Introduction
The study of early Greek literacy has long been in large part concerned with politics. Even after the demise of techno-determinist narratives directly linking democracy to literacy, politics still tends to set the overarching agenda. Two recent monographic contributions to the discussion are entitled Cité, démocratie et écriture (Pébarthe (Reference Pébarthe2006)) and Literacy and democracy in fifth-century Athens (Missiou (Reference Missiou2011)). A guiding concern with literacy and politics entails its own set of subsidiary concerns: how deeply did literacy penetrate society? What level of literacy did average citizens attain? Such questions are interesting and important, but they are not the only interesting or important questions, particularly for scholars of Greek literature.
While ‘optimists’ and ‘pessimists’ debate the centrality or marginality of literacy within society as a whole, this essay instead explores the practices through which a thin stratum of society acquired unusually deep experience with written literature. Combining a pessimistic view about the popularity of early Greek schools with an optimistic view about the stability of institutional patterns, I argue that from an early date elite ideology valorised education through the concerted study of certain written poetic texts. Schools thus worked to institutionalise an enduring and important connection between economic capital and cultural capital acquired through reading and performing poetry. It was in the Classical period, if not before, that the interconnected practices of literate schooling and literary reading acquired their distinctive social character.
This essay follows recent trends in shifting its focus away from the technology of the alphabet, and arguably unattainable statistics of literacy, to pursue instead a more nuanced and detailed understanding of how writing functioned in some particular social contexts.Footnote 1 Section i claims that from an early date schools focused on written texts and fostered a hierarchy of prestige which culminated in intensive literary reading and musico-poetic performance. However many may have attended such schools, the private, decentralised structures of education enabled an economically privileged minority to distinguish themselves from the rest. Section ii argues that schools focused on ‘canonical’ poets. A robust degree of curricular uniformity and stability expressed the notional integrity of a community of the educated. Section iii situates the origins and growth of literate schooling within the larger history of Greek literacy. Choruses and symposia may have already institutionalised a connection between elite education, literacy and poetry, but the rise of schools must have reflected the social prestige of a self-consciously impractical literary education. Section iv investigates connections between schooling and extra-scholastic reading. The real and imagined community of readers closely paralleled the real and imagined community of the educated, on which it directly depended. Section v concludes by briefly revisiting an oft-discussed topic. Fully understanding the complex interface between orality and literacy in the early Greek world, it is argued, entails understanding some highly literate subcultures on their own terms.
First, some caveats and definitions. The ambitions of this essay span the whole Greek world all the way from the late sixth century down to around the time of Aristotle, but much of the evidence studied here derives from classical Athens, which transmits to us a singularly rich picture of quotidian life. I want to escape the centripetal gravity of that particular time and place – as far as this is possible. The state of schooling in Athens was not straightforwardly representative of the Greek world, but it was certainly more representative than the state of schooling in Sparta, that other, stranger, pole of dichotomous discussions.Footnote 2 Many texts from classical Athens depict certain forms of literate education as international, traditional practices, and the ideology of internationalism and traditionalism was, Section ii will argue, integral to elite education. While on guard against overbold generalisations from limited evidence, this essay tries to bring into view a larger picture, however hazy it may be.
In the early Greek world, as today, formal education comprised but a part of larger ideas about education and educated people. I use the arguably inadequate word ‘school’ to pick out the relatively formalised transmission of knowledge pertaining to literacy. The key figure here is the professional teacher paid to teach others’ children.Footnote 3
The singular noun ‘literacy’ contains multitudes.Footnote 4 I am here concerned with one end of a wide spectrum: not the literacy necessary to scratch ‘Aristides’ on a potsherd (Plut. Arist. 7.7–8) but the literacy necessary to read Euripides’ Andromeda (Ar. Ran. 52–3). Whereas the study of literacy and politics implicates many literacies, the narrower study of such literary literacy will focus on elites, their modes of self-definition and, most importantly for present purposes, their institutions of cultural self-reproduction.Footnote 5
I. Teaching hierarchies
Early Greek schools are often emplotted into teleological narratives both about the growing centrality of literacy within education and about the growing popularity of literate education within society as a whole. Questions of popularity are hard to judge on available evidence, but our earliest textual and visual sources agree in depicting literate schooling as a quotidian, normal experience, at least within an abnormally privileged section of society. From the earliest period for which direct documentation survives, elite schooling embodied a moralising ideology which prescribed intensive engagement with written texts. The private and decentralised structures of such education supported a hierarchy of prestige which ascended upwards from literacy as such towards more expensive and more time-consuming realms of intensive reading and accomplished musical performance.
Discussing events on Chios around 494, Herodotus incidentally provides our earliest textual evidence for Greek schools (6.27.2):Footnote 6 ‘the roof fell on children learning their letters (γράμματα διδασκομένοισι) so that only one of the 120 escaped’. There is no compelling reason to doubt this story, which occurred within living memory and is the sort of thing that Herodotus’ sources will have thought worth remembering. 120 strikes us as a remarkably high number, but it is self-evidently meant to be credible, if notably large. Such mass instruction might suggest a building dedicated to teaching or even constructed for that purpose.
