Date: Wed, 21 Oct 1998 22:55:53 +0100 (BST)
From: Don Fowler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Wed, 21 Oct 1998, John Ahern wrote:
> >The following questions arise from a comparison I would like to make
> >between Virgil's and Dante's readers, with a gap of thirteen hundred years
> >between them, and with many changes in the technology of writing: the
> >codex, word separation, silent reading, changes in methods of textual
> >production, cross referencing, and hypertext.
>
> What is the current understanding of the relationship between the Aeneid
> and its earliest audience?
There is some disagreement about this amongst classicists, but in general
you should be wary of drawing big distinctions about oppositions between
ancient and medieval or modern reading practice. The answers that follow
are all _I_ believe the best available construction, but others may
differ. The subject has been bedevilled by "big stories" generated from
modern antipathy to textuality (e.g.the works of Saenger).
>
> Am I correct in guessing that as a text available in scrolls
> 1) it was read aloud to groups
It could be, but private reading was common throughout antiquity.
> 2) it was sometimes read by single readers who perhaps performed or uttered
> it in a low voice?
This is a communis opinio but we have explicit statements from opposite
ends of antiquity that silent reading was the norm. The standard
treatment, though in my view it underestimates silent reading, is:
Knox, Bernard M.W. (1968) Silent Reading in Antiquity.
Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 9 (1968) 421-435.
Cf. Antiphanes Sappho fr. 194 PCG (Athenaeus 10. 450e) `anyone standing
next to someone else reading will not hear him', Ptolemy On the Criterion
5, trans. in P.
Huby and G. Neal The Criterion of Truth (Liverpool 1989) 191:
The internal logos of thought is itself sufficient for judging
things and discovering their natures: uttered logos makes no contribution
to the process. Rather it disturbs and distracts our investigations if it
comes into operation, just as the motions of the senses do. This is why we
are more likely to discover what we are seeking in states of peace and
quiet, and why we keep quiet too when we are reading books if we are
concentrating hard.
> 3) Cross-referencing was not written into to it because it was not easy to
> skip from verse to verse within a scroll, or between scrolls,
I'm not sure what is meant by cross-referencing being "written in", but it
would be hard to find a world literature whose current reading practice
leans more heavily on intertextuality than Latin, so implicit
cross-referencing is everywhere patent. Homeric texts had marginal signs
pointing to standard commentaries: other texts would be plain. It wasn't
that hard to move around a scroll, which had the advantage of a resizable
window of text (you can only have a two page spread open in a codex, but a
scroll could be opened to as many columns as your table could take).
> 4) that it ordinarily did not appear with gloss or commentary.
Ancient commentaries were originally separate works (hypomnemata or
commentarii), boiled down in later antiquity into marginal "scholia". Most
people would have read Homer with commentaries, and the practice of
Vergilian commentary began early. But it would be true to say that most
texts people read would have been relatively "plain" texts.
>
> Any bibiliographical references on this matter would be most welcome,
There's a vast amount, but the two great compendia are still Das antike
Buchwesen and Dir Buchrolle in der Kunst by T. Birt: very good, very old,
and in German ...
Don Fowler
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* Don Fowler, Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Jesus College, Oxford OX1 3DW.*
* [EMAIL PROTECTED], Telephone (01865) 279700, Fax (01865) 279687.*
* Home Page: http://jesus.ox.ac.uk/~dpf/ *
* Classics at Oxford: http://www.classics.ox.ac.uk *
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University of Chicago Online Virgil discussion, bibliography & links
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