Augustan periods, ‘‘The author’s texts were intended primarily for a
relatively small circle of hearers at recitations.’’^3 That is, they assume
the audience was small, indeed intimate, and the medium of communi-
cation was oral and aural, an immediate ‘‘performance’’ of some sort to a
literal ‘‘audience’’ of some sort. The poets, however, say that they wrote
for people far away, both in space and in time. The writers therefore
assumed that their audience was large, indeed potentially unlimited, and
that the medium of communication was written, a text of some sort.
These two ideas are at variance.
The doctrine that literature was intended for the ears is enshrined, for
example, in theCambridge History of Classical Literature:
The literary life of Greece and Rome retained the characteristics of an oral
culture... .Nearly all the books discussed in this history were written to be
listened to....Ingeneral it may be taken for granted that throughout
antiquity books were written to be read aloud, and that even private reading
often took on some of the characteristics of a modulated declamation.
It might be said without undue exaggeration that a book of poetry or artistic
prose was not simply a text in the modern sense but something like a score
for public or private performance.^4The problem with this type of sweeping (and vastly influential) sum-
mation is that it unfortunately oversimplifies a more complex picture. As
the evidence considered below and in other papers in this collection make
clear, the Romans enjoyed poetry (and literature in general) in four
basic ways, each with its own social parameters: in recitations, as enter-
tainments at convivia, through professional lectors, and by private read-
ing. The last has generally in the past received the greatest amount of
attention. More recently, however, much important work has been done
on the performance of Roman literature.
I am a bit concerned, however, that like Luther’s drunken man on
horseback, we may be in danger of slipping off the other side, and oddly
enough losing sight of the role of books in the hands of individual readers.
The recitations and other means of listening to literature were very
important to the social life of the capital,^5 but what emerges from the
comes from later sources. The literary life of Cicero has been underutilized in this regard,
with the exception of Rawson 1985, esp. 40 4. W. A. Johnson 2000, 625, has called for
discussions of the vast topic of ‘‘reading’’ to be framed ‘‘within highly specific sociocultural
contexts.’’ He focuses on Greek literary prose texts (606) and rightly remarks that the ‘‘use of
performative reading of certain types of texts may tell us little or nothing about how others
handled these texts, or how the elite handled other types of texts’’ (625). See, too, Goldhill
1999, 118.
- Holzberg 2001, 3: ‘‘Texte vom Autor zuna ̈chst fu ̈r einen relativ kleinen Kreis von
Zuho ̈reren bei Rezitationen bestimmt waren.’’ - Kenney 1982, 3, 12. The lumping together of Greece and Rome is symptomatic of an
unnuanced approach. - How important they may have been outside Rome is a question for later.
Books and Reading Latin Poetry 187