Ancient Literacies

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

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



  1. Habinek 2005a, 116 22, 132 50; cf. Piccaluga 1965.

  2. 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.

  3. 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

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