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Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study in Elite Communities
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Basil Dufallo
Aratus and the Astronomical Tradition
Emma Gee
Gift and Gain: How Money Transformed Ancient Rome
Neil Coffee
Mosaics of Knowledge: Representing Information in the Roman World
Andrew M. Riggsby
Mosaics of Knowledge Representing Information in the Roman World
Andrew M. Riggsby
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2. Tables and Tabular Organization 42 Actual Tables 50 Not Tables 54 Outliers 70 Conclusions 73
3. Weights and Measures 83 How Does Roman Measurement Work? 85 Standards and Standardization 100 Direct Standardization 107 Indirect Standardization 115 Complications 120 Conclusions 125 Chapter Appendix 129
4. Representing Three Dimensions 130 Perspective and the Theory of Space 131 The Corpora 135 Space in the Landscapes 138 Two Comprehensive Examples 147 Conclusions 149
5. Representing Two Dimensions 154 Data Graphics 154 Plans 164
What Is a “Map”? 172
Ancient Maps 180
Maps as Information Technology 194
Chapter Appendix 201
6. Conclusion 203
Where Are We Now? 203
Going Forward I: Power and Other Topics 210
Going Forward II: An IT Revolution in Late Antiquity? 216
References 223
Index 245
FIGURES
1.1 Supposed theater token from Pompeii 32
1.2 Supposed amphitheater token from Arles 33
1.3 Inscription on a theater seat from Verona; token from the amphitheater at Frosinone 35
2.1 Organization of status theory 43
2.2 Schematic diagram of Roman centuriation 50
2.3 Military duty roster from Egypt 53
2.4 Military duty roster from Egypt 54
2.5 Victorius, Calculus 63
4.1 Landscape from the columbarium of Villa Doria Pamphilj 142
4.2 Landscape from room 14, Villa A, Oplontis 143
4.3 Landscape from the villa under the Farnesina 145
4.4 Fall of Icarus 153
5.1 Roman portable sundial 156
5.2 Schematic illustration from a land-surveying manual 158
5.3 More naturalistic illustration from a land-surveying manual 158
5.4 Inscription detailing rights to draw water 159
5.5 Inscription showing plans for the funerary complex of Claudia Peloris and Ti. Claudius Eutychus 166
5.6 “Map” from Dura Europos 173
5.7 Population-adjusted map illustrating the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election 174
5.8 Stylized map illustrating the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election 175
5.9 Network rendering of places named in Caesar 178
5.10 Schematic, two-dimensional rendering of places named in Caesar 179
5.11 Forma Urbis Romae, detail 182
5.12 Forma Urbis Romae, detail 182
5.13 Scale of FUR implied by individual comparisons with modern measurement and magnitude of each measurement 183
5.14 Fragment of inscribed map depicting the centuriation at Arausio 187
5.15 Tabula Peutingeriana, detail 192
5.16 Tabula Peutingeriana, detail 192
6.1 Jerome, Chronicle 219
TABLES
1.1 Early references to the supposed Arles amphitheater token 34
1.2 Supposed form of reference to a centralized catalog of Roman public statuary 39
1.3 Data about three American cities, arranged in tabular form 41
2.1 Varro illustrates linked proportions with numbers 52
2.2 Varro uses linked proportions to structure the declension of an adjective 52
2.3 Modern declension of the phrase hic Marcus 59
3.1 Multiple meanings of symbols used in systems of measurement 92
3.2 Variations in actual weights with respect to presumed standard values 103
3.3 References to measured lots of grain in TPSulp 117
3.4 Standard reference values for several Roman units of measurement 129
5.1 Concordance of Roman building plans 202
PLATES
1 Fasti Amiternini, with color coding
2 Riot in the Amphitheater, Pompeii
3 Landscape from the columbarium of Villa Doria Pamphilj
4 Landscape from the villa under the Farnesina, walkway
5 Landscape from the villa under the Farnesina, cubiculum
6 Landscape from a villa at Boscotrecase
7 Landscape from the villa under the Farnesina, triclinium
8 Fragment of marble map of Rome (“via Anicia” fragment)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This project, at least some parts of it, dates back a long time. The seminar alluded to at the beginning of chapter 2 was offered in the late 1990s, and I suspect that some of the thoughts here probably first arose before I finished graduate school, while I was reading Edward Tufte’s books from my mother’s book shelf. I have acquired an unusually large number of scholarly debts over that time (and unfortunately have doubtless forgotten others equally important). I got particularly extensive assistance and commentary from Klaus Geus, Paul Keyser, Michael Koortbojian, Rabun Taylor, and the readers for Oxford University Press. Tony Corbeill, Serafina Cuomo, Tony Grafton, Joseph Howley, Nate Jones, Stephanie Frampton, John Clarke, Eric Orlin, Liz Robinson, Philip Stinson, and Tyler Travillian all read and commented on chapters in draft. I have also gotten other help, particularly in the form of penetrating questions or advance access to work in progress from Dorian Borbonus, Alan Cameron, C. Michael Chin, Megan Goldman-Petri, Julia Hejduk, Alexander Jones, Duncan McRae, Reviel Netz, Carlos Noreña, Laura Novick, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Tim Parkin, J.