The Ancient Entomological Bookworm

This article traces how the entomological bookworm shaped the historical practices, poetics, and literary discourse of Greco-Roman book culture in the early imperial period. I argue that attending to the materiality of bookworms illuminates another realm of poetics and rhetoric around reading (and non-reading), with special focus on Ovid’s exile poetry and several Greek epigrams from the Garland of Philip. Building a bridge from the methodology of book history to literary criticism and metaphor, I ultimately show how the bookworm participates in the discursive construction and stigmatization of a certain kind of inept, pedantic reader.