Weber had already stressed in “Agrarverhaeltnisse im Altertum” that this was the fundamental difference between the Occidental (Graeco-Roman) world and Oriental world (ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Israel)… The citizen-state as a self-organizing military body developed in the coastal civilization of the Graeco-Roman world, because there the aristocracies had access to the gains made from commerce and thus could reduce the kingdom to a merely military leadership... Later they had to accept the political participation of the bulk of the citizenry who, as hoplites, provided most of the military. Priests were always mere functionaries of the community: they could claim no independent authority in political questions.
In the civilizations at the banks of great rivers, the necessity of river regulation and irrigation strengthened the primordial kingdoms and nurtured the development of a centralized bureaucracy subject to a monarch with an indisputable monopoly in political, military, and economic power. The monarch could rely on the support of a privileged priesthood. On this basis there later emerged what Weber described as “authoritarian liturgical state”. In the end this authoritarian liturgical state, especially as it has been created in Ptolemaic Egypt, came to dominate the later Roman Empire.
In his view commune building depends on the ability of the members to unite in a ritual community that he calls Verbruederung (confraternity) a community based on artificially-created and free-willed mutual ties, not in consanguinity. This meant that the community depended on the equal rights (in principle at least) of all its members, solidarity against non-members, connubium and a common cult symbolically expressed in communal cult-meals.
The notion of Verbruederung explains the fundamental difference between Occidental and Oriental city-dwellers and their different potential for commune-building; it also allows Weber to accentuate an important distinction between European Antiquity and Middle Ages.
In pre-Christian Antiquity… confraternity materialized in the union of heads of sibs that originally constituted the city-state by means of synoikismos (the real housing-together in an urban center or the constitution of a singular political center for hitherto separate communitites). The patrician clan, however, tried to preserve their ritual exclusivity with respect to the plebeians, an exclusivity abolished only after prolonged struggles… According to Weber, the ancient city-states failed to reach the intensity of confraternity that was later achieved in the medieval commune… In the European Middle Ageds confraternity possessed a positive religious basis, since all the members already belonged to the same church, as symbolized in the community of the Eucharist. (Of course, this inevitably implied the outsider-status of the Jews)…
In “Die Stadt” he makes the famous distinction between the ancient homo politicus and the medieval homo oeconomicus:
Whereas in Antiquity the hoplite army and its training, and thus military interests, increasingly came to constitute the pivot of all urban organization, in the Middle Ages most burgher privileges began with the limitation of the burgher’s military duties to garrison service. The economic interests of the medieval townsman lay in peaceful gain through commerce and the trade, and this was most pronouncedly so for the lower strata of the urban citizenry…
Weber followed a long tradition of criticism that held Graeco-Roman Antiquity responsible for cultivating the omnipotence of the state and preventing economical progress. This tradition goes back to the Scottish and French Enlightenment. It then was taken up in the French postrevolutionary debate (in reaction to the cult of Antiquity fostered by the Jacobins). In 1819 Benjamin Constant summarized and sharpened it in his famous essay on the distinction between the freedom of the ancients and that of the moderns. Finally, the tradition was developed in greater historical detail by late-nineteenth-century authors such as N.D. Fustel de Coulanges and Jacob Burckhardt.
Wilfried Nippel
***
Wilfried Nippel. Homo politicus and Homo Oeconomicus: the European Citizen According to Max Weber. In: Anthony Pagden ed. The Idea of Europe. From Antiquity to the European Union. Cambridge UP, 2002.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Books
Ewen Bowie. Lyric and Elegiac Poetry. In: J. Boardman, J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Oxford UP, 1986-1991
Alan Bowman. Recolonising Egypt. In: T.P Wiseman ed. Classics in Progress. Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford UP, 2002-2006.
Peter Burian. Myth and muthos:the shaping of tragic plot. In: P.E. Easterling ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge UP, 1997-2004.
Paul Cartledge. Greek civilization and slavery. In: T.P Wiseman ed. Classics in Progress. Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford UP, 2002-2006.
Thomas Cole. The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece. The John Hopkins UP, 1991-1995.
Michael Dewar. Culture wars: Latin literature from the second century to the end of the classical era. In: Oliver Taplin ed. Literature of the Roman World. Oxford UP, 2000-2001.
G.R.F. Ferrari. Platonic Love. In: Richard Kraut ed. The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge UP, 1992-2005
John Miles Foley. Epic as a genre. In: Robert Fowler ed. The Cambridge Companion to Homer. Cambridge UP, 2004-2007.
Hans-Georg Gadamer. A Century of Philosophy. A Conversation with Riccardo Dottori. Transl. by Rod Coltman with Sigrid Koepke. Continuum, 2003.
Edith Hall. The Sociology of Athenian tragedy. In: P.E. Easterling ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge UP, 1997-2004.
David Hahm. Polybius' applied political theory. In: Andre Laks and Malcolm Schofield ed. Justice and Generosity. Studies in Hellenistic Social and Political Philosophy. Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium Hellenisticum. Cambridge UP, 1995.
Sally C. Humphreys. The Strangeness of Gods. Historical Perspectives on the Interpretation of Athenian Religion. Oxford UP, 2004.
Richard Jenkyns. Silver Latin Poetry and the Latin Novel. In: J. Boardman. J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of the Roman World. Oxford UP, 1991.
George. B. Kerferd. The nomos-physis controversy; The theory of society. In: G.B. Kerferd. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge UP, 1981-1999.
Matthew Leigh. Primitivism and power: The beginnings of Latin literature. In: Oliver Taplin ed. Literature of the Roman World. Oxford UP, 2000-2001
Peter Levi. Greek Drama. In: J. Boardman, J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Oxford UP, 1986-1991.
Alasdair MacIntyre. Postscript to Plato; Aristotle's 'Ethics'; Postscript to Greek ethics. In: A Short History of Ethics. A history of moral philosophy from the Homeric Age to the twentieth century. Routledge 1967-2006.
Oswin Murray. Greek Historians. In: J. Boardman, J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Oxford UP, 1986-1991.
Andrea W. Nightingale. The rhetoric of philosophic "freedom"; The politics of panhellenism. In: Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy. Cambridge UP, 2004-2006.
Wilfried Nippel. Homo politicus and Homo Oeconomicus: the European Citizen According to Max Weber. In: Anthony Pagden ed. The Idea of Europe. From Antiquity to the European Union. Cambridge UP, 2002.
Simon Price. Religions of the Ancient Greeks. Cambridge UP, 1999-2005.
Jacqueline de Romilly. The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992-2002.
Christopher Rowe. Plato. In: David Sedley ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy. Cambridge UP 2003-2004.
Oliver Taplin. The spring of the Muses: Homer and related poetry. In: Oliver Taplin ed. Literature in the Greek World. Oxford UP, 2000-2001.
Alan Bowman. Recolonising Egypt. In: T.P Wiseman ed. Classics in Progress. Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford UP, 2002-2006.
Peter Burian. Myth and muthos:the shaping of tragic plot. In: P.E. Easterling ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge UP, 1997-2004.
Paul Cartledge. Greek civilization and slavery. In: T.P Wiseman ed. Classics in Progress. Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford UP, 2002-2006.
Thomas Cole. The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece. The John Hopkins UP, 1991-1995.
Michael Dewar. Culture wars: Latin literature from the second century to the end of the classical era. In: Oliver Taplin ed. Literature of the Roman World. Oxford UP, 2000-2001.
G.R.F. Ferrari. Platonic Love. In: Richard Kraut ed. The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge UP, 1992-2005
John Miles Foley. Epic as a genre. In: Robert Fowler ed. The Cambridge Companion to Homer. Cambridge UP, 2004-2007.
Hans-Georg Gadamer. A Century of Philosophy. A Conversation with Riccardo Dottori. Transl. by Rod Coltman with Sigrid Koepke. Continuum, 2003.
Edith Hall. The Sociology of Athenian tragedy. In: P.E. Easterling ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge UP, 1997-2004.
David Hahm. Polybius' applied political theory. In: Andre Laks and Malcolm Schofield ed. Justice and Generosity. Studies in Hellenistic Social and Political Philosophy. Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium Hellenisticum. Cambridge UP, 1995.
Sally C. Humphreys. The Strangeness of Gods. Historical Perspectives on the Interpretation of Athenian Religion. Oxford UP, 2004.
Richard Jenkyns. Silver Latin Poetry and the Latin Novel. In: J. Boardman. J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of the Roman World. Oxford UP, 1991.
George. B. Kerferd. The nomos-physis controversy; The theory of society. In: G.B. Kerferd. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge UP, 1981-1999.
Matthew Leigh. Primitivism and power: The beginnings of Latin literature. In: Oliver Taplin ed. Literature of the Roman World. Oxford UP, 2000-2001
Peter Levi. Greek Drama. In: J. Boardman, J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Oxford UP, 1986-1991.
Alasdair MacIntyre. Postscript to Plato; Aristotle's 'Ethics'; Postscript to Greek ethics. In: A Short History of Ethics. A history of moral philosophy from the Homeric Age to the twentieth century. Routledge 1967-2006.
Oswin Murray. Greek Historians. In: J. Boardman, J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Oxford UP, 1986-1991.
Andrea W. Nightingale. The rhetoric of philosophic "freedom"; The politics of panhellenism. In: Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy. Cambridge UP, 2004-2006.
Wilfried Nippel. Homo politicus and Homo Oeconomicus: the European Citizen According to Max Weber. In: Anthony Pagden ed. The Idea of Europe. From Antiquity to the European Union. Cambridge UP, 2002.
Simon Price. Religions of the Ancient Greeks. Cambridge UP, 1999-2005.
Jacqueline de Romilly. The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992-2002.
Christopher Rowe. Plato. In: David Sedley ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy. Cambridge UP 2003-2004.
Oliver Taplin. The spring of the Muses: Homer and related poetry. In: Oliver Taplin ed. Literature in the Greek World. Oxford UP, 2000-2001.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Greek politicians and public figures
When I began research, in 1957, the two most original and stimulating scholars working on Ancient Greece were Moses Finley and Jean-Pierre Vernant. It was their example that led me into anthropology; both, but especially Finley, led me to see anthropology as concerned with the criticism of culturally shaped categories and presuppositions…
The posthumous honours granted to Lycurgus in 307/6, when the city was freed from Demetrios' rule, form a fitting end to this somewhat ambivalent career. His descendants were granted perpetual dining rights in the Prytaneion.
In the archaic period the grant of lifelong dining rights in the Prytaneion - mainly, probably, to victors in major events at the Panhellenic games - meant a permanent seat at the centre of power in the city. After the fall of the Peisistratid tyranny the honour was awarded - partly, perhaps, in sympathy with the growth of a more critical attitude towards the honours heaped on successful athletes, partly as a snub to the Alkmaionidai - to the senior representatives of the families of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, who had assassinated Peisistratos' son Hipparchos. The next Athenian to be awarded lifelong sitesis was Cleon, in the enthusiasm which followed his capture of the Spartan force on Sphacteria in 425. A similar grant was made to Iphicrates after the peace with Sparta in 371. In the period after Chaeronea, two divergent conceptions of the role of grants of perpetual sitesis seem to have coexisted in implicit contradiction. Grants to Demades in c. 335… and the comic poet Philippides of Kephale in 283/2 seem to extend to citizens who have played an important role as intermediaries between Athens and Macedonian rulers the honours which were being granted to non-Athenians for performing the same functions. Yet the posthumous hereditary honours granted to Lycurgus and (in 280/79) to Demosthenes indicate a different view: those who dine in the Prytaneion are seen as representing glorious moments in the city's past, players in a perpetual historical pageant. Less than twenty years after his death, Lycurgus had become a museum piece, a figure almost as remote as Harmodios and Aristogeiton - two other Athenian aristocrats whose lives ended in irony…
In 1985 I saw an analogy between Lycurgus and Margaret Thatcher in that both combined a patriotic and ostensibly democratic rhetoric with undemocratic practice (in the British case, dismantling the welfare state), and both seemed to be clinging in their patriotism to an outdated conception of their states as Great Powers… Demosthenes political speeches can be read in a Thucydidean light; he presents himself as having to argue a relatively unpopular political programme before voters who are either reluctant to support military action or still convinced that the major danger to Athens was Persia rather than Macedon. The hectoring tone, however, seems closer to that of Thucydides' Cleon than his Pericles; perhaps hearers did not find a significant difference between Demosthenes' harangues and the moralizing rhetoric of Lycurgus. Did Lycurgus indeed see himself as following in Demosthenes' footsteps?... Asking questions about what we want from our own politicians and how we would like to be constructed as citizens may be a way of formulating new questions about Athens.
S. C. Humphreys
***
Sally C. Humphreys. The Strangeness of Gods. Historical Perspectives on the Interpretation of Athenian Religion. Oxford UP, 2004.
The posthumous honours granted to Lycurgus in 307/6, when the city was freed from Demetrios' rule, form a fitting end to this somewhat ambivalent career. His descendants were granted perpetual dining rights in the Prytaneion.
