The publisher, and even more the authors who try to live by their literary genius, are, however, under a grave handicap. There is no copyright. What you “publish” to-day, may be flagrantly recopied and sold under your very nose to-morrow--possibly with errors and interpolations calculated to drive an author frantic. The average aspirant for literary fame unless he has personal means is therefore constrained, as were Horace and Martial, to hunt up a rich patron who for the joy of being “immortalized” will keep him from starving. However, every aspiring author tries to find some bookseller, who will turn his works over to a corps of competent slaves, and then vend the products. There is a regular booksellers’ quarter in Rome down by the Forum of Cæsar in the heart of the commercial district. Here Horace’s old publishers, the Sosii, had their stalls; and Martial’s publishers, the firm headed by the clever freedman Allectus, are still there in the business. At Allectus’s shop they will tell you how the epigramist used to drop in with pardonable vanity to see how from “the first or second shelf they would hand down a ‘Martial,’ well smoothed with pumice stone and adorned with purple--all for five denarii (80 cents).” On the columns by the entrance to this and the rival shops are plastered up long lists of new publications--often with sample extracts to prove their wit or learning; or announcement of new or old copies of standard works from Homer down to that clever Greek litterateur Plutarch, who has recently died in Bœotia; or in Latin from old Nævius and Ennius to the recent biographies of the Cæsars by the imperial secretary Suetonius. Considering the labor of copying, the price of books is moderate; a small volume of poems by a popular writer can be had for as little as two denarii (32 cents), although such a scroll would probably be only equivalent to a thin pamphlet of later-day printing, and the works of a really voluminous author like Pliny the Elder might appear ruinously expensive. =189. Passion for Literary “Fame.”=--Expensive or cheap, by men of education a certain number of books must be had. Perhaps the Age of Hadrian will fail to leave a great mark in the history of either Greek or Latin letters, but that will not be because _literary fame_ is not passionately sought after. Everybody is anxious to dabble in authorship. Everybody (in the upper circles) seems incessantly compounding formal “epistles,” memoirs, essays, rhetorical and sentimental histories, and last but not least great quantities of verses which pass as “poetry.” Pliny the Younger (not long dead) was incessantly urging his correspondents to write: “to mould something, hammer out something, that shall be known as yours for all time.” The same pathetic desire for immortality which leads to ostentatious funeral monuments and to endowed funeral feasts, perhaps puts a premium upon this mania.