Literacy in the Spartan oligarchy

Abstract

Somewhere in the first half of the eighth century B.C. the ‘graphic counterpart of speech’ (Diringer's nice expression) and a fully phonetic alphabetic script were respectively reintroduced and invented in Greek lands. Thus the Greeks achieved the feat, unique among European peoples, of rediscovering (after an interval of more than four centuries) the literacy they had lost. The alphabet of course marked an enormous advance on the clumsy ‘Linear B’ syllabic script, in the sense that it made it possible ‘to write easily and read unambiguously about anything which the society can talk about’. However, as Harvey's exhaustive study demonstrated, even in Classical Athens, where popular literacy attained the highest level hitherto known in the Greek world, there were still significant areas of illiteracy or at best semi-literacy. Widespread literacy cannot simply be deduced (as it was by Goody and Watt) from the mere availability of a phonetic alphabetic script of the Greek type. Further factors must be taken into account. One of these, Harvey suggested, is the political system. For although ‘democracy and literacy do not necessarily go hand in hand’ (p. 590), the high level of literacy at Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries was perhaps ‘not entirely unconnected with the fact that she was a democracy’ (p. 623).