The Alphabetic Mind: A Gift of Greece to the Modern World

Up until about 700 years before Christ the Greek peoples were non-literate. About that time they invented a writing system conveniently described as an "alphabet," the Greek word for it. The use of this invention in the course of 300 to 400 years after 700 B.C. had a transformational effect upon the behavior of the Greek language, upon the kind of things that could be said in the language and the things that could be thought as it was used. The transformation, however, did not substitute one language for another. The Greek of the Hellenistic age is recognizably close kin to the Greek of Homer. Yet the degree of transformation can be conveniently measured by comparing Homer at the upper end of the time-span with the language of Aristotle at the lower end. The earlier form came into existence as an instrument for the preservation of oral speech through memorization. This memorized form was not the vernacular of casual conversation but an artifi cially managed language with special rules for memorization, one of which was rhythm. The later form, the Aristotelean one, existed and still exists as a literate instrument designed primarily for readers. It preserves its content not through memorization but by placing it in a visual artifact, the alphabet, where, the content can survive as long as the artifact and its copies survive also. The transformational effect made itself felt slowly in the course of 350 years. It was a complex process. What precisely was its nature? Its complexity can be summed up variously as on the one hand, a shift from poetry to prose as the medium of preserved communication; or again as a shift in literary style from narrative towards exposition; or again as the creation of a new literate syntax of defi nition which could be superimposed upon the oral syntax that described action. Or again we discern the invention of a conceptual language superimposed upon a non-conceptual; or alternatively a creation of the abstract to replace the concrete, the invention of an abstract version of what had previously been experienced sensually and directly as a series of events or actions.--Page 134-135.In 1963 Eric Havelock's landmark book Preface to Plato revolutionized the way we read both Homer and other ancient Greek literature by making the case for the "oral encyclopedia" of cultural attitudes, values, and beliefs that was "published" in oral performance. A collection of his seminal writings, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (1982), has since appeared, as has a fascinating study of the Presocratics (1983). He is Sterling Professor of Classics (Emeritus) at Yale University