BIBLICAL AND M ANICHAEAN CITATIONS IN TITUS OF BOSTRA’S CONTRA M ANICHAEOS by Timothy PettiPieCe Citation and quotation by ancient authors is an issue that remains poorly understood. All too often, modern scholars tend to assume that the ancients worked and wrote like we do, with multiple books at hand, scrupulously checking references and carefully rendering quotations. Such a scenario seems highly unlikely in Antiquity. In spite of the gradual pen- etration of literacy in ancient societies, most information continued to be transmitted orally. Even information that existed in written textual form was most often received aurally. In fact, the ancient relationship to written text was a unique one, at least from the modern perspective. At the com- position stage, authors tended to dictate to scribes, while at the reading stage, texts were mostly read aloud. So, for instance, someone in Alexan- dria might dictate a letter to a local scribe, the text of that letter is then transmitted to its addressee in Antioch. The addressee, when receiving the letter, either reads or has it read aloud to gain access to its contents. The physical letter itself is simply a vehicle by which an act of oral communica- tion can be reproduced in another space and time. Even writers who did not use scribes would often speak the words they were transcribing. 1 As Paul Achtemeier has put it, “late antiquity knew nothing of the ‘silent, solitary reader’.” 2 The same could be said for the silent, solitary scholar. After all, ancient books and scrolls were cumbersome and difficult to use even for the literate. The lack of punctuation, paragraph or line division, made reading itself burdensome, let alone looking up and verifying pas- sages one wanted to cite. Moreover, ancient memories seem to have been far more robust than our own, with memory exercises forming a key part of the rhetorical curriculum, 3 even from the earlies stages of education. 4 1. P. aChtemeier, “Omne verbum sonat: The New Testament and the Oral Environment of Late Western Antiquity,” Journal of Biblical Literature 109, 1 (1990) 3-27. 2. P. aChtemeier, “Omne verbum sonat: The New Testament and the Oral Environment of Late Western Antiquity,” Journal of Biblical Literature 109, 1 (1990) 17. 3. G.A. kenneDy, A New History of Classical Rhetoric (Princeton, 1994) 123- 127. 4. H. marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity (Madison, 1982) 154. Christianisme des origines. Mélanges en l’honneur du Professeur Paul-Hubert Poirier, éd. par Eric Crégheur, Julio Cesar Dias Chaves et Steve Johnston, éd. (JAOC 11), Turnhout 2018, p. 393-402. © F H G DOI 10.1484/M.JAOC-EB.5.115380