Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>The task of digesting and abbreviating content in the ancient Mediterranean was largely the business of the enslaved. This essay explores the various literary manifestations of this phenomenon in the Rome of the late republic and early principate: representations of stenography, “brief” forms such as the breviarium, the fable, the notebook, the couplet, the epitome, the condensed biography, and the universal history. All of these forms are taken to bear on the question of enslaved literary/secretarial labor and its aesthetic-cognitive impact. This impact can be observed directly and inferred indirectly, across texts of both “higher” and “lower” status authors. The essay ends by positing that the cognitive skill and aesthetic taste for brevity were absorbed by the elite from the enslaved and formerly enslaved, through a competitive tussle for epistemic control.</jats:p>