In the archaic period the grant of lifelong dining rights in the Prytaneion - mainly, probably, to victors in major events at the Panhellenic games - meant a permanent seat at the centre of power in the city. After the fall of the Peisistratid tyranny the honour was awarded - partly, perhaps, in sympathy with the growth of a more critical attitude towards the honours heaped on successful athletes, partly as a snub to the Alkmaionidai - to the senior representatives of the families of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, who had assassinated Peisistratos' son Hipparchos. The next Athenian to be awarded lifelong sitesis was Cleon, in the enthusiasm which followed his capture of the Spartan force on Sphacteria in 425. A similar grant was made to Iphicrates after the peace with Sparta in 371. In the period after Chaeronea, two divergent conceptions of the role of grants of perpetual sitesis seem to have coexisted in implicit contradiction. Grants to Demades in c. 335… and the comic poet Philippides of Kephale in 283/2 seem to extend to citizens who have played an important role as intermediaries between Athens and Macedonian rulers the honours which were being granted to non-Athenians for performing the same functions. Yet the posthumous hereditary honours granted to Lycurgus and (in 280/79) to Demosthenes indicate a different view: those who dine in the Prytaneion are seen as representing glorious moments in the city's past, players in a perpetual historical pageant. Less than twenty years after his death, Lycurgus had become a museum piece, a figure almost as remote as Harmodios and Aristogeiton - two other Athenian aristocrats whose lives ended in irony…
In 1985 I saw an analogy between Lycurgus and Margaret Thatcher in that both combined a patriotic and ostensibly democratic rhetoric with undemocratic practice (in the British case, dismantling the welfare state), and both seemed to be clinging in their patriotism to an outdated conception of their states as Great Powers… Demosthenes political speeches can be read in a Thucydidean light; he presents himself as having to argue a relatively unpopular political programme before voters who are either reluctant to support military action or still convinced that the major danger to Athens was Persia rather than Macedon. The hectoring tone, however, seems closer to that of Thucydides' Cleon than his Pericles; perhaps hearers did not find a significant difference between Demosthenes' harangues and the moralizing rhetoric of Lycurgus. Did Lycurgus indeed see himself as following in Demosthenes' footsteps?... Asking questions about what we want from our own politicians and how we would like to be constructed as citizens may be a way of formulating new questions about Athens.
S. C. Humphreys
***
Sally C. Humphreys. The Strangeness of Gods. Historical Perspectives on the Interpretation of Athenian Religion. Oxford UP, 2004.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Greeks and others
It hardly needs saying that the Greeks had earlier fitted Egyptian 'historical' events into their own chronological narrative scheme, which accomodated, for example, Solon's visits to Egypt, where he heard about Atlantis. But early in the Ptolemaic period an internal Egyptian chronological 'narrative' was constructed, was used by classical historians such as Diodorus, and is still used, as is too rarely explicitly stated, as the basis of the modern chronology of dynastic Egypt. This was created in the third century BC in the ambience of the Ptolemaic court by an Egyptian priest of Isis, Manetho of Sebennytos (in the Delta), writing in Greek, who alone 'represents a complete and systematic version of the Egyptian tradition' (G.P. Verbrugghe and J.M Wickersham, Berossos and Manetho. Michigan, 1996).
Egyptian history was thus recaptured or re-invented within a classicising historiographical framework possibly with the encouragement, if not instruction, of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the monarch who founded that factory of classical scholarship, the Alexandrian Museum.
The history and culture of one civilization were described and explained in the language of another. It is hardly necessary to labour the striking parallels: the work of Berossus, the Letter of Aristeas, the Septuagint. Manetho, of course, uses earlier Egyptian source material but, as far as I am aware, none of this is self-reflexive or historiographically conscious; that is, it never asks itself whether what it is saying is correct or plausible. The key difference is that Manetho and his material become part of a historiographical tradition, in which he debates with and criticises Herodotus and is in turn criticized by Josephus.
Alan Bowman
***
Alan Bowman. Recolonising Egypt. In: T.P Wiseman ed. Classics in Progress. Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford UP, 2002-2006.
Egyptian history was thus recaptured or re-invented within a classicising historiographical framework possibly with the encouragement, if not instruction, of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the monarch who founded that factory of classical scholarship, the Alexandrian Museum.
The history and culture of one civilization were described and explained in the language of another. It is hardly necessary to labour the striking parallels: the work of Berossus, the Letter of Aristeas, the Septuagint. Manetho, of course, uses earlier Egyptian source material but, as far as I am aware, none of this is self-reflexive or historiographically conscious; that is, it never asks itself whether what it is saying is correct or plausible. The key difference is that Manetho and his material become part of a historiographical tradition, in which he debates with and criticises Herodotus and is in turn criticized by Josephus.
Alan Bowman
***
Alan Bowman. Recolonising Egypt. In: T.P Wiseman ed. Classics in Progress. Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford UP, 2002-2006.
Greek society
One way of re-posing the question 'Was Greek civilisation based on slavery?' is to ask what Greek civilisation would have been like without it...
Looking forward, to the world of semi-realistic Utopia, no matter how hard they tried to view things otherwise, the Greeks could not quite envisage a slaveless future. The only alternative to slave labour that they could imagine was a world of automatic life, in which the necessities were constantly available without human labour, on tap as it were, and craft goods were produced or moved by automation (Arist. Politics, 1253b).
The inescapable inference is that the Greeks could conceive of no practical alternative for slavery. That is especially clear from the work of Aristotle… The proverb he quoted 'No leisure for slaves' (1334a) was at one level a statement of fact; more significantly, leisure (schole) was what distinguished the truly free man (eleutheros) and the truly 'liberal' lifestyle (eleutherios).
Moses Finley, as we have seen, did not give a direct, unequivocal answer to his own question ['Was Greek civilization based on slave labour?' (1959)]. The nearest he came to it, with consciously appropriate imagery, was this: 'If we could emancipate ourselves from the despotism of extraneous moral, intellectual and political pressures, we would conclude, without hesitation, that slavery was a basic element of Greek civilization.' If we could... Granted that we cannot, should we even try?
I would like to end by returning to my starting point, morality, and by quoting some wise words of Keith Bradley which I entirely endorse:
'The kinds of impact on slaves made by the traffic in human merchandise that I have posited are symptomatic of what in contemporary affairs we should now call violation of fundamental human rights. If the current sensitivity to that concept sharpens perception and understanding of the past, then that to my mind marks a true historical advance. It does not follow that what is admirable from the past is any the less admirable; it simply means, that the price of the admirable - an incalculable degree of human misery and suffering - is given its full historical due…'
To put the same point emblematically: 1959 was the year not only of Finley's epoch-making article but also of the death of Billie Holiday. Both, it seems to me, have a place within the study and understanding of ancient Greek slavery. They remind us, rather uncomfortably, just how deeply the whole western tradition of freedom is implicated, at its source and in the ever flowing current, with a history of unfreedom.
Paul Cartledge
***
Αndocides in 400 BC was defending himself against accusations of being involved in the mutilation [of the herms, 415 BC] and of thus having turned informer to save his own skin. He had opposed the mutilation, which took place while he was incapacitated by injury. Only one herm in the city escaped mutilation, that near his house, which the conspirators had expected him to mutilate. Apparently, on his return to Athens from exile in 403, he had instituted proceedings for impiety against someone for mutilating a herm belonging to his own family. This ploy to clear his own name disgusted his prosecutor in 400, who argued that it showed contempt for the gods. Andocides' own speech and that of the prosecution concur in their condemnation of the impious nature of the crime.
The profanation of the Eleusinian Mysteries came to light immediately before the Sicilian expedition set off. It was alleged that Alcibiades and others had celebrated the Mysteries in at least five private houses in the presence of non-initiates… The prosecution of 400 stressed that the rite was performed by the wrong person and that in imitation of the rites sacred things were revealed to the uninitiated (Lysias 6.51). This celebration was even more shocking than the mutilation of the herms and challenged one of Athens' central religious rites. So sensitive was the matter that the assembly in 415 to which news of the profanation was brought was cleared of non-initiated before matters could proceed and Andocides' jury in 400 again consisted only of Eleusinian initiates…
Those implicated in the scandal, including Andocides, were the subject of an awesome curse by male and female priests. Andocides himself was excluded by a special decree of 415 from the Athenian Agora and the sanctuaries. He thus wandered the Greek world for thirteen years until his return in 402. At his trial in 400 Andocides denied that he had acted impiously or had turned informer, especially not of his own father. He also argued that the exile decree of 415 was no longer valid because of subsequent constitutional changes. He stressed his performance of religious functions for the state since his return in 402 and argued that his safe passage over the seas in the years of exile demonstrated that the gods did not seek his death. Conversely, the prosecution argued for the continuing validity of the exile decree, expressed horror at the impious nature of his advising the counsel on religious matters and the possibility of his being appointed magistrate in charge of the Mysteries, and claimed that he had been preserved from the sea specifically to stand trial in Athens. But the central event which had brought about the trial was Andocides' alleged participation in the Mysteries while still debarred. The prosecution argued for the absolute necessity pf punishing impiety: the gods were capable of punishing impiety themselves, but the jury should here act as agents of the gods. Andocides evaded the issue of his alleged participation in the Mysteries, obfuscated the events of 415 and appealed successfully for leniency. But he entirely agreed with the prosecution that those actually guilty of impiety deserved death (I.30)
Simon Price
***
Paul Cartledge. Greek civilization and slavery. In: T.P Wiseman ed. Classics in Progress. Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford UP, 2002-2006.
Simon Price. Religions of the Ancient Greeks. Cambridge UP, 1999-2005.
Looking forward, to the world of semi-realistic Utopia, no matter how hard they tried to view things otherwise, the Greeks could not quite envisage a slaveless future. The only alternative to slave labour that they could imagine was a world of automatic life, in which the necessities were constantly available without human labour, on tap as it were, and craft goods were produced or moved by automation (Arist. Politics, 1253b).
The inescapable inference is that the Greeks could conceive of no practical alternative for slavery. That is especially clear from the work of Aristotle… The proverb he quoted 'No leisure for slaves' (1334a) was at one level a statement of fact; more significantly, leisure (schole) was what distinguished the truly free man (eleutheros) and the truly 'liberal' lifestyle (eleutherios).
Moses Finley, as we have seen, did not give a direct, unequivocal answer to his own question ['Was Greek civilization based on slave labour?' (1959)]. The nearest he came to it, with consciously appropriate imagery, was this: 'If we could emancipate ourselves from the despotism of extraneous moral, intellectual and political pressures, we would conclude, without hesitation, that slavery was a basic element of Greek civilization.' If we could... Granted that we cannot, should we even try?
I would like to end by returning to my starting point, morality, and by quoting some wise words of Keith Bradley which I entirely endorse:
'The kinds of impact on slaves made by the traffic in human merchandise that I have posited are symptomatic of what in contemporary affairs we should now call violation of fundamental human rights. If the current sensitivity to that concept sharpens perception and understanding of the past, then that to my mind marks a true historical advance. It does not follow that what is admirable from the past is any the less admirable; it simply means, that the price of the admirable - an incalculable degree of human misery and suffering - is given its full historical due…'
To put the same point emblematically: 1959 was the year not only of Finley's epoch-making article but also of the death of Billie Holiday. Both, it seems to me, have a place within the study and understanding of ancient Greek slavery. They remind us, rather uncomfortably, just how deeply the whole western tradition of freedom is implicated, at its source and in the ever flowing current, with a history of unfreedom.
Paul Cartledge
***
Αndocides in 400 BC was defending himself against accusations of being involved in the mutilation [of the herms, 415 BC] and of thus having turned informer to save his own skin. He had opposed the mutilation, which took place while he was incapacitated by injury. Only one herm in the city escaped mutilation, that near his house, which the conspirators had expected him to mutilate. Apparently, on his return to Athens from exile in 403, he had instituted proceedings for impiety against someone for mutilating a herm belonging to his own family. This ploy to clear his own name disgusted his prosecutor in 400, who argued that it showed contempt for the gods. Andocides' own speech and that of the prosecution concur in their condemnation of the impious nature of the crime.
The profanation of the Eleusinian Mysteries came to light immediately before the Sicilian expedition set off. It was alleged that Alcibiades and others had celebrated the Mysteries in at least five private houses in the presence of non-initiates… The prosecution of 400 stressed that the rite was performed by the wrong person and that in imitation of the rites sacred things were revealed to the uninitiated (Lysias 6.51). This celebration was even more shocking than the mutilation of the herms and challenged one of Athens' central religious rites. So sensitive was the matter that the assembly in 415 to which news of the profanation was brought was cleared of non-initiated before matters could proceed and Andocides' jury in 400 again consisted only of Eleusinian initiates…
Those implicated in the scandal, including Andocides, were the subject of an awesome curse by male and female priests. Andocides himself was excluded by a special decree of 415 from the Athenian Agora and the sanctuaries. He thus wandered the Greek world for thirteen years until his return in 402. At his trial in 400 Andocides denied that he had acted impiously or had turned informer, especially not of his own father. He also argued that the exile decree of 415 was no longer valid because of subsequent constitutional changes. He stressed his performance of religious functions for the state since his return in 402 and argued that his safe passage over the seas in the years of exile demonstrated that the gods did not seek his death. Conversely, the prosecution argued for the continuing validity of the exile decree, expressed horror at the impious nature of his advising the counsel on religious matters and the possibility of his being appointed magistrate in charge of the Mysteries, and claimed that he had been preserved from the sea specifically to stand trial in Athens. But the central event which had brought about the trial was Andocides' alleged participation in the Mysteries while still debarred. The prosecution argued for the absolute necessity pf punishing impiety: the gods were capable of punishing impiety themselves, but the jury should here act as agents of the gods. Andocides evaded the issue of his alleged participation in the Mysteries, obfuscated the events of 415 and appealed successfully for leniency. But he entirely agreed with the prosecution that those actually guilty of impiety deserved death (I.30)
Simon Price
***
Paul Cartledge. Greek civilization and slavery. In: T.P Wiseman ed. Classics in Progress. Essays on Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford UP, 2002-2006.
