The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
After the advent of the written word, the masses who could not - or were not permitted to - read, were given sermons by the few who could.
Had the followers of Jesus remained an obscure Jewish sect, most of you would not have learned to read, and the rest of you would be reading from hand-copied scrolls.
That is a Medieval way of drawing history, in which they do not respect the law and want the rest of the world to respect the law. That's not possible.
Anything based on ancient texts is difficult for a modern reader to get their head around.
When the Bible was first published, bathhouses were mandatory, no one could read, and only the people in the Church could write.
In England only uneducated people show off their knowledge; nobody quotes Latin or Greek authors in the course of conversation, unless he has never read them.
A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.
And we had our own laws. I mean, I wrote them. And we had our own customs, and traditions, and proprieties.
In ancient Greece, Socrates reportedly didn't fancy a literate society. He felt that people would lose the capacity to think for themselves, simply adopting the perspective of a handy written opinion, and that they would cease to remember what could be written down.
I still don't like authority exercised without reason. But they laugh at you at Cambridge if you say that sort of thing. For them, the law is a system of rules not that different from mathematics.
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