Epilogue: the Roman world

Summary

By comparison with Greece, the world of Roman history has remained unruffled by the controversies surrounding orality or the effects of literacy. On the whole, Rome has seemed safely distant from the beginnings of alphabetic writing and any related problems — though there are areas where such preoccupations are not irrelevant. Certainly Roman society in the late Republic and Empire is far more dominated by books and documents than classical Greece. Latin literature inherited the learned weight of Hellenistic scholarship, and everyone would agree that there was plenty of reading matter (at least in the cities), a flourishing book-trade, and a fairly wide reading public, certainly by the second century AD. It would be quite misguided to deny that the written word was important in administration, in the records of taxation, trials and the citizen-body, in the circulation of literature, and in everyday life. Writing in various forms was surely much more deeply integrated into the life of at least the cities by the first century BC than it had been in classical Greece. But how deeply? To deny a similarity between classical Greece and Rome does not reach the limit of possible enquiry. As current discussions about the nature of Roman administration show, for instance, much is unclear even about the precise place of the written document in Rome.