Terminology Used for Annotations

Clement of Alexandria defined his work made up of notes as Stromateis, “miscellanies, literary weavings,” referring to the unorganized character of the collection: “This is not a piece of writing rhetorically shaped for display nor a systematic treatise, but my notes stored for old age, a remedy for forgetfulness, a mere reflection, an outline of vividly alive originals, words I was thought worthy to hear and blessed and memorable men” (Strom. 1.1). This term stromateis was not in common use, although Gellius cited it along with other works of the same kind.⁶ Clement’s definition aptly defines what notes were and were not—an ensemble of annotations that usually differs from a rhetorically wrought text or a treatise and implies that this type of work has a private character. Further, he indicates that notes were memoranda kept in order to safeguard against the failure of memory. The relationship between the power of memory and annotations was often put into relief, to the point that it became a kind of cliché. Clement also insists upon the fundamental difference between real events and vividly pronounced words on the one hand and their pallid counterparts, the notes that recorded them, on the other.

As we will see later, the definition of notes and note-taking varies. Roman writers used the word commentaries, which denoted the raw material of prose or poetry that still needed to be revised and rearranged.⁷ In this sense, Cicero most closely resembles Lucian when writing to Lucceius to request a favor. Hoping for a bit of immediate glory (gloriola) through the immortalization of his accomplishments, he asks his correspondent to embellish and expand upon notes that Cicero himself would eventually put together. In the correspondence, Cicero uses the Greek term hypomnema for a collection of notes or for a text that is without a complete form.

In Greek, a note is commonly called hypomnema. The first to use this term in the sense of its etymological meaning (“reminder” or “memorandum”) was Thucydides.⁸ Starting with Plato, the term develops the meaning “notation,” but it could also refer to a literary commentary or sets of notes. It finds a place in historiography with Plutarch and Lucian, who use it to refer to notes, but for Eunapius it designates the historical commentaries that he used to prepare himself.⁹ Marcus Aurelius calls the Discourses of Epictetus tois Epicteteiois hypomnemasi: that is, Epictetan notes.¹⁰In the case of Epictetus, the term maintains its original meaning, “jottings,” and hypomnemata (in the plural) refers to a collection of annotations rather than a single one. Most Greek commentaries to the Categories (for example those of the late antique philosopher Ammonius) draw a distinction between works considered to be treatises, i.e., those called syntagmatica and those works called hypomnematica, in which only the principal things were written.¹¹ The Peripatetics lectured from notes called hypomnemata, and during classes their students would take down notes, which became texts.

Other terms that occasionally appear in the sources, παρασκευή, ὑπογραφή, and ὑποτύπωσις, refer more properly to sketches and outlines.¹² In Latin the term hypomnemata appears sometimes, but generally adnotatio is used to designate a work added to something already written. Commentarius is also used, though not exclusively in this sense. The term hypomnema, however, could be employed for a monograph, as with Galen. The latter frequently used this term in reference not only to a single work, but also to the whole of his production, with the result that it is impossible to apply a single definition to his usage.¹³ The etymological concepts of memory, memoranda, and aide-mémoire were always present.

Notes were also sometimes called grammateia, usually referring to writing on wooden tablets. Curiously, Lucian connects the term with amorous notes written by women. In Toxaris the term grammateia repeatedly designates the notes a married woman would have her maids bring to a young man in order to inflame him with love for her.¹⁴ In Lucian’s Professor of Rhetoric 23, the sophist of the easy road boasts of his popularity with women, showing to everybody the passionate notes (grammateia) they sent him. Lucian, of course, is being playful and pointedly deceptive.

In documentary papyri, the term hypomnema has been used since the third century BCE and is attested up to late antiquity (with a slightly different meaning). The archive of the third-century BCE businessman Zenon shows several examples. Notes consisting of a few lines that follow a letter and are called hypomnema appear to be postscripts, as in P.Col.Zen. II 107 (or P.Col. IV 107) which is in the hand of Zeno himself. At times, however, hypomnemata exist independently and refer to short communications, examples of which include directives about the destruction of certain trees or a lumber shipment.¹⁵ It is clear that no single term existed to designate notes, and that the one that appears most frequently, hypomnema, always needs to be reevaluated. I will revisit this term in part III referring to self-standing textual commentaries.

Notes were habitually used in medicine, and Galen refers repeatedly to the fact that Hippocrates took notes on pieces of papyrus and parchment and on tablets. His son Thessalos had found his father’s hypomnemata, which he put together in the Epidemics.¹⁶ In another book Galen called the notes hypographai (sketches). To these Thessalos added “some notes himself, not a few” (7 890). Some have taken this to mean that he added books two and five, but others have considered book four also interpolated and illegitimate (not gnesios).¹⁷ Traditionally all the Epidemics have been wrongly identified as a collection of notes, with various parts appended and containing deficient language. Finally, in his edition of the text, Jacques Jouanna clarified that the text did not consist of notes.¹⁸

In the Roman world, Pliny the Younger used the term commentarii for the 160 volumes of notes his uncle left him (Ep. 3.5.17). The model of the elder Pliny must have counted as a great stimulus, but as Ilaria Marchesi remarks, “Peer pressure must have been strong.”¹⁹ It is possible that these contained some comments, and they must have observed some order. The volumes consisted of papyrus rolls, inscribed on both sides in a small and tight hand.²⁰ Notes were prone to being misplaced, discarded, or lost after being incorporated into a text, with the result that in general we are only informed that they had existed at one time; individual notes usually have not survived, except on papyrus.

