The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

by Bryan Ward-Perkins

  As with the election posters, graffito-culture in Pompeii was sophisticated enough to poke fun at itself. One verse, which has been found scratched in four different places in the city, always in a different hand, runs as follows:

  Wall, I admire you for not collapsing in ruins

  When you have to support so much tedious writing on you.19

  Even though we cannot estimate the proportion of Pompeians who were literate (was it 30 per cent, or more; or perhaps only 10 per cent?), we can say with confidence that writing was an essential, and a day-to-day part of the city’s life. Writing was even common enough to be lightly mocked.

  Pompeii is uniquely rich in the evidence it offers of a city that used writing at all sorts of different levels, from the grandiose to the completely trivial. It is also likely that it was an unusually literate settlement. A rural village in Italy as well preserved as Pompeii, or a city in a region with less of a literate tradition, would almost certainly produce much less evidence of the use of writing. However, this is not to say that writing, even at an ephemeral and trivial level, failed to reach out-of-the-way regions. Roman Britain has produced far fewer examples of writing than contemporary central Italy; but this has had the advantage that every one of them has been carefully collected and published. The resulting volumes are slim in comparison to the evidence from Pompeii, but none the less impressive. There is an extraordinary variety of different types of inscription: formal dedications and epitaphs on stone; makers-stamps on a wide variety of objects (such as ingots, tiles, metal vessels, pottery, and leather goods); inscribed metal labels and seals; and short, scratched inscriptions, above all to denote ownership, on all kinds of different objects (for instance, 875 on fragments of tableware pottery, and 619 on kitchenwares). The list is truly impressive in its diversity. It includes, for instance, twenty-seven fragments of wooden barrels, branded or scratched with their owner’s name or initials, and thirty-one tiny inscribed stamps, that are believed to have been used to mark the salves dispensed by oculists.20

  7.6 Brothel-graffiti from Pompeii. That written by Phoebus the perfume-seller is no. 22.

  The archaeology of Roman Britain is exceptionally well known and fully published. Consequently, it has even been possible to chart the distribution across the province of Roman styluses, the small metal rods used for writing on wax tablets. Nearly 350 of these have been recorded on rural sites, primarily in the richer south-east, but also with a smattering in the North and West. Unsurprisingly, the majority come from villas, the dwellings of the ruling class, but this is by no means exclusively the case—styluses have also been found on a large number of humbler rural settlements, with no aristocratic pretensions. Some use of writing seems to have penetrated even low-status rural sites.21

  Like Pompeii, Roman Britain has also produced evidence of the very ephemeral and trivial use of writing—the kind that brings individuals from the distant past vividly to life, though often in a highly enigmatic way. A tile from Roman London had an inscription scratched on it while it was drying: ‘Austalis has been going off on his own for thirteen days.’ Who was Austalis, and who wrote this observation—a tile-worker, an overseer, or perhaps someone just passing through the yard? A second tile, from Silchester, has a one-word message, ‘SATIS’ (enough), drawn neatly on it with a finger (Fig. 7.7). This was probably the foreman marking up the end of a batch; but, alternatively, we can fantasize that it was a tired worker celebrating the end of a particularly hard day. A third graffito, on a clay water pipe supplying the bath-house of a villa in Lincolnshire, proclaims ‘Liber esto’ (Be free), the formula with which a slave was emancipated. Was this perhaps the daydream of a slave in the brickyard? We will never know the answer to all these questions; nor will we ever be confident of the status of the people who passed us these messages. But writing in informal and ephemeral use was certainly a feature of Roman Britain.22

  In Britain, as elsewhere in the Roman world, some sectors of society certainly used writing more extensively than others. The army, in particular, depended heavily on the written word. Some of this military literacy did not require high levels of intellectual achievement. The Roman army shared with modern armed forces an obsession with labelling its equipment, presumably because it also had a way of disappearing out of the storeroom. The resulting very brief inscriptions could be read, or at least recognized, by someone with only the most basic knowledge of letters. However, many soldiers could manage much more than this. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of documents of the late first and early second century AD were discovered at the fortress of Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall, written in ink on smooth, thin slips of wood (and, exceptionally, preserved in waterlogged conditions). Experts have identified in these documents the handwriting of hundreds of different people. This is perhaps not surprising amongst the letters that were received from outside the fort; but even amongst the texts written at Vindolanda itself, very few were written by the same hand—for instance, a dozen requests for leave are preserved, all written by different people. The officers at Vindolanda were certainly literate; some soldiers in the ranks may also have been.23

  7.7 ‘SATIS (enough)’ drawn with a finger onto a Roman tile from Calleva (Silchester, in Hampshire) while it was drying in the brickyard.

