possessed them, by the methods and institutions through which they
were imparted and acquired, by the languages and kinds of text they
dealt in, and the uses to which they were put? This idea has been a
powerful way of making sense of the diversity of the uses of writing in
some societies,^3 but I shall argue that it has relatively limited applicability
to the case of Rome. In attempting to understand how the Roman empire
came to be such a literate society I shall focus in particular on how writing
practices associated with the state were related to private uses of texts.
I shall argue that Roman literacies were much more closely connected—
much more joined up—than in many other premodern societies.
- EMPIRE AND THE EXPANSION OF ROMAN LITERACY
How precisely was Roman imperialism related to the growth and elabor-
ation of literacy?
Comparison is less helpful than it might be. It is generally true to say
that the use of writing systems of some sort or another seems always to
have been an essential component of state formation.^4 No early states
seem to have managed without writing technology of some kind or other,
and writing is rare in societies without the state. Administrative uses are
in some cases the first uses of writing attested. Writing has been seen
by some as a way of coordinating increasingly complex societies, and by
others as a common tool of domination. When early states became
empires, we might expect that their writing systems, too, might become
more elaborate.
But when individual cases are considered, what is really striking is the
variety of ways in which writing was employed by ancient regimes. Take
scribal literacy, for example. It seems that in many societies those who
were richest, most powerful, and most respected were not in fact those
with the greatest command of texts. This was probably the norm in the
Bronze Age states of the Old World from western Asia to China, and it
has recurred on several occasions since. The European Middle Ages are
often cited in this context, and a good case may now be made for the
dependence of modern elites on e-clerisies expert in handling the now
essential communicative media and the arcane languages in which mod-
ern software is written. Most often in antiquity a range of uses of writing
were combined. The emperors of Achaemenid Persia made use of a (low
status) scribal class who composed tablets and letters in Elamite and
- Street 1984 is a classic demonstration of this technique, as are many of the papers
he gathered in Street 1993. - For establishing all this, the works of Goody (especially 1968 and 1986) and of
Ong (e.g., 1982), together with the observations of Le ́vi Strauss 1955, 260 70, remain
fundamental.
Literacy or Literacies in Rome? 47