Konstantine Panegyres, The University of Western Australia

If you were to visit a bookshop in the ancient world, what would it be like?

You don’t just have to imagine it. The ancient Roman writer Aulus Gellius, who lived in the 2nd century CE, gives us a number of descriptions of his adventures at bookstores. In one passage, he describes an encounter at one in Rome, which he was visiting with a poet friend:

I chanced to be sitting in a bookshop in the Sigillaria with the poet Julius Paulus […] There was on sale there the Annals of Quintus Fabius Pictor in a copy of good and undoubted age, which the dealer maintained was without errors.

Gellius then tells us that, while they are sitting there, another customer enters the shop. The new customer has a disagreement with the dealer. He complains that he “found in the book one error”. The dealer says that’s impossible. Then the customer brings out evidence to prove the dealer wrong.

In different passage, Aulus tells us about some bookstalls he came across when he arrived by ship at the port of Brundisium on the Adriatic coast. The books, he records, were “in Greek, filled with marvellous tales, things unheard of, incredible […] The writers were ancient and of no mean authority”.

The volumes themselves, however, were filthy from neglect, in bad condition and unsightly. Nevertheless, I drew near and asked their price; then, attracted by their extraordinary and unexpected cheapness, I bought a large number of them for a small sum.

Aulus goes on to describe in excited language all the weird facts he derived from these books – like how people in Africa can “work spells by voice and tongue” and through this witchcraft cause people, animals, trees and crops to die.

The origins of writing

These sorts of stories bring us close to how ordinary people in ancient Greek and Roman times obtained books and engaged with books. But if we read stories like this it might lead us to want to know more. How did books and writing come into existence? And how were books written and produced?

Many people in the ancient world thought that writing had been invented by gods or heroes. For example, the ancient Egyptians believed the god Thoth was the first to create signs to represent spoken sounds.

The origins of writing are certainly mysterious. It’s unclear when writing began and who invented it.

The earliest written text is a wooden tablet radiocarbon dated to before 5000 BCE. This is known as the Dispilio tablet, because it was discovered at a neolithic lakeside settlement at Dispilio in Greece. It is carved with strange linear markings. These have not been deciphered, but most scholars think they are a form of writing.

Evidence for writing appears early in different parts of the world. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, the oldest texts, such as the Kish limestone tablet at Uruk or the Narmer Palette at Hierakonpolis, date to before 3000 BCE. In the Indus Valley, the Harappan script, which remains undeciphered, appeared around the same time. In China, the earliest characters, the Dawenkou graphs, also date to around 3000 BCE.

One of the most interesting aspects of early writing is that there is such a variety of different scripts. For example, the earliest known texts in the Greek language are written in the Linear B script, which was used from around 1500-1200 BCE, and wasn’t deciphered until 1952. Linear B is not an alphabet, but a syllabary of more than 80 different signs. A syllabary is a kind of writing system where each sign represents a syllable.

By around the 8th century BCE, most Greeks had starting using an alphabet instead of a syllabary. Unlike a syllabary, in an alphabet each letter represents a vowel or consonant. The Greeks adapted their alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet, probably via interactions with Phoenician traders. The Phoenician alphabet had only 22 letters, making it much easier to learn than the 80-plus syllabary signs of Linear B.

Our English alphabet comes from the Romans, who in the 8th and 7th century BCE also got their alphabet from the Phoenicians, via the Greeks.

The origins of books

People in ancient times used many different things as writing materials.

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) tells us that the earliest people in the world

used to write on palm-leaves and then on the bark of certain trees, and afterwards folding sheets of lead began to be employed for official muniments, and then also sheets of linen or tablets of wax for private documents.

However, the most popular writing material in the ancient Mediterranean was papyrus, from which we get our word “paper”.

To make papyrus, you get the pith of the papyrus plant (Cyperus papyrus), cut it into slender strips, then press it together. Once dried, it forms a thin sheet that you can write on.

Papyrus sheets were usually glued together into rolls. These rolls could be very long. Some of the most lavish Egyptian papyrus rolls were more than 10 metres long, such as the recently discovered Waziri Papyrus containing parts of the Book of the Dead.

