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In a play by Euripides, the priggish young man Hippolytus learns from a do-gooding nurse that his stepmother Phaedra is wasting away out of lust for him. Appalled, he roundly abuses all womankind and Phaedra, mortified at the revelation of the feelings she has honourably tried to keep hidden, commits suicide. Determined, however, to maintain her reputation and punish Hippolytus, she leaves a letter for her husband, claiming that he tried to rape her. The letter is a lie. But to Theseus, it ‘shouts out’; there is no arguing with it. Hippolytus protests his innocence in vain. The play ends with his death, and Theseus — too late — made aware of the truth.
That was the problem the Greeks had with the written word: it was dumb. You could never determine its truth because you could not question it or get a reply. This is one reason why Plato’s philosophy is composed as a series of dialogues between Socrates and his friends. It was the closest he could get to making the written word speak.
Letters for diplomatic purposes were especially open to suspicion. Sealed and secretive, they could suppress the truth, deceive the audience or be forged. The writer was in complete control of the information, and the recipient, especially in a society where literacy was not widespread, could exploit it as he wished. So not only were letters inherently untrustworthy, they could not be made accountable in the open, face-to-face, democratic way of doing business that Greeks preferred.
The political blog is, obviously, a highly democratic medium. It can develop into an argument between anyone who wants to join in. Yet, ultimately, all such written words are wasted on the midnight air unless the consequence is that the decision-makers are called to account where it hurts — in live, oral encounters. Two cheers for blogs and newspapers; but three for Socratic question-and-answer.
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