Writing, so often claimed as the necessary tool for social and individual progress, has another history. In classical Greece, writing was looked upon with suspicion, an attempt to subject the reader to the writer's will. The spread of books and their exaltation announced the victory of conquerors. In antiquity, writing was not written for a literary public but for private ceremonies, trade and secrecy. The invention of literature, writes Dupont, is recent, and its classical ancestry is not firm. Rather than representing solely the remains of a network of readers and writers, the odes, epics, tales and dramas of Greece and Rome had a much more diversified background and purpose. Some works were intended to be read in groups, other works were not meant to be read at all. The pleasures of reading - a vital characteristic of literature - were tied up in pleasures that were by no means private or intellectual. This text resists the temptation to project current tastes and beliefs upon Greece and Rome, and presents those writings in all their differences. The labour of understanding a lyric or an epic as it was understood in its times requires a radical reconsideration of what reading is and what it means.