Life as a Roman bureaucrat had nothing in common with the physically limp civil servants who haunt our contemporary notions of officialdom. On the contrary: You had to have a lot of muscles. It took the power of a coal tractor to carry even a few files with carbon copies from one office to another. Because the writing material of the Romans was marble.
At least that’s what the Asterix comics show, which for many people are the main source of their modest knowledge about the Romans. In the volume “Asterix as Legionnaire” one sees in the offices of the Roman legion how frighteningly high stacks of marble slabs lie on the tables of the barracks registry, on which the scribes chisel their notes. Even the legionnaires’ playing cards are made of marble.
This is of course nonsense….
