Keith Dix, an associate professor of classics in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, was quoted in The Washington Post about an ancient Roman library found in Germany.
When the Romans expanded across Europe 2,000 years ago, they were defeated in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest near modern-day Hanover. The Romans never recovered from it and were pushed back to the Rhine River. On the western side of the Rhine River, the country’s oldest-known public library is only now being uncovered. Built about 150 years after the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, its walls recently re-emerged during the construction of a new community center.
Researchers have since raised doubts over how public the libraries really were. Dix wrote in 1994 in “Public Libraries” in Ancient Rome: Ideology and Reality that anecdotes from that time indicate access remained mostly restricted to “authors close to imperial circles who might naturally be expected to have won access to libraries under imperial control.”
The Roman Empire’s official libraries appear to have been used “for censorship of literature,” according to Dix, a specialist on ancient libraries.
