You are giving general advice that feels right. I'm asserting the stakes are basically nothing?
I think the stakes are really low too.
And I also think the original post is introducing modern values when it comes to people's work. I don't think in the ancient world that academic brilliance was thought of as a great thing in the same way or possibly to the same extent it is today.
And if that was true, it'd mean the sources wouldn't have thought it was worth remarking on, so we'd get silence. Even if that isn't true, the whole thing is still an argument from silence.
Like, let's bear in mind that most of the population couldn't read, even scribes couldn't read—they just copied. How few people could actually math?
This is sort of like crapping on a modern-day rocket engineer because Slate isn't writing about them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
tl;dr I think we agree :)
Btw it's not that all scribes were illiterate, but definitely some were or perhaps they were just substantially less literate. For their job, copying out sheet after sheet of text, they just needed to know the alphabet. It'd be like learning to copy an alphabet you might not know, like Cyrillic or Arabic. And decent money too.
IIRC the argument for scribal illiteracy had to do with the kinds of scribal copying errors you would see.
There are some errors that suggest a person can read, like homoteleuton. That's when someone sees the phrase "I love you" in a love letter, copies it, and then starts copying from after a second "I love you" lower in the paragraph. "I love you. I'm a terrible person and I know I slashed your tires but... I love you, we should get married" —> "I love you, we should get married".
Other kinds of scribal copying errors betray a lack of reading ability. Like homearchy, where they skip a line because of similarities at the start of the line.
If you're reading along, it becomes obvious the sentence stopped making sense because you skipped a line. But if you're not reading along because you can't, you won't catch the change in meaning.
https://sites.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/ms-course/course/scbl-err...
I think what upset me is the downplaying of how good teachers and editors are. I will certainly make no claim that they are all amazing, but it is a worthwhile job and it doesn't help to dump on it. Punching down, as it were.
You have to look at the history of sources and their bias to understand the history of ideas. Historical sources don't necessarily contain facts; and they may also convey more than facts.
It's about getting to the spin behind the original sources, then you have a better idea of why the sources tell you what they're telling you. How you read them brings in your own bias (for someone else to examine and weigh up one day). It can be really powerful though, like in the example of Messalina.