Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-k8lnt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-27T15:47:05.983Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Book-Burning and the Uses of Writing in Ancient Rome: Destructive Practice between Literature and Document

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 July 2017

Joseph A. Howley
Joseph A. Howley*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
*
jah2220@columbia.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article examines the burning of written material at Rome from the Republican period until the rise of Christianity, using the lens of book history. It considers why and how Romans burned written material, gathering for the first time all testimony of burning any kind of writing, and examines responses to these burnings in ancient discourse. A capacious, book-historical approach to Roman book-burning shows that differences in practice and uses — of books as opposed to documents, for example — account for the different consequences Romans saw for burning different written media.

Keywords

book-burningbooksdocumentscensorshipmemory controlwriting

Information

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Roman Studies , Volume 107 , November 2017 , pp. 213 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2017. Published by The Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bagnall, R. S. 2002: ‘Library of Dreams’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 146(4), 348–62Google Scholar
Beard, M. 2002: ‘Ciceronian correspondences: making a book out of letters’, in Wiseman, T. P. (ed.), Classics in Progress, Oxford, 103–44Google Scholar
Buitenwerf, R. 2003: Book III of the Sibylline Oracles and its Social Setting, Leiden Google Scholar
Clarke, G. W. 1968: ‘The burning of books and Catullus 36’, Latomus 27, 575–80Google Scholar
Cramer, F. H. 1945: ‘Bookburning and censorship in ancient Rome: a chapter from the history of freedom of speech’, Journal of the History of Ideas 6(2), 157–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cramer papers 1938–1954 (finding aid): Five College Archives & Manuscript Collections. Retrieved 8 July 2016, from https://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/mountholyoke/mshm153.html Google Scholar
Dover, K. 1988: ‘The freedom of the intellectual in Greek society’, in Dover, K., The Greeks and their Legacy, Oxford, 135–58Google Scholar
Dumont, F. 1959: ‘Le testament d'Antoine’, in Droits de l'antiquité et sociologie juridique: mélanges Henri Lévy-Bruhl, Paris, 85–104 Google Scholar
Fishburn, M. 2008: Burning Books, New York CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flower, H. I. 1998: ‘Rethinking “Damnatio Memoriae”: the case of Cn. Calpurnius Piso Pater in AD 20’, Classical Antiquity 17(2), 155–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forbes, C. A. 1936: ‘Books for the burning’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 67, 114–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fowler, D. 1995: ‘Martial and the book’, in Boyle, A. J. (ed.), Roman Literature and Ideology. Ramus Essays for J.P. Sullivan, Victoria, Australia, 199–226 Google Scholar
Gitelman, L. 2014: Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, Durham, NC Google Scholar
Gruen, E. 1990: Studies in Greek Culture and Roman Policy, Leiden CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gunderson, E. 2014: ‘E.g. Augustus: exemplum in the Augustus and Tiberius’, in Power and Gibson 2014, 130–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hammond, M. 1953: ‘A statue of Trajan represented on the “Anaglypha Traiani”’, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 21, 127–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harker, A. 2008: Loyalty and Dissidence in Roman Egypt. The Case of the Acta Alexandrinorum, Cambridge CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, W. 1989: Ancient Literacy, Cambridge, MA CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hatzimichali, M. 2013: ‘Ashes to ashes? The library of Alexandria after 48 BC’, in König, J. P., Oikonomopoulou, K. and Woolf, G. (eds), Ancient Libraries, Cambridge, 167–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haynes, H. 2006: ‘Survival and memory in the Agricola’, Arethusa 39(2), 149–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hennig, D. 1973: ‘T. Labienus und der erste Majestätsprozess “de famosis libellis”’, Chiron 3, 245–54Google Scholar
Johnson, J. R. 1978: ‘The authenticity and validity of Antony's will’, L'Antiquité Classique 47(2), 494–503 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kallet-Marx, R. M. 1995: ‘Quintus Fabius Maximus and the Dyme affair (Syll. 684)’, The Classical Quarterly 45(1), 129–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaster, R. 1998: ‘Becoming “CICERO”’, in Knox, P. E. and Foss, C. (eds), Style and Tradition. Studies in Honor of Wendell Clausen, Stuttgart and Leipzig, 248–63Google Scholar
Krevans, N. 2010: ‘Bookburning and the poetic deathbed: the legacy of Virgil’, in Hardie, P. and Moore, H. (eds), Classical Literary Careers and their Reception, Cambridge, 197–208 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langlands, E. 2014: ‘Exemplary influences and Augustus’ pernicious moral legacy’, in Power and Gibson 2014, 130–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lintott, A. 1999: Violence in Republican Rome, Oxford CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marasco, G. 1983: Commento alle biografie plutarchee di Agide e di Cleomene, Rome Google Scholar
