Chapter 3
Most of us take it as a truism that writing is good, ennobling, and central to being an educated citizen. Socrates, ancient Greece’s greatest thinker, believed the opposite. He argued vehemently, through speeches Plato later wrote down, that writing caused humans to become less intelligent, less civilized, and less creative. As he put it: “A reader must be singularly simple-minded to believe that written words can do anything more than remind one of what one already knows.”1 For Socrates, mastering orality, not writing, was the epitome of knowledge. Having a robust, complex oral mind would ensure history would be preserved: “If men learn [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on that which is written.”2
Socrates also worried writing would stunt complex thoughts. We can only internalize concepts, he said, if we memorize them, and we can only fully develop those concepts if we talk them out. For Socrates and many other Greeks, speech was the most rarified, complex form of knowledge and expression.
Writing does decrease the human capacity to remember, to mentally retain and file facts, ideas, and experiences for later recall. As Socrates said, things “leave their head.” He pointed out that a piece of writing does not respond to questions, as do people in conversations. “If you ask a piece of writing a question, it remains silent,” he said. Writing is also static: It does not change its mind. Anyone can take a piece of writing and do anything he wants with it, Socrates argued, because writing “has no parent to protect [it].” There is no concept of forgery in oral cultures.
Socrates’s antiwriting position reminds us that with writing comes loss. We lose the body. We lose gestures. Without technology we lose some capacity to remember, for a pen is as much a technology as a computer is. We also lose those little phrases injected into speech that individualize us—“those scraps of language” like “Isn’t that right?” or “Make sense?”*3
Socrates’s words also remind us that oral cultures are no less sophisticated than literate ones. Many of Western civilization’s greatest figures never or rarely wrote. What we know about Moses, Buddha, and Jesus all comes from words they spoke, not wrote. Jesus is only described writing once: words in sand he later erased and that no one recorded (John 8:8).
But while they are no less sophisticated, oral cultures are significantly different from literate ones. “Sustained thought in an oral culture is tied to communication.”4 In other words, to think deeply and complexly requires one to talk to someone else.
Thus, oral cultures developed complex, intricate systems for how to remember ideas and then communicate them to others—ways of thinking unavailable to minds that have been altered by becoming literate. A member of an oral culture like Socrates had a capacity for memory that far outstripped his literate counterparts. Since no one could “look up” anything, oral cultures developed elaborate mnemonics, or memory systems, and used additive structures (and … and … and) and listing to create memorable rhythms. The book of Genesis, which was originally orally transmitted and later written down, is such an example:
In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters. And God said: Be light made. And light was made. And God saw the light, that it was good; and he divided the light from the darkness. And he called the light Day, and the darkness Night; and there was evening and morning one day.5
The frequent use of “and” makes the structure easy to memorize. Lists are another way to remember: God says light, light is good, light is divided from darkness, light becomes day, dark becomes night.
The Greeks also invented “memory palaces,” mnemonic devices in which a speaker would prepare a speech by imagining a palace or other structure he knew well. He would mentally “walk” through each room in the palace, tying a part of the speech to that room: in the foyer, the introduction; on the second-floor balcony, the fifth reason for his argument. For longer, more elaborate speeches, he would mentally place items in each room to signal an idea: the table in the foyer, for example, indicated an aside to be made during the introduction. Using a memory palace, a Grecian orator could lecture for hours. The poet Simonides of Ceos, it is said, attended a party in a house that was then destroyed by an earthquake. Afterward he helped name and recover each victim because he remembered every person who was there, and where he or she lay buried.
While the Greeks respected speaking over writing, and their education focused on rhetorical skills, not fine motor ones, ironically they also invented the most revolutionary technology in the history of writing: the alphabet. This remarkably efficient system was invented only once in history, and it has only one name, regardless of language.
