Dans le monde grec l'alphabétisation généralisée est un programme d'utopistes. Dans les îles du Soleil, mystérieuses et très agréables, que Iamboulos, d'après Diodore, aurait visitées à une époque non précisée, la connaissance des signes alphabétiques, de même que la connaissance de l'astrologie, étaient l'objet de la plus grande attention. On avait adopté une écriture artificielle basée sur sept lettres, dont chacune avait quatre emplois différents ; Diodore ajoute un détail curieux : on avait l'habitude d'écrire en procédant verticalement, de haut en bas. L'ordre est manifestement bouleversé dans les îles du Soleil : le travail n'existe pas, la nourriture est abondante et spontanée, la mort est douce autant que la vie, l'écriture procède verticalement. L'alphabétisation universellement répandue est donc un aspect de ce bouleversement utopique.

In ancient Greece, widespread alphabetization is a utopian programme. As a matter offact, it was very hard to decipher a written text because of its conditions of writing (without word séparation or signs of reading). So only a minority of people within urban population was alphabetized. If writing is a constitutive élément of Athenian democracy, being able to read does not mean diffusion of reading as reading of books. Thucydides remarks that his work is not especially destined to the audience and at the same time he hopes that it will be a "treasure" for ever. There is an audience Iistening to Thucydides, but it is limited. So, at Thucydides' âge, the conditions of alphabetization are changing, but we can 't imagine A thenian population as if perfectly able to read and write. They were not illeterate, as they knew letters, but above ail for business, for administration and political necessities (ostracism). In the Hellenistic Age there were 400.000 books in the Library of Alexandria, but they were read only by scholars who wrote for other scholars. In Rome, reading is almost inexistent out of the hellenized, political milieu. A real révolution ofthe material conditions of books (manuscripts) exploded only with the diffusion ofthe New Testament.