‘Etched into the Soul’: The Education of Shorthand-Writers in Late Antiquity

Abstract

Surviving in excellent condition on papyri and wax tablets, the Commentary and other late antique shorthand manuals offer a new way to investigate the complexity and diversity of non-elite intellectual culture in the later Roman Empire. Stenographical skill and obedience were hymned by elite authors, but the methods used to inculcate that skill and extract that compliance have rarely been examined. This article, the first to subject shorthand pedagogy to social historical analysis, argues that the difficulty of the shorthand system increased the potency of the ideological lessons it delivered to its (predominantly non-elite, often enslaved) students. It finds that, in addition to technical instruction, the Commentary communicated a coherent, if troubling, vision of late ancient society and of the proper dispensation of power within it. Student-authored marginalia point to the successes and limits of the Commentary's moral pedagogy and raise fresh questions about how non-elite communities developed their own intellectual identities and traditions.