The Bottom of the Iceberg

The Bottom of the Iceberg: Written and Unwritten Cultures in Dialogue in the Ancient Mediterranean

2-4 June 2025
University College London

Since the 1960s, when Havelock, MacLuhan, Goody and Ong reinterpreted the cultural and intellectual history of early Greece and Rome in terms of a transition from oral tradition to written literature, and when Milman Parry’s theory that Homer’s epics originated in an oral performance tradition gained wider currency, the twin notions of orality and literacy have been at the forefront of progressive thought in Classical studies. In recent decades, the simplistic notion of a ‘Great Divide’ between orality and literacy, and the corresponding deterministic theories about the impact of communication on culture,  has been replaced by an understanding, based essentially on advances in the contemporary anthropology of texts and textuality, that the two concepts are by no means mutually exclusive; while the emergence of new technologies that enable interactive multimedia communication and blend the spoken word with both written and visual elements  have given the whole issue a revived cultural urgency. These, and the emerging new spheres of public and private communication (or blind consumption) that they have helped to create, have been seen as an example of ‘tertiary orality’.  This project, entitled ‘The Bottom of the Iceberg: Written and Unwritten Cultures in Dialogue in the Ancient Mediterranean’, contends that the collapse of boundaries between oral and literate culture is not a modern phenomenon at all. In fact, both oral performance and writing often existed as alternative, simultaneous forms of communication within every stage of cultural development in the ancient Graeco-Roman world from Homer onwards.  Throughout this period, literacy was remarkably restricted, and the culture of the vast, unwritten majority remained overwhelmingly oral. The problem is how we can examine the mutual influence of the two. While the influence of written culture is easy enough to track, we are still far, thanks largely to a natural disciplinary bias towards the written sources, from understanding the other side of the equation, and how the dialogue of the oral with the written changed over time. A major problem in the study of the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean is the fact that cultural traditions only become visible to us as their written products hove into view. A clear example lies in Homer’s epics, where a variety of cultural and linguistic clues reveal the presence of a thousand-year oral song tradition behind the poems, a fact of which the ancients themselves were obscurely conscious. Our literary and material sources are effectively just the tip of a much larger iceberg representing cultural traditions often defined (with varying degrees of success) as ‘oral’, ‘popular’ or ‘folkloric’. But truly to understand the cultures of the Ancient Mediterranean we need to tear down the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ or popular culture, a hierarchy that is becoming increasingly irrelevant to our own networked culture of ‘tertiary orality’.

In fact, terms like ‘oral’, ‘popular’ or ‘folkloric’ distort both the question and our answers, by imposing on the ancient world an anachronistic distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Just so, the identification of ‘literate’ with ‘educated, high culture’ and of orality with ‘low’ misrepresents the real balance of social reach and influence between the two, particularly but not exclusively in pre-Hellenistic Greece. Finally, while the often-linear narrative of transformation from orality to literacy has inspired much groundbreaking scholarship in recent decades, the coterminous and overlapping boundaries of both oral performance and writing as simultaneous alternative forms of communication within the same culture has yet to be explored in its full depth. Particularly the ‘feedback’ from the oral to the written deserves study, within the framework of a research methodology that, like the work of Parry and Lord on Homer and South Slavic oral epic, needs to be based on a comparative approach that takes account of all the relevant parallels, from other ancient Mediterranean cultures to mediaeval Europe to contemporary Africa.  

In particular, it is to recent work in anthropology, ethnography and ethnomusicology that we must turn in our effort to reach a better, more lifelike understanding of the ancient world. We need to interrogate three key concepts in particular. The first are the very notions of ‘text’ ‘song/poem’ and ‘voice’, which ethnographers of speaking, text and oral tradition like Karin Barber, and ethnomusicologists like Gary Tomlinson, have shown are by no means stable outside the sphere of Western graphocentric culture; and the second is the cultural dynamics of early written literatures, which differ radically from our own. To study early texts as instances of a cultural taxonomy of genres and socially-sanctioned speech modes is to embark on a journey to reconstruct a whole system of cultural assumptions, an ‘implied aesthetic’ founded in the co-existence of the written with the oral, where the written texts transmitted to us often, and naturally, point to a background of lost oral tradition, and where clear distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture did not exist in the same way they might exist for us. Contemporary classical scholarship has tended to regard the problem as one of reconstructing a single performance occasion circumscribed in place and time, which can then be used to explain various enigmas in the text or, at the very least, to set limits to possible interpretation of it, even as this clashes with the very social function of text itself in these societies. The real, and difficult, task is not to stop at the particular occasion, but rather to explore the resonances of the written text as the preserved trace of a broader culture. And while, particularly in Italy, some exceptional work has been done on the ‘submerged literature’ and ‘lost genres’ of the ancient world, we want to put the focus of study back on the broader issues outlined above. Use of recent approaches to African orality and literacy and indigenous epistemologies and poetics to study material related to the ancient Mediterranean world is one promising way in which to make this happen, and it is also hoped that bringing European Classics to bear on questions such as these can help to support the study of indigenous and endangered cultures worldwide.  

