Silent Reading in Antiquity.

I am one of those who may have been hoodwinked into the myth that no one read silently to themselves in antiquity.  I say "may" because I'm not clear how much of a myth the myth is.

The usual proof-text of this is a passage in St. Augustine's "The Confessions," where St. Augustine supposedly expresses his marvel at St. Ambrose reading a letter silently to himself.

But it seems that there is a body of evidence that silent reading was common:

It is a myth that the ancients only or normally read out loud - a myth we appear to want to believe, since the evidence against it is strong. In Euripides's Hippolytus, the King, Theseus, confronted with the corpse of his wife, Phaedra, finds a letter fastened to her hand. While the Chorus expresses its foreboding, Theseus silently reads the letter (which contains Phaedra's false accusation that Hippolytus has raped her). Then he has an outburst, whose meaning takes force from his silent reading. The letter, he says, "shrieks, it howls horrors insufferable ... a voice from the letter speaks ..."


Plutarch, in a speech called "On the Fortune of Alexander", tells us that, when Alexander the Great was silently reading a confidential letter from his mother, Hephaestion his friend "quietly put his head beside Alexander's and read the letter with him; Alexander could not bear to stop him, but took off his ring and placed the seal on Hephaestion's lips". Plutarch tells this story four times: the point is that Alexander does not have a fit of temper at his friend's presumption: he behaves "like a philosopher" simply reminding his friend that such letters are highly confidential.

I consulted Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading (Flamingo), which was published in the same year as Gavrilov's and Burnyeat's articles. Manguel believes that the passage in Augustine is "the first definite instance [of silent reading] recorded in western literature". He is well aware of the evidence to the contrary, but he finds it unconvincing. Thus Manguel: "According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great read letter from his mother in silence in the fourth century BC, to the bewilderment of his soldiers." [My italics.] But these bewildered soldiers are Manguel's importation. They have been brought into the story in order to make it seem exceptional. Manguel shamelessly fudges the argument.

In order to read aloud well, especially when a text is written without breaks between words (as was classical practice), it seems important to possess the gift to read ahead simultaneously. Silent reading is a necessary adjunct to the kind of reading aloud for sound and sense Nietzsche admired. What shocked Augustine was that Ambrose read silently in front of visitors and refused to share his reading matter, and his thoughts, with them. But Augustine was perfectly capable of silent reading, and describes a key moment in his conversion as a moment of silent reading with a friend. As Gavrilov concludes: "... the phenomenon of reading itself is fundamentally the same in modern as in ancient culture. Cultural diversity does not exclude an underlying unity."

On the other hand, this book - points to the development of "word spacing" and devotional reading as elements of silent reading in 12th Century Scholasticism. (Referring to Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).)

This blog makes a couple of interesting observations:

Saenger argues that the shift from oral to print culture-- or rather from oral to silent reading, with various other attendant changes-- was brought on by the adoption of word spacing from the 1100s to 1400s, not the printing press. If this is so, then word spacing deserves to be regarded as an innovation on par with Gutenberg's invention of the printing press.


Roman authors like Plutarch and Cicero praised reading aloud as an aid to memory, and internal evidence suggests that letters and orations were meant to be spoken rather than read. Further, "books of the ancient Romans were highly unsuited to visual reading and study," containing "neither punctuation, distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters, nor word separation." This and other evidence suggests that "silent reading was an uncommon practice in classical antiquity." (370)

And:

Word spacing began as an aid to reading aloud, but it soon gave rise to two new practices: silent copying and (paradoxically) silent reading. Scribes who copied texts were supposed to do their work in silence. Previously they had developed means of copying in silence: most notably, such as breaking texts into lines of 10-15 characters, which they could remember in their entirety. Adding word spacing "increased reading speed and permitted more rapid copying." (378) The enforcement of silence became stricter as word spacing diffused through scriptoria, and scribal iconography shifts from showing scribes receiving dictation from angels, to scribes copying from texts.


Reading likewise became a silent activity, we evidenced by changing interpretation of the rule of silence. Before about the 10th century, "oral group reading and composition [were] in practice no more considered a breach of silence than were confession or the recitation of prayers. Cluniac monks were judged to have violated their vows of silence only when a word they spoke was not written in the text." (383) But later, "silence" comes to mean real silence.

Once reading became silent, the design of spaces for reading-- namely libraries-- could also change. Carrels had been developed in the early Middle Ages to let monks read aloud or dictate, and few reference books had been needed in a period in which memorization of Scripture was the central intellectual challenge of a life. In the late 13th century, libraries were relocated to central halls, and "furnished with desks, lecterns, and benches where readers sat next to one another. " (396) Services also changed: lending periods grow, as readers are able to work through books more quickly, and "reference books were chained to the lecterns so that they could always be consulted in the library." (396)

So, there seems to be something of a debate on the subject.

Silent reading is also linked to the "interiority" of modernity, the experience of modern people that they are a self.  This is also supposed to be a novelty of modernity, although how much cash value this notion has is questionable since even illiterate people must understand themselves as being unique and individual.