Abstract

The impact of written communication in ancient Athens, particularly the social consequences of literacy on an oral culture, has been a subject of keen interest among rhetoricians. This essay synthesizes current research on the impact of literacy in ancient Athens from a rhetorical vector. One of the principal observations discussed in this review of current research is that the alphabetic writing of oral discourse better enabled rhetors to invent and compose complex modes of oral argument and persuasion than the heuristics of orality alone.

Journal
Rhetoric Review
Published
2022-10-02
DOI
10.1080/07350198.2022.2109530
CompPile
Search in CompPile ↗
Open Access
Closed
Topics
Export

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (0)

No articles in this index cite this work.

References (44)

  1. The First Year of Greek
  2. Aristotle.Rhetoric.
  3. Landmark Essays on Aristotelian Rhetoric
  4. The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece.
  5. A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to the Modern United States
Show all 44 →
  1. On the Crown.” Demosthenes’ ‘On the Crown’: Rhetorical Perspectives
  2. Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle
  3. Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention
  4. The Literate Mode of Cicero’s Legal Rhetoric
  5. Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric
  6. A Rhetoric of Doing: Essays on Written Discourse in Honor of James L. Kinneavy,
  7. 10.1080/15362426.2019.1685416
    Journal for the History of Rhetoric  
  8. Numbers: Their History and Meaning.
  9. The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code.
  10. The Enthymeme: Syllogism, Reasoning, and Narrative in Ancient Greek Rhetoric.
  11. Law & Society in Classical Athens.
  12. A Study of Writing
  13. Perspectives on Literacy
  14. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.
  15. Aristotle, Rhetoric I: A Commentary.
  16. 10.1515/9780691196589
  17. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present.
  18. Preface to Plato
  19. Greek: A History of the Language and Its Speakers
  20. The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning.
  21. Homeric Speech and the Origins of Rhetoric.
  22. Graffiti and Dipinti. The Athenian Agora: Results of Excavations Conducted by the America…
  23. The Singer of Tales.
  24. Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition: Communication from Ancient Times to the Informa…
  25. 10.4324/9780203328064
  26. Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture.
  27. The Making of Homeric Verse
  28. Language and Thought in Early Greek Philosophy.
  29. The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece.
  30. The Sound of Greek: Studies in the Greek Theory and Practice of Euphony.
  31. Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece.
  32. Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach.
  33. Documents in Mycenaean Greek: Three Hundred Selected Tablets from Knossos, Pylos and Myce…
  34. Landmark Essays on Historiographies of Rhetorics.
  35. Wheelock’s Latin
  36. The Early Greek Alphabets: Origin, Diffusion, Uses
  37. A Companion to the Ancient Greek
  38. Young, Richard and Patricia Sullivan. “Why Write? A Reconsideration.”Essays on Classical Rhetoric and Modern …
  39. Written Texts and the Rise of Literate Culture in Ancient Greece.