Libraries and networks of influence in the Roman world* Matthew Nicholls Tis paper is concerned with the ways in which libraries – in this case public libraries in Rome and the Roman world – acted as points of connectivity and communication. Naturally one thinks frst of librari- es, as many Romans did 1 , as places of intermediation between writers and readers, via the physical medium of the books that they held. Te processes of accumulating a library’s holdings of texts, and of making it available to readers, involved in turn multiple interactions between the library and individuals in the roles of author or reader (or both), of collector, editor, library staf, and patron. Some of these individuals were known to each other, but others were distributed in time and spa- ce and connected to each other only through the common point of the library itself. More broadly, libraries also engendered communication between readers and other visitors, acted as places for oral interactions and performances of various sorts, held art works, and communica- ted complex cultural, social, and political messages via the architectu- ral, iconographic, and epigraphic programmes of the library buildings themselves 2 . Tis is a rich feld, and in this paper I will restrict myself to two sources that show the Roman library as a point of communication. I will frst discuss the network of readers, writers, texts, and libraries revealed in the Peri Alupias or De Indolentia of Galen by using concepts borrowed * Tis article is based on a paper delivered at the CUSL conference in Arpino in May 2014. I am most grateful to the CUSL and in particular to Prof. Antonio Stramaglia for their invitation, kind hospitality, and patience with my revisions to my original paper. Te comments of the reviewer were valuable; any errors and omissions are, of course, my responsibility. 1. See fn. 13 below. 2. See e.g. Woolf – König – Oikonomopolou 2013 and Houston 2014.