-B. Piggin, Phil Resnik and Jiesi Shi, Jane Sancinito, Josh Sosin, and a seminar which covered this material (Gabrielle Bouzigard, Timothy Corcoran, Eli Fleming, Vera Leh, Will Shrout, and Alain Zamarian). I would also like to thank audiences at Brown, Chicago, Columbia, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Maryland-Baltimore County, Minnesota, NYU, North Carolina, Penn, Princeton, Texas Tech, Yale, and the Finnish Institute in Rome for subjecting various parts of the argument to friendly scrutiny. And, of course, I need to thank Joe Farrell, the series editor, and Stefan Vranka, the sponsoring editor, for their interest, encouragement, and assistance in transforming the “project” into an actual book.
Finally, I would particularly like to signal the role in this project of my ongoing interaction with two younger scholars. Seth Bernard and Sarah Bond in their distinct, inimitable ways provided a stream of questions, prods, prompts, and problems and materials to work with. A project of this scope necessarily relies on the kindness of strangers to have any hope of reaching the necessary breadth, but even beyond that the constant presence of these two kept me honest and on my toes.
While I have been working on parts of this project for many years, the core of the research and writing took place over two academic years, and I am more than happy to thank the funding entities that made that possible. In 2010–11, I held the NEH/Roger A. Hornsby Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome. In addition to the scholars named earlier, I must thank the Academy for both the
Fellowship and the atmosphere uniquely hospitable to scholarship. Then in 2013–14, I was the Stanley Kelley Jr. Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton, a position which (perhaps ironically) carries quite modest teaching responsibilities and which in turn allowed me to take advantage of the remarkable research resources there. My thanks go to the University, the Classics Department, and to Andrew Feldherr, who brought it all together.
I also need to thank several institutions which supplied other kinds of intellectual resources. The Soprintendenza Archeologia del Veneto and Dott.ssa Brunella Bruno, the director of its Nucleo Operativo di Verona, were kind enough to allow me direct examination of the two bronze map fragments found there (and discussed in chapter 5). The Bodleian Library in Oxford allowed me to inspect their manuscript of Jerome’s Chronicle (discussed in the conclusion). Bruce Barker-Benfield, Senior Assistant Librarian in the Department of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts there, was particularly generous with his time and expertise in discussing the manuscript with me, and I hope to be able to publish further fruits of those discussions in due course. The Bibliothèque municipale d'Avignon provided images of an extremely rare volume on the antiquities of Arles. Finally, I (as every academic) must thank the library staff at my home institution, especially Shiela Winchester, the Classics bibliographer, and the InterLibrary Services Department for providing (and often finding) an endless supply of research materials. Kristina Schlegel did all the original drawings masterfully. Andrea Pittard provided assistance with the manuscript and bibliography. Khoa Tran did heroic work with image permissions. C. Berglie, the copy editor, had to deal with a rat’s nest of references.
It would probably not have been possible for me to write this book a decade earlier. Modern information technology made it possible for me to gather the kind of scattered evidence it relies on and to move into several areas that were previously unfamiliar to me. At the same time, it relied on the serendipity provided by traditional library shelving, and I fear that in another decade or so it will again be impossible to write a book of this sort, where the objects of inquiry and sources of evidence were not givens from the beginning.
My wife, Lisa Sandberg, once again brought her formidable editing skills to bear to grant this book such readability as it has, despite being subjected to the interminable process through which I brought the framework together.
My father was a scientist with a strong amateur interest in premodern history, and was happy that he was able to read this whole book in manuscript before his death. And even before learning of her career as a computer programmer, one could spot my mother’s interest in data and design from the way she puts together a quilt. It is to them that this book is dedicated.
