The Point of the Stilus more

THE POINT OF THE STILUS: TECHNIQUES IN ROMAN WRITING ‘At my top end I am flat – but not flat at the lower. I am turned both ways by hand and kept busy with diverse duties. One of my parts revokes what the other has made.’ 1 ‘It is writing with the stilus which produces by far the most profit…. We must therefore write as carefully and as much as possible... this is where the roots lie, this is where the foundations are, this is where the wealth is stored in the emergency reserves of our treasury, to be brought out to meet sudden contingencies when circumstances demand’.2 Those who wrote the earliest literature in Rome owed their working methods to the stilus. 3 The utilitarian nature of the instrument helped to ensure the incorporation of stilus writing into many areas of Roman life. In the classroom and intellectual life, or the lawcourts, a working practice developed that centred upon the usefulness of stilus writing. The world of Roman rhetoric, in particular, made good use of this writing instrument such that the Roman use of the stilus is perhaps responsible for the development of literature as we know it in the West today. 4 In this paper I will present some evidence to show that this was so. ‘De summo planus, sed non ego planus in imo. Versor utrimque manu,, diverse et munere fungor. Altera pars revocat, quidquid pars altera fecit’, Symphosii Scholastici Ænigmata, 289. 2 ‘Sic utilitatis etiam longe plurimum adfert stilus… scribendum ergo quam diligentissime et quam plurimum…illic radices, illic fundamenta sunt, illic opes velut sanctiore quodam aerario conditae, unde ad subitos quoque casus cum res exiget proferantur’, Quintilian, Inst. 10.3.1. 3 The spelling ‘stilus’ is preferable to the ‘stylus’ variant and will be used here. This orthography distinguishes the sharp writing instrument from other stake-like instruments, the descriptive term for which comes from Greek ‘στυλος’ meaning ‘column’. 4 Greg Woolf wrote: ‘Despite the huge volume of writing produced in running the Roman empire, and the text-based view we have of it, power was more closely associated with speaking than writing. Whether the object was to sway the emperor or the illiterate masses, speech, not writing, was the essential skill to master in order to make friends and influence people in the Roman empire’, G. Woolf, ‘Literacy’ in Cambridge Ancient History 2 Volume XI (Cambridge, 2000), 875-897, at 897). 1 1 1. HERITAGE People had been writing with stili long before the foundation of Rome. References to the instrument in literature are ancient and substantially predate archaeological finds. 5 The earliest surviving specimens are probably several small bone instruments found at Nimrud, together with sets of exquisite ivory waxed tablets, which have been dated to the eighth century B.C.E.. 6 It is remarkable to note, in fact, that, together with the accompanying wax tablets, the total period during which the stilus was in use is something in excess of 3000 years. 7 In both the Greek and the Etruscan civilisations writers and scribes used stili to scratch into wax, as also into lead and other materials. In a short study of the Etruscan use of wax tablets, for example, Dominique Briquel argued that in the seventh century, Etruscans valued the acquisition of writing highly, and believed it to be a mark of social prestige. For this reason, the aristocracy often had writing materials, including wax tablets, placed in their tombs or displayed in their funerary iconography. Indeed, stilus and tablets, for the Etruscans, belonged to a symbolic representational system in which they seemed to share the same status as other, more obviously prestigious, writing materials. 8 The Romans adopted the stilus on a widespread basis early in their history, no doubt perceiving its overall usefulness and Pliny, Naturalis Historia, 13.21 (69); 34, 139 (14). On the archaic heritage of the wax tablet see the papers of Salvini, Marichal and Sirat in particular in: E. Lalou (Ed.), Les tablettes à écrire de l'Antiquité à l'Epoque moderne (Turnhout, 1992). Sirat writes that the use of the wax tablet is certainly meant in Isaiah VIII, I: C. Sirat, ‘Les tablettes à écrire dans le monde juif’ in Les tablettes à écrire de l'Antiquité à l'Epoque moderne, (Turnhout, 1992) pp. 53-59). 6 G. F. Bass, ‘The Bronze Shipwreck at Ulu Burun: 1986 Campaign’, AJA 93 (1989), 1-29. 7 The stilus was in use throughout the mediaeval period. See: R. Büll, ‘Wachs als Beschreib- und Sigelstoff. Wachsschreibtafeln und ihre Verwendung’, in Vom Wachs. Hoechster Beiträge zur Kenntnis der Wachs, Bd. I.9 (Frankfurt, 1968), 785-894; M. Brown, ‘The Wax Tablet’ British Library Journal 20 (1994). 8 ‘Le prestige social lié à la maitrise de l’écriture s’exprime au vii siècle aussi bien par référence aux tablettes qu’aux livres de lin’, D. Briquel, ‘Les tablettes à écrire étrusques’, in E. Lalou (Ed.), Les tablettes à écrire de l'Antiquité à l'Epoque moderne (Turnhout, 1992), 188-202, at 200. See also M. Lejeune, ‘Les plaques de bronze votives du sanctuaire Vénètes d’Este’, REA 55 (1953) 58-112. 5 2 its versatility. 9 They perhaps also had a special respect for the instrument which may, at least in early Rome, have also had some prestige. 10 The instrument was easy both to manufacture and to use. Usually neat and small in size, say around 11 cm. long, and probably most commonly made of iron, many bronze examples have also been found as well as finer specimens in ivory and silver. Typically a stilus had, as is generally known, one very pointed end used for scratching into wax tablets and other surfaces, thus writing, while the other end was flattened. 11 The flat end acted also as an eraser, and this could be used to remove marks made with the point, simply by turning the instrument in the hand. Thus, a stilus was an uncomplicated tool, utilitarian, extremely hardwearing, easy to carry around, and, unlike other early writing instruments, was always ready for use without prepreparation. 12 This view is at odds with the predominantly legal use of tablets as argued by E. A. Meyer in Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World (Cambridge 2004). 10 A boy’s inscription found in the catacombs in Rome, for example, shows that he died aged but six months, two days, and four hours old. Engraved on his tombstone is a long pointed stilus with a set of writing tablets. These presumably represent the boy’s aristocratic status, F. Cabrol and H. Leclercq (Eds.) Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, s.v. calame, 1579 and Fig. 1858 (Paris 1907-1953). The difficulty in interpreting writing tools illustrated on funerary inscriptions was pointed out by J. d’Encarnação, and L. Cunha, ‘Techique et métiers dans l’épigraphie romaine de l’occident hispanique’, L’Africa Romana 11 (1996), 175-181. Much of the Pannonian writing material was found in burials. Some of these are children. Found in the grave of a young boy in Obudatestverhegy a complete writing kit (inkwell, tablet fragments, stilus and smoothing stone), (I. Bilkei, ‘Römische Schreibgeräte aus Pannonien’, Albia Regia 18 (1980), 61-80 at 73 and catalogue numbers 65–68.) From a child’s grave in Szöny came an inkwell, two stili and a smoothing stone. (I. Bilkei, ibid., catalogue numbers 92–95). Note that a full writing kit apparently consists of stilus and ink pens together. Iconography on inscriptions often corroborates that these in combination made up a writing set. 11 Sanscrit: tig., to be sharp; tigmas, sharp (OCD: v. stilus). Etymologically - an upright pointed thing, PW col. 2533. 12 The calamus reed pen required both preparation and regular sharpening (cf. P. Oxy. ii, 326 – a father writes to his son that he has left the inkwell, the penknife and the reeds with his mother so that she can split and shape them for him). For discussion of carrying apparatus for writing equipment see: D. V. Boeselager, ‘Funde und Darstellungen Römischer Schreibzeugfutterale zur Deutung einer Beigabe in Kölner Gräbern’, Kölner Jahrbuch für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, 22 (1989), 221-239. 9 3 Pliny the Elder, for example, as described by his younger nephew, goes out hunting and has with him not, as might be expected, his spear, but rather his stilus and tablets. These he had taken along so that if he brought back from the expedition ‘empty hands’ (‘manus vacuas’), he might at least have ‘full wax tablets’ (‘plenas ceras’). 13 In Roman life a stilus was sometimes a threat. The Emperor Caligula, for example, when he wished to get rid of a certain member of his senate, arranged for him to be challenged by a group of his colleagues as he entered the curia ‘...and stabbed and torn to pieces with their stili …’ 14 This story shows that in Caligula’s day, senators at least, customarily had their stili to hand. 15 In Latin literature, also, the stilus was a weapon as well as a tool. Horace, for example, uses a popular topos when he writes Pliny (the Younger) Epistulae, 1, 6.1.. For discussion of Pliny’s working methods see: N. I. Herescu, ‘Le mode de composition des écrivains’, REL 34 (1956), 132-146. This Pliny also tells us, making plain that the circumstance is rare, that: ‘stilo …difficulter … abstineo ….’ – ‘with difficulty I abstain from the stilus’, Epistulae. 2.21.1.. In one of his letters he also gives a particularly interesting account of a night spent by a certain ‘philosophus’ in a house that was purported to be haunted. In his description, the ‘philosophus’, hoping to get to the bottom of the ghost problem once and for all, settled himself down when darkness began to fall and began to write with stilus and tablets. When the ghost appeared, the ‘philosophus’ did not stop writing, but steadfastly ‘Non tollere oculos, non remittere stilum’. When the ghost attempted to communicate with him, he disregarded this too, ‘rursusque ceris et stilo incumbit’, Epistulae 7.27.9. The sage exhibits both steely determination as well as what looks like a customary and habitual devotion to private writing. Compare also Quintilian: ‘stilus secreto gaudeat’,‘Let the stilus enjoy privacy’, Inst. 1.12.12.29; 10.7.16.16.. 14 ‘graphisque confossum lacerandum ...’, Suetonius, Lives, Caligula 28.1.17; also Anth. Pal. XVI.324.. Dio Cass (XLIV.16.1) on senators’ request to take writing materials into the Senate. Seneca remembered the death in his own lifetime of the eques Trico in the forum at the hands of the people with their stili (‘populus graphiis’). This anecdote suggests quite widespread literacy amongst the ordinary public (Clem.1.15.1.1). In a later era, stilus murder develops as a topos in the martyrological literature. For example, one Cassian, a Christian notarius, was murdered by his students. They stabbed him en masse with their stili (writing their shorthand symbols on his body in the poet’s description) and battered him mercilessly with their tablets (Prudentius, Perist. IX). This is the earliest of several other similar accounts. See: S. Cavallin, ‘Saint Genès le Notaire’, Eranos 43 (1945), 150-175. 15 See on this text: D. Briquel, ‘Que savons-nous des Tyrrhènika de l’Empereur Claude?’, Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione Classica 116 (1988), 448–570. 13 4 ‘... this stilus shall protect me like a sword laid up in its sheath…’ 16 The poet’s written words can be harmful if he wishes and his stilus is the physical means by which he produces them. 17 A stilus in the hand of one who knew how to use it was often a weapon to be feared, and Roman society was founded and ruled by those who wrote, perhaps quite as much as by those who accomplished feats in war. Men of culture set influential literary norms while emperors, legislators and administrators of various degrees drew up and delivered countless documents: the imperial edicts, the laws, and all the great plethora of bureaucratic documentation that governed people’s lives. In their turn and in response they compelled yet further written deeds and documents: letters of commendation, certificates of attestation and witness, registers, endless varieties of list etcetera, etcetera. Many of these began life on wax tablets in draft. Many were written out on wax in their final form also. 18 In sum, the stilus was commonplace and was frequently used in daily life by all those who were literate. The appearance of early Roman writing itself offers good evidence for this - a point I hope to address in some detail elsewhere, although now it must Pliny the Elder wrote that Porsina had banned stili made of iron, Pliny, Historia Naturalis 34.139.14; later Isidore, Etym. VI.9.1-2. Whether there was actually ever such a ban, if many members of the populace had owned the instruments, the potential hazards therefrom would have been real enough. 16 ‘hic stilus … me veluti custodiet ensis /vagina tectus…’, Hor. Satirae 2.1.39. A stilus was often kept in a purpose-made case, a graphiarium which seems sometimes to have been worn about the person (Martial, XIV.21). 17 Stili were probably often sharpened (Seneca the Younger, QNat. 4b.6.3.100: ‘digitum suum bene acuto graphio pungebat.’ And Martianus Capella (I.65) on stenographers who sharpen stili. The small dagger known today in English as a ‘stiletto’, and shoe heel also termed a ‘stiletto’ known for its point, are both so named on the basis of their similarity to the writing instrument. 18 See: P. Degni, Usi delle tavolette lignee e cerate nel mondo Greco romano (Messina, 1998). 