Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities

Classical Culture and Society

by William A. Johnson

In Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire, William Johnson examines the system and culture of reading among the elite in second-century Rome. The investigation proceeds in case-study fashion using the principal surviving witnesses, beginning with the communities of Pliny and Tacitus (with a look at Pliny's teacher, Quintilian) from the time of the emperor Trajan. Johnson then moves on to explore elite reading during the era of the Antonines, including the medical community around Galen, the philological community around Gellius and Fronto (with a look at the curious reading habits of Fronto's pupil Marcus Aurelius), and the intellectual communities lampooned by the satirist Lucian. Along the way, evidence from the papyri is deployed to help to understand better and more concretely both the mechanics of reading, and the social interactions that surrounded the ancient book. The result is a rich cultural history of individual reading communities that differentiate themselves in interesting ways even while in aggregate showing a coherent reading culture with fascinating similarities and contrasts to the reading culture of today.

Genres: History, Books About Books

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

William A. Johnson is Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Duke University.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

While not definitive, these loosely connected essays are suggestive of a literary world at once much different than and, in a limited context, strangely similar to our own.
Dismissing the long-debated contention that the ancients were generally incapable of silent reading, the author still notes how much more public orality was linked to reading than it is in our culture. Some of the reason for this was purely economic. When an “edition” of a text was a single, unique holograph, expensively produced, access and demand were increased by public performance. Some of the reason was because of the long tradition of rhetorical ability being linked to political standing and accomplishment. Of all the liberal arts, rhetoric was the most practically important for the man of affairs.
In the high empire, however, high politics had become the provenance of the imperial court. The Senate and the assemblies had declined in importance. Politics had become dangerous, even dirty and demeaning. Elites outside the inner circle nonetheless maintained the old forms of patrons and clients, now exercised in safer forms, one of these being the literary or scholarly circle, the closest parallel to which in our own day will be found in the world of academics..
Here, amongst the literary elites of antiquity, were self-defining and self-perpetuating communities not unlike the academic specialties at their most refined, elites at once locally intimate and cosmopolitan, elites recognizing shared practices of initiation and accomplishment, often at far remove from quotidian popular concerns.
Johnson's book is a prime example of elitist accomplishment today. It is a book for specialists, not the general public, not even a person versed in Roman history and schooled in the contemporary canon of great books. There is little of Vergil or Ovid here, much of Pliny, Aulus Gellius, Fronto, Lucian and other, lesser known, authors. A basic understanding of Greek and Latin is presupposed, so too an ease with the conventions of scholarly citation. To the average, educated reader this book would likely be as obscure as some of the Oxyrhynchus papyri are to its author.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really appreciated how Johnson locates reading within the various social contexts it took place via close readings of books and treatises that discuss the practices surrounding reading. In so doing, he unseats prior suggestions that reading was most often a lone pursuit, uncovering various arenas where reading and memorization took place as collective action. Moreover, Johnson demonstrates how these public readings enabled books/bookrolls and reading to achieve their elite status, a practice that is somewhat mimicked by how reading in a classroom context produces cannonical knowledge today. Indeed, if there was one thing I would have been interested in seeing more of here it would be more gestures toward how the ideologies and behaviors surrounding reading remain entrenched in contemporary society. That said, Johnson doesn't deserve to be critiqued for what his book doesn't set out to do. It does quite a bit, and very well.

[Rosa]

I really could've used a lot of the stuff in the conclusion for my thesis :(

[Lauren Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everyone who knows me knows how much I like books about books and reading about reading. This was a little dry for me. Perhaps because it was less about a passion for reading than about a snobbery about it. It was a way of excluding all those who didn't have the leisure to memorize passages, the network to borrow and lend rare texts and the desire to quibble over obscure word usages. I'd recommend it only to those whose specialty is the classics or who has an academic interest in the history of reading.