Perhaps it might help demystify the process a little if we eliminate the distinction between works ‘intended for internal use’ and works ‘intended for wider circulation’. My deep personal skepticism about speculating on matters of intentionality aside, here it unnecessarily creates a false dichotomy between texts that almost seem to have circulated against their best efforts and texts that people actually tried to circulate. Both sets of texts were ‘published’ and we have extant texts from both sides of that division, which indicates that they must have circulated more widely. The process wasn’t inherently different for either text.

And for the process itself… It might also help us if we don’t call it “publication”, because at least for me that word pulls in a pre-loaded set of very modern ideas and assumptions. In the modern world, we have publishing houses to which people submit texts, where they are then edited, printed, and sent out for distribution. In the ancient world, textual circulation was a much more informal process, driven more by individual points of transmission than any centralized force.

Part of this was an effect of the development of writing and literacy in the Greek world. Writing increasingly proliferated writing in archaic and classical Greece. Laws were written down, memorials were inscribed, archives kept records, and writing became increasingly common in different aspects of life. One of the most visible examples of this are the boundary stones found in the Athenian agora, dating to around 500 BCE. Because there were specific laws regulating the agora, this boundary was important not just culturally but legally, and it was marked in writing. Two of these stones have been found in their original location, proclaiming “I am the boundary of the agora”. With this rise in literacy came a rise in written literature (it is important to remember that Greek literature, circulating orally through performance, pre-dates Greek written literature and even in a writing world such literature wasn’t always written down in its original performance context) and a new market for books.

Focusing on Aristotle in particular, our story of circulation begins at the Lyceum, in Athens, although I’d like to start by moving away from Aristotle himself for a second. Because at the point of material production, the point where a physical book comes into being, it wasn’t Aristotle doing the writing at all. He had a slave to do that for him, and at every point going forward that it’s mentioned that a book was reproduced or copied, that was also done by slaves. They often get erased from the narrative of the ancient literary economy, but they’re there every step of the way, facilitating our informal process of production and distribution.

At that point where a book came into being, whatever their initial use or eventual audience, Aristotle’s works would have certainly been codified into book form for the Lyceum’s own collection first. As an educational institution, the Lyceum had a collection of books for use, and it is noted by Strabo as having a particularly large collection (13.1.54). From that first copy, works could be copied for sale, for private collections, or for other institutions’ collections.

There was a healthy market for books in the classical period. Books could be copied, or stolen, and those copies sold. A passage of Xenophon’s Anabasis mentions books carried as part of a cargo off the coast of Thrace, indicating some larger circulation of books between cities at the beginning of the fourth century. And the fact that Aristotle’s works were philosophical in nature wouldn’t have excluded this method of circulation. In Plato’s Apology, he has Socrates ask the jury:

Do you think to accuse Anaxagoras, my dear Meletus? And through him to accuse these men and think them illiterate and that they do not know how the works (biblia, “books”) of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae are filled with such arguments?… [these things] which it is possible for them, when they can sometimes buy them for not anything more than a drachma from the orchestra, to laugh at Socrates over if he pretends that they’re his. (Pl. Ap. 26d-e)

Plato’s text makes a number of important assumptions. He takes as given that the philosophical works of Anaxagoras will be readily available for sale, in a way that is both easily accessible and quite cheap. This comment also indicates that the philosophical content of Aristotle’s works was not a barrier to wider circulation.

The rise of institutions that kept their own collections led to further copying. Plato’s Academy, like the Lyceum, was also reported to have a collection of texts and the Museum of Alexandria made serious efforts to curate an extensive collection. Galen writes that in order to create an accurate edition of Athenian tragedies, Egyptian authorities borrowed the official Athenian texts after placing a fifteen talent deposit, only to decide in the end on keeping the text and losing the deposit.

Individuals might also go through the trouble of copying texts for their own purposes. Educators used personal copies of texts, and therefore needed their own copies of important works in order to use them with students.

If all of this sounds a little haphazard, it was. The informal nature of it left works vulnerable to the vagaries of happenstance, access, and changing tastes in literature. We have reports of texts lost even in the ancient world quite shortly after their creation simply because they were never circulated widely enough to survive, and even some texts we have now were inaccessible at different periods in history.

For your follow up question, I don’t know anything about Heraclitus in particular (although the Plato quoted above uses Anaxagoras for its example, though I don’t know how well he was typical/atypical for pre-Socratic philosophers), but I would assume his writings only being available when he visited had to do with access. To copy a text, you need access to it, hence why the Library of Alexandria was willing to pay so much for Attic drama. This is the same point when the sophists are gaining fame and traveling around the Greek world, so having celebrity thinkers visit was something that was happening at the time.

If you’re interested in further reading, there is a short section at the beginning of Scribes and Scholars that deals with physical book production (although the book as a whole is actually on textual transmission from the ancient world to the present) and the first section from Greek Literature is on books and readers in the ancient world (I’ve cited only the first chapter here as it’s the one dealing with the Greek world in particular).

Reynolds, L.D. and N.G. Wilson. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Knox, B.M.W. “From the Beginnings to Alexandria.” In Greek Literature, edited by P.E. Easterling and B.M.W. Knox, 1-16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.