The trade of writing and making copies of the old authors employed a great many hands in the neighbourhood of the museum. Two kinds of handwriting were in use. One was a running hand, with the letters joined together in rather a slovenly manner; and the other a neat, regular hand, with the letters square and larger, written more slowly but read more easily. Those that wrote the first were called _quick-writers_, those that wrote the second were called _book-writers_. If an author was not skilled in the use of the pen, he employed a _quickwriter_ to write down his words as he delivered them. But in order that his work might be published it was handed over to the _book-writers_ to be copied out more neatly; and numbers of young women, skilled in penmanship, were employed in the trade of copying books for sale. For this purpose parchment was coming into use, though the old papyrus was still used, as an inexpensive though less lasting writing material. Athenaeus, if we may judge from Iris writings, was then the brightest of the Alexandrian wits and men of learning. We learn from his own pages that he was born at Naucratis, and was the friend of Pancrates, who lived under Hadrian, and also of Oppian, who died in the reign of Caracalla. His _Deipnosophist_, or table-talk of the philosophers, is a large work full of pleasing anecdotes and curious information, gathered from comic writers and authors without number that have long since been lost. But it is put together with very little skill. His industry and memory are more remarkable than his judgment or good taste; and the table-talk is too often turned towards eating and drinking. His amusing work is a picture of society in Alexandria, where everything frivolous was treated as grave, and everything serious was laughed at. The wit sinks into scandal, the humour is at the cost of morality, and the numerous quotations are chosen for their point, not for any lofty thoughts or noble feeling. Alexandria was then as much the seat of literary wit as it was of dry criticism; and Martial, the lively author of the _Epigrams_, had fifty years before remarked that there were few places in the world where he would more wish his verses to be repeated than on the banks of the Nile. Nothing could be lower than the poetic taste in Alexandria at this time. The museum was giving birth to a race of poets who, instead of bringing forth thoughts out of their own minds, found them in the storehouse of the memory only. They wrote their patchwork poems by the help of Homer's lines, which they picked from all parts of the Iliad and Odyssey and so put together as to make them tell a new tale. They called themselves Homeric poets.