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New Day Cafe: Why the Romans Stopped Reading Books [1]
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Date: 2025-04-07
Open Culture looks at a very old take, namely that no one reads books anymore.
“Nobody reads books anymore. Whether or not that notion strikes you as true, you’ve probably heard it expressed fairly often in recent decades — just as you might have had you lived in the Roman Empire of late antiquity. During that time, as ancient-history YouTuber Garrett Ryan explains in the new Told in Stone video above, the ‘book trade declined with the educated elite that had supported it. The copying of secular texts slowed, and finally ceased. The books in Roman libraries, public and private, crumbled on their shelves. Only a small contingent of survivors found their way into monasteries.’ As went the reading culture of the empire, so went the empire itself.
Some may be tempted to draw parallels with certain countries in existence today. But what may be more surprising is the extent of Roman reading at its height. Though only about one in ten Romans could read, Ryan explains, ‘the Roman elite defined themselves by a sophisticated literary education, and filled their cities with texts.’”
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