Simon Price. Religions of the Ancient Greeks. Cambridge UP, 1999-2005.
Aristotle
In the most general term, banausoi is the label for people who earn their living by plying a "craft" that involves the use of the hands. Banausos, however, is not merely a descriptive term, since it invariably marks a person as mercantile and servile. Thus Aristotle places the "banausic" arts in the category of "wealthgetting that involves exchange" and identifies them as a form of "labour for hire". In text from the classical period, the word banausia and its cognate is virtually monopolized by Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle; this language is never used in oratory or comedy (whose authors tend to reflect democratic sentiments).
First of all, aristocratic writers use the term to define a group of people as "by nature" inferior and unfit for participation in politics.
Nay, in ancient times, and among some nations the artisan class (banausoi) were slaves or foreigners, and therefore the majority of them are so now. The best form of state will not admit them to citizenship; but if they are admitted, then our definition of the virtue of a citizen will not apply to every citizen nor to every free man as such, but only to those who are freed from necessary services. The necessary people are either slaves who minister to the wants of individuals, or mechanics and laborers who are the servants of the community (Aristotle, Politics, III,5 - Jowett).
Xenophon too, claims that banausoi should not participate in politics, since they lack the leisure required for participating in civic affairs in a responsible and beneficial manner:
A good suggestion, Critobulus, for the base mechanic (banausic) arts, so called, have got a bad name; and what is more, are held in ill repute by civilised communities, and not unreasonably… Hand in hand with physical enervation follows enfeeblement of soul: while the demand which these base mechanic arts makes on the time of those employed in them leaves them no leisure to devote to the claims of friendship and the state. How can such folk be other than sorry friends and ill defenders of the fatherland? So much so that in some states, especially those reputed to be warlike, no citizen is allowed to exercise any mechanical craft at all (Oec. IV,2 - Dakyns).
Clearly then, banausia is a loaded and highly derogatory term. Note in particular Aristotle's claim that many banausoi were nouveaux riches, i.e. wealthy members of non-aristocratic class (Politics, III,5)… A passage in Nicomachean Ethics offers clear evidence of this point:
The man who goes to excess and is vulgar (banausos) exceeds, as has been said, by spending beyond what is right. For on small objects of expenditure he spends much and displays a tasteless showiness; e.g. he gives a club dinner on the scale of a wedding banquet, and when he provides the chorus for a comedy he brings them on to the stage in purple, as they do at Megara. And all such things he will do not for honour's sake but to show off his wealth, and because he thinks he is admired for these things, and where he ought to spend much he spends little and where little, much (NE IV,2 - Ross).
In this period, then, we find a rhetoric and ideology which set the "truly free" individual in opposition to men who were free in a merely legal and civic sense. The free or "liberal" man, in short, is leisured, educated, independent, and "truly" fit for rule, whereas the "banausic" or "illiberal" individual is slavish, servile, wage-earning, uneducated and unfit for rule…
I have discussed this ideological and political program because it provides the context for the fourth-century discussions of the "free" activity of theoria.
Andrea Nightingale
***
Different activities, different pleasures; which activities then? The activities of the good man... What is best in us is reason and the characteristic activity of reason is theoria, that speculative reasoning which deals with unchanging truths. Such speculation can be a continuous and pleasant - it is, Aristotle says brusquely, "the pleasantest" - form of activity. It is a self-sufficient occupation...
Thus, surprisingly, the end of human life is metaphysical contemplation of truth. External goods are necessary only to a limited extent, and the wealth required is only moderate. Thus the whole of human life reaches its highest point in the activity of a speculative philosopher with a reasonable income. The banality of the conclusion could not be more apparent. Why then it is reached? One clue is in Aristotle’s concept of self-sufficiency…
Aristotle’s audience, then, is explicitly a small leisured minority. We are no longer faced with a telos for human life as such, but with a telos for one kind of life which presupposes a certain kind of hierarchical social order and which presupposes also a view of the universe in which the realm of timeless truth is metaphysically superior to the human world of change and sense experience and ordinary rationality. All Aristotle’s conceptual brilliance in the course of the argument declines at the end to an apology for this extraordinarily parochial form of human existence...
In fact, Aristotle is much more of a quietist in relation to political activity. Provided only that there is a room for the contemplative elite, the Nicomachean Ethics does not provide for a condemnation or an endorsement of any social structure… In fact, by his own practice as the tutor of the young Alexander, and by his advocacy of the life of contemplation, Aristotle, as Kelsen pointed out, sided with the powers, which were about to destroy the polis as a political entity. For the exaltation of the contemplative life is an exaltation of it as a form of life for those men who have hitherto composed the political elite. It provides a rationale for their withdrawal to the status of citizen, “good citizens” in Aristotle’s sense, but not rulers… As Kelsen puts it, “the glorification of the contemplative life, which has renounced all activity and more especially all political activity, has at all times constituted a typical element of political morality set up by the ideologies of absolute monarchy. For the essential tendency of this form of state consists in excluding the subjects from all share in public affairs” (International Journal of Ethics, XLVIII, 1).
Alasdair MacIntyre
***
Andrea W. Nightingale. The rhetoric of philosophic "freedom". In: Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy. Cambridge UP, 2004-2006.
Alasdair MacIntyre. Aristotle's 'Ethics'; Postscript to Greek ethics. In: A Short History of Ethics. A history of moral philosophy from the Homeric Age to the twentieth century. Routledge 1967-2006.
First of all, aristocratic writers use the term to define a group of people as "by nature" inferior and unfit for participation in politics.
Nay, in ancient times, and among some nations the artisan class (banausoi) were slaves or foreigners, and therefore the majority of them are so now. The best form of state will not admit them to citizenship; but if they are admitted, then our definition of the virtue of a citizen will not apply to every citizen nor to every free man as such, but only to those who are freed from necessary services. The necessary people are either slaves who minister to the wants of individuals, or mechanics and laborers who are the servants of the community (Aristotle, Politics, III,5 - Jowett).
Xenophon too, claims that banausoi should not participate in politics, since they lack the leisure required for participating in civic affairs in a responsible and beneficial manner:
A good suggestion, Critobulus, for the base mechanic (banausic) arts, so called, have got a bad name; and what is more, are held in ill repute by civilised communities, and not unreasonably… Hand in hand with physical enervation follows enfeeblement of soul: while the demand which these base mechanic arts makes on the time of those employed in them leaves them no leisure to devote to the claims of friendship and the state. How can such folk be other than sorry friends and ill defenders of the fatherland? So much so that in some states, especially those reputed to be warlike, no citizen is allowed to exercise any mechanical craft at all (Oec. IV,2 - Dakyns).
Clearly then, banausia is a loaded and highly derogatory term. Note in particular Aristotle's claim that many banausoi were nouveaux riches, i.e. wealthy members of non-aristocratic class (Politics, III,5)… A passage in Nicomachean Ethics offers clear evidence of this point:
The man who goes to excess and is vulgar (banausos) exceeds, as has been said, by spending beyond what is right. For on small objects of expenditure he spends much and displays a tasteless showiness; e.g. he gives a club dinner on the scale of a wedding banquet, and when he provides the chorus for a comedy he brings them on to the stage in purple, as they do at Megara. And all such things he will do not for honour's sake but to show off his wealth, and because he thinks he is admired for these things, and where he ought to spend much he spends little and where little, much (NE IV,2 - Ross).
In this period, then, we find a rhetoric and ideology which set the "truly free" individual in opposition to men who were free in a merely legal and civic sense. The free or "liberal" man, in short, is leisured, educated, independent, and "truly" fit for rule, whereas the "banausic" or "illiberal" individual is slavish, servile, wage-earning, uneducated and unfit for rule…
I have discussed this ideological and political program because it provides the context for the fourth-century discussions of the "free" activity of theoria.
Andrea Nightingale
***
Different activities, different pleasures; which activities then? The activities of the good man... What is best in us is reason and the characteristic activity of reason is theoria, that speculative reasoning which deals with unchanging truths. Such speculation can be a continuous and pleasant - it is, Aristotle says brusquely, "the pleasantest" - form of activity. It is a self-sufficient occupation...
Thus, surprisingly, the end of human life is metaphysical contemplation of truth. External goods are necessary only to a limited extent, and the wealth required is only moderate. Thus the whole of human life reaches its highest point in the activity of a speculative philosopher with a reasonable income. The banality of the conclusion could not be more apparent. Why then it is reached? One clue is in Aristotle’s concept of self-sufficiency…
Aristotle’s audience, then, is explicitly a small leisured minority. We are no longer faced with a telos for human life as such, but with a telos for one kind of life which presupposes a certain kind of hierarchical social order and which presupposes also a view of the universe in which the realm of timeless truth is metaphysically superior to the human world of change and sense experience and ordinary rationality. All Aristotle’s conceptual brilliance in the course of the argument declines at the end to an apology for this extraordinarily parochial form of human existence...
In fact, Aristotle is much more of a quietist in relation to political activity. Provided only that there is a room for the contemplative elite, the Nicomachean Ethics does not provide for a condemnation or an endorsement of any social structure… In fact, by his own practice as the tutor of the young Alexander, and by his advocacy of the life of contemplation, Aristotle, as Kelsen pointed out, sided with the powers, which were about to destroy the polis as a political entity. For the exaltation of the contemplative life is an exaltation of it as a form of life for those men who have hitherto composed the political elite. It provides a rationale for their withdrawal to the status of citizen, “good citizens” in Aristotle’s sense, but not rulers… As Kelsen puts it, “the glorification of the contemplative life, which has renounced all activity and more especially all political activity, has at all times constituted a typical element of political morality set up by the ideologies of absolute monarchy. For the essential tendency of this form of state consists in excluding the subjects from all share in public affairs” (International Journal of Ethics, XLVIII, 1).
Alasdair MacIntyre
***
Andrea W. Nightingale. The rhetoric of philosophic "freedom". In: Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy. Cambridge UP, 2004-2006.
Alasdair MacIntyre. Aristotle's 'Ethics'; Postscript to Greek ethics. In: A Short History of Ethics. A history of moral philosophy from the Homeric Age to the twentieth century. Routledge 1967-2006.
Elegiac, iambic and melic poetry
Only of hexameter poetry have we examples earlier than 700 BC. But many genres first known to us from the seventh century were certainly thriving long before – that century gives us our first elegiac, iambic, and melic poetry because by then writing was spreading so that the works of celebrated poets could be recorded as those of their predecessors could not. Of our genres only elegiac significantly exploited those formulaic phrases which both aided the composition and recitation of epic and contributed to its oral preservation. Furthermore much of our poetry was composed with particular audiences and occasions in view, so that incentives to preserve it orally were fewer.
Also different from epic is the prominence given to the personality of the poet or singer. The first person becomes the focus of attention and ‘I’ (occasionally ‘we’) tell of ‘my’ loves, grieves, hates, and adventures. This has sometimes misled scholars into seeing the seventh century as an efflorescence of individualism. Not only, however, did such poetry exist earlier, but the ‘I’ of a poem cannot unquestioningly be referred to the person of the singer or poet. As traditional folk-songs and modern popular songs show, ‘I’ songs can be sung with feeling by many other than their composers. Rarely do we take such statements as autobiographical; sometimes indeed no composer is known. Hence we should hesitate to use fragments of such poets as Archilochus to ascribe strident self-assertion or to reconstruct biography.
Three more preliminaries. First, although what survives is ascribed to a few dozen figures, the genres exemplified, and many conventional themes and approaches, will have been attempted by hundreds over the Greek world. Most of our poetry was not, like epic, the virtuosos’s preserve, but was designed for occasions were amateurs contributed. This is clearest in the tradition about after-dinner singing at Athens: a myrtle branch circulated, and with it the obligation to sing…
Second, relative importance of text and accompaniment. Melic and elegiac poetry was sung, usually accompanied respectively on the lyre and the aulos (an oboe-like wind instrument). For no song can we reconstruct the vocal or instrumental line, and indeed we have only a rudimentary understanding of what it might have been like. In many songs music may have contributed more to initial impact than text, in many more it was an integral part of the effect. Doubtless the texts selected for copying and transmission were those whose words were of greater moment than music: but never forget that, even reading these poems aloud, we gain access only to part of their intended effect, and before impugning deficiency of thought or skill, ponder whether modern song-writers would gladly be judged on ‘lyrics’ alone.
Third, the work of almost all these poets has survived only in shattered fragments, preserved by later quotation or on papyri recovered from Graeco-Roman Egypt. We have a few dozen elegiac poems arguably complete, but of melic poets other than Pindar and Bacchylides only half a dozen complete songs remain.
