Question: In Ancient Greece Society, just how did people communicate?
Answer: Slowly!
In Greece
Sending messages in Ancient Greek Society was not as easy as using your cell phone. If you wanted to send a message from Point A to Point B in Ancient Greece, you had to physically take it there. Mostly people lived within walking distance of each other. In ancient times people thought nothing of walking 20 miles to your destination with a message. If you wanted to send a message far away from where you lived, you had a choice of giving the message verbally to someone, or write it down and then give it to someone. There was no postal service. You either delivered the message yourself, or you paid someone to do it. There were professional couriers; just how reliable they were is another matter. For important messages in Ancient Greek (read governmental or other official messages), they used runners to carry them. Most of you have heard the story of the runner Pheidippides who ran from the Battle of Marathon to Athens, about 26 miles, and died of exhaustion after yelling out the word “Nike”* (Victory). What you seldom hear about is that shortly before the battle, this same guy also ran from Athens to Sparta (about 150 miles each way) to ask for troops to fight off the Persians at Marathon. He then ran all the way back to give Athens the message the Spartans said to start the party without them. For very long distances, it was usually faster to send a message by ship. However, between storms, pirates, limited navigational aids, and just bad luck, a lot of these ships ended up at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.
In Other Places
In other states of the ancient world like Assyria or Persia, they had a state run service that used horse riders to carry official messages along state maintained roads. These messengers would change horses often and could cover well over a hundred miles a day. It still took at least a week or more to get a message from the edges of the empire to the center. Although I have described such a system in my novels, in reality, mainland Greece had no such organization, mostly because the distances from polis to polis was shorter. There were also few good roads in Greece or anywhere else except the official roads (Like the Persian Empire’s Royal Road) that most rulers did not allow the public to use without permission. An elaborate road network did not come into effect until the Romans. Comparing the Greek road system to the Roman road system was like comparing a wagon trail in the Ozarks to the Interstate Highway system.
Time and Security
There was also the matter of message security. Anyone could read a message. This is why message scrolls were sealed by wax seals that were impressed by a ring or other impression making device. At least the receiver could tell if someone had opened the message. Some cities did use codes or other means to obscure the message, but message security was a dubious at best. In any case, things did not move fast in the ancient world. You could send a message to a far colony and it would be a year before you could receive a reply. The main reason for that is that winds in the Med blew in different ways in different seasons and no one sailed in the winter. Try trading stock option on that time delay.
Just like everything else involving Ancient Greek Society or Culture, in that period, you communicated with people mostly by walking up to them and talking. It was a face to face society. If you had to use the methods above, delivering your message correctly and on time, was at best problematic unless you did it yourself.
You can find further background information on Greek history as well and most any other subject through the Great Courses library. The link below will take you to their web page.
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/
Enjoy!
WA
Long time supporter, and thought I’d drop a comment.
Your wordpress site is very sleek – hope you don’t
mind me asking what theme you’re using? (and don’t mind if I steal it?
:P)
I just launched my site –also built in wordpress like yours– but the theme slows (!)
the site down quite a bit.
In case you have a minute, you can find it by searching
for “royal cbd” on Google (would appreciate
any feedback) – it’s still in the works.
Keep up the good work– and hope you all take care of yourself
during the coronavirus scare!
I had a professional team set it up for me.
There’s certainly a lot to learn about this subject. I really like all of the
points you made.
You ought to take part in a contest for one of the finest sites on the
web. I most certainly will recommend this website!
I did not know such a contests exists.
WA
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every information is quality based stuff.
Hi, I think your website might be having browser
compatibility issues. When I look at your website in Safari, it looks fine but when opening in Internet Explorer,
it has some overlapping. I just wanted to give you a
quick heads up! Other then that, awesome blog!
I signed in on my IE and saw no problems. Not sure what you mean.
WA
Howdy! This post could not be written much better! Looking through this post reminds me of my
previous roommate! He continually kept preaching about this.
I am going to forward this post to him. Fairly certain he’ll have a very good read.
Thanks for sharing!
I was curious if you ever considered changing the layout
of your blog? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say.
But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect
with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only
having one or 2 images. Maybe you could space it out better?
My problem is I cannot afford an artist so I have to use ancient Greek pictures that are appropriate and are in the public domain. They are not that common. I agree more pictures would be nice, but it took a while to find these.
WA
Good information. Lucky me I recently found your site by accident (stumbleupon).
I’ve saved as a favorite for later!