What is so special about the Greek alphabet? Other forms of script, both pictographic and phonetic, were at hand in the ancient world, for example, Assyrian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs and various Near Eastern syllabaries. Yet the Greek alphabet came as a startling novelty and revolutionized the human ability to set down thoughts. How?
The Greeks created their alphabet by taking over the syllabic sign-system of the Phoenicians and modifying it in certain decisive ways sometime in the early eighth century B.C. It is standard to say that their chief modification amounted to “introducing the vowels.” Vowels were not expressed in Phoenician writing (although it is possible certain letters were beginning to acquire some vocalic character), but from the outset the Greek alphabet had five vowels in full use (Woodhead 1981, 15). This standard description does no justice, however, to the conceptual leap that distinguishes the Greek alphabet from all other writing systems. Let us look more closely at the unique activity of symbolization made possible when the Greeks devised the original twenty-six signs of their alphabet.
A script that furnishes a true alphabet for a language is one able to symbolize the phonemes of the language exhaustively, unambiguously and economically. The first and only ancient sign system to do so was the Greek alphabet. Other phonetic systems available to the Greeks, for example, the unvocalized syllabaries of the North Semitic scripts or the vocalized syllabary known as Linear B used by Cretans and Mycenaean Greeks prehistorically, operated on the principle of symbolizing each pronounceable sound of the language with a separate sign. Hundreds of signs were required, each representing a single syllable of vowel plus consonant. In their choice to translate sound into graphic symbol these scripts represented a decisive advance in the development of writing. But the Greek alphabet took one further notional step: it broke these pronounced units of sound apart into their acoustic components. Vowels came into being. But vowels are inconceivable without a prior, dashing innovation. For the components of every linguistic noise are two: (1) a sound (made by vibration of a column of air in the larynx or nasal cavity as it is expelled past the vocal chords); (2) the starting and stopping of the sound (by interaction of the tongue, teeth, palate, lips, and nose). The actions that start and stop sounds, which we think of as ‘consonants,’ can by themselves produce no sound. They are nonsounds having, as Plato said, “no voice” (Tht. 203b; cf. Phlb. 18b). The importance of these unutterable, symbolic entities called consonants is summarized by one historian this way:
What must be stressed is that the act which created the alphabet is an idea, an act of intellect which, so far as signs for the independent consonants are concerned, is also an act of abstraction from anything an ear can hear or a voice say. For the pure consonant (t, d, k or whatever) is unpronounceable without adding to it some suggestion of vocalic breath. The Phoenician sign stood for a consonant plus any vowel, the vowel being supplied from context by a reader. The Greek sign, and this for the first time in the history of writing, stands for an abstraction, the isolated consonant. (Robb 1978, 31)
When we think about this remarkable invention of the Greek alphabet and think about how a human mind operates when it uses the alphabet, the remarkable operations of eros stand forward for comparison. We have already detected an ancient analogy between language and love, implicit in the conception of breath as universal conductor of seductive influences and of persuasive speech. Here at the entrance to written language and literate thinking we see that analogy revivified by the archaic writers who first ventured to record their poems. The alphabet they used is a unique instrument. Its uniqueness unfolds directly from its power to mark the edges of sound. For, as we have seen, the Greek alphabet is a phonetic system uniquely concerned to represent a certain aspect of the act of speech, namely the starting and stopping of each sound. Consonants are the crucial factor. Consonants mark the edges of sound. The erotic relevance of this is clear, for we have seen that eros is vitally alert to the edges of things and makes them felt by lovers. As eros insists upon the edges of human beings and of the spaces between them, the written consonant imposes edge on the sounds of human speech and insists on the reality of that edge, although it has its origin in the reading and writing imagination.
This analogy between the nature of eros and the genius of the Greek alphabet may seem a fanciful one to literate, modern judgments; but it seems likely our judgments in this area have been blunted by habit and indifference. We read too much, write too poorly and remember too little about the delightful discomfort of learning these skills for the first time. Think how much energy, time and emotion goes into that effort of learning: it absorbs years of your life and dominates your self-esteem; it informs much of your subsequent endeavor to grasp and communicate with the world. Think of the beauty of letters, and of how it feels to come to know them. In her autobiography Eudora Welty confesses her susceptibility to this beauty:
My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it but, before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own story books, before I could read them for myself, I fell in love with various winding, enchanted-looking initials drawn by Walter Crane at the heads of fairy tales. In ‘Once upon a time’ an ‘O’ had a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon flowers. When the day came, years later, for me to see the Book of Kells, all the wizardry of letter, initial, and word swept over me a thousand times over, and the illumination, the gold, seemed a part of the word’s beauty and holiness that had been there from the start. (1984, 9)
Eudora Welty’s delight in beautifully inscribed letters is not, I think, untypical of writers. Pythagoras is said to have felt a similar aesthetic pressure:
Πυθαγόρας αὐτῶν τοῦ κάλλους ἐπεμελήθη, ἐκ τῆς κατὰ γεωμετρίαν γραμμῆς ῥυθμίσας αὐτὰ γωνίαις καὶ περιϕερείαις καὶ εὐθείαις.
