OF THE ROMAN SENATE--THE ECLIPSE OF CLASSICAL
LITERATURE AND DISMEMBERMENT OF THE
ROMAN EMPIRE--POEM ON THE THOUSAND YEARS
KNOWN AS THE DARK AGES WHICH FOLLOWED.

THEOPHRASTUS says that the papyrus books of the ancients
were no other than rolls prepared in the following
manner: Two leaves of the rush were plastered together,
usually with the mud of the Nile, in such a
fashion that the fibres of one leaf should cross the fibres
of the other at right angles; the ends of each being
then cut off, a square leaf was obtained, equally capable
of resisting fracture when pulled or taken hold of
in any direction. In this form the papyri were exported
in great quantities. In order to form these
single leaves into the "scapi," or rolls of the ancients,
about twenty were glued together end to end. The
writing was then executed in parallel columns a few
inches wide, running transversely to the length of the
scroll. To each end of the scrolls were attached round
staves similar to those we use for maps. To these
staves, strings, known as "umbilici," were attached,
to the ends of which bullae or weights were fixed.
The books when rolled up, were bound up with these
umbilici, and were generally kept in cylindrical boxes
or capsae, a term from which the Mediaeval "capsula,"
or book-cover was derived. "The mode in which the
students held the rolls in order to read from them is
well shown in a painting in the house of a surgeon at
Pompeii. One of the staves, with the papyrus rolled