Plate 1 Fasti Amiternini. Color coding indicates categories of information
DeA Picture Library, licensed by Alinari
Plate 2 Riot in the Amphitheater (Pompeii, now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples)
Landscape from the columbarium of the Villa Doria Pamphilj (A/ XII)
Plate 3
Su concessione del Ministerio dei beni e delle attivit à culturali e del turismo— Museo Nazionale Romano
Plate 4 Landscape from the villa under the Farnesina, walkway FG (inv. 1233) Su concessione del Ministerio dei beni e delle attivit à culturali e del turismo—
Museo Nazionale Romano
Landscape from the villa under the Farnesina, cubiculum D (inv. 1037)
Plate 5
Su concessione del Ministerio dei beni e delle attivit à culturali e del turismo— Museo
Plate 7 Landscape from the villa under the Farnesina, triclinium C (inv. 1080)
Su concessione del Ministerio dei beni e delle attivit à culturali e del turismo—
Museo Nazionale Romano
Plate 8 Fragment of a marble map of Rome (the “via Anicia” fragment)
Su concessione del Ministerio dei beni e delle attività culturali e del turismo—Museo Nazionale Romano
A Brief Orientation
This book investigates information technologies in the classical Roman world— their invention, diffusion, and use, and the interactions among those processes. The focus is on conceptual developments—e.g., “mapping,” “weighing,” “listing”— rather than material ones—e.g., “codex,” “abacus.” (Within the area covered, however, the interaction of concepts with the materiality of their actual uses will be a recurring theme.) It also focuses principally on “high” technologies rather than, say, literacy or numeracy in general. Perhaps paradoxically, this will end up setting the book against most work to date on classical knowledge regimes. Scholarship has typically dealt with intra-elite and largely discursive phenomena. As a result, we know a good deal about the intellectual history of antiquity’s formalized disciplines (e.g., rhetoric, philosophy, law, literature, grammar) and how they competed with and inflected one another. By contrast, my goal is to uncover an alternative set of regimes which were generally not theorized in antiquity, but which informed the practices of daily life, and did so in a broad variety of social locations (even if some had elite origins). These turn out to include relatively advanced technologies like complicated lists, tables, and textual illustrations.
While most of the book will be about technologies that were “advanced” in their time, I want to begin with a brief narrative of the study of a more basic one: literacy. Until a few decades ago it was a commonly, if not universally, held view that the ability to read and write was widespread in the Roman world, not different at least in kind from advanced nations in the modern world. This changed dramatically with the publication in 1989 of William Harris’ Ancient Literacy. Harris deployed comparative evidence to argue that such mass literacy could only exist in contexts that met a number of social and institutional prerequisites—systematic education, broad economic advantages that flow only to the literate, and the like—then showed systematically that almost none of this was true anywhere in the classical world. On this basis he then projected rough literacy rates on the order of 1% to 30% at various times and places within that world. Much of the response to Harris has been accepting, if slightly more “optimistic,” at least on a local level. That is, scholars
have been more willing to see social and institutional supports for literacy, even if they take different forms than modern ones and even if they only create larger pockets of literacy rather than universalizing it. But the real differences lie not in tweaking Harris’ numbers but in adding to his stock of questions and localizing their answers. There has been an increasing analytic interest in what might be called, in the plural of the title of Johnson and Parker’s 2009 book, Ancient Literacies. That is, with the basic quantitative picture already in place, interest has shifted to more qualitative questions of how reading and writing skills (and, to a lesser extent, numeracy) were employed by individuals in particular contexts. What kind of information, Woolf 2009 asks, would labels on commercial olive oil jars in their highly stereotyped format have been able to convey to “readers” in the industry, who might not be fully literate in general terms and might not even be Latin speakers? Or what, Beard 1991 considers, is the motivating effect of rituals that mediated access to the divine through writing?
I tell this story, which will already be familiar to many readers, because it has multiple resonances with the unfamiliar story I will tell in the body of this book. First, I hope also to make modern states of affairs seem less natural. One reason (though not, of course, the only one) it was easy to accept a highly literate antiquity was the ease with which reading comes to individuals today. It does not then feel like a very strong claim to extend that across an entire society, though in fact it is. The information technologies discussed in this book—things like numbered lists, numerical tables, or mechanical weights and measures—offer a similar temptation. Their use comes so naturally to anyone acculturated in the modern world that we are likely to take it for granted that they were available in the ancient world as well. Most insidiously, something merely similar to a modern device can readily be taken for fully identical.
