The Celsus Library at Ephesus: Spatial Rhetoric, Literacy, and Hegemony in the Eastern Roman Empire

Abstract

Building upon the insights of historians of rhetoric and architecture, this study examines the Celsus Library at Ephesus through the lenses of literacy studies and hegemony. By drawing on first-hand observations of the extant structure and historical studies that re-create its original appearance and relationship with its architectural context, the author speculates on the uses and functions of the library during the early second century CE. While the library's elite patrons experienced its instrumental impact, passersby from all levels of society witnessed the building's hegemonic display of Rome's cultural and political power.

Notes

1. For a reading of Rome through a Marxist lens, see Greg Woolf's (2012) Rome: An Empire's Story.

2. For literacy as historically situated, contingent, and variable practice, see Harvey Graff (1987, 1995). On rhetorical literacy, see John Duffy (2007). On ideological literacy, see Brian Street (1984, 1994). On economic literacy, see Deborah Brandt (2001, 2009).

3. For literacy as “literate practice,” see the work of Brian Street in his 1984 work Literacy in Theory and Practice.

4. This portrait of a typical elite reader is not meant to be comprehensive or absolute but to give a sense of urbane Roman practices of scribal culture: reading texts, writing texts, and speaking about texts. This composite was drawn from several primary and secondary sources, including Laurence Pernot (2005); Lionel Casson (2001); Richard Leo Enos (2008); Teresa Morgan (1998); A. K. Bowman and Greg Woolf (1994); Suetonius's (1995) De Rhetoribus, Tacitus's (2001) Dialogus de Oratoribus, Cicero's De Oratore, and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria. The primary sources by Suetonius, Tacitus, Cicero, and Quintilian, for example, both model and explicitly describe reading and writing practices of elites in Republican and early Imperial Rome. The secondary sources give accounts of formal education, oratory, jurisprudence, cultural activities, political viewpoints, and leisure reading that also helped me build a view of the “typical” elite reader during the time of Trajan and Hadrian, the era in which the Celsus Library was built.

5. Although I mention race, class, and gender identities, and I see them as being equally important, I focus primarily on class because socioeconomic status had the highest probability of determining a Roman's place in society. Ephesians who were women or of non-Roman racial heritage would have most likely also been nonelite (or plebeian) members of Roman society. Exceptions to this rule were rare, as social mobility was relatively limited. Material, political, and social relations were (and are) mutually constitutive and therefore impossible to separate entirely. I use an approach that accounts for and values the realities of material conditions and their inevitable impact upon ideologies.

6. Little evidence in the writings of Roman authors (including Quintilian, Cicero, Tacitus, among others) exists of nonelite reading practices. Therefore, this portrait was drawn using insights from the following secondary sources: Richard Enos (2008); Teresa Morgan (1998); Yun Lee Too (2010); A. K. Bowman and Greg Woolf (1994); and Diane Favro (1996). Someone who had a working knowledge of instrumentum domesticum and ways of reading symbols and ideograms would have most likely been someone engaged in commerce in an urban environment. Therefore, I chose a merchant of one of the most widely used foodstuffs in the Roman world: olive oil. This olive oil merchant would most likely have interacted with people of various classes, even though, admittedly, the very wealthy would have sent their slaves to purchase everyday items such as olive oil. The reason I did not choose a slave for the nonelite composite portrait is that some of them were highly educated and served as scribes, librarians, or schoolmasters. The olive oil merchant represents an urban figure who had achieved the literacies of everyday life but would not have received a formal education in a private school.

7. During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire (27 BCE to 212 CE), the government granted citizenship to provincial residents on a limited basis. Men who served in the military for twenty-five years were granted citizenship, as were some property holders. Rome also granted citizenship to people who had served the Empire in some extraordinary way and to people who paid a high fee to the government to obtain the status. Children born to Roman citizens inherited citizenship. Children of freed slaves were granted citizenship. Women were in a class apart from other citizens; no matter their socioeconomic status, they could not vote, had no legal rights to property, and in many respects were very much like slaves. In the early third century CE (212), Emperor Caracalla extended citizenship to all free Roman subjects (Coşkun 2010).