Lire à Athènes et à Rome

Reading in Athens and Rome. In ancient Greece, widespread alphabetization is a utopian programme. As a matter of fact, it was very hard to decipher a written text because of its conditions of writing (without word separation or signs of reading). So only a minority of people within urban population was alphabetized. If writing is a constitutive element of Athenian democracy, being able to read does not mean diffusion of reading as reading of books. Thucydides remarks that his work is not especially destined to the audience and at the same time he hopes that it will be a "treasure" for ever. There is an audience listening to Thucydides, but it is limited. So, at Thucydides' age, the conditions of alphabetization are changing, but we can't imagine Athenian population as if perfectly able to read and write. They were not illeterate, as they knew letters, but above all for business, for administration and political necessities (ostracism). In the Hellenistic Age there were 400.000 books in the Library of Alexandria, but they were read only by scholars who wrote for other scholars. In Rome, reading is almost inexistent out of the hellenized, political milieu. A real revolution of the material conditions of books (manuscripts) exploded only with the diffusion of the New Testament.Canfora Luciano. Lire à Athènes et à Rome. In: Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations. 44ᵉ année, N. 4, 1989. pp. 925-937