Ewen Bowie
Ewen Bowie. Lyric and Elegiac Poetry. In: J. Boardman, J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Oxford UP, 1986-1991
Also different from epic is the prominence given to the personality of the poet or singer. The first person becomes the focus of attention and ‘I’ (occasionally ‘we’) tell of ‘my’ loves, grieves, hates, and adventures. This has sometimes misled scholars into seeing the seventh century as an efflorescence of individualism. Not only, however, did such poetry exist earlier, but the ‘I’ of a poem cannot unquestioningly be referred to the person of the singer or poet. As traditional folk-songs and modern popular songs show, ‘I’ songs can be sung with feeling by many other than their composers. Rarely do we take such statements as autobiographical; sometimes indeed no composer is known. Hence we should hesitate to use fragments of such poets as Archilochus to ascribe strident self-assertion or to reconstruct biography.
Three more preliminaries. First, although what survives is ascribed to a few dozen figures, the genres exemplified, and many conventional themes and approaches, will have been attempted by hundreds over the Greek world. Most of our poetry was not, like epic, the virtuosos’s preserve, but was designed for occasions were amateurs contributed. This is clearest in the tradition about after-dinner singing at Athens: a myrtle branch circulated, and with it the obligation to sing…
Second, relative importance of text and accompaniment. Melic and elegiac poetry was sung, usually accompanied respectively on the lyre and the aulos (an oboe-like wind instrument). For no song can we reconstruct the vocal or instrumental line, and indeed we have only a rudimentary understanding of what it might have been like. In many songs music may have contributed more to initial impact than text, in many more it was an integral part of the effect. Doubtless the texts selected for copying and transmission were those whose words were of greater moment than music: but never forget that, even reading these poems aloud, we gain access only to part of their intended effect, and before impugning deficiency of thought or skill, ponder whether modern song-writers would gladly be judged on ‘lyrics’ alone.
Third, the work of almost all these poets has survived only in shattered fragments, preserved by later quotation or on papyri recovered from Graeco-Roman Egypt. We have a few dozen elegiac poems arguably complete, but of melic poets other than Pindar and Bacchylides only half a dozen complete songs remain.
Ewen Bowie
Ewen Bowie. Lyric and Elegiac Poetry. In: J. Boardman, J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Oxford UP, 1986-1991
Novel. The Metamorphoses
Apuleius was born at Madaurus in the province of Africa around 123 and was active at the second half of the century. Several works from his hand survive, including the Apologia, his self-defence on a charge of gaining his wife's love by the use of magic; but his fame rests above all on his novel the Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass. This is based on a Greek tale, Lucius, or The Ass, possibly written by Lucian, of which an abridged version is still extant. Comparison with the Greek story serves to demonstrate how brilliantly Apuleius enlarged and adapted his model. The Golden Ass is in eleven books and is told in first person. After nearly three books of amorous and humorous incidents the narrator, as a consequence of an experiment with magic which goes wrong, finds himself transformed into a donkey; and the rest of the work consists of a series of picaresque adventures which befall the hero in his animal form, interrupted by a large number of other tales recounted by various of the characters who figure in the main narrative. The longest of these, the tale of Cupid and Psyche, occupies about a fifth of the entire work.
Finally, after a vision of the goddess Isis, the narrator Lucius is restored to his human shape. The last scenes of the novel provide one of the most remarkable accounts of religious experience to come down from classical paganism. It has often been thoght that we see here the influence of Christian spirituality; on this supposition Apuleius was fighting Christianity but doing his best to steal the rival religion's clothes. The last book also presents the interpreter of Apuleius with his most teasing problem; no entirely satisfactory explanation has yet been given, and perhaps none is possible. How are we to reconcile the tone of the conclusion, with Lucius as an adept of the goddess, vowed to celibacy and simplicity of life, with the huge gusto with which the rest of the story is told? Lucius repeatedly tells us that he is 'inquisitive', or 'a thirster after novelty'; for this inquisitiveness he is punished and ultimatedly redeemed, but until the last book the whole atmosphere and style of the narrative encourages us to rejoice and share in this thirst for adventure and experience... And entertainment is what we get, though often of a grotesque sort. Sex and magic, comedy and horror, elegant romance and coarse bawdy are blended into an intoxicating mixture;
Richard Jenkyns
***
Sex sells, as any publisher knows. That much was true in the second century too, though it seems a little magic and a lot of learning could be usefully added to the mix. Known formally as The Metamorphoses this is the only Latin novel to survive complete from the antiquity, and a remarkable piece of work it is…
So poor Lucius in his grotesque inhuman form is subjected to a series of misadventures that take him from one end of Greece to the other, and see him repeatedly stolen, sold, beaten, humiliated, owned by all kind of even more unpleasant characters and threatened by all kinds of even more unpleasant deaths, before eventually being scheduled for a performance in the arena in Corinth. His role is intended to be a central one, fitting to his, as is were, assets: he is to copulate with a woman condemned to death, and thus provide the instrument of her execution.
What was the purpose of such a scandalous composition? Apuleius himself explains in the prologue:
Now, in this Milesian style, I shall string various tales together for you, and caress your kindy ears with pleasurable murmurings…
Such tales got their name from Aristeides of Miletos, who, in about 100 BC, wrote a collection of saucy stories translated into Latin soon after by Sisenna. These originals have long sinse vanished, but their disreputable nature is commemorated in Plutarch's story that copies were found in the baggage of Roman officers (Life of Crassus)…
The question of the level of education that Apuleius expected in his readers is almost as important as the fun he provided them. The Metamorphoses is a work of the Roman literature that, as so often, is more than it pretends to be. It takes the form of a pseudo-biography, and in the last book Lucius, having finally found some roses while on his way to perform his terrible duties in the arena at Corinth, has resumed his human shape. What follows is an account, less racy but no less remarkable, of the hero's spiritual salvation through initiation into the mysteries of the goddess Isis. Those of contemporaries who knew about Apuleius' other interests might not have been all that surprised after all: he was also the author of a number of treatises on philosophy, such as On Plato and his Teaching and On Socrates' God. And of the very heart of the novel is a long tale that can hardly be called 'Milesian' at all, though it does share all kinds of elements with folk-tales from many cultures. It is told by an old crone to cheer up a pretty girl (obligatory in ancient novels, as in most modern ones) who has been kidnapped by a group of wicked bandits (obligatory in ancient novels though optional in modern ones). In this tale, a princess with the by no means insignificant name of 'Psyche' is offered up in sacrificial marriage to a mysterious monster whose identity she is sworn not to try to discover...
The tale is plainly a Platonic allegory of sorts, and, although scholars argue about its exact meaning, the experience of Psyche surely mirror and predict those of Lucius. Like Psyche, he is made to undergo a number of thoroughly dehumanizing trials to punish him for his impious curiosity, and like Psyche, too, he is eventually saved, not by his own merits, but by the intervention of a divine being whose power is matched only by her benevolence.
Michael Dewar
***
Richard Jenkyns. Silver Latin Poetry and the Latin Novel. In: J. Boardman. J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of the Roman World. Oxford UP, 1991.
Michael Dewar. Culture wars: Latin literature from the second century to the end of the classical era. In: Oliver Taplin ed. Literature of the Roman World. Oxford UP, 2000-2001.
Finally, after a vision of the goddess Isis, the narrator Lucius is restored to his human shape. The last scenes of the novel provide one of the most remarkable accounts of religious experience to come down from classical paganism. It has often been thoght that we see here the influence of Christian spirituality; on this supposition Apuleius was fighting Christianity but doing his best to steal the rival religion's clothes. The last book also presents the interpreter of Apuleius with his most teasing problem; no entirely satisfactory explanation has yet been given, and perhaps none is possible. How are we to reconcile the tone of the conclusion, with Lucius as an adept of the goddess, vowed to celibacy and simplicity of life, with the huge gusto with which the rest of the story is told? Lucius repeatedly tells us that he is 'inquisitive', or 'a thirster after novelty'; for this inquisitiveness he is punished and ultimatedly redeemed, but until the last book the whole atmosphere and style of the narrative encourages us to rejoice and share in this thirst for adventure and experience... And entertainment is what we get, though often of a grotesque sort. Sex and magic, comedy and horror, elegant romance and coarse bawdy are blended into an intoxicating mixture;
Richard Jenkyns
***
Sex sells, as any publisher knows. That much was true in the second century too, though it seems a little magic and a lot of learning could be usefully added to the mix. Known formally as The Metamorphoses this is the only Latin novel to survive complete from the antiquity, and a remarkable piece of work it is…
So poor Lucius in his grotesque inhuman form is subjected to a series of misadventures that take him from one end of Greece to the other, and see him repeatedly stolen, sold, beaten, humiliated, owned by all kind of even more unpleasant characters and threatened by all kinds of even more unpleasant deaths, before eventually being scheduled for a performance in the arena in Corinth. His role is intended to be a central one, fitting to his, as is were, assets: he is to copulate with a woman condemned to death, and thus provide the instrument of her execution.
What was the purpose of such a scandalous composition? Apuleius himself explains in the prologue:
Now, in this Milesian style, I shall string various tales together for you, and caress your kindy ears with pleasurable murmurings…
Such tales got their name from Aristeides of Miletos, who, in about 100 BC, wrote a collection of saucy stories translated into Latin soon after by Sisenna. These originals have long sinse vanished, but their disreputable nature is commemorated in Plutarch's story that copies were found in the baggage of Roman officers (Life of Crassus)…
The question of the level of education that Apuleius expected in his readers is almost as important as the fun he provided them. The Metamorphoses is a work of the Roman literature that, as so often, is more than it pretends to be. It takes the form of a pseudo-biography, and in the last book Lucius, having finally found some roses while on his way to perform his terrible duties in the arena at Corinth, has resumed his human shape. What follows is an account, less racy but no less remarkable, of the hero's spiritual salvation through initiation into the mysteries of the goddess Isis. Those of contemporaries who knew about Apuleius' other interests might not have been all that surprised after all: he was also the author of a number of treatises on philosophy, such as On Plato and his Teaching and On Socrates' God. And of the very heart of the novel is a long tale that can hardly be called 'Milesian' at all, though it does share all kinds of elements with folk-tales from many cultures. It is told by an old crone to cheer up a pretty girl (obligatory in ancient novels, as in most modern ones) who has been kidnapped by a group of wicked bandits (obligatory in ancient novels though optional in modern ones). In this tale, a princess with the by no means insignificant name of 'Psyche' is offered up in sacrificial marriage to a mysterious monster whose identity she is sworn not to try to discover...
The tale is plainly a Platonic allegory of sorts, and, although scholars argue about its exact meaning, the experience of Psyche surely mirror and predict those of Lucius. Like Psyche, he is made to undergo a number of thoroughly dehumanizing trials to punish him for his impious curiosity, and like Psyche, too, he is eventually saved, not by his own merits, but by the intervention of a divine being whose power is matched only by her benevolence.
Michael Dewar
***
Richard Jenkyns. Silver Latin Poetry and the Latin Novel. In: J. Boardman. J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of the Roman World. Oxford UP, 1991.
Michael Dewar. Culture wars: Latin literature from the second century to the end of the classical era. In: Oliver Taplin ed. Literature of the Roman World. Oxford UP, 2000-2001.
Orators, Sophists, Plato
Yet it is in philosophical texts that we first hear of this discipline; and the word rhetoric itself bears every clear indication of being a Platonic invention. There is no trace of it in Greek before the point in the Gorgias (449a) where the famous Sophist - after hesitation and (possibly) a certain amount of prompting from Socrates - decides to call the art he teaches the "rhetorly" - that is, rhetor's or "speaker's" - "art" (rhetorike techne)... Even in the next generation the orator and educator Isocrates (c. 436-338 BC), usually credited with the creation of on of the two major "traditions" in ancient rhetorical theory, never uses the word - nor does any other Attic orator. Down to the end of the fourth century, all occurrences are, with a single exception, confined to Plato and Aristotle... It fell to them... to establish the basic categories and definitions that, here as everywhere, were to remain authoritative throughout antiquity and beyond...
Rhetoric is the "artificer of persuasion" (Plato in the Gorgias 453a) or the "influencing and swaying of the mind (psychagogia) through words" (Phaedrus 261a). More cautiously, it is the "capacity for seeing how to be as persuasive as subject and situation will permit" (Aristotle in the Rhetoric 1355b25)... The conviction that persuasion produces may be true or false, but it ranks as belief, not knowledge - hence the Platonic distinction (Gorgias 454-55) between persuasion and teaching, and Aristotle's insistence (1356-57) that rhetoric is called for in situations where rigorous, conclusive demonstration is either unavailable, or incapable of being taken in by an audience.
Thomas Cole
***
The very existence of panhellenic festivals testifies to the fact that the Greeks perceived themselves as members of a single religious group… This vision of Greek unity and kinship - which formed the very core of the politics of panhellenism - was in fact regularly promoted by the rhetorical speeches composed for these festivals (for example Gorgias' Olympicus and Pythicus and Lysias' Olympicus…). As Isocrates says in the Panegyricus:
Those who founded the great festivals are rightly praised for handling down a custom whereby, proclaiming a truce and resolving our existing quarrels, we come together in one place; then, as we perform our prayers and sacrifices in common, we recall the kinship that exists between us and are made to feel more friendly towards each other in the future (43).
