Ancient Literacies

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1

consequence of empire had been the creation of a complex urban world,


one where even the essentials of life had to be obtained through the retail


market, where many sold their labor, rented accommodation, and were as


a consequence functionally numerate. Public notions of time, weights,


measures, and the calendar ordered daily life, as law and custom ordered


the city. Navigating the rules of these games was, for those acclimatized to


this urban world, literally child’s play. An advantage of the termscalque


andparodyis that they emphasize the agency of the adopters, whether


they were slaves imitating their masters, the free poor their rich neigh-


bors, or provincials those Romans they encountered in the provinces.
17


Once again, it is the ease with which the relatively powerless could obtain


and use these skills that is striking.



  1. FROM ARISTOCRATIC HOUSEHOLD TO IMPERIAL


BUREAUCRACY


Too little is known of the earliest stages of gaming or education in Rome
to be certain of the exact sequence of imitation and appropriation. But


when we turn to Rome’s development of an administrative literacy, it is


much clearer that no component of what evolved into the complex


governmental system of Babatha’s day can be shown to predate analogous


uses of writing in the private sphere. Put otherwise, it seems very likely


that in ancient Rome, empire learned how to use writing from private


individuals, rather than the other way around.


The many roles played by literacy in Cato’sOn Agricultureillustrates


this perfectly. His preface already plays imaginative games with the


supposedly mundane subject matter of farming.^18 Cato also repeatedly


recommends the use of writing to manage the farm. These uses form a


link between his self-idealizing moralizing account and the records kept


for his eyes by his educatedvilicus. Cato—orator, historian, landowner—


offers a type, and his treatise with its detailed lists, its didactic prose, and


its precise formulae to be uttered in various farming rituals, displays him


as the master of all those literacies he needs to exercise mastery at home as


in the state. From about the same period are the first traces of a law of


agency that explicitly envisages the use of alex praepositathat all parties


could inspect, a document that established the extent to which a bailiff or


any other individual nominated as aninstitorcould act on behalf of their


principals (often in effect their masters or former masters).
19
Writing of



  1. But see Horsfall 2003, 64 74 for criticism of views that translate social hierarchies
    into hierarchies of culture.

  2. Gratwick 2002; cf. Reay 2005 for the self consciously literary self production of
    Cato in thede Agricultura.

  3. Aubert 1994.


Literacy or Literacies in Rome? 51

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