceable aqueducts. Homes had running water, plumbing, and central heat.
- The language of Rome has dominated science, medicine, and literature for centuries.
- Yet, the art and science of printing would elude the ancient empire. Why?
- It wasn't a matter of not having a literate population. Both the citizens and conquered slaves were well educated. Greek slaves worked as scribes, translators, and teachers. Romans loved to read. Great libraries existed adjacent to the public baths. Patrons could read in leisure or borrow great works of science and literature.
- There was a thriving publishing industry. Manuscript sellers were in the market place for those who wanted to own personal copies. First editions of one thousand copies were commissioned and best sellers sold over one hundred thousand copies in the arcade book stalls. But, each copy had to be hand copied with pen and ink.
- Some were massive works. Marcus Terentius Varro, over eighty-nine years, completed a six hundred twenty volume one-man encyclopedia of every branch of knowledge. Many books contained maps and illustrations as well as text. There was a book about seven hundred famous men. Each biographical sketch was accompanied by a portrait of the individual.
- The earliest Roman literary works were copied on Egyptian papyrus. In the first century, dried animal skin, called parchment, was used as a substrate. A short document on a folded sheet was a two fold or diploma. A longer work of literature was sold as a scroll or volumen (wound up). The writing was done in two narrow columnae per page. Punctuation and spacing did not exist. These innovations were introduced by printers centuries later.
- Less important documents were written on waxed-coated boards with a stylus.
- They could be easily erased with the thumb and reused. School children and store clerks used these. Some were hinged together into a codex. This was a forerunner of the book, as we know it.
- Julius Caesar didn't want secret acts of the Senate to interfere with his own plans. He issued a decree that the reports of the Senate be issued as Acta Diurna or The Daily Acts. At first it was issued on a whitened wooden board, called album (white). Romans could read the posted boards in the Forum.
- These official transcripts of government acts were also kept in the Temple of ... Wealthy Romans hired scribes to copy important items of interest. Soon, Romans living abroad began to subscribe to these first newspapers. They carried official news, sports, society news, and gossip.
- The Roman scribes were under pressure to speed up production. They took the elegant carved capital letters of stone cutters and evolved rustic capitals, lower case ascenders, descenders, and finally a cursive style. The word cursive means "course" as in "the course of a flowing river." Still, they could not keep up with demand.
- Necessity mothered some innovations, if not full blown invention. School boys were taught their letter shapes with a type of stencil board. One noble had a tablet of wood perforated, through which he traced in red ink the first four letters of his name.Yet, it never occurred to the Romans to adept this to mass production.
- Roman signet rings were used as stamps by the wealthy and noble. These wrong reading metal letters were in effect relief type. They were inked and used to stamp documents as the official mark of the owner. The concept of putting combinations of these "types" together to print a page never occurred.
- The major flaw of Roman society that prevented the germ of printing from progressing from the embryo stage was the abundance inexpensive labor. Slaves were not paid for their work. They were only required to be fed. Royalties to authors did not exist. Anyone was free to copy anything if he had enough slaves.
- What later writers would call "civilization's greatest blessing" would be reserved by Providence for a later time and place. One can only imagine what the Roman Empire would have become if there had been a Roman Gutenberg
Copyright (C) 1997 by Frank Granger
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