A Gentle Cynic Author:Morris Jastrow Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: vital factor in leading to its inclusion in the Canon, but even this would not have secured its admission without the additions which constitute such a considera... more »ble part of the work in its present form, and which made it practically a different kind of a book. The question arises, how were these additions made, or, rather, first of all, how was it possible for anyone to conceive of making them? II BEFORE THE DAYS OF "AUTHORSHIP" To us who are accustomed to think of a book as the work of a single individual, brought out with the seal of authenticity attached to it under the name of its author, it must indeed seem strange that the original form of a piece of writing should be altered by subsequent additions; but authorship in the modern sense was unknown in antiquity until we reach the flourishing period of Greek literature. Up to that time, authorship was largely anonymous. A book might pass through many hands before receiving its final form; and in this form, two features which we naturally associate with a book, an author and a title, are conspicuous by their absence. Book writing was in the literal sense of the word corn-position, that is, a putting together of documents wh1ch might date from various periods. A book involved a process of compilation in which various persons might take part. As a consequence, we have collective instead of individual authorship. A writer in the days of anonymousauthorship laid no claim to special ownership to what he wrote—could lay no such claim. Everyone who could do so felt free to add to a manuscript that came into his hands. The person who wrote was of minor significance as against what he wrote, and if a piece of writing became popular by being circulated within a certain circle, it was destined to continual enlargement and modificati...« less