The Romans used a variety of formats and materials for writing, including the codex form we’re more familiar with in the modern world, but for literary texts rolls were significantly more common until later Antiquity, usually made out of papyrus, although we do have a few from parchment.

It is true that there are a lot of convenient things about a codex rather than a roll, most of which we could probably guess at from our use of the one rather than the other in the modern world. Cribiore notes specific advantages for educational texts in antiquity: the format could hold more text than a roll, allowed for significantly easier reference, and allowed for easy annotation. Her example is a codex in which the right-hand pages were used for the text and the left-hand pages left blank for annotations and in one place was used to copy out, with learner-style word spacing, an unrelated grammatical treatise. While she writes specifically on educational texts, all of these carry over to writing for literary purposes. More space and easy reference ability are both major advantages of the codex form compared to the rolling and unrolling of a bookroll. Additionally, rolls could be written only on a single side, although sometimes we find writing on the back when papyrus is reused. Writing on the back of papyrus is even Juvenal’s way of satirizing a particularly long-winded (and bad) writer in a depiction meant to represent a particularly egregious offense against good literary taste. A parchment codex allowed for writing on both sides of the leaves, another advantage.

While discussing book forms, I should probably mention that besides parchment codices there was an additional form in antiquity that we can think of as a type of codex that would have actually been rather common among educated writers of any period at Rome, although it would not have been used for final-draft books. Up to ten wooden tablets could be joined together to create a sort of small notebook, joined together at one edge so that the wooden outside opened to the inner writing. Quintilian notes some of the advantages with this format, the most important being that it could be easily and frequently erased if needed (papyrus can be erased, but the erasure marks will remain visible afterwards and it is not a medium meant to be as easily undone as wooden tablets are), making it useful for a writer while writing a rough draft. While there were different types of writing materials made from wood in antiquity, all of them lend themselves to similar methods of binding in notebook form (although wooden leaf tablets from Vindolanda show a slightly different final form in terms of the fold of the leaves, the overall effect is the same). Wax tablets, in particular, were the everyday medium for things like bookkeeping and business correspondence, making them good candidates for this type of binding.

So why use the bookroll form at all, then, if the codex was so convenient? While Turner, noting the frequent use of papyrus as the material of early codices, argues against the importance of material here, it’s hard to ignore its role entirely. Papyrus was better suited for a form that prevented fraying around the edges, where it was weakest, and in fact the construction of rolls, with the unwritten protokollon sheet at the beginning and protected inside the roll, was meant to minimize edges in a way that best protected the material. The fact that papyrus codices are also much shorter than their parchment equivalents likewise betrays some of the weaknesses of using papyrus in codex form. While a standard form was eventually established for papyrus codices, there was no naturally convenient construction as there was for tablets or parchment. As for why one might choose to use papyrus to begin with, there were periods in the ancient world when papyrus was relatively inexpensive (especially so compared with parchment, where every double folio page requires an entire sheep or goat), particularly in Egypt, where use of papyrus roll lingered somewhat longer after the general adoption of the codex throughout the late Antique Mediterranean world.

We also shouldn’t ignore the importance of cultural expectations and cultural value placed on different written forms (including both our own modern preference for the codex and the ancient one for the roll). Because of the difference in inks and writing implements, what was considered top quality papyrus in Hellenistic Egypt and what was considered top quality papyrus in Imperial Rome were different from each other, even though the actual material was the same. In the same way, the rise of the codex didn’t actually depend on any particular change in the technology of writing, only the cultural value placed on it. Specifically, it seems that it was the rise of Christian literature that tipped the scales toward the codex. Early Christians showed a distinct preference for the codex over the roll, with high rates of Christian literature written in codex form as early as the second century (when almost no classical literature was written in the codex), and by the fifth century use of the roll had been almost completely supplanted, even for classical rather than Christian literature.

Herculaneum’s Villa of the Papyri was buried before this explosion of the codex form came onto the scene, although the technology did already exist, and houses a library of classical literature (showing a particular specialization toward philosophy), which was overwhelmingly written in roll form, even after Christians begin popularizing the codex. The material most commonly used - and because of expense most accessible for literary writing - leant itself best to the roll form and the culture that created it, like our own, had a distinct preference for one form over the other.

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Bülow-Jacobsen, Adam. “Writing Materials in the Ancient World.” In The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology. Edited by Roger S. Bagnall. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Cribiore, Raffaella. Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Turner, E.G. Greek Papyri: An Introduction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.