“What was a liber, a book, at Rome? A roll of papyrus on which the text was inscribed in ink with a reed pen. Publication consisted of the preparation and sale—or presentation as gifts—of copies made by hand. A wealthy man would have copyists on his household staff. There were bookshops, and Augustus founded a public library on the Palatine. Books were valuable, not owned by everybody, and by our standards hard to handle and to read. Words were not set off from one another by spaces but appeared in an unbroken line. You held the scroll in your right hand and unrolled it with your left. This is what Jupiter does metaphorically for Venus in Book I, unrolling the scroll of fate, and in Book IX, line 528, the poet calls on the Muse of Epic to unroll with him, as though on a scroll, the mighty scenes of war. In the first case the text is the future; in the second it is the past.”

—Robert Fitzgerald, postscript from his translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid, 1983.