He took pains over the beauty of letters, forming each stroke with a geometrical rhythm of angles and curves and straight lines. (schol. Dion. Thrax, Hilgard, Gramm. Gr. 1.3.183)
To take pains over letters is an experience known to most of us. They are enticing, difficult shapes and you learn them by tracing the outlines again and again. So also in the ancient world children learned to write by tracing out the letter-forms, as we may judge from a passage in Plato’s Protagoras:
ὥσπερ οἱ γραμματισταὶ τοῖς μήπω δεινοῖς γράφειν τῶν παίδων ὑπογράψαντες γραμμὰς τῇ γραφίδι οὕτω τὸ γραμματεῖον διδόασιν καὶ ἀναγκάζουσι γράφειν κατὰ τὴν ὑφήγησιν τῶν γραμμῶν,
… just as those who are teaching pupils not yet adept at writing draw in the strokes of the letters in faint outline with the pen for them, then hand them the writing tablet and have them trace over the guidelines.… (326d)
To anyone trained in this way the edges of letters are memorable, emotional places, and remain so.
We can see how powerfully these alphabetic outlines struck the eyes and minds of people grappling with them for the first time in the ancient Greek context. There are several scenes from ancient tragedy where such an encounter is dramatized. The most extensive is a fragment of Euripides’ Theseus. An illiterate man is looking out to sea and spies a ship with writing on it. He ‘reads’:
ἐγὼ πέϕυκα γραμμάτων μὲν οὐκ ἴδρις,
μορϕὰς δὲ λέξω καὶ σαφῆ τεκμήρια.
κύκλος τις ὡς τόρνοισιν ἑκμετρούμενος,
οὗτος δ’ ἔχει σημεῖον ἐν μέσῳ σαϕές·
τὸ δεύτερον δὲ πρῶτα μὲν γραμμαὶ δύο,
ταύτας διείργει δ᾽ ἐν μέσαις ἄλλη μία·
τρίτον δὲ βόστρυχός τις ὣς εἱλιγμένος·
τὸ δ᾽ αὗ τέταρτον ἣ μὲν εἰς ὀρθὸν μία,
λοξαὶ δ᾽ ἐπ᾽ αὐτῆς τρεῖς κατεστηριγμέναι
εἰσίν· τὸ πέμπτον δ᾽ οὐκ ἐν εὐμαρεῖ ϕράσαι·
γραμμαὶ γάρ εἰσιν ἐκ διεστώτων δύο,
αὗται δέ συντρέχουσιν εἰς μίαν βάσιν·
τὸ λοίσϑιον δὲ τῷ τρίτῳ προσεμϕερές.
I’m not skilled at letters but I will explain the shapes
and clear symbols to you.
There is a circle marked out as it were with a compass
and it has a clear sign in the middle.
The second one is first of all two strokes
and then another one keeping them apart in the
middle.
The third is curly like a lock of hair
and the fourth is one line going straight up
and three crosswise ones attached to it.
The fifth is not easy to describe:
there are two strokes which run together from
separate points
to one support.
And the last one is like the third.
(TGF, fr. 382)
The man has spelled out the six letters of the name ‘Theseus’: ΘΗΣΕΥΣ. It must have been a scene that proved dramatically effective, for two other tragedians imitated it very closely, as our extant fragments show (Agathon, TGF fr. 4 and Theodektes, TGF fr. 6; cf. Ath. 10.454b). Sophokles is said to have staged a satyr-play in which an actor danced the letters of the alphabet (TGF, fr. 156; Ath. 10.454f). The Athenian comic playwright Kallias produced something known as “The Alphabetic Revue” in which the twenty-four members of the chorus acted out the letters of the alphabet and imitated syllables by dancing in pairs of vowel plus consonant (Ath. 453c). Presumably, some considerable proportion of the audience at these plays could participate in the fascination and chagrin of tracing out alphabetic shapes. Perhaps they had practiced it themselves when learning letters. Perhaps they had been daunted by the task and never learned letters. Perhaps they listened to their children complaining about it at the dinner table every night. In any event, the people to whom such theater appealed were people whose imaginations could be seized by the spectacle of grammata taking shape in air as if they were real. These are vividly pictorial imaginations and they evidently take some pleasure in the plastic contours of the alphabet.
