A Companion to Greek Literature, First Edition. Edited by Martin Hose and David Schenker. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. For most of its history humankind has been illiterate. But this does not mean that humans used to be literarily less sophisticated: they sang hymns to gods, chanted ritual curses, ululated funerary laments, crafted complex genealogies, invented proverbs, fables, and folk‐ tales, and even composed long heroic epics in demanding metrical forms. All these genres of literature were orally created, orally performed, and orally transmitted to subsequent generations. The inhabitants of the lands that we now know as Greece were no exception. All ancient Greek literature was to some degree oral in nature, and the earliest literature was completely so. Consequently the term “ancient Greek literature” in a literal sense of the words is an oxymoron. For “literature” requires litterae “letters”: letters written by an author, whether with a reed pen, a printing press, or a keyboard; letters read by a reader, whether on a roll of papyrus, a sheet of paper, or a computer monitor. And these are activities foreign in greater and lesser degrees to the composition, reception, and transmission of much of what we by convention call ancient Greek literature. A chapter on the orality of ancient Greek literature should properly entail a survey of almost all of ancient Greek literature, and it would require one to proceed accordingly, beginning with Greek epic, which was orally composed, orally performed, and orally transmitted for many gener- ations before anyone felt the need to write it down. We know this for many reasons, most obvious of which is the simple historical reality that during the early stages of Greek epic, between the twelfth and eighth centuries BCE, Greece possessed no writing system. The Cretan syllabic writing system that Greece had used for some centuries before this time was adequate for record‐keeping but was not suitable for the recording of Greek epic, even if, as is unlikely, it had crossed anyone’s mind to do so; and Greece had not yet adapted the Phoenician writing system that it first used to record various forms of poetry, including epic, and that it still uses today. Greek lyric, both choral and monodic, which was sung to the musical accompaniment of a lyre, had a similar history: the surviving remnants of Greek lyric are from a period well after the first attestation of Greek epic, but lyric reveals, by the great antiquity of its meters, such as the glyconic and pherecratean, that as a genre it actually predates the epic hexameter. Thus, it is no surprise that the Homeric epics themselves mention various types of songs associated with choral lyric: marriage hymns, funeral dirges, harvest songs, the paean, etc. The rise and early stages of lyric, then, like epic, can be Orality and Literacy Ancient Greek Literature as Oral Literature Steve Reece CHAPTER 3 0002525073.indd 43 5/4/2015 9:35:53 AM