From dlupher@ups.edu Sun Sep 17 13:48:42 2000 Received: from mxu3.u.washington.edu (mxu3.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.7]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id NAA59092 for ; Sun, 17 Sep 2000 13:48:42 -0700 Received: from mail.ups.edu (main.ups.edu [192.124.98.219]) by mxu3.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id NAA32113 for ; Sun, 17 Sep 2000 13:48:41 -0700 Received: from [207.207.116.71] (wyatt1dhcp71.ups.edu [207.207.116.71]) by mail.ups.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id NAA13549 for ; Sun, 17 Sep 2000 13:48:37 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <012301c020e1$db848740$49972140@MikeSulliivan> References: <200009171927.PAA25906@ccat.sas.upenn.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2000 13:48:12 -0700 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Lupher Subject: Re: pigeon hole legend Mike Sullivan writes: >I had thought that the length of "books" was determined by the reasonable >lenght of one papyrus roll. That is, that too long a roll was just too >unwieldy. A variation of Jim's explanation. Are there any ancient sources? Of course! "Mega biblion, mega kakon." Callimachus. By the way, this prompts me to float a question I have about a statement made by the estimable John Gould on p. 2 of his useful book "Herodotus" (St. Martins, 1989): "As some point after his death, preferably in the altogether different world that followed the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C., Herodotus' narrative was divided into nine 'books,' and these in turn into sections and subsections..." Am I misreading Gould, or is he suggesting that a 5th or 4th century "edition" of Herodotus' book---"longer, almost certainly, that anything else yet written in the world" (James Romm, "Herodotus," Yale Press, 1998, p. xv.)---would have been loaded onto one humongous, lap-breaking roll? Why does Gould assume that only in the "altogether different" Hellenistic world would long works have been divided up into several rolls ("books")? Were Hellenistic laps more delicate than classical ones? I'm not disputing the standard claim that the naming of the Herodotean "books" after the Muses is quite late---Roman period, acc. to Romm, p. 10. I'm just wondering about Gould's apparent contention that the (or a) division of "ta Herodotou" (Aristotle's name for the whole work: Poet. 1451b---when was "Historiai" first attested as the name of the book?) did not occur until well over a century after Herodotus' death. Rummaging around books within reach, I've just found Gould's assumption stated more fully, along with a handy statement of the "convenience" theory of the length of papyrus rolls, on p. 47 of Harry Y. Gamble's excellent book "Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts" (Yale, 1995): The length of a papyrus book roll (as distinct from the standard unit of manufacture) was to some extent variable, with a mean of seven to ten meters. Short works took less space, but the upper limit was rarely transgressed. The maximum length was a function not of manufacture, since rolls of any length could be constructed, but of convenience to the reader. A roll of more than ten or eleven meters was too cumbersome for the reader to handle....The ordinary length came to be closely prescribed by custom. In the Hellenistic period and later, the subdivision of extensive works of literature into books (tomoi, libri) was determined as much by the conventional length of the book roll as by considerations of content. Older long works (such as those of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Homer) had divisions imposed on them, and authors of long new works made their own divisions by taking the customary length of rolls into account. Thus the physical unit of the roll tended to function also as a literary unit. Gamble cites here two articles I don't have handy: F.G. Kenyon, "Book Divisions in Greek and Latin Literature," in "William Warner Bishop: A Tribute," ed. H.M. Lyndenberg & A. Keogh (Yale, 1941), 63-75, and John van Sickle, "The Book-Roll and Some Conventions of the Poetic Book," "Arethusa" 13 (1980): 5-42. Does either Kenyon or van Sickle provide evidence that the "standard" size of the papyrus roll was fixed only in the Hellenistic period? And does either suggest what a copy of the "Iliad" or the works of Herodotus or Thucydides would have looked like ca. 400 B.C.? David Lupher Classics Dept. Univ. of Puget Sound .