Acknowledgements

Dr Attila Nagy, founding President of Magyar Olvasástársaság (The Hungarian Reading Association), formerly of the National Széchényi Library in Budapest, was a prime mover behind this project.
Emeritus Professor Tamás Adamik checked the translation for accuracy, identified a few errors, and pointed out that the Hungarian abbreviations for “pp.”, etc., should be changed to Anglophone usage.
Helen Kaufmann provided the translation of some lines of Dracontius shown in footnote 8.
Two reviewers provided numerous helpful comments.
Varjú László Gyula of the Veritas organisation in Budapest kindly translated a note about Balogh’s frontispiece, the first footnote in the replika reprint, and one or two other snippets of Hungarian.
The editor of Histoire Épistémologie Langage and other members of its editorial board helpfully checked the accuracy of the quotations from languages other than English, and of the translations.

Context and aim

1This article provides a detailed introduction to and commentary on the accompanying cover-to-cover translation into English of József Balogh’s 1921 dissertation titled “Voces paginarum” Adalékok a hangos olvasás és irás kérdéséhez (“The voices of the pages: contributions to the question of oral reading and writing”). A scan of the original dissertation is online at http://real-eod.mtak.hu/​6037/​1/​Voces_Paginarium.pdf (including the misspelling of paginarum). It was the first systematic, and the seminal, treatment of the practice of oral reading (with a few references to oral writing) in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and of their status vis-à-vis silent reading and writing. It is the principal source of the (now much disputed) notion that once upon a time all those who could read habitually read aloud.

2The translation was conceived as a centenary celebration of Balogh’s dissertation. The year 2021 was also the centenary of the first appointment of István Bethlen as Prime Minister of Hungary in 1921, and plans were made for a memorial conference celebrating both centenaries to be held in early 2021. Delayed slightly by the coronavirus pandemic, the conference took place on 28 September 2021 in the former House of Lords chamber in the Hungarian Parliament building; by invitation, Greg Brooks gave a paper about Balogh, the only one in English (but published in Hungarian: Brooks 2022).

Balogh published two further scholarly articles on this topic:

1926. A hangos olvasás és írás. Újabb adalékok a jelenség történetéhez és természetrajzához. (“Oral reading and writing. Recent contributions to the history and natural history of the phenomenon”). Magyar Nyelv XXII (1-2): 25-39.

1927. Voces paginarum. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Lauten Lesens und Schreibens. (“The voices of the pages: contributions to the history of oral reading and writing”). Philologus LXXXII. 84-109, 202-240. This article was then published as a book by Dietrich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Leipzig.

3The 1927 paper in German appears to be an amalgamation of the 1921 and 1926 items in Hungarian.

4Demeter (1999: 305, footnote 40) mentions a “fourth but much less significant, rather popular, essay titled Hangos betük (“Letters with Voices”) published in Tükör 1941/1. 11-14.”

5In addition to marking the centenary of Balogh’s dissertation, the translation is provided so that scholars and other interested parties who do not read Hungarian (presumably the great majority) have access to his original treatment of the topic. It would seem that all previous commentators on his work, including all those cited below, have relied on the 1927 German version – or even, if unable to read German, on the comments and interpretations of those who can. Some commentators have voiced fierce (and possibly justified) criticisms of Balogh’s methods and conclusions, and even Johnson (2010), having given a balanced account of Balogh and his main critics (Johnson 2010: 5-6), later (Johnson 2010: 9) asserts that “the terms of the debate”, “over whether the ancients always read aloud” are “wrongful terms first set into motion by Balogh”.

6Balogh’s dissertation, complete with his quotations from Greek (7), Latin (45), English (1), French (11), German (13) and Italian (1), was reprinted in replika, volume 31-32 (September 1998). 227-255, which is available online at: http://replika.hu/​system/​files/​archivum/​replika_31-32-17_balogh.pdf. In that version, the following footnote, kindly translated by Varjú László Gyula of the Veritas organisation in Budapest, precedes even Balogh’s first original footnote:

7Voces paginarum – Voices of the Pages. Published by the Franklin-Társulat Magyar Irod. Intézet és Könyvnyomda (Hungarian Official Institute and Printing House) in Budapest in 1921. The text is reproduced word for word in accordance with the rules of grammar of the period. Zoltán Ábrahám has translated the Greek, Latin, English, Italian, French and German quotations found in the original. We have placed each Hungarian translation in square brackets [**] after the corresponding foreign language text.

