Introduction: The Tally of Text

Summary

The Introduction presents the central questions and motivations of the book: why do Greek lists exist in such abundance, what are their purposes, and how do we trace their trajectory through and across the genres and text-types of the late archaic and Classical periods? How do literary and documentary texts intersect in this tradition? How, finally, does this widespread cultural phenomenon inform the post-Classical inventories and archival traditions we see in such abundance? As a grounding and point of departure, it provides a brief survey of lists and their manifestations in Greek literature and inscriptions. It turns then to definitions of lists, precursors to Greek alphabetic lists, and theoretical preliminaries, including: the connections of lists and literacy, orality, and numeracy, and lists’ relationship to memory, narrative, counting, and collecting.Finally, the Introduction establishes an original framework for the functions of Greek lists, to be explored and examined in the main body chapters of the book: Greek lists, I propose, serve to perform a spectrum of actions upon objects: they collect, count, control, display, distort, memorialize, and, finally, conjure them.