We now come to a further mutation of human intelligence, which occurred a few centuries after the introduction of monotheism into the Jewish sphere.
We move on to Greece, where the mythical Phoenician king Cadmus imported the alphabet into a culture where there was no ideographic writing but only an oral culture, myth.
Within a few generations the ancient poems sung by the Aedians, such as the Iliad and The Odyssey, became written works, but more importantly, a new intellectual expression, philosophy, was born here. A group of thinkers from different Greek polis, called pre-Socratics, makes one of the most important intellectual mutations in human civilization. Detachment from myth constitutes a fundamental philosophical theme: it comes to coincide with the origin of philosophy itself, which organizes the rational exercise of thought outside the sphere of myth.
Plato writes in the dialogue of the Cratylus that through stoicheia (this word denotes both elements and letters: the homonymy is certainly not accidental) differences and relations give order to the world of words and things. By adopting the alphabet, the imitation of the essence underlying language becomes thinkable and possible.
The elementary school teacher in ancient Greece is called the grammarian, followed in preadolescence by the grammatikos-with a clear reference to learning to write and read-and finally by the rhetoricians and philosophers.
The Library of Alexandria, with 800,000 papyrus scrolls, constitutes the first major attempt to collect and make available humanity’s collective knowledge, based on alphabetic technology.
It will be Greek slaves, used as guardians, who will elevate the culture of ancient Rome.
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