What does it say?

 

I still remember the early days of the pocket calculator. It couldn’t even properly restore the square power of a root fraction. But that was not the reason why our teachers prohibited the use of these new gadgets. Since Plato the traditional response to such conveniences was to denounce it as a slipshod way of corrupting our faculties to remember. The very same sentiment that before the reforms by Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi in 200 AD., explicitly forbade to put Jewish law in writing because it was deemed to be "incomplete and subject to misinterpretation and abuse."

Saint Paul, as well, had his concerns about “the letter that kills” (2 Cor. 3:6). It seems there is an old and deep seated suspicion against any “merely mechanical” device that appears to threaten the free wielding spirit. At times a suspicion with a hidden agenda. "When the law is put in writing, rich and poor alike have equal justice, and the weaker prevails over the stronger if justice is on his side," said Euripides in The Suppliants. Literate or not, the high and mighty knew it all the time: knowledge is power. So, let’s not spill it into the streets and have the mob piss into the grammar and shit on our privileges and marbled floors, shall we? Let’s make sure that only members of the club have the privilege to recall what makes the law legal, and since we are among us, no need to put anything in writing, alright? What this means I know from my wedding in China. Every step was counted, every ghost and genie appeased with gifts and frankincense and the demons shooed away with fireworks. The bride, of course, had to wear red shoes for good luck. Suddenly there was a heated debate between the matrons of the family whether it was appropriate to symbolically shield the bride from the sun under an umbrella when she was about to step into the limousine, and then discard it altogether, or whether her attendant should carry the thing everywhere. And wasn’t it customary to substitute the umbrella with a large lotus leaf? Who was to help the bride out of the car? Was it the groom? Why did nobody look it up in the Manual for Chinese Weddings? Well, there isn’t any. And if I hadn’t known already, this experience brought it home: our memory is no more than the writing on the water.

Especially when many minds try to remember the same thing. Without a written referent, a “text,” such recollections are anything but literal. The Tiv people of Nigeria still base their court disputes on oral genealogies. Joseph C. Miller has reported, that in recent years, these genealogies have been found to diverge considerably from the careful transcripts the British colonial administration had commissioned forty years earlier. Yet the Tiv tenaciously maintain that their current recollections are accurate (The African Past speaks, Hamden, Conn. 1980). The same colonial administration had also recorded the founding myth of the Gonja in Ghana, according to which the founder of the state, Ndewura Jakpa, is presented as father to seven sons, each the ruler of seven territories of the state. Sixty years later, two of these territories have disappeared and the myth tells of five sons and makes no mention of the extinct divisions. It became irrelevant for the present and dropped from memory (Goody & Watt, Literacy in Traditional Societies, Cambridge 1968). So no surprise that Homer's Iliad had gone through a long history of transformations, as many as there have been recitals, before the epic solidified in its present shape. In Yugoslavia the illiterate singer of epics, Demo Zogic, used to tell his informant that he had reported "the song, word for word," when the comparison between tape recordings and earlier transcripts in shorthand proved that he had done nothing of the kind (A.B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Cambridge Mass. 1960).

The dynamics of oral transmission have shrouded the actual circumstances of Mohammed’s activity to the point of putting in doubt the prophet’s historicity: “If one storyteller should happen to mention a raid, the next one would tell you the exact date of this raid, and the third one would furnish you even more details. Waqidi (d. 823), who wrote years after Ibn Ishaq (d. 768), will always give precise dates, locations, names, where Ibn Ishaq has none, give accounts of what triggered the expedition, provide miscellaneous information to lend color to the event, as well as present a reason why, as was usually the case, no fighting took place. No wonder that scholars are fond of Waqidi: where else does one find such wonderfully precise information about everything one wishes to know? But given that this information was all unknown to Ibn Ishaq, its value is doubtful in the extreme. And if spurious information accumulated at this rate in the two generations between Ibn Ishaq and Waqidi, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that even more must have accumulated in the three generations between the Prophet and Ibn Ishaq (Patricia Crone, Meccan Trade And The Rise Of Islam (1987), pp. 223-224).

Today we stand before the tombstones and epigraphs of the Roman Empire, and it makes me wonder. These people did write. They had a literature, they invented the concept of legality and of law as something apart from the arbitrary decree by a tyrant, they laid down what became our secular curriculum in the humanities, they taught us science. Greco-Roman antiquity is the cradle of Western civilization, but it rose from a society that was only semi-literate at best.

