Archaic Poetry, Epigraphical Letters and Early Greek Literary Prose

Ancient Greece developed prose as a medium for intellectual expression only after centuries of reliance on poetry for authoritative public speech. The impact of this centuries-long predominance of poetry on early literary prose is traceable both in a deliberate engagement with traditional poetry, and in the adoption of comparable enunciative strategies. After reviewing select examples from the extant corpus of archaic poetry, this paper draws a comparison between select inscriptional and non-inscriptional prose evidence. It then brings poetic and prose sources together to highlight shared indexical strategies, in particular the use of the first person singular, often introduced after a switch from the third person singular. The analysis of such shared pragmatic features can help shed light on the processes that led to the entextualization of early literary prose, and uncover the ongoing negotiation between the oral and textual dimensions that characterized the newly developing prose genres.