There’s a famous moment in Molière’s comedy The Bourgeois Gentleman when the philosopher rather pompously distinguishes between prose and verse; Jourdain, the old buffoon, comments with wonderment, ‘I have been speaking prose for forty years and I never knew it!’. It is easy to take prose for granted. It’s what everyone speaks, after all (and always has done); it’s what is taught at school as the normal and expected manner of communication. Prose is inevitably thought to be the ‘natural’ way to write. So how could a book be called The Invention of Prose? Hasn’t prose always been with us?

Herodotus was not the first to write prose. When his History appeared, probably in the 430s BCE, the scientists of Ionia (like the author of Airs, Waters, Places) had been working for more than a generation. Anaximander and Anaximenes had produced works on the nature of the world as early as the middle of the sixth century, and Hecataeus had already produced his Periodos Gês, ‘Trip around the World’, which surveyed the nations of the Mediterranean. Heraclitus had deposited his paradoxical provocations in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Yet, both for the Greeks and for us, what Herodotus achieved demands to be seen as a radical departure. For the first time, the stirring and dramatic events of a nation at war are not merely recorded but explored and discussed at epic length in prose. It is extremely difficult after the long history of History to appreciate just how remarkable this innovative and foundational act is.

‘Democracy is a constitution of speech-making’, wrote Demosthenes, the great orator of the fourth century. The Assembly is the arena where policy decisions of the state were publicly debated and decided – and where political careers were made and lost. The law courts were a forum not just for conflict resolution but for competition in status between elite males. The theatre staged debate for an audience’s reflection. Even in the more private sphere of the symposium amid the wine, women and song we see the party game of speeches on a particular topic. In the agora, the market place, and, more formally, in the theatre, visiting intellectuals and professional speech-makers – often called ‘sophists’ – gave speeches for the edification and amusement of a paying audience. What is perhaps as important as this institutional framework is the ideological underpinning of such practices. That both sides of a question must be publicly debated is a constant watchword of democratic principle. That all citizens are equal before the law, and that the provision of a law court with a public jury is basic to a democratic polity – these are principles uncontested in democratic theory. Isêgoria – the right of all citizens to speak – is announced in the opening ritual of each Assembly with the herald’s question, ‘Who wants to speak?’. There is a wonderful phrase that sums up these principles: es meson. It means literally ‘into the middle’ – but implies that a grounding ideal of democracy is that all issues should be set out in public for debate and decision. Demosthenes was right: Athenian democracy can be summed up as a ‘constitution of speech-making’.

Socrates is one of the iconic figures of the classical city – yet he wrote nothing. His teaching consisted in conversations with the people he met (we are told), particularly in the very highest circles of the cultivated and the powerful. He was prosecuted and put to death – and his execution has become the paradigmatic image of the man of principle standing firmly and calmly by his principles to the point of death, an image that Christian martyrology learnt a lot from. Socrates, however, is written about by many. He appears on the comic stage of Aristophanes as a leading sophist, he is memorialized by his followers, for example by Xenophon in his Memorabilia, Apology and Oikonomikos, and in particular he is the leading figure in the dialogues of Plato. It is first with Plato’s massive contribution to the invention of prose that this chapter is concerned.

There are two parts to this conclusion, first a look forward, and second a look backwards. The look forward is towards the continuing history of prose. The major genres – history, rhetoric, philosophy, science – which begin in the classical city, develop and become more clearly demarcated as generic traditions. There are more strongly articulated markers of belonging to a tradition – rules of the genre, as it were – and writers self-consciously affiliate themselves to such traditions and play with them. So, for example, if we were to move on fully five hundred years we would find that an orator like Aelius Aristides, writing in the second century CE in the Greek East, composes speeches which self-consciously echo the style, content and form of Isocrates (among his other performances). Or if we were to go to the second century BCE we could read Polybius’ history of Rome’s conquest of Greece which knowingly works within a tradition headed by Thucydides.