Herodotus and the Parts of the World

I. The Reign of Darius*

The paper focuses on the supposed cultural differences between the Greeks and the barbarians (represented mostly by the Persian empire), as seen by Herodotus. The observations are limited on the material of books III-VI, where the reader is told about the unsuccessful Ionian revolt and the first Persian war against the European Greeks, which had ended with the battle at Marathon. The main point of the essay is the specific Greek way of political expansion, and its possible parallels with the contemporary European model.
The paper is divided into the following chapters.
1. Persia and the Greeks. The clash.
2. The Parts of the World.
3. The Unity of the Greeks. The Greeks as a Maritime People. The Role of the Oracle at Delphi.
4. The Greek Fear in front of Persia.
5. Monarchy and Democracy. The Greek Understanding of the Freedom.


*the paper is published in:
ORIENTALIA. A Journal for the East. 2005, 1. New Bulgarian University

Building a Masters Programme: Difficulties and Challenges

1. The prerequisites *

A. Changes in the legislature

The academic system, which educates the students in three degrees – bachelor’s, master’s and doctor’s – is relatively new in Bulgaria. Until the change of the political system in 1989, and even several years after that, the students (I have in mind the students from the humanitarian specialties) underwent an incessant five-years-long education and graduated with a diploma for completed higher education and with the allowance to work as teachers (or exercise other profession). Receiving the diploma they acquired a professional qualification – say, philologist (or historian, or lawyer and so on). After that the diploma-bearer-specialist could apply in a competition for a governmental scholarship, then called aspirantska, and to become an aspirant, which means doctoral student. Several years later, if (s)he has managed to write and defend the Doctoral thesis, (s)he received a degree, called “candidate of science”. Later this degree was equalized to the present day “doctor”. Subsequently (s)he could write a second dissertation, this time without supervision and to acquire a higher scientific degree, called “doctor of sciences”, which was a necessary but not sufficient condition for becoming a “professor”. So, the then system had three degrees as well, but the difference was that the researcher needed much more years for work and had to pass two difficult procedures, in order to be named “doctor”.
This system, which was the result of the harmonization of the Bulgarian educational legislature with the Soviet one, is almost untouched today. In 1999 the changes in the Higher education act introduced the degrees bachelor and master, which haven’t existed before; the degree “candidate” has been converted into doctoral one, and “doctor of sciences” still exists today. Probably this degree will survive another 10 or 15 years – until the colleagues, who had troubled themselves with this procedure, remain influential in the academic, and in the political spheres as well. However, now it seems like a mechanical repetition of the first doctoral degree, it does not change the salary considerably, and it will be evaded more and more by the candidates for this title, because the changes in the Act allow them to become professors without it. Eventually it might disappear.
So, in 1999 the initially monolith five-years-long education has been divided into two degrees (bachelor’s and master’s) with special amendments in the Act. These engendered the requirement the specialties to provide new curricula, and they did so. Thus, the specialty classical philology, in which we are interested in, began to offer masters’ programmes, addressed mainly to students enrolled in the University after 1996. The programmes became accessible in 1999, which means one year before the graduation of these students. But in this year the programmes did not start, because there weren’t candidates. This was not strange, because at this time all the graduates in Bulgaria hold a degree, equal to the master’s. This was the more important reason for the lack of candidates; but it seems to me, that other reasons were there as well. I am going to discuss them further.

B. The situation in the specialty Classical philology

Actually, the shift from the one-degree to the two-degrees-system of the graduate education was not so sharp, as I have sketched it so far. Since this change was anticipated even in the beginning of the 90-ties, at least some of the universities reacted earlier, and some specialties, among which our specialty as well, started offering a basic division of the education in the beginning of the five-years period. So, the students studied three years according to the former curriculum and after that they entered a two-years specialization, chosen in conformity with their interest. In Classical philology the specializations were three: Greek studies (Grecistika), Latin studies (Latinistika) and History and Archeology, for which most probably some of the departments in the faculty of history has contributed. It was assumed, that every student has greater interest for one of the two antiquities – the Greek and the Latin, including their medieval corollaries. At the other hand, some of them are maybe exhausted by the preoccupation with language and literature, and are eager to learn more about the political history and the material culture. Hence, let’s give them an opportunity to specialize within the five-years course itself.
The educational conviction, founding this strategy was the following. The university is a place for the pursuit of elitist knowledge and for the creation of elitist professional scholars. “Elitist”, however means “highly specialized”, which in the realm of the ancient researches means: handling perfectly the classical languages (or better, language), but reading much more interpretations and commentaries, than original ancient sources, because a specialist is a person, who is familiar with everything, written by his/her colleagues all over the world on a certain topic. Consequently, the students, graduating from a secondary school, in which they have already followed five-years systematic learning of Greek and Latin, but in which they have studied other matters as well, were meant to undergo a basic three-years long university course in classical philology, and then to begin their specialization. The best were expected to continue as doctoral students, and some of them could hope to become regular academic staff in the specialty. There was an opportunity for them to find jobs as teachers in the classical lyceum, from which they have graduated, but it was not esteemed as so good, for the same reason. Because a teacher in a gymnasium is preoccupied with teaching and moreover (s)he has to stick to the manuals, in which the content of his discipline is treated in a general and simplified manner. That’s why (s)he could hardly become an elitist scholar.
All this strategy, however, had little to do with the reality, at least in Bulgaria, because it could not answer to the frequently posed question: what happens with the majority of the students, who graduate the specialty?

