Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Another measure of literacy comes from the extent of public and private libraries. There were no public libraries that we know about in ancient Athens but Pseudo-Plutarch, in his Lives of the Ten Orators, says that Lycurgus (c. 390–324 BC) proposed that official copies of plays performed at leading festivals should be stored in the public record office. Libraries may thus have begun in such a way.61 The first public library in Rome that we hear about was that put together by Asinius Pollio in 39 BC (Caesar had commissioned one earlier but it had never been built). By the fall of Rome there were twenty-nine public libraries in that city alone.62 Others that we know about existed at Comum (Como), paid for by Pliny, at Ephesus, Pergamum, and Ulpia.63 The elite, of course, had their own private libraries–Cicero’s letters make frequent references to books as he seeks to borrow titles from his friends. From time to time he would drop in on Lucullus’ library, on one occasion finding Cato already there.64 In 1752, excavations at Herculaneum revealed a private library of 1,800 book rolls.65 Finally, in considering the extent of literacy, we may note the wide range of backgrounds of Roman authors. Terence was an ex-slave from Africa; Cato was a member of the ruling aristocracy, while Horace was a freedman’s son from Venusia in south-east Italy. Statius, the poet, was the son of a schoolmaster. Still other clues may be gleaned from the fact that the army became heavily bureaucratised,66 at least one book in Rome was produced in an edition of 1,000 copies,67 and even graffiti refer to the works of Virgil.68 (As the most famous writer in Rome, who never had a political or military position, he naturally appealed to the graffiti artists.) Probably, tens of thousands of people could read in Rome, where there was, for the first time, such a thing as a literate culture.69 At the same time, oral culture continued for most people. In the market place, people still read out poems and spoke epics from memory.70

  Writers were more or less free to say what they wanted. The Twelve Tables outlawed defamation and Augustus, who took little notice of lampoons directed against him personally, nevertheless made it a criminal offence to sign them. But there was social pressure instead. The Senate in particular was close-knit and Simon Price tells us that when Ovid was exiled to the Black Sea for writing about the sexual habits of the emperor’s granddaughter, he felt ‘hard done by’ because others, higher up the social ladder, got away with pretty much the same offence.71 In the main, writing was an urban activity and ‘urbane’ values were fashionable in Rome.72 At the same time, Romans looked upon themselves as an active people, fighting, administrating, doing. This takes us back to utilitas, the doctrine of usefulness, for ever contrasted in the Roman mind with uoluptas, pleasure. And so reading was a useful activity only if it led to writing, ‘and especially if the writings proved to be morally useful’.

  On this score, poetry was a problem. Everyone conceded that much of it was very beautiful–especially the earlier Greek poetry. But, at the same time, whole swathes were undeniably frivolous. Horace was forced to argue both ways: ‘Poets either want to be of use or give pleasure, or to say things which are both pleasing and useful for life at the same time…The poet who has mixed the useful (utile) with the pleasurable (dulce) wins every vote, by delighting and advising the reader at one and the same moment.’73 Yet the Romans also believed, as the Greeks had before them, that poets were special in some way, attaching to them the term uates, which meant ‘prophet’.

  As was mentioned earlier, it was the Romans who invented the idea of ‘the classics’, the notion that the best of what had been thought, said and written in earlier ages (especially in ancient Greece) was worth preserving. This idea was intimately bound up with the birth of scholarship, which was such a feature of Roman life.

  Our words ‘scholar’ and ‘scholarship’ actually come from the medieval practice of writing commentary and critical remarks in the margins of texts–these comments were known as scholia. But the practice itself, the activity of criticism and commentary, began at the great library in Alexandria and it began because of certain characteristics of early books–the scrolls. These were made from thin strips of papyrus, from the fibrous pith of a reed that grew everywhere in the Nile delta. Two layers, at right angles to each other, were pressed together to form sheets, and the sheets glued together to form rolls, the first piece of which was called a ‘protocol’ and the last the ‘eschatacol’. The average sheet could support a column of writing some eight to ten inches high, and was between twenty-five and forty-five lines deep. At times of shortage, when the Egyptian government embargoed the export of papyrus in an attempt to control the production of books, animal skins were used, in particular in Pergamum. The English word ‘parchment’ comes from Pergamum, as is seen in the Italian equivalent of the word, pergamena.74 For the most part, papyrus was written on one side only. This was partly because scribes preferred to write only with the grain of the page and partly because, in a scroll, anything written on the verso side would quickly have worn away. The reader would unroll the scroll gradually, using one hand to hold the top roll, which he had already read. This had the effect of making the roll reversed after a reading, so that it had to be rerolled before another reader could use it. With some scrolls being ten metres long, this was a serious inconvenience, and the repeated rerolling shortened the life of scrolls. The inconvenience meant, too, that when one author decided to quote another, the chances were that he would rely on his memory rather than bother to unroll the relevant scroll. The copying of texts was therefore much more difficult than it sounds and it was not made easier by the fact that punctuation was rudimentary, even non-existent. For example, texts were written without word-division (this did not become systematised until the Middle Ages), changes of speaker were not always clearly indicated in dramatic texts (a horizontal line was used–like a dash–at the beginning of a line, but over the years it ran the risk of being rubbed out), and the names of characters might be omitted altogether.75 It was the inaccuracies and confusion created by this set of circumstances that helped give rise to scholarship.