5 simply be stated that the earliest surviving examples of Roman script witness the influence of the tool and its dynamics in their morphology. Far more difficult to show, would be the influence of the instrument upon literary form, but that it might have had an effect is one of the central ideas underlying this paper. 2. EDUCATION The stilus was the writing tool of choice in the classroom. 19 Roman children, if they were to be educated at all, usually began lessons in early childhood and handwriting was a necessary skill, certainly amongst the aristocracy. In their first classes they learned the names of the letters, the sounds they were used to represent, and also how to draw out the letter-forms. For this, the small child would ideally be given a tablet upon which the shapes of the letters had been carefully and accurately pre-inscribed. These were a guide for him to follow so that, as Quintilian writes, ‘... [his] stilus is, as it were, led through the grooves.’ 20 ‘First, wax was the medium in which all children formed their first letters and then learned how to write; and second, the wax tablet was the place where most ancient texts first took shape, the point of written conception.’ M. A. & R. H. Rouse, ‘Wax Tablets’, Language and Communication 9 (1989),175-191 at 175. Pace Meyer (1994) op. cit., 22-23. Several ‘very small’ stili have been found at Vindolanda which Robin Birley thinks were intended for children (Robin Birley personal communication June 2003). Children carrying wax tablets are mentioned in: Horace, Sat. I.6.74; and Prudentius, Perist, 9.13. 20 ‘ut per illos velut sulcos ducatur stilus’, Inst. 1.1.27.9. Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria is one of the earliest surviving manuals or textbooks for students of rhetoric. Such textbooks had been in existence long before Quintilian. On those of Corax and Tisias (see Cicero, Brutus 46). The passage in the Protagoras (326 c-e) in which Plato may be referring to the same process is controversial. See R. Cribiore, Writing, Teachers and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt (Atlanta, Georgia, 1996), 143-144. However, the advantage of having the letterforms ‘cut’ into a surface, so that the child can feel the shapes with his/her fingers as well as see them, is familiar to those informed about the teaching of writing today. Developing a kinetic sense of the letter shapes is an important part of learning to recognise and reproduce them. 19 6 Writing activities were included in many, more advanced classroom tasks. Indeed Quintilian, despite being a teacher of rhetoric, an oral skill one might think, appears to insist upon the value of writing, for ‘... it is the stilus which produces... by far the most... profit’. 21 The first ‘school’ exercises, the progymnasmata (Lat.: praeexercitamina), were a detailed, thorough and laborious preparation for the learning of more advanced rhetorical skills at a later educational stage. 22 They involved a great deal of writing and were graded in difficulty, according to the ability of the students and sequential upon their progress. 23 The exercises with fables (fabulae), for example, seem to have run approximately as follows. 24 Firstly the pupils would write out a fable in their own hands, very probably from a dictation by the master. Their individual efforts having been corrected, each pupil then rewrote his text out ‘in fair’. In the next stage the same text was used as the basis for further extensive, grammatical and compositionbased exercises. Many demanded the writing and rewriting of drafts and new versions. 25 Students might for example extend or expand the story in the same style, ‘... utilitatis etiam longe plurimum adfert stilus.’, Inst. 10.3.1. Inst. 2.19. See also ‘Theon’, in RE 5A (1934), 2037-54; ‘Nicolaus’ in RE 17 (1936), 424-57; also the webpage: ‘Silva Rhetoricae’ [http://rhetoric.byu.edu]. 23 See: T. J. Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds (Cambridge, 1998) at 65-66 and Notes 32-34. P. Oxy XI, 1414 is a Latin school rhetorical exercise. 24 See Hermogenes, Prog 2.12.3. on the composition of a book of fables as a school textbook and its use in the classroom. Books of fables were probably written exclusively for use in the classroom and such manuals were in use at least as early as Demetrius of Phalerus (b. 350 B.C.E.), for he is thought to have written one. Apuleius envisages school use for his Metamorphoses: ‘Visetur et in fabulis audietur doctorum que stili rudis perpetuabitur historia.’ - ‘This story will be seen and heard in simple fables and it will be perpetuated by the early stili of the learned’, Metamorphoses, 6.29.4. Phaedrus’ instrument for writing one of these seems to have been a stilus: ‘Librum exarabo tertium Aesopi stilo’ – ‘I will scratch out with stilus Aesop’s third book’, Fab. 3. Prol. 27. 25 The Hermeneumata are also instructive here. Sometimes just wordlists, they do contain several complete sentences. The student having arrived early in his ‘schoolroom’, behaves, according to the Latin text, as follows: ‘Porrexit mihi puer meus scriniarius tabulas, thecam graphiariam, praeductorium. Loco meo sedens deleo, praeduco ad praescriptum. Ut scripsi ostendo magistro; 22 21 7 produce abbreviated or paraphrased versions, or indeed, as Rutherford put it, turn the whole thing upside down ‘by a thousand rhetorical tricks’. 26 Even the youngest child carried out this type of exercise. The aim was that having fully understood the construction of the model fable in grammatical and stylistic terms, and by having thus absorbed it, the pupil would be able thereafter to produce something similar in style himself. 27 Thus, wrote Quintilian, ‘Let them learn then to tell Aesop’s fables which follow on directly from their nurses’ stories, in pure and unpretentious language; then let them learn carefully to produce that same slender elegance with the stilus in writing’. 28 Again, his emphasis on stilus and tablets is noteworthy. emendavit, induxit’ – ‘My [secretary] boy hands me tablets, stilus case, pencil case.25 I sit in my place. I delete. I [copy the model].25 I show what I have written to the master. He corrects it. He [adds phrases]’. This from the M branch of the manuscript stemma, see A. C. Dionisotti, ‘From Ausonius’ schooldays? A schoolbook and its relatives’ JRS 72 (1982), Note on 22/27, 111. Some vocabulary causes difficulty (in square brackets), (and see discussion in J. V. Muir ‘A Note on Ancient Methods of Learning to Write’ CQ, 34 (1984), 236-7), but this looks like a continuous process of writing, amendment and rewriting of text. The first thing the student does is clean off the previous day’s work. Then the cycle begins: the initial writing-up, the master’s correction and amendment and the pupil’s rewriting. Cf. also on correction: T. J. Morgan, op. cit., 67. 