The earliest alphabet was invented sometime around the fifteenth century B.C.E. by Semites living in Canaan, in modern-day Israel, Lebanon, and Jordan, and then spread along the Mediterranean coast. An alphabet is a writing system that uses symbols for sounds rather than syllables or logograms; each sound is represented by one letter. The early Phoenician alphabet represented only consonants; the first alphabet to represent both consonants and vowels is the twenty-two-letter Greek system, developed around 750 B.C.E.; the Latin alphabet derives from the Greek, with additions and modifications from Etruscan. Any alphabet is less cumbersome than previous writing systems: Compare our twenty-six letters to cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs, which both included several thousand signs at points in their development. In addition, alphabets, with their ordering of letters, allow for easier record keeping and lists.
Who actually invented the alphabet is unknown. The legend Greeks told about the origin of the alphabet was that it was brought to them by Cadmus, a Phoenician prince. Whether or not there was an “alphabet inventor,” the alphabet was the first conscious analysis of all components of speech broken into constituent parts, and it is the world’s most efficient way to represent spoken sounds.
Writing had actually existed in Greece before the alphabet, in Crete during the fifteenth century B.C.E.: Linear A and B were cuneiform-based writing systems (Linear A has yet to be decoded), and the Greeks used them for recording bureaucratic and military matters. But then, for a reason unknown to us now, they put writing aside. Writing in Greece largely disappeared between the twelfth and eighth centuries B.C.E., a period now called the Greek “dark ages,” although it was an extraordinarily literate time in which cultural knowledge was vaunted. This is the time of Homeric epics, which were known by every educated Greek. No one knows if Homer was a person; he may have been a collection of bards, or the word “Homer” may just be a shorthand term for a long poem. Whatever the truth, and despite having writing, no one wrote Homer’s poems down for generations. Instead, they recited them, memorized them, and recited them again.
Eventually, of course, the ancient Greeks integrated writing into their lives. For their writing surfaces, the Greeks learned from Egyptians how to make papyrus. Greek papyrus was never as elegant as the Egyptian goods though, and Grecian scrolls were always smaller than the twenty-foot-long ones used in Egypt. In fact, the size of Greek scrolls, and the specifics of papyrus, helped determine subsequent literary forms and practices we still use. A play, for example, was usually the length of one Greek scroll. When the Iliad and the Odyssey were written down, they were divided into “books” that may have originally been determined by the length of a scroll.6 The beginning of a scroll was called the “protocol,” a term which echoes in our prologues, and the side of the papyrus on which the lines naturally run horizontally—and thus is easier to write on, as if it were organically ruled paper—was called the “recto,” a term still used by printers.
As a writing tool, a Greek would use a reed pen called a calamus that improved on the Egyptian one by being harder and thicker. Scribes would trim the pen with a knife and split the nib for better ink flow. Alphabetic letters are better written with a sharper point than are hieroglyphs, which are better made with a brushwork motion. Like the Egyptians, Greeks also used ink from ground lampblack (the remains produced when something burns without sufficient air), gum, and water. A knife for trimming the pen, a pumice stone for smoothing the papyrus, and a sponge for erasing completed the Greek scribal tools.
Ancient Greeks didn’t use margins when writing, nor were there spaces between the words. Letters were uniformly written, but nothing indicated when a word or sentence or paragraph ended, and no punctuation was employed, because most Greeks spoke the words aloud as they read them. Silent reading and punctuation were still centuries away.
Unlike the Sumerians, whose clay tablets we have today in abundance, or the Egyptians, who buried their papyrus in tombs, the ancient Greeks did not manage to preserve their writing for posterity. We have almost no extant original papyrus documents written in ancient Greek. Most Greek correspondence, bureaucratic records, and original literary works are lost. We do, however, have much evidence of the writing they did on more durable surfaces, such as stone walls, pottery, and gems. And we have, of course, the texts of ancient Greek writing that were deemed important enough that they were subsequently copied.
