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Communication Arts in the Ancient World by Eric A. Havelock; Jackson P. HershbellReview by: H. Curtis WrightThe Journal of Library History (1974-1987), Vol. 15, No. 1 (Winter, 1980), pp. 89-94Published by: University of Texas PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25541050 .

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Book Reviews

Communication Arts in the Ancient World. Edited by Eric A.

Havelock and Jackson P. Hershbell. (Humanistic Studies in the

Communication Arts) New York: Hastings House, Communication

Arts Books, 1978. xiv, 162 pp. $12.50. ISBN 0-8038-1252-3.

I have recently argued that librarianship is the management of

ideas by any available means, not the means by which ideas are

managed. Thus conceived, librarianship occurs in all of the world's

preliterate cultures, whose literate counterparts have no monopoly on the human need of information: it cannot be reduced to books

and libraries, which are only the conventional instruments of a tra

ditional librarianship based on literacy. This argument derives in

part from the Greek assimilation of phonemic writing from the

Near East, an experience which drastically overhauled the outlook

of an astute but illiterate people in every sphere of life. It draws on the findings of classicists like Eric A. Havelock, who insists that

every human civilization depends for its survival "on a sort of cul

tural 'book', that is, on the capacity to put information in storage in order to reuse it." That dependence, furthermore, is absolute, even if, as in the cultural "book" of preclassical Greece, infor

mation is "stored in the oral memory."1 Communication Arts in the Ancient World, edited by Havelock

and a fellow classicist, Jackson P. Hershbell, constitutes an impres sive collection of ancient studies which supports the notion that

the Homeric bard tradition was an early form of oral librarianship whose informational functions were subsequently transferred to

the literate institutions of post-Archaic Greece. The contributors, of course, do not speak in those terms; but what they say amounts to the same thing. "This volume is primarily devoted to exploring the beginnings of literacy in ancient Greece and Rome, and the

effects of writing on these cultures" (p. xii). It thus emphasizes the Greco-Roman transition from oral to literate ways of thinking, "a period of technical change in human communication that rivals our own in diversity and pith, and from which we modernists can

learn much of both theoretical and practical immediate impor tance" (p. ix). It therefore makes the important point that "the

beginnings of Western civilization are in the spoken, not [in the] written or printed word, and that a culture can be highly efficient



90 JljH/Book Reviews

and 'civilized' without widespread literacy" (p. xiii). It also implies that Greek librarianship has oral antecedents: the creation and

storage of knowledge for reuse, "the very task which literate com

munication sets itself," was originally undertaken "in the uncount

ed millennia of oral experience" which preceded the introduction of Phoenician writing into Greece (p. 20).

George N. Gordon, editor of the series in which Communication Arts appears, "is the only contributor to this collection who is not a classicist" (p. 54). His contribution, the weakest offering of the

book, is a curious melange of ancient and modern notions which

concludes, quite wrongly I think, "that the origins of propaganda are ... in ancient Greece, and that the Aristotelian enthymeme is at the heart of persuasion" (p. xii). The arts of persuasion are al

ready present in the Iliad, for example, and in many of the Near

Eastern literatures.

The rest of the collection may be briefly summarized. Eric and

Christine Havelock, a husband-wife team of considerable merit, discuss respectively the problems associated with communicating the effable concepts of language and the ineffable images of art

(pp. 2-21, 94-118). Eric argues that the epics were "enclaves of contrived language" devised according to "the rules of oral mem

orization" in order to guarantee the "secure transmission" of cul

tural knowledge (p. 4). Documentation, he notes, is the literate means of accomplishing this; but preliterate societies "achieve the

same result by the composition of poetic narratives which," as the

basic constituents of an oral information system, "also serve as

encyclopedias of conduct."2 The reduction of epic to writing leads directly to the "erosion of 'orality'

" which still finds the

West "unevenly divided" between the oral and literate modes of

communication.3 All of its subsequent literature has been com

posed in the resulting tension between the spoken and the written

word (p. 19):

When visual organization is superimposed upon an acoustic one ... an [alternate] architecture of language becomes con

ceivable. . . . The literary terminology now commonly ap

plied to organized discourse begins to come into its own. The

author . . . becomes ... a 'composer,' his product becomes a

'work' possessing 'pattern' and 'structure,' controlled by 'theme,' 'topic,' or 'subject.' Even his actors become 'char

acters'. . . . These and dozens of other terms are drawn from

the visual, tactile experience of handling alphabetized script.

They lie outside the thought world of an oral culture.



91

The importance of the above should not obscure the fact that Eric

also compares the Near Eastern and Western epics, formulates the

"echo principle" of oral discourse, discusses the superiority of al

phabetic writing to all other forms of writing, and much else.

