How long were books in ancient times?
score:3
Plato:Republic ~220,000 words (in translation), Symposium ~25,000 words (in translation)
Aristotle: Poetics ~20,000 words (in translation), Physics ~85,000 words (in translation)
It is fairly easy to find the word counts for English translations of surviving works
Upvote:4
Books, as we know them, did not exist in the ancient times. Texts were written on scrolls. Scrolls did not have pages. On the size of these scrolls we can make a good judgment: longer works were subdivided into "books", which probably corresponds to scrolls. This is the terminology of the modern editions.
For example Euclid's Elements consists of 13 "books". This means that the whole composition originally had 13 scrolls. Herodotus Histories consists of 9 "books", and so on. Of course this division into "books" could change with time when the things were copied, but the size of an ancient "book" is approximately stable, and probably this was a size of a standard scroll.
A book in the modern sense (set of bound sheets) was invented in late antiquity. It was called Codex in Latin.
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Source: stackoverflow.com
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