Documents And Writing Equipment. From left to right an eraser, a four-leaved tablet, a double inkwell with a pen leaning against it, and a scroll. Wooden
tablets coated with wax, in which writing was inscribed with a metal stylus, were used for a variety of documents, from official and business records to
private letters; scrolls of parchment or papyrus, with writing in ink in the modern manner, were the standard vehicles for longer texts.
Documents, once stored, were of surprisingly little use. Governmental acts could not afford to depend on such an unreliable basis. The archives
represented continuity and stability, and were not for regular use. The truth appears well from the story of the disastrous fire of A.D. 192 at Rome, when
the central imperial archives of the Palatine were completely destroyed (Dio 73. 24). There is no hint that Roman government was disrupted; but the event
was taken as a token that the authority of Rome, embodied in these documents, would weaken. The omen is not so far removed from the association of
Rome's universal rule with a census registration at the beginning of the Gospel of St Luke.
Another famous fire, this time not accidental, destroyed 3,000 inscribed tablets on the Capitoline during the Civil War of A.D. 69. Vespasian, by contrast
with the events just described, saw to it that new texts were inscribed whenever another version of one of the perished documents could be discovered.
State documents, we must not forget, included texts on stone and bronze and wood, and in the arts of government these were perhaps more important than
the ones which were stacked in dusty muniment rooms. The ancient world was a uniquely epigraphic culture-otherwise our view of it, and especially of its
institutions, would be very different. In classical Greece* Athens had been exceptional in the extent to which it encouraged the publication on stone of
official texts. During the Hellenistic period this important governmental act became a universal practice which was naturally enough adopted by Rome.
The inscribing of a decision made it seem more permanent; it gained from the association of other venerable and welcome enactments inscribed nearby,
and from the religious, political or sentimental tone of the place in which it was set up. To give only one example: the patents of citizenship of discharged
auxiliary soldiers were at first tacked in hundreds to the Temple of the Good Faith of the Roman People to its Friends, high on the Capitol in the very heart