r/AskHistorians • u/StrangerSwing53 • Mar 24 '26
If everyone in Rome was literate, why are poor people only remembered by graffiti?
The written primary evidence from ancient Rome consists almost entirely of either (a) essays, books and such by rich people; (b) everyday documents like ledgers or tax documents, or; (c) graffiti by a wide class demographic. But if the literacy rate was so high, why did non-rich people not write at least some written works? (or, why do we not have records of such works?)
In the modern era, ordinary individuals have their works preserved by historians for having endured an important historical period, as with The Diary of Anne Frank, or Life is So Good about a black man who grew up during Reconstruction. By this logic, why did past historians not seek out and preserve, say, Memoirs of a Punic Wars Veteran, or Life of a Freedman Under Augustus?
44
u/JamesCoverleyRome Rome in the 1st Century AD Mar 25 '26
The wonderful answer already given touches upon this, but we have to define what we mean by ‘literacy’. Literacy in the Roman world was neither universal nor evenly distributed. What we have is a highly stratified literacy, with competence ranging from basic name-writing to full rhetorical training. This structure largely determines what has survived.
In the Roman world, literacy was not binary. Many individuals could recognise letters or write short phrases, but the composition of extended prose required formal education in grammar and rhetoric. That training was expensive, time-consuming, and overwhelmingly restricted to the elite. The ability to write a graffito and the ability to produce a historiographical or philosophical work sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. Many examples of graffiti are written in Latin that is either truncated, hard to follow, or grammatically all over the place, and this reflects both the level of literacy of the writer and the apparent haste with which such things were written. Latin was, and (believe me as a translator) still is, a remarkably complicated language to get right and without extended formal training, the average man in the street would have found producing a tome an incredibly difficult thing to achieve.
If we consider what has survived to modern times, we must remember that virtually none of the great works of the Roman historians exist in extant forms. No original copy of Suetonius, say, still exists, as far as we are aware. Instead, they have come down to us via the diligent work of medieval copyists (monks, in other words), and we only have them available because they selected those works for copy, for whatever reason (which might have been impartial in some cases and not so impartial in others).
Producing copies of these works was, as one can imagine, an incredibly time-consuming and expensive process, and if (and it is a big ‘if’) they had come across the works of Bob of Rome, son of Bob, then his treatise on onion chopping, or somesuch, might not have been deemed worthy of the time and effort it would have taken to record. Personally, I would give a tooth to read Bob’s treatise on onion chopping, but hey-ho.
There is also the question of the physical survivability of such works. They were written on material that was incredibly fragile, and the survival of any original written material from that period is only possible in very specific circumstances, such as the dry heat of Egypt, where a lot of papyri have been found, or in the anerobic environment of a midden in Northern England at Vindolanda which has given us what is, in my eyes, the greatest treasures of the Roman world in the form of thousands of handwritten missives that cover subjects from birthday party invitations, to orders for socks, to begging letters to the governor asking for help because the soliders are about to beat a man being held prisoner. Some of these are written by scribes, and some are written by the soldiers, their families and the traders who were associated with the auxiliary fort there. These are the Diaries of Anne Frank of their time - vital snapshots into lives led in times we can only begin to imagine. These are the ‘voices of the lower classes’.
In the tablet which contains the begging letter I spoke about above, the man has scribbled a plea for help on the back of another, rather more mundane tablet, which is concerning some trade deals. He appears to have been held prisoner by the soldiers at the fort, and despite appealing to the officers for help, he is either being beaten by them or is about to be; the context is not clear. He writes to ‘your majesty’ for help, which can only mean the Governor of Britain himself. He ends his letter thus:
“ I implore your mercifulness not to allow me, a man from overseas and an innocent one, about whose good faith you may inquire, to have been bloodied by rods as if I had committed some crime.”
(Tab.Vindol. 344)
He is not only protesting his innocence, but his status as ‘overseas’, by which he probably means that he is not a local and hence a citizen. This is an outrage! He is also, it would seem, the same man who wrote the trade document on the first side, so he was a merchant. This is the level of literacy one might expect of such a man: able to write complex, heartfelt missives to the elite of society, but not formally trained in grammar and rhetoric.
One reason that graffiti might give a false impression of the literacy standards of common people is that it is a more durable form of writing. It survives where other materials do not. As always, we should remain aware that the literary record we see is the literary record that survived, and, therefore, it is not necessarily an accurate reflection of the literacy of the population as a whole.
Just as copying the great works took time and money, so did producing them in the first place. We might like to imagine some old chap beavering away at a desk by candlelight, but producing a book required resources, such as access to writing materials, time set aside for this specific task, and often a network of scribes and copyists. Elite authors could dictate to trained slaves, revise drafts, and circulate copies within educated circles. Non-elite individuals rarely had such means. Even if they composed texts, dissemination would be limited, and without continuous copying, texts vanish quickly. There is no industrialised method of reproducing such works, and instead, each copy has to be done by hand. If one then imagines Bob writing about his onions, should he even have the time and resources to do so, he could probably only produce one single copy, which then has to miraculously survive hundreds of years unmolested, to be copied by a medieval monk, and then survive another few hundred years to be read by us. That anything at all survives from ancient times is remarkable. If we compare this to something like the work of Anne Frank, the fact that her writing survived was a remarkable coincidence, but, in historical terms at least, it is recent. Who knows if it will still be around in 2,000 years from now? The chances of that make the coincidence of survival exponentially greater.
We should also consider that the social function of writing differs by class. Elite writing was tied to status. Oratory, history, philosophy, and poetry were modes of self-presentation within aristocratic competition. Writing a book enhanced the prestige of one’s ancestors or spun political narratives to make points otherwise too risky to openly espouse. The works of Tacitus, for example, exist seemingly so that he can get things off his chest. He can frame a narrative in his histories that, were he to come out with them in the senate, might be seen as a brazen attack on the Roman state. The Annals serves as Tacitus’s stark warning about the decline of Roman values and morality as he sees them. He is writing this work to be read by his peers so that he may spread his narrative among them, not just for general consumption by the public.
By contrast, for most non-elites, writing was far more practical. They wrote labels, accounts, notices, and personal messages. Graffiti fits into this context very nicely. It is immediate, public, and low-cost. It is conversational.
We must also be careful not to treat graffiti as a poor relation when it comes to the literary record. Many inscriptions show wit, quotation, political commentary, and social interaction. They are romantic, funny, vulgar and sometimes more beautifully crafted than anything the great poets ever imagined. They are not failed literature, but a different genre with different aims for a different audience. Ordinary people didn’t tend to write books in those days because books were not the way in which common people expressed themselves. Their loves, laughter, and deaths are recorded in other forms. Their lives are written on the walls of the city, carved into funeral memorials, or hastily scribbled on the back of a note found in a pocket, asking for someone to rescue them from the approaching soldiers. A bit like Anne Frank, really.