(follows in Monday, June 11)

* this is the full version of a lecture, held at the First Contact Session of the three-year "Contextualizing Classics" project of the Sofia University and the HESP Regional Seminar for Excellence in Teaching (Open Society Institute, Budapest).
For further information see: http://www.proclassics.org/

Writing and Erudition in XXI century

1. From the history of the written word

The culture to which we belong shows a considerable interest in the preservation of the memories of the past. This interest had been stated directly for the first time by Herodotus. It should be noted that his “History” is the most voluminous unified text, created by the Greeks in the classical epoch. The beginning of it says explicitly:

“These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feuds.” (Herodotus, I, 1. Translated by G. Rawlinson)

Since then the Greeks and the inheritors of their culture had made considerable efforts in order to continue the deed of Herodotus. It could be said, that they had developed a whole technology of the reminiscence. In the beginning they had written down what had happened, but also what might happen, creating thus the forms of the word, which we nowadays call history and literature.

“It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen - what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The work of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity; and it is this universality at which poetry aims in the names she attaches to the personages. The particular is - for example - what Alcibiades did or suffered” (Aristotle, Poetics, 9. Translated by S.H. Butcher).

They had added to that the records of the circumstances and the conditions in which things could happen and even of “what are” these things, which had created the scientific and the philosophical genres of the word.
Later on simultaneously with the production of new and new records antiquity had guided its concerns to the preservation of the available texts (and thus appeared the libraries and the philology) and – what is even more respectable – antiquity had guided its cares to make the access to them easier. Thanks to that, in the first centuries CE the traditional scroll had been replaced by the codex, because the codex had a very important advantage – it had been most suitable to unfold. In the Middle Ages the large square letters /majusculus/ by and by had been replaced by the small rounded letters /minusculus/; so the lines in each page could be much more in number and the writing down – much faster. In the Renaissance the paper became thinner and the separate volumes gathered much more text. The publishing of books became mundane; the market dealing with books and the total prints had increased. However, all that had been no more than an approach to the ancient way of propagation of the written word. The main problem, connected with the prolonged handwork on each separate copy of the book remained unsolved. It is evident, that the discovery of the print press led really to a great change: suddenly it had appeared, that the books could be many in number and cheap. Nobody had to copy with months one and the same book; nobody had to dictate to copyists, but the books could be propagated in a few hours in an unseen total print. In the next 500 years nothing considerable had happened again: the development relied – as before – on a paper of greater quality and on smaller letters.
The invention of Gutenberg has led to an unknown and incredible by that time propagation of the documents of the past. The memories of the deeds and the thoughts of the ancestors begot much more and much richer libraries. In the private houses appeared special places for the books: that was something, which had been of a great rarity in the times before. The need of the inconvenient and expensive travelling of the individual to the educational center had vanished: not only because the centers increased in number, but also because man already had enough means for his association to the word inheritance. Then appeared another problem that had been familiar to the antiquity, but that became serious only in the 15-th century, when the book wealth suddenly increased. At once appeared enormous quantities of new texts of a very low value. These were books of less importance: books-ephemera, deprived of the spring of their own culture; books-weeds, that had grown up thanks to the deed of Gutenberg, but they had strived to replace the old valuable texts, because of which the printing press itself had been invented. Their existence became a hindrance to the good education, and it did not disappear. On the contrary, by and by it became much more difficult to overcome it. How to help the one, who wishes to get really acquainted with one’s own culture – that means, to be “reminded” of what is essential of it – and that’s why he relies on the accessibility of the written word, but precisely because of this accessibility he gets quite another thing? The market and the libraries had been full of very quickly made similarities of literature; of very superficial retellings and compilations of the good historical texts (very often these were retellings of other retellings and compilations); also, very prolonged references of strictly made but aimless collections of facts; also, writings, containing senseless statements and untested or simply fancied evidences; and at last, clumsy, short-witted or incomprehensible sequences of words which claimed to be philosophy. The memory of what really had happened never reached these people, lost in the book jungle: instead of that their brains had been overloaded by words without clear content, and from them remained only several phrases, used with an ease. The education got by these texts resembled to the furniture of a house, the owners of which can afford themselves only cheap furniture from the common shops. When these houses are new, they suppress with the lack of taste of their keepers and with their overburdeness; but the bad furniture is very soon worn out and a feeling of blunt, negligence and poverty appears at once.
Let see what happened after that. Now, 500 years after Gutenberg we possess another device of preservation of the word – it is the computer record. The first and the most obvious result of that is the sharp increase of the volume of the information which is in the physical space around us. The whole ancient Greek literature from Homer to Proclus could be gathered in one CD – this object with its package is smaller, compared with the smallest edition of Herodotus, that could be produced with the means of the traditional editing. Thanks to the CD records all of the well-known literary monuments, belonging to all earth civilizations, could be placed in a modest library shelf. But there is something more. The virtual library of Internet gives freedom to the reader and deprives him from the duty even to bye books, recorded on CD. Today everyone could read Herodotus in the original language, in which he had written or translations of it on the screen of one’s personal computer without possessing no record whatsoever of the text. All the reader needs is an Internet connection that could be acquired by everyone. The free access to the whole word inheritance of the world is already secured.


