This ninth Orality and Literacy volume considers oral composition, performance, reception, and the mutual interplay between oral performance and written text. Authors under consideration are Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Isocrates, orators of the Second Sophistic, and Proclus. Cross-cultural studies are included.

This ninth Orality and Literacy volume considers oral composition, performance, reception, and the mutual interplay between oral performance and written text. Authors under consideration are Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Isocrates, orators of the Second Sophistic, and Proclus. Cross-cultural studies are included.

Explores the role of written and oral communication in Greece.

The volume represents the seventh in the series on Orality and Literacy in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds. It comprises a collection of essays on the significance and working of memory in ancient texts and visual documentation, from contexts both oral (or oral-derived) and literate. The authors discuss a variety of interpretations of ‘memory’ in Homeric epic, lyric poetry, tragedy, historical inscriptions, oratory, and philosophy, as well as in the replication of ancient artworks, and in Greek vase inscriptions. They present therefore a wide-ranging analysis of memory as a fundamental faculty underlying the production and reception of texts and material documentation in a society that gradually moved from an essentially oral to an essentially literate culture.

Surveying the variety of ways in which written texts and oral discourse were involved in ancient religions, the contributions to this volume show that oral and written forms were intricately connected in both Greek and Roman state and private religions.

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.

This volume is concerned with aspects of orality and literacy in the ancient world. It arises from the tremendous contemporary interest among scholars in questions of how literacy and orality co-exist and interact in the ancient world. The contents of the book are refereed papers originally presented at the fifth biennial 'Orality and Literacy in ancient Greece' held at The University of Melbourne in 2002. Papers are offered by scholars from Britain, the USA, Canada and Australia which deal with a range of periods and genres in antiquity, from Homer through to Roman literature. The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the ancient world.