Copyists were much employed in the Roman Empire from the time of the Scipios until the irruption of the barbarians. This was a very ungrateful employment. The dealers always paid authors and copyists very ill. It required two years of assiduous labor for a copyist to transcribe the whole Bible well on vellum, and what time and trouble to copy correctly in Greek and Latin the works of Origen, Clement of Alexandria and all the others writers called Fathers! St. Hieronymos, or Hieronymus, whom we call Jerome, says, in one of his satirical letters against Rufinus that he has ruined himself with buying the works of Origen, against whom he wrote with so much bitterness and violence. "Yes," says he, "I have read Origen, if it be a crime I confess that I am guilty and that I exhausted my purse in buying his works at Alexandria." The Christian societies of the three first centuries had fifty-four gospels, of which, until Diocletian's time scarcely two or three copies found their way among the Romans of the old religion. Among the Christians it was an unpardonable crime to show the gospels to the Gentiles; they did not even lend them to the catechumens. When Lucian (insulting our religion of which he knew very little) relates that "a troop of beggars took him up into a fourth story where they were invoking the Father through the Son, and foretelling misfortunes to the emperor and the empire," he does not say that they showed him a single book. No Roman historian, no Roman author whomsoever makes mention of the gospels. When a Christian, who was unfortunately rash and unworthy of his holy religion had publicly torn in pieces and trampled under foot an edict of the Emperor Diocletian, and had thus drawn down upon Christianity that persecution which succeeded the greatest toleration, the Christians were then obliged to give up their gospels and written authors to the magistrates, which before then had never been done. Those who gave up their books through fear of imprisonment, or even of death, were held by the rest of the Christians to be sacrilegious apostates, they received the surname of _traditores_, whence we have the word "traitor," and several bishops asserted that they should be rebaptized, which occasioned a dreadful schism. The poems of Homer were long so little known that Pisistratus was the first who put them in order and had them transcribed at Athens about five hundred years before the Christian era. Perhaps there was not at this time in all the East a dozen copies of the Veda and the Zend-Avesta. In 1700 you would not have found a single book in all Rome, excepting the missals and a few Bibles in the hands of papas drunk with brandy.