26 W.G. Rutherford (Ed.), Babrius (London, 1883), xl. Note also Cicero, De Or. 2.20.90-92, recommending as especially useful exercises: writing, paraphrase, translation and imitation. 27 A later rhetorician, Peter Ramus, divided rhetorical pedagogy into two overarching activities: analysis and genesis. The observation of successful speaking or writing (‘analysis’) precedes and improves one's own speaking or writing (‘genesis’). Likewise, Teresa Morgan observes what she calls the ‘bivalent approach’ to learning that was part of ancient pedagogy. The bivalence operates between absorption of a skill on the one hand (full appreciation of the style of the original in this case) and articulation of it for oneself on the other (here the pupil writing a new but similar text). In her Chapter 7 in particular, she notes the work of modern educational theorists who find such an approach to be valid and effective. She also comments on the importance given to imitation as a principle in the early classroom (T. J Morgan, op. cit., 251). 28 ‘Igitur Aesopi fabellas, quae fabulis nutricularum proxime succedunt, narrare sermone puro et nihil se supra modum extollente, deinde eandem gracilitatem stilo exigere condiscant’, Quintilian, Inst. 1.9. 2. 8 Another set of school exercises were those known as narratio and these could also have been used with young learners as well as with those more advanced. 29 A memory training exercise when carried out orally, narratio also had an important written component. The students, having been given a narratio, dictated and written down perhaps, would follow this up with further writing-orientated activities such as paraphrasing, summarising or composing alternative versions of the text. In this exercise also, the particular use of the stilus is stressed. 30 In the more advanced Roman ‘classroom’ not much is known about the procedure, but there is one group of texts that could perhaps be more fully explored in this respect, the Hermeneumata, bilingual Greek-Latin schoolbooks. 31 The Hermeneumata contain small dramatized scenes from everyday life, ‘colloquia’, which Dionisotti describes as akin to those used today: ‘in modern language courses and the Cambridge Latin Course.’ 32 In these exercises also there is an emphasis on text-based activities and on writing. 33 For example, there are alphabetically organised lists of words and words arranged according to topic which were probably given in written form to the students for development in further written exercises and in compositions. 34 See Ad Herennium 1.8.12-13; Inst. 2.4.2; 2.4.15. Narratio is an element in a rhetorical speech so this exercise was preparatory for that purpose. Texts used for narrative exercises would have been not only literary and fictional but also historical. 30 ‘Narrationes stilo componi quanta maxima possit adhibita diligentia volo’, Quintilian, Inst. 2.4.15. 31 Extracts of these are preserved in several Carolingian manuscripts and one particular example is contained in the 15th century Vienna manuscript discovered and published by A. C. Dionisotti (MS. Vindob. Suppl. Gr. 43c, (Dionisotti, op. cit.). She believes it preserves a third century text, itself possibly dependent on an earlier source. 32 Dionisotti, op. cit., 86-7. 33 Phrases implying the use of texts/books in the classroom texts set out by Dionisotti (op. cit. 99-100) include: ‘Dat mihi manuale’ (Διδωсιν μοι αναλογιον), 20; ‘edisco scripta mea’ (γραπτα) 30; ‘Accepi lectionem’ (αναγνωсιν) 32. 34 Ibid., 93. 29 9 Thus students in ancient schools learned to craft their texts slowly and carefully. This ancient practice, which is certainly best carried out with a stilus, is at the very root of rhetorical composition. According to Quintilian, even Plato worked in this way, chipping away at his written language when he was preparing a speech. Thus the tale about the four words found drafted in a number of different orders upon his wax tablets reveals him composing by turning his stilus, fine tuning his syntax, making small adjustments to the form so as to make the rhythm as perfect as possible and to better capture the content. 35 This activity, the painstaking effort to ensure that the right words which most perfectly express the content are chosen and precisely placed in the best order, is what the author of the Ad Herennium called the addition of ‘style’, the third part of rhetoric, the ‘... adaptation of suitable words and sentences to the matter devised’. 36 3. CRAFTING THE TEXT The biographer Suetonius, in his description of Domitian, complains that the emperor ‘Never… gave any attention to knowing poetry or history or to the necessary writing’. 37 J. C. Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in Classical Antiquity, (London, New York, 1997), 10 citing Inst. 1.8.64. 36 ‘Elocutio est idoneorum verborum et sententiarum ad inventionem adcommodatio’, Ad Her. 1.2.3. 37 ‘numquam … aut historiae carminibus ue noscendis operam ullam aut stilo uel necessario dedit’, Suetonius, Lives, Domitianus, 20.1.8. 35 10 Indeed, not only did Domitian not practise his writing, he also apparently let secretaries polish and refine his correspondence, his edicts and his speeches, and thus his behaviour fell short of the expectations Suetonius had for him. For Suetonius apparently subscribed to a generally shared cultural belief that good style in written work was achieved by the careful polishing and small-scale revision of drafts. Furthermore, amending and editing one’s work required discrimination and taste. In Suetonius’ day at least, to leave this to another to do on one’s behalf was, even for a busy emperor, imprudent. All writers, including those who customarily preferred to compose by dictating, were advised to work over their texts and to tinker with them in their written form; making small changes, rephrasing the syntax and consulting glossaries perhaps so as to expand the vocabulary used and so on. 38 Crafting a text required care, and sensitivity in one’s written work was an indication of one’s culture and training. This Suetonius perhaps implies in his criticism of Domitian for leaving the amending for others to do on his behalf. Writing and rewriting one’s own draft texts was in any case an integral element of Roman compositional praxis and it would, in itself, help a pupil progress. 39 Personal writing activities were instructive and also useful, because, as Cicero writes, To Quintilian dictation is unnecessary and he argues that when writing the mind and the hand work at equal speeds and one thereby has control of the process. When dictating, in contrast, ‘he to whom we dictate is impatient and we may feel ashamed to hesitate, or pause or alter, as if afraid of this as weakness’ - ‘ille, cui dictamus, urget, atque interim pudet etiam dubitare aut resistere aut mutare quasi conscium infirmitatis nostrae timentis’, Inst. 10.3.19. 39 ‘Nam cum sit in studiis praecipuum, quoque solo verus ille profectus et altis radicibus nixus paretur, scribere ipsum’, Inst. 1.1.28. 38 11 ‘... the marshalling and the arrangement of words is made perfect in the course of writing’. 40 The rewriting and reorganization of text while composing, that Cicero refers to, could be most easily achieved using the stilus eraser. Indeed, the efficiency of the eraser on wax tablets for small-scale ‘local’ revisions remained unrivalled until the invention of the word processor now so fundamentally altering modern approaches to composition. 41 Erasing, for example, was an integral and important part of the compositional method of Horace. This poet at least clearly believed that it belonged to good writing practice to wipe out much of what one wrote. His dictum ‘turn the stilus often if you want to write something worth a second reading’ is very often quoted. 42 It is worth enquiring after the kind of process that Horace is engaged in, where wiping something out is as important as putting it in. I suggest in fact that turning the stilus is not just correction as we might understand the word, meaning the removal of mistakes, but rather a positive process of conscious and studied refinement of a text. Quintilian writes: ‘Next comes ‘correction’, by far the most useful part of studies, for not without reason has it been held that the stilus moves no less when deleting.’ 43 ‘Tum ipsa conlocatio conformatio que verborum perficitur in scribendo’, Cicero, De Oratore, 2.1. 22. Arrangement (dispositio) is particularly emphasised in Ad Her.3.8.16. 41 C. Haas, ‘Writing Technology: Studies in the Materiality of Literacy’ (New Jersey, 1996), passim. 42 ‘Saepe stilum vertas, iterum quae digna legi sint scripturus’, Hor, Satirae, 1.10.l. 40 12 ‘Correction’ (‘emendatio’) had, for Quintilian, pride of place. He believed that a well-written text was one that had been carefully and thoroughly revised as part of its composition process. This revision was not something done in a perfunctory way after the writer had reached a point where he felt that his text was in fact complete. ‘Emendatio’ was part of the writing process itself; less correction than essential improvement. Writing was a utilitarian practice because only written texts gave the opportunity for their leisurely amelioration. In good literary practice a text should be refined and revisited with active mind and hand. Quintilian also recommended that students left the opposite ‘page’ of their diptychs blank so that they had a place to ‘jot down’ notes and ideas as they arose in the process of composition. Thus, the writer could add into his text and supplement it without difficulty. The text under composition was fluid and in flux until it was finally fixed. But the finished text, however much work had gone into it, should always appear artless and natural. The stilus is a natural instrument here. Cicero is insistent upon this point. 44 He praises, for example, the style of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus Porcina (consul in 137 B.C.E.) for its attainment of simplicity by artifice, precisely its ‘artifex stilus’, or, as the Loeb translator renders it, its ‘skill in construction’. 45 The image conjured up here is not one of piles of waste papyrus cast aside impatiently, but of the tablet face worked and reworked, invisibly with the stilus. 46 43 Sequitur emendatio, pars studiorum longe utilissima: neque enim sine causa creditum est stilum non minus agere, cum delet’, Quintilian, Inst. 10.4.1. 44 ‘Nolo haec tam minuta constructio appareat’, Cicero, Orat, 149. 45 Brutus, 96.29. See also: Brutus, 25.27; Vell. Pat. 2.10; Appian, Hist. 80-83; Livy, Epit. 56. 46 There is a larger deletion tool available for wiping the tablet completely clean, the ‘scalprum’. See: D. V. Boeselager (1989), op. cit. 13 Quintilian, while explicitly recommending use of the stilus, compares the writer at work to a sculptor with a chisel, chipping away at his text while composing. 47 The emperor Marcus Aurelius, similarly, compares good writing practice with inscribing or moulding jewels, lovingly, with a metallic tool. His vocabulary, in his description of his contemporaries’ writing, is very evocative of stilus use. ‘Some absolutely work at their words with crowbar and maul as if they were flints: others however grave them with burin and mallet as though they were little gems’. 48 Similarly Marcus Aurelius, in his correspondence with his ‘schoolmaster’ Cornelius Fronto, made several remarks that show his belief both in carefully written text and in its careful fine tuning. He reveals himself drafting compositions on wax, and this puts him in mind of his teacher of oratory. ‘I think of one man only, and deservedly, when the stilus comes into my hand.’ 49 Marcus Aurelius venerated Fronto, not least because he was his teacher of rhetoric and style. Fronto’s compositions were his model and Marcus continually sought his teacher’s advice in matters of linguistic and rhetorical propriety. The emperor was intensely aware that his own works would be models of good usage for his lesser or Inst. 2.4.13; 10.3.18. Metaphors suggesting inscription are not uncommonly used in the literature to describe the process of writing. Many instances in Cicero’s letters, for example Att. 12.1.1; 13.38.1; 14.22.1; 15.1.5; 16.6.l.; 9.26.1; 12.20.7; Ad Brutum 2.4.l.. Another common metaphor compares the action of writing to that of ploughing (‘exarare’), the point of the stilus parting the wax surface as it is pulled, is likened to a ploughshare furrowing soil. 48 ‘Verba prorsus alii vecte et malleo ut silices moliuntur, alii autem caelo et marculo ut gemmulas exculpunt’, Ad Caes. 4.4.3. 49 ‘Merito unum hominem cogito, quom stilus in manus venit’, Ep. Front. 2.8.1. See also M. McDonnell, ‘Writing, Copying and Autograph Manuscripts in Ancient Rome’ CQ 46 (1996), 469-491. 47 14 less-gifted contemporaries as well as for generations to come, and he wrote openly with an eye to posterity. He insisted that writers of status should personally pay scrupulous attention to fine details in their work and that it was incumbent upon them in their representative role that they do so, writing, ‘we... who have dedicated ourselves in dutiful service to the ears of the cultured must needs with the utmost care study these nice distinctions and minutiae’. 