BMCR 2009.07.65: Dozier on Johnson, Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome

William A. Johnson, Holt N. Parker, Ancient Literacies: The Culture of
Reading in Greece and Rome.  Oxford/New York:  Oxford University Press,
2009.  Pp. xv, 430.  ISBN 9780195340150.  $74.00.

Reviewed by Curtis Dozier, Vassar College ([email protected])
Word count:  3875 words
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Table of Contents
(http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0907/2008020329-t.html)

Preview (http://books.google.com/books?id=SrTUcYJTMewC)

This volume collects revised versions of papers given in 2006 at a
University of Cincinnati symposium entitled "Constructing 'Literacy'
among the Greeks and Romans." The collection's title is clearly meant
to evoke William Harris' Ancient Literacy, now twenty years old; the
plural "literacies" may be felt to indicate an attempt to move beyond
that book's conclusions. But there is little continuity between the two
books; Harris himself admitted that a colleague "gently explained that
he was not even asking the truly interesting questions"[[1]] and it is
to those questions that the contributors to this volume turn, often
without any reference to Harris' work at all. Thus we find essays that
"ponder the cultural and social significances of literacy and literate
behavior" (334). This line of inquiry will be familiar to those who
have read editor William Johnson's earlier article "Toward a Sociology
of Reading in Classical Antiquity,"[[2]] and in its examination of the
status of written texts within ancient culture and the connections
between "reading events" and broader sociological concerns, this
collection places itself much more in the tradition of Eric Havelock
than that of Harris. But in keeping with contemporary scholarly
tendencies, generalizing theories such as Havelock's are for the most
part eschewed, and instead we find "an intense interest in particulars"
(9). The result is a series of essays of disparate subject-matter and
scope, but this is not a bad thing: the collection is successful in its
promise to offer "food for thought of many types," considering
questions such as "how reading communities fashion themselves" and
"what 'book' and 'reading' signify in antiquity" (4).

A few readers, expecting new discussion of rates of literacy or new
insight into the dawn of literacy in Greece, will be disappointed, but
a more serious fear is that other readers, expecting the same and
perhaps feeling that they have heard as much as they want to about a
sometimes technical subject, will decide not to explore this
wide-ranging collection, which contains many fascinating contributions.
I should note that the volume's subtitle, "The Culture of Reading in
Greece and Rome," somewhat distorts the focus of the volume: only one
paper (Thomas) treats Classical Greece; all the others are concerned
with Roman culture or, in a few cases, Greek culture under the Roman
empire. Shirley Werner's extensive bibliographical essay and David
Olson's epilogue, which I will discuss first, will be of interest to
all readers, and I would recommend the contributions of Parker and
Habinek to all Latinists. Parker argues against widely held orthodoxies
and Habinek poses fundamental questions about the status of texts in
Roman culture. I discuss these two papers in some detail after Olson's
and then turn more briefly to the other essays, many of which are
excellent but are, in my estimation, of more specialized interest than
those I highlight first.

David Olson's epilogue is the only paper that, to my mind, fulfills the
editors' hope that the contributions will introduce classicists to
"important advances in the way that literacy is viewed in other
disciplines" (3). Olson, of the University of Toronto's Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education, was the Cincinnati conference's
keynote speaker, and is the author of a study of "how the very
structure of knowledge was altered" by the proliferation and
interpretation of printed documents in the early modern period.[[3]]
His essay for the present volume examines the relationship of speech to
writing and along the way provides a very useful survey of contemporary
debates about the relationship between literacy and cultural progress.
The contributions of classicists such as Havelock and Powell are
described and assessed but much of Olson's discussion draws on work in
philosophy, cognitive science, and linguistics that will be less
familiar to professional classicists. Olson's central claim is that the
relationship between writing and speech is analogous to the
relationship of quotation to direct speech, in that a quotation
divorces a speaker's meaning from textual meaning. Quotations, and by
extension texts, are, he memorably says, "more a corpse than a corpus,"
in need of "reanimation" by a reader. This is a much more subtle claim
than that writing either is or is not an extension of speech; writing
is a "subclass of speech, specifically that of quotation" that
nevertheless "calls for a distinctive mode of interpretation" (401).
Olson's own research is concerned with the cognitive processes required
by this mode of interpretation, and his reports of empirical research
on the cognitive side of literacy provide some of the most stimulating
material in the collection. For example, preliterate children and
illiterate adults, when asked to say /fish/ without the /f/, are unable
to produce /ish/, presumably because being able to analyze words into
constituent sounds is a result of learning how to write. The essay
provides a fascinating glimpse of just how significant the development
of literacy may be for a society and his ample references and
bibliography will entice many to reading outside our chosen field.

