The Scribes of Rome: A Cultural and Social History of the Scribae by Benjamin Hartmann

Reviewed by: The Scribes of Rome: A Cultural and Social History of the Scribae by Benjamin Hartmann Claudia Paparella The Scribes of Rome: A Cultural and Social History of the scribae. By Benjamin Hartmann. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. 2020. Pp. xxi, 228. This book delineates a sociocultural history of Roman public scribes from the early republic to the late empire. Hartmann assembles a variety of literary, epigraphical, and iconographical evidence to tell the story of these lower-ranking public officials, who improved their social status by virtue of their literacy skills. The study of this ordo goes back to Mommsen's work on the apparitores of the Roman state, while more recent treatments have appeared by Adalberto Giovannini and Nicholas Purcell.1 In this book, Hartmann shows that the durable Roman office of the public scribae continues to repay interest. His primary aim is not to present a straightforward history of the office, but to discuss the sociocultural implications of scribal literacy, and how Roman scribes' specialized knowledge supported their often remarkable social mobility. This theoretical engagement sets the book apart from previous contributions. Hartmann draws on Pierre Bourdieu's concept of cultural, social, and economic capital to place scribal knowledge at the center of the office's social mobility.2 For Hartmann, scribes possessed "embodied social capital" in their literary abilities (4); through this specialized knowledge in writing and numeracy, they ascended in the Roman social hierarchy to a place where they could also access other forms of capital. The book is structured in six thematic chapters, followed by an appendix of scribes' names and a rich, multilingual bibliography. A small selection of images supports discussion of iconographic sources. Chapter One ("Imagining the Roman Scriba," 1–12) establishes the theoretical framework, setting out the topic and contextualizing it within larger scholarly trends. The author emphasizes the comparative scantiness of the evidence and the analytical problems posed by rhetoric in literary accounts of scribes who "transgressed professional or social boundaries" (6). Chapter Two ("The Human Archive," 13–60) is the densest of the book in terms of both the use of sources and the detail of the discussion. Hartmann describes the crucial role of scribes in Roman archival and administrative practices, highlighting how professional expertise also allowed them to break elite monopoly on literacy as early as the fourth century b.c.e. and to obtain the socially prestigious position of custodians of the written laws and documents of the Roman state. [End Page 174] In Chapter Three ("The Attendant," 61–93), scribae are analyzed in their guise of apparitores devoted to fulfilling clerical tasks. To shed light on the origins of the office, Hartmann turns to the Roman annalistic tradition and Etruscan iconographic evidence to show similarities between early Roman and Etruscan apparitorial classes. While the chapter succeeds at positioning the beginning of apparitorial scribal activity in its early historical context, I found the role of writing in the sphere of the sacred a somewhat neglected topic. The relationship between writing, religion, and the state is central to discussions of literacy in various cultures and seems relevant also at Rome, where figures such as the scriba Cn. Flavius are specifically framed as taking steps adversarial to elite priestly classes when disseminating written information. For the later republic, the chapter offers good discussion of scribes' recruitment, hierarchy, and function in decuriae, the base units of Roman apparitorial organization. This is supported by a concise overview of the Lex de XX quaestoribus, passed in 81 b.c.e. to raise the number of apparitores in each decuria (70), and of the Lex Ursonensis, which records the scales of apparitorial pay (84). Chapter Four ("The Profiteer," 94–110) addresses the moral implications of scribal activities. Scribes worked in public archives, and their literacy skills and patronage relationships often created conditions for abuse of power. Before the Quaestio de repetundis formalized the accountability of public officers in the second century b.c.e., scribes' professionalism was only regulated by socially constructed trust (fides). Hartmann interestingly points out that corruption always remained to some extent unavoidable because state control took the form of...

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