Dioscorus of Aphroditois the classic example. Sometimes, however, we do get the opportunity to learn about the precise social milieu or personal preferences of an individual reader through his texts, when they can be connected to specific archaeological or archival contexts. Much the same may be said of the anonymous owners of our papyrus literary manuscripts, which come from the sites that preserve documentary papyri: only rarely do we have any sense of what relationship, if any, particular literary manuscripts have to particular documents.
Cicero or Pliny the Younger clearly read both books and documents, being not only educated gentlemen and authors, but also wealthy landowners, lawyers, and provincial governors yet we can only see this indirectly from their correspondence. Of course, there is no reason to doubt that most, if not all, readers of literature were involved in both types of literacy.
#OLD MANUSCRIPTS PAPYRUS FULL#
In studying ancient reading, however, it also pays to remember that we rarely get to see ancient readers in the full spectrum of their literacy: we usually have evidence of either (elite) literary engagement or (sub-elite) documentary practice. For instance, we can understand something of the way texts were actually read from marginalia, glosses, and accents-all added to aid comprehension and recitation (see the recently-published fragment of Homer, left). Papyri allow us to explore the relationship between readers and texts from several possible angles. So, I naturally decided to take the opportunity presented by my friend Mathias's challenge to find humor in the papyri to see if I could determine the place of humorous literature in the reading culture of Greek and Roman Egypt. Being a librarian and a papyrologist, I have always found the possibility of learning about ancient reading preferences and habits from papyri intriguing.
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