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in drachmas, with 1,200 drachmas as the highest valuation given. Normally, only the name of the owner appears on the outside; the other data is rele- gated to the interior of the tablet and could not be read unless the tablet was unrolled or unfolded. A number of tablets are palimpsests; that is, the original entries were erased and replaced by new data.”65 From the extensive information available, John H. Kroll, author of the primary paper on the 1971 excavation, developed a theory of the purposes and operation of the Athenian Cavalry Archives.66
The persistent influence of the oral tradition is seen in fourth century Athens with their continuing reliance on witnesses for the oral validation of written contracts early in the fourth century, and the beginning phase out of oral witnesses to written contracts much later in the fourth century. Contracts were frequently written on wooden tablets.
The written contract first appears in our evidence in the first decade of the fourth century (Isoc. Trapez. XVII 20) and more frequently thereafter. But not till much later in the fourth century do we find a written contract apparently made without witnesses (Hyp. Ag. Athenogenes, i.e. 320s). Before this, witnesses were present as well and they duplicated the proof of the written con- tract. As Pringsheim has put it: “We are in a transitional stage in which documents did not yet replace attestation, but only helped to prove it”; and he recognizes that the oral agreement was still felt to be the important element of the contract (Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens [1989], p. 41).
Books do not seem to have become common in Athens until the first quarter of the fourth century.67 In an era in which memory was so highly valued, Plato, in his dialogue Phaedrus, written circa 380 BCE, provided one of the most eloquent and frequently quoted discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of writing. Plato’s teacher Socrates (d. 399 BCE) taught
65 Posner, “The Athenian Cavalry Archives of the Fourth and Third Centuries B.C.”, The American Archivist (1974): 579-82.
66 Kroll, “An Archive of the Athenian Cavalry,” Hesperia XLVI, no. 2 (1977), pp. 94-95
67 Harris, op. cit., p. 23.
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