ABSTRACT
At Vindolanda in about AD ioo Flavius Cerialis, prefect of the Ninth Cohort of Batavians, sat and drafted a letter to one Crispinus in which he attempted to gain access to the patronage of the provincial governor. Towards the end of the draft he states specifically haec tibi a Vindolanda scribo ('I am writing this to you from Vindolanda'): no phrase in all our texts stimulates the imagination more vividly or reminds us more emphatically that the environment at Vindolanda was a literate one.1 From the point of view of acculturation and romanisation, perhaps the most important and exciting aspect of the tablets is that they illuminate the extent, the quality and the nature of literacy in the community at Vindolanda and, to a lesser extent, at those places from which letters came to members of the community at Vindolanda. We may also consider the extent to which the information they offer is more broadly applicable in the Roman world of the period around AD ioo. It is not merely a question of quantification of the number of people in a society who were able to achieve whatever we consider an adequate ability to read and write. On this subject the tablets probably reflect, like other material, a small proportion of the population which was fully literate; it is important to remember, however, that there are degrees of literacy. Attempts at quantifying and measuring literacy in the ancient world face formidable difficulties, and it is much more important and fruitful to consider the ways in which use of the written word was embedded in the institutional and social structures of a society and the functions which depended upon that use; in other words, to assess the degree to which the lives and activities of people who could write little or not at all, as well as those of people who could, were controlled by the written word. The relatively small size of the literate group needs to be set against the fact that a much larger proportion of the population behaved according to conventions which depended on the presumption that written communication was a normal means of regulating society. To that extent, we could assert, even without the evidence of Vindolanda, that the
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Roman civilisation was a literate one. What we can study at Vindolanda, through a collection of evidence of unique coherence and depth, is the character of that literacy at the periphery of the Roman world and its role in the organisation of that provincial region and society.2
