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| Read My Lips |
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James Fenton
copyright © 2006
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Originally published
in The Guardian
29 July 2006
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Were the ancients in the habit of reading silently,
or did they normally read out loud? Three weeks ago, discussing
certain famous passages in St Augustine's Confessions, I mentioned
that St Ambrose's habit of silent reading was clearly unique
to him and a novelty to Augustine when he encountered it in
Milan. Soon afterwards I received a letter from Myles Burnyeat
of All Souls, Oxford. "I fear," says Professor Burnyeat,
"you are one of numerous victims of a widespread myth,
a serious misreading of Augustine. Since it has been a minor
mission in my life to combat this myth, I take the liberty of
enclosing two articles designed to set the record straight."
The two articles, one by AK Gavrilov, the other
by Burnyeat himself, first appeared in Classical Quarterly (47,
1997). They trace to early German scholarship the almost universal,
erroneous belief that in the classical world people read aloud
to themselves rather than silently. Here is Nietzsche in Beyond
Good and Evil, section 247, berating the sloppy reading habits
of his day: "The German does not read aloud, does not read
for the ear, but merely with his eyes: he has put his ears away
in the drawer. In antiquity, when a man read - which he did
very seldom - he read to himself ... in a loud voice; it was
a matter for surprise if someone read quietly, and people secretly
asked themselves why he did so. In a loud voice: that is to
say, with all the crescendos, inflections, variations of tone
and changes of tempo in which the ancient public world took
pleasure."
What Nietzsche is saying is not only that,
if you "put your ears away in the drawer" you will
miss the point of classical prose style, but also that you yourself
will write badly. The greatest German prose hitherto, he goes
on to argue, came from the pulpit, and its masterpiece is Luther's
Bible. "Compared with Luther's Bible almost everything
else is merely 'literature' - a thing that has not grown up
in Germany and therefore has not taken and does not take root
in German hearts: as the Bible has done."
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."
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