In his Visits, Ion of Chios (392 F 6 BNJ) remembered how the general (and poet) Sophocles met with, and got the better of, a ‘teacher of letters’ (γραμμάτων … διδάσκαλος) from Eretria on Chios in 440/441 – about fifty years after Herodotus’ Chian disaster. The Eretrian faults the tragedian for praising a verse of Phrynichus, but Sophocles puts him in his place by adducing validating parallels from Simonides and the traditional diction of lyric and epic. This elementary schoolmaster might be an authority among boys scrawling out abecedaria, but he is not an authority within the grown-up realm of making and evaluating poetry.Footnote 7
Herodotus reports a surprising number of children in one school; Thucydides implies a surprising number of schools in one community. From him we learn of another scholastic tragedy, this one in Mycalessus in 413 (7.29.5): Thracian mercenaries ‘attacked the schoolhouse (διδασκαλείῳ) of children, which was the biggest one (μέγιστον) there’. διδασκαλείῳ suggests a space dedicated to, or primarily used for, teaching. μέγιστον entails a multiplicity of such structures. It is hard to say much about Mycalessus (IACP #212) except that it was relatively insignificant, as Thucydides himself implies (7.29.3). ‘So how many schools were there’, wonders Hornblower (Reference Hornblower2008, 599), ‘in this one small community?’
Starting around the turn of the sixth century, the visual record, which is predictably Atheno-centric, presents a basically stable iconographic tradition of school scenes.Footnote 8 As our earliest textual sources incidentally mention literate schooling as something normal and not intrinsically worthy of comment, so from the earliest instantiations pottery depicts schooling as something drawn from quotidian life and familiar to viewers. A great many of these pieces were produced for primarily elite sympotic contexts and a disproportionate number are of high quality. Such fine wares attest to the normality of literate schooling within a particular segment of society, not within society as a whole.Footnote 9
The relative rarity of school scenes represents a possible stumbling block for this claim. Classical texts often refer to literate education as a normal experience for elite males,Footnote 10 but neither in the visual art of that period nor in that of other periods are school scenes very frequent in comparison with, say, athletic or sympotic scenes.Footnote 11 In fact, school imagery becomes less frequent in the late-fifth and fourth centuries – but obviously not in response to a decline in schooling. There are evidently problems in equating the popularity of practices with the popularity of depicting those same practices.Footnote 12 The relative rarity of school scenes is better explained not by hypothesising that literate schooling was in fact unusual among elite boys but rather by hypothesising that many elite men would not fondly remember the beatings and compulsions that their social inferiors had inflicted on them as boys.Footnote 13 Pottery was painted to sell,Footnote 14 and early schools were not obvious fodder for the market in nostalgia.
Vases confirm the early existence of literate education and point towards its social character, but they are not very informative about its contents and methodology. Many late fifth- and early fourth-century texts, by contrast, not only report but critically reflect upon educational practices. It seems that during this period new sorts of attention were paid to traditional forms of schooling, which were perceived to be imperilled both by growing popularisation from below and sophistic innovations from above.Footnote 15 Xenophon contrasts the Spartans with the rest of the Greeks who purport to give their sons the finest education (κάλλιστα τοὺς υἱεῖς παιδεύειν) by ‘sending them off to their teachers’ to learn letters, music and matters in the palaestra’ (γράμματα καὶ μουσικὴν καὶ τὰ ἐν παλαίστρᾳ, Lac. 2.1). Letters, music and gymnastics repeatedly feature as a supposedly ‘complete education in excellence’ (?Pl. Clitophon 407c), but it is difficult to work out the history of this trivium and the interrelations between its components.Footnote 16 The line between grammata and mousikē was mobile and blurry, but poetry was clearly central to both. Rather than seeking to resolve apparent contradictions in order to reconstruct one supposedly uniform curriculum, we might instead focus on well-attested practices which together suggest how early schools went about teaching poetry.
Speaking in generalisations before intellectuals gathered from various communities (Prt. 337d), Plato's Protagoras asserts that (325d–6b)
[fathers] send [their children] to their teachers’ and bid them to look after the children's behaviour much more than their writing or lyre-playing. The teachers take care of these, and after the children learn letters and are about to understand writing as they understood the voice before, then they set beside them on the benches texts to read and force them to memorise poems of noble poets in which there are many admonitions, descriptions, praises and encomia of noble men of old, so that the child may be zealous to imitate them and try to be as they were. The lyre teachers in turn do much the same and care for prudence and that the young might not misbehave. Besides this, when [children] learn to play the lyre, [the lyre teachers] in turn teach them the poems of other noble poets, melic ones …
The Protagoras is commonly assigned a dramatic date around 430,Footnote 17 but Morgan (Reference Morgan1998, 12 n. 33; Reference Morgan1999, 50, 55) argues that Plato probably describes the educational practices of his fourth-century adulthood. Yet this sits uncomfortably with commonplace views about Platonic realism. Aristophanes’ Banqueters, staged in 427, similarly links traditional schooling with culturally approved melic and non-melic poetry (frr. 233, 235, discussed below). By 430, pots had depicted students with writing equipment for the better part of a century. The Protagoras does robustly agree with our sources for fourth-century schools, but this convergence is better explained through pedagogical conservatism rather than revolutionary change coupled with Platonic anachronism.
