Early Greek Texts Speak to the Reader
The Greeks invented scripts for their own language based on Phoenician writing during the eighth century BCE. From the eighth century BCE we have a few short Greek texts written on pottery or carved or scratched into stone. Nestor’s Cup from the settlement of Pithekoussai on an island in the Gulf of Naples is especially famous since it seems to allude to a character in the Iliad (less famously, all three lines go from right to left like in the Semitic languages, not left to right like in later European alphabets – other early inscriptions alternate between right to left and left to right like an ox plowing a field). But classicist Peter Gainsford tells us that these early Greek texts have something in common:
All extant Greek writing from before about 540 BCE is framed as an utterance designed for the moment at which it is read – declarative statements, instructions, etc. for the reader at the moment of reading it. We have no direct evidence that writing was used to transcribe anything at all until after that point. (See further Jesper Svenbro, “Phrasikleia”, opening chapter.) [JSTOR]
Peter Gainsford, comment to the Kiwi Hellenist blog, “Getting the Iliad Right” 1 March 2017 https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2017/03/getting-iliad-right.html
Many of these inscriptions speak as if they were the object they are written on.
Nestor’s cup never pursed its rim and spoke, and the kore-statue of the woman Phrasikleia never opened its mouth and said that it would be forever a maiden, never a bride. They speak when someone else reads their words aloud. The words were composed by someone who scratched or carved them on the stone, but they are in the voice of the cup or the statue. That is different from a Near Eastern royal inscription which speaks in the voice of the king: “I am Darius, King of Kings.” It is also different from biblical stories which speak in an anonymous voice of authority: “in the beginning God created heaven and earth,” “the LORD spoke to Moses in the wilderness of Sinai.” As late as the first century BCE, a Roman crier (praeco)1 still had his epitaph written in the voice of the stone:
This silent stone begs that you halt, stranger, while it shows what the man whose shade it covers entrusted it to reveal. Here lays buried the bones of Olus Granius, a praeco (‘crier’), a man of modesty, temperance, and great trustworthiness. That is all. He desired that you should not be ignorant of this. Farewell! Aulus Granius Stabilio, freedman of Marcus, a praeco, (erected this).
Translated in Sarah E. Bond, Trade and Taboo: Disreputable Professions in the Roman Mediterranean (University of Michigan Press, 2016), p. 21
We don’t expect our Tolinos or our hardcovers to speak to us, we expect the writing to be in the voice of some third party. Many of these early Greek inscriptions are more like the mascot of a website telling us what to do than the city telling us to not park in front of this sign, and they are not at all like the notes of a meeting.
We often assume that writing is used to record texts thousands of words long, but the oldest surviving Greek texts say things like “remember the deeds of Apollodoros, killed by cruel iron” or “drink from me.” Of course if all you have is a pen and a potsherd or a bodkin and a slab of limestone its easier to write a short message than a long message, and early Greek texts on papyrus and skin have long been lost, but its just an assumption that the Greeks must have written things the size of the Homeric epics as soon as they had any writing at all. The Egyptians wrote long texts, and the Mesopotamians wrote long texts, but both started by writing short records or messages. Its just an assumption that the Greeks would have done the same within 100 years of adopting writing.
Further Reading
Matthew Lloyd has an article on the statue of Phrasikleia which takes the view that she was dead and that the inscription speaks as the woman rather than the statue https://www.ancientworldmagazine.com/articles/phrasikleia-boy-attic-statues/
Kenneth Hite took the idea that words or writing take over the audience and force them to do things and turned it into his Madness Dossier TTRPG setting (Sumerian gods! volcanic winter of 536 CE! precocious children fighting terrible forces!), while I turned it into a blog post on black magic.
(scheduled 9 July 2024)
Edit 2024-08-26: fixed link to Kiwi Hellenist blog (was to book on JSTOR)
- A Roman praeco told the public about goods for sale or passed on messages from the organizers of games or festivals or funerals to the public; there were several related names for similar professions, and the Roman elite saw them as dishonourable because they got attention without relying on their own dignitas (and perhaps because they were involved in slave markets and funerals). In a world without loudspeakers, having a loud clear voice was valuable! I think a praeco shows up in the HBO Rome series as Newsreader. You can learn more about this trade in Lowe, Dunstan (2018) “Loud and Proud: The Voice of the Praeco in Roman Love-Elegy” https://kar.kent.ac.uk/69094/ ↩︎
Fascinating. Thank you.
If the little bits of writing were meant to be read aloud might they give some clues about pronunciation?
Early Greek and Latin writing seem to preserve pronunciation pretty closely, although that starts to change by later in the Roman empire as the Greek or Latin people learned in school to show culture got further from the Greek or Latin they used to buy figs at the market or agora. There are some hints that Latin pronunciation was simplified in everyday speech a bit differently than the rules you learn to scan poetry https://inter-versiculos.classics.lsa.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Irby-Basic-Meter-Guide.pdf The books Vox Latina and Vox Graeca are classics although there is probably newer research.