The Purpose of Writing: From Things to Thoughts in the Ancient World

Focus on Egyptian Love Songs

“Writing, which has preserved some ancient literatures for us, was not invented for that purpose. The earliest written documents we have contain commercial, administrative, political, and legal information” (p. 3).

“. . . in the cities founded on the Asian coast . . . the Greeks adapted to their own language the Phoenician system of writing, adding signs for the vowels to create their alphabet, the forerunner of the Roman alphabet and our own. Its first use was probably for commercial records and transactions, but as literacy became a general condition all over the Greek world in the course of the seventh century B.C., treaties and political decrees were inscribed on stone and literary works written on rolls of papers made from the Egyptian papyrus plant” (p. 107).

“The Chuang Tzu is the most inventive and diverse writing in early China, yet throughout the book we find doubts about the capacity of language, and particularly of written language, to convey truth” (p. 833).

A clay tablet with a seal impression, ancient Uruk (3100-2900 B.C.), in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The tablet probably documents information about grain distribution.
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Writing Evolves

The earliest writings that we recognize deal with administrative matters as overseen by kings and rulers. Toward the end of the fourth millennium B.C., pictographic writing systems like cuneiform in Mesopotamia and hieroglyphics in Egypt were used to record business transactions and ritual obligations. A code of signs that stood for familiar objects was developed. What mattered were the things thus represented (often to be counted and catalogued). With the introduction of syllabaries and alphabets, in which the sound associated with the sign becomes detached from the thing it originally denoted, writing systems became infinitely more flexible. Writing, it then seemed, might have another purpose: to express one’s private thoughts.

Once writing systems expressed sounds from the point of view of the speaking, reading, and writing subject, the sign left the external environment, perceived by sight and hearing, and showed humans as thinking and speaking. Its point of application, from being outside of the person, came to be lodged inside him. . . . writing . . .became the mold into which people poured their own thoughts.

Clarisse Herrenschmidt, “Writing between Visible and Invisible Worlds in Iran, Israel, and Greece,” Ancestor of the West: Writing, Reasoning, and Religion in Mesopotamia, Elam, and Greece,
trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2000),
p. 91

Writing and the Personal

Woman reading, from Professor Marilyn A. Katz’s course site.
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Scholars generally agree that in fifth century B.C.E. Athens, we can pinpoint at least one moment when documents begin to record personal perspectives rather than public concerns. In Greece, early (as opposed to ancient) written evidence of the personal takes two distinctive forms: philosophical discourse and intimate lyric.

Philosophical Thinking

Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates (1787). This great French neoclassical painting, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows the philosopher making an oratorical gesture even as he is about to drink the hemlock that will kill him.
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The Advent of Philosophy: Greece

Eric Havelock, who taught Classics at Yale University, sees Socrates as the historical figure whose career marks the shift from orality to literacy and clarifies the intellectual and emotional consequences of this shift. In The Apology of Socrates, the aging philosopher famously declares “that the unexamined life is not worth living” (p. 796). The notion that private persons should spend effort examining their lives presumes a “new mentality,” ultimately engendered by a new, alphabetic, writing system.

As language became separated visually from the person who uttered it, so also the person, the source of the language, came into sharper focus and the concept of selfhood was born.

Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write:
Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present
(New Haven: YUP, 1986), p. 113

The expressive modes chosen by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle exemplify the gradual invention of new ways of thinking made possible by a new kind of writing. Socrates, like all educated Athenian men of his generation, was literate. In the Apology, he speaks of combing through the writings of the poets as he tries to understand why the Oracle has declared him the wisest of men (p. 784). Yet “Socrates himself . . . wrote nothing” (p. 778), as the Norton Anthology headnote asserts.

