The Romans even as late as the first centuryA.D. still felt that performance
was the real thing and a written text ... was not in itself a substitute for
performance.
Romans were more accustomed to the sound than the sight of a literary text.
In the Augustan age it seems clear that the written text continued to be felt
as no more than the basis for a performance.^6This view of the primacy of performance leads to an odd conclusion:
The ‘‘Aeneid’’ is in a sense an anachronism, a literary dinosaur even in its
own day: its carefully planned plot structure, its detailed craftsmanship,
made it incompatible with performance, and there was no other way
in which the poem could reach a large audience.^7Any theory that makes Vergil out of touch with the basis of successful
poetry probably needs to be looked at again.
This common view has not been without its critics: ‘‘For the student of
the Golden Age of Latin poetry, the reading of books is a particularly
important subject. It is commonly misrepresented, through romantic
preconceptions about oral culture.’’^8 However, such objections have
been largely overlooked in favor of the handbook formulation. Recent
examples might include such flat statements as the following:
Many of the nineteenth and twentieth century readers of Roman elegy
have read these poems [elegies] as if they were ancient versions of Romantic
male confessions. .. This approach ignores the conditions of poetic com
position, presentation, and response which prevailed in the late republic
and early empire and which presuppose a dramatic, communal performance
and response. Roman elegy and drama share more than themes, characters,
situations, and vocabulary. Although works in these genres were recorded in- Quinn 1982, 82, 83 n. 23, 90, 91, and 145. I quote liberally from Quinn 1982 as not
only the most detailed treatment but also as the most influential (directly or indirectly).
Many studies however simply take the ‘‘orality’’ of Rome as a given. Examples will be cited
below. Cavallo, Fedeli, and Giardina 1993, and Cavallo 1999 are largely derivative. Quinn’s
seminal essay tends toward imaginative reconstruction (e.g., 85, 149) and is oddly self
contradictory. So contrast the last statement with (142): ‘‘In the Augustan age [which seems
to include Cinna’sZmyrna(Cat. 95)] the poet thinks of himself as a writer rather than a
performer.’’ Fantham 1996, 38 (cf. 42, 214) shows similar formulations: ‘‘So we should
imagine the cultured book lover listening to more often than perusing his texts’’; however,
she rightly emphasizes the role of the book in transmitting literature outside of Rome (10). - Quinn 1982, 144. The contradictions of the purported chronology of orality are never
resolved. Roman literature was first oral (like Greece); then written (down to Catullus, with
some overlap into the Augustans); then oral (with the rise of the recitation), when appar
ently Romans forgot how to read books, leaving poor Vergil a whale beached on the sands of
time; and then written again (84 9). Part of the problem in many discussions is a confusion
between what has survived and what was there: thus, early Rome is thought to be all drama
(Plautus and Terence) and so labeled ‘‘oral.’’ - Hutchinson 1984, 100, citing Kenney, above. So, too, Morgan 2001, 81, who, though
he believes that the Romans normally read aloud, writes, ‘‘The Roman upper classes who
were the core audience for this poetry. .. still had an essentially bookish culture rather than a
performative one.’’
Books and Reading Latin Poetry 189