True enough, although most of those tracts would be dreadfully short by modern standards; the Aeneid waa around 130k words -- compared to 80k for the first Harr

True enough, although most of those tracts would be dreadfully short by modern standards; the Aeneid waa around 130k words -- compared to 80k for the first Harry Potter and 485k for the fourth Stormlight Archive -- and the 8 books of Caesar's Gallic Wars were 5-15k words a pop. Assuming ancient readers were as proficient as modern ones, "reading every book available" was a reasonable ambition back then, and you were almost certainly limited by money and availability more than time.