8The current version includes all the original quotations in the six languages just listed (including some which Balogh omitted or truncated and which we have added for completeness and reference), and translations of all of them into English (except of course the one already in English). We acknowledge that pulling together translations from sources of different eras has resulted in some unevenness of tone.

9N.B. The quotations from Greek (especially) and Latin in replika contain numerous transcription errors, almost all minor, except that on p. 334, 4^th line, for noces (“you [sing.] harm”) read uoces (“voices”), as in the accurate text of Augustine’s Confessions used here. Because of these errors in the replika version, all the Greek and Latin quotations in this version have been copied over from reliable sources, and should be error-free. The replika version does, however, have an Appendix listing the authors Balogh cited (we provide a much fuller list, with some analysis, as an Annexe to this article), followed by a scholarly note stating what was known in 1998 about the origin of the sarcophagus carving reproduced next to the epigraph from Schiller on the page following the title page – again, we provide fuller and more accurate notes about the sarcophagus at the end of the translation.

10Notes on referencing:

1. In his dissertation, Balogh gave references to the original sources in the abbreviated style current in his day, e.g. for his first quotation, from Lucian: “Adv. Ind. 2”. In our translation we show them in modern style, e.g. “Lucian of Samosata, Adversus indoctum, 2”, with full references at the end to the sources of both the quoted text and the translation.

2. Almost all the emphases in quoted passages are Balogh’s.

3. The sequence of the footnotes in the translation follows Balogh’s exactly. They are not numbered in the original (being indicated by asterisks), so we have followed the numeration given to them (presumably by Zoltán Ábrahám) in the replika reprint, though their contents sometimes differ where we have added comments or transferred matter into the main text.

4. Throughout this document, cross-references to the translation are shown simply by page number, e.g. “p. 165”, with “footnote” and the relevant footnote number added where necessary.

5. Sources which are mentioned in this document but not in Balogh’s dissertation are referenced at the end of this document, and not at the end of the translation.

1. Balogh József: Life and work

11[The following paragraphs are abbreviated from Demeter (1999: 388-389), with additions from other sources.]

12József Balogh was born in Budapest in 1893 into a prominent Jewish family. His father, Ármin Balogh, was professor of History and Literature in the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary, and a prominent member of the Hungarian Jewish community. József converted to Catholicism in youth – his description in the dissertation of Augustine’s youthful struggles with faith may echo his own. In 1911-1915 he studied at the universities of Budapest, Berlin, Munich and Freiburg, and in 1918 gained a doctorate at the Budapest University of Science. In Berlin he studied under Eduard Norden, who was world-famous in classical circles and held the most prestigious position for a classicist in Germany, the Professorship of Latin. Balogh’s interest in orality in antiquity seems to have been sparked by Norden’s – see below.

13Besides his mother tongue, Hungarian, Balogh had excellent knowledge of Greek and Latin, and spoke German, French, English and Italian. Given his background, he may also have had good knowledge of Hebrew and possibly Aramaic; in the dissertation he makes one reference to “the practice of reading aloud in the Jewish faith” (p. 187, footnote 28). As a classical scholar, he especially studied Augustine’s life and works – in the dissertation he makes more references to Augustine than to any other author (closely followed by Horace). He also published works on medieval church problems and on the legends of the saints King Stephen and Bishop Gellért.

14Although highly gifted and a convert, as a Jew, in the 1920s Balogh was banned from holding a university post, and so was forced to the periphery of Hungarian intellectual and public life. However, thanks to his family connections and his fluency in several languages, he became editor of La nouvelle revue de Hongrie and subsequently of The Hungarian Quarterly. Through his editorial work, Balogh did manage, in the 1930s, to become a de facto member of the Hungarian establishment. But his conversion and privileged status were not enough to save him from Nazi terror; having gone into hiding, he was betrayed, and murdered by Gestapo agents in Budapest on 2 April 1944, one of nearly 400,000 victims of that pogrom; for testimony from one of the few survivors, whose parents and seven of nine siblings were killed, see Perl (2023). Whether either kaddish or requiem was said for Balogh, or kaddish for any of those other victims, is unknowable. So, it goes.

