How Did Ancient Greeks See Without Glasses?

It is a bright morning in Athens, around 350 BC. An old merchant holds a contract at arm's length, and the letters will not come clear. There are no glasses in a drawer and no optician, so he calls the enslaved man who reads for his household. This film answers one question: how did ancient Greeks see without glasses? Spectacles appeared in Italy only around 1286, so for two thousand years people past about forty-five lived with failing close vision and no lenses to help. The answer is not a cure. Greek life moved the problem out of the eye. Important words were cut large in stone, where a crowd could stand close. Information moved into speech, because courts and assemblies ran on voices more than paper. Close work went to the person whose eyes still worked: a child, a clerk, a scribe or an enslaved reader. Along the way we meet a juror paid three obols, a smoky olive-oil lamp, a clear stone in an Aristophanes joke, a water-filled glass globe described by Seneca, little sticks of eye medicine, and the blind poet Homer and the blind seer Teiresias. The story ends back in the shop with a question about trust. Would you give a household reader every private letter, or give up the written business that depends on them?