Abstract
This study of the emergence of a reading culture in ancient Greece starts from the beginnings of the written text and analyzes its evolution in the Greek world of the 5th century BC and during the Hellenistic and Imperial periods.
The first reader figures to appear in texts bear witness to a gradual entry into the "Kingdom of the written word". During the Hellenistic period, the book spread throughout the Greek world and became the preferred medium for poetic texts; the occasional reader was transformed into the professional reader, who consulted texts in libraries, and the erudite poet, who played with the visual structure of the written word and called on the reader to put texts into dialogue with one another. In this way, the history of reading also becomes the history of the birth of archiving, of the notions of canon and intertextuality and, finally, of the Greek sense of cultural belonging and identity.
