Writing in Ancient Greece

In ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, literacy-the ability to read and write-was limited to scribes (people who produced written documents) and court officials, but it became more widespread in ancient Greece, where the earliest true alphabet (with symbols for both consonant and vowel sounds) emerged in the early eighth century B.C.E. Purely alphabetic writing had its origins in script devised around 1800 B.C.E. by the trading peoples around the eastern Mediterranean Sea, whose alphabet consisted solely of consonants. It was spread by the Phoenicians, a seafaring people who established trading posts and independent city-states along the south and east sides of the Mediterranean basin. The Greeks made the crucial addition of five signs for vowels to this alphabet, which made learning to read and write much easier. Greek soldiers left graffiti (writings on walls and in other public places) at Abu Simbel in Egypt in 593 B.C.E., for example, which is evidence of the wider spread of literacy in Greek society. Around this time, Greek writing also appears on coins and pottery, indicating its commercial and domestic use by ordinary people.

Hipparchus, a member of the ruling class in Athens in the sixth century B.C.E., had stones put up along the roads leading out of the city, labeled "This is a monument of Hipparchus," with pithy sayings underneath such as "Do not deceive a friend." This sort of self-promotion would not have been worthwhile unless a reasonable proportion of the population was literate. The introduction of the practice of ostracism in Athens around 510 B.C.E. also implies quite widespread literacy, at least among male citizens. The word "ostracism" is derived from the ostraca (pieces of pottery) on which at least 6,000 voters (or around 20 percent of male citizens) were required to write the name of anyone they wished to expel from the city for ten years. The pottery shards were then counted up, and if the threshold was reached, the person in question was banished. This practice was used to defuse political struggles by banishing one of the participants.

With their political and intellectual culture based on discussion and an unusually high rate of literacy, the Greeks had the opportunity to create the first social media culture, based on the exchange of written rather than spoken information. The prefaces of mathematical works by Archimedes and Apollonius show that both men sent copies to mathematicians in other parts of Greece. But there is no evidence for a wider culture of copying and sharing of documents; Greek culture, it seems, never quite shook off its skepticism toward writing. Writing was seen as a threat to the supremacy of the spoken word, which was central to Greek culture. Political, legal, and philosophical arguments took place through face-to-face dialogues and debates. There was no need for a government-supported system of scribes, because each city-state was independent and could conduct its affairs through public meetings of its citizens. Indeed, the philosopher Aristotle defined the ideal city as one in which the population was small enough that a single speaker could address all of its citizens at once. The art of speaking was revered as an important skill. And the long traditions of Greek poetry and drama were based on the spoken rather than the written word.

The Greek case against writing was summarized by the philosopher Plato in the fourth century B.C.E. in two written works: the Phaedrus and the so-called Seventh Letter. The Phaedrus takes the form of a dialogue between Plato's teacher, Socrates, and Phaedrus. Socrates complains that writing undermines the need to remember things and weakens the mind, creating "forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves." Socrates also points out that written texts cannot respond to queries ("if you ask them a question, they maintain a solemn silence") and are subject to misunderstanding or distortion. Socrates concedes that written texts have their uses "as memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness of old age," but he is far more worried about their shortcomings. People who rely on written documents, he fears, will be "hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing."