Empire of Letters: Writing in Roman Literature and Thought from Lucretius to Ovid by Stephanie Ann Frampton (review)

Since William V. Harris's Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, Mass., 1989) students of the book during the classical period have been struggling with the question of how widely Greeks and Romans wrote and read. Harris's argument suggested a large proportion couldn't read at all, and his position seemed strong, given the dearth of physical evidence that forced us to rely for the history of writing and reading in the period on allusions in canonical literary works and sometimes the iconographic legacy of the time. In the ensuing three decades the Harris thesis has been disputed by a number of scholars (many of them drawn on in this new book) who have turned to broader concepts of available evidence, implicitly repudiating the hierarchies in terms of which the classical canon—Homer, Virgil, Ovid—was perceived. Not that the authors themselves were repudiated, as Stephanie Ann Frampton's study shows, but that the scene has been widened to take into consideration social and technological evidence: the ubiquity of the tablet (Alan Bowman on Vindolanda, Elizabeth Meyer on legal tablets), the scene of writing (Rosalind Thomas on Greek literacy, Keith Hopkins on the keeping of army accounts, Roger Bagnall on everyday writing in Egypt). Besides the early chapters of Cavallo and Chartier's History of Reading in the West there has been massive work on Roman libraries (George Houston and Greg Woolf), new insights from the Oxyrhynchus discoveries (William Johnson's exacting study of the book-roll), and, though not Frampton's specific concern, much on the earliest Christian reading and writing. To cap it all came the 2005 discovery of a manuscript of Περί ἀλυπίας or De Indolentia, the great physician Galen's long-lost account of his stoical response to the loss of most of the manuscripts of his own works and others he had copied and edited in the fire of 192 at Rome's Temple of Peace, a discovery that has produced a weighty bibliography on writing and reading in later antiquity. Though it's not widely known among modern book historians with their post-Gutenberg orientation, the study of the book in the classical period is alive and well, no longer defined faut de mieux by epigraphers and papyrologists.

Paradoxically, this means it is precisely the great Roman literary writers Frampton can now return to discuss, applying to a selection of authors of the pre-codex era what book history has learned as a result of the response to Harris, to whom she nevertheless pays courteous tribute. Writing was difficult in the Augustan era, Frampton points out—bad pens, fragile papyrus, and the results didn't travel well. In such a setting, she asks, how did authors of the late Republic and early Empire think about, and through, textual materiality? It is these very material obstacles ('bugs', she calls them) that suggest the medium is not the message; artefact and work are not the same, they are aspects of writing the author can play with. This is true not only of great writers like Virgil, who interestingly avoided topoi of writing, but also Ovid, who was saturated in them. Frampton brings not only literary analysis, but a fresh approach to the epigraphic evidence to situate these writers, for whom no contemporary physical evidence exists, in a world of richly expressive textuality.

Chapter One deals with 'Classics and the Study of the Book'. After a summary review of the ways 'book' has been defined over many centuries, and the praise-worthy admission that English does not deal with it particularly well, she suggests that the very idea of 'book' is expanding as book historians work through the global and historical ramifications of its existence. How I wish this were so! Frampton writes as a classicist who has read and is able to cite McKenzie, Darnton, Suarez...