From the Beginning to Plato

26 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
hieromnemon or sacred remem-brancer, who is a man with powers to impose
fines and not just a repository of traditional knowledge, a popular court and an
epignomon, who has authority to order the whole people about. 32
Without the onset of literacy we would not have all this evidence about
detailed legal arrangements. But was literacy actually a factor in enabling law to
happen in the first place? It has certainly been suggested in the past that literacy
encourages, if it does not require, certain intellectual operations which an oral
culture manages to do without: logical deduction and exercises in classification,
it is claimed, feed upon, if they do not rely upon, written lists, and writing allows
more thorough analysis of the modes of communication. 33 The ancients
themselves certainly thought that writing, and in particular the writing down of
law, made a difference. Euripides has Theseus in the Suppliant Women (lines
433–4) say, ‘When the laws have been written down, both the weak and the rich
have equal justice’, a view echoed by Aristotle. No one would argue for
widespread ability either to write or to read in archaic Greece, so how plausible
are these views that the existence of writing changed how people thought or how
they interacted with each other? Whether or not one believes that the Homeric
poems, which only once refer to writing (Iliad VI.168–9), were themselves
written down shortly after 700 BC, they reveal that the oral culture in which they
were created was distinctly capable of analysing techniques of communication
and making play with subtle variations in wording. Equally, it is clear that law
did not have to be written to be fixed: ‘remembrancers’, who continue to exist even
when law is written, seem to have been charged with the precise recall of
enactments, and references to early law being sung suggest that music was one
means by which precision of memory was ensured. Nor does the fixing of law at
all guarantee ‘equal justice’, for, as the procedural emphasis of so much early
written law itself emphasizes, power remains with the interpreters of the law. 34
What writing does enable is communication at a distance, something with
considerable consequences for the general dissemination of information. Even
once writing was available, much that might have been written down continued
to be unwritten, and it is not clear that communications which were of their
nature dependent upon writing developed before the invention of the architectural
treatise, giving the precise ‘rules’ according to which a particular building was
created, in the sixth century BC
There might be a stronger case for believing that law codes, rather than simply
law itself, were literacy dependent, but although later tradition talks of early
lawgivers inventing whole codes of laws for cities, the earliest laws look to have
been single enactments brought in to deal with particular problems. And it is
significant that while the disputes to be settled in Iliad XVIII, where Achilles’
new shield’s scene of city life includes a dispute being settled, and in Hesiod’s
Works and Days are personal, disputes over property and homicide, these early
laws are dominated by broadly ‘constitutional’ issues.
Other evidence too suggests that political arrangements were very much under
discussion in the seventh century, and that the question of the authority of