My book is thumbed by our soldiers posted overseas, and even in Britain people quote my words. What’s the point? I don’t make a penny from it.

Just another author bitching about his profession, right? Right, except his complaint was written two thousand years ago. The author was Martial, and he was not just one of the great Roman poets of his day, he was also a defender of authors’ rights, according to a delightful New York Times Book Review article by Mary Beard, a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge and classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement.

Beard reminds us that “books” in Martial’s Rome were papyrus scrolls and, as the printing press was some fourteen centuries away from invention, they were transcribed by hand, ofttimes by slaves. And – where have we heard this before? – there were plenty of ways for copyists and booksellers to rip writers off.

“Like Martial,” writes Beard, “most Roman writers knew that the profits of their writing ended up in the pockets of the booksellers, who often combined retail trade with a copying business – and so were, in effect, publishers and distributors too.”

“At best, the author received only a lump sum from the seller for the rights to copy his work (though once the text was “out,” there was no way of stopping pirated copies). Horace, the tame poet of the emperor Augustus, made the obvious comparison: booksellers were the rich pimps of Roman publishing and authors, or even the books themselves, were the hard-working but humiliated prostitutes.

Bear cites numerous ways that grievances two millennia old seem no farther in the past than the last issue of the Authors Guild Bulletin:

• “There’s a lot in the Roman literary world that seems quite familiar two millenniums later: money-­making booksellers, exploited and impoverished authors, celebrity book launches and career-making prizes…”
• “With slaves on hand to summon up refreshments, it would have been not unlike the coffee shop in a modern Borders.”
• “A cut-price book roll would presumably have fallen to pieces as quickly as a modern mass-market paperback. But worse, the pressure to get copies made quickly meant that they were loaded with errors and sometimes uncomfortably different from the authentic words of the author.”
• “The Roman launch party took the form of select readings from the work, given semi-publicly or at exclusive invitation-only events, perhaps in the home of a rich patron.“
• “Roman emperors paid for high-profile prizes, more like the Pulitzer or the Booker.”

After reading Scrolling Down the Ages by Mary Beard, you may conclude that, compared to your Roman counterparts, you don’t have it so bad after all. On the other hand, our literary forebears didn’t have to put up with the torments of reserves against returns.

RC