Chapter 4 - Recitation from tablets

Summary

The similar qualities attributed to tablets, their characteristic linguistic forms, and the parallel treatment accorded such forms all suggest that the underlying relationship the Romans themselves perceived, in calling these forms carmina, was no superficial one. Moreover, Roman tabulae not only displayed similarities. In the ceremonies with which they were associated, they were used in two similar, major ways, the subjects, respectively, of this chapter and the next: first, as templates for reading (itself performed in a distinct and powerful way, called recitatio), and second, as the objects created in association with, and embodying the result of, that ceremony. In these ceremonies, tablets were not just useful but both significant and active. Their language, described in chapter three, is thus not only “formalized” but approaches what philosophers of language (following J. L. Austin and J. R. Searle) call “performative”: “the issuing of the utterance is the performing of an action.” Austin, Searle, and others have noted that defined circumstances (or “conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect”) must exist for words to have performative effect, and that these procedures must be executed correctly and completely. But the ways in which Roman tabulae are used demonstrate that, in this Roman context at least, performative language cannot be abstracted from physical form, and that agreed-upon ceremonial completed correctly must be understood as far more than just a necessary “precondition” that allows performative language to have its effect.