When papyri were rolled up they were stored in shelves or boxes. Labels were attached to the handles of the papyri so you could identify their contents. In his play Linus, Greek playwright Alexis (c. 375-275 BC) has one character tell another how to look through a bunch of rolls to find what he wants:

go over and pick any papyrus roll you like out of there and then read it… examining them quietly, and at your leisure, on the basis of the labels. Orpheus is in there, Hesiod, tragedies, Choerilus, Homer, Epicharmus, prose treatises of every type…

Papyrus seems flimsy to the eye, but it is a durable writing material, stronger than modern paper. Many papyri have survived for thousands of years stored in jars or sarcophagi or buried under the sand.

The oldest surviving papyrus text is the so-called Diary of Merer (which you can listen to here), the logbook of a man named Merer, who was an inspector during the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza under Pharaoh Khufu. This papyrus, which dates to around 2600 BCE, gives a day-by-day account of how Merer and his team of about 200 men spent time hauling and transporting stone and doing other work.

Papyrus was susceptible to being eaten by insects or mice. But there were ways to prevent this. Pliny the Elder, for example, advises that sheets of papyrus soaked in citrus-oil won’t be eaten by moths.

How to write a book in antiquity

If you were living in ancient Greece or Rome and wanted to write a book, how would you do it?

First, you would buy sheets or rolls of papyrus to write on. If you couldn’t afford it, you’d have to write on the back or in the margins of papyri you already owned.

If you didn’t own any papyri already, then you would have to write on other materials. According to the Greek historian Diogenes Laertius (3rd century CE), the philosopher Cleanthes (c. 331-231 BCE) “wrote down lectures on oyster-shells and the blade-bones of oxen through lack of money to buy papyrus”.

Second, you would get your ink. In the ancient world, there were many varieties of ink. Normal black ink was made from the soot of burnt resin or pitch mixed with vegetable gum. When buying ink, it would come in powder form, and you would need to mix it with water before using it.

Third, you would get your pen. It would be made from reed, hence it was called the “calamus” by Greeks and Romans (“calamus” is the Greek word for reed). To sharpen your pen you would need a knife. If you made a mistake, you would erase it with a wet sponge.

Now you have all the materials you need. However, you don’t need to use the pen and papyrus yourself. If you want, you can get a scribe to write down your words for you.

The Greek orator Dio Chrysostom (c.40-110 CE) even advised writers not to use the pen themselves:

Writing I do not advise you to engage in with your own hand, or only very rarely, but rather to dictate to a secretary.

If you needed to consult other books while writing, you could get friends to send them to you or ask book dealers to make you a copy. In a papyrus from the 2nd century CE found at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, and written in Greek, the writer asks his friend to find the books that he needs and make copies of them. Otherwise, you would go to a library, though the best libraries at Alexandria, Rome and Athens might be far away.

When you finished drafting your book you would need to revise and correct it. You could then publish it by having many copies made by scribes and delivering these copies to friends and booksellers.

When all this was done, your book would be out in public. Perhaps someone like Aulus Gellius would stumble across it in a busy Roman bookshop. Maybe he’d even buy it.

Konstantine Panegyres, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Rachael Mead, University of Adelaide

Stories from the ancient past are enjoying a literary renaissance. Classicist, broadcaster and comedian Natalie Haynes stands out for her ability to straddle scholarship and storytelling. The international success of her classical fiction and nonfiction speaks to readers’ fascination with examinations of myth and contemporary retellings that peel away centuries of cultural, gender and identity bias.

And in a thrilling entry into the ever-evolving genre of mythological retellings, Australian writer, actor and trans/queer advocate Zoe Terakes revisits five ancient tales through a defiantly queer lens, in their debut short-story collection, Eros: Queer Myths for Lovers.

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Review: No Friend to This House – Natalie Haynes (Pan Macmillan); Eros: Queer Myths for Lovers – Zoe Terkaes (Hachette)

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These two books interrogate the myths of the ancient world, stripping away centuries of patriarchal and heterosexual assumptions about the definition of heroism. Familiar stories are told from new perspectives.

