The Attitude of Ancient Greeks to Writing: A Mystery’s Secret

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of transition from oral to written culture in Ancient Greece. Most foreign and Russian researchers associate the duration and instability of this transition, firstly, with some features of power organization in the city-states, in which Greek citizens had to exercise their rights themselves — narrow specialization was condemned; and, secondly, with the anthropomorphic specificity of Greek culture. The article analyzes the use of oral and written communications in the major works of a number of ancient Greek writers: Homer (“Iliad”, “Odyssey”), Hesiod (“Theogony”), Aeschylus (“The Suppliants”), Aristophanes (“The Birds”), as well as in the philosophical works of Plato (“Phaedrus”).The article specifies that ancient Greek authors, despite the possession of writing, rely in their works on oral communications and on such forms of ensuring trust in oral communication as personal testimony, religious oath, reinforcing all this with a belief in potential religious punishment. As a result, the ancient Greek authors (in the absence of specially created institutional forms of trust) either ignore written communications or depict them as secondary. Therefore, this article aims to explain the distrustful attitude of the Greeks to writing at an early stage. The author proposes an original hypothesis, within the context of which this phenomenon is explained by inability of the institutional forms of trust, created for oral communication, to perform their function during the transition to written communications, which “hindered” the transition process. The author’s hypothesis is based on the theory of documentary information. The article concludes that the final transition to written communications was completed only after the creation of institutional forms of ensuring trust in written communications, in the form of archives and libraries.