Holt Parker ("Books and Reading Latin Poetry") attacks--the only word
for his rhetorical technique--some widely-held views about the ancient
reception of Latin poetry, and as such is worthy of the attention, if
not necessarily the agreement, of all Latinists. His primary target is
the idea, enshrined for Anglophone classicists by E.J. Kenney[[4]] and
Kenneth Quinn[[5]] and propagated by many successors, that Latin poetic
texts were intended only for a poet's circle of friends and that this
audience's primary experience of these texts was at recitations and
convivia. He argues even more strenuously against the often repeated
idea that Roman poetry was intended to be heard and read out loud,
often by specially trained lectores. Parker's view is that any
performance of poetry, including that by a lector, was "preparatory,
ancillary, or supplementary to private reading," which was, he argues,
widespread among those who could read, though he never addresses the
issue of whether hyper-literate men like Cicero, Atticus, Pliny, and
Gellius can be taken as representative of Roman practices. Parker takes
special pains to show just how many times the poets indicate that they
intend their works to be read as opposed to heard, and nowhere is it
more clear that Parker is probably right that, in our recent zeal to
show all the ways that Roman reading is different from modern reading,
we are in danger of obscuring the ways in which it is similar. Along
the way Parker amasses and discusses many references to reading events
in Rome, whether at recitationes, at convivia, or (his primary
interest) in private, and a reader unfamiliar with the kinds of
evidence we have for Roman encounters with poetry will find much of
interest. In his attempts to refute other scholars Parker is often
polemical and occasionally nasty. Not everyone will find this
rhetorical mode appealing, and while he has gathered so many statements
of views he rejects that he cannot be accused of setting up a straw
man, he sometimes seems to me to take the arguments of others further
than those scholars themselves might have done. The essay's occasional
repetitiveness is balanced by the corresponding virtues of
straightforwardness and clarity.

Thomas Habinek's "Situating Literacy at Rome," is the second essay that
I believe is worth special consideration for its suggestive analysis of
fundamental questions, and the author's exemplary (and characteristic)
awareness of relevant theoretical approaches to the study of culture.
The essay begins with an examination of the changing use of writing in
Rome over time, illustrated with a chart listing the evidence for
non-literary writing at different periods: gravestones, dedications,
boundary stones, and the like. The data is suggestive but its
persuasiveness is weakened by Habinek's own comparison with a similar
chart for Greek materials:[[6]] whereas the Greek chart gives absolute
numbers of objects, Habinek's Roman chart lists each type as a
percentage of total objects which, one suspects, may be meant to
conceal the very small and hence potentially insignificant amount of
evidence available.[[7]] Habinek's argument that the changing
ideological concerns of writers--sometimes about property lines,
sometimes about class--can be detected in the changing numbers of
written objects shows how apparently mundane objects such as boundary
stones can provide real insight into Roman society, but in this
particular case the argument is hard to follow because Habinek does not
say explicitly enough which objects indicate which ideological
concerns.

The essay's second section describes how writing confers status on its
user. The argument is explicitly based on Habinek's conclusions in The
World of Roman Song[[8]] and these few pages (121-24) may serve as an
introduction to some of the key ideas of that complex book, in which he
argued that, in Roman culture, the elite male derived his authority
from a mastery of specialized forms of oral expression. This article
attempts to describe the role of writing in that culture, and he
asserts that writing confers status as an extension of the privileged
mastery of oral expression. To claim, as Habinek does, that writing
derives its status-conferring power from the fact that Rome was
primarily an oral culture is a very subtle argument and not all will be
persuaded, but this section certainly lives up to the highest
aspirations of the volume to force a reconsideration of our attitudes
toward the cultural significance of texts.

Habinek's third and most challenging section examines various forms of
specialized writing--acrostics, palindromes, and figure writing--in an
attempt to understand Roman attitudes toward writing itself. For
Habinek, such texts raise a set of challenging questions about how
writing can be self-conscious of the processes of perception that
communication depends on and the degree to which these highly
constrained compositions can complicate those processes. He approaches
these questions through the categories of symbolic and embodied
practices, and his discussion of this dichotomy, worth reading even for
its own sake, is suggestive but I am not sure I am convinced that an
analysis of literary documents, however "bizarre" (135) by traditional
standards, can give us access to anything other than symbolic
practices. His strongest example for an embodied practice is a set of
gaming boards, also discussed by Woolf in this volume but with somewhat
different conclusions. Here the inscribed texts must be understood as
part of the embodied practice of gaming, but throughout the essay the
relationship between the two is not made explicit enough. Nevertheless
Habinek is to be praised for, and emulated in, his efforts to explore
something as fundamental as the Roman concept of the nature of writing
itself.

