In the immortal words of Walt Whitman
Where did you get my journal?
Why would you do this to me?
I’ll sue you, I’ll sue you all.
That was private.These Romans were selfish assoles, for sure. Imagine writing massive encyclopaedias, detailing how people saw the world at the time, to only read them at family gatherings in best case, or just have them hidden away and eventually burned.
The reason the Romans were so weirdly stingy when it came to books is because they were a bitch to make and expensive as hell so unless it happened to be in a library you had to find someone with a specific book in their collection. It wouldn’t be until the early medieval period when scriptoriums started to appear that you see large numbers of books being reproduced for relatively cheaply.
Oh also if a book wasn’t well liked or just wasn’t copied frequently then it had a pretty good chance of being lost. This is how the works on the Etruscans by Augustus was lost, note it was multiple volumes yet I’m pretty sure we have none, from what citations still exist is seems to have been a proper historical and anthropological work.
Openly admiring Aurelius or stoicism is a big red flag. Nothing inherently bad about that philosophy, but it tends to appeal to a certain type who tend to think stoicism is just the serenity prayer duct-taped to an overwhelming sense of superiority.
Some of us are aware of that and I have heard the term “broicisim” used before and I THINK thats the demographic that was being described, the same one you are talking about.
It’s a shame they’re bringing the reputation of this philosophy down.