Where did the students who recorded lectures write their texts? Writing notes on a papyrus roll required some ability. With the absence of tables and probably also a lack of boards to support the papyrus, writing notes was an act of dexterity.²¹ It is conceivable that these students employed tablets. Nowadays, electronic media and keyword searching have alleviated the notetaker’s burden, but in the Greek and Roman worlds storing and indexing notes required manual organization. Given the prevalent use of alphabetical order, which was enforced starting with primary education and was also used for numerical sequences, we may surmise that individuals employed it to manage abundant notes, probably taking advantage of readily available slave labor. Notes could be made on erasable writing surfaces and thus be inherently temporary, or they might be written on more permanent materials, such as papyrus, parchment, ostraca (potsherds), or tablets. Reading widely, excerpting information, and assembling notes must have been part of the working methods of many writers, even those who never mention these activities.

The physical storage of notes is unclear. Many were lost or discarded, as they were only intended for short-term use, while others cannot be recovered because they were not deposited in locations designated for long-term storage. However, archival evidence suggests that preserved notes would have been stored together with other incomplete pieces of writing.²² For example, Libanius makes a distinction between speeches he delivered and those he kept in a chest (kibotion) for emergencies, like delivering an impromptu oration.²³ The latter must have needed some finishing touches, and his notes for declamations were likely stored along with them (Ep. 877.3). His slave was in charge of the chest, with the result that the sophist found himself unable to locate desired notes in the slave’s absence (Ep. 744.5). From Synesius’s Ep. 154.62–63 we learn that the author’s enemies assumed that the books he kept in this chest were incomplete and uncorrected (adiorthota). These chests, therefore, would usually have contained material that still needed work. Early Islamic historians used a similar chest to store annotations from both oral and written sources.²⁴ Other scholars, whether contemporary or later, could use the notes in the chest to compose their own works with no concern for plagiarism. Better organization featuring indexing and headings came later, at the turn of the eighteenth century, with the invention of a peculiar but handy “note closet” in which a great variety of notes could be stored.²⁵

Writing Strategies

Here, I focus on the ancients’ strategies of composing works by using notes derived from oral performances, the reading of texts, the jotting down of original thoughts, and memories of events like traveling. “Of course, the ancients made notes!” one might say. On the writing process, John McPhee says, “You begin with a subject… . You pile up volumes of notes and then figure out what you are going to do with them.”²⁶ Writing them down to compose a whole text was the ultimate achievement. Ancient works of literature must in many cases have been derived from notes, because writers needed to construct and organize their texts and to record what they had read, and they likely did so often, as we do, from notes. Most of the time, however, the notes that writers took in antiquity are not extant as separate entities in their original forms unless they are preserved on papyri, ostraca, or tablets. Even though in some rare cases authors explicitly mention the ways in which notes shaped their work, many aspects and circumstances of note-taking, both inside and outside the classroom, are obscure. It is also important to recognize that sometimes we risk falling prey to anecdotes that are short and isolated, but it is the composite picture that counts.

The primary rationale for making annotations was to remember knowledge gained through reading, listening, and seeing to ultimately benefit people’s ability to combine sources and put together written works. Students who recorded lectures did so not only to enrich their patrimony of knowledge but also to learn how to organize and create written works.²⁷ The narrations of our predecessors’ prodigious memories that have come down to us are fabulous. Memory needed to be aided and stimulated, both in school and in real life. The students of rhetoric and philosophy whom we will meet later recorded portions of texts and discussions in order to retain this knowledge.²⁸

A well-known letter by Pliny the Younger reveals precious information regarding his uncle Pliny the Elder.²⁹ A compulsive reader, the elder Pliny would isolate and preserve excerpts from any book—even bad ones (as we are told)—in case he might ever need them. He would have assistants make notes for him as he was basking in the hot Italian sun, eating dinner, and being rubbed down after visiting the baths. Pliny did not write his notes himself but instead verbally responded to texts that others read to him. His note-taking therefore depended on listening to others, just as students would take notes when listening to their teachers. The elder Pliny also relied on note-taking when traveling, bringing along a secretary (notarius)—a stenographer who would take notae on tablets to later be “translated” into Latin or Greek words. I will describe in greater detail at the end of part I how stenographers were used at the beginning of the Roman imperial period but only appeared later in the Greek world. In Pliny’s case, however, he was very concerned with productive work, and on frigid days he would take care that long sleeves protected the notarius’s hands.³⁰ Speed characterizes the entire passage describing Pliny’s frantic literary habits, and we can almost visualize notes flying from his mouth straight to the tablets.³¹ Clearly idiosyncratic to each notetaker, the practice of note-taking did not necessarily happen in the privacy of one’s room.