If we give some consideration to ancient writing as a physical production, we see this same imagination at work. The Greeks plainly regarded their alphabet as a set of pictorial devices. Through the sixth century B.C. they used for their inscriptions the continuous to-and-fro style of writing known as boustrophēdon, so named be cause it turns at the end of each line and comes back along the furrow as the ox turns with the plow (Pausanias 5.17.6). All the letters in the odd-numbered lines would face in one direction, and those in even-numbered lines in the opposite direction. Writing this way was made easier for the Greek writer by the fact that, of the twenty-six shapes available to him, twelve were symmetrical, six required very little change in reversal and only eight looked markedly different backwards. Such a style suggests a writer who thinks of his letters as a series of novel, reversible shapes: a Greek way of thinking about letters. Greek society does not seem to have borrowed this style from any other system of writing. “Its adoption,” says L. H. Jeffrey, “implies simply a pictorial conception of the letters as outlined figures which can be turned in either direction according to need” (1961, 46).
Attentiveness to outline in early Greek writers is apparent not only at the level of individual letters but also in the approach to groups of words and lines of text. It is a notable feature of archaic inscriptions that they frequently mark divisions between word groups with patterns of dots set one atop another in small columns of two, three, or six. This practice died out in classical times as writers and readers became blasé about their power to impose or deny edges. Some care is also given in early inscriptions to demarcating whole lines of text, and this is not merely an accident of the boustrophēdon style where alternate lines are distinguished by the direction of the writing. Even after this style had given way almost everywhere to a consistent left-to-right script (by the fifth century), writers continued to approximate the distinction with alternating colors of ink. Stone-cut letters, too, were at times colored with paint in alternate lines of red and black. “Some aesthetic attraction” is the motive adduced by epigraphists (e.g., Woodhead 1981, 27) for such peculiarities. But we should take note of the particular mode of the aesthetic. In writing, beauty prefers an edge.
Nor should we disregard the implements and materials of ancient writing. They wrote on stone, wood, metal, leather, ceramics, waxed tablets and papyrus. By the fifth century papyrus was the accepted medium (see Herodotos 5.58; cf. Aesch. Supp. 947) and the Greeks took their word for ‘book’ from byblos, ‘papyrus plant.’ Papyrus, both the material itself and the idea of writing on it, came originally from Gebal in Phoenicia and later from Egypt, but the Greeks did not use papyrus in the same way as the Egyptians or Phoenicians did. Instead, they rethought the activity and redesigned the materials, as they had done when they took over the Phoenician sign-system and transformed it into the world’s first alphabet. A radical innovation was introduced: for use on papyrus Greek writers devised the pen (Turner 1952, 10).
The Egyptians wrote with the stem of a rush. Its ends were cut at a slant and chewed to create a fine brushlike tool. With this soft brush the Egyptian writer painted rather than wrote his letters, producing a thick and often uneven band of ink that left forked trails wherever it was lifted. Greek writers devised a pen out of the stiff, hollow reed called kalamos (see Pl., Phdr. 275). It was sharpened to a point with a knife and split at the tip. The reed-pen produced a fine line without raggedness where the pen was lifted. “But if the hand stops still for a moment, either in beginning or finishing a stroke, a little round blob of ink collects …” warns the papyrologist E. G. Turner (1952, 11). The reed-pen would seem to be a tool expressly designed for keeping the edges of letters cleanly demarcated. It is also a tool whose user must pay attention to exactly where he wants to stop and start each letter-stroke. Blobs of ink mar the quality of the written product as well as the enjoyment of producing it. Expertise tells, at the edge: there is the juncture of a writer’s pleasure, risk and pain.
It is arguable, then, from the way they wrote and the tools they used, that ancient readers and writers conceived the Greek alphabet as a system of outlines or edges. But let us penetrate beyond the physical procedure of their writing to the activity of mind that informs it. It is an activity of symbolization. Being a phonetic system, the Greek alphabet is concerned to symbolize not objects in the real world but the very process in which sounds act to construct speech. Phonetic script imitates the activity of discourse itself. The Greek alphabet revolutionized this imitative function through introduction of its consonant, which is a theoretic element, an abstraction. The consonant functions by means of an act of imagination in the mind of the user. I am writing this book because that act astounds me. It is an act in which the mind reaches out from what is present and actual to something else. The fact that eros operates by means of an analogous act of imagination will soon be seen to be the most astounding thing about eros.