In her fifth novel, No Friend to This House, Haynes continues her mission to wrest the focus of ancient Greek myth away from the male hero.

This time, she turns to one of antiquity’s most enduring tales: Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece. Apollonius of Rhodes’ book Argonautica is often used as the historical source for the story of Jason, leader of the Argonauts, and Medea, the sorceress who helped him take the Golden Fleece from her father – then married him. But Haynes widens the frame, in narrative voice and scope.

Decentring Jason and his band of Argonauts, she hands the story to the women and minor figures of the myth. This includes Medea’s murder of their two sons, after Jason leaves her for another woman. Haynes allows those sidelined and victimised by Jason’s quest to speak. Using her signature multi-voiced structure, Haynes creates a chorus of perspectives from those relegated to the periphery by ancient sources.

With wit and sardonic insight, this cast of narrators reveals the impact of the “heroes” choices, as the expedition moves from Jason’s hometown Iolkos to his destination Colchis, home of the Golden Fleece – and back.

Goddesses, naiads and nymphs

Female voices dominate: women, goddesses, naiads and nymphs. Together, they tell their stories of abandonment, fury and despair. But Haynes pushes further, insisting we move beyond the human perspective. Jason’s ship, the Argo, speaks, as does the bird who guides the Argonauts through the clashing rocks, and the golden ram whose hide is flayed to become the famous golden fleece.

These non-human voices reframe the quest as an act of violence and disruption, extending beyond the Argonauts and their human victims.

More intriguingly, the quest itself is freed from its traditional boundaries. Instead of beginning with Jason’s challenge from his uncle, King Pelias, to steal the fleece from Colchis (at the eastern end of the known world), Haynes makes us reconsider where this story truly starts and ends. It reaches back to its origin: Helle and Phrixus (children of Nephele, goddess of clouds) escaping their stepmother Ino on the back of the golden ram. It also stretches forward, past Jason’s triumphant return to his family.

Drawing on Euripides’ Medea and Ovid’s Heroides, Haynes casts fresh eyes on one of mythology’s most demonised women.
Her re-examination of Medea is signalled in the chapter epigraphs: each is a line (translated by Haynes herself) from the opening of Euripides’ play. Historically, most classical translations have been produced by men. The first verse translation of The Odyssey by a woman, Emily Wilson, only appeared in 2017. So Haynes’ decision to personally translate Euripides’ Ancient Greek is a powerful declaration.

Medea is not exonerated

Her broader project is to reexamine these stories and strip away centuries of accumulated bias – across both fiction and nonfiction. Given Haynes’ feminist lens, it would be easy to assume she might apologise for Medea’s crimes. Instead, she offers a complex portrait.

Medea is not exonerated. She is rendered in full: daughter to a tyrannical father, refugee, magic-user – and a political strategist keenly aware of her power and vulnerability. By giving voice to Medea and the women around her, Haynes exposes Jason’s unheroic actions in the years following the quest – such as taking another wife while still married to Medea, threatening to take the children and render her homeless. Yet she equally scrutinises Medea and her choices.

The result is not an attempt to justify Medea’s actions, but an exploration of how a person – flawed, furious, capable of the unimaginable – might still be profoundly human.

Extending the story and handing it to so many voices creates a challenge in maintaining narrative tension. But the resulting chorus is consistently fascinating, and the cast list in the front of the book proves invaluable for situating the more obscure players. For readers drawn to Medea – the dark magnet at the heart of this story – her delayed arrival, a third of the way into the tale, might feel like a long wait. But the voices who lead us there bristle with more than enough anger, betrayal and conflict to drive it in the meantime.

No Friend to This House is another sharp feminist reclamation from Haynes. The novel dismantles the heroic epic and engages with ancient sources in ways that are witty, yet grounded in the emotional heft of this tragedy. It is Haynes’ most challenging (arguably, her most controversial) subject. But it is also one of her most successful – less a retelling than a dismantling of Jason’s legend. It rebuilds the myth through the voices of those left in the margins.