2. Balogh’s thesis, and its origins

15The conclusion at which Balogh arrived on the basis of his accumulation and analysis of the evidence is stated most succinctly as follows (p. 188):

This long series of data provides evidence that reading and writing were vocalised operations in antiquity and, in all likelihood, even in the Middle Ages.

16As he points out (p. 163), Wieland in 1789 was the first to posit that “the ancients, at least the Greeks, customarily read aloud all books that had value for them, and that it was their rule that a good book must be read aloud.” Nothing further was written on the topic until Nietzsche (1885) (p. 163) alluded to it, followed by Norden (1898) and Sudhaus (1906), with Norden starting to accumulate supporting examples in volumes II and III of Antike Kunstprosa (1909, 1915). Balogh (p. 166, footnote 4) acknowledges the work of both Norden and Sudhaus, and mentions that some sources he had identified had been included by Norden in his 1915 volume.

17The nineteenth century was a key era for all aspects of linguistics in Europe, and the Zeitgeist seems also to have reached the United States, since Hendrickson (1929: 193) too claimed to have been studying the oral vs. silent reading topic since 1898. The University of Berlin was a key centre of philological and other linguistic research; the great classical scholar and investigator of manuscript studies, Theodor Mommsen, held a chair there from 1858. Eduard Norden had been Professor of Latin there since 1903. [Being also a Jew who had converted to (evangelical) Christianity in youth, Norden found life increasingly difficult under the Nazi regime. The 1938 Jewish tax forced him to sell his house and portions of his library, and he lost his right to use university facilities. Friends persuaded him to move to Zürich in safe, neutral Switzerland, where he died on 13 July 1941.]

18It seems likely that Norden, whose Antike Kunstprosa could be seen as the use of linguistic evidence to write cultural history, welcomed a younger scholar seizing on this highly relevant research topic and intending to work it up more fully, as fully as the evidence then available permitted. But as Balogh (p. 166) points out, “In 1898, […] the practice of reading aloud was still only supported by one single piece of evidence” (i.e. Augustine on Ambrose), and (p. 167) even 20 years later the evidence consisted of 15-20 passages “of varying value and of varying authoritativeness”. His own researches uncovered many more; from them, he reached the conclusion noted above, which is repeated, only slightly nuanced, in his amalgamated 1927 article in German.

3. The evidence base

19For a full list, and some basic analysis, of the 78 quotations in Balogh (1921), see the Annexe.

20It is clear that, in the distant past, literacy, the ability to read and write (which can exist at any level from a few words to substantial works of literature; Thomas (2009) emphasises this in the classical Greek context), was less widespread than it is in industrialised societies today (though what Vincent (2000) calls ‘mass literacy’ is relatively recent, in historical terms), but this alone is not evidence for or against Balogh’s theory. It should also be said immediately that his evidence base for oral writing (5) and silent writing (3) (at least in 1921) is exiguous: eight references in all, some doubtful (Theodoretus on Socrates (possibly a piece of anti-pagan propaganda), Horace Satires 1.6 (probably a misinterpretation), Cassian (second quotation, p. 175), Paulinus of Nola (second quotation, p. 184), Thomas a Kempis, Apollonius of Tyana/Euxenus, Isaac of Antioch, Paulinus of Périgueux), much too small a basis for Balogh’s definite conclusion that oral writing prevailed in the distant past. Hereafter we consider only his 1921 evidence base on reading.