What a modern visitor to the Roman Empire would immediately notice is the absence of advertisements for cosmetics and grocery at the roadside and the lack of name tags on the doors to residential buildings. One had to ask one's way through the murk of smelly corridors to find the right flat in a Roman five- and eight-storey apartment block. Generally neither shopkeepers and craftsmen, nor their small time customers, wrote or read much in the course of business. But since the time of Augustus (63 BC. – 14 AD.), the Romans began to use a new form of document for borrowing money. It was the "chirographum," usually, but not always, written in the borrower's hand. Large sums of money were transferred only on paper, the great temples, including the temple in Jerusalem, acted as the empire’s high street banks and backed up loans to the community from their vaults of bullion. People deposited their valuables in the temple’s strong boxes, for a fee of course. The shrine of Delos served as the empire’s central bank. Dio reports 10,000 cash transactions per day. Wax tablets found in Yugoslavia record the sale of an ox for 115 sesterces in 45/58 AD.; two centurions signed as witnesses (FIRA II, 137). The smallest transactions on record are petty loans of fifty and sixty denarii (nos 12 and 5 FIRA III, 120,122). In Pompeii the surviving archives of the financial agent L. Cæcilius Jucundus, consist of one 153 wax tablets mostly belonging to the years 52 – 62 AD., suggesting that it was normal to write out receipts for considerable sums. The average sum recorded in the transactions was about 4,500 sesterces, the smallest varied between 654 and 342 sesterces. Some of Jucundus’ clients were illiterate and had the document drafted for them by a different hand. Two out of three rental offers, advertised on walls at Pompeii, concerned rather substantial properties. The term used for property transactions was “to proscribe" (Cicero, Ad Atticus 4:2,7). The infamous “proscriptions” of the Triumviers were basically real estate transactions abetted by murder.

It seems, the first person to become fully literate must have been a merchant or his banker. But how did they pick up their letters?

Some of the Greek-Hellenistic cities experimented with subsidized public schools and even with the idea of mandatory education. “Charondas laid down that all the sons of the citizenry should learn letters, with the city providing the salary for the teachers; he assumed that people without means, who could not afford the tuition fees, would otherwise be cut off from the nobler pursuits. Because of this, Charondas rated writing above all other forms of knowledge and for good reason. Life's business – voting, letters, wills, laws, transactions – is put on the right track in writing. It is by means of writing that we remember the dead, and it is through the written word that people from the far ends communicate like neighbors. As for treaties, made in times of war between the warring factions, it is the written word that guarantees the survival of the agreement. It is writing that preserves for posterity words of wisdom and oracles of the gods, philosophy and culture. Therefore, while nature is the cause of life, writing is the cause of a good life" (Diodorus, 60 – 36 BC.). Under Roman rule, such schemes apparently withered away, although the state used to keep teachers and doctors on the public budget. A teacher would open a stall at the local basilica and without sparing the cane, teach Homer and Virgil to little boys and teenage students. Women received their education at home; if they were lucky. But it wasn’t something unheard of in Gentile circles to have emancipated women teach math and philosophy.

Learning by rote remained the common practice. The schoolchildren competed for memorization awards, and the elder Seneca boasts that as a schoolboy he had been able to repeat in a given order a list of 2,000 names which had been read to him, and to repeat in reverse order more than 200 lines of poetry (Seneca Controversae I:praef. 2). The Athenian POWs in Sicily won favors and even their freedom by reciting passages from Euripides. Presumably they had to manage more than a phrase or two. All these feats of memory, however, were based on a written text for reference. Speeches and recitations, the performances of plays transferred thoughts from the written letter to the listener, but there were severe limitations of space and time. Theatre was an urban entertainment and most people still lived in villages. It was a big thing for a peasant from the Mezzogiorno to attend a "contio" in Rome. Should you miss the premiere of Oedipus Tyrant you had to wait a very long time for another performance.

Even the elites continued to rely on the spoken word: they frequently dictated letters instead of writing them, which explains the often convoluted style; dictating well is an art by itself. They listened to political news rather than reading it. They attended public recitals and had a slave read to them their correspondence and literary texts. In 390 AD., an illiterate wage earner was assaulted and petitioned for redress in writing to the court of law (P. Oxy. 49:3480). He had no choice. In the Byzantine legal system without public hearings, it was necessary to submit a written document. There was no shame in illiteracy. Aurelius Sakaon of Theadelphia held important offices at Arsinoe in 310/330 AD. In a petition to the prefect of the province, he declared himself an illiterate. It did not stop him to employ the written word. But it did compel him to depend on the services and honesty of others. "What does it say?" was an often heard question in the public places if somebody stopped to read an inscription; and even so, only a fraction of the people who actually could read would also write. Writing remained the domain of schooled notaries and scribes. Most of the ancient letters we still possess were written down at the corner stall of a local scribe taking the client’s dictation. Many of these documents traveled considerable distances. There was no mail delivery, the imperial post served only matters of state. Common people imparted their letters to the kindness of traveling friends, or, for a little fee, to the mailbags of traveling merchants. The document is often signed with the remark: "I wrote on behalf of X because he doesn't know letters." Or more politely, it says that the document is written on behalf of a client who "writes a slow hand." It didn’t come cheap.