If the Greeks gave us the alphabet, we owe the Romans for the shape of our Western letters. Ours is the Latin or Roman alphabet—a tweaked version of the Greek, and the transformation of the Greek alphabet to the Roman one was eventually adopted for dozens of languages, thanks to the long history of the Roman Empire and its conquests. The Romans wrote a lot, and their writings are still foundational and well-known to us thousands of years later. But curiously, as with ancient Greece, we know less about how Romans actually wrote—how they taught writing and the methods they used—than we know about how the Sumerians and Egyptians set down their words.
In fact, not until 1748—thousands of years after they were written—was much of the Roman handwriting available to us now discovered in an area called Civita. Archaeologists found remarkably well-preserved documents in the form of graffiti and, to a lesser extent, papyrus in the rubble of Pompeii that was buried in volcanic ash after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius more than a millennium and a half earlier, in 79 B.C.E. Archaeologists started digging—and they have continued to dig for hundreds of years; indeed, one third of the city is yet to be uncovered.
When it comes to preserving handwriting, entombment in volcanic ash rivals firing clay and burying papyrus. The best-preserved examples in Pompeii are graffiti found inside houses and on the walls of buildings. Some three thousand examples of political campaigning have been found, written in either red or black. Most simply include a name, the position the person was running for, and maybe a note like “worthy of public office.”7 Also found were many profane writings by individuals, and they, not surprisingly, give us more insight into average Romans who were as concerned with ribald and scatological references as today’s graffiti writers are. “Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!” wrote someone on the wall of a bar and brothel. In a bathhouse, a man named Severus wrote: “Successus, a weaver, loves the innkeeper’s slave girl named Iris. She, however, does not love him. Still, he begs her to have pity on him. His rival wrote this. Goodbye.”8 With ancient graffiti, the power of writing to simply attest to one’s presence on earth is overpowering, as emotive as it is to hold a cuneiform tablet in the palm of one’s hand.
A trove of graffiti was discovered in what was the ancient Greek city of Smyrna (present-day Izmir, Turkey) in 2013. We have many pieces of ostraca, the “scratch paper of the ancient world,”9 those shards of clay so many cultures wrote on. And the Vindolanda tablets, discovered in 1973 on the site of a Roman garrison in northern England, are small wooden letters dating to the first and second centuries C.E. containing military documents and personal messages; these are the oldest surviving examples of Roman ink writing. Romans also apparently wrote on bark, because we have comments about this in Pliny the Elder and elsewhere. Although there are no extant examples of bark writing, the Latin word for “bark” comes from liber, the word we use for book, and that also forms the root of Latin words for both “bookseller” and “scribe.”
But precious little Roman writing on papyrus has been found. Most of what we have comes from one thousand partial scrolls, almost all written by the philosopher and poet Philodemus of Gadara, found in Herculaneum. However, the contents of many important Roman texts have been preserved because the early Christian church set up veritable factories to copy and recopy them.*
Romans also used wax tablets, which were made by scraping out the insides of a piece of wood or ivory to create a bed, then filling it with wax. When two pieces of wood or ivory were joined together, the tablet was called a diptych; for three a triptych (as similarly constructed paintings are named). Romans jotted things down on their tablets and then erased them to write something new. The Roman stylus, also a calamus, had one sharper end for writing, and another, broader end for erasing. Unlike scrolls, tablets were easier to transport and were used for documents, letters, and school assignments. Some wax tablets even had writing on the outside, summarizing the text inside, much like the flap copy of a book.
The Romans were avid writers, producing thousands of administrative documents backed up by many laws, and each Roman colony had its own written constitution. The extremely complex Roman bureaucracy produced a need for many documents. The Romans were also more interested in writing down their histories, rather than orally transmitting them like the Greeks.