The example of Pliny the Elder is certainly suggestive, but in general Greek and Roman authors showed some reluctance to discuss their writing methods and preferred to present only their finished product.³²Authors such as Plutarch and Lucian, who like many others relied on note-taking, disclosed their methods only in part. Plutarch, who devoured “omnivorously works in all areas of ancient learning,”³³ wrote in a letter to a friend that appears at the beginning of On Tranquility of Mind that as a gift he “had gathered together observations from notes” that he had intended for his own use.³⁴ The word hypomnemata has aroused scholarly attention regarding Plutarch’s sources, namely whether he relied on multiple sources or just one.³⁵ The friend had requested a treatise, instead of which Plutarch, in order not to appear unfriendly, sent this specimen. Thus, Plutarch was in the habit of first writing notes for himself on various subjects, then later combining them.³⁶

In De historia conscribenda 47–48, Lucian recommends that a historian collect facts carefully, first producing a series of notes (again called hypomnemata) without concern for continuity or “beauty.” The notes then needed to be properly arranged and ordered, then finally embellished with charm and proper style.³⁷ Every meticulous ancient historian must have started a project by randomly collecting material in the form of annotations, which he subsequently arranged. Thucydides’s History, much admired by Lucian, is emblematic of the difficulty historians faced in accurately evaluating and ordering each piece of testimony.³⁸ Thucydides does not discuss his working methods, but in his Vita his later biographer Marcellinus³⁹commented on his copious notes from the time the war started.⁴⁰ Even if we do not have the notes or the copies redacted under the supervision of Thucydides (or indeed any other Greek historian), editions of their texts that contain rather modest and literary marginalia survive, testifying to how grammatical and rhetorical curricula used these authors’ works.⁴¹

Literary evidence from other poets and prose writers indicates they also used various note-taking methods. For example, Diogenes Laertius reports on the writing habits of the philosopher Timon, who was fond of wine and composed poems as a respite from philosophy.⁴² Though difficult to take at face value, this anecdote still alludes to modes of note-taking that are not unrealistic and must have been frequent. His disorderly way of writing and preserving his creations may have depended partly on his state of inebriation. He would write here and there on a papyrus roll, producing poetic excerpts of which he subsequently would lose track.⁴³ Timon (DL 9.114) had great difficulty reciting his “half-eaten” poetic texts on request, and if a complete annotation escaped him, he sometimes would find half a poem scrawled somewhere on the roll. Diogenes commented that Timon was adiaphoros, “indifferent,” and made no effort to preserve his notes, which were apparently all together on a single roll, in order. Some character traits may have facilitated his tendency to write annotations rather than to automatically conceive of a piece of writing as a whole. He would also cooperate with poets and tragedians by sketching plots and giving them material. Like Diogenes, he was very fond of quotations—or rather, fragments of writing.⁴⁴

Notes were usually private, but they could be shared with personal assistants and other students and in rare cases passed from author to author as a “gift.” This is the situation in which the poet Parthenius of Nicaea reveals a dedication of his Erotika pathemata (Sufferings in love) to the poet Gallus.⁴⁵The teacher of Vergil and a favorite of emperors, Parthenius was famous in his day, but his poetry has mostly been lost.⁴⁶ All that survives is this little prose work that contains thirty-six love stories. Sending it to his friend to be rendered into verse, Parthenius describes it as “a little notebook” (hypomnemation). Parthenius was no different from other ancient writers who jotted down ideas and facts for later use. Here he had collected mythological stories that, in his opinion, had not yet been subjected to sufficient treatment. While he offered them to Gallus in hopes of receiving a poetic gift in return, it is conceivable that he had tried (or was going to try) to turn them into poetry himself as a challenge to his friend. It is inspiring to imagine Parthenius putting together a much larger collection of “sufferings.”

Notes and Memory

We now rely heavily on computer memory, and a single transient glitch can render our memory storage unreadable. Therefore, we are confronted with sudden failure instead of a healthy, natural process of forgetting. Scholars have studied the art of memory, emphasizing certain ancient figures’ incredible feats, and yet within the generally positive assessment of artificial memory there were, and still remain, some doubts.⁴⁷ The power of memory was essential to the orator, but it usually required a natural visual memory. As a result, I argue that students of rhetoric needed to write notes and concurrently work on their memory skills if they chose to become professional orators. Though aware of memory’s importance, Quintilian had more modest goals, framing the system as useful for remembering a list of names but not for parts of speech.⁴⁸ Pseudo-Longinus’s On Memory insisted that natural endowments, proper exercises, and personal application could remedy a faulty memory. His perception that many still had difficulty remembering shows that a good memory was not universal, and that the art was not infallible.⁴⁹

We have already pointed out some examples of the use of notes to retain information. This is an important theme that deserves a longer treatment than I can give it here. My discussion will concentrate on certain examples while only mentioning others. The importance of memory is also relevant to the case of the students we will encounter in the rest of the book. Arrian and the pupils of Didymus and Olympiodorus took down the lectures of their educators not only because their memory was not sufficient to record them in their minds but also because a written text was a better and more secure voucher for credibility. Their teachers allowed the students’ lecture notes to circulate under the students’ own names. The notes recorded by the advanced students were full texts compiled by listening to their teachers’ lectures, perhaps supplemented also with shorter annotations jotted down after conversing with their teachers and classmates and consulting texts. From the elementary level on, young people wrote notes, made doodles, and recorded passages written by various authors.⁵⁰ The papyri, however, can barely testify to the notes of older students because we do not have a way to distinguish these from those of adults. This is a part of an activity in class of which we are not informed but which is reasonably thought to have existed.

