Silent Reading

Ambrose (ad 338-397), Bishop of Milan, appears to have been the first person in Europe who could read without moving his lips; or, at least, that’s the interpretation generally given to this passage from the Confessions of St Augustine of Hippo.
 
‘When [Ambrose] read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.’
 
Although there are various references to it in antiquity (Henry Chadwick says that it was ‘uncommon, but not unknown’ – e.g. it is attributed by Plutarch to Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, and there are characters in Greek plays who read silently on stage), silent reading seems to have been a lost art in Europe in Ambrose’s time. The passage from the Confessions doesn’t directly state that Ambrose was unique, of course, but it is clear that the scholarly Augustine regarded silent reading as being akin to a conjuring trick of some sort.