Tacitus tells us that Nero, a bad-tempered emperor at the best of times, killed his wife Poppaea in A.D. 65 by kicking her in the stomach when she was pregnant (or maybe by a less dastardly dose of poison). He goes on: ‘The body was not consigned to the flames, as is the Roman custom (mos Romanus), but following the practice of foreign kings it was embalmed with spices’ (Ann. 16.6 (written c. A.D. 115)). Three hundred years later, though, Macrobius could say that cremation was the sort of thing that people only read about in books (Sat. 7.7.5). Two interesting stories, to be sure. There are strict limits on what we can do with them, but they hint at the biggest single event in ancient burial, the change in ‘the Roman custom’ from cremation to inhumation. This involved tens of millions of people across the whole western part of the empire.

This is the first of two linked chapters dealing specifically with the body. The body is a uniquely powerful medium for ritual communication, furnishing a set of ‘natural symbols’, as some would call them. Intuitive awareness of this led early ethnologists to seek pan-human explanations for burial customs. After observing one funeral, Frazer claimed that ‘Heavy stones were piled on his grave to keep him down, on the principle of “sit tibi terra gravis”’ (a little Latin humour here, reversing the common Roman epitaph ‘sit tibi terra levis’, ‘may the earth be light upon you’).

‘Oh, he's illiterate’, someone may say, and they mean, not that the object of their scorn is unable to read and write, but that he is uncivilized — or simply boorish (as above), or that he has not read the great works of literature, that he is not educated to a high standard. In other words, we use the descriptions ‘literate’ and ‘illiterate’ today to denote a whole range of meanings, for both the ability to read and write, and the degree of refinement or culture.

What does the prevalence of oral communication imply for later Greek culture? In what way does it really change our understanding of the ancient world? Is orality a useful tool of analysis? Is it largely specific to a given culture, like literacy (as I tentatively suggested for the field of Homeric epic)? Much recent work on Greek orality has been connected with the stylistic study of specific Greek authors. But it is time to get beyond stylistic analyses and move into areas more difficult to discuss but equally important to any understanding of oral communication, that is, the performance and context of Greek literature (and attention is increasingly turning to this). We need also to consider more sympathetically how oral communication may have affected not so much individual style or mentality, but our own evidence and judgements. Many of our problems in understanding Greek culture stem simply from the lack of accurately preserved material.

ARCHAIC AND CLASSICAL ORALITY: ORALITY AS A TOOL OF ANALYSIS

Most discussion of orality and oral communication in Greece after the period of the Homeric poems suffers from an inability to detach itself from the lines of debate used for Homer, and accordingly concentrates on formulaic style.

By comparison with Greece, the world of Roman history has remained unruffled by the controversies surrounding orality or the effects of literacy. On the whole, Rome has seemed safely distant from the beginnings of alphabetic writing and any related problems — though there are areas where such preoccupations are not irrelevant. Certainly Roman society in the late Republic and Empire is far more dominated by books and documents than classical Greece. Latin literature inherited the learned weight of Hellenistic scholarship, and everyone would agree that there was plenty of reading matter (at least in the cities), a flourishing book-trade, and a fairly wide reading public, certainly by the second century AD. It would be quite misguided to deny that the written word was important in administration, in the records of taxation, trials and the citizen-body, in the circulation of literature, and in everyday life. Writing in various forms was surely much more deeply integrated into the life of at least the cities by the first century BC than it had been in classical Greece. But how deeply? To deny a similarity between classical Greece and Rome does not reach the limit of possible enquiry. As current discussions about the nature of Roman administration show, for instance, much is unclear even about the precise place of the written document in Rome.

In early Greece from the eighth century BC we may observe the gradual development and extension of the written word in a society which, as everyone agrees, still performed almost entirely without writing. Much attention has been devoted to the very earliest uses of this alphabet, less to its later application. It has also been tempting to concentrate on the more intelligible examples of early writing, especially those which foreshadow later usage, and ignore the less straightforward — or even quite incomprehensible — pieces. Yet the many obscure graffiti are just as important a part of the impact of the alphabet, and I shall stress them in this chapter precisely because no picture of archaic writing can be complete without them. Nor can we discern the impact of writing at all adequately without assessing the nature of the non-written background. Very few discussions really attempt this (and since our evidence is slanted overwhelmingly towards what was written, it is very hard). The debate is often dominated by the controversy over whether the alphabet was invented to record poetry, which disregards much of the evidence. But we would also like to ask more generally whether — or how far — early Greek writing simply represented speech.

