sensibility from his use of the alphabet, he also wins his 
personal freedom to dissociate himself from clan and family. 
This freedom to shape an individual career manifested itself in 
the ancient world in military life. Careers were open to talents in 
Republican Rome, as much as in Napoleonic France, and for the 
same reasons. The new literacy had created an homogeneous 
and malleable milieu in which the mobility of armed groups and 
of ambitious individuals, equally, was as novel as it was 
practical.