Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary material / C. Cooper -- The language of heroes and the language of heroines: Storytelling in oral traditional epic / Elizabeth Minchin -- “Summoning together all the people”: Variant tellings of the Mwindo epic as social and political deliberation / Nathalia King -- Orality and textual criticism: The homeric hymns / Franco Ferrari -- Orality and the politics of scholarship / Annette Teffeteller -- Written lists of military personnel in classical Athens / Geoffrey W. Bakewell -- Why the athenians forgot Cleisthenes: Literacy and the politics of remembrance in ancient Athens / Greg Anderson -- Lycurgus and the state text of tragedy / Ruth Scodel -- Myth and writing in Aeschines’ against Timarchus / Guy Olding -- Orality and the politics of roman peacemaking / L.T. Zollschan -- Theognis’ Sphrêgis: Aristocratic speech and the paradoxes of writing / Thomas Hubbard -- Thucydides’ history live: Reception and politics / James V. Morrison -- From orality to literacy: The moral education of the elite in fourth-century Athens / Frances Pownall -- Writing divine speech: Greek transliterations of near eastern languages in the hellenistic east / Matthew J. Martin -- Fighting the future: Euripidean letters and Thucydides’ Athens / E.M. Griffiths -- Elitist orality and the triviality of writing / Margalit Finkelberg -- Neronian oral politics: The case of Musonius Rufus / Niall W. Slater -- Oral “agreement”, written contract, and the bonds of law at Athens / Edwin Carawan -- Did the athenian courts attempt to achieve consistency? Oral tradition and written records in the athenian administration of justice / Edward M. Harris -- Select index / C. Cooper -- Supplements to Mnemosyne / C. Cooper.

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This volume represents the sixth in the series on Orality and Literacy in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds. The present work comprises a collection of essays that explore the tensions and controversies that arise as a society moves from an oral to literate culture. Part 1 deals with both Homeric and other forms of epic; part 2 explores different ways in which texts and writing were manipulated for political ends. Part 3 and 4 deals with the controversies surrounding the adoption of writing as the accepted mode of communication; whereas some segments of society began to privilege writing over oral communication, others continued to maintain that the latter was superior. Part 4 looks at the oral elements of Athenian Law.