[Excerpts from THE LITERATE REVOLUTION IN GREECE AND ITS CULTURAL CONSEQUENCES by Eric A. Havelock:]
Today persons and peoples are either literate or not: if semiliterate, this condition is viewed as a failure to become literate. This is because the alphabet is available, its full use is understood, a regimen for teaching reading to children is available, as also is an adequate supply of documented speech to afford practice in reading as well as a motive for reading. These resources are either used or not used, and the result is either literacy or nonliteracy. In dealing with ancient Greece, which started from scratch and had to learn the full use of the alphabet after inventing it, this simplistic view should be abandoned. Tentatively, let me suggest in its place a progressive classification, which would identify the condition of Athenian society during the seventh and as far as the last decades of the sixth centuries B.C. as craft-literate: the alphabet written or read represents an expertise managed by a restricted group of the population. During the latter part of the sixth and the first half of the fifth, the skill begins to spread, though I would suspect that the governing classes were the last to acquire it, but the skill is one of decipherment rather than fluent reading. The use of the written word is very restricted, and any reading of it is regarded as ancillary to the central function of culture, which still is, as it had always been, to memorize and recite the poets. I would classify this period as one of “recitation literacy.” Only in the last third of the century is the average Athenian taught letters in such a way as to begin to pick up a script and read it through. It follows that testimonies drawn from fourth-century authors will take literacy for granted, for it has now been achieved. These chronological distinctions may seem fine-drawn, but they call attention to the basic fact that what we call the “literature” both of the sixth and fifth centuries is addressed to listeners rather than readers and is composed to conform with this situation.
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The cultivation centered today in the more privileged classes, to use a term which is snobbish but seems inevitable, is identified with a superior capacity to read and write, which diminishes as one goes down in the social scale. Therefore, if it be discovered that a Greek potter or carpenter or stonemason could use the alphabet, it is assumed a fortiori that the upper classes must have previously mastered this skill which had now filtered down to the artisan, or conversely, that the artisan was not really an artisan but a very educated type. The great bulk of the inscriptional material on which we rely for any material evidence of the alphabet’s use in the early centuries is contributed by craftsmen. It may seem therefore inevitable to the historian of the period, and particularly to the epigraphist, to conclude that if craftsmen wrote, then everyone did. But suppose, as I have earlier suggested, that the truth was rather the reverse of this, that the alphabet’s use did not achieve what I may call cultural prestige for a very long time?
It is also a fact of life in literate societies that prose is the primary form in which experience is documented, while poetry is more esoteric and sophisticated, a medium to be reserved for special experiences outside the day’s work. The notion runs deep in our consciousness, and continually colors the attitude we take up towards Greek literature in the first three centuries of its existence. Its poetic form prevents us from evaluating its functional role as preserved communication in the society of its day. More particularly, if we encounter in inscriptions a plethora of metrical statements, memorials, dedications, and the like, we are ready to read these in the light of what is believed to be an unusual degree of Greek cultivation. This conception has to be reversed if we are to understand early Greek poetry. In an oral culture, metrical language is part of the day’s work.