But Roman writing was not all laws and history. They also liked to curse, and they created “curse tablets” exclusively for this purpose. One was discovered a few years ago in England, far from the capital, having lain undiscovered for centuries because it had been hidden in what was then likely a temple. Romans wrote the names of those they were cursing upside down; the curses themselves, like the graffiti found in Pompeii, are both hilariously resonant and startlingly unfamiliar, such as the prayer that a victim “become as liquid as water” or that “I curse Tretia Maria and her life and mind and memory and liver and lungs mixed up together, and her words, thoughts and memory; thus may she be unable to speak what things are concealed.”10
Romans were influenced by the Greeks in all facets of writing, from the way it was taught to how it was written. As in Greece, orality still carried enormous influence and prestige in politics and the law. Writing was done by minions, not by emperors and statesmen themselves, so the famous and wellborn orated while scribes recorded their words. Some of those scribes were Greeks who had been enslaved. Julius Caesar is said to have had seven scribes; one imagines an entourage of scribblers following him as he strode into the Coliseum.
We owe much of what we know about Roman events to scribes. For example, Pliny the Elder, the philosopher and commander of the Roman military, was on the Bay of Naples in the summer of 79 A.D. Noticing smoke coming from across the water, he set out on a boat to get a closer look. He took a scribe with him, to whom he dictated what he was seeing. The smoke was the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. As his boat approached the city, the rowers advised Pliny to head back, to which he famously responded, “Fortune favors the brave,” and told the helmsmen to keep going. They made land at Pompeii, which they found “in the greatest consternation.” They were unable to get back into the boat and leave, but Pliny encouraged the party to wait it out and then, at some point—perhaps due to inhaling gases—collapsed and died. The rest of the group survived. When they returned home, the scribe gave his notes to Pliny the Younger, who then rewrote his uncle’s words.
To the Romans we owe not just our alphabet but our first books. Roman books were made by trimming pieces of papyrus to the same size, tying them together, and putting them between boards. Some credit Julius Caesar as being the first to fold a roll of papyrus into pages instead of a scroll, but the first reference to the “book” as we know it today comes from the poet Martial, who lived from about 38 to 102 C.E.:
Whoa, that’s enough now,
whoa, little book!
We’ve come now right
to the end.
You’re keen to keep
going any further,
And you can’t be held
back on the last page,
As if you hadn’t finished
the task
That was finished already
on the first page.
Now your reader is
grumbling and giving up,
Now even the scribe
himself is saying
“Whoa, that’s enough now,
whoa, little book!”11
Romans eventually shifted from papyrus to parchment, and this made books even more convenient. Papyrus had to be imported from Egypt. Parchment, made from animal skins, could be locally produced. By the first century B.C.E., bookstores had been established in Rome and other cities such as Carthage, Lyon, and Brindisi, selling both new and used books. The first X-rated and pulp books, as well as fine literary works, were published. And the wealthy started collecting the new technology into libraries.
The book did not kill the scroll any more than writing killed speech. But the classical veneration of orality is as important if not more so to understanding Greek and Roman civilization as are their writings. Eventually, writing as a form of communication, and the codex book as the privileged form of its transmission, would become the bedrock forms of transmitting Western knowledge. And from late antiquity through the medieval era in Europe, the work of transmission—of reproducing bound sheaves of pages—fell to lowborn monks laboring in dark, drafty monasteries.
* Today, people are inventing new ways to reinsert gestures and individuality into writing. These are often noted with alarm, often by those who also decry the atrophying of handwriting. Think of the rise in the use of Internet slang like “XO” (“hugs and kisses”) and acronyms like “IRL” (“in real life”), and the interest in new, shorter writing forms, like Twitter or the appropriately named “chat” rooms, which are based more on patterns of oral speech than they are on writing. These appeal to people because they offer ways to reinject into writing the individualizing, self-branding scraps of language like “Make sense?” to get writing closer to that Socratic ideal of two people, IRL, having a conversation.
* Similarly, I do not know where the original file of a word-processed article I wrote in 1999 might be found, but I have paper copies of it in a file cabinet.