A portrait bust of Plato and a page of his most influential dialogue, The Republic.
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Plato did write. What he wrote were dialogues, using writing to preserve or invent the speech of Socrates and his interlocutors. Plato, in one sense, is a dramatist, following the model of the great imaginative literature produced by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Following Havelock, we can see Athenian drama as the link between an oral and a written sensibility. It is born out of ritual, as the Choral Odes indicate, rich with imagery. It is written not to be read by individuals but to be memorized by actors, who then embodied what had been written in theatrical action. Drama is thought made palpable. Plato, who pondered the relationship between orality and literacy, wrote about abstractions—thoughts, not things—but maintained the fictional strategy of embedding the abstractions in distinctive human actors.

A portrait bust of Aristotle and a page of The Nicomechean Ethics.
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As the student of Socrates, Plato dramatizes the philosophical; Aristotle, the student of Plato, has made the change to a thoroughly written, logically conducted abstract form of argument. The written word had become the essential medium for the intellectual examination of self and all else. While teaching remained an enterprise in which people spoke to each other in schools like Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum, Aristotle “established the world’s first research library” (p. 799). In a library, a private individual confronts a written text alone; mind contacts mind without any mediating physicality. Thoughts have precedence over things.

An imagined portrait of Confucius reading from a scroll.
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The Advent of Philosophy: China

The writing systems of Greece and China differ fundamentally. Yet in each civilization, a distinct philosophical mode emerges with a decisive shift in the purpose of writing. Philosophers begin to examine personal conduct and in so doing grapple with abstract questions in a new way. In A History of Chinese Philosophy, Fung Yu-lan introduces his subject by giving primacy to Confucius:

. . . up to the time of Confucius (551-479 B.C.) there appears to have been no one who composed any sort of literary work in a private capacity, that is to say who wrote books under his own name expressing his own opinions, in contradistinction to authorship of historical works or other writings directly connected with official position.

Volume I: The Period of the Philosophers, trans. Derk Bodde
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1952), p. 7

Harnessing writing in order to explore personal rather than official interests enables a new kind of thinking. Like Socrates, Confucius was a teacher rather than a writer. Fully literate, credited with canonizing the literary heritage that was available to him, Confucius talked and his disciples wrote down what he said, leaving us the Analects, in which they captured the first Chinese “system of thought worthy to be called philosophy” (Fung Yu-lan, p. 8).

A painting of Confucius receiving visitors, from The Life of Confucius, owned by the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. This comes from the Web site maintained by the Center for the Development of Asian Studies, directed by Dr. David Jones.
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Teaching, we have seen, is a social activity that depends on forging a common language. Through speech, Confucius taught values that seemed threatened by regimes that had lost touch with basic social virtues. The other great early Chinese philosopher represented in The NortonAnthology of World Literature, Chuang Chou, often used the figure of Confucius to promote an essentially asocial ethos. A brilliant writer, Chuan Chou nevertheless doubts the possibility of a common language and instead delights in subverting the ordinary meanings of words. In a section of Chapter 4 of the Chuang Tzu, “In the World of Men” (not available in the Anthology), he imagines Confucius in conversation with a disciple, uncharacteristically warning of the inadequacy of language.

“In all human relations, if the two parties are living close to each other, they may form a bond through personal trust. But if they are far apart, they must use words to communicate their loyalty, and words must be transmitted by someone. To transmit words that are either pleasing to both parties or infuriating to both parties is one of the most difficult things in the world. . . .

Words are like winds and waves . . .”

Chaung Tzu: Basic Writings, trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia UP, 1964), pp. 56-57

The paradox explored in the anecdote about Duke Huan “in his hall reading a book” in Chapter 13, “The Way of Heaven,” is adumbrated in the scene above. Words, spoken in the case of Confucius, or written in the story of Duke Huan, cannot be counted on to transmit meaning. And yet they are all we have if human beings are to communicate with each other.

Writing and the Personal

An image of a woman reading, with a lyre visible in the composition, identified with Sappho.
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The Lyric Impulse

The earliest poems were sung; we call them lyrics because they traditionally were accompanied by the stringed instrument called the lyre. Although lyrics seem to explore the personal, the private emotions of the singer/poet, good poets have always been capable of voicing or impersonating feelings that they may not themselves at the moment actually be experiencing. Yet to the reader, or audience, the emotions ring true: perhaps this is because human beings share a range of emotions, especially when the subject involves love.