Additionally, however, I would like to try to borrow some of the qualitative focus that characterizes much of the response to Ancient Literacy. That is, I ask not just how often Romans used various technologies but also when, how, and why. Those contextual questions are probably good historical practice in general, but they strike me as particularly urgent in this specific area of technology. As it happens, most of the information technologies discussed here were not huge successes that spread through the Roman world in the way, say, blown glass or concrete construction did. But the reason I can talk about them at length is that they were at least invented, unlike, say, stainess steel or stirrups. One need not (as most readers probably will not) believe in the necessary “progress” of technology to be puzzled by a lack of eagerness to adopt what were at least technically useful devices. “Why did the Romans use tables or scale representations differently than how we do?” for instance, is interesting because it will likely tell us as much about the Romans in general as about those tables or plans. Different people use technologies for particular purposes in particular circumstances. The question, thus, is almost never whether a particular technology is “good” or “powerful” or “elegant,” or anything else. The issue is whether particular people (or enough of them) find it worthwhile
to acquire that technology for some particular task before them. In a broad sense, we could make this point about any adoption of any technology, but I will argue that Roman cost-benefit calculations in this respect were particularly strict and particularly local.
While I do not, I hope, adopt a teleological view of technological change, I should probably also point out that I do not hold a purely culturalist view, either (even though the previous paragraph might have been read that way). I don’t think it is meaningful to describe any technology as “good” or “the best,” only good or best for some particular end (which might itself be defined by a complex of mechanical, social, and other aims). However, this does mean that to the extent that we understand those aims, we can say that some technologies are objectively better: they have a lower rate of false positives, they create less pollution, they are cheaper, the hardware is less likely to malfunction, they require fewer (or, if this is what circumstances demand, more numerous) human workers, they channel revenue to a politically powerful class. My account is also imperfectly culturalist because I believe that the invention and diffusion of inventions are path-dependent. Devices do not simply arise whenever and wherever cultural circumstance might make them desirable. Various material preconditions and contingent discoveries are required. I don’t claim to have proven the truth of this point of view. Rather, I have sketched an approach which will stand or fall depending on how well it actually works throughout the body of the study.
Though quite broad, the scope of this book will be limited in two important ways. Chronologically, it will extend, at least in principle, from the earliest Roman times to the year 300 (all dates will be ce unless otherwise noted). Any precise cutoff is of course arbitrary to some extent, but I have chosen this one for several reasons. As a practical matter, going substantially later would have expanded the available evidence too much to be able to handle (the reader will have to decide whether I have already bitten off more than I can chew). A cut-off around 300 ce also corresponds to a fairly traditional sense of “classical” (that is, non-Christian) Roman culture. That would not obviously be relevant in itself, but I suspect that it is connected to another reason for the cut-off. It appears to me, on the basis of evidence I have admittedly scrutinized less carefully, that there is an information technology revolution in Late Antiquity. There seem to be significant changes to the technologies described in most of my chapters (and the invention of at least one important new one) during roughly the fourth and fifth centuries. I will say a little more about both the shape and the possible reasons (some Christianity-based) for this revolution in the last chapter, but the topic seems to me to require separate treatment. The end date of 300 will not be applied mechanically. First, evidence from later periods can sometimes be used to cast light on earlier ones. Second, I will be fairly generous in allowing myself to use evidence (especially inscriptions) that is not definitively datable to within my period.
The other constraint will also be partial, perhaps even more so. Though I have been speaking (and will continue to do so) of “Roman” information technology, the
focus of some of the chapters will be specifically on the Latin-speaking world. That is hardly an obvious line to draw in a historical rather than, say, a literary context, so let me say a few words about why a linguistic distinction might be appropriate to the particular topic and in what ways in which this limitation will and will not be observed over the course of the book. Many of the technologies discussed here, especially in those first two chapters, can be seen as specialized forms of literacy. This seems to me to be the central insight of Jack Goody’s famous 1977 book, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, and its chapters on the cognitive operations enabled or encouraged by tables, lists, formulas, and recipes. My subject matter is deeper and narrower than Goody’s, but I also differ from him in one methodological emphasis. He tends to look more at what written technologies can do than what they actually do. The former was important for opening up a field of inquiry in a theoretical kind of way, but the historical specificity that I am aiming for seems to require the latter. Seeing these technologies as an aspect of literacy accounts for a restriction on the scope of this book. Though I will generally speak of “Rome” and “Romans,” my focus will be on the Latin world when the devices in question are used and transmitted by writing, and so we would not necessarily expect them to be constant across linguistic boundaries.
