visual sense even of words.

     The only concern here is to spot the degree of effect 
which the alphabet had on its first users. Lineality and 
homogeneity of parts were “discoveries,” or rather changes in 
the sense life of the Greeks under the new regime of phonetic 
writing. The Greeks expressed these new modes of visual 
perception in the arts. The Romans extended lineality and 
homogeneity into the civic and military spheres, and into the 
world of the arch and of enclosed or visual space. They did not 
so much extend the Greek “discoveries” as undergo the same 
process of detribalization and visualization. They extended 
lineality into an Empire and homogenization into the mass-
processing of citizens, statuary, and books. Today the Roman 
would be quite at home in the U.S.A. and the Greek by 
comparison would prefer the “backward” and oral cultures of