21To arrive at an accurate count of Balogh’s ancient and medieval citations on reading, from the 78 items listed in the Annexe, we first discard 38: of these, two are purely terminological (see p. 177, footnote 18), two are irrelevant (third quotation from Cassian; Dracontius), five refer only to writing, and the other 29 are modern, or at least post-medieval, and therefore not strictly speaking relevant to Balogh’s focus on antiquity and the Middle Ages, but added for literary garnish and/or rhetorical effect. Of the remaining 40, 14 (3 in Greek, 11 in Latin) are from classical authors (provided we count Aristaenetus, 5^th century AD, as such – his topic is non-Christian and his Greek seems entirely classical); the rest, 26, are from Christian sources, of which four are in Greek (including one from the New Testament), one is from a Syriac Christian source via German, and the rest are in Latin. Of these 40 references, one (Horace with Maecenas) even Balogh thinks is ambiguous, nine relate instances of silent reading, and the other 30 oral reading. However, Balogh bolstered his case for predominantly oral reading by interpreting several of the references to silent reading as showing that the latter was unusual, most famously in the case of Augustine’s story about Ambrose – but see below, both on that incident and on “confirmation bias”.

4. Hypotheses

22Various possible reasons have been adduced for the theory that oral reading was once ubiquitous: so that others could benefit from hearing what was being read (with the concomitant implication that it might be unsociable not to read aloud); because literate people took pleasure in the euphonies of spoken text; because scriptio continua and the lack of punctuation made word identification difficult; or because it was supposedly impossible to read silently.

23The implications of these theoretical reasons can be expressed as three hypotheses:

1. That in antiquity and the Middle Ages people who could read routinely read aloud, whether in company or alone;

2. That the reason for this is that it was physiologically impossible for them to read silently;

3. That, if 1) is true, given the obvious preponderance of silent reading now and for many centuries before, a transition from predominantly oral to predominantly silent reading must have occurred – at some period or other.

24Before analysing the evidence further, some logic: If 2) is true, 1) must also be true. But if 1) is false, 2) must also be false and 3) would become irrelevant. These matters are revisited at the end.

5. Physiological impossibility?

25This argument comes in strong and weak forms. The strong form (not advanced as such by Balogh) can be dismissed peremptorily. Its major advocate was Saenger (1997); he based his conclusion mainly on the supposed difficulty of reading scriptio continua. Vatri (2012), backed up strongly by McCutcheon (2015) and anticipated, with less empirical evidence, by Battezzato (2009), summarised contrary experimental evidence (e.g. that fluent readers of normal, spaced scripts are hampered only when spaces are removed, and that fluent readers of normal, unspaced Thai script are hampered only when spaces are introduced). Vatri added his own demonstration that certain bigrams are more frequent in word-initial and -final positions in classical Greek words and would have facilitated the reading of unspaced text. Coping with unspaced text would also obviously improve with practice, a point acknowledged by Balogh (p. 192). Gavrilov (1997: 61) summed up the argument against the strong form of the physiological impossibility argument trenchantly: “If the ancients did not read to themselves, that would not show their love for the spoken word and for the euphonies of speech, but a severe psychic handicap.”

6. Aesthetics

26However, Balogh did advance a weaker form of this argument, linking it to aesthetics (p. 192): “The reader of antiquity was […] inclined to read aloud […] for a combination of technical and aesthetic reasons.” The technical reason, already referred to, was the supposed difficulty of reading scriptio continua. It is weak, and Balogh downplayed it. The aesthetic reason (p. 195) is the rhetorical nature of much classical style, which, Balogh argues, is only fully appreciated in oral reading: “Reading aloud fits easily and naturally into the rhetorical world of Hellenistic-Roman antiquity, where the living, carefully crafted and articulated word was the common basis for public life, education, literature and science.” Here he was following his mentor Norden in drawing attention to the highly-wrought, rhetorical style of much classical literature. High literary style involved intricate word order and rhetorical flourishes, and often seems designed for declamation rather than silent contemplation. Balogh is also aware (p. 196) that, throughout history, whenever rhetoric ceased to be a live need (e.g. in law courts, political assemblies), it tended to become instead a literary pursuit, a process to which Kennedy (1980) applied the Italian term letteraturizzazione (“literaturification”).

