ENOS, Richard Leo

Summer 2006, pages 223 - 242

The Emergence of a Literate Rhetoric in Greece

The "invention" of the alphabet is widely seen as the defining characteristic of literacy in Greece. This article examines the development of written rhetoric; that is, how alphabetic writing was structured for a variety of functions, and how such functions reveal the heuristics that were developed. The article argues that the paragraph is the earliest and dominant feature of an alphabetic rhetoric, and the source for understanding the recursive dynamics of oral and written expression that contributed to the development of a literate rhetoric in Greece.