These young men were in a better position than other youths who placed their annotations unsystematically and ended up losing them. An anecdote of Diogenes Laertius concerning Antisthenes underscores both the value of notes and their ephemeral quality. In it, the philosopher refuses to console a very unhappy student who has lost his notes, with the admonition that he should have inscribed them in his mind and not on papyrus.⁵¹ The philosopher pointed to the superiority of natural memory, which the ancients cultivated and tried to enhance by using certain strategies of recollection. A well-known scene in Plato’s Theaetetus reads like an example of meta-literature, the intersection of orality and writing. In it, Euclid confesses his inability to recall a speech of Socrates, showing that he instead must rely on annotations to reconstruct it. As soon as he had reached home after listening to the philosopher, he jotted down some notes as aide-mémoire (hypomnemata), writing more at leisure later as his recollection became clearer.⁵² Gaps remained in his memory, and he asked Socrates to clarify details whenever he went to Athens. On returning home, he would correct the whole. The resulting text was a different version of the original one.⁵³

The drawn-out process evident in this example shows that the transitions between memory, notes, and a definitive text were quite elaborate. Many other authors followed this system, even if they did not explicitly mention it due to the usual reluctance or lack of interest in describing writing methods. Many centuries later, Libanius’s students (3.16) slowly reconstructed the orations he delivered over the course of several days. At times, however, the process of putting together a correct and plausible text would become so difficult that an author would abandon the task. Thucydides originally intended to insert transcripts of original speeches in his history (1.22.1), but he soon realized that his own recollections and the reports that others brought him—presumably in the form of notes, or oral reports—would not allow him to reconstruct speakers’ words with enough accuracy. As a result, he wrote speeches that would express in the best way the speakers’ original meanings.

Looking at Aulus Gellius and his notes can give us an idea of how memory worked. In his Noctes Atticae, Gellius⁵⁴ confirms the connection between note-taking and memory by saying that he recorded in his notes everything that was worthy of being remembered (memoratu).⁵⁵ Notes allowed him to retrieve things and books he had suddenly forgotten (oblivio). Sometimes he refused to include excessively long entries, instead opting for short ones (adnotatiunculae).⁵⁶ After Gellius jotted down the notes (adnotationes), he adjusted and polished them in his commentarii.⁵⁷ A few first-person plural pronouns reveal that Gellius used assistants in this work of storing and indexing; he distinguishes his own work by using the first-person singular pronoun. We can surmise that a scribe prepared a clean copy. His original notes were assembled in a somewhat disorderly and brief fashion, with no thought for style.⁵⁸ As in the case of the elder Pliny, note-taking was not a completely solitary experience but could be a pleasurable nighttime activity (19).⁵⁹

There is no doubt that Gellius’s collection is a sophisticated work that testifies to an erudite and refined act of reading and excerpting. Yet recent scholars have neglected, and even purposely disregarded, the fact that notes formed the basis of his work. Gellius’s collection has been defined as a cultural artifact of “literary historicizing” subdivided into short articles.⁶⁰ It is important to consider both aspects. It is true that Gellius himself wrote in a sophisticated literary world, but he was explicit about the genesis of his work, showing how it came to be. Perhaps he threw away his notes after he used them, as writers could land in trouble if their disorganized annotations were exposed to others, becoming precarious textual residues of doubtful veracity.

Awareness of possible loss of evidence, along with a desire to prevent future losses, motivated compilers to gather a large quantity of notes and lists of various characters that were not school exercises. In these works, the impulse to collect extracts from vast readings and to compile entire volumes of notes gave rise to some works that are only partially known.⁶¹ A good example is the collection of a first-century CE Egyptian woman named Pamphila who compiled eight or ten volumes of Notebooks. Photius, the late ninth-century patriarch of Constantinople who wrote brief comments to about 280 works, mentioned that Pamphila gathered her miscellanies from what she directly learned from her husband and his learned male visitors.⁶² Photius considered her style simple “because she was a woman” and commented on her choice to disregard genre in favor of producing a miscellaneous collection without order. In another entry about the compiler Sopater, Photius included fragments from Pamphila’s works.⁶³ The notice devoted to her in the less trustworthy Suda lexicon contradicts that of Photius. Pamphila was related to the grammarian Soteridas of Epidaurus, who was probably her father, and the Suda credits her apparently numerous works to either Soteridas or her husband.⁶⁴ In this report, her Notebooks comprised thirty-three books. We do not know Pamphila’s final aim or whether she had intended to produce a more ambitious work based on her annotations. In an age when most women were only partially educated, her awareness that evidence could be lost and her desire to prevent future losses are remarkable, even if they were dictated by personal and antiquarian interests. The ten fragments of her notes that are extant come from citations in sources such as Diogenes Laertius and Gellius.⁶⁵ Was Pamphila drawn only to sensational and frivolous subjects? It is difficult to form an objective judgment on the basis of only ten fragments that may have survived on account of their playful tone. Her collection may have been more ambitious, and in fact it is telling that her Notebooks inspired the Notebooks or Memorabilia written by Favorinus of Arles.⁶⁶ Favorinus embodied the characteristic polymathy of the Second Sophistic,⁶⁷ but as was the case of many of his other works, his compilation Notebooks or Memorabilia did not survive and is known only by later quotations and descriptions.