To be sure, Isocrates articulates an idealizing portrait of panhellenism... As we have seen, Greek religious practices never completely transcended politics. In fact, individuals from different cities often competed at these festivals in contest that pitted one city against another. As Cartledge suggests "[athletic] competition at Olympia was a paramilitary exercise", where the competitors "channeled their competitive aggression into action that only just stayed this side of outright martial violence". Not surprisingly, political tensions ran high at panhellenic gatherings, especially when individuals at these festivals came from cities that were at war with each other. An example of political hostility at an Olympian festival is recounted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus:
In his Panegyric, the orator [Lysias] summoned the Greeks to expel Dionysius of Syracuse from power and free Sicily, and to start the hostilities at once by plundering the ruler's tent with its adornments of gold, purple finery and many other riches… For the tyrant of Syracuse had sent theoroi to attend festival and offer sacrifice to the god. Their arrival at the sanctuary had been staged on an impressive and lavish scale to enhance the dynast's prestige among the Greeks (Lysias, 29).
Andrea Nightingale
***
Who were these men whom we still, even today, refer to as 'the Sophists'?
The meaning of the term 'Sophist' was in principle relatively wide. It could be applied to anyone thoroughly qualified to exercise his profession, be he a diviner or a poet. In this sense, the term was sometimes applied to men such as Plato or Socrates. But it soon came to denote in particular the group of men who are the subject of this book and it remained associated with the kind of teaching that they provided. It was a result of the reactions provoked by this teaching that the word, as used by Plato and Aristotle, acquired the derogatory undertones that it still has today.
Much later on, notwithstanding, a group of teachers keen to draw inspiration from their example also adopted their name: this was the 'Second Sophistic', under the Roman Empire…
They emerged in many different parts of Greece at about the same time; and they all taught for a while in Athens. It is in Athens, only, that we come across them and learn of them.
The greatest of them were Protagoras, who came from Abdera, in northern Greece, on the borders of Thrace; Gorgias, who was from Sicily; Prodicus, from the small island of Ceos; Hippias from Elis, in the Peloponnese; and Thrasymachus, from Chalcedon, in Asia Minor. Others are known just as names and hardly count. Among all these foreigners there were only two men who were natives of Athens, Antiphon and Critias, and neither - certainly not Critias - appears to have been a professional itinerant teacher. There were certainly other Sophists such as the two brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, whom Plato brings to life in his very comical dialogue named after the former…
The only Sophists we really know anything about are the ones in that first group, whose teaching and writing, quite apart from their performance as professionals, made them figure-heads.
Jacqueline de Romilly
***
By far the greater part of the first book of The Republic is devoted to expounding and critisizing the views of the sophist Trasymachus... It has never been doubted, that the opening statement by Trasymachus represents the position actually held by him as a historical person...
When he first enters the discussion Thrasymachus says that Justice is the interest of the stronger and superior... Forced to choose between two positions, that justice consists in obeying the laws, and that justice consists in seeking the interest of the rulers, Thrasymachus refuses to accept the first...and argues that true rulers never make mistakes as to their interests, even though actual rulers do on occasion make mistakes as to their own interests...
This leads on to Thrasymachus' long speech in which he provides the second and the more extended statement of his position. He now states that justice consists in pursuing another's good... Injustice on the other hand consists in seeking one's own good, and so for the ruler the interest of the stronger who is himself, and for the ruled the interest of the weaker, who are themselves, namely the ruled...
Thrasymachus claims two things... First the just ruled are foolish in seeking the interest of the ruler and the just ruler is foolish in seeking the interest of the ruled. A sensible and wise man seeks only his own interest... Secondly it is injustice which is the true virtue for man since it is by pursuing injustice that men achieve arete and so eudaimonia, since it is by this path alone that they fulfil their needs...
Thrasymachus has raised the question why should I restrict the pursuit of my own interests for the sake of others, and, ever since, this has been one of the central questions in ethics... Plato... proceeds by an analysis of the structure and functioning of the individual human soul, to argue that the source of what is right is indeed not a heteronomous prescription, but autonomous because it is a prescription arising from within our own natures.
Gеorge B. Kerferd
The only positive indications that we have concerning Protagoras' view about nature of human societies are to be found in the myth put into his mouth in the Protagoras 320c onwards, of which I have already made considerable use in earlier chapters...
The first men to be born lived a life that was disorderly and beastlike... Gradually, with need as a teacher, the arts were discovered as well as the things that were useful. This was possible, because man was well endowed by nature, and was further assisted by his hands, his power of speech and his shrewdness of intelligence...
According to the myth of Protagoras, when men did 'come together' the result was continued acts of injustice between them, all because they lacked the techne of living together in a city, the art of politics, which meant that they soon scattered again. So Zeus sent Hermes to give men aidos and dike to be ordering principles of cities and bonds drawing people together in friendship... Earlier in the myth, skills in the various arts and crafts had been distributed among them by the activity of Prometheus in their defence, not the same crafts to all men, but different crafts to different people. The present distribution arranged by Zeus is on a different basis in that aidos and dike are to be given to all men, and all men are to share in them...
First does Protagoras mean, as has often been asserted, that all men possess aidos and dike by nature? It seems clear that the powers of animals are regarded as possessed by nature. It is possible that the skill in crafts is also possessed by human beings. It is given to mankind before they began their life on this earth, and it is to men what the powers are to animals. But aidos and dike are in a different position - they are something acquired after man has been living in the world.
Secondly it is important to realise that it is not the view of Protagoras that all men are to be regarded as sharing equally in aidos and dike... So it is perfectly possible for a man to act unjustly in any particular case. But social expectations differ in the cases of justice and of the special skills. In the case of the latter no one individual is expected necessarily to possess any share of his own, and when he lacks the skill he is expected to admit is. But in the first case he necessarily does possess a share, and so has the capacity of acting justly in the particular case in question, whatever it may be. So when he fails, there is a social expectation that he will endeavour to conceal his failure by claiming that in fact he has been acting justly...
The importance of this doctrine of Protagoras in the history of political thought can hardly be exaggerated. For Protagoras has produced for the first time in human history a theoretical basis for participatory democracy. All men through the educational process of living in families and in societies acquire some degree of political and moral insight. This insight can be improved by various formal programmes in schools and under particular teachers and also by the operation of laws deliberately devised by the polis in order to supplement the earlier education of its citizens...
But in moral and political questions it is not the case that all opinions and all pieces of advice are of equal value... Thus an ideal Protagorean society is not ultimately egalitarian - it is to be guided by those with the most wisdom on each and any occasion. Will such people be somehow separatedly identifiable and so constitute a ruling elite of wise advisers who can provide what is known as 'a led democracy'? This has sometimes been said.
Gеorge B. Kerferd
***
Dottori: Then one can persuade someone of the true without being able to prove it?
Gadamer: Of course. And this does not mean that the proof would be meaningless or that the point is not to prove something. Rhetoric, of course, implies that one wants to persuade someone of one takes to be true - this is also rhetoric, and this is what we are constantly doing. It's inherent in our speaking with one another and in our mutual understanding.
D.: On the other hand, I think rhetoric for Gorgias consisted in the sheer desire to persuade and in nothing else, thus disregarding the problem of truth. That is to say, that Aristotle, in the first book of his Rhetoric, says that we are not dealing here with the true, but only with the eikos, the "veri-similar", and that rhetoric teaches to us how to defend ourselves; for it is unworthy for a human being to be able to defend himself only with the body and not with speech.
G.: No - that wouldn't hold for the Gorgias who is handled with such great respect in Plato. Now, Prodicus and Protagoras - whom we consider to be precursors of Nietzsche rather than Rorty - they're different. Gorgias, who was a highly gifted man and whose reputation was apparently enormous because he had such enormous eloquence, is respected and praised by Plato because he is reputed to be honest. But, just as we misunderstand Gorgias, we also misunderstand the true sense of Platonic-Aristotelian rhetoric because we remain trapped in a false estimation of rhetoric that we have dragged alone with us through the intervening centuries in which the schools of rhetoric have dominated. The rhetoric that we can call the art of speech or persuasion does not, as we have believed for centuries, consist in a body of rules according to whose application and adherence we can achieve victory over our opponent or our partner in public debates or simply in conversation with one another. The art of speech or persuasion consist, rather, in the innate ability - which we cal also, of course, develop and perfect - of being able to actually communicate with others and even persuade them of the true without being able to prove it (assuming that we are no longer able to). It's really a matter of our actually being able to speak to others, and this means that we must appeal to their emotions and their passions (this is why the second book of Aristotle's Rhetoric deals with the passions of the human soul), but not in order to deceive others or to profit by it personally, but, instead, to allow what is true to appear and to reveal what we ourselves are persuaded by and what, otherwise (through the usual methods of proof) could not appear as such. This is why Aristotle calls the domain of rhetoric eikos - for it is a question of a truth that could not appear only in our speech and that otherwise would not be manifest as such…
We can now conclude that he philosopher and the Sophist are not to be distinguished sheerly by their argumentation. The mode of arguing is the same, and the difference consist only in the fact that, in the one case, we seek only what is just, and we want to convince the other that it is also what is true; in the other case, we seek only that which appears to us to be more advantageous and more useful. And, in this case, perhaps we also try to make our own advantage appear to be what is just. as long as it can appear (according to the eikos, thus apparently) to be such a thing.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
***
The important things we know for sure about the author of the works collected under the name 'Plato' are roughly these: that he was born in the early 420s BC to a wealthy father by the name of Ariston (his mother's name is in some doubt); that he had a close relationship, at least on a intellectual level, with Socrates; that he spent the larger part of his life in Athens, without interference from the authoritites, despite the profoundly anti-democratic nature of his extensive political writings; that he founded a philosophical 'school', the Academy, which was to survive as an institution for research and reflection, and for teching; that from 367 until his death, he had Aristotle with him in the Academy; and that he died in 347.
However elusive Plato may be, and have been, from a biographer's point of view, there is no doubting the difference he made, as a single individual, to the history of philosophy. Even Stoicism, the great rival of Platonism in the early days of both, can be detected rifling Platonic dialogues to provide material for its own systematic constructions.
Christopher Rowe
***
The speakers of the first group (Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus) draw a fundamental distinction between a good and a bad variety of love, while those of the second group do not. This development comes to a head with Diotima's teaching that love in any of its manifestations is directed towards good.
Pausanias draw the obvious contrast with lovers who are more concerned with the body than the soul, and who therefore do not take virtue into account. Phaedrus does not; but the contrast is implicit in his claim to know of no greater good for a young boy than a "decent" or "worthy" lover.
Aristophanes announces a break with Pausanias and Еryximachus's scheme of things… The break is to see love not sundered into good and bad, but as a single aspiration, common to all and directed (despite differences of sexual orientation) at the same generic object - wholeness…
Agathon failed to see that love's nature is to seek the good, rather than to possess it; but it turns out, that he was not wrong to claim that love is praiseworthy in its very nature; for to seek the good is praiseworthy. And this is to reinstate the message of Aristophanes'tale: that love is above all a search for what has been lost.
Diotima returns to the topic of specific love. Specific love is in fact not, as Socrates (and Agathon) suppose, love of the beautiful, but rather "of begetting and giving birth in the beautiful". In the specific case beauty takes the role of midwife to generation, prompting those fertile in body, both animal and human, to engender offspring who can renew their line and (for humans) keep their name alive, while those men who are more fertile in soul than body will be inspired by a boy who combines bodily beauty and beauty of character to give birth to fine discourse about civic virtue with a view to his education. At the level of Lesser Mysteries she describes the ultimate good - the goal of generic love, toward which all human actions are directed - as "immortal virtue and the glorious fame that follows". The "love of honor" is the highest human aspiration here. But when introducing the topic of generic love, Diotima has prepared us to accept the "love of wisdom" as one of its manifestations; and in the Greater Mysteries it will be philosophy that leads us to the ultimate goal.
The philosophic initiate begins, then, at level lower than that attained by the honor lover in the Lesser Mysteries (whom he will overtake in due course). His starting point is higher than the level of the fertile merely in body, however; for their love engenders human offspring, whereas his produces discourse… We next find him having come to prize beauty of soul over beauty of body. We are not told how he made the transition, but only that these are stages along the way that he "must" visit if he is to achieve the highest goal… Compelled, in his role as mentor, to consider beauty of activities and laws, he comes to a conclusion about it that is independent of his educative purpose (just as he spent more thought on bodily beauty in general than was necessary for the purpose of seduction). The lover will think the beauty of bodies a thing of no importance...
At the next stage of his development, accordingly, he is not attached to an individual, but is attracted rather by the beauty of knowledge in its various forms, which causes him to give birth once again to beautiful discourse - now the discourse of philosophy.
His (of Alcibiades) is the version on a heroic scale of the danger that Apollodorus, hawking memberships to the Socratic fan club, had illustrated in the prologue on the level of farce: Instead of loving wisdom he falls in love with the wisdom lover - exactly the danger that Diotima attempts to exclude from her ladder of love by banishing individual from the centre of attention when the rung of philosophy has been reached.
