How Traveling Booksellers Spread Literature Throughout Ancient Greece
How many books were there in the golden age of ancient Greece? What percentage of the population could read them? We have only shreds of information preserved by chance, blades of grass that float along on the breeze but don’t allow us to calculate the size of the meadow from which they came. And most of them refer to an exceptional place, the city of Athens. The rest remains in shadow.Seeking traces of this invisible literacy, we turn to images of readers represented in ceramic paintings. Fr...