Many fourth-century texts highlight the purported ethical value of learning poetry in school,Footnote 18 but this commonplace approach had deep roots. The Theban Pindar, composing around 490, describes how the Sicilian Thrasybulus avoids youth's vices (Pyth. 6.47–8) by ‘culling wisdom in the Muses’ valleys’ (δρέπων … σοφίαν δ’ ἐν μυχοῖσι Πιερίδων, 48–9). ‘By setting the enjoyment of poetic σοφία in direct contrast to an arrogant and overweening youth’, observes Kurke (Reference Kurke1990, 99), ‘Pindar implies a causal connection which gives to poetry a paideutic function.’ It may be doubted whether Thrasybulus, nephew of the tyrant of Acragas, attended the same sort of literate schools depicted on contemporary Athenian pottery, but Pindar's depiction of his poetic education very probably draws on a widespread moralising ideology which was at work in those schools and elsewhere.Footnote 19 From early on those able to afford literate education could claim ethical as well as economic and cultural superiority.
In early schools, emphasis on edifying content went hand in hand with rote memorisation.Footnote 20 According to Plato's Athenian Stranger (Leg. 810e–11a),
weFootnote 21 have a great many poets of hexameters, trimeters and all the various metres, some of them with serious intent, some with humorous intent, with which countless thousands claim that it is necessary to rear and stuff full (διακορεῖς ποιεῖν) the young who are being properly educated (τοὺς ὀρθῶς παιδευομένους), making them extensive listeners in readings and widely learned by memorising whole poems. Others take excerpts from many sources and bring together whole speeches and say that the young must memorise these, if one is to become a good and wise man from much experience and learning.
Schools cultivated ‘intensive’ rather than ‘extensive’ reading.Footnote 22 The goal of such textual labour was, somewhat paradoxically, to liberate one from a text. Thus Niceratus’ father (Xen. Symp. 3.5–6), taking commonplaces to uncommon extremes, sought to make him a good man by having him memorise the entire Iliad and Odyssey; Niceratus still knows both by heart (ἀπὸ στόματος εἰπεῖν). Much older Athenian vases depict boys reciting from memory the texts which others hold in their hands.Footnote 23 Again our visual evidence predates but essentially agrees with our textual evidence.
Elite education included reading and memorising poems, but it also comprised much else. Just before the passage quoted above, Plato's Athenian Stranger prescribes three separate years for the lyre after three separate years for grammata (Leg. 809e–10a). Several other texts strongly suggest that the lyre teacher often represented a higher, if not clearly subsequent, level of education beyond the writing teacher.Footnote 24 Grammata standardly precede mousikē in casual listings of subjects (see n. 16 above), and this ordering does not look random. Much lyric education, as Plato's Protagoras suggests (ποιητῶν ἀγαθῶν, 325e; ἄλλων αὖ ποιητῶν ἀγαθῶν … μελοποιῶν, 326a), built upon literary literacy and added musical performance to the oral recitation of (more difficult) memorised written texts.
Arguing from Aristophanes’ Clouds (964–72, discussed below), Morgan (Reference Morgan1999, 47–8) suggests that early lyric schooling ‘could be entirely oral’.Footnote 25 But there is not much reason to believe that it in fact was. From the turn of the sixth century onwards, Athenian pottery depicts scrolls and tablets in intimate connection with musical instruments. In contemporary scholarship, ‘books’ sometimes sound like the natural enemy of ‘performances’, but these images reveal a culture in which reading poetry and performing poetry were allied, not opposed, facets of a particular social identity.Footnote 26 Indeed, the same person, at least in literary representations, could teach both letters and music (Eup. fr. 17 and, intriguingly, Sophron fr. 153).
The lyre teacher (kitharistēs) appears frequently in our sources, but musical education also included instruction in singing and dancing, the other two components of ‘the whole of mousikē’ (?Pl. Alc. i.108c–d), as well as the aulos. Footnote 27 These performance-oriented skills were honed through the direct imitation of an instructor, as we see on Athenian pottery depicting pupils and teachers seated face to face with lyres in hand.Footnote 28 Whereas at least elementary literacy could evidently be taught to large groups and so presumably at relatively low cost, it is hard to imagine how lyric schooling could have involved comparable economies of scale.Footnote 29 Such advanced musical education will thus have both presumed outlay on other literate education and also required relatively higher tuition.
Economic, scholastic and generic hierarchies paralleled one another. Any literate education conferred prestige,Footnote 30 but more expensive schooling conferred more prestige. Addressing popular assemblies, Aeschines (1.141, 3.135) flattered his audience's education in Homer and Hesiod, authors repeatedly credited with ‘teaching’ the masses.Footnote 31 No lyric poet is ever credited with anything comparable. On the contrary, knowledge of how to play the lyre and knowledge of canonical lyric poets signified elevated status.Footnote 32 Fourth-century dicastic speeches never quote melic poets; Plato, on the other hand, often quotes them.Footnote 33 Elementary teachers of letters, rarely named in our sources, held low status;Footnote 34 some lyre teachers cut a profile.Footnote 35
Plato's Protagoras has children turn to poems as soon as they can read and then move on to lyric poems (Prt. 325e–326a), but it is not clear how much poetry an educational career typically included. Despite the insistence of Plato's myriads that ‘proper’ education entails deep inculcation in a wide poetic curriculum (Leg. 810e–11a), most will have inevitably fallen short of such deliberately exclusionary ideals. Early education was a purely private affair, and there existed no formalised lower or upper limit.Footnote 36 As throughout later centuries, many will have been able to afford just a few years of school, enough time to acquire basic literacy and perhaps little else. Schools were, as the English word suggests, essentially an expression of leisure (scholē), that unevenly distributed good which was, as Fisher and Van Wees (Reference Fisher and Van Wees2015) argue, the single most defining feature of elites. It was the children of the wealthy who could afford the luxury of the longest education, as Plato's Protagoras observes (Prt. 326c), and hence the most substantial exposure to literature. Early schools thus institutionalised a connection between economic capital and cultural capital acquired through reading and performing written texts.Footnote 37 Scholars have long been much concerned with how many attended schools, but the point of these institutions was in large part to distinguish the few.
