Orality and Literacy in Hellenic Greece

An examination of the relationship between writing and orality which proposes that culture flourishes when competition among media emphasizes the strength of each.

Lentz builds on Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato, providing concrete evidence for Havelock's hypothesis on the importance of writing to the origins of Greek philosophy. He focuses on the interaction between the abstract thought and verbatim precision that writing reinforced and the memory and oral performance skills that were at the heart of the oral culture.

In each chapter Lentz illustrates the importance of the oral tradition of powerful memory and effective oral delivery in a given context, from the divine inspiration of the rhapsode to the importance of face-to-face interaction in Platonic dialectic. The contexts include the use of written and oral evidence in the law courts to the presence of both traditions in the philosophical works of Plato.

The resulting view of orality and literacy in Greece shows a long interaction between the two media, continuing through the Hellenic period. He shows that both traditions played vital roles in the intellectual flowering of the age: while literacy is a requirement for the basic recipe for Western culture, it is not the only ingredient. Lentz argues that the key to many of the most exciting cultural developments of the Greek world was the relationship between written and oral modes of thought and communication.