I turn now to briefer descriptions of the remaining papers in the
volume.

Rosalind Thomas ("Writing, Reading, Public and Private "Literacies")
examines non-elite literacy such as that required for banking,
commerce, and, in particular, participation in democratic institutions.
Much of her chapter is a useful survey of the types of documents that
are attested for or survive from these spheres, with attention paid to
the degrees of literacy they imply. She is especially interested in
"Name Literacy" (the ability only to write one's name) and "List
Literacy" (the ability to recognize a name or other data in a list).
Thomas reminds us that levels and uses of literacy can change, even
over short periods of time, and argues that as time went by more and
more literacy was required of those who wanted to participate in civic
institutions, though she does not make a judgment on whether the
requirements of civic engagement drive or respond to levels of literacy
among the citizenry.

Greg Woolf ("Literacy or Literacies in Rome?") argues that in Rome the
requirements of literacy in private life, especially those for the
management of aristocratic households, indicate that Roman literacy
was, as he puts it, "joined up," that is, that there was "no
fragmentation of writing practices, no specialized literacies" (61).
This conclusion is appealing but the role of literate slaves in Roman
households merits further analysis: Woolf makes the excellent
observation that "slavery provides the key institutional and cultural
context" to literacy since it was slaves who educated children and kept
accounts (52), but literacy being the province of slaves seems to me to
indicate a fragmentation of literacies, if not along the lines of
function, then along those of status. A second claim is that the
administrative use of documents was responsive to, not ahead of, the
domestic use of writing. Woolf makes these points through an
examination of the broad range of non-literary texts discovered in
Britain, a region which he argues, because of its poverty and political
irrelevance, represents a baseline level of literacy for the rest of
the empire.

Barbara Burrell ("Reading, Hearing, and Looking at Ephesos") intends to
describe the "reading experiences" of viewers of monuments and their
texts, many of them bilingual, in Ephesus. She focuses on the plaza
where the famous Library of Celsus eventually stood, and provides a
thorough discussion of the relevant buildings along with excellent
three-dimensional diagrams of the different building phases. But the
essay does not live up to the expectations it sets: Burrell gets bogged
down in the problems of identifying and dating the buildings, a promise
to employ "reception theory" goes unfulfilled, and bilingualism's
complex relationship to literacy is treated only superficially ("code
switching" is invoked without discussion of its relevance to her
argument). Her ultimate conclusion, that this plaza shows how Greek and
Roman influences worked together to present a "burgeoning Helleno-Roman
cultural ideal" is unsurprising and does not really speak to the
subject of this collection.

Simon Goldhill ("The Anecdote: Exploring the Boundaries between Oral
and Literate Performance in the Second Sophistic") argues that much of
imperial literature, for example, Philostratus' Lives of the Sophists,
served as handbooks of anecdotes that were read in order to be
retold--that is, circulated orally--at symposia and in other less
formal exchanges where cultural attainments were performed. Thus these
works straddle the boundary between the oral and the literate. This
essay is, I sense, just the sort of contribution the editors hoped for,
in that it takes two traditionally opposed categories and demonstrates
their interdependence, even in a highly literate and book-centered age.

Florence Dupont ("The Corrupted Boy and the Crowned Poet") argues that
Roman poets regarded preservation in libraries, rather than a wide
readership, as the key to their immortality, since the fragility of
papyrus meant that reading would lead to the destruction of texts. This
argument has a certain perversity to it--she all but says that Roman
poets would have preferred that no one read their works, and she
explicitly says, more than once, that a book is valuable only as an
object, not for what it contains. ("The value of the text plays no
role." (144); "[Books] owe nothing to the value of the writings that
they contain" (162)). Not surprisingly her discussion is marred by
contempt for Latin literature ("No Roman poet composes while possessed
by the Muses," as if the opposite is true of Greek poets just because
they say they do (153)[[9]]), and her case is built out of what strike
me as old-fashioned ways of thinking: that Roman poetry is nothing more
than Greek poetry in a different language ("litterae latinae are, so to
speak, litterae graecae in Latin" (144)), that Roman literary culture
is transplanted more or less intact from Alexandria (and, incidentally,
that Hellenistic poetry existed "only for the scientists at the museum,
and no one else" (146)), and that a meaningful distinction can be drawn
between "true" poems--those that are a transcript of what was said at a
real event--and "fictive" poems (of which all Latin poetry serves as
her example).[[10]] Most objectionable, at least in the context of this
collection, is her assumption that all writing is nothing more than
imitation of speech, and that a sharp distinction can be drawn between
the oral and the written, because these are two of the very assumptions
that the other contributors of this volume, for example Habinek and
Goldhill, are working so hard to question and revise.

