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The Debate Of Silent Reading

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It has long been a source of debate among classicists whether the ancients read silently or aloud. Analysis of this question is necessarily fragmented, since the only information available to modern scholars comes from the few extant ancient sources discussing how texts were read. In the surviving sources, there are many more explicit references to reading aloud than to reading silently, which suggests that reading aloud was more common. Nevertheless, there is evidence in ancient literature that reading silently was both possible and “unremarkable” (McCutcheon 2). Reading silently and reading aloud are not practices at odds with each other; while reading aloud was almost certainly more conventional, reading silently was not necessarily abnormal. In fact, the available evidence shows that readers in Greek and Roman antiquity read both aloud and silently. Modern scholarship about reading in antiquity began in large part with Balogh’s landmark publication, “Voces Paginarum,” which argued that silent reading was extremely rare. This conclusion held until Knox’s 1968 seminal work, “Silent Reading in Antiquity,” which discredited much of Balogh’s work by pointing out major flaws in his research by scrutinizing much of Balogh’s “evidence.” More recent scholarship by Gavrilov has gone even further, questioning the validity of Balogh’s central evidence that reading silently was unusual—a short passage from Augustine’s Confessions in which Augustine discusses seeing Ambrose reading

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