Tiberius and the Libraries

George Houston (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

Several brief references in literature and inscriptions connect the Roman emperor Tiberius with libraries.  They have seldom been taken seriously (one exception being B. Levick, Tiberius the Politician [1999] 15-18), and they have never been exploited as sources for ancient library history.  In this paper, I review these bits of evidence and explore what they tell us about the libraries of Rome and Italy and, incidentally, Tiberius.

Late in his reign, Tiberius built a Temple of the Deified Augustus, with a new library in its precinct (Plin. HN 34.43; Suet. Tib. 74).  We know little about this library—even its site is uncertain—but Pliny tells us that Tiberius brought from Syracuse and put in the library a statue of Minerva that was 50 feet tall.  We can draw inferences.  The building must have been at least 60 feet high, big enough for three levels of bookshelves and very large for a Roman library; and we know from Cicero that this statue was not easy to move.  (Verres had tried.)  The conclusion seems obvious:  Tiberius was willing to spend considerable time and effort on this library, and it should be considered an important early imperial building project.

Suetonius reports (Tib. 71) that Tiberius had copies of the Greek writers Euphorion, Rhianus, and Parthenius placed in the public libraries of Rome.  Since we have little evidence on the contents of these libraries, this is a welcome bit of evidence, but it is especially useful if we reverse the question:  what do we learn from the fact that these authors were NOT in the libraries before Tiberius?  While certainly not writers of the first rank, all three were important to the poets of the first century B.C.:  Catullus and Gallus were influenced by Euphorion, and Vergil actually knew Parthenius.  Obviously, the great public collections were selective and had significant gaps.  The question is:  how selective?  and on what basis?  We will compare the papyrological record and other evidence to assess the nature and contents of their collections—which authors you might expect to find, and which not—and we will consider the possible origins of the book collections as a possible explanation for gaps.  The library in the Portico of Octavia, for example, may well derive ultimately from the collection of Varro, and that scholar, we might guess, was not much concerned with the predecessors of the avant-garde poets of his day.  Above all, we will note that despite the overwhelming extent and prestige of Greek literature, Roman libraries do not seem to have felt compelled to maintain comprehensive collections of Greek works.

An inscription (S. Panciera, Epigraphica 31 [1969] 112-20) tells us that a certain Iulius Pappus was a comes (“advisor,” argues Panciera, no doubt correctly) of Tiberius, and that Tiberius put Pappus in charge of all the imperial libraries (supra bybliothecas omnes Augustorum).  So far as we know, Pappus is the first such library director, and it was Tiberius who perceived the need for such a position.  Perhaps the creation of the new library at the Temple of Augustus, and the numbers of books that came to the emperor as presentation copies, gifts, and bequests, suggested the need for some overall direction.

Outside Rome, we know that the imperial villa at Antium had a library, with slaves assigned to it from at least Tiberius’ last year (Inscriptiones Italiae 13.2, p. 203).  On Capri, no physical remains of a library in Tiberius’ villa remain, but we can safely infer the presence of one by analogy with the villa at Antium, and we may well assume that there were libraries in all of the villas that Tiberius visited in his last years, as he wandered from place to place outside of Rome.  He died at Misenum, in one of Lucullus’ old villas, and we know from Cicero that Lucullus had been a great collector of books.

Thus the reign of Tiberius emerges as a time of consolidation and new organization of the libraries in Rome, and of considerable interest in books and libraries on the part of the emperor himself.  In creating the first new library building in half a century, filling gaps in the public collections, and appointing one man to oversee all the libraries of Rome, Tiberius established precedents that all subsequent emperors could, and many did, follow.