Compilation of Notes and Lists

The students of Olympiodorus sometimes wrote lists of various items in the margins in addition to recording their teacher’s lectures.⁶⁸ In general, some lists addressed beginners’ needs. In these, words were divided into syllables for easy reading and learning how to write. Other lists were memorized, with subjects varying from months to rivers, famous historical or contemporary personages, and mythological figures.⁶⁹ Three examples of lists compiled in an educational setting elucidate these characteristics. First, Ammon, scholastikos of Panopolis, wrote in his own hand a list of philosophers, notes from a teacher’s lecture or annotations on some readings that Ammon had made personally. A member of a distinguished Egyptian priestly family, Ammon must have had an education in rhetoric and philosophy.⁷⁰ His list includes Presocratics, Academics, Cynics, Peripatetics, and Stoics. At the beginning he ordered the list by teacher-student and then by schools of philosophy.

The second example is the so-called Anonymous Londiniensis, P.Lit.Lond. 165, an isagogic text on medicine and causes of disease that seems to consist of lecture notes taken by a student. The writer did not copy from a model but instead wrote down his uncertainties and thoughts with corrections and improvements, showing that the text was not static but fluid. The writer added numerous notes on top of the lines or in the margins, presenting two versions of the same text, the second of which should be considered an ensemble of notes as an aide-mémoire.⁷¹

Another text to be considered is a papyrus dating to the second to first centuries BCE, Laterculi Alexandrini (Berlin P. 13044r), which may have originated in Alexandria. It contains lists of painters, sculptors, architects, and technicians. In addition, it lists the Seven Wonders of the World, the largest islands, and the tallest mountains, as well as rivers, springs, and lakes.⁷²This “list of lists” is anonymous but may have been the work of a teacher who wrote it, copied it, or had it copied to inculcate notions of general culture in his students. Whether this list derived from someone’s original annotations is impossible to know. Diels compared it with the anonymous Tractatus de Mulieribus, which listed the names of fourteen notable women (including goddesses and women in myth) with brief notices.⁷³ Diels also mentioned Hyginus’s Fabulae, which included lists of lyric poets, wonders of the world, the seven wise men, and many more prominent individuals, mostly from mythology.⁷⁴

Annotations while Traveling

When traveling for pleasure today we favor taking pictures that can later revive our original impressions. Yet travel writers often also take copious notes, which they can later clean up easily and conveniently transfer to the cloud, an inbox, or a hard drive. In the ancient world, note-taking was of paramount importance for travelers who needed to preserve information. Notes taken during travel are usually derived not from reading but from observing unfamiliar places or customs firsthand and formulating questions; nevertheless, they too could contribute to the composition of a text. Pausanias does not explicitly mention taking notes during his travels, but unquestionably he must have filled innumerable notebooks with his observations, which would have traveled with him throughout Greece along with his books and other equipment.⁷⁵ In the second century, the sophist Aristides had notes written up when he visited Egypt.⁷⁶ Making sure to see all the important sites—temples, the Labyrinth, the pyramids, and canals—he consulted books when possible, but when necessary he took his own measurements with the help of “the priests and prophets of each place.” Aristides mentions that he had ordered his slaves to make notes (hypomnemata) but those containing measurements were lost, with the result that he could not send them to his unknown addressee. This treatise was supposedly occasioned by a scientific question regarding the rise of the Nile, but in saying this, Aristides’s tone is unmistakably literary. As a rule, a notetaker’s personal intervention is assumed whenever note-taking is mentioned in antiquity, as is the case nowadays. Literate slaves and assistants, however, could facilitate the task, as in the case of the elder Pliny. An example of a scholar who requested that a subordinate make annotations appears in Aelius Donatus’s Life of Vergil 34. Eros, Vergil’s secretary and freedman, reports that during an extempore recitation Vergil completed two lines that he had previously left unfinished. Vergil immediately ordered Eros to make note of the two half lines on the scroll.

The Annotations of Theophanes and the Geography of Notes

Illustrating travel note-taking during a later time period is a trove of papyri with notes taken during a fourth-century CE journey.⁷⁷ Theophanes of Hermopolis traveled from that city to Syrian Antioch and back.⁷⁸ Theophanes was a wealthy and educated man, and his notes and accounts reveal intimate and curious details.⁷⁹ The information we can glean from his travels is so rich that with some imagination it can illuminate and supplement the unknown details of Pausanias’s and Aristides’s journeys.⁸⁰ The archive of Theophanes’s papers is a priceless source of evidence for everyday social history. The diverse memoranda taken during his journey indicate not only that note-taking was necessary while traveling but also the manner in which it was done. The notes cover the whole period of the journey, from mid-March to early August, and offer precious information about several areas, including baths, the diets of officials and subordinates, different kinds of wines, and items of jewelry. Different hands appear in the documents, and different conventions of keeping records have been observed. Altogether, Theophanes’s notes indicate that note-taking was not always systematic but needed to be “translated,” that is, interpreted and put into chronological order. In the case of Theophanes, annotations were essential for organization and for rendering an account of expenses.⁸¹ In this archive, sometimes blank spaces in the papyrus attracted intrusive annotations.⁸² This practice is not unique to Theophanes. For example, the medical papyrus P.Lit.Lond. 165 mentioned earlier contains on the verso a letter and recipe in the hand of another writer, who took advantage of the empty space.

Notes in the Margins

Writing habits change with the passing of time. In classical antiquity an author could either write and compose a text in his own hand or dictate it to another person, but by late antiquity dictation came to prevail in the writing of texts and letters. At that point, authors entrusted others to pen their notes, a practice that might generate some confusion. However, teachers and students themselves sometimes wrote notes in the margins of a text. In part III we will look at marginalia on papyri, some of which were the work of teachers and students.