  There is similar evidence of high levels of military literacy from elsewhere in the empire, sometimes of a very ephemeral kind. In 41 BC during the civil war that followed the death of Julius Caesar, Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus) trapped Lucius Antonius and Fulvia (the brother and the wife of Mark Antony), within the walls of the central Italian town of Perugia. A number of lead sling-bolts (roughly the size of hazelnuts), manufactured during the siege that followed, have been recovered in Perugia; they bear short inscriptions, which both sides carved into their moulds, so that the bolts could be used in a war of words, as well as to inflict death or injury. Some of these inscriptions are fairly tame, wishing victory to one or other side, or commenting on Lucius Antonius’ receding hairline (which is also known from his coinage). Others are rather richer in flavour, like the one, fired from Octavian’s side, which bluntly asks: ‘Lucius Antonius the bald, and Fulvia, show us your arse [L[uci] A[ntoni] calve, Fulvia, culumpan[dite]].’24 Whoever composed this refined piece of propaganda and had it cast into a sling-bolt certainly expected some of the soldiery on the other side to be able to read.

  If we ask ourselves how the ability to read and write came to be so widespread in the Roman world, the answer probably lies in a number of different developments, which all encouraged the use of writing. In particular, there is no doubt that the complex mechanism of the Roman state required literate officials at all levels of its operations. There was no other way that the state could raise taxes in coin or kind from its provincials, assemble the resulting profits, ship them across long distances, and consume or spend them where they were needed. A great many lists and tallies will have been needed to ensure that a gold solidus raised in one of the peaceful provinces of the empire, like Egypt or Africa, was then spent effectively to support a soldier on the distant frontiers of Mesopotamia, the Danube, or the Rhine.

  In the documents from Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall, we have already seen one example of the high levels of literacy expected and achieved in state service. A far larger body of evidence, of a very varied kind, has been recovered from Egypt at the other end of the empire, where dry conditions have preserved a mass of administrative records of many different kinds, some of them highly ephemeral. Figure 7.8 is a tiny papyrus receipt, of the late second century AD. It was issued to a certain Sotouetis when he entered the gates of the settlement of Soknopaiou Nesos in the Fayum. The imperial customs official on duty there took 3 per cent of the value of the goods that Sotouetis was carrying, and issued him with this neat receipt, giving it the extra validity of a clay seal in the centre, stamped with the heads of the ruling emperors. This slip of papyrus shows that the wheels of the Roman fiscal and bureaucratic machine ground very fine: what Sotouetis wa
s carrying was a mere six amphorae of wine. Other very similar tax receipts survive, mostly for equally trivial quantities of foodstuffs, being carried in or out of the gates of Soknopaiou Nesos on donkeys and camels. Even at this very low level of Roman bureaucracy, an official had to be able to issue a neat and formal written receipt, and the animal-driver concerned, while probably illiterate himself, presumably used the written document when challenged further along the road over his customs liabilities.25

  7.8 Literacy and the administration. A tax receipt from Roman Egypt. The document, in papyrus and with a clay seal stamped into the middle, is here reproduced actual size.

  The complex Roman economy certainly also needed the written word in order to function. The dry sands of Egypt have produced a mass of different types of commercial document: requests for goods; contracts for services and products; lists of articles and dues; records of dispatch; receipts of goods and payments; and many more besides. Outside Egypt, most of our evidence consists of chance and scrappy survivals in the archaeological record. Fortunately it is sufficient to prove what is anyway obvious—that the written word was necessary for production and trade on the scale achieved in the Roman period. For instance, as we have already seen, over 200 graffiti, scratched onto broken bits of pottery, have been recovered from the massive pottery-production site at la Graufesenque. The largest single category are lists, often in four columns: first a name (presumed to be the proprietor of a workshop); then a type of vessel; a dimension; and, finally, a number (Fig. 7.9). When the columns of numbers are added up they can total over 30,000. These graffiti are almost certainly the records of the stacking of huge communal kilns—so that, after firing, the individual workshops got back the same vessels that they had put in.26

  Writing was perhaps even more necessary during the complex and precarious processes of distribution. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the riverside quays on the Saône at Lyons were rebuilt, and in the process the river was dredged. Around 4,000 small seals of the Roman period, mainly in lead, which had once identified and protected bales and crates, were recovered during the dredging. Many of these seals were military or originated at the imperial customs post at Arles, but the great majority bore simple inscriptions (often just the initials of a name), which were almost certainly the identifying marks of individual shippers and producers. Goods passing through Lyons, which was a vital staging post on the route to and from the Mediterranean, needed to be identified, and, in the widely literate Roman period, this was done with small inscribed seals.27 Amphorae, when they are well preserved, sometimes bear similar evidence of how writing was used to identify goods in transit. Brief painted inscriptions, which survive on the necks of some vessels, very occasionally seem to have been aimed at the consumer (identifying the contents), but generally seem to have served as records during the process of production and shipping.28

  Writing was also needed at the moment of sale or exchange. A group of graffiti, preserved in a hilltop trading site in modern Austria, shed some light on this. In the period between about 35 BC and AD 45, merchants, dealing above all in the iron goods that were mined and worked in the area, were using two cellars on the site. They covered the walls in over 300 graffiti, with simple messages, like ‘Orobius 565 hooks’ or ‘Surulus 520 hooks’. These must be basic records of sales (or perhaps of goods stored in the cellars).29

  So far we have looked at the spread of literacy amongst merchants and state officials, both civilian and military; but there was also a pressure on the rich to learn. In the Roman world, the ability to read and write became a prerequisite of upper-class life. In part this was for solidly practical reasons. In a society where government and the economy revolved around writing, there was a very strong incentive for those who controlled power and money to be confident with their letters. But there were also powerful ideological and social pressures encouraging the aristocracy to be fully literate. Reading and writing (and a grounding in classical literary culture) were in Roman times an essential mark of status. Indeed, for the very richest landowners, the senatorial aristocracy, a basic literary education was not considered nearly enough. Males of this class were expected to have a thorough knowledge of the language and literature of the ancient world, and to be expert in oratory and rhetoric, skills that were obtainable only through long and expensive schooling. Thanks to these incentives, illiterates amongst the Roman upper classes were very rare indeed.

