Transcriber’s note Variable spelling and hyphenation have been retained. Minor punctuation inconsistencies have been silently repaired. A list of the changes made can be found at the end of the book. Formatting and special characters are indicated as follows: _italics_ =bold= AUTHORS AND THEIR PUBLIC IN ANCIENT TIMES A SKETCH OF LITERARY CONDITIONS AND OF THE RELATIONS WITH THE PUBLIC OF LITERARY PRODUCERS, FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE BY GEO. HAVEN PUTNAM, M.A. AUTHOR OF “THE QUESTION OF COPYRIGHT,” ETC. _THIRD EDITION, REVISED_ G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS NEW YORK LONDON 27 WEST TWENTY-THIRD ST. 24 BEDFORD ST., STRAND The Knickerbocker Press 1896 COPYRIGHT, 1893 BY GEO. HAVEN PUTNAM The Knickerbocker Press, New York [Illustration] PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. IN printing the second and third impressions of my essay, I have been able to take advantage of certain corrections and suggestions submitted by friendly critics, among whom I wish to make special acknowledgments to Mr. Charlton T. Lewis and to Mr. Otis S. Hill, whose aid in the verification of the quotations has been particularly valuable. I may mention that in the printing of the first edition, I had been obliged, in connection with the increasing limitations of my eyesight, to confide the verification and the proof-reading of the quotations to an assistant, whose services proved, unfortunately, incompetent and untrustworthy. As a result, a number of errors which had been repeated from the German editions, or which had crept into the work of the transcriber, of the typewriter, or of the compositor, found place with annoying persistency, in the volume as printed. While I may not hope that the text as now printed is correct (and a book free from typographical errors is an almost impossible production), I can feel assured that the more serious misprints at least have been duly cared for.