increasing need to use such fragments to bolster against ruin. A dictionary
of cultural literacy. It is a pattern that Classics as a discipline is all too
familiar with.
I am suggesting that in Empire culture, parallel to the high level of
literacy with its concomitant focus on the book, there is another current
whereby information becomes increasingly divided into anecdotal form
for oral circulation. What thepepaideumenoiswap in dialogic exchange—
with all the competitiveness that such exchanges can have in this male
agonistic environment—is the brief paragraph of paradox, strange tale,
telling a story. Whereas the heroes of oral poetry tell myths, the elite of
the Empire tell a neat story about the peacock or what Diogenes said
to Alexander. The anecdote is themuthosof literate culture.
30
The glue
and ideological underpinning of literate exchange. It is where the literate
and the oral meet.
At one level, this sort of oral performance could certainly tend firmly
toward the literate. We are told in Athenaeus (1.4c) of one Calliphanes,
called son of Parabrukon, Mr. Voracious, who wrote down and learnt the
first three lines of a host of poems and speeches, so that he could get a
reputation forpolumatheiaby reciting a suitable quotation at any moment
in a symposium. This shows us how reading and learning underpinned
performance in the oral environments of the symposium or of less formal
exchanges. At another, more general level, the circulation or dissemin-
ation of such packaged information is key to the construction ofpaideia,
the culture and education that binds the elite into a social group. We are
accustomed to thinking of theenkuklios paideiaas the training that ties
together the upper echelons of society. But it also involves a discursive
frame, which is made up in part of the anecdotes which define and delimit
the normal,to eikos, by their careful exposition of the strange or unex-
pected. Because anecdotes depend on an agreed recognition and accep-
tance of the ordinary in order to have their frissonof the surprise,
anecdotes perform the ideological function of linking a speaker and an
audience in a shared normative frame. Even as they allow competition by
the exchange of wittier, more bizarre, more striking anecdotes. Anecdotes
thus enable the elite to performpaideiaat an everyday and oral level—to
place themselves socially. A life becomes a set of brief tales, to be retold.
As Horace put it,heu fabula quanta fiebam.
The anecdote is an oral form that can be written down, or it can be
written down and then recirculated orally. It crosses the boundaries be-
tween oral and literate in a way that shows the interdependence of both
spheres. It plays an integral role in the construction of the ordinary and the
creation of a normative perspective on the world. It organizes knowledge
in a very particular, packaged way. The Second Sophistic is the period of
- See Beard 1993 on howdeclamationesmay play such a role in Roman discourse (with
Kaster 2001).
The Anecdote 111