This is a richly detailed book that, despite its abstract title, is down to earth—literally so, as it is based on the minute study of many excavations, graves in particular, which have yielded Roman writing equipment. But it goes far beyond just cataloguing objects, examining their use, and the meanings that their users placed upon them. It is “both a detailed case study […] and a much more general, theoretically informed discussion of the role of writing in Roman society” (p. 20). Whereas an old-fashioned scholar might have called it ‘ATRAMENTARIVM: the inkwell in the Roman world, index and symbol of literacy’, Eckardt ranges from “the now extensive literature on emotional literacy” (p. 10) to “actor-network-theory and entanglement” (p. 15), before accepting the concept of “identity […] but only if we approach it through a consideration of dynamic social practices within their specific historical contexts” (p. 17). Unsophisticated readers may need to translate into concrete terms a sentence such as “The reading culture of [early imperial Rome] forms a sociocultural context in which often very difficult texts are employed as a form of self-validation, through learned aesthetic and social responses to the event of reading” (p. 13), lest they feel like Huckleberry Finn reading Pilgrim's Progress: “The statements was interesting but tough” (Twain Reference Twain1996: 143).

Chapter 2 introduces “the practicalities of literacy” (p. 21), with useful descriptions of writing equipment such as waxed tablets and spatulas, ink and inkwells, pens, pen-knives, rulers and sponges, and the various paper-equivalents, papyrus, parchment or wooden tablets such as those recovered at Vindolanda. Some of these tools are nicely illustrated by the funerary monument of the toolmaker Atimetus, which shows him standing by his stall with a customer. The next chapter considers “literacy as technology and practice” (p. 41); how did people stand or sit when writing, and how did writing influence the way that they thought? Eckardt appositely quotes Quintilian for the disadvantage of writing in ink, as opposed to using a waxed tablet: one's flow of thought is forever being interrupted by the need to dip the pen. It is rather like reading a book such as this one that embeds the references in the narrative, instead of segregating them into footnotes. On page 29, for example, a text of 38 lines, citations such as “Wasgestian and Quarg 1986” occupy the equivalent of nine lines. They interrupt one's reading, but Cambridge University Press probably wanted to save on footnotes. There are only 12 in the whole book.

The great strength of Writing and power in the Roman world lies in the succeeding chapters, which examine “a previously neglected category of writing equipment, the inkwell” (p. 53). One-hundred and thirty-four Samian inkwells, for example, have been recovered from Roman London, but more diagnostic is the metal inkwell: Eckardt has collected 440 from across the western Empire, and groups them according to type (Boeselager and the like), carefully distinguishing them from other small metal containers. Despite the uneven level of publication—Augst provides 57 metal inkwells (including 42 lids), the whole of Spain just three—their distribution is clear: largely military and urban, a picture that is refined by study of their context. This, when known, may be domestic or mercantile (including three shipwrecks), but no fewer than 125 have been found in graves (and another 6 in cemeteries), an association that Eckard deftly exploits with tombstone reliefs to write social history: “the funerary sphere can be viewed as the context in which identities are enacted and represented through material culture” (p. 137). To be depicted or buried with writing equipment was an assertion of status and achievement, whether by professional scribes, officials, officers or simply persons proud of employing a secretary.

When burials can be sexed—by bone-analysis or the scrupulous evaluation of grave-goods—the results are still more interesting. A well-known British archaeologist is cited as “a classic example of mid-twentieth-century male excavator's prejudice” (p. 158) for suggesting that the presence of two styli increased the probability of a particular grave being a man's, as there are “twenty-five inkwells from twenty graves thought to be those of women” (p. 164), even if four are not certain to be inkwells. This is a wonderful demonstration of female literacy—and of female pride in literacy. Eckardt also distinguishes the graves of young persons, which add to our knowledge from other sources of children's education: 13 graves of children or young adults contain inkwells, perhaps sad symbols of aspiration rather than achievement. The tombstone of Servius Primigenius illustrates his jejune epitaph with an inkwell flanked by writing tablet and wax spatula. Was he a professional scribe (as Eckardt allows), or a schoolboy whose studies were cut short? She does not consider the further question of why he shared the nomen gentilicium of his mother, Servia Secunda. Had he been borne out of wedlock, or was his mother a slave who had been manumitted and married by her master, now deceased? It is an intriguing illustration of how literacy is bound up with family ambition and social mobility.

Buried inkwells are also found with high-status goods such as counters (for games or accounting), doctors’ instruments and personal grooming-gear such as strigils and mirrors, all of which provide evidence of self-conscious elitism. A brief summary cannot do justice to this major contribution by an archaeologist to Roman social history, but let it end on an inky footnote. Professional scribes used pairs of inkwells for red ink (to write the headings or ‘rubrics’) and black ink (the main text). Eckardt illustrates an example from the Magdalensberg that is inscribed CAV(E) PVR(PVRAM) MAL(AM): ‘Danger: red ink’. She does not explain this health warning, perhaps because she has already described the colourant, vermilion/cinnabar [mercuric sulphide], as “a plant extract” (p. 27). This lapse is only worth recording as it seems to be unique in such an encyclopaedic work. With its associated online catalogue, it will be essential reading for anyone who publishes future discoveries of Roman writing materials and equipment, and it will take the debate about Roman literacy to a higher plane. It is no longer a question just of epigraphy. Archaeology has now staked its claim.