G.R.F. Ferrari
***
In the Republic the role of ordinary people in the state corresponds to that of appetite in the soul… In the Laws the positive development of desirable habits and traits takes the place of this restraint. The common people are encouraged to live in accordance to virtue and both education and the laws are to nurture them in this way of life. But when they live in accordance with the precepts of virtue, it is because they have been conditioned into and habituated to such a way of life, and not because they understand the point of it. That understanding is still restricted to the rulers. This emerges most clearly in discussion of the question of the existence of the gods or god… In the Republic explicit references to the divine are sporadic… In the Laws, however, the existence of the divine has become the cornerstone of morals and politics… The divine is important in the Laws because it is identified with law; to be obedient before the law is to be obedient before god…
But the rulers are to be men who have “toiled to acquire complete confidence in the existence of the gods” by intellectual effort… Suppose, however, that a member of the ruling group comes to think that he has found a flaw in the required proof – what then? Plato gives a clear answer in Book XII. If this doubter keeps his doubts to himself, then well and good. But if he insists on disseminating them, then the Nocturnal Council, the supreme authority in the hierarchy of Magnesia, will condemn him to death. The absence of Socrates from the dialogue is underlined by this episode… But it is also clear that Plato’s political philosophy is not merely only justifiable if, but is only intelligible if, some theory of values as residing in a transcendent realm to which there can be access only for an intellectually trained elite can be shown to be plausible. This is the connection between the nonpolitical vision of the Symposium and the entirely political vision of the Laws. But what is the turn in Plato’s thought which transformed Socrates from hero into potential victim?
Alasdair MacIntyre
***
Thomas Cole. The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece. The John Hopkins UP, 1991-1995.
Andrea W. Nightingale. The politics of panhellenism. In: Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy. Cambridge UP, 2004-2006.
Jacqueline de Romilly. The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992-2002.
George. B. Kerferd. The nomos-physis controversy; The theory of society. In: G.B. Kerferd. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge UP, 1981-1999.
Hans-Georg Gadamer. A Century of Philosophy. A Conversation with Riccardo Dottori. Transl. by Rod Coltman with Sigrid Koepke. Continuum, 2003.
Christopher Rowe. Plato. In: David Sedley ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy. Cambridge UP 2003-2004.
G.R.F. Ferrari. Platonic Love. In: Richard Kraut ed. The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge UP, 1992-2005
Alasdair MacIntyre. Postscript to Plato. In: A Short History of Ethics. A history of moral philosophy from the Homeric Age to the twentieth century. Routledge 1967-2006.
Rhetoric is the "artificer of persuasion" (Plato in the Gorgias 453a) or the "influencing and swaying of the mind (psychagogia) through words" (Phaedrus 261a). More cautiously, it is the "capacity for seeing how to be as persuasive as subject and situation will permit" (Aristotle in the Rhetoric 1355b25)... The conviction that persuasion produces may be true or false, but it ranks as belief, not knowledge - hence the Platonic distinction (Gorgias 454-55) between persuasion and teaching, and Aristotle's insistence (1356-57) that rhetoric is called for in situations where rigorous, conclusive demonstration is either unavailable, or incapable of being taken in by an audience.
Thomas Cole
***
The very existence of panhellenic festivals testifies to the fact that the Greeks perceived themselves as members of a single religious group… This vision of Greek unity and kinship - which formed the very core of the politics of panhellenism - was in fact regularly promoted by the rhetorical speeches composed for these festivals (for example Gorgias' Olympicus and Pythicus and Lysias' Olympicus…). As Isocrates says in the Panegyricus:
Those who founded the great festivals are rightly praised for handling down a custom whereby, proclaiming a truce and resolving our existing quarrels, we come together in one place; then, as we perform our prayers and sacrifices in common, we recall the kinship that exists between us and are made to feel more friendly towards each other in the future (43).
To be sure, Isocrates articulates an idealizing portrait of panhellenism... As we have seen, Greek religious practices never completely transcended politics. In fact, individuals from different cities often competed at these festivals in contest that pitted one city against another. As Cartledge suggests "[athletic] competition at Olympia was a paramilitary exercise", where the competitors "channeled their competitive aggression into action that only just stayed this side of outright martial violence". Not surprisingly, political tensions ran high at panhellenic gatherings, especially when individuals at these festivals came from cities that were at war with each other. An example of political hostility at an Olympian festival is recounted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus:
In his Panegyric, the orator [Lysias] summoned the Greeks to expel Dionysius of Syracuse from power and free Sicily, and to start the hostilities at once by plundering the ruler's tent with its adornments of gold, purple finery and many other riches… For the tyrant of Syracuse had sent theoroi to attend festival and offer sacrifice to the god. Their arrival at the sanctuary had been staged on an impressive and lavish scale to enhance the dynast's prestige among the Greeks (Lysias, 29).
Andrea Nightingale
***
Who were these men whom we still, even today, refer to as 'the Sophists'?
The meaning of the term 'Sophist' was in principle relatively wide. It could be applied to anyone thoroughly qualified to exercise his profession, be he a diviner or a poet. In this sense, the term was sometimes applied to men such as Plato or Socrates. But it soon came to denote in particular the group of men who are the subject of this book and it remained associated with the kind of teaching that they provided. It was a result of the reactions provoked by this teaching that the word, as used by Plato and Aristotle, acquired the derogatory undertones that it still has today.
Much later on, notwithstanding, a group of teachers keen to draw inspiration from their example also adopted their name: this was the 'Second Sophistic', under the Roman Empire…
They emerged in many different parts of Greece at about the same time; and they all taught for a while in Athens. It is in Athens, only, that we come across them and learn of them.
The greatest of them were Protagoras, who came from Abdera, in northern Greece, on the borders of Thrace; Gorgias, who was from Sicily; Prodicus, from the small island of Ceos; Hippias from Elis, in the Peloponnese; and Thrasymachus, from Chalcedon, in Asia Minor. Others are known just as names and hardly count. Among all these foreigners there were only two men who were natives of Athens, Antiphon and Critias, and neither - certainly not Critias - appears to have been a professional itinerant teacher. There were certainly other Sophists such as the two brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, whom Plato brings to life in his very comical dialogue named after the former…
The only Sophists we really know anything about are the ones in that first group, whose teaching and writing, quite apart from their performance as professionals, made them figure-heads.
Jacqueline de Romilly
***
By far the greater part of the first book of The Republic is devoted to expounding and critisizing the views of the sophist Trasymachus... It has never been doubted, that the opening statement by Trasymachus represents the position actually held by him as a historical person...
When he first enters the discussion Thrasymachus says that Justice is the interest of the stronger and superior... Forced to choose between two positions, that justice consists in obeying the laws, and that justice consists in seeking the interest of the rulers, Thrasymachus refuses to accept the first...and argues that true rulers never make mistakes as to their interests, even though actual rulers do on occasion make mistakes as to their own interests...
This leads on to Thrasymachus' long speech in which he provides the second and the more extended statement of his position. He now states that justice consists in pursuing another's good... Injustice on the other hand consists in seeking one's own good, and so for the ruler the interest of the stronger who is himself, and for the ruled the interest of the weaker, who are themselves, namely the ruled...
Thrasymachus claims two things... First the just ruled are foolish in seeking the interest of the ruler and the just ruler is foolish in seeking the interest of the ruled. A sensible and wise man seeks only his own interest... Secondly it is injustice which is the true virtue for man since it is by pursuing injustice that men achieve arete and so eudaimonia, since it is by this path alone that they fulfil their needs...
Thrasymachus has raised the question why should I restrict the pursuit of my own interests for the sake of others, and, ever since, this has been one of the central questions in ethics... Plato... proceeds by an analysis of the structure and functioning of the individual human soul, to argue that the source of what is right is indeed not a heteronomous prescription, but autonomous because it is a prescription arising from within our own natures.
Gеorge B. Kerferd
The only positive indications that we have concerning Protagoras' view about nature of human societies are to be found in the myth put into his mouth in the Protagoras 320c onwards, of which I have already made considerable use in earlier chapters...
The first men to be born lived a life that was disorderly and beastlike... Gradually, with need as a teacher, the arts were discovered as well as the things that were useful. This was possible, because man was well endowed by nature, and was further assisted by his hands, his power of speech and his shrewdness of intelligence...
According to the myth of Protagoras, when men did 'come together' the result was continued acts of injustice between them, all because they lacked the techne of living together in a city, the art of politics, which meant that they soon scattered again. So Zeus sent Hermes to give men aidos and dike to be ordering principles of cities and bonds drawing people together in friendship... Earlier in the myth, skills in the various arts and crafts had been distributed among them by the activity of Prometheus in their defence, not the same crafts to all men, but different crafts to different people. The present distribution arranged by Zeus is on a different basis in that aidos and dike are to be given to all men, and all men are to share in them...
First does Protagoras mean, as has often been asserted, that all men possess aidos and dike by nature? It seems clear that the powers of animals are regarded as possessed by nature. It is possible that the skill in crafts is also possessed by human beings. It is given to mankind before they began their life on this earth, and it is to men what the powers are to animals. But aidos and dike are in a different position - they are something acquired after man has been living in the world.
Secondly it is important to realise that it is not the view of Protagoras that all men are to be regarded as sharing equally in aidos and dike... So it is perfectly possible for a man to act unjustly in any particular case. But social expectations differ in the cases of justice and of the special skills. In the case of the latter no one individual is expected necessarily to possess any share of his own, and when he lacks the skill he is expected to admit is. But in the first case he necessarily does possess a share, and so has the capacity of acting justly in the particular case in question, whatever it may be. So when he fails, there is a social expectation that he will endeavour to conceal his failure by claiming that in fact he has been acting justly...
The importance of this doctrine of Protagoras in the history of political thought can hardly be exaggerated. For Protagoras has produced for the first time in human history a theoretical basis for participatory democracy. All men through the educational process of living in families and in societies acquire some degree of political and moral insight. This insight can be improved by various formal programmes in schools and under particular teachers and also by the operation of laws deliberately devised by the polis in order to supplement the earlier education of its citizens...
But in moral and political questions it is not the case that all opinions and all pieces of advice are of equal value... Thus an ideal Protagorean society is not ultimately egalitarian - it is to be guided by those with the most wisdom on each and any occasion. Will such people be somehow separatedly identifiable and so constitute a ruling elite of wise advisers who can provide what is known as 'a led democracy'? This has sometimes been said.
Gеorge B. Kerferd
***
Dottori: Then one can persuade someone of the true without being able to prove it?
Gadamer: Of course. And this does not mean that the proof would be meaningless or that the point is not to prove something. Rhetoric, of course, implies that one wants to persuade someone of one takes to be true - this is also rhetoric, and this is what we are constantly doing. It's inherent in our speaking with one another and in our mutual understanding.
D.: On the other hand, I think rhetoric for Gorgias consisted in the sheer desire to persuade and in nothing else, thus disregarding the problem of truth. That is to say, that Aristotle, in the first book of his Rhetoric, says that we are not dealing here with the true, but only with the eikos, the "veri-similar", and that rhetoric teaches to us how to defend ourselves; for it is unworthy for a human being to be able to defend himself only with the body and not with speech.
G.: No - that wouldn't hold for the Gorgias who is handled with such great respect in Plato. Now, Prodicus and Protagoras - whom we consider to be precursors of Nietzsche rather than Rorty - they're different. Gorgias, who was a highly gifted man and whose reputation was apparently enormous because he had such enormous eloquence, is respected and praised by Plato because he is reputed to be honest. But, just as we misunderstand Gorgias, we also misunderstand the true sense of Platonic-Aristotelian rhetoric because we remain trapped in a false estimation of rhetoric that we have dragged alone with us through the intervening centuries in which the schools of rhetoric have dominated. The rhetoric that we can call the art of speech or persuasion does not, as we have believed for centuries, consist in a body of rules according to whose application and adherence we can achieve victory over our opponent or our partner in public debates or simply in conversation with one another. The art of speech or persuasion consist, rather, in the innate ability - which we cal also, of course, develop and perfect - of being able to actually communicate with others and even persuade them of the true without being able to prove it (assuming that we are no longer able to). It's really a matter of our actually being able to speak to others, and this means that we must appeal to their emotions and their passions (this is why the second book of Aristotle's Rhetoric deals with the passions of the human soul), but not in order to deceive others or to profit by it personally, but, instead, to allow what is true to appear and to reveal what we ourselves are persuaded by and what, otherwise (through the usual methods of proof) could not appear as such. This is why Aristotle calls the domain of rhetoric eikos - for it is a question of a truth that could not appear only in our speech and that otherwise would not be manifest as such…
We can now conclude that he philosopher and the Sophist are not to be distinguished sheerly by their argumentation. The mode of arguing is the same, and the difference consist only in the fact that, in the one case, we seek only what is just, and we want to convince the other that it is also what is true; in the other case, we seek only that which appears to us to be more advantageous and more useful. And, in this case, perhaps we also try to make our own advantage appear to be what is just. as long as it can appear (according to the eikos, thus apparently) to be such a thing.
Hans-Georg Gadamer
***
The important things we know for sure about the author of the works collected under the name 'Plato' are roughly these: that he was born in the early 420s BC to a wealthy father by the name of Ariston (his mother's name is in some doubt); that he had a close relationship, at least on a intellectual level, with Socrates; that he spent the larger part of his life in Athens, without interference from the authoritites, despite the profoundly anti-democratic nature of his extensive political writings; that he founded a philosophical 'school', the Academy, which was to survive as an institution for research and reflection, and for teching; that from 367 until his death, he had Aristotle with him in the Academy; and that he died in 347.
