Dear Helen,
A few more comments, from the beginning of Part I Ch. 1.
oratoris futuri not pratoris fururi
decolor . . . haereret
`By the fourth century Vergil was the leader of the 'quadriga' of
Cicero Terence and Sallust all with their own commentary
traditions': this makes Cicero, Terence, and Sallust a triga!
Mention Arusianus Messius, whose exempla elocutionum are taken
from those four author.
student's spoken language: students'
`a virtual *bible* for the *pagan* reaction of the late fo<u>rth
century'. Paradox deliberate, I take it.
Aus{s}onius
`Harris (1991) suggests that even allowing for an active imperial
bureaucracy and the social importance of a rhetorical education,
most of the empire's inhabitants: the slaves, the small farmers
and the members of the urban working class, were unlikely to have
had even basic literacy, let alone the highly developed skills
which we would associate with the composition of rhetorical Latin
and the ability to read Vergil or the other poets with
appreciation.' WIth the let alone I agree; but who was scrawling
all those bar bills and gladiator scores and boasts about sexual
prowess on the walls of Pompeii, if not the urban common people?
Spelling and syntax takes us pretty low down the social scale,
never mind content. The rural masses are another matter; I don't
know what exactly is meant by `working class', but in modern
times the growth of free and even compulsory elementary
education, for all the highflown cant about human development and
liberating the personality, was driven above all by urban
employers' requirement for a basic literacy in their workforce
that landowners neither needed nor desired. Slaves are far too
broad a category for anything to be said about them overall; they
range from the likes of M. Tullius Tiro to the labourers in the
field who never saw their master, let alone a book, but a fair
number of them were engaged in administrative tasks for which
literacy is indispensable.
Centurions may have been big men locally (cf. the _pueri magnis e
centurionibus orti_ who attended Flavius' school), but one
expects no more literacy of them than from regimental sergeant-
majors, i.e. purely functional. In the late empire one may indeed
find a general decline in literacy as in other things (which may
even help explain the collapse of the epigraphic habit), not
least because of the increasingly rural basis of society;
decurions might indeed be illiterate, since anyone who had the
slightest pull got out of the job at all costs. As for the
senators whose reading failed to satisfy Ammianus' exacting Greek
standards of literary culture, a French observer would be no less
scathing about the average British MP (if your TDs are better,
congratulations); similarly in the eighteenth century English
squires and even aristocrats could be pretty boorish in
comparison with their French counterparts, but they could read
and write, even if they didn't read whatwe think they ought to
have read and wrote for practical purposes only. And don't forget
that (a) many of the illiterates are Egyptians illiterate in
Greek, but capable of writing demotic; (b) highly literate
persons dismiss as illiterate persons who have no interest in
literary culture, without actually meaning that they cannot read
or write at all. It seems to me that before pronouncing on
ancient literacy and literary culture, one should compare, on the
one hand such a society as Norman and Angevin England, in which
as Frank Barlow observes the only people who could not read and
write were those who did not need to (these of course, especially
in the earlier period, included the lay lords), on the other the
philistinism of (say) the British upper, commercial, and working
classes.
Best wishes,
Leofranc
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Leofranc Holford-Strevens
67 St Bernard's Road usque adeone
Oxford scire MEVM nihil est, nisi ME scire hoc sciat alter?
OX2 6EJ
tel. +44 (0)1865 552808(home)/267865(work) fax +44 (0)1865 512237
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
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