Galen relied on notes, but only one instance is explicitly mentioned in his works. The notes that he wrote in the margins of some texts were apparently very extensive; he would fill these spaces with an alternative discussion of the same subject, allowing him to decide at a later time which of the two was preferable (In Hipp. Epid. I CMG v 10.1). The text in the notes therefore offered a different version. In one instance Galen had failed to give clear instructions to the scribe, who accidentally copied and combined both versions. Notes in this case acquired a different dimension and lost their identity as notes.

Further, we encounter Jerome briefly annotating a private translation of a learned letter of Epiphanius of Salamis by indicating its various contents in the margins.⁸³ An illustrious monk had asked him for a Latin translation that might simplify the argument. This translation was stolen and divulged by someone he defined as a “pretend” monk, and Jerome found himself the subject of accusations because of his free rendering of the text.⁸⁴ The brief notes in question were a service to the reader. Marginal notes were always in danger of being misplaced, and Jerome was not exempt from these accidents. In Ep. 106.46 he ranted against a stupid scribe (nescioquis temerarius) who erroneously incorporated his notes into the body of a text.⁸⁵

Augustine similarly relied on scribes and stenographers. In the prologue to his Retractationes, he does not mention personal writing but only dictation and oral delivery. At the end of his life, he felt the need to consolidate his work, aware that he would leave behind a huge written legacy; he compiled the Retractationes in an attempt to shape his authorial legacy to the world.⁸⁶ He finished working on the text in 427, but it remained incomplete. It took the form of a compilation of notes that reveal the author’s utter frustration in ascertaining what in his body of work had been lost and what had been manipulated and altered.⁸⁷ His annotations were of varying length, according to the number of corrections that he wanted to make.

The intrusive presence of his brothers, who insisted on disseminating incomplete works, is remarkable, despite Augustine’s attempt to exonerate them by invoking their desire to please him. Two episodes concerning notes are curious.⁸⁸ Burning with desire to have his writings at any cost, his brothers went so far as to try to appropriate notes he had written in the margins of a work, and by so doing they created an entirely new text. In Retractationes (II 39) Augustine reveals that he did not recognize a particular text titled Adnotationes in Iob that had been circulating under his name. The text consisted entirely of his notes, which were unintelligible in the absence of the original work. He refused to emend it because it was defective. By editing the text, he would have acknowledged ownership of it—something he did not want to do. The situation, in any case, was not so unusual. Augustine’s brothers had shown the same zeal when compiling another work, Explanation of the Epistle of James, Retr. I2.32 (58), which consisted of notes they had lifted from those that Augustine wrote to clarify that Epistle. These two incidents put into sharp relief the fact that annotations could have a valuable life of their own as the different voices of a single author.⁸⁹

1. Genette 1997, 319. Yet Genette devoted much attention to notes, which he defined as elements strictly connected to a segment of text of a certain length and possessing a local character. This definition does not always apply to what will be discussed in this book.

2. Konstan 2011. Excerptors do a mechanical job that requires them to remain impersonal, something that is rarely fully appreciated, even as we owe a great debt to the collections that excerptors produce. The relationship between excerptors and the works of literature they select is mostly obscure to us.

3. Dürrenmatt and Pfersman 2004.

4. Lefebvre 2004. In those cases, notes acquire some independence from the whole and may even have their own titles or dedications. Notes in this case become a space of some freedom, where an author or a reader enters into a dialogue.

5. Blair 2008.

6. NA Pref. 7. On Gellius, see Beer 2020.

7. Cic. Ad fam. 5.12.10. See Lightfoot 1999, 218–19.

8. Thu. 2.44.2 and 4.126.1.

9. Eunapius, VS proem 453.

10. Meditations 1.7.3.

11. On the Categories, cf. Sorabji 2016a, 5–8; Praechter 1909 (2016), 47–48.

12. Devresse 1954, 76–77. The term Hypotyposis was used about the “sketch” Albinus produced from the lectures of Gaius. Galen calls hypographai a set of notes, in Hipp.Epid.iv comm.17B 249.

13. Boudon-Millot and Jouanna 2010, 95–96.

14. Lucian, Toxaris 13.3; 14.13; 16.25. In those notes the woman confessed her love and threatened to kill herself if her love was not requited.

15. P.Col. Zen. II 96 and I 47. There are also examples of whole letters designated in this way; see PSI I 106 from the same archive.

16. Galen, in Hipp.Epid.iv comm. 174a 922 and 796 and 17B 249; De diff.resp. 7 890.

17. Galen, De diebus decretoriis libri 3, 9 859. There was much confusion. Galen thought that when it was uncertain whether a work had been written by Hippocrates or by Thessalos, it was best to learn that text only summarily.

18. Jouanna (2016) accepted the conclusions of a dissertation by Hellweg (1985) that made careful consideration of the language. It clarified that the work was intended for a medical audience and therefore adopted a specific style, but that stylistically it was coherent. Books I and III were separated long ago. It is conceivable that the author had relied on reworked hypomnemata.