II. Teaching canons
Schools perpetuated hierarchies among people, but they also perpetuated hierarchies among texts. From early on literate education tended to focus on major, canonical poets. A robust degree of curricular uniformity and stability expressed the integrity of a notional community of the educated which transcended temporal and geographical boundaries.
All indications suggest that early Greek schools taught verse, not prose.Footnote 38 It might strike us as strange to imagine the tender young cutting their teeth on Anaxagoras or Hecataeus, but an exclusively poetic curriculum looks more interesting when we consider that we have no evidence for texts written in order to be taught. Later eras and other cultures produced such schoolbooks, but early Greek teachers, as far as we can tell, only taught texts not originally intended for teaching. Poetic language presented sui generis difficulties, and the real-life benefits of mastering such specifically literary challenges are not, and were not, self-evident.Footnote 39 The overwhelming preference for poetry in early schools must have reflected the prestige which poetry, and certain poets, had already attained outside the classroom.
Yet we have one piece of evidence for decidedly minor poets inside the classroom. Once upon a time, according to Aristophanes’ Right, the kitharistēs would teach boys to sing ‘either “Pallas dread sacker of cities” or “some far-reaching shout”’ (ἢ “Παλλάδα περσέπολιν δεινάν” ἢ “τηλέπορόν τι βόαμα”, Nub. 967). These incipits probably belong, respectively, to Lamprocles (= 735 PMG), active in early fifth-century Athens, and Cydias, active in late sixth-century Athens (cf. 714 PMG).Footnote 40 Yet Aristophanes is not here straightforwardly reporting vanished practices, and his Atheno-centric, anti-canonical lyric curriculum for the Marathon generation, like the rest of his ‘traditional education’, may well be parodic and distortive. Perhaps the comedian selected two poets mostly remembered for being largely forgotten.
One can assemble a far more extensive and trustworthy dossier of evidence for major authors in schools. A lekythos from around 470 depicts a boy with a scroll on which is written the incipit of the shorter Homeric Hymn to Hermes.Footnote 41 A kyathos from about 490 represents a boy with the Hesiodic Teachings of Chiron. Footnote 42 Around the same time, Pindar's Pythian 6 alluded to the same work as a source for the Sicilian Thrasybulus’ poetic education.Footnote 43 Aristophanes’ Banqueters, staged in 427, revolved around educational themes and mocked the Teachings of Chiron (Ar. fr. 239 = [Hes.] fr. 284 MW; cf. Cratinus fr. 253). The comedian's earliest work also staged an oral quiz in Homeric vocabulary (Ὁμήρου γλώττας, fr. 233; cf. Arist. Poet. 1459a.9–10) through a question-and-answer format which was presumably already a classroom staple.Footnote 44 In this play, knowledge of the abstruse epicisms ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα (‘powerless heads’, as at Od. 10.521, 536, 11.29, 49) and κόρυμβα (‘tops of sterns’, as at Il. 9.241) was associated with ‘old-school’ as opposed to ‘new-school’ education; the ability to perform Anacreon or Alcaeus to the lyre had the same connotations (Ar. fr. 235).Footnote 45 The bad son, who absconded from the schoolhouse (ἀπεδίδρασκες ἐκ διδασκάλου, fr. 206; cf. fr. 225), will have lacked such time-honoured proficiencies in non-melic and melic poetry.
Plato's Protagoras has the didaskalos and kitharistēs assign ‘noble poets’, non-melic and melic (ποιητῶν ἀγαθῶν, Prt. 325e and 326a). Homer and Hesiod fit comfortably within the former class (cf. 316d); a subsequent discussion of Simonides (339a) and allusion to Pindar (337d, looking to Pind. fr. 169a) make them attractive candidates for the latter class. Eupolis (fr. 398) apparently lamented that Pindar's poems were no longer taught.Footnote 46 Aeschines refers to children learning from older poets before quoting Hesiod (3.135); he elsewhere flatters his audience's Homeric education (1.141). Writing to the Cyprian Nicocles, Isocrates mentions ‘certain precepts of older poets’ (2.3) that educate common citizens; Phocylides, Theognis and Hesiod belong among such authorities (2.42–4). Elsewhere Isocrates credits the Athenians’ ancestors with long ago making Homer honoured ‘in the education of the young’ (4.159).
