In antiquity and the Middle Ages reading was necessarily 
reading aloud.

*     “It is not too much to say that with Aristotle the Greek world 
passed from oral instruction to the habit of reading,” writes 
Frederic G. Kenyon in Books and Readers in Ancient Greece and  
Rome  (p. 25). But for centuries to come “reading” meant 
reading aloud. In fact, it is only today that the decree nisi  has 
been handed down by the speed-reading institutes to divorce 
eye and speech in the act of reading. The recognition that in 
reading from left to right we make incipient word formations 
with our throat muscles was discovered to be the principal 
cause of “slow” reading. But the hushing up of the reader has 
been a gradual process, and even the printed word did not 
succeed in silencing all readers. But we have tended to 
associate lip movements and mutterings from a reader with