Was there anything especially Roman about the fixing of personal
names through writing? That personal names are particularly common
in monumental epigraphy is well known. Roman epitaphs are more likely
than most Greek ones to map out a whole complex of relationships
between the deceased and her or his survivors.^39 It has been suggested
that leaving one’s name inscribed in a sanctuary was one way of asserting
membership of a particular religious community.^40 The joined-up nature
of Roman literacies perhaps makes it all the more likely that some at
least felt that inscribing their possessions with their name might fix their
place in a world that was ever expanding and less and less personalized.
- WRITING, SOCIETY, AND THE STATE
It is time to return to writing and the state and the question with which
this chapter began, whether or not the undoubted growth in the use of
writing in the Roman and Hellenistic Mediterranean was a by-product
of the state’s increased dependency on the written word. The broad lines
of an answer are clear. The growing complexity of social and economic
relations and the increased reach of the institutions developed to facilitate
them provided many opportunities for literates. New forms of document
emerged, along with new kinds of readers well equipped to use them.
A few—such as legal formulae or the labels on Dressel 20 amphorae—
were highly specialized. But the peculiar conditions of Roman alphabetic
literacy, and in particular the centrality of the aristocratic slave household
in most of these webs of exchange, held Roman literacies together. There
was no real fragmentation of writing practices, no specialized literacies,
and the practices of writing—in particular the use of complex formats, of
a set of graphic symbols, and of particular resonances associated with
personal names—moved easily between different genres of text. Roman
writing practices, in brief, were joined up.
How did the writing practices of the state fit into this? Here it is
possible to draw on a recent and very thorough body of research on
precisely this subject, generated by the research projectLa me ́moire
perduecentered on the E ́cole franc ̧aise a` Rome.
41
In the course of a
collaborative project investigating the use of documentation for public
and private purposes by Romans, extensive investigations were carried
out of the use of texts in a range of spheres including banking, census,
- Woolf 1996.
- Beard 1991.
- This project, under the direction of Claude Nicolet, set out to investigate a range of
vanished public and private Roman archives. The principal publications are Demougin 1994,
Moatti 1998, 2000, and 2001. The project developed ideas adumbrated in Nicolet 1988.
Moatti 2004 is in some respects a successor project.
Literacy or Literacies in Rome? 61