Between Orality and Literacy: Communication and Adaptation in Antiquity

The essays in Between Orality and Literacy address how oral and literature practices intersect as messages, texts, practices, and traditions move and change, because issues of orality and literacy are especially complex and significant when information is transmitted over wide expanses of time and space or adapted in new contexts. Their topics range from Homer and Hesiod to the New Testament and Gaius’ Institutes, from epic poetry and drama to vase painting, historiography, mythography, and the philosophical letter. Repeatedly they return to certain issues. Writing and orality are not mutually exclusive, and their interaction is not always in a single direction. Authors, whether they use writing or not, try to control the responses of a listening audience. A variable tradition can be fixed, not just by writing as a technology, but by such different processes as the establishment of a Panhellenic version of an Attic myth and a Hellenistic city’s creation of a single celebratory history.

Ruth Scodel (PhD, Harvard 1978) is D. R. Shackleton Bailey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Latin at the University of Michigan. Her many publications on Greek literature emphasize Homer and tragedy, including Greek Tragedy: an Introduction for Students (2010).

"It is a rich collection, offering a wealth of material for thought. Many of the contributions present sources not often studied from the point of view of orality and literacy, and most of them underline that the ways of communication in antiquity were multifarious." Minna Skafte Jensen, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2015.02.41.