Читать книгу A Social and Cultural History of Republican Rome - Группа авторов - Страница 13

One of the primary issues we must confront in approaching the literary sources from Roman history is to recognize that fundamentally Rome was an oral society. Although the alphabet had been invented as early as the eighth century BCE, Rome did not develop a written literary tradition until the middle of the third century BCE. For comparison’s sake, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey seem to have been committed to writing in the eighth century, and the great Athenian tragedies were composed over the course of the fifth century. Mass literacy is a relatively recent phenomenon and it remains unclear how many Romans could read and write.