Ulpian Library
About
Twin library halls (one Latin, one Greek), each holding an estimated 20,000 scrolls, flanking Trajan's Column within the Forum of Trajan; founded by Trajan c. 114 CE. Scrolls sat in wall niches fitted with wooden presses, traces of which excavators found cut into the floor; a two-story design gave readers upper-level balconies with a close, level-by-level view of the Column's spiral relief. One of the great libraries of the ancient world, newly opened and functioning in 117 CE, and the only Roman library known to have survived in some form to the city's fall in the 5th century. Coordinates approximate the space between the Basilica Ulpia and the Temple of the Deified Trajan.
What happened here
Books are scrolls, kept in labelled pigeonholes around the walls, and you read them standing at a desk or sitting in the courtyard with a slave to hold the roll. Greek and Latin collections are kept separately, often in facing rooms. Nothing is borrowed. A staff of copyists keeps the collection alive, because a scroll handled regularly lasts a couple of generations at best, and a library that stops copying is a library that is dying. Readers are respectable men and their secretaries; access is a favour that can be withdrawn. Libraries attach themselves to baths, temples and fora rather than standing alone, so a visit is folded into a day of other business. Lamps are forbidden inside for obvious reasons.
In ancient writing
- Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights (Noctes Atticae) 11.17.1
Gellius describes sitting in the library of Trajan's temple and, on a whim, calling for the edicts of the old Republican praetors to read and get to know them — a rare eyewitness glimpse of a scholar actually working inside the Ulpian Library's stacks.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →