Page 95 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

for comparatively brief technical or legal documents. Advance preparation by skilled readers, or even memorization or partial memorization of fre- quently read texts, were common means of compensating for the difficulties. Because literacy was also very uncommon, most people in the ancient world would have experienced reading by listening. Conversely, because compos- ing while writing in scriptio continua without word division was so difficult, writers in antiquity and the early Middle Ages often dictated their writings to scribes, or perhaps they wrote on wax tablets and gave those to scribes for transcription on papyrus or parchment. It is thought that when different people read different texts aloud to themselves in the same room, as might have happened in ancient libraries, the act of speaking or murmuring the words aloud blocked out the sound of other readers.
An aspect of the reading and writing experience in the ancient world that I have not seen discussed is how the practice of writing on papyrus might have served far-sighted people. Because of the nature of papyrus as a writing surface, use of majuscule was necessary, but the act of writing in majuscule on papyrus would also have allowed a scribe whose vision might not have been perfect to write in the relatively large majuscule letters while the same scribe might not have been able to see or write in the smaller minuscule. Similarly, having professional reading done aloud would have allowed older readers who had become far-sighted to continue hearing reading aloud after they could no longer see the words on the page. The process of writing by dictation would also have extended the working life of far-sighted writers. These factors would, of course, have remained until the invention of spec- tacles sometime in the mid-thirteenth century, and until spectacles were widely available.
Stated summarily, the ancient world did not possess the desire, characteristic of the modern age, to make reading easier and swifter because the advantages that modern readers perceive as accruing from ease of reading were seldom viewed as advantages by the ancients . . . We know that the reading habits of the an- cient world, which were profoundly oral and rhetorical . . . were
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