Self-referentiality about the playfulness of writing provides an additional
link between the board games and the manuscripts’ word games: forms of
lud-orlus- occur on eleven of twenty-onetabulaeand in five of the twelve
monostichs. Such insistence on play is unlikely to be accidental. In the
Latin language, the termludus, or ‘‘play,’’ refers to the ordering of the
body according to externally imposed schemes and patterns (as in ritual
performance, gladiatorial training, school exercises, and even sex) and, in
many cases, to the ordering of writing according to arbitrary rules and
conventions.^46 For example, theludus poeticusof Catullus and Calvus in
Catullus 50 takes place through writing (scribens,50.4) on tablets (in meis
tabellis,50.2) and consists of submission to metrical and perhaps sexual
rhythms (ludebat numero modo hoc modo illoc,50.5). In the works of
Vergil, Horace, and other poets as well, the termsludusandludererefer
to responsive singing, as in a challenge match, or more generally to the
poet or other performer’s submission to externally imposed standards and
patterns of genre, meter, and style.
47
These writing games, which cross boundaries between the literary and
the nonliterary, the textual and the inscriptional, and the symbolic and
the embodied, can be compared to yet another set of interrelated graphic
practices, ones that construct and transmit meaning through the arrange-
ment of letters at cross-purposes to the usual pattern of reading left to
right. Figure writings, acrostics, and palindromes share with board games,
metrical play, and the like an insistence on the users’ recognition of the
arbitrariness of writing practices and of the materiality of their own
perceptual processes. Although they communicate symbolically (i.e.,
transmit meaning), they do so only by calling attention to the nonsym-
bolic, embodied aspects of writing, reading, and playing.
Figure 6.1 presents one of thetabulae iliacaefound near Bovillae in
Latium and dated to the reign of Augustus. (Thetabulae iliacaeare a
group of low reliefs dating to the early principate, many but not all of
which, illustrate scenes from theIliad.)^48 This one, known as the Tabula
Iliaca Capitolina, provides a particularly striking example of the visual
playfulness that characterizes much ancient writing—epigraphic and
otherwise. Here the letters of the text have been organized into the
form of an altar. If the reader starts at the center and follows the line
of letters horizontally or vertically in any direction, she or he receives
the same message:aspis akhilleos theodoreos kat’ homeron(‘‘the shield
of Achilles by Theodorus following Homer’’). Note, as well, that the
- Habinek 2005a, 116 22, 132 50; cf. Piccaluga 1965.
- For responsive song and dance, see Pl.Curc. 295 6, Hor.C. 2.12.17 9, Verg.Ecl.
7.5 17. For adherence to metrical or other formal constraints, see Hor. C. 1.32.1 5,Ep.
2.2.141 4, Ov.Am. 3.1.27 8,Tr. 2.59,Ciris19 20. - On thetabulae iliacaein general and theTabula Iliaca Capitolinain particular see
Horsfall 1979, who recommends Sadurska 1964, which I have not yet seen.
Situating Literacy at Rome 127