Ancient Literacies

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

increasing need to use such fragments to bolster against ruin. A dictionary


of cultural literacy. It is a pattern that Classics as a discipline is all too


familiar with.


I am suggesting that in Empire culture, parallel to the high level of


literacy with its concomitant focus on the book, there is another current


whereby information becomes increasingly divided into anecdotal form


for oral circulation. What thepepaideumenoiswap in dialogic exchange—


with all the competitiveness that such exchanges can have in this male


agonistic environment—is the brief paragraph of paradox, strange tale,


telling a story. Whereas the heroes of oral poetry tell myths, the elite of


the Empire tell a neat story about the peacock or what Diogenes said


to Alexander. The anecdote is themuthosof literate culture.
30
The glue


and ideological underpinning of literate exchange. It is where the literate


and the oral meet.


At one level, this sort of oral performance could certainly tend firmly


toward the literate. We are told in Athenaeus (1.4c) of one Calliphanes,


called son of Parabrukon, Mr. Voracious, who wrote down and learnt the


first three lines of a host of poems and speeches, so that he could get a
reputation forpolumatheiaby reciting a suitable quotation at any moment


in a symposium. This shows us how reading and learning underpinned


performance in the oral environments of the symposium or of less formal


exchanges. At another, more general level, the circulation or dissemin-


ation of such packaged information is key to the construction ofpaideia,


the culture and education that binds the elite into a social group. We are


accustomed to thinking of theenkuklios paideiaas the training that ties


together the upper echelons of society. But it also involves a discursive


frame, which is made up in part of the anecdotes which define and delimit


the normal,to eikos, by their careful exposition of the strange or unex-


pected. Because anecdotes depend on an agreed recognition and accep-


tance of the ordinary in order to have their frissonof the surprise,


anecdotes perform the ideological function of linking a speaker and an


audience in a shared normative frame. Even as they allow competition by


the exchange of wittier, more bizarre, more striking anecdotes. Anecdotes


thus enable the elite to performpaideiaat an everyday and oral level—to


place themselves socially. A life becomes a set of brief tales, to be retold.


As Horace put it,heu fabula quanta fiebam.


The anecdote is an oral form that can be written down, or it can be


written down and then recirculated orally. It crosses the boundaries be-


tween oral and literate in a way that shows the interdependence of both


spheres. It plays an integral role in the construction of the ordinary and the


creation of a normative perspective on the world. It organizes knowledge


in a very particular, packaged way. The Second Sophistic is the period of



  1. See Beard 1993 on howdeclamationesmay play such a role in Roman discourse (with
    Kaster 2001).


The Anecdote 111

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