in the buried city was chiefly made up of philosophical works,
some of which were quite unknown to the modern world until
discovered there.

But this find, interesting as it was from an archaeological
stand-point, had no very important bearing on our knowledge of
the literature of antiquity. Our chief dependence for our
knowledge of that literature must still be placed in such copies
of books as were made in the successive generations.
Comparatively few of the extant manuscripts are older than the
tenth century of our era. It requires but a momentary
consideration of the conditions under which ancient books were
produced to realize how slow and difficult the process was before
the invention of printing. The taste of the book-buying public
demanded a clearly written text, and in the Middle Ages it became
customary to produce a richly ornamented text as well. The script
employed being the prototype of the modern printed text, it will
be obvious that a scribe could produce but a few pages at best in
a day. A large work would therefore require the labor of a scribe
for many months or even for several years. We may assume, then,
that it would be a very flourishing publisher who could produce a
hundred volumes all told per annum; and probably there were not
many publishers at any given time, even in the period of Rome's
greatest glory, who had anything like this output.

As there was a large number of authors in every generation of the
classical period, it follows that most of these authors must have
been obliged to content themselves with editions numbering very
few copies; and it goes without saying that the greater number of
books were never reproduced in what might be called a second