‘Literacy’ has a multiplicity of levels and meanings. It also has a history, as does its interaction with oral communication. But how important is literacy to a society? What effects does writing have? How does the coming of writing change a society which has previously relied entirely on oral communication and tradition?

The wider significance of writing is much debated. Influential theories have seen it as a fundamental agent of change — change either to the workings of society or to the mentality of individuals. Is it, or is it not, such a powerful agent? The debate could be said to have been focused — if not actually triggered off — by the example of ancient Greece. But it encompasses anthropological and more modern or more ancient historical data, as well as psychological research. It is difficult to characterize the broad state of play at the moment. The extreme picture of literacy as a catalyst for certain changes has been much criticized. Most historians and anthropologists seem happier with a more relativist concept of literacy, which allows for diverse implications in diverse societies and periods; psychologists tend towards the fundamentalist view. The controversy is certainly showing no signs of dying down. From our point of view, I would single out two main trends in recent studies.

INTRODUCTION: LITERACY AND POWER

The modern state is inconceivable without its extensive record-keeping, its administration and bureaucracy. Information for and about the population is amassed in large quantities. The collection of taxes involves enormous paperwork. Economic, social, and political decisions may be based on elaborate data collected and stored with the aid of writing. Not surprisingly, indeed, it has been said that writing is essential to the definition of the state and its power. More cynically, as we saw, the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss once claimed in a famous passage that writing was an essential tool of empire and expansion, since it ‘seems to have favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment’, and that ‘the primary function of written communication was to facilitate slavery’. In ancient Mesopotamia, writing was indeed used from early on for bureaucracy and exploitation: in fact it was used exclusively for administrative records and lists for its first 600 years, and its role as an instrument of power and control in China and Egypt also may suggest that the development of complex state-structures is at least related to, if not closely bound up with, the development of literacy.

When we look more closely at such theories, however, the relation of writing to ‘power’ or to the state is often left extremely vague.

INTRODUCTION: ORAL POETRY AND ORALITY

Modern study of Greek orality — perhaps even of orality itself — is founded on Homeric epic poetry. In a brilliant series of articles between 1928 and his untimely death in 1935, Milman Parry argued that Homer's Iliad and Odyssey were traditional oral poetry, the product of a long tradition rather than the creation of one poetic genius. Parry and his pupil Albert Lord turned to the contemporary illiterate bards of southern Yugoslavia in the 1930s and 1950s. Here they could see how an oral poet actually composed in performance and, in particular, how he used a traditional stock of set pieces, formulae and set themes to help him compose as he sang. Parry's detailed analysis of Homer seemed to reveal a similar system of traditional formulae: thus the Homeric epics were oral poetry.

This theory had precedents in earlier work but it proved to be revolutionary. Homer is now widely known at an oral poet. Oral poetry was put on the map. The ‘oral theory’ or ‘Parry—Lord theory’, as it is sometimes known, has been applied to other poetic traditions of epic or archaic nature — Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, African epic, Karakirghiz poetry, to name only a few.

INTRODUCTION: BEYOND THE WRITTEN MESSAGE

It is frequently taken for granted that writing will be used to communicate and store information, to create documents and books which have obvious recognized functions, or generally that it will serve as a vehicle for rational thought. It is also assumed that writing simply conveys the message of its written content without any further meaning; or that written communication, almost exclusively now on paper (or disk), is predictably uniform in its significance. But such modern perceptions may not always be appropriate for the ancient world. The symbolic or non-documentary use of writing is often recognized in other cultures. Scholars are strangely reluctant to see it in ancient Greece except in the unavoidable region of magic. This chapter aims to explore these neglected aspects of writing which do not conform to the straightforward (and modern) expectations of historians: one might perhaps call these ‘non-literate’ uses of writing, in order to underline their distance from what are usually felt to be the normal uses of literacy. Writing is not a neutral and autonomous medium.

I shall argue that Greek (and indeed Roman) writing has many forms and functions — symbolic and magical, for example — which take us beyond the message contained merely in the written content of the document; secondly, that the written word in the ancient world often has such a close relationship to the background of oral communication that it cannot properly be understood in isolation from that background; thirdly, that the use of written documents is dependent partly on experience, partly on the way writing is seen by contemporaries, and partly on the very nature of oral communication: thus that the value and use of a written document (and even whether written documents are made in the first place) change considerably in the course of Greek history.