Ancient Literacies

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

Although the acrostic requires slight emendations in both parts (substi-


tution of a verb beginning with the lettervin verse 7, transposition of the


wordremisfrom the end to the beginning of verse 1065), it is generally


accepted as complete and intentional: ITALICVS SCRIPSIT.^56


Like figure writing and acrostics, palindromes, too, invite a use of


writing contrary to the normal practices of left-to-right reading. ROMA


OLIM MILO AMOR (CILiv. Suppl. 8297), reads one such palindrome


(‘‘Rome once Milo love’’). Another, playing as often on the relationship


betweenRoma(Rome) andAmor(Love), readsRoma tibi subito motibus


ibit amor(‘‘Rome, to you love will come with sudden passion’’; Sid. Ap.


Ep. 9.14). Such palindromes share with acrostics and figure writing an


insistence that the reader/viewer defamiliarize his own processes of visual


perception and interpretation: indeed, unlike the acrostics, which can at


times layer one form of meaning production on another, it is hard to see


what function the palindromes have other than that of calling attention to


writing’s insistence on arbitrary patterns of visual perception.
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Reading and writing’s role in the process of defamiliarizing one’s own


language is at the heart of recent cognitive approaches to literacy and its
effects on the literate subject. As David Olson notes, learning to read


requires the adoption of an objective or analytical stance towards lan-


guage.^58 What I am arguing here is that certain instances of writing—and


the reading processes they invite—require the adoption of a self-aware


stance toward one’s own processes of perception. Literacy defamiliarizes


the word. These processes potentially defamiliarize our perceptual rela-


tionship to the world.


A little-noticed passage of the Roman scholar Varro’s treatise on the


Latin language suggests an awareness of both versions of defamiliariza-


tion—of the word and of the world. Varro’s text gives instructions


for drawing up a chart that maps the declination of the Latin adjective


albus, -a, -umin its thirty-six forms (the term for the color ‘‘white,’’ as


adapted to nouns of masculine, feminine, and neuter gender respectively,


in both singular and plural:De Lingua Latina10.22, 10.44).
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The result-


ing matrix would have the following appearance:
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  1. Scaffai 1982, Courtney 1990.

  2. In their reliance on and confutation of normal means of visual processing, acrostics
    and palindromes are to be differentiated from the widespread use of anagrams, or ‘‘words
    under words’’ in Latin literature. These latter are oral/auditory in their processing and thus
    accessible even to illiterate audiences of literature. For discussion of Latin anagrams, see
    Starobinski 1979, Ahl 1985.

  3. Olson 1994. On the cognitive aspects of ancient literacy, especially in relationship to
    memory, see Small 1997.

  4. I follow the text of Taylor 1996. On the use of the termordoto describe Varro’s
    chart or matrix, see Taylor 1978.

  5. Cf. Lamer 1927, 1977.


Situating Literacy at Rome 133

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