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All Greek tragedies that came down to us except Aeschylus' Persians are based on various mythological stories situated in the Mycenaean period (it is dated usually between 1600 and 1200 BC), which was primarily characterised by oral communication. Therefore, references to writing in the fabulas of Greek tragedies are in fact a huge anachronism. Nevertheless, some of the terms that denote written documents, e.g. inscriptions in stone or on warriors' shields, lists, laws and letters, are sporadically found in the surviving dramas and dramatic fragments. This paper deals with the terms referring to (or alluding to) the act of writing or the resulting scripts in Aeschylus', Sophocles' and Euripides' extant dramas and fragments. Naturally, the first point of reference were the derivatives of the root γραφ- (nouns, adjectives and verbs): γράμμα, ἐπίγραμμα, γραμμή, γραφή, περιγραφή, ὑπογραφή, γραμματεύς, γραφεύς, μελεγγραφής, καλλίγραπτος, γραπτός, ἄγραπτος, γράφω, διαγράφω, ἐγγράφω, εἰσγράφω, καταγράφω, μεταγράφω and ὑπογράφω. Next, various terms that point to tablets or the material used for their manufacture are taken into consideration ; these terms can denote the material, the tablet, but also the very document written upon it (therefore these terms are referred to as metonymical terms in this paper). Some of the terms of this kind are: βύβλος, δέλτος, δελτογράφος, δελτόομαι, πίναξ, πτυχή, διαπτυχή and σανίς. Finally, two derivatives of ἐπι- στελλ- are included: the noun ἐπιστολή in Greek points to any kind of message, including a written one (i.e. a letter ; this meaning is more frequent from Hellenistic period onwards), and the verb ἐπιστέλλω signifies the sending of oral, as well as written messages (i.e. letters) with the help of a messenger. As a starting point, all terms potentially connected to writing (as listed above) are detected and extracted from surviving tragedies and available tragic fragments. The search is conducted by the use of two important tools: Diogenes (the desktop/laptop application for searching and browsing the legacy databases of texts in Latin and ancient Greek) and the online data base TLG - Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. As the next step, the context of the verses in which the terms appear is carefully analysed, and the terms are catalogued according to their approximate meaning (e.g. a tablet, a painting, a piece of writing, written laws, a letter etc.). The analyses in question are conducted separately on the opuses of the three authors ; each individual research is followed by a concise table, consisting of the total of the terms used by the author in question, their location in dramas (with the abbreviated title and the verse number noted) and their approximate meaning. In the end, the individual results obtained are meticulously compared, the frequency of all terms in dramas of the three tragedians is determined and an analysis of whether or not the authors use the most important terms equally is conducted. The final aim of this paper is to point to similarities and also potential differences regarding the very choice of the terms referring to writing and/or their usage (i.e. the meaning they achieve) in tragedies of the three Greek master playwrights of the Classical era. |
