Assignment: letters and literacy in the Roman world
1. What can you say about the identities or backgrounds of the senders and receivers of the
letters and lists in the Vindolanda tablets?
A wide range of people were using wooden tablets at Vindolanda. Senders and receivers
often were military roman men: centurions, duplicarii, optiones, legionary legates.
Sometimes receivers were thought to occupy administrative positions: senators or provincial
governors.
Civilians also made use of the tablets to communicate with each other or with the military:
merchants, travellers, roman women.
On more than one occasion slaves were identified as senders and receivers of letters at
Vindolanda.
All the tablet users were people under roman rule using Latin script, even though not all of
them were of roman descent: an addressee is hypothesised to be a Greek slave and in
another instance a sender refers to himself as “hominem trasmarinum” (man from
overseas).
No Britons were identified as senders or receivers although they are mentioned in the
letters.
2. What can you say about the relation between the senders and receivers of the letters, and
their whereabouts?
Tablets were used among military personnel on several occasions. Letters were sent from a
commanding officer to his successor, from lower ranked personnel to higher-ups, from
centurions to prefects.
Civilians also interacted with the military and roman administration through lists and letters.
Transaction lists and inventories of goods show soldiers buying from civilians. Complaint
letters show civilians addressing provincial governors.
The same was done from one civilian to another: business partners, merchants and their
customers, women or slaves and their respective friends all used the tablets.
These exchanges were happening within the roman side of Hadrian’s wall but were not
limited to the premises of Vindolanda. Many other locations and addresses were mentioned
on the tablets. One tablet mentions three different towns (Isurium, Cataractonium, Vinovia)
describing a journey from Vindolanda to York and back, another letter was sent to London,
and in one case the town Briga in northern roman Gaul is mentioned, implying overseas
correspondence.
3. Why were these letters/documents of Vindolanda written? What was being dealt with in
them?
The tablets were clearly very useful to organise and structure practical tasks but also to
facilitate individual communication, within the roman army and amongst civilians.
On the practical side, daily logs were kept in workshops detailing worker count and material
inventory.
Accounts at Vindolanda support the evidence for a well-developed cash economy and
complex financial dealings. We therefore note that lists were extensively used to keep track
of the acquisition of goods, register distribution of resources, keep a record of transactions,
loans, expenditures and debt.
Letters played a role in exchanging information in many sectors. Military use involved
intelligence reports describing the Britons’ arsenal.
Individuals also used letters to request promotions or patronage, to solicit payments, to
discuss business arrangements or to send formal complaints about mistreatment by local
authorities.
Some used letters for more private matters: inviting friends, arranging encounters or
discussing future festivities.
4. What can you infer on the basis of the tablets about communication in this part of the
Roman Empire? Do you think the communications of the fort can be used as a blueprint
for written communication in general at that time? Or is this limited to the military
sphere?
The tablets paint a clear picture of the inner workings of communication at Vindolanda.
It is evident that there is a well-established infrastructure revolving around the use and
distribution of the tablets. Senders always use some form of opening to the letter and many
writing cliches can be identified meaning that writing etiquette is present, therefore we can
assume that this form of communication is well known and used often in this part of the
roman empire.
Tablets are not exclusively used for military or industrial applications but are also used by
civilians for more mundane matters. This widespread utilisation points to the ease of
deployment of this commodity.
Handwriting of scribes has been identified in the tablets. The presence of professional
scribes at Vindolanda hints at the abundance of tablets being written.
If the use of tablets is so well engrained at Vindolanda, which is located on the far reaches of
the roman empire, detached from the roman “mainland”, we can only assume that in betterserved parts of the empire communication will be at least equal if not better and not limited
to the military sphere.
5. Can you tell anything about the identity of the readers of those literary texts?
In the Roman world literature was a symbol of social status, a custom of the upper
echelon of society. The economic structure of that time was composed of a very small
number of rich people, a very large number of impoverished and illiterate people and no
significant middle class (as we understand it today). It is therefore evident that readers of
literary works were very few elites.
Most readers were authors and poets themselves, since authors shared works with their
literary colleagues. These Roman aristocrats occupied various roles such as diplomats,
senators, orators, politicians, statesmen, lawyers, scholars, philosophers, naturalists and
bishops. But the paper suggests that with the increased importance of bookstores after the
first century A.D., readers and authors (in this context, readers and authors can be merged in
one group for most cases) could potentially integrate the elite literary circle without having
an aristocratic background or ties to politics, but through literature itself (ex: Martial).
Many names were cited in the paper I will list a few of them here: Cicero, Atticus, Brutus, Pliny,
Silius, Vergil, Horace, Martial, Sidonius Apollinaris, Lucontius, Catullus, Faustus...
6. How were these texts distributed and what is the main difference in the way both
manners of texts survived so we may still read them in our present day?
Distribution of literary Roman texts was very different to that of our day. As described in the
paper, most circulation happened privately starting directly from the author, then following a
path of concentric circles of friends and eventually, if the author wished so, made its way to
the public.
Authors redacted a first draft which they ran through their close friends to get feedback and
assist with editing. They either sent a preliminary copy, made privately at the author’s own
expense, or held book gatherings where they discussed the ins and outs of their work.
At this point the work was still in the author’s control, meaning no one unknown to them
could get a hold of it.
After enough tinkering, the author would decide to make gift copies at his own expense and
send them to the dedicatees of the work and to other friends, thus widening the circle of
circulation. Were the author to specify to the recipients that no copies of his work should be
made, the work will not circulate to strangers.
Otherwise, the recipients were free to make their own copies, this time at their expense, and
in turn share them with others.
Authors could also deposit their work in a library, where other could read it or make copies.
At this point the work is no longer in control of the author.
Bookdealers also made and sold copies of current works, but this accounted for a small portion
of book circulation as most readers relied on privately made copies. Non-current texts also
circulated through private circuits.
Roman literature, probably survived to this day by the process of repetitive copying and
circulation, making its way to different private collections, archives or even surviving in public
libraries. This way different versions of the same work can be identified tracking editing and
modifications through time.
On the other hand, the Vindolanda tablets were found through excavation of the fort and did
not benefit from the luxury of being transcribed several times and sent forward in time like
literature. Even though they are texts in nature they arrive to us in a similar way to physical
artifacts that get unearthed by digging and documenting fragmentary evidence to reconstruct
a picture of the past.