Queer myths for lovers

In Eros: Queer Myths for Lovers, Zoe Terakes mines their Cretan ancestry and trans experience to centre identities long pushed to the margins of the mythological record. They refuse both the heterosexual straightening and the hero worship that have fossilised these stories over the centuries.

Terakes’ myths range from the canonical to the unexpected. The opening story reimagines the love between Iphis – born female, raised and disguised as male (to avoid being killed by their father) – and childhood friend Ianthe, praised for “her unequalled beauty”.

The story, familiar to many from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is sharpened into something far more visceral and urgent. Told from Iphis’ perspective, Terakes reframes the tale as a narrative of trans masculinity, stripping back centuries of sentimentality to reveal a character wrestling with their hidden identity.

In the second story, Icarus, who flew too close to the sun with wax and feather wings, is freed from his conventional role in the cautionary tale about arrogance. His story is reimagined as a study of homoerotic longing between a mortal youth and a god.

The third piece is set in the contemporary underworld. Eurydice, whose husband Orpheus famously tried to bring her back from the dead, is recast by Terakes as a dissatisfied girlfriend who uses her death to break free from her traditional passive fate and claim agency during her time in the afterlife.

And in the final two stories, the location migrates from ancient Crete to late 20th-century Australia. Terakes again takes fascinating liberties with myth.

They twist the myth of Artemis, goddess of wild animals and the hunt, and the nymph Kallisto, tricked into sleeping with Zeus and turned into a she-bear as a result. Artemis and Kallisto’s relationship plays out in a fantastical tale of migration and family loyalty that veers from a magical Cretan setting to a sweaty Northern Rivers abode, both revolving around a Zeus-like father-figure raised by a goat.

Hermaphroditus, a youth who in myth became both male and female due to the unrequited passion of an enamoured nymph, experiences the shock of transformation in the humid, neon-lit underworld of King’s Cross.

Like Haynes, Terakes writes with a keen awareness of the centuries of scholarly varnish applied to the mythological record by classicists who are overwhelmingly white, male and (at least presenting as) heterosexual. This varnish has obscured, minimised or erased queer identities. Of course, queer love, much like other minority perspectives, has always existed: Terakes re-examines these stories through a queer lens as an act of reclamation – a restoration, rather than invention.

Since Madeline Miller’s wildly successful The Song of Achilles (2011) opened the door for queer love in the mythological retelling genre, these stories have increasingly honoured – and at times amplified – non-heterosexual voices. Terakes extends this project with authority.

As a trans man and prominent queer advocate, they write these characters with a confidence that is intimate, visceral and boldly political.

Sweaty, urgent, sensual and raw

One of the many pleasures of reading ancient literature is the sense of emotional connection it offers to lives from the deep past – the recognition those who lived millennia before us loved, grieved and yearned with the same ferocity we do.

Terakes pushes this identification even further, slipping readers not only into the emotional lives of these characters, but into their erotic ones too. These first-person narratives are intensely embodied – sweaty, urgent, sensual and raw – capturing not just the lust and longing, but the comedown after it.

Terakes’ writing style slides between the mythic and the modern. In the story of Icarus and Apollo, they show us Icarus’ first glimpse of the minotaur:

And there he saw it. Steaming with unnatural heat. Hot out of hell. The bull. Bloodied pearlescent horns mounted its large, bovine head. Its eyes were tunnels, a kind of black that didn’t occur in nature. They were the colour of death – impenetrable, unendurable.

But soon, the writing switches from this epic tone to the vernacular. The Cretan queen confesses to bestiality, spitting: “I fucked him […] And it was wonderful.”

The pieces set in the contemporary world weave in commentary on the migrant experience and Australian racism. It’s unusual, but not jarring, in a collection that deftly straddles millennia. Terakes’ insistence on bringing queer sexualities into mainstream literature feels not just important, but vital.

The explicit eroticism of these stories may not be to the taste of all readers – but its presence within a genre committed to amplifying marginalised voices is essential. These myths always had desire at their core. Terakes is simply restoring identities that heteronormative scholarship had erased.

Rachael Mead, Fellow, J.M. Coetzee Centre, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.