Christine, on the other hand, attempts "to reconstruct, in some

measure, the ancient experience of a work of art" (p. 96). She

shows that the Greeks, who wanted to do things right, admired the

implicit "action" of art, which had to resemble life in "seeming to

be alive" (pp. 99, 101). They were moved by the materials, the

craftsmanship, and the stories of good art, associating with life

sized statues, for example, as though communicating with their

gods on equal terms (pp. 102, 109). The Greeks, in a word, were

everywhere surrounded with significant forms of official and pri vate art. This is further verified by Eva Keuls, whose study of a

rhetorical device for introducing oral discourses by reference to a

painting concludes that "ancient education was more visually oriented than the literary-rhetorical handbooks would indicate"

(p. 130). This conclusion holds, of course, for the artistic com

munication of images, but not for the verbal expression of con

cepts.

Joseph Russo also discusses "the epic outlook, and the notion

that Greek epic poetry was created to function as an effective

medium of communication, primarily in an oral culture" (p. xii; cf. p. 49). In doing so, he refines "the orthodox Parry-Lord posi tion" on formulas by distinguishing five levels of formular regular

ity: (1) metric (using dactylic feet), (2) rhythm (following the "laws" of caesura, spondees, etc.), (3) diction (choosing pre-set

phrases from stock), (4) theme (organizing traditional incidents in to stories), and (5) outlook (presenting a consistent world-view).

The epic world, he says, "is describable only as a word-product," for the world reconstructed by the bard "exists only so long as the

bard chants" (pp. 43-46). The purpose of David Harvey's chapter "is to examine what is known of the methods by which writing

was taught ... at Athens and in Rome" (p. 63). He discovered that students, after learning to recognize their letters, either (1) had another guide their fingers while writing them, or (2) used a

stylus to trace in wax the letters already pre-cut in an underlying board. The rest of the process was consumed by copying sentences

(pp. 69-73). There is also an interesting chapter on the ancient

telegraph by Jackson P. Hershbell, who shows that all the essen

tials of modern telegraphy were present in the ancient telegraph. "That there was one in the ancient world [at all] may surprise

modern readers," who are easily startled by ancient goings-on



92 JLH/_5_>ofc Reviews

(p. xiii). Electricity, of course, was not available to the ancients; "but this medium is not essential for a telegraph system" (p. 88). The modern reader may now wonder how telegraphy was accom

plished anciently?or read Hershbell in order to find out.

The most important contributions of the collection, in my opin ion, are the chapters by Kevin Robb, who "engages in a compara tive study of the earliest Greek and Phoenician inscriptions"

(p. xii), and by Bruno Gentili and Giovanni Cerri, who explore "the effect of literacy on Greek historical writing" (p. xiii). Robb

disputes "the common assumption that the Greeks borrowed their

letters from the Phoenicians in order ... to keep commercial ac

counts" (pp. 24, 26, 32). He revives instead an older theory, pre

maturely rejected by scholars like Rudolf Pfeiffer, that alphabetic characters were "adopted and adapted" by the Greeks (p. 26) in

order to write epic verse.4 The evidence for this is (1) the Greco

Phoenician inscriptions, which are not commercial but religious

(pp. 26-28, 32), and (2) the vocalic metering of oral epic, which

created what Bowra calls "the dominating Homeric presence" of

the whole Archaic Age.5 If the earliest Greek inscriptions "are

not all in verse" as Pfeiffer notes,6 "all [of them] are metrical," thus reflecting "the influence of oral epic, as indeed does the liter

ature of the period" (p. 26; italics Robb's). Thus, even Archaic

prose was orally structured: the logoi of Heraclitus, for example, "the earliest Greek literary prose extant,. . . were framed to be

carried in the hearer's memory" (p. 30), as was the historical prose of Hecataeus and Herodotus.7 Robb concludes that the early in

scriptions "reflect the pervasive influence of oral epic" (p. 27). This explains, incidentally, why "in the Greek inscriptions, and

only in them, a fully developed system of vowel indication is pres ent from the beginning": anything less would be unthinkable for

representing poetically metered utterances created solely by the

length and pitch of vowels (p. 27; italics mine). And finally, Gen

tili and Cerri re-examine the question of vision and hearing as

channels of historical information in order "to put it in closer re

lationship with the evolution of the technology of communication

from the oral and aural phase to . . . the production of books"