An Egyptian love song invoking Mehy, a perhaps mythical charioteer who may have a function like Cupid’s (see p. 51 of the Anthology), from a papyrus called the Chester Beatty I.
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Ancient Love Poetry

The earliest love poems in the Anthology include Egyptian songs, dating from 1300 to 1100 B.C., and the Chinese Classic of Poetry, probably composed between 1000 and 600 B.C. Early as they are, poems like “I think I’ll go home and lie very still” and “Boat of Cypress” reveal idiosyncratic personalities and nuanced thoughts. A refrain like “This heart of mine is no stone” (p. 815) emphasizes a universal vulnerability captured in writing that moves readers still. Even without an alphabet, the Egyptian and Chinese lyrists, like the Greeks, managed to make the transition from things to thoughts.

The character for “mountain,” in a bold, modern calligraphic style: the very shape of the character seems to reproduce the image of what it represents.
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Indeed, some critics argue that when a writing system preserves pictorial elements, as do hieroglyphics and Chinese characters, the physical aspect of the poem may convey additional sensory information that a bare alphabet does not. The beauty, and sometimes, part of the meaning, of the poem may be expressed visually as well as verbally.

Sappho and Her Influence

Sappho and Alcaeus, the two great lyrics poets of Greek Antiquity, from a vase attributed to an artist known as the Brygos Painter.
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Writing and the Authentic Voice of Feeling

Sappho’s few surviving poems are couched in the first person. Readers throughout the ages have responded to these lyrics as autobiography, but scholars increasingly argue against assuming that Sappho, a consummate artist, used poetry to reveal her most private thoughts. The poems’ many representations of the power of desire, like the reference to her “tortured heart” in l.17 in the prayer to Aphrodite (p. 531), succeed precisely because they convince us of their truth. But, as always, we should avoid praising art on the grounds that it is “real,” and instead celebrate Sappho’s lyrics as the earliest Western documents to consider personal anguish as the business of poetry.

From a Greek vase painting, an image of Peitho, the goddess of Persuasion, participating in the seduction of Demonassa, while Eros looks on. Note the gesture signifying speech.
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Oral poets sang of wars, of gods, of public concerns. Sappho sounds a new note. Significantly, both “Throned in splendor, deathless, O Aphrodite,” preserved for us in the critical text On the Sublime, and “Like the very gods in my sight is he,” quoted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in On Literary Composition, win praise from these authors for the rhetorical skill with which they mime personal intensity. In describing her prayer to Aphrodite and its success, Sappho has Aphrodite inquire “Whom then would you have Persuasion / force to serve desire in your heart” (18-19)? The ancient Greek poets recognized the impact of speech by suggesting, as here, that part of Aphrodite’s allure lies in the rhetorical strategies at her command.

Fresco of a man with a scroll from the museum at Sirmione, on Lago di Garda, where the family of Catullus had a villa. This photograph, taken by Susan Bonvallet, is available on the Vroma Web site, “A Virtual Community for the Teaching and Learning Classics.”
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Subjectivity in Catullus

In contrast to the early Greek lyric, Roman poetry comes out of a literate culture. Latin writers, however, venerated their Greek precursors and often consciously imitate Hellenic models. Thus the Aeneid pays constant homage to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Patronized by Maecenas in support of Caesar Augustus, Virgil writes public poetry. By contrast, in the previous generation, a few Latin poets created a new poetics by voicing personal experience, none more notably than Catullus. In the groups of poems about a tormented affair with the woman he calls Lesbia, Catullus emulates Sappho, the poet of Lesbos. He wrote two of his poems in Sapphic stanzas, one of which, #51, translates Sappho’s Greek original (see pp. 532 and 1047-48). Catullus appears to be the first poet to turn a protracted love affair into a series of poems, and the first to give his lover a pseudonym, artfully turning writing into a vehicle for intimate personal reflections. Charles Martin, whose translations of Catullus we read in the Anthology, underscores the revolution that these poems wrought:

The notion that a poem should be the expression of the personality of the poet is not to be found in traditional Roman poetry, in which the personality of the poet is subservient to the Greek text he is translating, or to the story he is telling, or to the patronus who is paying his way.

