Re: Who read Plato and Herodotusl and did they make money on their writings?



Agamemnon wrote:

"Matt Giwer" <jull43@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:475e1c7f$0$8845$4c368faf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Jimmy Clay wrote:
I'm curious about ancient writers. Plato wrote all those dialogues. And
Herodotus wrote the very good and long "The Histories." I'm wondering who
those works were written for. This seems like a problem to me because
there
was no printing press back then and each dialogue or book had to hand
written.

Interested people made their own copies. The first lending library was in
Islamic Baghdad. The lending period was one day per page presumably to
permit

No it wasn't. It was the Library of Alexandria and possibly libraries before
that.

time to copy it. Earlier there was some market for ordering copies of
particular works but they were commissioned works. There was no production
of many copies on speculation as is done for books today.

Wrong. There was an entire industry based on it as early as 3000 BC when
Gilgamesh was mass-produced.


Correct. And on ocassion there were formal writings and copies
for circulation at the ambassadorial level. One exchange required
an expedition and a caravan to bring the "clay" tablet copies back.
.....








I know of no recorded reason why Herodotus wrote. But he traveled looking
for business opportunities. I can speculate he wrote to prove he had been
there, knew the area, and thus get backing for his trading projects. Think
Marco Polo who apparently grossly exaggerated the extent of his travels
but used the story to expand his trading opportunities.

Did Plato and Herodotus make money on these works?

Copyright had not been invented. So even if they had tried copying was
still the only tradition.

The only possibility I can see is that their writings must have been read
in
a public form. Perhaps people paid money to hear them read. Is that what
happened? Just curious.

The idea of writing for profit is quite recent. Professional writers are
even more recent. And then it was mostly limited to fiction.

The model for fiction in ancient times would have been for plays the
continued almost to modern times. The plays and the productions were paid
for by patrons. Even Shakespeare did not make a living as playwright. He
made his money putting on plays and simply created his own material. The
tradition goes back to the traveling storytellers and entertainers. And
that tradition likely goes back to the beginning of time in one form or
other.

Non-fiction material was similar. Plato did not make any money on his
writings per se but he accepted fees for teaching what he wrote about. I
don't have references for most of what was written but it was likely
similar. Consider them the professor's notes made available to the paying
students.

Given the internet the world appears to be going back to these models.
Musicians no longer need record companies and rarely made money from them
anyway. Their earnings from from the performance tours. So we see a
growing trend to give away or very low price songs on the internet which
serve to promote ticket sales for local performances.

The trend has not hit colleges as yet that I am aware of but electronic
copies of textbooks will make selling them obsolete and the real earnings
coming solely from paying for class attendance.

It is not clear what will happen to writing fiction for a living. There
appears to be no market for live dramatic readings. E-books and audio
books are available by the torrent. What I have not seen are scanned books
to text available so that may remain a way to make a living for some time.
The "infamous" last Harry Potter book was a set of jpg images of the
pages. That is not scan to text and is time consuming and a bitch to read.

--
Unlike Jews, Palestinians always bring on their own suffering on
themselves.
Unlike Jews, Palestinians always do something to deserve their suffering.
Unlike Jews, Palestinians always provoke others to retaliate against them.
Unlike Jews, Palestinians are never innocent victims.
-- The Iron Webmaster, 4007

.

Relevant Pages