book: Chasing the Idea of Completeness
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Chasing the Idea of Completeness

Great Book Collections in the Roman World
  • Katarzyna Pietruczuk
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2025
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About this book

This book sets out to explore how the Romans appropriated the Hellenistic concept of a complete library collection. Tracing this idea in the Roman world allows us to reconstruct the discourse on cultural transmission between Greece and Rome. The model of a super-library dominated the landscape of the Hellenistic period. The Romans were fascinated by this ideal, but never wholly embraced it and never formed one leading book collection of their own. This book attempts to answer the questions resulting from this observation: How did the Romans perceive the shifting of the world’s cultural omphalos throughout their dominance in the Mediterranean? How did they map the empire of books? How did they acquire books for their private collections? This book contributes to the current debate on ancient scholarship by discussing the evolution of the concept of the library in Rome from a broad and novel perspective, thanks to approaching a gamut of sources which have not previously been brought into the scholarship on Roman libraries, such as Terence’s programmatic prologues, testimonies on early Roman literary studies, or the Roman Didascaliae inscription. In addition, a fresh perspective is offered on Galen’s newly discovered Peri alypias.

Author / Editor information

Katarzyna Pietruczuk, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland.


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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
March 17, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9783111634616
Hardcover published on:
March 17, 2025
Hardcover ISBN:
9783111634388
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Front matter:
0
Main content:
242
Illustrations:
3
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