19. Marchesi (2008, 145) remarks that at any rate Pliny did not leave historical works.

20. Pliny the Younger appears to admire these capacious rolls. He was probably used to reading texts written on the recto. Dorandi (2007, 29–36) has commented in detail on the passage regarding Pliny and the terminology for notes.

21. McNamee 2007, 20–21.

22. For Pliny the Elder, Naas (1996, 328) supposes that there was an intermediate phase between collecting notes and utilizing them for composition and thinks of a boîte à fiches (index card box).

23. See Or. 18.118 on Julian taking out books from his chest. Cf. also Synesius Epp. 130.59 and 154.62–63.

24. Juynboll 1973.

25. According to Blair (2010, 92–95), this was a high-tech piece much admired. No examples of it are extant.

26. McPhee 2017.

27. Cf. the introduction. An excursus on writing strategies can be beneficial to illuminate students’ later use of annotations, even though, in this case, we are only allowed to guess.

28. One should take into account, however, that a text written in somewhat disorderly fashion as an ensemble of notes and observations of events reported orally could displease some readers. See the remarks of Papias, a writer of the church in the second century, as reported by Eusebius of Caesarea HE 3.39.15. Papias had said that Mark, the writer of the Gospel, did not err when he “put down disorderly the things said and done by the Lord.” Some people had not approved of that.

29. Pliny the Younger Ep. 3.5.10–11.

30. Pliny the Younger Ep. 3.5.15.

31. See Pecere (2010) where such practices are widely discussed.

32. Livy, for instance, never discussed his working methods. Scholars, however, paid attention to his use of Polybius in his later books and thought they could deduce aspects of his writing methods from that. See Luce 1977, 185–229. On other historians’ presentation of their methods, see Marincola 1997, 63–86.

33. Stadter 1989, xliv–xlvi.

34. On Tranquillity of Mind. 464F–465a. Cf. 457d On the Control of Anger where he says that he always made an effort to collect information. On his writing methods, see Pelling 1979, revised in Pelling 2002. See also Stadter 2014.

35. Pettine 1984, 95–102. Hypomnemata meant notes in general. It is likely that Plutarch used his annotations taken from his vast readings. In what follows I will consider the varied nomenclature used to distinguish notes.

36. If we examine Plutarch’s statement, however, it does not seem to inform us only about his writing habit but needs to be read rhetorically. He wanted to warn his friend not to have many expectations in order not to attract any criticism.

37. This apparently objective statement needs to be read in the context of Lucian’s bitter polemic against contemporary historians.

38. See, e.g., Thucydides 1.2, 20–22.

39. Vita Thucydidis 47.3. Marcellinus probably lived in the fourth century CE. Thucydides would note down speeches, discussions, and events without regard for style, later developing and embellishing what he had written down to preserve in his memory.

40. Centuries later, Gert Avenarius (1956, 85–92) agreed with Marcellinus and went further. He considered the historian’s eighth book an ensemble of notes due to its lack of speeches. Thucydides did not have enough time to fully develop this book before his death.

41. McNamee 2007, 124–25. Prentice (1930) takes it for granted that Thucydides assembled notes before and during the war but wonders where they would have been kept.

42. DL 9.110. Dorandi 2013, 109–16. It seems that wine and poetry go together. Timon was not an enthusiastic teacher; he preferred to mind his own business, unlike his peers, some of whom pursued students (DL 9.112). Of course, this was Diogenes’s opinion.

43. Epitulittein, to open a book. So Timon composed different parts of poems. He marked a note distinguishing half a poem and then completed it later.

44. Dorandi 2013, 728–32; Goulet-Cazé 1986; see König and Whitmarsh 2007, 133–49. On the date, see Jouanna 2009.

45. Lightfoot 1999.

46. Pl.xxiii P. Geneve inv. 97. On Parthenius’s fragments on papyrus, see McNamee 2007, 301–4.

47. Yates 1966; Cicero, De oratore, Ad Herennium; Philostratus, Vita Apollonius 1.7; Seneca the Elder, Preface and 18–19 on Latro; Xenophon Symposium 62; Aeschines, De falsa Leg. On Philip’s great memory; Plato, Hippias minor 368d–369a on Hippias’s art of memory; Lucian, Dance 74.

48. Quintilian 11.2.

49. Patillon and Brisson 2002, 125–232. The addendum on memory transmitted under Longinus’s name is by an unknown author.

50. See part III.

51. Diogenes Laertius 6.5, Dorandi 2007, 409. For Antisthenes 5/4 BCE see McNamee 2007, 114–15 description of learned scholia. The word gnorimos is usually translated as “friend, acquaintance” but I think “student” is more appropriate since Antisthenes had a school.

52. Theaetetus 143a. Some hurry transpires from the passage. Notes could evaporate.

53. Phaedr. 274D–275 story of Teuth: writing cannot substitute memory but can only be an aid to memory.

54. NA Praef. 2–3.

55. Cf. W. Johnson (2010, 118–20), who points to the fact that the term memoria is not only personal memory but also what is worth remembering of the past. See Holford-Strevens (2020) for a new edition of the first ten books.

56. Noctes Atticae Pr. 1–3; 1.7.18; 15.14; 17.21.50. There are a few points to mention here. Where does this statement of Gellius lead us? In mentioning how the book originated, did he simply report it without any ulterior motive? Did he try to defend himself from eventual criticism concerning the nature of the work, as Plutarch may have done? Was he addressing the reader to point to the way the text was supposed to be read?