2. The problem of the erudition

All this happened very quickly and as if astonishing easily – from the point of view of the one who remembers how many efforts and means it has taken to get one or another book. It seems, that everyone, who today wishes to use the written monuments of the past is no longer in isolation. One even does not need the knowledge of different languages, which has been inevitable until late and took a lot of time, because today almost all important texts are translated into English. That’s the way in which the modern man is released from the fragmentary and ideological selection of the texts, forced by the milieu where one got one’s education before. At the same time, the problem of every free and mundane society, where the monopoly on the creation of the word does not exist, remains the same. Who will explain what is useful to be read or whether it is useful to read anything at all? Does it make no difference in what way exactly the people in the XXI century will get their education?
From the point of view of the philologist (I use this word in the broadest sense; something like “specialist in word education’) the advantage of the present-day situation is in the fact, that it secures good conditions for a conscious choice.

(follows)

The Ancient Hermetism

1. Intentions of the research

This study has several concerns.
First, it gives a detailed description of the texts of the ancient hermetism (chapter I).
Secondly, it tries to comment on the testimonies, given by the ancient authors about the legend of Hermes Trismegistus and about the literature, ascribed to this mythical figure (chapter II);
Then it presents - as clearly and systematically as possible in the case of such difficult texts - the basic characteristics of the hermetic doctrine (chapter III);
Fourthly, it makes a brief survey of the academic studies on hermetism, with special emphasis on the discussion of the first half of this century, commenced with the famous ”Poimandres” by Reitzenstein, and its evolution after the discovery of the new writings at Nag Hammadi (chapter IV);
Fifthly, it informs the reader about the phenomenon of the so-called ”technical hermetism”, and about the history of the hermetic tradition among the Arabs and in the Renaissance (chapter V).
Special attention is paid to the attempt to construct a ”theory of the hermetic gnosticism.” The hypothesis of the chapter VI is as follows. There exist some basic models of the mythical thought, which underlie the majority of the mythological ”sacred histories”. It is important, that the most original and influential among the hermetic texts, the CH I, does present to its readers such a sacred history. Not only Hellenistic hermetism, but also many of the Gnostic systems of the same period (2nd-3rd CE), as well as Plato and the Orphics, needless to mention for the Judeo-Christian mythological tradition, are deeply occupied with the construction of a sacred history.
On the basis of hermetic and gnostic mythological material I try to demonstrate, that in the kernel of the sacred history myths there is a small number of pre-narrative notions. In most cases these notions are connected with the well-known (and very typical of the ancient mode of grasping the reality) dichotomy between the unchanging, unmovable, eternal on the one hand and the changeable, movable, ephemeral on the other hand. According to our hypothesis, every sacred history of gnostic type is a single realisation of the mentioned basic models, which exist as results of some simple relations between the two ”principles”.

