Abstract
The emergence of the reading culture in Greece and its gradual spread to the West can only be fully understood by going back in time to its foundations in the Archaic period.
On the one hand, there are written testimonies that predate the first books by at least two centuries: these are inscriptions engraved on a durable medium, mainly funerary and dedicatory epigrams. These early texts reflect on their own written nature and construct the projection of a future reader, by addressing him or her. And although archaic literature is intrinsically oral, a similar approach can be found in lyric poetry from the 6th and 5th centuries BC, in Athenian theater, and even in Homeric epics: a distant, fictional audience is constructed, its reactions and interpretations imagined and projected.
Its universalism enabled Greek literature to conceive of a future reader in an oral world, and still enables us today to read these texts as if they were addressed to us.
