Ella Kirsh (Brown University)
“THE TEACHER: Wield the rod to your heart’s content – instruct through chastisements”. To readers familiar with the rituals and rhythms of late antique elite education, this advice harps on a familiar tune. Beatings were an accepted and well documented part of late antique pedagogy. They were imagined as a critical tool supporting the formation of a powerful future governing class (Bloomer 1997, Richlin 2011, Bernstein 2012). However, this particular pedagogical nugget appears in a source which has little to do with the annals of elite education: it derives from a sixth-century wax tablet displaying sections from the stenographical ‘Commentary’. Shorthand, an arduous discipline which took years to master yet carried little cultural prestige, was almost always a pursuit of the enslaved or low-status (Moss). Although we can assume violence was pervasive in the non-elite classroom, the stenographical axiom quoted above counts among very few direct references to non-elite school beatings. With little other evidence of non-elite classroom dynamics, late antique shorthand manuals offer a privileged insight into the content, methods and experience of sub-elite educational culture.
The figure of the amanuensis within the Roman family has been subject to renewed attention in recent years (Starr 1991, Lewis 2003, Cribiore 2021, Moss 2021), part of a wider scholarly effort to include non-elite people within accounts of late antique intellectual culture. This paper builds on this approach by investigating how educated sub-elites learned to occupy their social role. What did a late antique curriculum of subordination look like? Stenographical manuals will provide a window onto the intellectual formation of the serving class. Specifically, this paper looks at the ideological messages embedded in the ‘Commentary’ and argues that sub-elite students saw shorthand textbooks as repositories of moral content as well as technical instruction.
Associative thinking lay at the heart of the Commentary’s methodology: each sign designated not an individual word but rather each word in a short phrase, so that a single sign stood for each word of the above-quoted pattern-phrase: διδάσκαλος: ἀρέσκων ἐπίπλησσε, νουθετῶν δίδασκε (Tovar & Worp). The phrases (tetrads) which corresponded with signs were artfully designed to communicate basic moral precepts, and shorthand writers needed to internalize these phrases so thoroughly that producing signs became a matter of instinct, not analysis. Indeed, contemporary observers imagined that stenographical students memorised shorthand signs deeply enough that God could see them, scratched onto their souls. Stenography’s reliance on associative thinking made the substance of its connections enormously important: the paper brings this out through explorations of: (i) the handbooks’ messages about the dangers of non-elite speech, and (ii) stenography’s implicit racial categorisations of othered groups.
The results of such an inquiry promise not simply to reveal stenographical manuals as significant social historical documents, but also to complicate scholarly narratives about the dimensions of elite self-conception. Ultimately, stenographical textbooks allow insight into the imaginative resources of sub-elite shorthand writers, whose underrepresentation as protagonists of historical narratives belie the complexity of their intellectual training and the interest of the stories they had to tell.