Classical World

It is important to note the subtitle of this book: “Books, Publishing and Performance in Classical Rome.” Winsbury starts with books as physical objects, but he is just as interested in how literary works were disseminated and in performances of all sorts, from formal drama to the dance of pantomime. A central thesis is that the recitatio was “the nearest Roman equivalent to ‘publishing’ a new literary work” (112), with the corollary that written texts were, more than anything else, “a stage between two sets of oral activity—the original oral presentation of the ‘work’ and some future . . .oral recreation of it” (122).

Winsbury describes the physical characteristics of book rolls (3–50, 79–91), argues against the idea of any significant commercial book trade (53–66), considers libraries (67–75), discusses the recitatio at length (95–110), and moves on to consider other forms of performance, including storytelling, music, mime, and pantomime (111–25, 147–61). He sees “the theater in all its aspects” as a sort of cultural glue: performances in theatrical settings appealed to all classes and, by drawing on traditional stories, “created a common cultural vocabulary” (161). Winsbury has read widely in the recent literature on orality and literacy, and his book surveys a good part of that literature. He generously acknowledges his debt to various scholars, among them E. Valette-Cagnac on oral presentations, F. Dupont on recitations, and I. Lada-Richards on pantomime. He omits, however, much important work by Italian scholars, such as the relevant chapters in G. Cavallo et al. (eds.), Lo spazio letterario di Roma antica (1989–91) and T. Dorandi’s Le stylet et la tablette (2000), and one might have expected a greater use of information from Herculaneum, much of which is applicable to the Roman context.

It is good to be reminded, as we are in this book, of how readily texts in the Roman world could move from oral to written form and back. Here, though, various types of oral presentation are treated as though they were a single phenomenon. Vergil reading to the imperial family, Martial at a dinner party, formal recitationes: all are taken as roughly equivalent presentations or “publication” (99–101). It would be more helpful to sort them out, distinguish among them, and perhaps arrange them along a spectrum from informal and private to formal and ceremonial. Another problem arises when we try to apply the “recitatio as publication” thesis to all periods and all types of work. As Winsbury notes, the formal recitatio can be traced only from about the 30s b.c. to the third century a.d.; yet books were disseminated both before and after that period. And while the thesis works well enough for poetry and literary history, few scholarly or reference works—lexica, commentaries, scientific treatises—would make for pleasant listening, even though they were all, somehow, made known to the public and disseminated. We may happily agree with Winsbury that a public recitatio could and often did launch a work of literature, but there clearly were other mechanisms as well. Quintilian describes one, as Winsbury notes (104): he gave the bookseller Tryphon permission to make copies of his Institutio. In this case, commercial activity was clearly important.

Winsbury was trained as a classicist, but he has worked as a journalist and in publishing. The Roman Book reflects this background: it is clear and lively, and it reveals a publisher’s interest in the mechanics of book production. Classicists will find the omission of the original Greek and Latin (in most but not all cases) an inconvenience. There are too many typos and occasional oddities and mistakes. Inscriptions are sometimes cited by [End Page 258] their Orelli number (198, notes 4, 20; in addition, the first is a forgery, the second irrelevant). Quintilian is made an ex-consul (51). Winsbury thinks that patrons in libraries did not sit, since there are no...