ABSTRACT
The spread of literacy in the Hellenistic world and the Roman Empire is one of the most important features of the early part of our period. It is evident to the archaeologist not only in the masses of surviving inscriptions, carved by professional writing experts in bronze and stone, but also in the numerous scrawls on the walls and pavements of buildings excavated all over the Empire. By 100 CE even the handwriting in Latin documents from outposts of the Empire as far apart as Upper Egypt and the north of England is astonishingly uniform (Bowman and Woolf 1994:12). A recent estimate reckons a maximum of 20–30 per cent literacy was achieved in the Roman Empire (Harris 1989; OCD: 869; cf. Gamble 1995:1–10) as opposed to estimates of between 2 and 7 per cent for pre-Hellenistic Egypt (Ray 1994:64–5). This was due in part to the enormous number of schools, many of them like the one endowed by the Younger Pliny at Comum, established by private investors. There were also an increasing number of institutions of higher education in which rhetoric was central— there were eleven such centres in Gaul alone (Cary 1980:691).