Papyrus must have been expensive for people of lower income. In 45 – 49 AD., the price for papyrus at Tebtunis in Egypt was about four drachmas a roll, and a single sheet might have cost two obols. A skilled laborer earned six obols a day, the unskilled about three. The price is comparable to half a day’s minimum wages for a single sheet of paper today. Papyrus was produced only in Egypt. The selling price for the imported product must have been even higher in Italy and Greece, not to mention Spain or Britain. So a complete book written on papyrus was very expensive. Papyrus was not a standard material for day to day business, or only when recycled from other uses. The text of Aristotle's Athenion Politeia in the British Museum is written on the back of some farm accounts from the 1st or early 2nd century AD. Even people who could have afforded papyrus routinely used wax-coated tablets; at school and in the office wax-tablets were the medium of choice. One could fill one side with up to fifty words and a multiple set of tablets stringed together as a codex, were worn on the belt.

Using and storing materials like potsherds and wooden tablets was obviously tiresome and inconvenient, so not surprising, people were just as eager to disfigure empty walls with graffiti as in the age of the spray can. The most extraordinary epigraphic collection are the Safaitic graffiti in southwest Syria and the north of Jordan. They cover a period from the 1st to the 4th century AD.; 12,000 rock cut graffiti, more than there have been read at Pompeii. Apparently the inscriptions had been the work of a nomadic (sic!) population at the fringes of Roman power. There are so many that it raises intriguing questions about ancient literacy in general. So when the codex began replacing the scroll, it was initially for the benefit of a mere fraction of society, but it was as revolutionary as Gutenberg’s printing press. In a codex "it is so much easier to mark a page and turn it immediately" said St. Augustine with approval (Ep. 29:4-10). Although using more space in the margins, a codex allowed to make use of both sides of the papyrus or parchment. For the first time it was feasible to itemize the content in an index. With a scroll, you would have to unroll up to ten feet of glued together sheets without ever knowing exactly where your reference could be.

The earliest codices appeared in the 2nd century when more than 98% of the Greek literary texts in our possession were still written on scrolls. In the 3rd century the figure is 81%, in the 4th it drops to 26%, in the 5th century to 11%. The surviving eleven biblical papyri from the 2nd century are all fragments from codices. A codex also lent itself easier to sortilegia – book oracles – we remember the "tolle lege" in St. Augustine's autobiography (Confessions, VIII,12:22); I have it on good authority that the faithful is still in a habit of flipping the page as the finger falls for an instant report from God.

The Romans invented the red tape; over the centuries the empire became the mother of all bureaucracies. Pliny the Younger (62 – 113 AD.) opens a glimpse at the Roman penal system. People could not be taken into custody nor be released without the proper paperwork (Ep. 10:31, 32). Which is fine, except for the perils of fire and neglect in a world that hasn’t yet invented duplicates and triplicates. A missing document could burry a prisoner for ever in the dungeons, even for petty crime. This explains the not infrequent general amnesties for prisoners on public holidays. It was a means to alleviate a known problem. In 69 AD. a fire destroyed the Roman Capitol. Emperor Vespasian sent out his agents to search for copies of 3,000 bronze inscriptions. Senatorial decrees, treaties, and privileges, each a document of importance for the constitution of the state. One should assume that copies would have been made available by the central archive. No luck here. There was no central archive of the state. Neither did the private archives of the curial elite yield any drafts or copies. The Senate of the Republic had never been in a habit to frequently exchange written communications with the provinces. It was all very homely with hordes of town criers and the occasional inspection tour of the magistrate, settling affairs on sight. Only under the emperors things began to change. They exercised their power over absent subordinates largely through correspondence and indeed used text on a large scale to deal with their subjects. Most of the instructions and the information about the army, the revenues and administrative matters in the provinces was transmitted in writing. It was Emperor Augustus who introduced the compulsory registration of Roman citizens at birth, the birth certificate. It has remained the most important document in a person’s life ever since. From now on the use of the written word became all-important for each and everyone, whether literate or not. However none of this actually required ordinary people to do any writing for themselves. All the surviving birth certificates were written by professional notaries. So one should expect that at least the village clerk (k'omogrammateus) would have been literate, but H. C. Youtie's study reveals the opposite.

