certain tendencies in Antonine society, literature, taken as a whole, seems
to function in the following ways:
.as an exclusionary device: admitted into the community are only those
with the education to be able to understand, let alone participate in, the
learned exchanges
.as a social mechanism: this is what the community gets together to do,
and serves as the means by which the members of the community
establish a hierarchy
.as an ideological statement: these are cultured people who buy into a
certain idea of Romanness: these are the virtuous, who see the present as
heir to a particular Roman paradigm harder and simpler and more upright
.as an aesthetic statement, which (in this case) is self consciously archaizing
.as the basis on which to assert a gatekeeper role: the controllers of these
(central) texts become the arbiters of what is ‘‘correct,’’^14 and thus the
(central) importance of this subgroup among the elite is assertedFinally, I return, however briefly and inadequately, to the question of
the literary text. As with any carefully controlled fiction, it is difficult to
say how much of what we see is ideal or traditional or simply imaginative
and how much is reflective of a real society. In this case, it seems clear
enough from the letters of Fronto and other contemporary witnesses^15
that the scenes we have visited have some concrete basis, even if they are
(as I suppose) highly idealized. But in any case the codes of behavior seem
to be what the author chooses to highlight, what the author endorses. An
interesting and important feature of this sort of literature is that the text
itself seems at least in part designed so as toassist in the construction of the
reading community; that is, the literary text not only invites a defined
readership (which is exclusive in a way parallel to the community), but
also advocates through its fiction certain types of community behavior,
including ‘‘best practice’’ ways of interacting with texts. The literary text
of Gellius is intrinsically self-serving, and it seems to me that in this
respect it is not only not unique but represents a fairly broad class of
writings. The text, that is, does not merely reflect or serve its readers, but
projects and therebyactively seeks to createthe (ideal) reading community
to which the writing aspires.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Burnyeat, Miles F. 1997. ‘‘Postscript on Silent Reading.’’CQ47: 74 6.
Gavrilov, A. K. 1997. ‘‘Techniques of Reading in Classical Antiquity.’’CQ47:
56 73.
- In language, of course, but also literary criticism, textual criticism, history (at least
biographical history: e.g., 13.20), ethics, philosophy; there is aspiration even to subjects like
anatomy and law, though the group seems to find its limits there. - On the Greek side, theloci classiciare Lucian,Indoct. andSymp., but we see much of
the same in Plutarch, Galen, Athenaeus.
Constructing Elite Reading Communities in the High Empire 329