Direct observation of contemporary societies at the threshold of widespread literacy has not assisted our understanding of how such literacy altered ancient Greek society, in particular its political culture. The discovery of what Goody has called the "enabling effects" of literacy in contemporary societies tends to seduce the observer into confusing often rudimentary knowledge of how to read with popular access to important books and documents: this confusion is then projected onto ancient societies. "In ancient Greece," Goody writes, "alphabetic reading and writing was important for the development of political democracy." An examination of the ancient Greek city Athens exemplifies how this sort of confusion is detrimental to understanding ancient politics. In Athens, the early development of a written law code was retrospectively mythologized as the critical factor in breaking the power monopoly of the old aristocracy: hence the Greek tradition of the "law-giver," which has captured the imaginations of scholars like Goody. But the application and efficacy of all law codes depend on their interpretation by magistrates and courts, and unless the right of interpretation is "democratized," the mere existence of written laws changes little. In fact, never in antiquity did any but the elite consult documents and books. Even in Greek courts the juries heard only the relevant statutes read out during the proceedings, as they heard verbal testimony, and they then rendered their verdict on the spot, without the benefit of any discussion among themselves. True, in Athens the juries were representative of a broad spectrum of the population, and these juries, drawn from diverse social classes, both interpreted what they had heard and determined matters of fact. However, they guided solely by the speeches prepared for the parties by professional pleaders and by the quotations of laws or decrees within the speeches, rather than by their own access to any kind of document or book. Granted, people today also rely heavily on a truly knowledgeable minority for information and its interpretation, often transmitted orally. Yet this is still fundamentally different from an ancient society in which there was no "popular literature," i.e., no newspapers, magazines, or other media that dealt with sociopolitical issues. An ancient law code would have been analogous to the Latin Bible, a venerated document but a closed book. The resistance of the medieval Church to vernacular translations of the Bible, in the West at least, is therefore a pointer to the realities of ancient literacy. When fundamental documents are accessible for study only to an elite, the rest of the society is subject to the elite's interpretation of the rules of behavior, including right political behavior. Athens, insofar as it functioned as a democracy, did so not because of widespread literacy, but because the elite had chosen to accept democratic institutions.