The UCL conference, to be held on June 2-4, 2025 at UCL’s Department of Greek and Latin in London with the support and involvement of our collaborators Palladion, the University of Birmingham, and the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London, will focus primarily on texts, textuality and visual art in relation to their possible oral backgrounds, exploring avenues for the study of the ‘lost iceberg’ in a variety of ancient disciplines.  The conference is fully hybrid, and can be attended either in person or online. 

  • To book a place, please go to our Eventbrite page. 
  • All papers given will be recorded and made publicly accessible on the http://palladion.hu website, and both events will be broadcast live on Zoom.
  • Papers will be 40 minutes in length, with 20 minutes for discussion. There will be a one-hour closing discussion as well at the end of the last day.

(* marks an online talk)

Monday 2 June: 9:30-18:00

9:30-9:40  Welcome and introductory words

Session 1: Keynote Talks: The Ethnographer’s Perspective
9:40  Prof Karin Barber (University of Birmingham)
10:40  David R. M. Irving (ICREA & Institució Milà i Fontanals de Recerca en Humanitats, CSIC)

12:00-1:30  Lunch break

Session 2: Ancient Greek Song and Music
1:30  Lauren Heilman (Birmingham): Duelling Adelphoi: The Contest of the Lyre in the Homeric Hymns to Apollo and Hermes
2:30  Armand D’Angour (Oxford): Dithyramb or Folksong: What was ‘popular’ music in ancient Greece?

3:30  Tea break

Section 3: Hellenistic and Roman Culture
3:30  Jessica Lightfoot (Birmingham): Pindar, Herodotus and the Ram-God of Mendes
4:30  Ábel Tamás (ELTE, Budapest): The Triumph of the Reader: A Poetically Exploited Folk Ritual in Catullus 42

Evening: conference dinner

Tuesday 3 June: 9:30-18:00

Section 4: Folklore, Orality and Verbal Art
9:30  Rosalind Thomas (Oxford): Archaic Dedications and Inscriptions: The Tip of the Iceberg
10:30  Richard Janko (Michigan): Eurytus and Oechalia in Greek and South Slavic Heroic Song.
11:30  Gábor Bolonyai (ELTE, Budapest): Agricultural Metaphors for Marriage and Sexuality from a Comparative Perspective *
12:30  Sámuel Gábor (Budapest): Why did Odysseus’ Companions Kill the Oxen of the Sun?

1:30-3:00  Lunch break

Section 5: Visual Culture, Ritual and Drama
3:00  Szilvia Lakatos (Museum of Ethnography, Budapest and University of Pécs): Choruses of Satyrs and Spectators: Echoes of Athenian Drama in Etruscan Art
4:00  Tyler Jo Smith (University of Virginia): Every Picture Tells a Story: Festival, Movement and Ancient Greek Vases *

5:00-5:50  Concert by Rachel Fickes, John Franklin and Barnaby Brown

Wednesday 4 June: 9:30-18:00

9:30  Árpád M. Nagy (University of Pécs): ‘A stumbling block to Jews’ but no ‘folly to Gentiles’ – magical gems related to Deus Israel in the Roman Imperial Period

Section 6  Ancient Greek Song and Music II

10:30 Timothy Power (Rutgers): Music out of contest: concerts and recitals in archaic and classical Greece.*
11:30  John Franklin (Vermont):  Composing and Rehearsing to the Lyre

12:30-1:30 Lunch break

Section 5: (Re)defining Ancient Greek Lyric
1:30  Nathaniel Agnew (UCL): The Case of Calyce: Re-evaluating (pseudo?) Stesichorean Lyric
2:30   Kathryn Morgan (UCLA): Pindar and Bacchylides
3:30   Peter Agócs (UCL): Song, Textuality and Performance
4:30  Closing discussion