  Another reason arose from the fact that the librarians at the Mouseion in Alexandria made a conscious attempt to compile a complete library of Greek literature and in so doing they noticed that different copies from different parts of the world showed serious discrepancies. This set of circumstances gave rise to a number of devices which also contributed to the birth of scholarship. The first was the decision to produce a standard text of the authors commonly read by the educated public. The next step was to ensure that fifth-century (BC) books coming from Attica, some of which were written in archaic Greek, were transliterated into the Greek then in use. Until 403 BC, Athens had used the archaic alphabet in which the letter epsilon was used for three vowels: epsilon, epsiloniota and eta; and omicron was used for omicron, omicron-iota and omega.76 Third was the invention of a system of accentuation which, in effect, preceded the idea of punctuation. Fourth, the commentary was introduced, a separate book which discussed shortcomings in the text of the classic. In the first instance, a set of critical signs was introduced, which were made in the margin of the text, and referred the reader to the appropriate place in the commentary (it was these marginal signs which later became scholia). The most important of the critical signs was the obelos, a horizontal stroke placed in the margin to the left of the verse and indicating that the verse was spurious. Other signs included the diple (>), which indicated any noteworthy point of content or language, the antisigma , indicating that the order of lines had been disturbed, and the asteriskos , which marked a passage incorrectly repeated somewhere else.77

  In Rome this critical method of the Alexandrians was taken up by L. Aelius Stilo, active around 100 BC, who produced, among other things, lists of plays from both ancient Greece and early Rome which he regarded as genuine. He was interested in more than authenticity but, nevertheless, his approach and judgements, taken up by his pupil, Varro (116–27 BC), have determined in part what classics have come down to us. After this such authors as Seneca and Quintilian were always aware in Rome
that texts could become corrupted and they often compared different copies of books with this in mind.

  As the empire declined, and fewer books were produced, the continuity of classical culture came under threat. One way in which it was preserved was via the development of new forms of literature, the epitome and the compendium. The epitome is what we would mean by an ‘abridged version’, a short form of a book, containing its essence, often published together with other epitomes in a compendium. Although many details were lost in this way, the men who produced the compendia were forced to choose one version of a book over another, again exercising their critical judgement. Alongside the compendia, Romans also produced many commentaries which tell modern scholars which version of which classics were available, where, and when.78

  It was during these years of decline that learning and literacy combined to produce at least three sets of books which would have a major impact, not just in Rome, but in later medieval times. The first of these was Aelius Donatus’ two grammars, the Ars Minor and Maior, which, together with the Institutiones grammaticae, provided the Middle Ages with their main textbooks on grammar. The second was Nonius Marcellus’ De compendiosa doctrina, a dictionary particularly noteworthy because it contains many quotations from works which are, for the moment, lost. And third there was Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Mercurii, an allegorical treatise on the seven liberal arts. The ‘liberal arts’ were the subjects deemed suitable for the education of a Roman gentleman and were originally conceived by Varro, under the influence of Posidonius (c. 151–135 BC). Varro produced an influential encyclopaedia, Nine Books of Disciplines, in which he outlined nine arts: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, musical theory, medicine and architecture. Later writers omitted the last two arts.79 In Rome, by the end of the first century AD, education had been more or less standardised and the seven liberal arts identified. In turn, these would become the basis of medieval education, when they split into two, the more elementary trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) and the more advanced quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy). As we shall see in a later chapter, this system formed the basis of modern educational systems, and was one of the elements leading to the birth of the West.80

  The other main innovation in Rome, which affected learning and literacy, was the gradual disappearance of the scroll, in favour of the codex. This took place between the second and fourth centuries. There had always been an alternative to the scroll–this was the writing tablet, which usually consisted of wax-coated boards. These could be wiped clean and so were convenient for casual use: teaching, letters, rough notes. The Romans, however, started to use them for legal documents, gradually replacing the boards with parchment and fastening a number of pages together with a thong or clasp.81 Martial is the first author we know about to mention literary works being put together as a codex (in a poem written in the 80s), but the practice didn’t seem to catch on at that time. It grew from the second century and really triumphed in the fourth, at least for pagan literature. It is not hard to see why the codex caught on. Papyrus rolls, though not fragile exactly, rarely lasted more than, say, three hundred years and it is likely that, had the change to codex not come when it did, many classical texts would have perished completely. The codex was much less bulky than the scroll, numbered pages made it a much handier reference format, it was less likely to be bruised in use, and it may well have been cheaper to produce.

