6
Situating Literacy at Rome
Thomas Habinek
In 1997 Emmanuelle Valette-Cagnac published her Paris dissertation on
the anthropology of reading in the Roman world.^1 This important study
opened the way to a new understanding of what its author calls ‘‘the
practices and rituals’’ of reading in relationship to those of speaking and
writing. Valette-Cagnac reminds us of the privileging of the oral over the
written in Roman law, of the range of ways in which a text can be enunci-
ated, as characterized by such Latin verbs asrecito,pronuntio,andcanto,
and of the interdependence of speaking, writing, reading, and performing
in the production of verbal utterances in the Roman world.
2
Like William
Johnson, in his article ‘‘Towards a Sociology of Reading in Classical
Antiquity,’’ published in 2000, Valette-Cagnac shifts attention from text
to practice, from writing to reading, and from a schematic distinction be-
tweenoralityandliteracytoamorenuancedaccountofthevarietiesofboth.
3
A year after Valette-Cagnac’s work appeared, Rudolf Wachter pub-
lished an equally important study of the relationship between Pompeiian
epigraphical verses and the surviving elegiac poetry of Propertius, Tibul-
lus, and Ovid, making the surprising but compelling argument that both
sets of texts could be understood as building on a tradition of orally
transmitted verse in elegiac couplet.^4 Wachter’s paper, the title of which
can be translated as ‘‘Oral Poetry in an Unexpected Context,’’ does not
argue for or against the importance of writing in the production of so-
called literary elegiac, but it does remind us of the role of hearing and
- Valette Cagnac 1997.
- On the last mentioned point, see also Habinek 2005a.
- W. A. Johnson 2000. On reading, rather than writing, as the skill effecting the
cognitive and social changes that accompany the spread of literacy, see Olson 1994. Morrison
1987 makes the important distinction between alphabetic literacy, which he associates with
classical Greece, and textual literacy, which he regards as the contribution of late antiquity
and the early Middle Ages. He makes no mention, however, of the conflicted efforts of the
Romans in the direction of textual literacy. - Wachter 1998.