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Communication in Europe and its Influence

Orality And Literacy In Greece



Homer's Iliad and Odyssey occupy an important early niche in the history of European literature. It has been argued, however, that the Homeric epics, strictly speaking, are not even literature. In An Essay of the Original Genius and Writings of Homer (1775), the English diplomat and archaeologist Robert Wood initiated a continuing debate by arguing that Homer could not read or write and that the poetic character of the epics facilitated memorization and therefore oral transmission. More recent research has shown that these narratives share important characteristics with the oral histories of nonliterate societies around the world. Their aural resonance results from the use of devices such as hyperbolic turns of phrase, metrically patterned formulae, and extensive clichés.



Sometime between 700 and 550 B.C.E., the Homeric epics were committed to writing, using an alphabet the Greeks had recently adapted from the twenty-two-character Phoenician consonantal alphabet, which some scholars insist should be called rather a syllabary or consonantal syllabary. The Greek variant modified the original characters and added several new ones in order to represent a series of independent vowel sounds. This made writing easier to learn, a more complete approximation of speech, and a medium capable of transcribing different dialects and even other languages—such as Coptic, an Egyptian language recorded using modified Greek characters. Within a hundred years the convention of writing left to right displaced the right-to-left Phoenician (and Semitic) tradition. Before this conversion the Greeks briefly experimented with boustrophedon, the seemingly logical but ultimately impractical style of alternating the direction of the script in each line.

The literacy revolution in Greece had significant cultural consequences, but it must be remembered that at first what was transcribed reflected the extant oral tradition, as in the poetics of Homer. Over the next several centuries, writing would gradually take a less flowery and more prosaic turn. This evolution, in which the content of a new medium is at first that of the previous mode of communication, is a central tenet in the communication theory of Marshall McLuhan. It recurs throughout the cultural history of Europe. In the fifteenth century, for example, the incunabula, or first wave of printed books, replicated not only the content but the calligraphic style of the earlier manuscripts—the Gutenberg Bible was even printed on parchment, the preferred medium for manuscripts—and before the rise of newspapers in the seventeenth century, during the period when reports of major news events were printed in pamphlets and broadsides, they were often written in verse. Eventually, more efficacious ways of using a new medium change the forms of discourse conveyed by that medium, and so it was with alphabetic literacy in Greece.

Until the fifth century B.C.E., a teacher in Greece taught from transcribed texts that were steeped in the conventions of the spoken word. Students were expected to commit the information conveyed to memory (similarly, in the Middle Ages, a scribe might read a manuscript passage aloud in order to ensconce it in auditory memory). By the end of the fifth century, in the period coinciding with Plato's early education, what had been recited was now read by students schooled in the new mode of communication. How widespread literacy was at this time—it was limited in theory to free male citizens—is still subject to debate. Nevertheless, its influence on institutions, such as the law, as well as on philosophy and knowledge in general, was profound. Learning the new alphabetic script was facilitated through the use of several easily accessible media—sand, slate, and waxed tablets. More permanent texts were inscribed on papyrus (imported from Egypt) and parchment (obtained from the skins of domestic animals).

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Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Cluster compound to ConcupiscenceCommunication in Europe and its Influence - Orality And Literacy In Greece, Plato's Critique, Rome, The Middle Ages, Monastic Expansion