THE EXTENT AND SIGNIFICANCE OF LITERACY

Literacy poses in an acute form a central problem of Roman cultural history. How are we to reconcile the striking contrasts between the Roman world and our own, with the equally striking similarities? Very few of the inhabitants of the Roman empire were able to read even the simplest documents, fewer still could write as much as their own name. In that respect, Roman antiquity conforms to our expectations about the world in general before mass education, the printing press, the industrial revolution and all the other paraphernalia of modern, western civilization. Yet, superficially at least, Romans seem to have used writing in ways that are immediately familiar to us: to write poems and contracts, love-letters and sales invoices, public notices and graffiti, to register births, to tax the living and to commemorate the dead. Literacy offers one way of exploring this culture as a whole. But the strength of literacy as a vehicle for this exploration, the apparent pervasiveness of the written word, also creates problems. Roman literacy cannot be closely circumscribed as an area of study, and there is no single issue to be resolved. Instead, the study of Roman writing practices sheds new light on many aspects of early imperial society, economy, religion and government, and suggests new connections between them. Writing was not so much a single phenomenon as an aspect of Roman cultural style, and the apparent contradiction between the banal everyday uses of the written word and its evident symbolic significance suggests new ways of looking at modern, as well as ancient, literacies.