What Do You Mean ‘‘Oral’’?
The second presupposition is that Rome was an oral culture, at least in some
sense. Wefirstneed to definetheterm.Thedifferences betweenRomeanda
predominantly oral culture such as archaic Greece can be shown in one
important fact, which I have not seen mentioned in the various treatments
of the oral performance of poetry at Rome. In an oral culture, X sings a
poem toY,whointurnsingsittoZ. Itisthislast stage oforaltransmissionthat
marks an oral culture proper. So burning Sappho loved and sang, and later
Solon heard his nephew singing one of her songs and asked the young man
to sing it again so that he might learn it (Ael. ap. Stob.Flor.3.29.58).
We can get a better idea of the differences between written and oral by
examining with some suspicion the recurring and misleading metaphor
of reading as the interpretation of a musical ‘‘score.’’
21
Those who main-
tain that for the Romans ‘‘performance was the real thing and a written
text.. .was not in itself a substitute for performance’’ must necessarily
maintain that for the Romans to read to themselves was a failed reading, a
poor second best, that they read to themselves only when they could not
get a better performer to read to them, as is the case with drama. If we are
to continue with music as a metaphor, the only proper and obvious
analogy is folk song.^22 Here it is important to realize that we are speaking
about oralcirculation. Did the audience (in the strict sense) for Roman
poetry go to hear a performance, learn the song/poem by ear, and then go
home with it in their memories, to perform it later for others?
It is clear that they did not. There is no example known to me of any
person who performed a Latin poem or a speech before a second person,
who in turn transmitted it orally it to a third.^23 Instead authors or other
performers read from written texts to audiences, who, if they wished to
experience that text again, obtained a written copy.^24 Because this point
- Originating with Hendrickson 1929, 184 (Johnson, 2000, 597 n. 10), who, however,
deploys the metaphor to indicate the wonder of the earliest listeners to the earliest readers;
cf. Saenger 1982, 371. Quinn 1982, 91, defends the notion of a ‘‘score’’ against the text of a
drama; repeated by Cavallo 1999, 73. - For a brilliant analysis of the intertwining of oral, manuscript, and print in even the
oldest layer of English ballads, see Fox 2000, 1 10. - The two nearest cases I know are instructive. (a) One of the Elder Seneca’s anecdotes
of remarkable feats of memory that tells of a man (Greek or Roman is not specified) who
heard a poem and recited it back to its author, who could not himself repeat it (Cont.1.
pref.19). (b) HoraceSat. 2.4, his witty parody of thePhaedrus, in which Catius is in a hurry
to write down the rules of the gourmet lecture he’s just heard yet despite Catius’s
phenomenal memory (6 7) it’s just not the same as being there (90 91). See below for Mart.
7.51, in which Pompeius who has memorized Martial’s poetry still reads it to another fan out
of books. - See the examples below. For the written text, which distinguishes a recitation from
an oration, see Pliny 2.19.2; and Dupont 1997, 45; Markus 2000, 144, 152. The process is
laid out by Starr 1987, esp. 213 16; Valette Cagnac 1997, 111 69, esp. 140 7.
Books and Reading Latin Poetry 193