  But it seems that we have the early Christians to thank most for the codex. While the pagan codex was a rarity in the second century, it was much more common for Christian texts. This may have been because the Christians wanted to set themselves apart from pagans, and it may have been because codices were cheaper than scrolls. But it seems more likely that the codex was popular with Christians for an entirely different reason: with its format–numbered pages and a contents list–it was much harder to interpolate forgeries in a codex. In a young religion, when the accuracy and authoritativeness of the scriptures was a major concern, the advantages of the codex format would have been considerable.82

  The Greeks had invented the main forms of literature–epic, history, comedy, philosophy, tragedy, pastoral, lyric, oratory, didactic. Though many of the Roman authors are now treated as ‘classics’, in fact the only real advance on the Greeks, so far as literature is concerned, lay in two areas: love poetry and satire. Except for these innovations, it was acceptable in Rome for writers to emulate the Greeks–imitatio was a legitimate literary device, alongside uariatio.

  Cicero (106–43 BC) was the most famous Roman writer who assimilated Greek culture.83 Besides the oration, of which he was the supreme master, his writings consisted mainly of letters and treatises on various phases of Greek learning. His On the Nature of the Gods and On Duties are among the best sources of our knowledge of Greek religious and ethical thought. His works, which have always been studied as much for their literary elegance as for their philosophical content, were so important that he is widely regarded as second only to Aristotle among the contributors to the intellectual content of the Western cultural tradition.84

  Born into a well-to-do family, he trained as an advocate and was appointed to the office of augur, where his duties consisted of foretelling the future and interpreting omens. There was little in his work that was truly original but his style and the elegance of his Latin were unsurpassable: ‘Century after century learned its philosophical grammar from these works and they are still valuable.’85 Roman Stoicism, the most influential philosophy of Cicero’s day, and his own viewpoint, was less a philosophy in the Greek sense, less a fundamental exploration of metaphysics, and more a practical, eclectic system concerned with morals, which in Rome had three main effects. The first was an overlap with Christianity, not so much in the writings of Cicero himself as of Seneca, who was often compared later on with St Jerome. At any rate, this played a part in the conversion of many pagans to Christianity. A second effect was on the Roman attitude to law. Stoicism included the idea that man should live according to nature and ‘Nature had a code of laws of which the philosopher could catch a glimpse.’86 In this way the concept of ‘natural law’ was launched, which was to have a long history in European thought. Finally, Stoic ideas about ‘the brotherhood of man’ had a great effect in Rome on the treatment of slaves.

  For Cicero, ‘True law is reason, right and natural…There will not be one law at Rome, one at Athens, or one now and one later…’ (On the State, III, 33). He was most concerned with harmony between the orders, co-operation between the middle-class non-senators and the Senate. He was, in Michael Grant’s words, a middle-of-the-road man: ‘to the two tyrannies, reaction and revolution, he was opposed, and whenever either of them became menacing he was on the other side’.87 He was a liberal. ‘Indeed he is the greatest ancestor of that whole liberal tradition in western life.’

  He was also the founder of humanitas, often called the essence of Ciceronianism. He believed that virtue ‘joins man to God’ and that from this it follows that all human beings, however humble, must count for something, and that this bond ‘joins man to man, irrespective of state, race or caste.’88 By humanitas, he meant not just humanity, or humaneness, or humanism, but consideration for others, tolerance, the liberal arts, education. In his translations of Greek works he adapted the smaller vocabulary of his native tongue to larger Greek ideas, inventing in the process such terms as qualitas and quantitas. The influence of Cicero on European ideas ‘greatly exceeds that of any other prose writer, in any language’. Pope Gregory the Great went so far as to say he wished he could destroy Cicero’s writings since ‘they diverted men’s attention from the scriptures’.89 Though not a party to the assassination of Caesar, Cicero approved the act, yet thought that Antony’s tyranny, which came after, even worse, and spoke out. As a result, he was himself assassinated in December 43 BC. (He was reading Euripides’ Medea when the assassins caught up with him.)

  Virgil (c. 70–19 BC) has been described as t
he poet laureate of the Augustan age. His Eclogues and his Georgics formed a type of apprenticeship to his great epic, the Aeneid, the Roman counterpart of the Homeric sagas, in which Augustus is openly disguised as Aeneas. By coincidence, the family of the Julii, to which both Caesar and Augustus belonged, claimed descent from Iulus, son of Aeneas, who was a character in the Iliad. Virgil’s epic is accordingly typically Homeric, in that Aeneas wanders the Mediterranean, from Troy to the Tiber, in the manner of the Odyssey, and, in the second half, fights great battles in Italy, reminiscent of the Iliad.90 In addition to its parallels with Homer, however, the book is a cipher: Aeneas is Augustus and the book is a disquisition on the nature of power. A central theme is pietas, which has two meanings, the Roman sense of obligation–to parents, the state, to God–and pity, but not in a conventional or modern sense. Aeneas has pity for other characters, Dido his wife and Turnus his enemy, but he leaves the former and kills the latter. This is Virgil’s comment on war: it destroys equally those that we love and those whom we hate. Far from being an idealisation of Rome and imperial power, the ending is ambiguous. Virgil’s humanity is of a piece with Cicero’s, matching him in tenderness and sympathy.