By the fifth century, if not before, literate schooling evidently concentrated on a relatively small set of canonical poets broadly agreed to be worthy of concerted attention, none of whom was thought to have originated from Athens, some of whom would go on to be mainstays of literate education throughout later centuries.Footnote 47 Yet, as Pfeiffer (Reference Pfeiffer1968, 15) observes, ‘we know of no tradition about the “selected authors to be read in school” at Athens or anywhere else in the sixth and fifth centuries’. Indeed, we know of no authority capable of imposing formal consensus. Early schools were not manifestations of centralised power but rather the projects of individual teachers; presumably fee-receiving teachers simply tended to teach what fee-paying fathers wanted taught.Footnote 48 This complete lack of regulative superstructure makes the level of curricular agreement that we do find all the more remarkable. Teaching tastes must have varied over time and space, but what is more interesting is the degree to which they did not.
The initial enshrinement of certain poems as schoolbooks will have reflected the prominence which these works had already attained in older arenas of cultural competition.Footnote 49 Once an organic consensus about which texts were worth teaching began to crystallise, it is easy to see how this could have proved self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating: one learned certain texts in schools because these were what educated people had traditionally been expected to learn as part of ‘shared education’ (τῆς κοινῆς παιδείας, Isoc. 12.209, describing what the Spartans do not share with other Greeks). Aristotle saw that common education could foster unity within a political community as a whole (Pol. 1263b.36–7, 1337a.21–6), but, in reality, the private nature of early schooling was far better suited to fostering a sense of ‘international’ unity among the affluent classes of different political communities. Organic curricular agreement supported that sense of unity, and the conservatism of the teaching canon bolstered the idea of a supposedly stable identity inherited in turn by the elite boys of each successive generation. From the level of quotidian pedagogy to the level of content over decades and centuries, schools were essentially institutions of repetition.
III. Schools in history
Schools fit into a particular place in the history of Greek literacy. We must posit some transmission of knowledge from the very dawn of the alphabet,Footnote 50 but the professionalisation of teaching requires literacy to have acquired enough cultural capital for teachers to attract a critical mass of people willing to expend financial capital. Our earliest evidence for literacy as such is, at present, a single word written around 825;Footnote 51 our earliest textual evidence for schools is 120 boys learning their letters in 494 (Hdt. 6.27.2). How did formal schooling relate to older practices? What propelled its rise?
Besides poems originating from professional singers of epic, many early Greek poems derive from choruses and symposia, two elite institutions which were deeply educational in nature, as Griffith (Reference Griffith and Too2001), (Reference Griffith and Bloomer2015) emphasises. Was literacy transmitted in the social contexts surrounding early choruses and symposia? No early choral or sympotic poem clearly shows that it was, but if these poems were, as most scholars suppose,Footnote 52 composed and transmitted through writing, then literacy must have had some place in the environments from which such written texts emerged.
One hardly needed to peruse a book before dancing in a chorus (Il. 18.590–4) or singing over wine (Od. 14.463–5), but texts could have been useful tools for especially complex performances.Footnote 53 Various skills related to performance – dancing (Alcm. 1.43–5 PMGF), lyre-playing (Sappho 22.9–11 Voigt), singing (Thgn. 241–3) – were clearly integral to the individual and corporate identities cultivated through early symposia and choruses. If reading and writing were already, as later, subsumed together with these other performance-related competencies under the encompassing sign of mousikē, conceptually if not semantically,Footnote 54 then perhaps reading and writing were also already taught as parts of a panoply of skills pertaining to ‘the gifts of the Muses’ (Alcm. 59b PMGF; Sappho 58b.1 as in Budelmann (Reference Budelmann2018) 40, Thgn. 250).Footnote 55 This hypothesis receives fresh support from new epigraphical finds which bring into slightly better focus the early prestige of literacy and its place in archaic symposia.Footnote 56 On a larger level, it becomes easier to understand the unrivalled centrality of poetry and performance-related skills to early schools if we posit that these institutions pursued pedagogical ideals which were not fundamentally innovative but had rather been shaped by older, more prestigious and still more exclusive institutions. Schools, in other words, may well have represented just a further development of the long-standing relationship between poetry, literacy and elite education.
However older institutions may have factored in, the growth of literate schooling must have responded to demand. In the early Greek world, writing was not, in relative terms, integrally allied to centralised political power or to mainstream religious practice.Footnote 57 Those who learned to read and write were not those destined for some scribal or priestly class but rather those whose fathers had the desire and resources for them to do so. ‘What caused the … spread of Greek literacy down to the fourth century BC is in general terms reasonably clear’, writes Harris (Reference Harris and Kolb2018, 145): ‘it was a fairly simple technology that offered multiple practical advantages to certain kinds of people’.
Despite the merits of this lucid formulation, it demands qualification and clarification. We should beware of overemphasising the ‘practical advantages’ of literacy in the early Greek world; illiteracy did not debar one from participation in society to anything like the degree that it does today.Footnote 58 The ‘practical advantages’ of an education aiming at literary literacy rather than merely ‘functional’ literacy are thus, prima facie, all the less clear. Indeed, doubts about the use of such education were voiced,Footnote 59 and against these doubts were marshalled claims about moral, not pragmatic, value (see n. 18 above). Classical authors are in fact notably silent about the practical benefits of literate education; some instead contrast the sort of education ‘that befits a free man’ (Pl. Prt. 312a–b) with useful training.Footnote 60
‘What help are rhythms to my daily bread?’, asks Strepsiades; ‘firstly, to be clever in company (κομψὸν ἐν ξυνουσίᾳ)’, answers Aristophanes’ Socrates (Nub. 648–9).Footnote 61 Here comedy captures an old and important truth. Among the chief ‘practical benefits’ of literary schooling was, somewhat paradoxically, the social prestige bound up with an impractical education. One went to school in large part to be initiated into the real and imagined community of the educated.
