many and detailed descriptions the Romans have left us of what William
Johnson has called ‘‘reading events’’ (2000, 602) is a fairly clear picture
showing that each of these other ways of enjoying literature was consid-
ered and presented as preparatory, ancillary, or supplementary to the
main event, the unmarked case of private reading.
Each of these, it must be emphasized, was indeed a reading event. That
is, each involved someone reading from a book. The first three merely use
different types of mediation between the text and the audience in the strict
sense. We do not find literature being performed from memory without a
text in front of a reader. Indeed, one of the things that marks theatrical
performance is not only the assumption of roles (pretending to be some-
one you are not), but precisely this absence of a visible text, and great pains
were taken to distinguish the readers of texts from the actors of plays.
The purpose of this chapter is to reexamine this now widely accepted
idea. It falls into four parts. The first analyzes in some detail the intellec-
tual underpinnings of the idea that poets wrote primarily for perfor-
mance. The second looks at some instances of the considerable evidence
for solitary, private reading as the unmarked norm for how Romans
experienced texts. The third examines the various occasions for public,
communal readings of texts to see what they do, and do not, tell us about
the Roman reading of literature. Finally, after this background, I turn to
the questions that especially interest me: How did the poets themselves
want their poetry to be experienced? Did they expect to be listened to
or to be read? Did they write with listeners or with readers in mind? What
does their poetry say about its own reception?
To state the conclusions at the beginning, I hope to show that the
assumption that Rome can be considered an ‘‘oral’’ society in any mean-
ingful sense because of certain types of vocal performance of certain types
of literary texts in certain contexts (some rightly understood, some not)
is mistaken. The testimony from Latin poets and other writers indicates
quite clearly that poets intended their works to be read, by readers, in
books. They wrote to tell us, quite explicitly, that they hoped to reach a
readership larger than those who happened to be present at any particular
performance, a readership extending through space and time, far beyond
the confines of the city of Rome or the poet’s own life.
I. THE STANDARD VIEW AND ITS UNDERPINNINGS
Some Recent Examples
First some quotes to illustrate the claims of this widespread view of how
Roman literature circulated:
Books were not the normal means by which the writer reached his audience.
My argument is that... what makes the work known to the public is
performance, not publication.188 Books and Texts