Literacy And Orality In Ancient Greece

Explores the role of written and oral communication in Greece.

This seventh volume on Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece and Rome presents a series of essays that explore the workings of memory in ancient texts and artworks marking the shift over centuries from an oral to a literate culture.

This volume represents the sixth in the series on Orality and Literacy in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds. The present work comprises a collection of essays that explore the tensions and controversies that arise as a society moves from an oral to literate culture. Part 1 deals with both Homeric and other forms of epic; part 2 explores different ways in which texts and writing were manipulated for political ends. Part 3 and 4 deals with the controversies surrounding the adoption of writing as the accepted mode of communication; whereas some segments of society began to privilege writing over oral communication, others continued to maintain that the latter was superior. Part 4 looks at the oral elements of Athenian Law.

This volume deals with orality and literacy in ancient Greece and what consideration of these areas yields for that society, its literature, traditions and practices. Individual chapters focus on art, comedy, historiography, oratory, religion, rhetoric, philosophy, poetry, tragedy, and on orality in contemporary cultures (Greek and South African), which have a bearing on the ancient world. By considering such factors as oral elements in various genres and practices and how these have shaped the texts we have today, as well as the extent of literacy and the impact of literacy on oral traditions and on singers/writers, the book presents another insight into ancient Greek society and its people.

This volume deals with aspects of orality and oral traditions in ancient Greece, and is a selection of refereed papers from the fourth biennial Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece conference, held at the University of Missouri Columbia in 2000. The book is divided into three parts: literature, rhetoric and society, and philosophy. The papers focus on genres such as epic poetry, drama, poetry and art, public oratory, legislative procedure, and Simplicius’ philosophy. All papers present new approaches to their topics or ask new and provocative questions.

The essays in Between Orality and Literacy address how oral and literature practices intersect as messages, texts, practices, and traditions move and change, because issues of orality and literacy are especially complex and significant when information is transmitted over wide expanses of time and space or adapted in new contexts. Their topics range from Homer and Hesiod to the New Testament and Gaius’ Institutes, from epic poetry and drama to vase painting, historiography, mythography, and the philosophical letter. Repeatedly they return to certain issues. Writing and orality are not mutually exclusive, and their interaction is not always in a single direction. Authors, whether they use writing or not, try to control the responses of a listening audience. A variable tradition can be fixed, not just by writing as a technology, but by such different processes as the establishment of a Panhellenic version of an Attic myth and a Hellenistic city’s creation of a single celebratory history.

This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures offering a very clear account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology. In the course of his study, Walter J. Ong offers fascinating insights into oral genres across the globe and through time, and examines the rise of abstract philosophical and scientific thinking. He considers the impact of orality-literacy studies not only on literary criticism and theory but on our very understanding of what it is to be a human being, conscious of self and other. This is a book no reader, writer or speaker should be without.