This book considers a number of intellectual and social practices of ancient Greece: religion, law, medicine, science, philosophy, and several kinds of literature. In each case, we ask how the practice in question was affected by the introduction and use of written texts. Now, the relation between human activities and the tools employed in those activities is generally worth reflecting on, as the startling pace of modern technology cannot but remind us. Yet the case of written texts is compelling for reasons of its own. While the practices under consideration may not require writing for them simply to be carried out, they do require language as a vehicle for communicating intentions and meanings. So much is clear from Greece and elsewhere. Yet it is a fundamental fact of human history that, as a way of recording and transmitting language, writing established itself, over time and much of the world, as an indispensable feature of the practices under consideration. The current set of essays inquires into the conditions and consequences of the establishment of written texts within these cultural practices in ancient Greece.