7
The Corrupted Boy and the Crowned Poet
or, The Material Reality and the Symbolic Status
of the Literary Book at Rome
Florence Dupont
Translated by Holt N. Parker
WRITING AND THE BOOK
What is a book in Roman antiquity? Even if we confine ourselves to
literature—to what the ancients calledlitterae—a book in Cicero’s library,
a book sent as a present from Horace to Augustus, and a book for sale
in a bookstore in the Vicus Tuscus were different cultural realities.
1
Not because their realizations sometimes drew on different techniques—
papyrus, parchment, tablets—but because their symbolic status and func-
tions were different according to the social uses that were made of them.
The very practice of having books needs to be resituated in Roman
civilization and put into proper relationship with other practices of writ-
ing. In Greece and in Rome, one can write on an object—for example, a
drinking cup, a tripod, or a funerary stele.^2 The object that serves as a
support (a medium or vehicle) for the writing has in this case its own
reason for existing, and the writing is parasitic on it: the writing uses the
person who manipulates the object to get itself read. The drinker reads
the pederastic proclamation on the cup, the passerby reads the name of
the deceased on the stele or of the dedicator of the ex-voto. The writing is
spread on the object, taking its form or following the design painted on
the vase.^3 It often happens that the engraver or the painter, having
miscalculated the space, is forced to reduce the size of the letters or to
tighten the spacing. The text reduced to itself is formless.
- For the stores on the Vicus Tuscus and the other locations mentioned in this paper,
see Peter White, ch. 11, this volume. - Svenbro 1988.
- Lissarrague 1987.