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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1696750" data-attributes="member: 3146">First things first. You're confusing pre-modern with pre-literate.The Periclean Athenians were pre-modern but not pre-literate. The Romans were also pre-modern but not pre-literate. In fact, excavations at Masada show that even in the hinterlands of the empire, enough of its population was literate (in multiple languages) that written receipts for things as trivial as wine bottles were sometimes written. So, if (as is obviously the case), composition was not a written process in pre-literate societies, it does not follow that composition was  not a written process in pre-modern societies. (For that matter, what you mean by pre-modern isn't exactly clear either).Furthermore, it is important to realize that the world doesn't all live in the same era. The Roman senatorial class was very largely literate as the works of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Cicero, et al demonstrate. Ovid's metamophes, Juvenal satires, and the exchanges between the Christian apologists and their pagan rivals also demonstrate a highly literate subculture in the Roman empire. It may well be that some of Rome's subjects were illiterate (though the works of slaves like Plautus and Epictetus and the evidence from Masada, etc. and the apparent wide distribution of Christian scripture should give us pause before concluding that the mass of the Roman citizenry was illiterate). It is almost certain that many barbarian tribes were pre-literate cultures. But that doesn't mean that Rome was any more than the tragically enforced illiteracy of African slaves in the early years of the American Republic made the United States a pre-literate society. It is quite possible for a visual/written and an oral society or sub-culture to co-exist simultaneously.Finally, while many oral cultures are able to retain amounts of information that now seem amzing to us and that explains the apparently intact transmission of epics like the Illiad from the time of their composition to the time of their recording, that has no bearing at all upon the method of their composition. Just because Homer's listeners could repeat his epic verbatim to their children does not mean that Homer himself composed it when, one day around a campfire, someone asked him, "so what was up with that Achilles dude and the fall of Troy?" In fact, the kind of memory implied by the strong existence of oral traditions makes extensive pre-planning and composition plausible without writing. The notion that all pre-Shakespearean artists simply came up with their masterpieces impromptu in the context of a particular performance does not hold water and the facts of oral history and pre-literate cultures don't lend much support to the notion.</blockquote>

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