SOURCE: Cartledge, Paul. “Literacy in the Spartan Oligarchy.” In Spartan Reflections, pp. 39-54. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Cartledge gathers the available evidence regarding the relative illiteracy of Sparta.

I

Somewhere in the first half of the eighth century bc the ‘graphic counterpart of speech’ (David Diringer's nice expression) and a fully phonetic alphabetic script were respectively reintroduced and invented in Greek lands.¹ Thus the Greeks (apart from those of Cyprus, among whom continuity of writing may be inferred) achieved the feat, unique among European peoples, of rediscovering the literacy they had lost; and that after an interval of at least four centuries. The alphabet marked an enormous technical and practical advance on the clumsy ‘Linear B’ syllabic script, in the sense that it made it possible ‘to write easily and read unambiguously about anything which the society can talk about’.² However, it is...