However elusive Plato may be, and have been, from a biographer's point of view, there is no doubting the difference he made, as a single individual, to the history of philosophy. Even Stoicism, the great rival of Platonism in the early days of both, can be detected rifling Platonic dialogues to provide material for its own systematic constructions.
Christopher Rowe
***
The speakers of the first group (Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus) draw a fundamental distinction between a good and a bad variety of love, while those of the second group do not. This development comes to a head with Diotima's teaching that love in any of its manifestations is directed towards good.
Pausanias draw the obvious contrast with lovers who are more concerned with the body than the soul, and who therefore do not take virtue into account. Phaedrus does not; but the contrast is implicit in his claim to know of no greater good for a young boy than a "decent" or "worthy" lover.
Aristophanes announces a break with Pausanias and Еryximachus's scheme of things… The break is to see love not sundered into good and bad, but as a single aspiration, common to all and directed (despite differences of sexual orientation) at the same generic object - wholeness…
Agathon failed to see that love's nature is to seek the good, rather than to possess it; but it turns out, that he was not wrong to claim that love is praiseworthy in its very nature; for to seek the good is praiseworthy. And this is to reinstate the message of Aristophanes'tale: that love is above all a search for what has been lost.
Diotima returns to the topic of specific love. Specific love is in fact not, as Socrates (and Agathon) suppose, love of the beautiful, but rather "of begetting and giving birth in the beautiful". In the specific case beauty takes the role of midwife to generation, prompting those fertile in body, both animal and human, to engender offspring who can renew their line and (for humans) keep their name alive, while those men who are more fertile in soul than body will be inspired by a boy who combines bodily beauty and beauty of character to give birth to fine discourse about civic virtue with a view to his education. At the level of Lesser Mysteries she describes the ultimate good - the goal of generic love, toward which all human actions are directed - as "immortal virtue and the glorious fame that follows". The "love of honor" is the highest human aspiration here. But when introducing the topic of generic love, Diotima has prepared us to accept the "love of wisdom" as one of its manifestations; and in the Greater Mysteries it will be philosophy that leads us to the ultimate goal.
The philosophic initiate begins, then, at level lower than that attained by the honor lover in the Lesser Mysteries (whom he will overtake in due course). His starting point is higher than the level of the fertile merely in body, however; for their love engenders human offspring, whereas his produces discourse… We next find him having come to prize beauty of soul over beauty of body. We are not told how he made the transition, but only that these are stages along the way that he "must" visit if he is to achieve the highest goal… Compelled, in his role as mentor, to consider beauty of activities and laws, he comes to a conclusion about it that is independent of his educative purpose (just as he spent more thought on bodily beauty in general than was necessary for the purpose of seduction). The lover will think the beauty of bodies a thing of no importance...
At the next stage of his development, accordingly, he is not attached to an individual, but is attracted rather by the beauty of knowledge in its various forms, which causes him to give birth once again to beautiful discourse - now the discourse of philosophy.
His (of Alcibiades) is the version on a heroic scale of the danger that Apollodorus, hawking memberships to the Socratic fan club, had illustrated in the prologue on the level of farce: Instead of loving wisdom he falls in love with the wisdom lover - exactly the danger that Diotima attempts to exclude from her ladder of love by banishing individual from the centre of attention when the rung of philosophy has been reached.
G.R.F. Ferrari
***
In the Republic the role of ordinary people in the state corresponds to that of appetite in the soul… In the Laws the positive development of desirable habits and traits takes the place of this restraint. The common people are encouraged to live in accordance to virtue and both education and the laws are to nurture them in this way of life. But when they live in accordance with the precepts of virtue, it is because they have been conditioned into and habituated to such a way of life, and not because they understand the point of it. That understanding is still restricted to the rulers. This emerges most clearly in discussion of the question of the existence of the gods or god… In the Republic explicit references to the divine are sporadic… In the Laws, however, the existence of the divine has become the cornerstone of morals and politics… The divine is important in the Laws because it is identified with law; to be obedient before the law is to be obedient before god…
But the rulers are to be men who have “toiled to acquire complete confidence in the existence of the gods” by intellectual effort… Suppose, however, that a member of the ruling group comes to think that he has found a flaw in the required proof – what then? Plato gives a clear answer in Book XII. If this doubter keeps his doubts to himself, then well and good. But if he insists on disseminating them, then the Nocturnal Council, the supreme authority in the hierarchy of Magnesia, will condemn him to death. The absence of Socrates from the dialogue is underlined by this episode… But it is also clear that Plato’s political philosophy is not merely only justifiable if, but is only intelligible if, some theory of values as residing in a transcendent realm to which there can be access only for an intellectually trained elite can be shown to be plausible. This is the connection between the nonpolitical vision of the Symposium and the entirely political vision of the Laws. But what is the turn in Plato’s thought which transformed Socrates from hero into potential victim?
Alasdair MacIntyre
***
Thomas Cole. The Origins of Rhetoric in Ancient Greece. The John Hopkins UP, 1991-1995.
Andrea W. Nightingale. The politics of panhellenism. In: Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy. Cambridge UP, 2004-2006.
Jacqueline de Romilly. The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1992-2002.
George. B. Kerferd. The nomos-physis controversy; The theory of society. In: G.B. Kerferd. The Sophistic Movement. Cambridge UP, 1981-1999.
Hans-Georg Gadamer. A Century of Philosophy. A Conversation with Riccardo Dottori. Transl. by Rod Coltman with Sigrid Koepke. Continuum, 2003.
Christopher Rowe. Plato. In: David Sedley ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek and Roman Philosophy. Cambridge UP 2003-2004.
G.R.F. Ferrari. Platonic Love. In: Richard Kraut ed. The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge UP, 1992-2005
Alasdair MacIntyre. Postscript to Plato. In: A Short History of Ethics. A history of moral philosophy from the Homeric Age to the twentieth century. Routledge 1967-2006.
Monday, January 28, 2008
The Historians
Herodotus' work is the earliest Greek book in prose to have survived intact; it is some 600 pages or nine 'books' long…
The ultimate justification of the work is the account of the conflict between Greece and Persia, culminating in the Great Expedition of Xerxes to Greece in 480 BC described in the last three books: it is the story of how an army of (allegedly) one and three-quarter million men and a navy of 1 200 ships was defeated by the fragmented force of the Greeks, who in no battle could muster more than 40 000 men and 378 ships; a fleet from Herodotus' city had fought on the Persian side, and one of his earliest memories was perhaps of the setting out and return of that fateful expedition; he grew up in a Ionia suffering the joys and pains of its liberation and then subjection by the victorious Athenian navy. For the generation of Herodotus the epic achievements of their fathers had created the world in which they lived, as the return of the exiles from Babylon had created the world of Ezra.
The central theme of this conflict requires Herodotus to go back to its origins: 'who was the first in actual facts to harm the Greeks'. So the work begins with the earlier struggles between the Ionian Greeks and the kingdom of Lydia, before passing on to the origin of Persian power and the story of Cyrus the Great, and then the further conquests of the Persians, in Egypt and North Africa, and around the Black Sea, until we see that the conflict was inevitable.
Like Hecataeus, Herodotus was a traveler… The result is rather a total picture of the known world, in which the geography, customs, beliefs and monuments of each people are at least as important as their often tenuous relationships to the war. It is which gives added depth to Herodotus' account, and makes it both a great work of art and a convincing history of a conflict not just between two peoples but between two types of society, The Mediterranean egalitarian city-state and the oriental despotisms of the Middle East. It also makes Herodotus more modern than any other ancient historian in his approach to the ideal of total history.
Herodotus' openness to other cultures indeed caused him to be called a 'barbarophile'. It reflects in part an older Ionian view from an age of exploration, reinforced perhaps by the traditions of Herodotus' own community of Halicarnassus, which was a mixed Greek and Carian city. But these attitudes have been systematized under the influence of the new sophistic interest in the relationship between culture and nature, nomos and physis…
The two aspects of the work in one sense reflect the two main literary influences on it, Homer and the world of war and conflict, Hecataeus and the world of peace and understanding. He seems to have begun as an expert on foreign cultures, a traveling sophist who lectured on the marvels of the world; only later did he arrange his researches around a unifying theme… His travels included Egypt and Cyrene in North Africa, Tyre in Phoenicia, Mesopotamia as far as Babylon, the Black Sea and the Crimea, and the north Aegean, apart from the main cities of Asia Minor and Greece, and ultimately (though this has left little if any trace in the Histories) south Italy where he settled…
At Delphi a different type of tradition was available, a series of stories told by the priests and related to the monuments and offerings at the shrine. These stories contain many folk-tale motifs and have a strong moral tone: the hero moves from prosperity to misfortune as a victim of divine envy - the ethical teaching is not aristocratic but belongs to the shrine of a god whose temple carried the mottoes, 'Know yourself' and 'Nothing too much'. The same types of story pattern are dominant in Ionia: Herodotus history of his home area is far less 'historical' and far less political than his account of mainland Greece.
Just as behind Homer there lies a long tradition of oral poetry sung by professional bards, so behind Herodotus there lies an Ionian tradition of storytelling of which he himself was the last and greatest master.
Oswin Murray
***
Polybius' History book VI contains the most complete text of Hellenistic Greek political theory that has survived from Antiquity and the only extended example of applied political theory. Polybius, an Achaean statesman turned historian, developed a political theory not to justify a political position, advocate an ideal constitution, or speculate on the nature of law, justice, political authority, or the relation of man to the state, but for the practical purpose of explaining an predicting historical events.
Polybius explicitly tells us that the sixth book of his History was intended to serve two functions: (1) to explain Rome's rise to power, specifically, 'how and by what type of constitution nearly the whole of the inhabited world, in less than 53 years, was overpowered and brought under one rule, that of the Romans'; and (2) to enable astute readers to make intelligent, informed political decisions in a world dominated by Rome, and in the particular case of political leaders, to govern in such a way as to upgrade and perfect the constitutions of their several states...
Polybius makes no pretence that his theory is completely original. He openly acknowledges that Plato and other philosophers 'discussed the subject at length and in precise detail'... His theory appears to have been drawn from three established Greek traditions: (1) the classification and comparison of the value of various constitutions, traceable back at least ti Herodotus and continuing in Plato, Aristotle, and later Peripatetics; (2) the theory of constitutional change, discussed by Plato, Aristotle and later Peripatetics; and (3) the origin of human society, speculatively reconstructed by many philosophers, including Protagoras, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus as well as later Peripatetics and Epicureans.
David Hahm
***
Oswin Murray. Greek Historians. In: J. Boardman, J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Oxford UP, 1986-1991.
David Hahm. Polybius' applied political theory. In: Andre Laks and Malcolm Schofield ed. Justice and Generosity. Studies in Hellenistic Social and Political Philosophy. Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium Hellenisticum. Cambridge UP, 1995.
The ultimate justification of the work is the account of the conflict between Greece and Persia, culminating in the Great Expedition of Xerxes to Greece in 480 BC described in the last three books: it is the story of how an army of (allegedly) one and three-quarter million men and a navy of 1 200 ships was defeated by the fragmented force of the Greeks, who in no battle could muster more than 40 000 men and 378 ships; a fleet from Herodotus' city had fought on the Persian side, and one of his earliest memories was perhaps of the setting out and return of that fateful expedition; he grew up in a Ionia suffering the joys and pains of its liberation and then subjection by the victorious Athenian navy. For the generation of Herodotus the epic achievements of their fathers had created the world in which they lived, as the return of the exiles from Babylon had created the world of Ezra.
The central theme of this conflict requires Herodotus to go back to its origins: 'who was the first in actual facts to harm the Greeks'. So the work begins with the earlier struggles between the Ionian Greeks and the kingdom of Lydia, before passing on to the origin of Persian power and the story of Cyrus the Great, and then the further conquests of the Persians, in Egypt and North Africa, and around the Black Sea, until we see that the conflict was inevitable.
Like Hecataeus, Herodotus was a traveler… The result is rather a total picture of the known world, in which the geography, customs, beliefs and monuments of each people are at least as important as their often tenuous relationships to the war. It is which gives added depth to Herodotus' account, and makes it both a great work of art and a convincing history of a conflict not just between two peoples but between two types of society, The Mediterranean egalitarian city-state and the oriental despotisms of the Middle East. It also makes Herodotus more modern than any other ancient historian in his approach to the ideal of total history.
Herodotus' openness to other cultures indeed caused him to be called a 'barbarophile'. It reflects in part an older Ionian view from an age of exploration, reinforced perhaps by the traditions of Herodotus' own community of Halicarnassus, which was a mixed Greek and Carian city. But these attitudes have been systematized under the influence of the new sophistic interest in the relationship between culture and nature, nomos and physis…
The two aspects of the work in one sense reflect the two main literary influences on it, Homer and the world of war and conflict, Hecataeus and the world of peace and understanding. He seems to have begun as an expert on foreign cultures, a traveling sophist who lectured on the marvels of the world; only later did he arrange his researches around a unifying theme… His travels included Egypt and Cyrene in North Africa, Tyre in Phoenicia, Mesopotamia as far as Babylon, the Black Sea and the Crimea, and the north Aegean, apart from the main cities of Asia Minor and Greece, and ultimately (though this has left little if any trace in the Histories) south Italy where he settled…
At Delphi a different type of tradition was available, a series of stories told by the priests and related to the monuments and offerings at the shrine. These stories contain many folk-tale motifs and have a strong moral tone: the hero moves from prosperity to misfortune as a victim of divine envy - the ethical teaching is not aristocratic but belongs to the shrine of a god whose temple carried the mottoes, 'Know yourself' and 'Nothing too much'. The same types of story pattern are dominant in Ionia: Herodotus history of his home area is far less 'historical' and far less political than his account of mainland Greece.