(p. 150, note 17). In Herodotus and Thucydides, they argue, a

"contrast between two marked tendencies in the Greek historians

begins to take shape" (p. 138). The former gave public lectures,

presenting his material to live audiences in the epic format of "a

single logos, 'an essay designed for spontaneous listening.' "8

The

latter, however, composed a written history for a future audience

of unknown readers (pp. 139-140). This accounts for the real dif



93

ference between them: Herodotus, no less than Thucydides, pro duced historical knowledge "lest the deeds of men become extinct

with the passage of time."9 But he tried to build that knowledge directly into the tribal memory of a traditionally preliterate cul ture by utilizing time-honored oral procedures, whereas Thucy dides turned to the book, a new kind of artificial memory with an

objective existence of its own, in order to do essentially the same

thing. And to this day the Herodoteans complain that the deadly prose of the dull, "scientific" historians is inadequate for present

ing the facts they discover?to which the Thucydideans reply that

historical "artists," like the tragic poets, can only thrill their audi ences by distorting the facts they present. This antithesis?between

(1) the noetic history of Thucydides as an intellectual account of

actuals, and (2) the mimetic history of Herodotus as a dramatized

individualization of possibles?defines, "in terms which today are

still current, the duties of the historian as regards the facts,. . . the

problem of the particular and the general, of objectivity and sub

jectivity, which is ... to say the dialectical relation between facts and their interpretation" (p. 143). It all turns, as it has always turned, on "the distinct contrast between the spoken word {phra

sal) and the written word (graphein)" (p. 141). The significance of this book for library history is easily stated.

It has no significance whatever for those librarians who equate li

brary history with the history of libraries; but its significance for

the history of librarianship is enormous. No profession can solve

its basic problems at the operational level. It is, rather, the resolu tion of basic problems which creates technological possibilities, be cause you can't apply nothing: the application of knowledge pre supposes the existence of knowledge to be applied. For those li brarians who, by refusing to reduce librarianship to the manipula tion of data, regard its history as the history of knowledge man

agement, of the human storage and retrieval of ideas for reuse, Communication Arts in the Ancient World should contribute in a

large way "to the awakening of interest in a veritable briar patch of theoretical possibilities in the interdisciplinary study of infor

mation."10

Notes

1. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press,

1963), pp. xiii, xx. For my own arguments along this line, see H. Curtis

Wright, The Oral Antecedents of Greek Librarianship (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, 1978), especially "On the Reality of Oral Librarianship," pp. xxii-xxvi; "Librarianship in Alex Haley's Roots" Utah Libraries 20



94 JIM/Book Reviews

(Spring 1977): 10-24; and "Of Mirrors, Monkeys, and Apostles," Journal of

Library History 13 (1978); 388-407. 2. E. A. Havelock, "The Alphabetization of Homer," in Havelock and

Hershbell, eds., Communication Arts in the Ancient World, p. 4. Havelock

notes that the social consciousness, "formed as a consensus, is . .. continually

placed in storage for re-use," adding that "all societies support and strengthen their identity by conserving their mores.. .. These exist and are transmitted

[in oral cultures] through memorization, and as continually recited consti

tute a report... of the communal ethos and a recommendation to abide by

it," ibid.

3. Cf. ibid.: "In 'Homer' we confront a paradox unique in history: two

poems ... in documented form, the first 'literature' of Europe; which how

ever constitute the first complete record of 'orality,' that is, 'non-literature'?

the only one we are ever likely to have: a statement of how civilized man

governed his life and thought. .. when he was entirely innocent of . .. read

mg. 4. See Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship .. .

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 23, and my discussion in Oral Antecedents, pp. 148-149 and notes 109-110. The arguments for and against this theory are

presented in H. T. Wade-Gerry, The Poet of the Iliad (Cambridge: At the Uni

versity Press, 1952), pp. 11-14; and Denys L. Page, History and the Homeric

Iliad, Sather Classical Lectures, 31 (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1954), p. 260.

5. C. M. Bowra, Landmarks in Greek Literature (London: Weidenfeld and

Nicolson, 1966), p. 58. The Greeks of the Archaic Period "could not escape from it; its metre, its manner, much of its temper, and many of its devices

were bred into their consciousness.. . . They could make innovations and

variations and approach new subjects, but they still remained in thrall. . . .

When, in the latter part of the eighth century, men wished to speak about

their present occasions or feelings, they resorted for aid to the language of the

epic, that is of the whole oral tradition spread through many parts of

Greece," ibid., pp. 58-59.

6. History of Classical Scholarship, p. 23; italics his. Cf. Wright, Oral

Antecedents, p. 148 note 110.

7. See ibid., pp. 151-153.

8. Thucydides 1.22.4.

9. Herodotus, proem. See also above, notes 7-8.

10. Wright, Oral Antecedents, p. xxv.

H. Curtis Wright, Brigham Young University

Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries: Essays Presented to

N. R. Ker. Edited by M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson. Lon

don: Scolar Press, 1978. xv, 395 pp. ?30.00; $59.95. ISBN

0-85967-450-9.

This volume of essays honoring Neil R. Ker is the second Fest

schrift to appear in recent years in honor of a scholar whose work



art. 1

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