has been misunderstood so often, it may be necessary to repeat that
performance is not the same as an oral culture. Though literature at
Rome could be (but need not be)presentedorally on occasion, literature
at Rome did notcirculateorally.^25 Rather, Roman authors explicitly di-
rected their books to a group of men and women who could read them.^26
Reading Aloud Now
Don’t you read or get read to?
—Dickens,Bleak House, ch. 21
The third factor is an odd forgetfulness of the fact that the features that
are held to have made Rome an ‘‘oral’’ or ‘‘performative’’ culture are not
the exotic practices of a distant land and time but things we are all familiar
with, both in how people read books in the recent past, and how we read
them today. The evidence that is used to conclude that Rome was an oral
society, that books were merely scores for performance and so on, is richly
available for most of history without such overstatements being drawn.
The Romans, in short, show the same mixture of private reading and
shared reading that has been a feature of literate Europe from the Helle-
nistic Age through the Middles Ages to the Renaissance and to the present
day. The practice of public reading does not indicate a lack of private
reading, nor does private reading cancel out communal enjoyment.^27
Let me offer three scenes from English literature to query the sorts of
arguments being made for Rome.
Goldsmith one day brought toTHE CLUBa printed Ode, which he, with
others, had been hearing read by its authour in a publick room at the rate of
five shillings each for admission. One of the company having read it aloud,- For examples of quasi oral composition, which always involved writing, see Horace’s
condemnatory picture of Lucilius, for what it’s worth (Sat. 1.4.9 10, 1.10.59 61; Quinn
1982, 84 5, is somewhat credulous). For dictation, see Horsfall 1995, 51 2. Contrast Hor.
Sat. 1.10.72: ‘‘saepe stilum vertas’’ and the picture of Vergil’s method of composing the
Georgics (Vit. Don. 22). For ‘‘circulation,’’ see Starr 1987, Cavallo et al. 1993. - Two famous statements: Lucil. 592 5 Marx (Cic.De orat. 2.25): ‘‘Persium non curo
legere, Laelium Decumum volo’’ (‘‘I’m not interested in Persius reading me, I want Laelius to
read me’’); Hor.Sat. 1.10.72 90: ‘‘contentus paucis lectoribus’’ (‘‘I’m content with a few
readers’’). - For this mixture, see the sensible remarks of Chartier 1989, 103 20, and 1994, esp.
1 17 (both primarily on early modern France). See also Darnton 1990, esp. 165 7) and the
revised version 2001, esp. 164 5 for his critique of Engelsing’s proclamation of aLeserevo
lutionc. 1750 (Engelsing 1969 and 1974). For English literary history, see the stimulating
study by Fox 2000, esp. the opening essay, 1 50. Coleman 1996, in an effort to redress the
balance for Chaucer, effectively ignores all private reading, and rules out at the beginning
many possible counterexamples from her survey. Saenger 1982, frequently adduced by
scholars in Early Modern Studies, believes that Latin was always written without word
divisions, as do Fantham 1996, 37, and Gamel 1998, 81.
194 Books and Texts