IV. The production of readers
In the early Greek world, the highest levels of schooling sought to produce people capable of reading complex poetic texts. Our own experiences of English-majors-turned-philistine-bankers happily liberate us from the unfounded assumption that even intensive literary education necessarily entails post-scholastic literary reading. Aeschines informed jurors that they studied edifying classics as children so that as adults they might put into practice what they had memorised long ago (3.135) – not so that they might read other, newer, compositions like his own erotic verses (1.135–6). ‘Est-ce que la littérature peut être pour nous’, asks Barthes (Reference Barthes, Doubrovsky and Todorov1971, 170), ‘autre chose qu'un souvenir d'enfance?’
Many among those few privileged enough to have received a deluxe education may have then left behind reading together with their unfondly remembered schooldays, but adult readers existed from early on. Rather than re-emphasising that the early Greek world was not a ‘book culture’, this section investigates some relatively bookish subcultures and suggests some connections with literate schooling. As previous sections shifted their focus away from the place of schools within society as a whole to study instead the culture of literate education on its own terms, so here I examine the intimately related culture of reading as a social phenomenon in its own right.Footnote 62 In structural terms, the imagined and real community of readers closely paralleled the imagined and real community of the educated, on which it directly depended. It is hard to say how many readers there were in the early Greek world, but more can be said about what is meant to be a reader.
Aristophanes’ Frogs constitutes some of our most frequently discussed evidence and thus provides a convenient point of departure. Reading Euripides’ Andromeda to himself inspires Dionysus to descend into the underworld (Ran. 52–3; cf. Plato com. fr. 189). Later the chorus exhorts Aeschylus and Euripides (1109–18):
If you are afraid lest the spectators have some lack of learning that will prevent them from understanding the subtle things that you say, have no fear about this, since matters aren't like that any more: they are veterans and each holds a book and learns the refined bits (βιβλίον τ’ ἔχων ἕκαστος μανθάνει τὰ δεξιά).
Part of the humour here, as scholars now generally agree, derives from attributing to everyone a literate and literary connoisseurship which in fact characterised a minority. This passage has long featured in discussions about the rarity of fifth-century reading,Footnote 63 but emphasising this rarity risks implying a misleading contrast with some unspecified later period when literary reading was the favoured pastime of the people. Hellenistic poems about fishermen ([Theoc.] 21) were not written to be read by fishermen.
Scholars routinely cite Aristophanes’ insidiously bookish Euripides, but in our passage the chorus constructs a hierarchy of sophia in which the recently democratised (οὐκέθ’, 1111) practice of reading has now contributed to the learning (ἀμαθία, 1109; μανθάνει, 1114) enabling each and every spectator to ascend towards a rarefied pinnacle occupied by both the new-school Euripides and the old-school Aeschylus (μηδὲν ὀρρωδεῖτε, 1111, plural). Many sources link poets with writing and construct, or deconstruct, a similar hierarchy of prestige. Already around 476 Pindar's Muses were, like the poet himself, literate (ἀνάγνωτε, Ol. 10.1). From Pindar and Aeschylus onwards, it becomes cliché for written texts to celebrate the connection between memory and writing, ‘the putting together of letters, memory of all things, mother of the Muses, worker’ (γραμμάτων τε συνθέσεις, | μνήμην ἁπάντων, μουσομήτορ’ ἐργάνην, [Aesch.] PV 460–1).Footnote 64 Starting around 450, the Muse herself, divine patron and apogee of poetic culture, is depicted as reading on Athenian vases.Footnote 65 Euripides wrote of the deltoi of the Muses (IA 798) and also of those who keep the Muses’ constant company through reading (Hipp. 451–2). Alcidamas had the Muses teach the alphabet to the ur-poet Orpheus (2.122–3; cf. Pl. Leg. 677d). A cup from around 440 depicts Linus teaching Musaeus in a text-based pupil–teacher relationship which is ‘a school scene cloaked in mythical garb’ (Immerwahr (Reference Immerwahr and Henderson1964) 20).Footnote 66 Sappho features with her lyre and scroll on a roughly contemporary vase.Footnote 67 A tomb from around 420 has recently disclosed its inhabitant: a performer, and perhaps also a poet, who was buried with the tokens of his identity, his lyre and writing tables.Footnote 68 Plato's Socrates assumes that poets work hard in writing and rewriting (Phdr. 278d–e; cf. Ap. 22b). Alcidamas disparagingly suggests that those who expend their energies on writing deserve the name ‘poet’ (1.9–11).
Aristophanes’ Euripides distils his plays from many other books (Ran. 943) and is invited to tip the scales with masses of them (1409). Cratinus staged his own act of written composition (γράφ’, fr. 208; γράψον, fr. 209). Eupolis (fr. 192.13–19) presented himself not as an exalted culture hero enlightening humanity (Ar. Ran. 1030–6, 1054–5) or as a respected chorus-master (διδάσκαλος, Ar. Ach. 628) but rather in the ironical mask of the humble writing teacher, that marginalised gatekeeper to the world of literacy.Footnote 69 We have it on the unusually reliable authority of Ion of Chios that Sophocles was so ‘wise in poetry’ (σοφός … ἐν ποιήσει, 392 F 6 BNJ) that he could put an actual writing teacher to shame.
