Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Literacy and orality
- 3 Oral poetry
- 4 The coming of the alphabet: literacy and oral communication in archaic Greece
- 5 Beyond the rationalist view of writing: between ‘literate’ and ‘oral’
- 6 Orality, performance, and memorial
- 7 Literacy and the state: the profusion of writing
- Epilogue: the Roman world
- Bibliographical essay
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Literacy and orality
- 3 Oral poetry
- 4 The coming of the alphabet: literacy and oral communication in archaic Greece
- 5 Beyond the rationalist view of writing: between ‘literate’ and ‘oral’
- 6 Orality, performance, and memorial
- 7 Literacy and the state: the profusion of writing
- Epilogue: the Roman world
- Bibliographical essay
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Impossible men: idle, illiterate,
Self-pitying, dirty, sly,
For whose appearance even in city parks
Excuses must be made to casual passers-by.
Robert Graves‘Make and send me copies of Books 6 and 7 of Hypsicrates’ Komodoumenoi (Men Made Fun of in Comedy). For Harpocration says that they are among Polion's books. But it is likely that others, too, have got them. He also has his prose epitomes of Thersagoras' works On the Myths of Tragedy …'
Note added in another hand: ‘According to Harpocration, Demetrius the bookseller has got them. I have instructed Apollonides to send me certain of my own books which you will hear of in good time from Seleucus himself. Should you find any, apart from those which I possess, make copies and send them to me. Diodorus and his friends also have some which I haven't got.’
Letter found at Oxyrhynchus, second century AD‘Oh, he's illiterate’, someone may say, and they mean, not that the object of their scorn is unable to read and write, but that he is uncivilized — or simply boorish (as above), or that he has not read the great works of literature, that he is not educated to a high standard. In other words, we use the descriptions ‘literate’ and ‘illiterate’ today to denote a whole range of meanings, for both the ability to read and write, and the degree of refinement or culture.
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- Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece , pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992