3
Literacy or Literacies in Rome?
Greg Woolf
A great deal is now agreed about Roman uses of writing. It is certain that
relatively few individuals possessed that broad set of skills in creating and
using texts that today we term full literacy. It is also clear that a far greater
proportion of the population of the Roman empire could make use of texts
than was the case in most ancient societies.^1 That the Roman world was
once awash with documents is also clear, even if hardly any have survived.
Papyri from interior Egypt and other arid areas of the Roman Near East;
waterlogged writing tablets from Vindolanda and other military sites; ritual
inscriptions on stone and on lead from all over the empire; the vast number
of brick stamps, potters’ marks, and other epigraphy oninstrumentum
domesticum; graffiti onostrakaand standing structures: all substantiate the
impression given by a mass of literary and legal sources, and by the abundant
textual relics of the Vesuvian cities. Writing was in widespread use through-
out the empire. Texts were produced, stored, and referred to in vast num-
bers. The precious remains of genuine documents—contracts, wills,
vadimonia, and the like—together with monumental epigraphy, show that
writing was also accorded a certain authority per se, not unlike the authority
that written documents possess in our own societies.^2 We can go further.
Writing articulated the complex economic and administrative systems on
which the empire, its cities, and their inhabitants depended. The Roman
empire, and its societies, could not have functioned without it.
My aim in this chapter is to ask some questions about how this
situation came about. I want in particular to raise questions about how
different uses of writing were related to each other in the Roman world.
Should we envisage a range of literacies—literary, commercial, religious,
military, and so on—differentiated by the social location of those who
- Harris 1989 firmly established the limitations of literacy. The studies gathered in
Humphrey 1991 and Bowman and Woolf 1994 (largely in response to Harris) did not
challenge this central contention. For other ancient literacies see the studies gathered in
Schousboe and Larsen 1989 and Gledhill, Bender, and Larsen 1988. - Meyer 2004 for a recent exploration of this.