27Balogh’s own style, even in translation, seems consciously rhetorical and literary. For example, it seems clear that he deliberately balanced Nietzsche’s diatribe against German authors and readers of his time having no “third ear” (as Anglophones might say, having a “tin ear”) for harmony of style (p. 163) with his closing quotation from Legouvé (p. 198): “I recite as I walk, learning verses, trying to give them their true emphasis,” etc. Legouvé’s habit was obviously oral, and Nietzsche’s preference would clearly have been for writers of German to test their phrases aloud for euphony. Many writers even today, if concerned for the beauty of their prose, might attempt the same effect in silent rehearsal, using subvocalised murmuring, or even silent “inner speech”, as some modern psycholinguists have dubbed it (e.g. Baddeley & Lewis 1981; Sokolov 1968 [1972]).

7. Reading that others heard

28A clear case of this is the story of the apostle Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts of the Apostles, ch. 8, vv. 28-30. The eunuch is “on his way home, driving along in his chariot and reading the prophet Isaias. The Spirit said to Philip, ‘Go up to that chariot and keep close by it.’ And Philip, as he ran up, heard him reading the prophet Isaias, and asked, ‘Can you understand what you are reading?’” Even if the incident is perhaps a pious fiction, it illustrates the idea that people in antiquity who overheard someone reading a known passage aloud would have been able to both identify and understand it.

29The story of Acontius and Cydippe (p. 176) provides both an example and a contrast. Acontius contrives to have Cydippe read out most of a sentence he has carved into an apple; “By Artemis, Acontius I shall wed.” She avoids the trap of inadvertently swearing the oath by leaving the last Greek word half-spoken: “gam […].” In Ovid’s version Acontius then writes her a letter, which she reads in silence “lest my tongue unknowingly swear by some god.” Balogh interprets both as evidence that oral reading was usual and silent reading not – but both seem appropriate in these differing contexts.

8. Followers and supporters

30Hendrickson (1929: 193) reached much the same conclusion as Balogh: “Throughout antiquity reading aloud was the general habit of the learned as well as of the unlearned. Silent reading was unusual, but in what degree exceptional or possible the evidence as yet collected does not permit us to say.”

31Balogh’s conclusion was also accepted by many later scholars – for example, Chaytor (1945: 13) wrote: “It is not commonly realised that this [reading aloud] was the manner of reading generally practised in the ancient world and during the early days of Christianity,” and assembled copious evidence for the continuation of this practice up to the invention of printing. Stanford, Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College, Dublin, 1940-1980, in The Sound of Greek (1967) spoke of “the extreme rarity of silent reading in antiquity”, and wrote: “There is no clear reference at all to silent reading by any Greek, named or unnamed, until after the fourth century A.D.” More nuanced, because applied to literary texts, was the opinion of E. J. Kenney, Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge, 1974-1982:

In general it may be taken for granted that throughout antiquity books were written to be read aloud, and that even private reading often took on some of the characteristics of a modulated declamation. It might be said without undue exaggeration that a book of poetry or artistic prose was not simply a text in the modern sense but something like a score for public or private performance. (Kenney 1982: 12)

32Rosalind Thomas, in Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece (1992: 91), endorsed “the commonplace that the written word in the ancient world, particularly the written record of literature, was meant to be heard rather than read silently”. Cavallo & Chartier (1995: IX/1999: 4) extended the idea much as Balogh had:

In the ancient world, in the Middle Ages and as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the sort of reading implicit in many texts was oralized (as was their actual reading). The “readers” of those texts were listeners attentive to a reading voice. The text, addressed to the ear as much as to the eye, played on forms and formulas that adapted writing to the demands of oral performance.

33And Cavallo (1995: 47/1999: 73) seems to admit no exceptions, at least in the 1^st century AD: “As Quintilian tells us […] and various other sources confirm, the most common way to read was […] reading aloud (at all levels and for all functions).” This general idea is (or was) also strong in German and Russian scholarship, according to Gavrilov (1997).

