THE PALLADION

Since the 1960s, when Havelock, MacLuhan, Goody and Ong reinterpreted the cultural and intellectual history of early Greece and Rome in terms of a transition from oral tradition to written literature, and when Milman Parry’s theory that Homer’s epics originated in an oral performance tradition gained wider currency, the twin notions of orality and literacy have been at the forefront of progressive thought in Classical studies. In recent decades, the simplistic notion of a ‘Great Divide’ between orality and literacy, and the corresponding deterministic theories about the impact of communication on culture, has been replaced by an understanding, based essentially on advances in the contemporary anthropology of texts and textuality, that the two concepts are by no means mutually exclusive; while the emergence of new technologies that enable interactive multimedia
communication and blend the spoken word with both written and visual elements have given the whole issue a revived cultural urgency. These, and the emerging new spheres of public and private communication (or blind consumption) that they have helped to create, have been seen as an example of ‘tertiary orality’. This project, entitled ‘The Bottom of the Iceberg: Written and Unwritten Cultures in Dialogue in the Ancient Mediterranean’, contends that the collapse of boundaries between oral and literate culture is not a modern phenomenon at all. In fact, both oral performance and writing often existed as alternative, simultaneous forms of communication within every stage of cultural development in the ancient Graeco-Roman world from Homer onwards. Throughout this period, literacy was remarkably restricted, and the culture of the vast, unwritten majority remained overwhelmingly oral. The problem is how we can examine the mutual influence of the two. While the influence of written culture is easy enough to track, we are still far, thanks largely to a natural disciplinary bias towards the written sources, from understanding the other side of the equation, and how the dialogue of the oral with the written changed over time. A major problem in the study of the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean is the fact that cultural traditions only become visible to us as their written products hove into view. A clear example lies in Homer’s epics, where a variety of cultural and linguistic clues reveal the presence of a thousand-year oral song tradition behind the poems, a fact of which the ancients themselves were obscurely conscious. Our literary and material sources are effectively just the tip of a much larger iceberg representing cultural traditions often defined (with varying degrees of success) as ‘oral’, ‘popular’ or ‘folkloric’. But truly to understand the cultures of the Ancient Mediterranean we need to tear down the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ or popular culture, a hierarchy that is becoming increasingly irrelevant to our own networked culture of ‘tertiary
orality’.

In fact, terms like ‘oral’, ‘popular’ or ‘folkloric’ distort both the question and our answers, by imposing on the ancient world an anachronistic distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Just so, the identification of ‘literate’ with ‘educated, high culture’ and of orality with ‘low’ misrepresents the real balance of social reach and influence between the two, particularly but not exclusively in pre-Hellenistic Greece. Finally, while the often-linear narrative of transformation from orality to literacy has inspired much groundbreaking scholarship in recent decades, the coterminous and overlapping boundaries of both oral performance and writing as simultaneous alternative forms of communication within the same culture has yet to be explored in its full depth. Particularly the ‘feedback’ from the oral to the written deserves study, within the framework of a research methodology that, like the work of Parry and Lord on Homer and South Slavic oral epic, needs to be based on a comparative approach that takes account of all the relevant parallels, from other ancient Mediterranean cultures to medieaval Europe to contemporary Africa.

In particular, it is to recent work in anthropology, ethnography and ethnomusicology that we must turn in our effort to reach a better, more lifelike understanding of the ancient world. We need to interrogate three key concepts in particular. The first are the very notions of ‘text’ ‘song/poem’ and ‘voice’, which ethnographers of speaking, text and oral tradition like Karin Barber, and ethnomusicologists like Gary Tomlinson, have shown are by no means stable outside the sphere of Western graphocentric culture; and the second is the cultural dynamics of early written literatures, which differ radically from our own. To study early texts as instances of a cultural taxonomy of genres and socially-sanctioned speech modes is to embark on a journey to reconstruct a whole system of cultural assumptions, an ‘implied aesthetic’ founded in the co-existence of the written with the oral, where the written texts transmitted to us often, and naturally, point to a background of lost oral tradition, and where clear distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture did not exist in the same way they might exist for us. Contemporary classical scholarship has tended to regard the problem as one of reconstructing a single performance occasion circumscribed in place and time, which can then be used to explain various enigmas in the text or, at the very least, to set limits to possible interpretation of it, even as this clashes with the very social function of text itself in these societies. The real, and difficult, task is not to stop at the particular occasion, but rather to explore the resonances of the written text as the preserved trace of a broader culture. And while, particularly in Italy, some exceptional work has been done on the ‘submerged literature’ and ‘lost genres’ of the ancient world, we want to put the focus of study back on the broader issues outlined above. Use of recent approaches to African orality and literacy and indigenous epistemologies and poetics to study material related to the ancient Mediterranean world is one promising way in which to make this happen, and it is also hoped that bringing European Classics to bear on questions such as these can help to support the study of indigenous and endangered cultures worldwide.