50 With the stilus eraser, quite tiny sections of text such as single letters or words could easily be isolated. These details were important, as Marcus again confirms: ‘the transposition or subtraction or alteration of a single letter in many cases changes the force and beauty of a word and testifies to the taste or knowledge of the speaker…. I should be loath therefore, for you not to know the immense difference made by one syllable.’ 51 This, surely, is a man who feels words very closely, who listens intensely and with a delicate, finely-tuned ear. ‘Nos vero qui doctorum auribus servituti serviendae nosmet dedimus, necesse est tenuia quoque ista et minuta summa cum cura persequamur’, Ad Caes. 4.4.3. 51 ‘Una plerumque littera translata aut exempta aut immutata vim verbi ac venustatem commutat et elegantiam vel scientiam loquentis declarat….. nolim igitur te ignorare syllabae unius discrimen quantum referat’, Ad Caes. 4.3. 50 15 4. THE WRITING OF SPEECHES The best orators, very early on, drafted and pre-composed their speeches in writing before they delivered them. 52 The Greeks, Corax (fifth century B.C.E.) and his pupil Tisias (fl. circa 467 B.C.E.) are often referred to as the founders of ancient rhetoric and they were purportedly the first to insist on the importance of order and arrangement in texts. 53 Gorgias is known to have opened his school of rhetoric in Athens c. 431 B.C.E.. He was well-known for the use of rhetorical figures in his speeches and this suggests his literate approach to composition. 54 The existence of his school suggests that practitioners of the oratorical arts in Greece already sought out tuition. It is known also that Isocrates (436–338 B.C.E.), perhaps the student of Tisias, wrote instructional books of some kind. Cicero tells us, in the Brutus, that Isocrates had been a pioneer in the specifically Roman practice of crafting language for greatest effect, in writing, so as to improve the quality of the eventual oral delivery. Thomas and Webb argue indeed that his manuals contained model compositions and speeches for students to work on, emulate and analyse, just as did Quintilian’s pupils also. 55 In early Greek politics, in fact, the need to be able to deliver an effective speech gave rise to an industry in speech writing. 56 In Athens there were professional Cf.: ‘as a reflective art or science [rhetorike] rhetoric was and had to be a product of writing….’ W. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word (London, 1982) at 9. Ecclesiastes 12: 910, to which Ong refers, seems to signal the antiquity of this practice. 53 The unknown author of the Ad Herennium lays great emphasis upon the importance of arrangement (dispositio), Ad Her. 3.8.16. 54 For further discussion on differences between oral and written language, see W. Österreicher, ‘Types of Orality in Text’ in E. Bakker and A. Kahane (edd.), Written Voices, Spoken Signs: Tradition, Performance and the Epic Text (Cambridge, 1997), 190-214. 55 C. G. Thomas and E. K. Webb, ‘From Orality to Rhetoric: An Intellectual Transformation’, in I. Worthington (Ed.), Persuasion: Greek Rhetoric in Action (London, 1994). 56 To both Plato and Aristotle, as Morgan points out, proper speaking was a product of education ( T. J. Morgan, (1998), op. cit., 21, Note 65; and 176, with further discussion). 52 16 speechwriters (logographoi), people who plied their trade dealing in written texts. 57 In the Athenian civil courts, therefore, while litigants delivered their own speeches, the text would very often have been written by someone else. 58 The great early Roman orator, Cato (234–149 B.C.E.), describes himself, in a rescued fragment of his writings, working over the text of a speech, giving instructions for amendments and deletions. This was a characteristic of the working method, as we have seen, of the most literate, best educated Romans, and perhaps it was from Cato’s working style that Roman rhetoric took its cue.59 At any rate, according to Cicero, Cato set new precedents for oratory in Rome: ‘Before him there was nothing so to speak like structure in the joining of words and rhythmical rounding out of the sentence’. 60 Already then, in the middle years of the republic, oratory had developed an essentially literary style in which, ‘… the sound patterns of assonance, alliteration, homoeoteleuton, the figura etymologica and the like were the predominant aids to delivery, and orators worked pairing, parallelism, and tricola very hard’. 61 Cicero writes that it was at Athens that speeches were first committed to writing: ‘... Primum monumentis et litteris oratio est coepta mandari’, ‘...here that oratory first began to be consigned to written record’, Brutus, 6.26. 58 E. Fantham, ‘The Contexts and Occasions of Roman Public Rhetoric’, in W. J. Dominik (Ed.) Roman Eloquence: Rhetoric in Society and Literature (London, 1997), 111-128, at 112. Cf. also Quintilian: ‘Et tum maxime scribere litigatoribus quae illi pro se ipsi dicerent moris.’ It was the practice in those days to write speeches for litigants to deliver in court. Inst. 2.15.30. 59 Oratorum Romanorum Fragmenta, 173. 60 ‘Ante hunc enim, verborum quasi structura et quaedam ad numerum conclusio nulla erat’, Brutus, 8, 32. 61 S. M. Goldberg, ‘The Rhetorical Prologue’ in CP 78, (1983), 198-211 at 202. 57 17 These were surely literary devices, best worked through before delivery in writing. The special care taken over a text in the process of composition meant that a speaker could thus enhance the effect of his oral delivery. Predrafting in writing was an important step and it was expected of the orator. 62 He could not indeed properly overlook it. As Cicero characteristically insists ‘... your stilus - ... is the best teacher of eloquence…’ 63 Cicero also reacts furiously, on one occasion, to someone who suggests that even an orator as accomplished as was Cicero himself was able to speak without at least some kind of pre-preparation and he pours icy water on the notion that anything like good improvised speaking can possibly exist.64 Cicero was a follower of Isocrates in his work and practice and in his own pedagogical works he urged his students to follow the ancient precepts and to predraft texts in writing. There was no other way around it. ‘Our speeches are to be formed by exercising the stilus.’ 65 Thus, an orally delivered speech in the ancient world was perhaps somewhat rarely the unplanned and impromptu flow that it may sometimes have seemed to an innocent audience. 66 W.A. Edwards, The Suasoriae of Seneca the Elder (Cambridge, 1928), 13. ‘... ac stilus... tuus, quem [tu vere dixisti] perfectorem dicendi esse ac magistrum…’, De Oratore, 1. 257.17; see also Brutus 91; De Oratore 1.150.18; Theon, Progymnasata, 62.9.10. 64 Cicero, De Oratore 1.102. 65 ‘Cum exercitatione … stilo … formanda nobis oratio est’, De Oratore 3.190.14; also 1.150.18; and Quintilian: ‘What will happen to anyone who has not taken time to compose the speech with his stilus?’ - ‘Quid fiet alioqui, si spatium componendi orationem stilo non fuerit?’ Inst. 3.9.9. 63 62 18 5. SPEECH TO MEMORY I should emphasise here, the interrelatedness in antiquity of the two media, the written and the spoken. In the earliest classrooms for which we have records there was already a conflation between spoken and written language and their interdependence is ancient in origin. 67 At the first educational stage a child was invariably told that letters are sounds, and throughout the rest of the educational process the two representations of language were never extricated one from the other. Thus, the key to successful speeches lay in careful writing practice and the ability to speak well stemmed from the fact that one had first learned to write. 68 This perhaps encouraged, as we have seen, a view which typically considered writing skills as part of speaking skills and thought that mastery of the one medium brought with it quite naturally accomplishment in the other. ‘To me speaking well and writing well are one and the same’, wrote Quintilian.69 In fact there is a transition from a written text to its meaningful and effective oral presentation. For after having taken the requisite time and care over the drafting of ‘‘Orality’ may at times have had a text under its cloak’, H. G. Snyder, Teachers and Texts in the Ancient World (London, 2000), 177. Speeches were also often ‘written up’ after delivery. 67 Aristotle himself wrote that ‘the standard definition of a letter was an element of sound’ (cited in T. J. Morgan, T. (op. cit.), 176. Grammarians of all eras talk about units of writing as if they were units of speech, and vice versa. This confusion has compounded the belief that a line of text corresponds directly to a sound pattern, or that writing is an exact representation of speech. This could not have happened, however, without the pre-existence of a literate mentality accustomed to seeing sounds represented in writing and to hearing writing translated into sound. 68 ‘multo ac fideli stilo sic formetur oratio, ut scriptorum colorem, etiam quae subito effusa sint, reddant…’, Inst. 10.7.7. 69 ‘Mihi unum atque idem videtur bene dicere ac bene scribere’, Inst. 12.10.52; also 1.4.1-2; 1.5.6. Reading is also important. Quintilian emphasizes the interrelationship of these three skills: ‘Firma facilitas….ad quam scribendo plus an legendo an dicendo conferatur, solere quaeri scio…. verum ita sunt inter se conexa et indiscreta omnia’, ‘I know that it is commonly asked, whether writing, reading or speaking contributes most to a strong facility….. in fact they are all inseparably linked with one another...’ Inst. 10.1.2; also 7.1.2. Cicero used the word ‘litteratus’ to refer to an orator. Since ‘littera’ is the word for ‘letter’, then an orator is someone who is a master of language in written form. 66 19 his speech, the orator has to pay attention to the manner in which he will present or deliver to best effect, the text he has so painstakingly wrought. Establishing the text of the speech was not the end of the job. Effective delivery was vital. How, therefore, was this best accomplished? Simply reading a pre-written script to the audience was not a possibility. Good rhetorical delivery involved a complicated gesture routine and was a complete performance. It also required intense concentration. 70 Here, however, the written text might come again to the rescue, for this could be used as a tool in memorisation. If he learned his text off by heart and thus worked from his memory alone, the orator would be free to give his full attention to the features of the oral performance that now came into play, the right gesture, the right tone, the right emphasis and timing etc. In the ancient world it was probably usually the case that an orator, apparently speaking impromptu, was reciting a script that he had memorised. 71 We know that the mnemonic feats that the average educated Roman is likely to have been able to carry out would be, to our own comprehension, amazing, but the Roman rhetorician made use of certain devices and techniques to assist his memory as much as he might. 72 Teachers of rhetoric insisted on order and sequence in text, for example. This would help memorisation since the memory generally copes well with lists. Blänsdorf (2001) illustrates this point in detail, showing, in his argument, how repetitive syntactic structures in his speeches might have helped Cicero to remember them. Reading a speech was apparently sometimes an acceptable alternative for Augustus: ‘Ac ne periculum memoriae adiret aut in ediscendo tempus adsumeret, instituit recitare omnia, sermones.’ ‘He avoided the embarrassment of forgetting his words or the drudgery of learning them by reading all his speeches from a manuscript.’ Suetonius, Lives, 84.2. 71 Inst. 2.4.27 and 11.2.32-34 respectively. 72 J. C. Small, (1997) op. cit., 126-131. 70 20 Alternatively, in the act of memorisation, writing could literally provide a visual map of the words and act as a series of eidetic images that could be grasped by the mind and used as mnemonic ‘hooks’. 73 Quintilian hints at a particular technique here when he suggests that symbols (notae) be written into the text in its final written form. These symbols then act as ‘keys’ that prompt recall of the whole passage to which they have been affixed. This type of memorisation, well treated in the literature, depends on visual memory and is a practice that survived well into the mediaeval era. 74 Precisely how the ancient orator worked in the individual case perhaps varied widely. Hammerstadt suggests that speakers could have written down key sections, and above all the beginnings and ends of sections of a speech, and that he would then glance at these notes periodically throughout the performance. The notes here act as triggers for memory recall in a fashion similar to the notae method recommended by Quintilian, only in this instance the technique does not rely on the visual aspect of the prompt so much perhaps as on its content. Schanz believes an orator would have used what he calls an ‘artfully improvised diction.’ 75 This was a diction that made the differences between the prepared in writing and the improvised excerpts no longer visible. Thus the idea is that some An analogy existed, commonly used in antiquity, and of very early origin, between the memory and the surface of a wax tablet, which suggests that there was a close association between the written form of a text and its retention in the memory; Inst. Or. I.8.64 on Plato’s draft on wax tablets. Story also in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, ‘On literary composition’ 25; Ad. Her. 3.30, cit. Small (1997, op. cit.), at 132. 