  7.9 Literacy and commerce. A kiln-load of pottery listed on the base of a broken potsherd, from the production site at la Graufesenque, in southern France. Below is a cross-section drawing of just such a kiln-load being fired (based on the evidence of similar graffiti and of the excavated remains of one kiln).

  The powerful hold that literacy held over the Roman world is exemplified in a striking portrait of a Pompeian couple (Fig. 7.10), of which other similar examples exist. The man has in his hand a papyrus roll, and the woman is holding to her lips a stylus, for writing on the wax tablets that she holds in her other hand. This couple, who did not come from the very highest ranks of the Pompeian aristocracy, probably chose to be depicted in this way as a mark of their status—they belonged to the ranks of those who were literate, and they wished to display the fact. In this sense, the portrait is evidence that literacy was far from universal in Roman Pompeii. But it is none the less an impressive fact, typical of the Roman world and difficult to parallel before modern times, that a provincial couple should have chosen to be painted in a way that very specifically celebrated a close relationship with the written word, on the part of both the man and his wife.

  Another indication of how deeply entrenched literacy became amongst the Roman ruling classes is the striking fact that, despite frequent military coups, not until the accession in the East of Justin I in 518 was the empire ruled by someone who is said to have been unable to read or write. Procopius, who wrote soon after his reign, recorded of Justin, an uneducated soldier from the Balkans, that he was ‘ignorant of every letter, being as they say unlettered [analphabetos], the first such case amongst the Romans’. Earlier emperors, in particular Maximinus Thrax (235–8), another Balkan soldier, had been made fun of for their lack of educational polish, but the worst that Maximinus’ highly derogatory biography accused him of was an ignorance of Greek and a knowledge of Latin that was only newly acquired.30

  7.10 A Pompeian couple celebrate their literacy. The house where the portrait was found was prosperous, but by no means one of Pompeii’s richest dwellings.

  ‘Turo the pilgrim, may you live for ever in God’: Early Medieval Literacy

  At some date between the mid-seventh and the mid-ninth centuries, a pilgrim with the Germanic name ‘Turo’ scratched this message into a wall of the pilgrimage shrine of S. Michele sul Gargano on the heel of Italy (Fig. 7.11). The script is laboured enough to be his own work, unlike other more regular inscriptions at the site, which were probably carved on behalf of visiting pilgrims by more practised hands. Turo added at the end of his inscription: ‘You who read this, pray for me.’31

  7.11 Turo’s scratched message, celebrating his visit to the shrine of S. Michele sul Gargano in southern Italy.

  Reading and writing, and the importance of the written word, certainly did not disappear in the post-Roman West. Only in some remote provinces did the use of writing vanish completely, as it did in Anglo-Saxon Britain during the fifth century, to be reintroduced by Christian missionaries only around AD 600. In more sophisticated regions, such as Italy, Spain, and Gaul, written documents were always important. For instance, the law code of the mid-seventh-century king of Lombard Italy, Rothari, recommended that the freeing of a slave be recorded in a charter, in order to avoid future problems, and also threatened anyone forging a charter ‘or any other kind of document’ with the amputation of a hand. If written documents were being forged, they were certainly important, and if former slaves were encouraged to use them to defend their freedom, they were also quite widely available.32

 
; Almost all the references we have to writing in post-Roman times are to formal documents, intended to last (like laws, treaties, charters, and tax registers), or to letters exchanged between members of the very highest ranks of society. However, some remarkable texts from Visigothic Spain, of the sixth and seventh centuries, show that much more ephemeral written records were also once common. In the area south of Salamanca outcrops of good-quality slate are abundant, with the result that it was used in the early Middle Ages as a medium on which to write, the letters being scratched into the smooth surface. Because slate does not decay, a number of these scratched tablets have been recovered and published (153 complete or fragmentary texts are included in the most recent catalogue). A few of them carry religious texts, such as prayers, psalms, and an incantation against hail storms; others are formal documents, recording transfers of land. But many are estate documents of only temporary importance, listing animals (in one case carefully differentiated by age and sex), dues rendered, and distributions made; one slate carries an inventory of some clothing. For me the most evocative of all these texts is an ‘Account of cheeses [Notitia de casios]’, which lists some names, and, against each one, a number of cheeses. It is probably a record of payment of rent in kind. Hundreds of thousands of similar estate documents must once have existed in the post-Roman West; only the good fortune that the region of Salamanca is rich in slate has ensured these very few survivals.33