How literate was the Roman world? While literacy may have been more prevalent among the elite (and their clients, slaves, and freedmen) or those associated with Roman power (army, administration, tax collection, annonae), a “bundle of...
moreHow literate was the Roman world?
While literacy may have been more prevalent among the elite (and their clients, slaves, and freedmen) or those associated with Roman power (army, administration, tax collection, annonae), a “bundle of literacies” must be acknowledged (Woolf 2002: 184f.). Many people were capable of writing if they needed it. This included (on an unprecedented scale compared with Hellenistic–Republican times) many “lower class” people, like craftsmen,merchants, bankers, and farmers. Major regional differences within the empire, especially between north-western Europe and the central and eastern Mediterranean, are also apparent. It is the expectations of a Roman literate
society that created the preference for writing over iconographic representations: for example, the boundary stones, which mark the territories of the coloniae of Arles and
Aix-en-Provence (ILN-3, 274–86), exclusively use writing and no heraldic devices, unlike similar markers in medieval and modern times. This does not reflect the degree of literacy in these local societies, but it does indicate a society in which people were expected to cope with writing. We can recognize the evolution of different strands of literacy, each of which may have its own chronology and distribution. From the fourth century CE, literacy seems to be once again largely limited to the elite, professional scribes, and to religious and administrative texts.
