How do you communicate with other flesh and blood people with neither the ability to read nor listen deeply? This is a civilization-destroying kind of crisis. Without the possibility of deep, meaningful communication across society, there will be fewer deep friendships, fewer relationships, less healthy marriages, and more intergenerational strife as communication between parents and  children becomes harder. There will be less collaboration beyond our immediate circles. All of these activities rely on effective speaking and listening, on remembering information, on understanding people and their ideas, on holding multiple ideas in one’s mind and discerning patterns or conflicts between them. There is significance, as the early Christians knew well, to the idea of God as Word that became flesh. Words can be transcendent. Words are how God communicates with us. 

In a city center somewhere in the ancient Greek world—let’s say Epidaurus in the sixth century BC—a religious festival is in progress. The mood is festive, buoyed by the free barbecue that religious sacrifices occasioned for the entire local populace. Animal sacrifices were ostensibly for the gods, but it was the humans who benefited tangibly from the opulent community cookouts. The gods largely just enjoyed the smell. And now, bellies full, the moment everyone has been waiting for has arrived: entertainment.  

A bard begins singing in a clear voice, accompanying himself on a lyre. Dramatically inflecting the familiar lines, he sings a tale well known to all. Even so, it always is a delight; besides, every bard tells it just a little differently. If it’s Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey the recitation will take around twenty-four hours in total, with the crowds dispersing at dark and returning on the morrow. But return they will, that much is certain. While few of them can read, they delight in these occasional festival performances and look forward to them each time.  

Fast-forward a little over a century. It is 430 BC in Athens, and the leading democratic statesman of the day, Pericles, gives the Funeral Oration, commemorating the war dead at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War. The reason his speech survived is because one of the thousands in the audience that day, the historian Thucydides, not only heard the speech, but remembered it so well that he could transcribe it down from memory later. This might seem impressive to us. It wasn’t for the Athenians, who were used to turning up regularly for dramatic performances and public speeches, which people remembered in detail years later. These works, heard rather than read, formed the shared literature of the Athenian democracy. 

And yet, when we speak today of the wonders of Greek literature, the very term we use is misleading. After all, “litterae,” Latin for letters, whence the term “literature” derives, were only invented sometime in the eighth century BC, when the Greeks adapted their own alphabet, borrowing heavily from the Phoenicians. The Homeric epics, composed orally, were not written down until sometime in the sixth century BC in Athens. Then, once writing existed, few were literate enough to make use of it. Still, this did not hamper their ability to create, maintain, and appreciate a highly developed culture of storytelling that valued the beauty and complexity of narratives reflective of both the intellectual and emotional elements of the human experience. 

These achievements of pre-literate Greek artists came to mind as I read Beth McMurtrie’s recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Is This The End of Reading?” In some ways, it may appear to be yet another one in a long series of (alas) warranted jeremiads on the decline of literacy in our society. Thirteen years ago, for instance, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s book, Academically Adrift, bemoaned the decline in students’ ability to write. Arum and Roksa’s solution was: Make them write more, not less.  

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