Literacy in Fifth Century Athens

Abstract

Exactly as the fossil record can be counted on to fail us at just those crucial moments when new species irrupt, the documentary record of Athenian literacy, just when it was supposed to be abounding in the fifth century B.C.E., is scant. With species, the explanation is easier: down to its last few members from pressure of food supply, climate or predators, species inbreeding increases, thus the probability of mutations increases; if a new species is engendered with an adaptation that enables it to escape what was killing off the parent species, its numbers build up slowly until a threshold is reached when, secure in its niche, there is a sudden proliferation. Meanwhile, fossils are being formed of, say, one in a million individuals; and of those million, say, one is preserved, of which, say, one in a million is discovered and examined by an interested member of Homo sapiens. Naturally, speciation events are virtually absent from the fossil record. In literacy studies, as in nature, when we find a preponderance of documents, like a new species, after a period of scarcity, as we do for the fourth (as compared to the mid fifth) century, we infer that there was a period in between when writing, finding its niche, steeply increased. But where exactly within that frame did the increase occur? Unfortunately for the controversy that confronts us—whether widespread literacy was reached in the fifth, or not until the fourth, century in Athens—the documentary record does not disappoint anticipation: it is paltry. Many of the examples that have traditionally been provided as evidence in the debate are non-Athenian or non-fifth century or both. While acknowledging this methodological problem, we need not shrink from discussion of the meager extant texts we do have, nor from drawing such implications as we can.