57. On the difference of the two terms, see Dorandi 2007, 36–37.

58. Cf. above what Lucian wrote. Yet Gellius uses the adverb facile (easily) to describe the work of the slaves who organized the material in order to retrieve it.

59. Praef. 19. It is unclear whether slaves were still present at night, but of course they could be invisible. These activities are called lucubratiunculas in Pr. 14, cf. Kerr 2004.

60. Howley 2018, 20. Exclusive consideration of the finished product, which requires ignoring the presence of notes per se and the ways in which these four hundred articles may or not relate to each other, is no doubt a legitimate reaction to past considerations of Gellius’s book as no more than a mine of information to be cited. And yet one needs to be cautious.

61. These texts are often impersonal, and the compilers concealed their own thoughts and identities, though something can be gleaned from the material they gathered.

62. While I have discussed men as notetakers so far, the patriarch Photius hands down an intriguing example of a female notetaker. See Henry 1959–67, 2:170–71. Women rarely had access to rhetorical education, and Photius rightly remarked that Pamphila’s style did not show traces of that.

63. Henry 1959–67, 2:123–28.

64. Suda under v. Adler 1935, Suidae lexicon I 4 no. 139.

65. Cagnazzi 1997. In fr. 3 a smith uses a bronze axe to kill the son of Pittacus as he sits in a barbershop. Fr. 4 consists of a pretty riddle whose answer is “the year.” Fr. 6 contains an anecdote about Alcibiades wanting to donate a piece of land to Socrates, and fr. 9 regards Alcibiades being encouraged by Pericles, his maternal uncle, to learn to play the double flute. Seeing his face so altered as he blew into the instrument, however, the vain Alcibiades broke it in a rage and threw it away.

66. Sandys 1997, 77–79; Barigazzi 1966.

67. Gleason 1995, 131–32.

68. Cf. part III.

69. See Legras (1997) who looked at the possibility that the Laterculi and other lists could refer to the teaching of history.

70. P. Duke inv. 178, P.Ammon I 1, Willis 1978, 140–53 at 145–51; Willis and Dorandi 1989. See van Minnen 2002; Cribiore 2019, 177–78. See also P.Ammon I 2 A, Maresch and Andorlini 2006: a codex with Odyssey 9 and 11 was found among the papers of Ammon. It testifies to his level of culture.

71. See Manetti 1999. However, Ricciardetto (2016, xli–xviii) considers the papyrus a draft.

72. Diels 1904; Cribiore 1996, 270, no. 380 plates LXVII–LXIX. The hand is graceful but irregular, not a book hand. Legras 1997, 591–93.

73. The text is of unknown authorship and should be dated to late second or early first centuries BCE. The purpose and genre of this work are unknown. Gera (1997, 60–61) made the hypothesis that Pamphila might be the author of the catalog, but this is only a suggestion with no proofs.

74. Rose 1933. Cf. Cameron 2004, 11 and passim. This work was probably published around the second century, but the existing copy is abridged and interpolated. See also the list included in Joseph’s Bible Notes, see part III.

75. Pretzler 2004, 210.

76. Aristides, The Egyptian Discourse 36.1.

77. Other observations on notes on papyri will be presented occasionally.

78. He primarily used the cursus publicus, the imperial transport service, but sometimes also traveled by riverboat, spending on average more than eight hours a day in transit.

79. He preferred to be elegantly dressed, and on one occasion he purchased a very expensive hat as well as tickets for the theater and concert hall.

80. The papyri were published by Roberts in 1952, in vol. 4 of the Catalogue of the Greek and Latin Papyri in the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester. More letters belonging to this archive were published by Rees 1964, 2–12, nos. 2–6, and 1968. See also Moscadi 1970. Matthews (2006) considered the whole archive.

81. An issue to be solved. In the Third Discourse on Kingship, von Arnim maintained that in Or. 62 Dio had put down common places (loci: that is, notes) that he could eventually use in speechmaking. Paolo Desideri (1992) refused to recognize that on the grounds that a short address to the emperor was included (paragraphs 1 and 3). Von Arnim was right here, in my opinion: Oration 62 is a conglomeration of various notes.

82. Empty spaces were often left at the end of a roll containing a literary work and were occupied by the name of the author and title. Cf. Del Corso 2022.

83. Ep. 57.2: Ex latere in pagina breviter adnotans.

84. Christian writers apparently found it difficult to accuse other monks and brothers. Cf. Tertullian CPL 14, preface to book 1. See Cribiore (1999, 273–74), where a dissenting brother is described as becoming an apostate. It is possible that the malicious “pretend monk” here was a regular monk who disagreed with Jerome.

85. See Arns 1953, 71–77.

86. Retractationes 1.2. A translation in The Fathers of the Church, vol. 60. (1999). See also Eller 1949.

87. Altogether his opuscula numbered ninety-three.

88. Cf. Cribiore 2019, 276–77.

89. As an addendum, I would like to bring in an unusual parallel in the world of law. Expert jurists answered legal questions asked of them. Collections of such responses were one of the genres of legal literature. Thus for the jurist Paul there was a collection of Responsorum libri XXIII published around 220 CE. These responses were given in various contexts such as when somebody approached the jurist to ask a question or was in court or in a meeting of the emperor’s consilium. But who then took down the answers? It is unknown where these “notes” were kept as well.