alphabet is also a strictly oriented code which is biologically determined from left to right. What I would like to emphasize here is that where other forms of scripts may establish a direct relationship between the signifier and the signified, the use of the Greek alphabet is pr edi cat ed upon the med iat ion of a men tal com bin ati on of phon eme s whi ch have no meaning by themselves. The phonetic is therefore far more abstract than any other alphabet and contrary to its closer cousins, the Hebraic and the Phoenician varieties, it does not rely on any context ual evidenc e for its decodi ng. All this is to say t hat when a profess ional scribe or a literate bard wrote down an oral epic, he was unwittingly changing the nature of the information as well as the relationships of his body and mind to its content and delivery. He would be fragmenting the poem to process it through the alphabetic code, and the fragments of the story would appear as specific actions, roles and heroic or exemplary attitudes. In fact he was not w riting down a story, he was representing s ounds. And surely the sounds would be read aloud and retell the story, but in the meanwhile the information would have been completely abstracted from the storyteller even as he was writing it down. The nature of memory must have changed: you did not memorize sounds and images, you memorized a code which gave you instant and permanent access to those sounds and images . Eric Have lock has done inval uable resea rch in this fiel d and he explains in his Preface to Plato that whereas the performance of epic poetry would involve the whole body of the performer as well as the whole body of his audience without implying that there be a strict hierarchy of mental processes over physical ones, the act of writing knowledge down would liberate the memorizer from all mnemonic devices other than mental. This is one of the main aspects of what I call the desensorializati on of the Greek culture. Drama was thus borne out of the various physical techniques of memory evolved for the oral epic but which were broke n loose and rearr anged by the phonet ic alphabe t. From the poi nt of view of communication, one could say that theater was to the oral epic what writing was to speech; it was a revol ution of sensor y relat ionshi ps perta ining to the major modes of trans mitt ing and exchanging information on a personal and a social level. Oral poetry, the alphabet and theater were all different aspects of what the Greeks called mimesis, but I suspect that the alphabet introduced an important change to the traditi onal notion of mimesis. It is possi ble to surmise that where the mimetic practices ascribed by Plato to epic poetry were age old convent ions of re-ena ctmen t, the new, coded, conventio ns of mime sis were unifo rmly gear ed tow ard s imi tat ion proper . In sim ple r ter ms, theat er woul d pre sen t mod els of experience to spectators which were removed from the action, where the traditional epic performance would still involve its audience very closely in a ritual remaking of the action. Havelo ck even refers to almost patho logica l forms of identif icati on. It is importa nt to remember however that initially theater must have exerted a very powerful manipulation of its publ ic

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s sen sor y pro jec ti ons . One of the most inte res tin g ins igh ts of cla ssi cal scholarship into the nature of chorus dancing is H.C. Baldry

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s opinion that it probably

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was the sort of physical reaction to the play which the audience might have shown if they had risen from their seats

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