McCutcheon, R. 2015: ‘Silent reading in antiquity and the future history of the book’, Book History 18, 1–32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Meyer, E. 2004: Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World: Tabulae in Roman Belief and Practice, Cambridge CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Millar, F. 1967: ‘Emperors at work’, The Journal of Roman Studies 57(1/2), 9–19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moles, J. 1998: ‘Cry freedom: Tacitus Annals 4.32–35’, Histos 2, 95–184 Google Scholar
Nicholls, M. 2011: ‘Galen and libraries in the Peri Alupias ’, The Journal of Roman Studies 101, 123–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinault, J. R. 1992: Hippocratic Lives and Legends, Leiden CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Power, T., and Gibson, R. K. (eds) 2014: Suetonius the Biographer: Studies in Roman Lives, Oxford Google Scholar
President Obama at White House Correspondents Dinner, The White House. Retrieved 8 July 2016, from https://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2013/04/28/president-obama-white-house-correspondents-dinner#transcript Google Scholar
Purcell, N. 2001: ‘The ordo scribarum. A study in the loss of memory’, Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome. Antiquité, 113(2), 633–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Raaflaub, K. A., and Samons II, L. J. 1990: ‘Opposition to Augustus’, in Raaflaub, K. A. and Toher, M. (eds), Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and his Principate, Berkeley, CA, 417–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Radner, K. 2014: State Correspondence in the Ancient World: From New Kingdom Egypt to the Roman Empire, Oxford CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rizakēs, A. D. 2008: Achaïe. III. Les cités achéennes: épigraphie et histoire, Athens Google Scholar
Rohmann, D. 2013: ‘Book burning as conflict management in the Roman Empire (213 BCE–200 CE)’, Ancient Society 43, 115–49Google Scholar
Rohmann, D. 2016: Christianity, Book-burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity, Berlin CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roman, L. 2001: ‘The representation of literary materiality in Martial's “Epigrams”’, The Journal of Roman Studies 91, 113–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosen, R. 2012: ‘Spaces of sickness in Greco-Roman medicine’, in Baker, P., Nijdam, H. and van't Land, K. (eds), Medicine and Space. Body, Surroundings and Borders in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Leiden, 227–43Google Scholar
Rostovtzeff, M. 1941: The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, Oxford Google Scholar
Rudich, V. 2006: ‘Navigating the uncertain: literature and censorship in the early Roman Empire’, Arion 14(1), 7–28 Google Scholar
Sailor, D. 2008: Writing and Empire in Tacitus, Cambridge CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sarefield, D. 2006: ‘Bookburning in the Christian Roman Empire: transforming a pagan rite of purification’, in Drake, H. A. (ed.), Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, Aldershot, 287–96Google Scholar
Sarefield, D. 2007: ‘The symbolics of book burning: the establishment of a Christian ritual of persecution’, in Klingshirn, W. E. and Safran, L. (eds), The Early Christian Book, Washington, DC, 59–73 Google Scholar
Schiappa, E. 1991: Protagoras and Logos: a Study of Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric, Columbia Google Scholar
Scott, A. G. 2013: ‘The legitimization of Elagabalus and Cassius Dio's account of the reign of Macrinus’, Journal of Ancient History 1(2), 242–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Seo, J. M. 2009: ‘Plagiarism and poetic identity in Martial’, American Journal of Philology 190(4), 567–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silk, M. 2004: ‘Numa Pompilius and the idea of civil religion in the West’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72(4), 863–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Speyer, W. 1981: Büchervernichtung und Zensur des Geistes bei Heiden, Juden und Christe, Stuttgart Google Scholar
Suarez, M. F., and Woudhuysen, H. (eds) 2013: The Book of Global History, Oxford Google Scholar
Thomas, R. 1994: ‘Literacy in Archaic and Classical Greece’, in Bowman, A. K. and Woolf, G. (eds), Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, Cambridge, 33–50 Google Scholar
Torelli, M. 1982: Typology and Structure of Roman Historical Reliefs, Ann Arbor, MI Google Scholar
Tortorella, S. 2013: ‘Monumenti statali fra Traiano e Marco Aurelio’, in la Rocca, E., Presicce, C. Parisi and Monaco, A. Lo (eds), L'età dell'equilibrio 98–180 d.c.: Traiano, Adriano, Antonino Pio, Marco Aurelio, Rome, 52–9Google Scholar
Vismann, C. 2008: Files. Law and Media Technology, trans. Winthrop-Young, G., Stanford Google Scholar
White, P. 1996: ‘Martial and pre-publication texts’, Échos du monde classique 30(3), 397–412 Google Scholar
Williams, G. D. 1992: ‘Representations of the book-roll in Latin poetry: Ovid, Tr. 1, 1, 3–14 and related texts’, Mnemosyne 45(2), 178–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winsbury, R. 2009: The Roman Book, London Google Scholar
Woolf, G. 2012: ‘Reading and religion in Rome’, in Spickermann, W. and Rüpke, J. (eds), Reflections on Religious Individuality. Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian Texts and Practices, Berlin, 193–208 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zadorojnyi, A. V. 2006: ‘Lords of the Flies: literacy and tyranny in imperial biography’, in Mossman, J. and McGing, B. (eds), The Limits of Ancient Biography, Swansea, 351–94Google Scholar