Joseph Farrell ("The Impermanent Text in Catullus and Other Roman
Poets"), in his discussion of the materiality of texts as a theme in
Catullus, provides a much more satisfying discussion of much of the
same material that Dupont addresses. One of the strengths of the
article is its illumination of further dimensions of familiar aspects
of canonical texts: for example, Farrell reads Catullus' description of
his libellus not just as a statement of his stylistic ideals but as an
acknowledgement of his reliance on written texts. Catullus' ambivalence
toward textual materiality is explored: Farrell invokes, like Dupont,
the fragility of papyrus, as well as the loss of authorial control that
committing poems to books implies, and claims that this ambivalence
differentiates Roman from Callimachean poetics. The last section of the
essay, in which Farrell examines some examples of Roman poets
describing themselves as singers, is, as his own rhetoric shows, more
speculative but lays out foundations for interesting further work.

George Houston ("Papyrological Evidence for Book Collections and
Libraries in the Roman Empire") compares the standard account of book
collections, derived from anecdotes about libraries in literary sources
and from the extensive study of the collection of Villa of the Papyri
in Herculaneum, to what we find in two other types of papyrological
evidence: lists of books that appear to represent collections and
groups of fragments that, because they were found together, are taken
to have been discarded together, and as such to represent collections.
He uses these data, conveniently summarized in charts, to explore the
organizing principles and sizes of collections, how long manuscripts
were kept, and how different collections show different
"personalities." The result of this careful collation is indeed a more
diverse picture of particular collections, even if his conclusions are
a little underwhelming; again and again he notes that his discoveries
mostly conform to what we already thought we knew about ancient
libraries. Nevertheless, since extrapolation from literary evidence is
necessary in all areas of Classical scholarship, such confirmation is
always welcome and reassuring.[[11]]

Peter White's "Bookshops in the Literary Culture of Rome" surveys the
evidence for bookshops in Rome, and the chapter provides an accessible
introduction to the subject, but in his discussion White does not
always make it clear when he is presenting a new interpretation or
repeating orthodoxy. White then argues that bookshops supported a
unique "mode of engagement with texts," by which he means a kind of
hyperliteracy, whereby expert customers make judgments about the
authenticity and quality of texts. Because these judgments depend on
specialized knowledge, there is often a competitive element to such
conversations. White collects a few examples of grammatici engaging in
these exchanges and suggests that it was in bookshops that these men,
otherwise limited to teaching children, built their reputations with
adult Roman readers.

Kristina Milnor ("Literary Literacy in Roman Pompeii: The Case of
Vergil's Aeneid") considers quotations from the Aeneid in Pompeian wall
inscriptions. She argues that writers of graffiti were not always, if
ever, primarily interested in textual meaning; graffiti should be seen
as "acts" rather than as "texts." So for example the frequently
inscribed words arma virumque "are literally meaningless except as a
reminder of Vergil's text." Much of her paper is dedicated to showing
the interesting tendency of such graffiti to call attention to their
written-ness (through use of the verb scribere, for instance). She also
points out that many of these graffiti, which often feature
imperatives, vocatives, and second-person verbs, emphasize moments of
communication. This is a very acute and suggestive observation but
Milnor, citing the need to avoid totalizing theories, shies away from
drawing conclusions from this tendency, even though her discussion of
the theme of communication in graffiti seems like the foundation for
just such a theory. A handy appendix that lists and describes the
sixty-seven quotations from Vergil on Pompeian walls follows the essay.

William Johnson ("Constructing Elite Reading Communities in the High
Empire") examines a few episodes from Gellius' Noctes Atticae in order
to observe some characteristic features of the "reading culture" of
that time, in particular the presence of groups of people at the
reading events Gellius describes, the ease with which participants move
between conversation and reading, the intense interest in abstruse
topics, and the competitive nature of the exchanges. It is this last
aspect that particularly interests Johnson, for it is through this
competition that the group constructs (a key word for Johnson) itself.
He ends his piece with a list of several ways that literature functions
in this process of construction: for example, as an "exclusionary
device," as a "social mechanism" that establishes a hierarchy, and as
an "ideological statement" by which a particular version of Romanness
is approved and displayed. The paper, the shortest in the collection,
reads at times more like a prospectus of Johnson's research interests
than a self-contained argument, but it nevertheless provides many
fascinating suggestions and whets our appetite for his forthcoming
monograph on these and related subjects.[[12]]

The last paper before Olson's epilogue is an extensive and polyglot
bibliography, compiled by Shirley Werner, covering work on literacy
that has appeared since 1989, the year that Harris' Ancient Literacy
was published. A topical index augments this bibliography, grouping
references under headings such as "Alphabet," "Books," "Bilingualism,"
and "Libraries," as well as more specialized topics such as "Ostraka"
and "Linear B." The accompanying bibliographical essay identifies the
most significant points of debate and important work in various areas
of inquiry. Many works cited come from outside the field of Classics,
and her inclusion of a section on studies of literacy in non-Classical
societies is particularly welcome. Anyone wishing to address questions
in these areas will find Werner's discussion and bibliography a useful
starting point.

