Though it is unique, and extremely puzzling to us, it is not actually
a complicated text. Although we need careful decipherment, it must have
been obvious for the writer. The writing is confident and neat, the layout
pretty clear. There is a system here, even a system of punctuation, and the
added notation of ‘‘E’’ (the editor suggests this signaled a completed
transaction). It is well organized and looks like a text written by someone
who knows what he is doing (is it, for instance, his own system of punc-
tuation?). As for its date, c. 350B.C., it is much later than the ostraka we
looked at earlier, and we cannot read this system back 100 years earlier or
even more. But this may be a glimpse into the mundane ‘‘functional’’
literacy of a commercial kind in Athens of the high classical period; this
may be a rare example of a type of list literacy that was used and usable in a
commercial establishment of slaves, or leasing of slaves. It is exceptionally
functional and easily legible: no continuous prose, no words running on
without word division, no problem working out names and numbers.
38
One can perhaps wonder if much of the day-to-day literacy—if it existed—
of traders, bankers, potters, small-manufacturing establishments, looked
somewhat like this by the mid-fourth century.
LISTS AND LEGIBILITY IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE: THE CITIZEN
This brings us to the list in the public sphere and back to Athens. I would
like to emphasize the list as a separate type of writing and writing use that
is relevant to public documents as well as private, and ‘‘list literacy’’ as an
interesting subcategory of literacy use. Lists are interesting for our pur-
poses for several reasons. They have been said to be a quite separate
entity from oral communication (Goody [1977] argued that the list was
a quintessentially literate artifact, not a naturally occurring phenomenon
in an entirely oral society, though early Greek poetry is not entirely
unable to give lists of names). Lists on stone are very common indeed in
classical Athens. They are usually—but not always—set out in list form,
names one below another rather than continuously along the same
line, and therefore they are exceptionally clear and easy to read (see,
for instance, the First Stele from the Athenian Tribute Lists, figure 2.8b,
and the fragment from the list of 440/439, figure 2.8a). In the Greek
writing system the list is unusual in not having words running on con-
tinuously: there would be no difficulty separating words. If Saenger is
right about the connection of silent reading with separated words,
39
lists
- It is interesting, as Threatte points out (1980, 74ff., esp. 82) that punctuation and
interpuncts were apparently seen as especially useful for setting off numerals even in public
texts, which usually avoided them. - Saenger 1997.
30 Situating Literacies