“ If we consider the occasions on which the Iliad-poet himself appeals to the Muses for help, we shall see that it falls on the side of content and not of form. Always he asks the muses what he is to say, never how he is to say it; and the matter he asks for is always factual. Several times he requests information about important battles; once, in his most elaborate invocation, he begs to be inspired with an Army List—”for you are goddesses, watching all things, knowing all things; but we have only hearsay and knowledge.” These wistful words have the ring of sincerity; the man who first used them knew the fallibility of tradition and was troubled by it; he wanted first-hand evidence. But in an age which possessed no written documents, where should first-hand evidence be found? Just as the truth about the future would be attained only if man were in touch with a knowledge wider than his own, so the truth about the past could be preserved only on a like condition. Its human repositories, the poets had (like the seers) only their technical resources, their professional training; but vision of the past, like insight into the future remained a mysterious faculty, only partially under its owner’s control, and dependent in the last resort on divine grace. By that grace poet and seer alike enjoyed a knowledge denied to other men.
E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, pp. 80–1. Dodds shows us that the urge of the letter is primordial: a retrospective hunger that is twin to prospect. Like the rationalism that was its supposed daughter, the urge to write and read was driven as much by a lively and mystical religious imagination as it was by cool, tabular calculation.
