Books of the Romans: everything you need to know about the scroll

When a book was a scroll...

Imagine you want to read your favorite novel, but instead of turning pages, you have to unroll a long scroll with both hands. That's exactly what readers in ancient Rome did.

They called that scroll a volumen — and yes, that's where the word we use today comes from. From the Latin verb volvere, meaning to roll. As simple and beautiful as that.

The plural is volumina, and in a good Roman library (called a bibliotheca) you could find hundreds of them stacked on shelves or stored in leather or wooden cylinders.

What was a volumen made of?

The main material was papyrus, a plant that grew abundantly in the Nile and which the Egyptians began using long before the Romans. Its stalks were used to make thin sheets that, glued one by one, formed a long, continuous strip: the perfect writing surface.

Each of these sheets was called a plagula (plural: plagulae). A scroll could be made up of twenty or more plagulae glued together, and easily measure between three and ten meters long.

Can you imagine? Ten meters of reading rolled up in a wooden cylinder.

The parts of a Roman volumen

Here comes my favorite part, because a Roman scroll wasn't just papyrus. It had its parts, its structure, even its aesthetics. The most luxurious ones were true works of art.

🪵 Umbilicus

The umbilicus was the wooden or ivory cylinder around which the entire papyrus was rolled. It was the central axis of the scroll, its spine. When you finished reading, you rolled all the papyrus back around the umbilicus — something like "rewinding," but in the Roman way.

✨ Cornua

The cornua (which means "horns" in Latin) were the decorative ends of the umbilicus that protruded from both sides of the scroll. They could be made of painted wood, bone, or even ivory. The more elaborate and luxurious they were, the more they spoke of their owner's status. A small detail that said it all.

📄 Plagulae

As I've already told you, the plagulae were the papyrus sheets glued together to form the continuous strip. The quality of the papyrus mattered a lot: there were different categories, and the best sheets were reserved for the most important texts.

🏷️ Titulus

How did you know which scroll you had without unrolling it? Thanks to the titulus — a small parchment or papyrus tag that hung from the end of the scroll with the title of the work and the author's name. The direct ancestor of a book cover. And yes, that's where our word "title" comes from.

And finally, and although it wasn't a scroll itself. As a curiosity, I want to tell you that there were containers or cases to store and preserve papyrus scrolls:

📦 The case: The capsa

The volumina were kept in cylinders called capsa — a kind of leather or wooden case that protected the scroll from dust and moisture. In a well-organized library, the capsae were stacked on shelves with the tituli visible. Exactly as we do today with book spines.

But how did one read a volumen?

Reading a Roman scroll was a physical and almost ritualistic act. You held it with both hands: with your right, you unrolled it, with your left, you rolled up what you had already read. When you finished, you rewound it completely so that the next reader could start from the beginning.

Touch history with your hands

At Vita Romana, we are excited to bring Rome into everyday life. That's why we make papyrus scrolls that capture that spirit: authentic papyrus, rolled up, with its umbilicus and cornua, ready for writing or decorating.

They are not museum replicas. They are objects to use, to give as gifts, to take to the classroom, or to have at home and feel, if only for a moment, that you live in another time.

👉 Discover our collection of papyrus scrolls

*If you liked it, leave me a comment to let me know you're there and that it's worth continuing to write articles about the life of the Romans. 🤗