9. Critics

34Others have been sceptical or taken a mostly contrary view. Knox (1968) and Gavrilov (1997) re-analysed at length what Balogh himself (p. 164) called “the locus classicus of the entire problem”, and Knox called Balogh’s “Exhibit A”, the famous passage in Augustine’s Confessions where he seems to express surprise that Ambrose was reading silently while in company. Balogh and others interpreted this as showing that silent reading was unusual to the point of abnormality or unsociability. But the key words in the original are: “[…] sic eum legentem vidimus tacite et aliter numquam” which, translated idiomatically, mean “[…] that is how we saw him reading, silently. He always read like that.” The last few words, often overlooked by commentators (though briefly glanced at by Clark 1931: 700), actually prove that it was NOT unusual for Ambrose to read silently. Knox’s view, as summarised by Gavrilov (1997: 57), but not expressed so neatly by Knox himself, was that “Reading to oneself was known very early and was not felt to be something extraordinary. Nevertheless, because they loved the sonorities of language, people often read aloud, especially works of artistic literature.” Gavrilov (1997: 70-71) also added over 20 citations of ancient “Passages where silent reading is more or less certainly implied”. Silent reading may even have been known many centuries earlier than ancient Greek texts imply, if Charpin & Todd’s (2010: 21) interpretation of a Mesopotamian cuneiform tablet is correct.

10. More counter-examples: “reading” that others did not hear

35The earliest historical figure said to have read silently is Alexander the Great (356-323 BC). The first-century AD historian Plutarch recounts the following incident four times in different versions of the life of Alexander. He was looking at a confidential letter from his mother when his lover and comrade in arms Hephaistion came to look over his shoulder. Alexander touched Hephaistion’s lips with his signet ring to mean “Sh”. The novelist Mary Renault, who had studied the ancient sources for Alexander’s life and written a trilogy of novels about him based on them, wrote about Alexander reading silently. Stanford wrote to the Times Literary Supplement saying “There is no evidence for this!”; she wrote in saying “Yes, there is.” Ten years later Stanford wrote in again to apologise: he had finally read the version of the story in Plutarch, On the Great Fortune and Virtue of Alexander 2.7: 7, which includes the phrase:

σιωπῇ πρὸς ἑαυτὸν ἀναγιγνώσκοντος
while he was reading [it] silently (σιωπῇ) to himself

36This is the only version of the four which includes the word σιωπῇ. So Stanford was wrong, but had the grace to admit it. We might infer that Hephaistion too was able to read the letter silently. However, we might also wonder how Plutarch, four centuries later, knew this about Alexander; the following contemporaneous evidence should be stronger.

37Knox’s (1968: 433) earliest example of obviously silent reading is from Euripides’ play Hippolytus (first performed in 428 BC). Phaedra, the second and much younger wife of Theseus, king of Athens, has fallen in love with her stepson Hippolytus, been rejected, and killed herself. As he prepares to light her funeral pyre, Theseus notices the letter she has tied to her wrist, reads it while the Chorus express forebodings, then (line 877) exclaims βοᾷ, βοᾷ – “It shrieks, it shrieks.” This makes no sense unless the actor playing Theseus has behaved in a manner which the audience can without question interpret as his having read silently. (It is useful to take note of ‘stage business’ here: nothing need actually be written on Phaedra’s “letter” – the actor “pretend-reads”.)

38The second earliest example of obviously silent reading is almost as ancient: it comes from Aristophanes’ play The Knights (first performed in 424 BC). Nicias, who is portrayed as unable to read (though the actor playing him will almost certainly have learnt his lines from a script), has stolen a written prophecy from Paphlagon. Demosthenes offers to read it for him. Nicias gives him a goblet of wine and asks “What does it say?” Demosthenes, focused on the document (which again need not have anything written on it – more stage business), says “Fill me another cup.” Astonished, Nicias asks “Does it really say ‘Fill me another cup?’” Further humour at Nicias’ expense follows, until Demosthenes eventually tells him what the oracle says. There would be no humour here if many (most?) of the audience were not already familiar with silent reading. Svenbro (1993: 164; verbatim also in Svenbro, 1999: 51) comments:

The scene from The Knights is particularly instructive […] because it indicates that the practice of silent reading was not familiar to everyone in 424 BC […], even though the author assumes that the theatre audience was familiar with it. Silent reading was probably practised by only a limited number of readers and was unfamiliar to a good many Greeks, especially to illiterates who knew about writing only “from the outside”.

