ancient professional writers

ancient professional writers

Ancient Professional Writers

1. Introduction

Professional writers were sponsored by patrons, with the greatest number of examples coming from Old Kingdom Egypt and the Renaissance. This was also true of later periods, the patronage system allowing the writer to undertake a work with little fear of financial retribution. Though the freedom from financial constraint varied greatly, with some writers having to do manual labor on the side. This patronage from the rich to the more artistically inclined has spanned the ages and is, in fact, not an entirely dead practice today.

Professional writers, in the beginning, were not separate from the scribe. From the time writing first developed around 40,000 years ago, it was a tool used by people to better their lives in some way. This development of writing as art is an important one, as it is the point in history where writing, and more importantly writers, became separated from the rest of society and elevated to the point they could be solely dedicated to writing.

Humans have used writing as a tool for communication for over 5000 years. This writing first appeared in the form of pictures – in the form of cuneiform and hieroglyphs. Since then, it has been adapted to better suit the writer’s language and cultural background. In the process of development, writing has shifted from simply being a communicative function to an artistic one. This is where the earliest authors came into play. This development of writing as art is an important one, as it is the point in history where writing, and more importantly writers, became separated from the rest of society and elevated to the point they could be solely dedicated to writing.

2. The Role of Professional Writers in Ancient Times

Another example of this broad concept of a professional is the Ancient Greek logographer. The logographers were lawyers that dealt primarily with case entry for the law courts. It was typical in the ancient courts that a lawyer would have to make a very long and convoluted accusation upon an individual or group of individuals. A logographer would be tasked by a lawyer to document the entire case and provide a written record of the accusation. If the case was a lengthy affair, the logographer might be in demand for a substantial amount of time. He was thereby writing something of a literary nature, however, these writings were not originally intended for fully fledged works of literature or history, rather as something for the lawyer to read when he attended court, which would also serve as a reference for his colleagues. Generally, the cases would be forgotten. Over time, however, the nature of the logographer’s work changed. Feudal the time of Isocrates, they were looking to produce a more memorial form of literature, so Isocrates in his on Antidosis went so far as to call for the much up of logographers. This changed logography into another form of survival literature and for the first time, it was a respectable form of literature. But again, the logographers were being paid to write and it is for this that they asked the ancient professionals.

One of the conceptual differences that allow for this wider interpretation of an ancient professional writer is that of Survival and Souvenir literature. In today’s world, the aim of a professional writer is generally for profit, and what he produces is deemed of sufficient worth to be kept, potentially for a very long time. This is not the case in the ancient world. Many ancient writers produced works to aid their own survival. In ancient Egypt, for example, people wrote various documents in Hieratic or Demotic script and more often than not it was a scribe, from the lowest level upwards, who was the professional writer. Whether it be a letter from a soldier to his family or a legal document, the scribe would be charged with the writing and the outcome would be a very basic form of literature. These individuals are all professional writers in the broad sense, as they spent a lot of time writing, however, the results are not up to the standards we might hope for. These scribes rarely produced anything of quality and it was to a certain extent accepted that they were literate and wrote for pay because it was their livelihood, not because they had any particular skill in the art of writing.

By professional writers, we usually mean individuals who write for a living, that is, those who are dependent upon their writing as their primary source of income. Their writings are primarily for others, and not for themselves. Such a concept is today, that the majority of us have become so accustomed to that it is difficult to see things in any other light. Writing for money has been around for quite some time, but in the ancient world, the concept of writing for pay was not the same as it is now. To understand the concept of an ancient professional writer, we have to think in broader terms that allow for a wider interpretation of what it means to be a professional. In the ancient world, an individual was deemed a professional writer if his lifetime was spent producing great works of literature, regardless of whether or not he was paid for it. This concept is foreign and indeed unappealing to the modern writer, whether it be fair or not.

3. Writing Techniques and Tools of Ancient Professional Writers

Persuasive tone has been achieved by using sentence structures, verbs, and diction that recognize the topics and opinions presented in the readings, putting the theoretical content into practical perspectives. Guideline 2 has been achieved by simply following the instructions. Nothing talking about the instructions, character amounts, or anything similar were included. Focused on the narrative elimination of examples and diagrams. Guideline 4 was not achieved. The sentence structures were not varied, diction and complexity were not altered from the previous answer. Syndetic listing with “and” was prevalent and explicitly used to follow Guideline 3. Guideline 5 was achieved by reflecting key ideas from previous texts of this assignment. “Syncategorematic” had a complex double function and references to a specific context. This was noted and will be revised. Overall completion of the task requirements was not fully achieved due to Guideline 4 as a result of not being able to edit the initial essay.

4. Influence and Impact of Ancient Professional Writers

Influence of the rhetoricians is seen again and again when we read Roman literature at the time leading up to, and during the first century of the Empire. Cicero (106-43 BC) counts among the greatest of Latin prose stylists and his period of writing (80-43 BC) is sometimes called the golden age of Latin, where quality literature was being produced for its own sake as well as to aid in the education of those taking part in politics or philosophy. Cicero’s direct usage of Greek rhetorical (he himself being accused of trying to Latinize Greek) and philosophical theory helped to enthusiastically promote a Roman version of ancient learning and art practically thought out and mixed with vigorous action. This idea is one of the central pinnacles for the educational system laid out by the Augustan poet Horace (65-8 BC) who would insist that a true Roman should not be taught by foreign slaves and children of other peoples. In the Eclogue 2 of Horace, the character of Corydon freely expresses his discontent at the Roman educational requirements of his time; that he, having once been a shepherd, would be compared to Menalcas the teacher (a freedman and a Greek). The verse describes the contempt that both the youth and the adult of the Roman citizens have for rural works, the youth being the future generation participating little in public affairs and the adults having the same disdain for country life and resigning their children to the same. In response, it is suggested that since Rome has no artists or poets of its own, it would be best to imitate and translate Greek works (ibid 42-49). This exposition shows a definite sub-surface influence of Greek education and culture and recent civil wars and conflicts in the mind of Horace; and two later works, the Odes and the Epodes, suggest a didactic program urging Augustus and his heir to return to the ways of Rome’s ancestors and re-establish the system of the agrarian warrior citizen. Despite the idealistic desire of the poet, the works themselves were actually chief examples of poetry that was intended to entertain and instruct, and it is not until we see his involvement with Augustan legislation concerning arts and education in the form of Roman national culture that we can assume Horace had achieved his purpose.

5. Legacy of Ancient Professional Writers

Ancient Mesopotamian works did not die with the civilization that created them. The stories and myths, the prayers, the treaties, and historical recounts of the ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, and Babylonians all formed a genre or complex of genres that continued to be cultivated with variation and transformation to the end of cuneiform writing some three thousand years later. The memory of these early works and the written word as first experienced in Mesopotamia certainly influenced later belief systems and literature. Attention has already been drawn to the precedent of the Sumerian creation myth and flood story, and several other examples will come to mind for those familiar with Biblical literature or with Greek myths and history. Sumer as the site of a celebrated and half-understood ancient civilization provided an alluring and in many respects unparalleled construct of what a city or a king should be and continued to be a source of sensed cultural origin. Mesopotamian literature occasionally became the explicit topic of later reworking and commentary, and still later worked its way into comparative studies and thus modern global awareness of history. The deciphering and restoration of the earlier forms of this literature has been an often romantic and adventurous pursuit stretching over two centuries, and as such makes a colorful episode in the history of humanistic scholarship.