‘Musical people’,Footnote 70 observes Xenophon's Cyrus, ‘don't just use whatever they learn but also try to make other new things’ (Cyr. 1.6.38). Many of the authors discussed in this section were products of the sort of literate education discussed in the previous sections of this essay. The literary works that they went on to produce variously manifest the influence of the training which they had received, most obviously in the brute fact of their accomplished literacy but not least in their manifold engagements with the canonical poems that they, and some among their audiences, had intensively studied in school.
Poets claimed the heights of literate sophistication, but their works were also read by others on that same pyramid of refinement. Reading could be denigrated in anti- or hyper-intellectual tones,Footnote 71 but it would be misleading to generalise only from such passages. Other attitudes existed. The very phenomenon of literary education, let alone a desire to maximise it (Pl. Prt. 326c), bespeaks a positive estimation of reading. From the early fifth century onwards, Athenian pottery valorises reading as part of a recognisable social identity. Writing equipment on walls sometimes lacks any obvious purpose beyond conveying a literate atmosphere. Many classical images, like classical texts, depict reading as a deeply interpersonal activity;Footnote 72 a book is here not primarily a passport to solitary realms of imagination but rather an emblem of belonging to a world inhabited by attractive young boys and women and filled with music and athletics. Schools belonged to that same real and imaginary social landscape situated at once within, without and in tension with the larger civic community.Footnote 73
Like going to school, reading was a manifestation of privileged leisure.Footnote 74 The ‘Old Oligarch’ laments that in Athens (as opposed to elsewhere) the masses have attacked those who practise gymnastics and those who ‘spend their time practising music’ (τὴν μουσικὴν ἐπιτηδεύοντας) – because the rabble knows that they cannot enjoy such luxuries (1.13). The sort of people ‘who have the writings of older men and themselves are always among the Muses’ (ὅσοι μὲν οὖν γραφάς τε τῶν παλαιτέρων | ἔχουσιν αὐτοί τ’ εἰσὶν ἐν μούσαις ἀεί, Eur. Hipp. 451–2) could afford texts and did not need to pursue more practical concerns elsewhere. Thus a Euripidean chorus fondly anticipates the peace and quiet (ἡσυχίας) that will enable them to sing at the symposium and ‘unfold the voice of the tablets through which the wise are glorified’ (δέλτων τ’ ἀναπτύσσοιμι γῆρυν ᾇ σοφοὶ κλέονται, fr. 369; cf. Pind. Pyth. 4.294–6).
Symposia, like schools, were focal points for the communal expression of elite identity, and reading, like the symposium, must take its place in ‘the history of pleasures’ (Murray (Reference Murray2018) 367). Indeed, much early intensive reading will have been in preparation for performing memorised texts at symposia. A key ‘practical’ aim of early schooling was equipping one to participate in such occasions.Footnote 75 In antiquity, as today, people forgot what they had memorised without assiduous practice, and texts were helpful mnemonic aides.Footnote 76 There is no good reason to endow the ancients with memories fantastical enough to have rendered books useless, but there is some reason to believe that schools cultivated a learnable facility in memorising written texts.Footnote 77
Like going to school, reading was a leisure activity notionally open to all with the means and desire to pursue it. We may take as our paradigmatic reader Plato's Socrates: having been schooled in mousikē as a boy (Cri. 50d–e), he heard Anaxagoras recite his work and then went off to purchase his readily available writings (Phdr. 97b–8c; cf. Ap. 26d–e). This anecdote unites a face-to-face performance with an open, public book trade. Isocrates similarly read his work to his intimate circle and also put out the text for ‘those who wanted to take it up’ (διαδοτέος τοῖς βουλομένοις λαμβάνειν, 12.233; cf. 15.193). Alcidamas, who lionised extemporaneous speechifying over writing in a written text which he left behind as a memorial (μνημεῖα καταλιπεῖν, 1.201–2; cf. Pind. Nem. 4.79–85), also gave his work on Homer ‘into the public for those among the Greeks who want to pursue the love of fine things’ (τοῖς βουλομένοις φι[λοκαλ]εῖν τῶν Ἑλλήνων εἰς τὸ κοινὸν παραδο[ύς, 7.202–3).Footnote 78
The commercial book trade, in evidence from around 420, presupposed a critical mass of people who indeed wanted to ‘pursue the love of fine things’ by purchasing texts.Footnote 79 There is no reliable evidence for public libraries in this period, but starting around 490 vases depict teachers and other readers with a chest (kibōtos), a common household item which could house scrolls.Footnote 80 Some such private collections must have included works as odd as the Derveni Papyrus, but many will have (also) contained the canonical poets who were taught in school. Indeed, some descriptions of extra-scholastic reading are overtly classicising.Footnote 81 Rereading one's own collection of older poetry, like reading poetry in school, meant entering into an imagined community centred around certain culturally privileged texts.