2. Detailed summary

In the introduction there is a short explanation of the terms ”hermetism” and ”hermeticism”, in accordance with the definition of A. Faivre (Hermetism. Encyclopaedia of Religion. ed. M. Eliade, Chicago, 1986). Then it follows a presentation of the legend of Hermes and its writings in the way it was probably known after the 1st C.E. (I,1-2). The greater part of the first chapter is dedicated to a detailed description of the arguments of all religious and philosophical hermetic writings, preserved in Greek, Latin, Coptic and Armenian. These texts are known to the specialists as Corpus Hermeticum, Asclepius, Stobaei Hermetica, Fragmenta Hermetica, Nag Hammadi Hermetica, Definitiones Hermetis ad Asclepium and Fragmenta Vindobonensia (I, 3).
The second chapter is devoted to the testimonies of the ancient authors about hermetism. Firstly, the knowledge of the classical authors (up to the 1st B.C.) of the Egyptian god Thot-Hermes is discussed. The references of Herodotus, Plato and Cicero are cited (II, 1). After that there are comments on the testimonies of some Christian apologists like Athenagoras, Tertullian and Lactantius, and also on the information we find in pagan writers like Zosimus and Iamblichus. This part ends with a presentation of the testimonies in the works of St. Augustine and St. Cyril of Alexandria. We may conclude, that the opinion of the Christian authors in respect of Hermes is at least twofold. Some of them (Lactantius, Cyril) admire Hermes as the ”first philosopher”, and perceive him as a real Egyptian prophet of Christ.
Others, especially Augustine, critisize him for his interest in magic and astrology, and ascribe his prophetic abilities to his contact with impure demonic powers. As to the pagan authorities, they see in him the greatest personification of the old and glorious Egyptian wisdom and, naturally, the inventor of philosophy and of all worldly and occult sciences and arts (II, 2). The last paragraph is a brief survey of the Byzantine testimonies. Most interesting are the references of Psellus, who, as far as we know, is the first European reader of Hermes after the disappearance of the writings by the middle of the 6th CE.
The third chapter tries to make a systematic presentation of the hermetic doctrine. The observation (made by Bousset some 80 years ago), that in hermetism can be found two almost antithetical world-views, is accepted without objection. On this ground a comparison is made between the conceptions of the creator, the world and the soul in the ”optimistic” treatises and in the ”pessimistic” ones (III, 1-3).
The theme of the fourth chapter is the history of the studies on hermetism from the beginning of this century. The interest of philologists and historians of philosophy and religion is directed to the following problems. Was there in the late antiquity something like a hermetic church, or hermetic school of philosophy, or hermetism was only a kind of sophisticated religious literature, addressed to educated people? Where are to be sought the origins of religious and philosophical dogma of the hermetists? How to deal with the firmly established (since Bousset and Scott) distinctions between the different trends in hermetism, such as the ”technical” and the ”learned” one, and the ”optimistic” and ”pessimistic” one? The work of every scholar in this field is oriented to some of these problems and suggests one of the possible solutions. So, for example, R. Reitzenstein seeks to demonstrate the connection between hermetism and the Egyptian, or, in a later study, the Iranian mythological traditions. In his learned “Die Hellenistische Mysterienreligionen” he posits the hermetic ideas in the context of the very complicated religious life of that period. He is also the first 20th-century editor of hermetic texts. The evolution of hermetic studies after him can be seen as a series of attempts to develop his work and to examine his hypotheses (IV, 1).
So some scholars like Scott and more recently Mahe, are concerned chiefly with the editing and commenting on the extant texts. Others, like Heinrici, Dodd and Grese, are interested in the detailed study of the textual parallels between the hermetic treatises and the Bible. In the third place there are historians of the religious literature (Striker, Derchain) who are interested in the possibility to prove the ”Egyptian hypothesis” of the origin of the hermetism. A special attention is paid to the work of A.-J. Festugiere, a highly learned and undoubtedly the most productive author in the field of the academic studies on hermetism. He was interested, just like Reitzenstein, in all the aspects of this phenomenon. It can be said, that while the German scholar simply poses the questions, Festugiere gives a full and abundantly supported answer to them. The results of his life-long studies on the subject can be summarized as follows. Firstly, Festugiere says, there was no such thing as hermetic church, although it may be supposed, that some kind of schools of hermetic philosophy existed in the big cities of the Roman Empire.

(follows)