The production of this volume is in keeping with the high standards of
OUP, and many of the chapters include attractive figures, drawings,
photographs, and diagrams. The editors are to be commended for
providing an extensive general index and index locorum. I noticed only
one misprint ("Caecilius Epiropa" for "Epirota" at 203n59 and in the
index). A further quibble is that the list of abbreviations at the
beginning of the volume is incomplete.[[13]]  My only real desideratum,
which I realize is perhaps too much to wish for, is that the
contributions showed some evidence of the fruitful exchange that must
have marked the symposium at which they were originally presented.
Thomas describes different types of literacy in Greece; Woolf argues
that in Rome these distinctions did not exist. Habinek asserts the
primacy of the oral in Roman culture, Parker rejects the category.
Dupont and Farrell treat substantially the same material from very
different viewpoints. The medievalist Paul Saegner's argument that
silent reading requires word division, which conference organizer
William Johnson has argued convincingly against, is cited by Thomas
with something like approval.[[14]] I would imagine that these points
of divergence provoked discussion between speakers, but in only a few
cases do the contributors refer to each other's work, and they never
address these points of potential disagreement that I have sketched
out.[[15]] Cross references between papers are rare.[[16]] It is a
shame that, while the scholars represented here have given us
fascinating essays, whatever exchanges took place between them in
Cincinnati seem fated, like so many reading events, to be known only to
their participants.


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Notes:


1.   W. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1989), ix.

2.   W. Johnson, "Toward a Sociology of Reading in Classical
Antiquity." AJPh 121 (2000): 593-627.

3.   D. Olson, The World on Paper (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), xvii.

4.   E. J. Kenney, "Books and Readers in the Roman World." in E. J.
Kenney, ed., The Cambridge History of Classical Literature, vol. two
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 3-50.

5.   K. Quinn, "The Poet and his Audience in the Augustan Age," ANRW
II.30.1: 75-180.

6.   Habinek reproduces the findings for Greece of S. Stoddart and J.
Whitley, "The Social Context of Literacy in Archaic Greece and
Etruria," Antiquity 62 (1988): 761-72.

7.   There may also be some error in tabulation, since the percentages
of the fourth column do not add up to 100.

8.   T. Habinek, The World of Roman Song (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins:
2005). Reviewed at BMCR 2006.04.34.

9.   In any case many of the passages discussed by Farrell in this
volume show Roman poets invoking muses.

10.   Dupont rarely indicates her sources for her account of literary
history (her bibliography contains only nine items). For a refreshing
examination of some traditional scholarly biases against Roman
literature and culture see D. Feeney, Literature and Religion at Rome
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) esp.12-70. Many of the
other contributors to this collection show much more care in addressing
the complex relationship of Rome and Greece; see, for example,120n22
(Habinek) and 165n2 (Farrell, who also makes the case, as noted, that
there is a difference between Roman and Callimachean poetics). Parker
points out that "The lumping together of Greece and Rome is symptomatic
of an unnuanced approach" (187n4).

11.   I am reminded of Morgan's discussion of how Quintilian's
description of educational practice conforms to what schooltext papyri
show actually happened in class in T. Morgan, Literate Education in the
Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), reviewed at BMCR 1999.05.22.

12.   In Johnson's bibliography this forthcoming work is called Readers
and Reading Culture among the Greeks and Romans: A Study of Elite
Reading Communities in the High Empire.

13.   Missing are two papyrological publications referred to by
Houston: MP3 for Mertens-Pack Online and PSI for Pubblicazioni della
Societa\ italiana per la recerca dei papyri greci e latini in Egitto.

14.   W. Johnson, op. cit (n2) 598.

15.   Editor Holt Parker is the only contributor to make reference to a
response to his paper (Farrell's, 191n14). Farrell and Houston seem to
have discussed their contributions but this may have been in the
context of Houston's visit to the University of Pennsylvania for which
he thanks Farrell in his acknowledgments.

16.   192n20, 217n130, 260n76, 293n16.