Catullus (New Haven: YUP, 1992), p. 21

Jupiter and Io (Jan Vermeyen-Kamee, ca. 1590).
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Writing as Self-assertion in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Ovid, another Roman poet who sometimes used his own life experience in his poetry, insisted that he wrote fiction, not confession. Yet his poetry plays constantly with the depiction of writing as the revelation of subjective feelings. The Tristia, or sad poems, reflect his life in exile, and the Heroides, fictional letters attributed to some of the great heroines of antiquity, show them trying to come to terms with their suffering by writing of their feelings. More remarkably, in the Metamorphoses, many episodes depict characters desperately seeking to document their sorrows. Following the stories of origins that begin Book I, Ovid tells the story of Io. Io’s efforts to communicate with her father, the river god Inachus, can be read as an allegory of the origin of writing. Trapped in the shape of a heifer, Io makes her way to her father’s river. There she captures his attention and finally identifies herself to him by pawing her name into the ground for her father to read:

and if
she could have uttered words, she would have told
her name and wretched fate and begged for aid.
Instead of words, it’s letters that she traced
in sand—she used her hoof: so she revealed
her transformation—all of her sad tale.
“What misery!” cried Inachus; he clasped
her horns and neck; and snow-white Io moaned.
“What misery!” he wailed.

(Trans. Allen Mandelbaum, I, 293-30)

“Instead of words, it’s letters that she traced / in sand”: Ovid wittily recapitulates the evolution of writing in these lines. Written language began as signs that stood for whole words; the Latin language completed the process of refining those early signs into a flexible alphabet of letters. A graceful bilingual pun condenses the psychological distress of the metamorphosed Naiad. Her name literally means her father’s response “What misery!”—‘woe is me.” Through letters, Io expresses the sorrow of her life and thereby reclaims her identity. To write is to be.

A pottery shard from Pakistan, with undecipherable marks that may be one of the oldest examples of writing ever found. From a BBC news item published in 1999.
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The Limits of Writing

The earliest writing demanded physical strength and material resources; it was not an activity to be undertaken lightly, at the spur of the moment. Signs were originally incised on clay tablets or stone, in Mesopotamia or the Indus Valley, or on oracle bones, in China. Although we cannot assign a clear timetable or prove causal relationships, it would seem that new media for writing—making marks with inks on bamboo, silk scrolls, or papyrus—allowed for greater spontaneity in setting down one’s thoughts and capturing personal feeling and idiosyncratic voices. Looking back over millennia, media and matter seem oddly congruent: the gravity of Gilgamesh, the most ancient of poems, is matched by the stone shards and clay tablets on which it survived the centuries; the lighter, shorter Egyptian poems come down to us on fibrous scrolls.

Writing about the personal has its limits, however. Metamorphosed into an alien form, like so many of Ovid’s characters, Io reclaims her essence by making her linguistic mark—in the dust. Having learned to define and capture their inmost thoughts by writing, human beings also learned that writing could be futile. The new media are subject to erasure and dissimulation. And writing our thoughts down cannot ultimately change the things of this world.

A parchment scroll.
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Catullus has the last word here. A connoisseur of poetry and of the writer’s media and methods, he derides the efforts of a hack who goes to great expense to preserve his words in “good new rolls / wound up on ivory, with red parchment wrappers, / lead-ruled, smoothed with pumice” (Poem #22, trans. Charles Martin). Bad writing isn’t helped by beautiful presentation; and good writers know that their efforts may be for naught.

My woman says there is no one whom she’d rather marry
than me, not even Jupiter, if he came courting.
That’s what she says—but what a woman says to a passionate lover
ought to be scribbled on wind, on running water.

Poem #70, trans. Charles Martin (p. 1049)