Mechanics and Means of Production in Antiquity

Abstract

This chapter aims to reconstruct mechanics and means of production of literary texts in the Greek world from Archaic age to Late Antiquity. The survey begins with a description of the main writing supports employed by the Greeks, relying on direct evidence (i.e. extant papyri, writing tablets and ostraka) and on iconographic and literary sources. Then the dynamics of creation of literary texts are explored, starting from the descriptions of the compositional process we can find in many authors scattered in different periods, from Plato to Anastasius of Sinai. As a result, the production of a literary text in Greece is described as a dynamic process, which required the use of different materials and technologies, developed in the context of a constant interaction between voice and writing, and was influenced by a plurality of factors (the contexts of literary communication, the purposes of the message, the variety of the recipients).

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 19 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.