A certain Petaus was the village clerk of Ptolemais Hormou and other villages during the years 184 – 187 AD. Petaus used to sign a document with the standard formula "homogrammateus epidedoka" – “I, the village clerk, have submitted this.” Yet well into his term of office, the man was still trying to learn how to write this phrase without having to copy from a model. The papyrus P. Petaus 121 appears to be a worksheet on which he practiced writing the formula; it is very possible that he could read, but he was virtually unable to write. This didn't stop the local prefect to call on Petaus to investigate another village clerk in the district. The man had come under scrutiny for running up debts and being an illiterate himself. The prefect either had no one else to choose for his investigation or he thought Petaus to be a capable man. Petaus reported back that all was well and that the clerk was not illiterate at al, because "he signs all the village papers which he submits to the prefect and others."

(Maybe he also signed Petaus’ papers, but let’s not go there.) If Petaus' superiors found this satisfactory, then we can see how they defined the literacy required for a village clerk: as an ability to sign a document. The two clerks were semi-literate at best but fit for the job, because literacy was routinely supplied by an underling.

A possible benchmark for the overall literacy of a population could be the frequency of epigraphic inscriptions per thousand square kilometers. In Italy the highest frequency is found in Campania with a factor of 410.9, and the lowest in Lucania with a factor of 18.5, from which we conclude an overall level of literacy of fifteen percent. An other indicator is the common habit in semi-literate cultures to record people's ages as ending in five or zero. The proportion of such age groups seems to exceed by far the twenty percent of the natural population curve. Too many people seem to be twenty, twenty-five, and so on. This can be observed everywhere in the Roman Empire. The tendency of the Romans to round up or down their ages does confirm that many of them were illiterate. Soldiers were much more prone to age-rounding than Italian decurions, though less so than ordinary citizens. This is a strong hint, that among the praetorian guards and the legionaries it must have been frequent. Age rounding was least common in Italy, in Gaul, in the city of Rome, in Africa Proconsularis and Numidia. The pattern correlates reasonably well to the selective frequency of Latin epigraphs.

When Emperor Augustus had another bout of insomnia "he use to summon readers or story-tellers," instead of reaching for a novel, as a modern person might do. There was no such thing as "popular literature." Phlegon of Tralles wrote his Book of Marvels to entertain just one person, Emperor Hadrian. How many other readers had actual access to the book or copies of it, we have no way of knowing. Common people listened, they didn’t read. Dion Chrysostomus (c. 40 – 112 AD.) describes a walk through the hippodrome after the races.

Musicians play the flute, dancers test the margins of modesty, conjurers perform tricks, in a corner a group has gathered to listen to the reading from a poem; singers and storytellers entertain the idle passerby. Street performances were a well attested feature in the cities of Imperial Italy. Books were of course frequently copied and distributed for profit, and works of literature spread to every city in the empire. But when the library of Marcus Terentius Varro (116 – 29 BC.) was plundered during the proscriptions in 43 BC., a substantial number ("aliquam multos") disappeared from the 490 books Varro had written. This testifies to the fact that an author, even if wealthy and well received – Varro was popular in his days – might not bother at all to have copies of his work distributed. The primary way of distributing books was not by means of trade, but through gifts and loans among friends. The geographer Strabo (64 BC. – 23 AD.) complained about the poor quality of copying in Alexandria, a center of learning. Seneca (4 BC. – 65 AD.: De ira 2:26,2) and Cicero (QF 3:5.6) got angry over the poor workmanship of the books in circulation. Seneca was the richest man of his period. What less wealthy people had to put up with can only be imagined. And badly put together as they were, such books still used to be costly. The paperback from the kiosk, the daily paper at the news agent, were unthinkable.

There have of course survived novels and collections of stories; we have the scenic mimes by Herondas (c. 3rd cent. BC.) written with a deliberate low brow appeal which must have delighted the soldiers in a remote Roman outpost. We recovered Herondas' fragments from their backpacks. We even have an example for proper pornography, the novel Daphnis and Chloe by Chariton (3rd cent. AD.). A very coy pornography by modern standards. The story talks of two shepherd kids who are too dense to get the idea as the animals around them are doing "it" all the time. Certainly there was a market, a demand by a small circle of connoisseurs. It is a matter of simple logic. Popular literature requires a modicum of competent literacy. This competence was a privilege of the elites, therefore no mass market. At school the kids picked up their Homer and Virgil from dictation, but the only textbook in the classroom was the teacher’s memory. The elder Pliny (23 – 79 AD.) dedicated his Natural History to Emperor Vespasian (9 – 79 AD.) stating, that if he had simply published it, he would have defended it from the emperor's criticism by saying, that he had written the work for the "humile vulgus," the crowd of farmers and artisans (Pliny N.H. praef. 6), in other words the people who can’t read. He was kidding, of course.

© – 1/24/2009 – by michael sympson, 4,000 words, all rights reserved