Archives

The Romans liked to think of themselves as less 'bookish' than some of their more effete Mediterranean neighbours. However, their conquests of Greece, Macedonia, Asia Minor and other knowledgeable cultures did mean they were able to collect many texts to fill archives and private collections. This, along with their own scholarship, provided an invaluable source of research into history, culture, military tactics and technology. Books in a Roman library were mainly written in Latin or Greek and, as in modern libraries, covered all kinds of topics from politics and economics to agriculture and poetry. Books were extremely valuable due to their scarcity and because they were all hand-copied in the scriptoria of larger libraries. Statues of writers and decorative architecture often adorned the libraries making them memorial temples to wisdom and the written word.