39This may be straining the evidence: an illiterate who knew enough about writing to know both the value of written prophecies, and that he would need the services of a literate, would surely also know that he would need to wait until his informant had finished reading before asking questions, and that an oracle was unlikely to demand a refill for the reader. The humour is in portraying Nicias as the sort of bumpkin who does not know even those things. Also, it seems risky to generalise from this one instance to the notion that “Silent reading […] was unfamiliar to a good many Greeks.”

40Cavallo and Chartier (1995: XII/1999: 7) cite several more examples of evidently silent reading from plays first performed in the late 5^th/early 4^th century BC, and in the latter century Antiphanes’ play Sappho contains the famous riddle which (paraphrased) runs: “There is a female being who keeps her babies under her dress. They have no voices but send sounds across the world that reach those not present and even the deaf.” The answer is a letter (in the epistle or missive sense), the babies are the alphabet letters whose message reaches those far away, but will not be audible to a person standing close to someone reading – silently, therefore.

11. Precise ancient psychology of reading

41But theatrical plays are fiction, even if they represent occurrences that Athenian audiences would have recognised. Burnyeat (1997: 74) warns of “problems about the inference from art to life”, and provides instead a classical “calm, straightforward statement about reading in general” from the Greek-Egyptian thinker Ptolemy of Alexandria (better known as an astronomer and geographer):

The reason [why the only proper purpose of uttered logos is to get oneself understood] is that for judging a thing and discovering its nature, the internal logos of thought is sufficient; uttered logos makes no contribution here – rather, its activity, like the exercise of our senses, disturbs and distracts one’s investigations. That is why it tends to be in states of peace and quiet that we discover the objects of our inquiries, and why we keep quiet when engaged in the readings themselves if we are concentrating hard on the texts before us. What talk is useful for, by contrast, is passing on the results of our inquiries to other people. (Burnyeat 1997: 74, translating Ptolemy Περὶ κριτερίου καὶ ᾑγεμονικοῦ ch. 5, 1-2 and adding emphases)

42Ptolemy was writing in the 2^nd century AD, but Burnyeat argues (p. 75) that “Ptolemy’s statement is clear proof that long before Augustine met Ambrose it was normal practice among educated people to read to themselves in silence.”

12. Sociological contexts

43Many of the examples mentioned above, and others which Balogh cites, show the importance of knowing the context: when would people in antiquity and the Middle Ages have felt it correct to read aloud, and when silently? This sociological angle is explored in depth by Johnson (2000: 625; also at book length in Johnson 2010) with particular reference to “a specific ‘reading culture’, limited by type of text (literary prose), audience (the elite), and time (the early [Roman] empire)”. He shows that Balogh’s picture of reading aloud of high literature fits there, provided “the elite” are remembered as probably the sole audience for such events, even if the reader were a trained slave. But the implication is that this picture would not fit the circumstances of many of Balogh’s excerpts from early Christian sources: if Ambrose, for example, had read aloud for the benefit of his devotees, the texts would have been religious, not literary, unless written by divines also steeped in classical style (as Augustine was). Nor would this picture fit the circumstances in which merchants would have needed some distinctly non-literary literacy to manage their affairs, as shown by the many “commercial” papyri unearthed in Oxyrhynchus. And the rumour reported of Socrates, eight centuries later, that “it was ridiculous, whenever he had to read or write, he stammered like a child” (p. 168) lacks context entirely, so is difficult to evaluate sociologically (though, given Theodoretus’ anti-pagan bias, the anecdote may be a scurrilous invention). It also contradicts Plato’s story (not cited by Balogh) of Socrates reading a book of Anaxagoras as fast as he could (Phaedo 98; cf. Harvey, 1966: 629, footnote 8: “Socrates was an avid reader”, with references).

