been able to pull out of the pocket of his toga the twenty-fifth book of
Varro’santiquitates rerum humanarum, whose authority as an antiquarian
text wins the day. This is a community that lives and breathes texts,
literary texts,classicaltexts.
It may be justly doubted that this community ‘‘truly’’ existed—ideal-
ized details strain credulity at every turn—but the fiction is nonetheless
important as, at the least, an ideal that Gellius expects to be able to live in
the minds of his readers. The fact that this world is a literary depiction is a
problem to which we will return at the end.
In earlier work,
1
I have argued for the need to consider ancient literacywithin the context of a broad system of interlocking social behaviors, and
I have also emphasized the need to consider the ‘‘reading system’’ or
‘‘reading culture’’ (both terms I have used) within a particular time and
place. I concede, of course, that reading systems have continuity: that
conventions become traditions, and that reading and writing systems are
prone to conservative treatment. But as a point of methodology and of
fact, there are important differences that arise among communities as we
move in time and place, even among communities in the same time and
place. The ‘‘reading system,’’ that is, turns out to be an ever-changing
thing; like all social systems, the details and even the structure of inter-
actions are subject to continual negotiation by the community. Despite a
general sense of continuity, the ways that people interact with texts are no
more stable than other social conventions. Just as, for example, the
meaning and use of words can change over time and place, so, too, can
the significances associated with the use of text. In this chapter I want
therefore to focus not so much on the broader system of reading, but on
the individual community. In what follows, I will concentrate on two
complementary aspects: (1) the sociology of text-centered events, that
is, the nuts and bolts of how the community makes use of texts; and (2) the
cultural construction of text-centered events, that is, the ideological and
other encumbrances that the community attaches to its use of texts.
GELLIUS’S WORLD: THE READING COMMUNITY
Let us turn first to consider a characteristic encounter in the reading
community that I have chosen as my example—that is, ‘‘Gellius’s
world,’’ that Antonine community, dating from roughly the 140s to the
170sA.D., described by Gellius. The chapter is 19.10, and the scene is the
house of Cornelius Fronto, famously the tutor of Marcus Aurelius and a
leading orator and intellectual of his day. The story here told is particu-
larly rich in typical elements, but it is not otherwise unusual: each of the
elements recur, mutatis mutandis, again and again in the scenarios
- Johnson 2000, 2002.
Constructing Elite Reading Communities in the High Empire 321