referring to the evident necessity for orators and sophists to write the
spoken and to speak the written.
Nor am I going to focus on the oppressive nature of Atticism. In modern
literacy studies, particularly in the last fifteen years or so, there has been a
great deal of work on the potentially oppressive nature of literacy training
in Western schools.^7 This research is aimed at explaining why certain
groups, ethnic minorities in the main, in so-called advanced and wealthy
urban environments appear to be repeatedly disadvantaged in schools. It
has explored how verbal patterns in, say, black or Hispanic use of English
are not recognized in the classroom, and how certain patterns of social
behavior in black culture—not asking children questions, for example, or,
more importantly, not expecting answers to be given by children to non-
family members—disadvantages them when they enter an environment
where answering questions promptly is at a premium.
8
Although some of this research seems to me to have some awkward
political manipulation in it, it is useful for reminding us how we could
look at the strange and forced world of Second Sophistic linguistic perfor-
mance. Although scholars continue to argue with great ferocity about levels
of Atticism in this or that piece of late prose,^9 we should not allow
such discussion to obscure the sociopolitical impact of what appears
to have become a linguistic environment imbued with an aggressive and
self-aware scrutiny. Plutarch tells us firmly that we should accustom our-
selves to shout out ‘‘No! Error!’’ if we hear a mistake of pronunciation or
grammar in conversation.^10 Lucian records with a more self-deprecating
irony how he had used the wrong word one morning when greeting
his patron at thesalutatio. ‘‘I began to sweat and went pink with embarrass-
ment, and was all over the shop in my confusion. Some of those present
thought I had made an error, naturally enough; others that I was babbling
from age; others thought it was a hangover from yesterday’s wine-drink-
ing.’’^11 Lucian captures with amusing poignancy the shame of a public
verbal slip in the presence of his patron, without even a Plutarch to correct
him loudly.
Literacy, in the form of the carefully trained and practiced world of
Attic speech, constantly polices the boundary of verbal performance. The
performance of oral speech is regulated and ordered by the institutions of
literacy in the Second Sophistic as much as in the secondary schools
of America. There is a continuity between Plutarch’s essays on ‘‘How to
listen to lectures,’’ ‘‘On garrulousness,’’ ‘‘How a young man should listen
to poetry,’’ ‘‘How to tell a flatterer from a friend,’’ and Philostratus’s
- Good summary of this in Collins and Blot 2003 with extensive bibliography.
- See Heath 1983.
- See the useful work of Swain 1996.
10.How to Study Poetry26b. - Lucianpro lapsu(64).1.
The Anecdote 99