Written Text and Transformations of Thought and Expression in Classical Greece
April 13-16, 2000
1. Description and rationale
In Greece during the period from roughly the 540s to the 320s BCE, the manner in which knowledge and the artifacts of intellectual culture were produced and disseminated underwent a fundamental change from oral to written. This change, which affected history, religion, literature, law, politics, philosophy, science, and other areas, was relative, not absolute: alphabetic writing was used in Greece for a variety of purposes from about 725 BCE on; and oral communication did not die out as a means of transmitting intellectual culture, but continued, as it still does, to fulfill purposes for which it is uniquely suited (e.g. poetic performance, oral instruction, communal worship). Nevertheless, a transition is unmistakable: before the classical period, live speech still dominated formal artistic and intellectual communication; afterwards, as the basic institutions of the Hellenistic world were taking hold, written texts had replaced oral communication for many forms of cultural transmission. The very creation of the "classical" and the perennial use of classical Greece by later European civilizations as a source of knowledge and inspiration were made possible by the institutionalization of written texts in the latter part of the classical period.
The first aim of the conference is to define the parameters of the problem and to address a number of questions that can help us understand the impact of the growth of written texts on the modes of thought and literary expression in the classical period which led to the new genres of the hellenistic period: What sort of written texts are we talking about? Who produced them, how were they distributed, who read them? How did such texts vary by genre and occasion? How did social and economic factors affect the production and use of written texts? How were the texts received and preserved? To what extent were aesthetic criteria decisive in the creation of written culture? How did written texts and the traditional oral forms of communication overlap and interact? How did new artistic genres arise and old ones change?
Secondly, we will examine a wide array of intellectual and cultural activities that experienced, in some form and to some extent, a transition to written text. In law, judicial practices of Athenian democracy began to utilize written, accessible laws; and notions of evidence, legal proof, and relevance developed through the use of written documents and texts. In politics, techniques of public speaking, elaborated during this period as the new art of rhetoric and based on the availability of written texts, eliminated the traditional political monopoly of the aristocratic elite and made an impact on the traditional, oral mechanisms of democratic politics. An important question regarding science, technology, and philosophy concerns the relation between enormous advances in knowledge and the startling growth in schools and texts (especially in medicine); schools based on "canonical" texts came into being and scientific communication between far flung parts of the world (e.g. the Mediterranean and the Hellenistic East) flourished. In education, collections of written texts initiated the basis of a common paideia, which eventually replaced the traditional oral education and enabled the notion of "Greek" to acquire a cultural sense alongside the traditional ethnic core. History developed as a distinct and self-conscious alternative to myth and poetry; its authority was based partially on its use of written documents and partially on its cultivation of written narrative style. In poetry, the dramatic arts, and literary criticism, alongside the traditional genres of performance before mass audiences (e.g. drama, choral lyric, poems performed in religious settings), written texts were used in both private, smaller circles (e.g. skolia) and other non-traditional public settings (e.g. epigrams). By the time Lycurgus established canonical versions of the texts of the three classical tragedians (ca. 330 BCE), fifth-century literary aesthetics, which had been dominated by tragedy, was giving way to new forms of literary creativity that flourished in the Hellenistic period. In religion, mythography and written accounts of religious experience developed alongside and beyond the traditional forms of religious ritual. Other areas for consideration include the growth of libraries and literary scholarship, the development of prose as a medium for formal, public expression, and the use of written texts in trade and commerce.
2. Schedule
Thursday, April 13, 2000
Baker Hall, International Conference Facility
Session One:
2:15-2:20: Welcome: Judith Brown, Dean of the School of Humanities, Rice University
2:20-2:30: Conference introduction: Harvey Yunis, Rice University
2:30-4:00: Andrew Ford, Princeton University: "Literacy and the 'Song Culture' of Classical Greece"
4:15-5:45: Albert Henrichs, Harvard University: "Writing Religion: Ritual Authority, Inscribed Texts and the Religious Discourse of the Polis"
Friday, April 14, 2000
Baker Hall 104
Session Two:
9:00-10:30: Michael Gagarin, University of Texas: "Writing and the Orality of Greek Law"
10:45-12:15: David Cohen, University of California, Berkeley: "Writing, Law, and Legal Practice in the Athenian Courts"
Session Three:
1:15-2:45: Sir Geoffrey Lloyd, Cambridge University: "Literacy in Greek and Chinese Science: Some Comparative Issues"
3:00-4:30: Leslie Dean-Jones, University of Texas: "Bodies by the Book"
Saturday, April 15, 2000
Baker Hall 104
Session Four:
9:00-10:30: Dirk Obbink, Oxford University: "Silent Reading and the Origins of Greek Scholarship"
10:45-12:15: Rosalind Thomas, University of London : "History and Epideixis: Authority, Oral Performance, and 'Written Style'"
Session Five:
1:15-2:45: Hilary Mackie, Rice University: "Praise, Performance, and the Past in Epinician"
3:00-4:30: Richard Hunter, Cambridge University: "Theocritus and the Style of Cultural Change"
Sunday, April 16, 2000
Baker Hall 104
Session Six:
8:30-10:00: Harvey Yunis, Rice University: "Didactic Texts, Literary Depth, and the Reader as Critical Interlocutor"
10:15-11:45: Charles Kahn, University of Pennsylvania: "The Use of Prose and Poetry in Greek Philosophy from Thales to Plato"
12:00-1:00: Concluding discussion
Discussants:
Christian Brockmann, Free University-Berlin and Rice University
John Marincola, New York University and Center for Hellenic Studies
Johan Schloemann, Humboldt University-Berlin
For more information contact Harvey Yunis (713-348-2775, yunis@rice.edu)
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