Conclusions

44McCutcheon (2015: 1) quotes Werner (2009: 337) as describing the oral vs silent reading debate as a “moribund” controversy, but goes on to show that, while this may be the case for most classicists, the belief that ancient reading was predominantly oral is taking longer to die elsewhere. It is worth quoting at length McCutcheon’s analysis of confirmation bias in the wider scholarly community:

[M]any scholars demand a great quantity of evidence to be convinced that silent reading was actually practiced regularly in antiquity... However, the burden of proof for the opposite proposition is not nearly so heavy. Thus, the necessarily finite number of examples of silent reading in the classical canon appears unpersuasive, since they can always be rationalized away as outliers and oddities of cultural practice, or dismissed as “uncertain” and “ambiguous”. In contrast, the similarly limited number of examples of reading aloud – which, as Gavrilov (1997) has documented, roughly equal examples of silent reading – always seem capable of providing sufficient proof of its primacy. Thus Fischer (2003: 82) can observe that “only a handful of passages in antiquity attest to silent reading” without mentioning that only a handful attest to reading aloud. Similarly, […] scholars often assume that whenever a particular ancient source specifies that an act of reading was conducted in silence this is being done to position this act in opposition to the default mode of reading for the time – viva voce. Nonetheless, the fact that ancient writers often specify that an act of reading was done aloud curiously attracts little notice. (McCutcheon 2015: 14)

45That the controversy is not moribund even to a commentator on the classics is clear from Vallejo (2022: 40-41):

From the early centuries of writing up to the Middle Ages, the norm was to read aloud for oneself or others, and writers uttered their phrases as they wrote them, listening to their musicality […] a written text was understood as a basic score, which is why the words appeared one after another, in an unbroken chain, with no spaces or punctuation – they had to be pronounced to be understood […]. Perhaps this is why the first people to read […] in silence […] were considered so remarkable. In the fourth century, Augustine was so intrigued to see Bishop Ambrose of Milan read in such a way that he made a note of it in his Confessions […] Clearly, it seemed out of the ordinary.

46Scholars who nevertheless believe that there was a time when reading was predominantly oral have expended considerable research time and paper speculating on when the change-over to predominantly silent reading occurred. Balogh, Hendrickson and Chaytor all attributed it to the invention of printing. Saenger (1995; 1997) suggested the 13^th-14^th centuries AD, while Chartier (1995: 276) placed it in the 15^th-17^th centuries. At the extreme, Pugh (1978: 12) believed that silent reading did not become commonplace until the mid-nineteenth century. However, this pursuit seems pointless. It is clear that for a long while now, at least a few centuries, silent reading has predominated, and that the shift away from the elite Roman practice documented by Johnson (2000, 2010) must have been slow and gradual (for an analysis of Shakespeare’s plays suggesting the transition was still progress in his day, see Brooks 2020), though oral reading by adults is still surprisingly frequent even today – see the account of the RABiT (Reading Aloud in Britain Today) research project in Duncan (2021). Equally invalid from a modern perspective is Balogh’s inference (p. 189) “that the now undisputed [sic] fact of the transformation (“silence-ification”) of reading also suggests a remarkable underlying psychological shift.”

47It is also clear that, in his enthusiasm for his research topic, Balogh over-egged the evidence for oral reading – see for example his translation/interpretation of Augustine’s omne verbum sonat (p. 189) compared to a more accurate translation, while underplaying the examples of silent reading that he also knew of. Knox’s opinion quoted above from Gavrilov is therefore a suitably balanced position, and we can provide answers on the three hypotheses which (it was suggested above) are implications of the theory that reading in the distant past was predominantly oral:

1. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, did people who could read routinely read aloud, whether in company or alone?

2. Not routinely – only for special purposes with specific forms of literary text;

3. Was the reason for this that it was physiologically impossible for them to read silently?

4. No – not only because the logic stated just below the hypotheses earlier means that 1) being (largely) false, 2) is also necessarily false, but also because of the empirical evidence cited by Vatri (2012);

5. Given the obvious predominance of silent reading now and for many centuries before, must a transition from predominantly oral to predominantly silent reading have occurred at some specific period?
   No – 1) being largely false, 3) is irrelevant.

48While all of this challenges Balogh’s work and conclusion, it takes nothing away from his status as the pioneer who first treated this topic systematically, and we are proud to present his seminal work in translation here.