Two examples might help show how this linguistic division clearly can work in practice (one is from outside the realm of this study and the other will be treated at length in chapter 2). For the former, I offer the following observation on differences in substance between contracts surviving from Roman Egypt correlated with the language in which they are written (Alonso 2016, 65):
[T]he contracts concluded by Romans in Greek are usually indistinguishable from those concluded by [non-citizens]. Vain have been most attempts to identify “Roman” traits in these Greek contracts. Their Latin contracts, instead, which are rather scarce, do adhere to the Roman models both in form and content, even if occasionally with peregrine accretions.
The contracts in question, even the ones in Greek, were concluded between Roman citizens. The difference is thus not one of culture in general or even legal culture but, rather, of language. Alonso suggests, plausibly enough, that the key factor was reliance on notaries among the less privileged classes to produce these kinds of documents. The second example has to do with tables (the organizational device, not the piece of furniture). These are not, as it turns out, particularly common in either the Latin- or Greek-speaking worlds, though they do appear in certain, very limited contexts. One of those contexts in the Greek world was the display of astronomical data of various sorts. Yet these do not appear in Latin. Roman authors either give (some of) the same information in continuous prose or in lists or, in the extreme case of Vettius Valens (second century), write in Greek themselves.
These examples are not meant to show that Latin and Greek information technologies are entirely cut off from each other, a claim that would clearly be false. Rather, I simply wish to illustrate that there are both theoretical and empirical
reasons to suspect that there might be a significant level of separation. Nor do I mean to ignore the Greek-speaking world all together. Most mechanically, there are at least a couple of cases where we have Greek texts that appear to be fairly direct representations of operations of the Roman state originally conducted in Latin (e.g., translations of senatorial decrees, labels on weights authorized by a Roman governor). Though they are rare, I will also record cases where I think direct influence from Greece to Rome can be established (e.g., the introduction of the chronological table). Occasionally, there will be points at which Greek evidence seems to provide an illuminating comparison, if not of a different sort than Mesopotamian cuneiform or Renaissance Italian evidence might offer. Finally, the technologies of chapters 3 through 5 are less clearly tied to writing and so there is less call for a distinction. For instance, I look at weights and measures from across the Roman Empire. Even in those cases, however, the linguistic distinctions can resurface. The most “scientific” tradition of ancient (Mediterranean) mapping, for instance, is closely tied, even subordinate to, written geographical texts, and this may be reflected in broader practice. Greek and Roman practice in textual illustration overlaps in some respects, but contrasts in others.
In addition to those restrictions of scope I should mention what may seem a peculiar feature of many of the arguments. This book discusses devices that I presume will be familiar not only to every reader but also—with the possible exception of “perspective” in chapter 4—to their school-aged children. It may then come as a surprise that in many of the chapters I spend as much time as I do working out definitions of terms like “list,” “table,” and “map.” I will say a few words here about why that is. I do not intend to tease out “what we really mean” by these terms in the manner of an analytic philosopher. Nor do I intend a more historical or philological investigation of the possible semantic range of these English words, though for clarity’s sake I will point out ambiguities that I fear may mislead. Nor do I think that any of these technologies form a “natural kind” like, arguably, “dinosaur” or “proton” or “water.” Nor, finally, am I generally trying to reconstruct ancient Roman conceptual categories. Rather, I am trying to capture features of Roman practice that line up only approximately with any language’s lexicon. In these cases I have decided that the easiest way forward is not to try the reader with frequent neologisms (“category 1 map,” “category 2 map,” etc.) or circumlocutions (“listwhose-order-conveys-information-to-the-intended-audience” vs. “list-with-indicespermanently-attached-rather-than-created-on-the-fly”). I have chosen instead to use ordinary words that make the general area of interest clear, then to stipulate whatever additional properties are important for my local purpose. I do not defend these definitions as truer than any other. I intend them as useful, however, if they help express significant distinctions in Roman practice. For example, are lists of the types just mentioned restricted to specific use-contexts?
It is also true, however, that there is another, more specific issue at stake, and it is one that systematically results in more complex definitions. This arises from the relation of form and function in the technologies. When definitions have been
