make clear that the only place that records of ancient decisions or actions
could be found were in the private archives of those families with consular
and censorial ancestors, that the documentation created by colonial en-
terprises did not find its way back to Rome, that there were few copies
even of laws and senatorial edicts.^46 There are several instances from the
imperial period of central government finding it hard to track down
records of its own actions, from the efforts needed to replace the 3,000
inscriptions allegedly lost when the Capitol was burned in 68–69 to the
difficulties facing compilers of the Theodosian Code. It is less clear how
much this was due to a lack of desire to store and retrieve information and
how much it was simply the incompetence of those responsible for doing
so. Either way, if Rome was indeed bureaucratic in the sense of creating
paperwork, there is little sign that government made much use of its
records for long after they had been generated.
47
This documentary mentality was clearly in place by the late Republic.
The growth of the state promoted first by thepopularesand then by their
opponents generated a mass of new texts and new categories of texts.
The emperors would add more. Colonization and the census were much
older, but it is unclear how far back these operations involved intensive
documentation.La me ́moire perduefound plenty of evidence from the
early second century B.C.E., together with some indications that the
amount of documentation generated by the state increased dramatically
in the last centuryB.C.E.^48 Military uses of texts were not covered directly
by this project, but Polybius’s account of the Roman army shows the
regular use of texts in routine operations such as the watch.^49 Although
our detailed knowledge of military documents does not predate the
Augustan reforms, it is clear that Caesar made extensive use of writing
to coordinate his operations in Gaul. It is difficult to imagine Pompey’s
campaigns against the pirates not requiring something similar. Roman
coins, also not surveyed by the project, bore short legends from the
early third centuryB.C.E.
- Culham 1989, Nicolet 1994, Moatti 1993.
- The term bureaucracy has been revived by Nicolet 1994 to refer to Rome, and one
achievement of the project is certainly to show Roman government was not amateurish or
primitive. It does not follow that Roman government was bureaucratic in the Weberian
sense in which the term is often used, and Saller’s arguments (1982) for a strong patrimonial
element remain strong. Many of the documents to which Suetonius had access asab epistulis
in Hadrian’s court seem precisely the kind of personal and private documents that many
great senatorial families held. - Nicolet 1994 writes of first centuryB.C.E. Rome as ‘‘fortement ‘paperassie`re’’’ and
supposes fiscality after 167B.C.E. must have required significant documentation. Moatti 1993
traces the documentation of colonization back to the early second centuryB.C.E. but thinks it
increased over the last centuryB.C.E. Lo Cascio 2001 suggests the census began to collect
more information after 179B.C.E. Purcell 2001 sees key changes in the order of scribes in the
early second centuryB.C.E. - Best 1966 7, Harris 1989, 166 7.
Literacy or Literacies in Rome? 63