round the skilled scribes sat within in rows, with pen and ink, working
at the manufacture of books. The Sosii Brothers were rich, and probably
owned their workmen as slaves, both the writers and those who prepared
the delicate materials, the wonderful ink, of which we have not the like
today, the fine sheets of papyrus,--Pliny tells how they were sometimes
too rough, and how they sometimes soaked up the ink like a cloth, as
happens with our own paper,--and the carefully cut pens of Egyptian reed
on which so much of the neatness in writing depended, though Cicero says
somewhere that he could write with any pen he chanced to take up.

It was natural enough that Horace should look in to ask how his latest
book was selling, or more probably his first, for he had written but a
few Epodes and not many Satires at the time when he met the immortal
Bore. Later in his life, his books were published in editions of a
thousand, as is the modern custom in Paris, and were sold all over the
Empire, like those of other famous authors. The Satires did him little
credit, and probably brought him but little money at their first
publication. It seems certain that they have come down to us through a
single copy. The Greek form of the Odes pleased people better. Moreover,
some of the early Satires made distinguished people shy of his
acquaintance, and when he told the Bore that Maecenas was difficult of
access he remembered that nine months had elapsed from the time of his
own introduction to the great man until he had received the latter's
first invitation to dinner. More than once he went almost too far in his
attacks on men and things and then tried to remove the disagreeable
impression he had produced, and wrote again of the same subject in a
different spirit--notably when he attacked the works of the dead poet
Lucilius and was afterwards obliged to explain himself.

No doubt he often idled away a whole morning at his publisher's, looking
over new books of other authors, and very probably borrowing them to
take home with him, because he was poor, and he assuredly must have
talked over with the Sosii the impression produced on the public by his
latest poems. He was undoubtedly a quaestor's scribe, but it is more than
doubtful whether he ever went near the Treasury or did any kind of
clerk's work. If he ever did, it is odd that he should never speak of
it, nor take anecdotes from such an occupation and from the clerks with
whom he must h