If readers, like the highly educated, constituted a small minority, it does not follow that they espoused small enthusiasm for reading. Isocrates advises Nicocles to learn from all the famous poets (τῶν ποιητῶν εὐδοκιμούντων, 2.13) whom one must not neglect in a work which shows that he himself has already done so. The bibliophile Euthydemus collected as many texts as he could – only to be mocked by Socrates (Xen. Mem. 4.2.8–12). Xenophon elsewhere describes Socrates’ preferred practice, which is avaricious for immaterial wisdom rather than material texts but is still predicated on extensive reading: ‘the treasure-troves of ancient wise men, which they left behind having written in books, I unroll and go through together with my friends, and we take out whatever good we see therein’ (Mem. 1.6.14). Xenophon's Socrates elsewhere pursues such social reading in a schoolhouse (παρὰ τῷ γραμματιστῇ, Symp. 4.27).
Beyond the face-to-face communities implicated in such reading events inside and outside of schools, there was also a larger notional community of readers. From early on texts manifest writers’ reading and reach out to other readers. Acusilaus already paid enough attention to the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women to attract later charges of plagiarism (T5).Footnote 82 Hecataeus, who programmatically signals the written nature of his work (γράφω, F1), corrected Hesiod and echoed the poet's epithet for the dog of Hades (F19, F27b).Footnote 83 Andolfi (Reference Andolfi2018, 91) reckons that perhaps a quarter of Hecataeus’ extant fragments ‘display clear hints of epic exegesis’. Herodotus, who corrected Hecataeus’ writing (4.36.2), describes an Alcaean poem as a written letter (ἐπιτιθεῖ, 5.95.2).Footnote 84 Discussing the Iliadic quotation at 2.116, Neville (Reference Neville1977, 4) writes of ‘the striking testimony to the thoroughness of Herodotus’ research in that he could find four lines out of some 16,000 which might support his ideas’. Elsewhere the historian asserts that the Spartans ‘agree with no poet’ about the Heraclidae (6.52.1); he writes as if he had comprehensive knowledge of early verse.Footnote 85 Thucydides, who corrected Herodotus (1.20.3), implies careful, complete reading when he asserts that Homer nowhere refers to the Greeks or barbarians as a collective (1.3.3–4).Footnote 86 Hippias, who composed a text from many other poetic and prose works (D22), implies more comprehensive reading when he claims that the word turannos (‘tyrant’) entered the Greek language around the time of Archilochus (D26). Readers wrote, and their works, through their interactions with each other, created an ever-expanding written landscape which, like the community of educated readers who inhabited it, self-consciously transcended temporal and geographical boundaries. To read meant to enter that landscape.
Early Greek schooling and reading are both sometimes acknowledged in passing as historical realities only to be dismissed as insignificant to society as a whole, the narrow preserve of the louche and the eccentric. But the importance of education and reading – either from the perspective of educated readers or from the perspective of society – need not necessarily have correlated directly or positively with the popularity of these practices.
V. Taking texts seriously
Discussions of early Greek literacy are almost invariably progressivist in orientation, and with reason. This overarching teleological focus, however, might occlude the essential stability of the social institutions fostering the highest levels of literacy. An increasing number of people may well have been becoming highly educated, but by the fifth century, if not before, becoming highly educated already entailed, in structural terms, what it would entail for a very long time afterwards: joining a minority who had the financial capital necessary to distinguish themselves by going to school and acquiring the cultural capital associated with intensive experience of written, canonical poetic texts.
Yet when an early Greek poet ‘first set his tablet on his knees’ (Callim. Aet. 1.21–2 Harder) it did not destine him for a world in which reading was the sole arena of prestige. Sophocles may have really composed a treatise about the chorus (Suda Σ 815 Adler = T2.7) and formed a thiasos of the educated in honour of the Muses (ταῖς δὲ Μούσαις θίασον ἐκ τῶν πεπαιδευμένων συναγαγεῖν, Vit. Soph. = T1.29–30), but he certainly did not confine his creative energies to prose or to a refined coterie. Written texts and oral performances existed side by side for a very long time, and we need to come to grips with this important fact.
Well into the twenty-first century, ‘orality to literacy’ still looks like the single best candidate for a master narrative guiding the study of early Greek poetry. We might wonder if a master narrative is something that we ought to have in the first place, but there can be little doubt about which half of the formula claims more attention. Looking through or past written texts towards oral performances is, by now, just business as usual. From a wider comparative perspective, however, it is not altogether surprising that in the early Greek world we find the oral performance of poetry, a common phenomenon attested in many unconnected cultures; what is more remarkable is that here we also find the beginnings of a text-based literary culture.Footnote 87 What is still more distinctive is the sheer variety and complexity of the interactions between orality and literacy that co-existed during this period. The particularised interface between the oral and written at work in a given text and its reception is a complex matter affected by, among other things, date, genre and class, both of practitioners and of audiences.
Having left behind a crude dichotomy between oral versus literate societies, we now tend to think of societies as existing along a spectrum between orality and literacy.Footnote 88 This is an advance, but continuing to focus on society as a whole might deflect attention away from how very wide, and fundamentally unfamiliar, was the spectrum of literacies which co-existed side by side in antiquity. The early Greek world was hardly an organic, unified ‘song culture’ unriven by social stratification and untouched by the written word. Understanding the social life of literacy means not just grasping its place within society as a whole but also appreciating its importance to some elite subcultures. We will not fully understand the complex interactions between orality and writing at work in the early Greek world if we downplay the literate half of the equation or look past the ideology of the written word itself.