74 Inst. 11.2.28-29. See here: M. Carruthers: ‘A Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture’ (Cambridge, 1990); M. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record (London, 1993) at 288. Small notes the early roots of this practice (1997, op. cit.) at 126-131. 75 M. Schanz & C. Hosius (edd.), Geschichte der römischenliteratur I, (Munich 1927), 40–41 and with reference to Cicero, De Or. 1.150-2. 73 21 parts only of a speech would be learned while others truly improvised. Perhaps this is the kind of speech production that Quintilian had in mind when he wrote that he intended that his teaching method, so heavily dependent on writing, should ensure that ‘...through much conscientious use of the stilus... even sudden effusions reflect the tone of [the] writing.’ 76 Whatever the precise technique chosen by the orator for his memorisation, the final aim of the exercise was that the speaker should appear to be uttering, spontaneously and naturally, those words over which he had actually, if he had done the job properly, spent long hours labouring. It seems certain, however, that the written text was an essential aid in memorisation. The author of the Ad Herennium, brings this out clearly. He recommends memorising a series of images that represent elements in the text but he also stresses that: ‘Such an arrangement of images succeeds only if we use our notation to stimulate the natural memory, so that we first go over a given verse twice or three times to ourselves and then represent the words by means of images. In this way, art will supplement nature. For neither by itself will be strong enough [my emphasis].’ 77 ‘multo ac fideli stilo sic formetur oratio, ut scriptorum colorem, etiam quae subito effusa sint, reddant…’, Inst. 10.7.7. Suetonius also writes of Nero in the following terms: ‘… note books and loose pages have come into my possession, which contain some of Nero’s best-known poems in his own handwriting, and have clearly been neither copied nor dictated. Many erasures and cancellations, as well as words substituted above the lines prove that he was thinking things out for himself.’ Suetonius, Lives, Nero, 52. 77 Ad Her. 3.21.34: ‘sed haec imaginum conformatio tum valet si naturalem memoriam exsuscitaverimus hac notatione, ut versu posito ipsi nobiscum primum transeamus bis aut ter eum versum, deinde tum imaginibus verba exprimamus. Hoc modo naturae suppeditabitur doctrina. Nam utraque altera separata munus erit firma.’ 76 22 The memorisation exercise is doomed to failure without the previous existence of, and the earlier reliance upon, the pre-written text. Thus, in the delivery itself, although the written text was present, it was no longer visible. The use of the memory, which acts as vehicle between the two media, only increases their apparently shared identity. The younger Seneca in his Controversiae, discusses at some length the habits of his gifted and literate friend Porcius Latro who was, in his opinion a talented speaker and rhetorician. Seneca shows in his description that Porcius Latro was in the habit of using his stilus himself but he also makes plain the importance that this orator gave, when composing a speech, to its written stage. ‘When he had roused himself to write ….. he stopped only when exhausted.’ 78 A point of curiosity to Seneca however is that: ‘He would never read over again what he was going to say in order to learn it; he had learned it as he had written it.’ 79 This suggests then that the act of writing itself might stimulate the memory and surely this is what Cicero and Quintilian intuitively feel. 80 It is not that Porcius, the great speaker, was a natural, impromptu performer. He was not. In fact, he deliberately wrote out his speech, let’s assume with his stilus and tablets, and it is thanks to his ‘Cum se ad scribendum concitaverat…. Nec desinebat nisi defecerat’, Praef. 14-16. ‘Numquam ille quae dicturus erat ediscendi causa relegebat; edidicerat illa cum scripserat’, Praef. 17. 80 In fact, suggestive work is being carried on in this vein in the area of modern handwriting research, J. Medwell & D. Wray, D. ‘Handwriting: what we know and need to know’, Literacy 41 (1) (2007), 1015. 79 78 23 insistence on doing this that his rhetorical skill derives. Let us not assume, mistakenly, that a great speaker was not also, at least usually, a careful and talented writer. Thus he made the tablets superfluous. 81 Porcius was apparently accustomed to saying that he ‘wrote in his mind’. 82 There must indeed certainly have been a close connection in Porcius between his mind and the writing instrument, the writing surface, the writing process and the train of thought. With the idea that one can write in one’s mind, the writing instrument, the stilus, has no material reality and it becomes purely metaphorical. It is in the commonplace nature of the metaphor, I imagine, that the writing instrument was lost behind the objective existence of the text. Thus today, when we talk of ‘style’, we rarely give a thought to the simple stilus. Writing, the Roman way, with a reed pen, which was an alternative to stilus and tablets would mean that the writer had to ink-dip repeatedly as he worked. To Quintilian this is more than just an inconvenience. For, ‘... whenever the calamus is dipped into the ink the hand is delayed and the flow of thought broken.’ 83 81 82 ‘… itaque supervacuos sibi fecerat codices…’, Praef. 17. ‘Aiebat se in animo scribere’ Sen¸ Cont, 1.1.18. 83 ‘Quotiens intinguntur calami, morantur manum et cogitationis impetum frangunt’, Inst. 10.3.31. Assuming ink is to hand, pen dipping is messy and often leads to indelible blots and smudges both on the writing surface and on the writer himself. For a study of pen-dipping in a manuscript see: P. Head & M. Warren , ‘Re-inking the Pen: Evidence from P. Oxy. 657 concerning Unintentional Scribal Errors’, New Testament Studies 43 (1997), 468-473. 24 This statement shows that Quintilian envisages a link between the thinking mind of the writer and the tool in the writer’s hand. 84 The writing instrument is integral to the writer’s thoughts as he works; while the written text captures his fleeting thoughts in objective form (Goody, 1977, p.150). Perhaps then, writing as an exercise is important because it is an opportunity to practise one’s thinking. The ordered nature of a text composed in this way would presumably make it easier to memorise. Vocabulary is very particularly chosen and devices such as repetition of syntactic structure and the reformulation of ideas are prominent. 4923 words Wordcount inclusive of footnotes: 8670 For Quintilian, literary composition is ‘half in the mind and half on the tablet’, M. A. & R. H. Rouse (1989), ‘Wax Tablets’, Language and Communication 9, 175-191. 84 25