and nationalism were merely latent in the scribal mode. For in 
the highly tactile product of the scribe the reader found no 
means for splitting off the visual from the audile-tactile 
complex, such as the sixteenth and seventeenth century reader 
did. A great deal of what is said by Bernhard van Groningen in 
his study of the Greek time sense, In the Grip of the Past , is 
useful in understanding the effects of visual bias as they 
concern the time sense. As might be expected, the new Greek 
sense of chronological order and a one-way movement of 
events was an overlay on the older mythical and cosmic idea of 
simultaneous time, which is common to all nonliterate 
communities. Van Groningen observes (p. 17): “The Greeks 
often refer to the past and by doing so, they bind the matter in 
question to a chronological conception. But as soon as we 
inquire after the real meaning, it becomes obvious that the idea 
is not temporal but is used in general sense.”