CONCLUSION: LITERACY AND LITERACIES IN ATHENS
To return to the problem of functional literacy, what it means at any
point, and how it might relate to individual aspirations and ambitions: the
really ambitious in fifth- or indeed fourth-century Athens needed far
more than list literacy or any level of education that left him without
the ability to compose speeches and speak eloquently off the cuff. But we
can see at a less elevated level a range of different literacy practices,
of which we have isolated banking literacy, list literacy, name literacy,
and officials’ literacy. A similar range of literacies can be recognized
nowadays from text messaging, for example, to the literacy of Parliamen-
tary clerks, or legal secretaries. As the democracy developed in Athens,
there was increasingly a need for anyone active as an official, magistrate,
orboulemember to be familiar, or at least not uncomfortable, with
writing down the basic decisions and accounts of the democracy, with
keeping or reading accounts. The relation to the spoken word changed. By
their very layout, the written records we have discussed show degrees of
accessibility and legibility, some exceptionally well presented in list form,
others not. This perhaps reflects a recognition that some Athenians were
more likely to read certain inscriptions than others.
Between the faltering or illiterate ostraka of the 480s and 470s and the
more sophisticated record keeping of the mid-to-late fourth-century dem-
ocracy, the very active democratic citizen (and I stress ‘‘active’’) will have
hadtochange.Whatworkedas‘‘functionalliteracy’’inthedemocracyofthe
470s was not so functional two generations later, let alone three or four. It is
interesting how much Athenian document keeping boils down to lists and
I have suggested list literacy as a genre of literacy very relevant to ancient
Greece. But the elite stayed well ahead: literary education developed in
turn; the truly ambitious needed to learn the skills of oratory. The juror
whose literacy extended only to recognizing hispinakionwill have become
outclassed. The upwardly mobile needed to learn still more in a kind of
cultural (and political?) inflation. In the fourth century, ever more elabor-
atedforms ofverbalskill,written or not,werethesupreme educationalgoal.
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42 Situating Literacies