Still others are merely curious. But for everyone, the public reading of the letter provides high entertainment in a setting where few other diversions are available for poor manual workers who labor from dawn to dusk. The room quiets as Phoebe is introduced, and the presentation begins. Trained in persuasive rhetoric, the reader knows that much of the power of Paul's letter will depend on how it is read. The voice rises and falls, speeds up and slows down, lingers over sarcasms, creates pregnant silences after Paul's many rhetorical questions, argues vehemently against the hypothetical opponents Paul sets up, shouts the triumphs from the end of chapter 8, and switches to an agonized pleading at the beginning of chapter 9.
Sweat pours off the reader's face as the temperature rises in the packed room.
For their part, the listeners pay rapt attention. In a culture with low rates of literacy, they train themselves to follow the course of a verbal argument from its thesis statement through its proofs of the thesis to its climax. Their emotions rise and fall with the power of the reading. Where they do not understand, they interrupt and ask for further interpretation. If they do not agree with a point, they register dissatisfaction.