Just as behind Homer there lies a long tradition of oral poetry sung by professional bards, so behind Herodotus there lies an Ionian tradition of storytelling of which he himself was the last and greatest master.
Oswin Murray
***
Polybius' History book VI contains the most complete text of Hellenistic Greek political theory that has survived from Antiquity and the only extended example of applied political theory. Polybius, an Achaean statesman turned historian, developed a political theory not to justify a political position, advocate an ideal constitution, or speculate on the nature of law, justice, political authority, or the relation of man to the state, but for the practical purpose of explaining an predicting historical events.
Polybius explicitly tells us that the sixth book of his History was intended to serve two functions: (1) to explain Rome's rise to power, specifically, 'how and by what type of constitution nearly the whole of the inhabited world, in less than 53 years, was overpowered and brought under one rule, that of the Romans'; and (2) to enable astute readers to make intelligent, informed political decisions in a world dominated by Rome, and in the particular case of political leaders, to govern in such a way as to upgrade and perfect the constitutions of their several states...
Polybius makes no pretence that his theory is completely original. He openly acknowledges that Plato and other philosophers 'discussed the subject at length and in precise detail'... His theory appears to have been drawn from three established Greek traditions: (1) the classification and comparison of the value of various constitutions, traceable back at least ti Herodotus and continuing in Plato, Aristotle, and later Peripatetics; (2) the theory of constitutional change, discussed by Plato, Aristotle and later Peripatetics; and (3) the origin of human society, speculatively reconstructed by many philosophers, including Protagoras, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus as well as later Peripatetics and Epicureans.
David Hahm
***
Oswin Murray. Greek Historians. In: J. Boardman, J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Oxford UP, 1986-1991.
David Hahm. Polybius' applied political theory. In: Andre Laks and Malcolm Schofield ed. Justice and Generosity. Studies in Hellenistic Social and Political Philosophy. Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium Hellenisticum. Cambridge UP, 1995.
Drama. Tragedy, Comedy
Traditionally, the criticism of tragedy has assumed that there is (or should be) something that can be called a 'true' tragic plot. The most widely accepted master narrative is an integral part of the Aristotelian tradition that for centuries dominated tragic criticism and is still surpisingly resilient today. This schema emphasises hamartia, generally understood as the 'tragic flaw' of overweening pride, and its punishment. The tragic hero, although caught in circumstances beyond his ken and control, is finally to be understood as destroyed by the gods (or fate) because of his own failings. Even cursory examination of the plots of the extant tragedies will suggest some obvious ways in which this schema is inadequate and even irrelevant...It has at any rate created an situation in which the small corpus of surviving Greek tragedy has been further subdivided, leaving only a tiny group universally recognised as 'true' tragedies. The rest are treated as failed attempts at tragedy, relegated to mixed genres invented ad hoc, or left to specialists.
'Conflict' has been a central term in criticism of tragedy only since Hegel's Vorlesungen uber die Aesthetik of the 1820s, surprisingly, since from our perspective it is in many ways the crucial one...
In speaking of story patterns, I am not claiming to isolate a set of master plots to which all the narrative forms of tragedy can be referred; I am simply highlighting particular forms used repeatedly by the tragic poets in shaping their plots... The commonest of these story patterns are those I shall refer to as retribution, sacrifice, supplication, rescue and return-recognition.
Peter Burian
***
Yet despite tragedy’s ethnic plurality, and its interest in heroes and communities spread over vast distances across the known world, the Athenian focus, the ‘Athenocentrism’ of tragedy is manifested in several ways. Many plays include explicit panegyrics of Athens, for example in Aeschylus’Persians (231-45) and Sophocles’Oedipus at Colonus (668-719); the women of Troy, about to be sent off to slavery in Greece, hope that their destination is Athens (Trojan Women, 208-209). Secondly, even plays, with no obvious Athenian focus often include an aition, an explanation through myth, of the origins of an Athenian custom (Iphigenia among the Taurians, 1459-69). Thirdly, the tragedians used communities other than Athens as sites for ethnic self-definition; the barbarian world often functions in the tragic imagination as the home of vices (for example, Persian despotism, Thracian lawlessness, eastern effeminacy and cowardice) conceived as correlatives to the idealised Athenian democratic virtues of freedom of speech, equality before the law, and masculine courage. Nearer home it can also be helpful to see other Greek cities, especially Thebes, as imagined communities whose negative characteristics are partly determined by their deviation from the Athenians’ own positive self-representations...
Fourthly, a subspecies of tragedy emerged enacting transparently ‘patriotic’ myths, concerned with the early mythical history of Athens and Attica, and stressing such vital components of the Athenians’ identity as their claim to autochthony. The repertoire included Euripides’ Suppliant Women, Ion, and his Erechtheus, of which considerable fragments survive...
Even in plays set in Athenian territory, the Athenian characters always interact with representatives of other city-states. Some plots seek to display the superiority of Athenian democratic culture over other cities, especially Thebes or Argos, and imply that Athens is entitled to the imperial role of ‘moral policeman’ in Greece. In Euripides’ Suppliant Women Theseus, the mythical founder of the Athenian democracy, is portrayed as a pious and egalitarian constitutional monarch of a democracy (352-353). He takes action against the despotic Thebans to impose ‘the common law of Hellas’ protecting the rights of the dead.
The Athenocentrism of tragedy is revealed when myths involving heroes from other cities are manipulated to serve Athenian interests. Until the sixth century Athens had enshrined little of its own local mythology in poetry and art; it had no hero equal in status to Heracles, Achilles, Orestes, Agamemnon, or Oedipus. There was an attempt in the late sixth and fifth centuries to develop a nexus of myths around the Athenian king Theseus, who appears in several tragedies; but the Argive, Theban, and other non-Athenian heroes from the old epic cycle, while remaining central to tragedy, are often appropriated to the Athenian past, in each case conferring on the city some special advantage.
Edith Hall
***
The main surviving mass of ancient Greek comedy begins only with Aristophanes, who was born within a few years of the mid fifth century, long after the great tragedians and too late to tell us much about the riotous early days of the comic chorus, before the state took it over… In his early plays traditional Athenian comedy, the Old Style, as it came to be called, had already reached its full development; it has, as Aristotle remarked of tragedy, ‘attained its nature’. The chorus was all-important, and the revelation of its dress and dances and music… was central to the competition.
The comic theatre in the fifth century was directly political in a way that tragedy was not; its jokes had a bite and were often meant to be taken seriously. Aristophanes used his chorus at a certain moment in the play to address the audience directly; sometimes the chorus itself, the Birds or Clouds or Wasps or Frogs or whatever, seems to be speaking to us, sometimes the poet himself speaks through them…All the same, real Athenians could be parodied by name ot only thinly disguised, and plays could even be named after them. We know that politicians resented this, which is hardly surprising, but there is no evidence that they ever managed to stamp it out under the fifth-century democracy…
The greatest comic poet we know much about before Aristophanes is Cratinus. They overlapped; young Aristophanes attacked old Cratinus as a drunk who had given up poetry… The nearest contemporaries to Aristophanes in his working lifetime were Eupolis, who started producing comedies in 429 BC and died young in the course of the war, by drowning at sea, and a comic poet called Plato, younger than either of them, at work from about 410 to some time after 390… In the course of his career, Aristophanes spans the first two of the three phases or styles of Greek comedy. We must leave Epicharmus in Sicily out of account; Sicily and Athens in his day were separate planets. But starting in the twenties with vigorous and farcical burlesque, intermingled with savage onslaughts on politicians, he moved through the sadder, and in places more solemn, schemes of comedies such as the Frogs (405 BC) to the revival of comedy after the fall of Athens…
The essential plot of the Frogs is the descent of Dionysus, a god with many human weaknesses, to the underworld, mocked by the Frogs as he learns to row in Charon’s boat; he is searching for a great tragic poet, and chooses between Aeschylus and Euripides by a contest in which they destroy one anther’s lines with parody and mockery…
Of the plays we have, the very first is like a bucket of cold water in the face. It not only sounds, it trumpets the great themes of comic poetry: sex, life on the farm, the good old days, the nightmare of politics, the oddities of religion, the strange manners of the town. It is called the Acharnians (425 BC). The Knights, in the next year, adds to the old mixture some stern moralizing, some furious invective and some lyrical patriotic politics…
His early comedies were political, his latest began to be social. In the second phase of Athenian comedy, to which Aristophanes is virtually our only witness, the chorus withered away to some musical interludes, plots knitted together into coherence, and a kind of realism took over… His Wealth (388 BC) reflects only the transition. What was coming was comedy as the modern world has known it, beginning with Menander.
Peter Levi
***
Plautus frequently parades the fact that his drama is adapted from an original in Greek New Comedy. In doing so he positively embraces the implication that he has debased his model by stating that he has translated it into barbarian. The criticisms of the Greek-speaking snob are not deflected, they are made part of the comic experience…
It is not easy to account for the popularity of Greek mythological tragedy in the early years of the Roman theatre. In comedy, it is possible to analyze the process of adaptation involved in the presentation of Greek New Comedy at Rome. It is clear, for instance, that nobody attempted to Romanize the exuberant fantasies or contemporary political humour of Aristophanes, and the other masters of fifth-century Old Comedy. Rather, the pieces which won such favour with Roman audiences were those which adapted the domestic, bourgeois New Comedy of late fourth- and early third-century authors such as Menander, Diphilos and Philemon.
Some ancient critics praised Menander in particular for his naturalism, for the mirror which he held to life. When he presented an Athenian youth on the stage he wore clothes which had been subject to some degree of stylization but which were not dissimilar to those typical of his class in the world outside the theatre. In a Roman palliate comedy (named after the pallium - Greek-style cloak, to designate the Greek origins of the genre, contrasted with partly Roman 'togate' comedy), every time a character refers to 'my pallium' he is also drawing attention to his theatrical costume, to the marker of the burlesque national identity which he has embraced. Plautus veritably proclaims the Greekness of his comic world, even to the extent of having his characters make comments about Romans as barbarians...
The poets and chorus of Greek Old Comedy frequently step out of their roles and address the theatrical audience directly on issues of dramatic technique, rivalry between authors and the competition between the plays on show, but they do so in the formal section of the drama known as the parabasis. Menandrean New Comedy features a range of divine prologue-speakers who address the audience directly and sketch out the plot of the drama to follow; characters in Menander occasionally recount some off-stage incident to the audience and address them as 'Gentlemen'. Terence in turn will adopt the prologues of Menander, but eliminate all expository content in favour of literary criticism and polemic against competitors. None of these writers, however, comes close to the intense interaction between actor and audience which typifies Plautine comedy.
Matthew Leigh
***
Peter Burian. Myth and muthos:the shaping of tragic plot. In: P.E. Easterling ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge UP, 1997-2004.
Edith Hall. The Sociology of Athenian tragedy. In: P.E. Easterling ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge UP, 1997-2004.
Peter Levi. Greek Drama. In: J. Boardman, J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Oxford UP, 1986-1991.
Matthew Leigh. Primitivism and power: The beginnings of Latin literature. In: Oliver Taplin ed. Literature of the Roman World. Oxford UP, 2000-2001
'Conflict' has been a central term in criticism of tragedy only since Hegel's Vorlesungen uber die Aesthetik of the 1820s, surprisingly, since from our perspective it is in many ways the crucial one...
In speaking of story patterns, I am not claiming to isolate a set of master plots to which all the narrative forms of tragedy can be referred; I am simply highlighting particular forms used repeatedly by the tragic poets in shaping their plots... The commonest of these story patterns are those I shall refer to as retribution, sacrifice, supplication, rescue and return-recognition.
Peter Burian
***
Yet despite tragedy’s ethnic plurality, and its interest in heroes and communities spread over vast distances across the known world, the Athenian focus, the ‘Athenocentrism’ of tragedy is manifested in several ways. Many plays include explicit panegyrics of Athens, for example in Aeschylus’Persians (231-45) and Sophocles’Oedipus at Colonus (668-719); the women of Troy, about to be sent off to slavery in Greece, hope that their destination is Athens (Trojan Women, 208-209). Secondly, even plays, with no obvious Athenian focus often include an aition, an explanation through myth, of the origins of an Athenian custom (Iphigenia among the Taurians, 1459-69). Thirdly, the tragedians used communities other than Athens as sites for ethnic self-definition; the barbarian world often functions in the tragic imagination as the home of vices (for example, Persian despotism, Thracian lawlessness, eastern effeminacy and cowardice) conceived as correlatives to the idealised Athenian democratic virtues of freedom of speech, equality before the law, and masculine courage. Nearer home it can also be helpful to see other Greek cities, especially Thebes, as imagined communities whose negative characteristics are partly determined by their deviation from the Athenians’ own positive self-representations...
Fourthly, a subspecies of tragedy emerged enacting transparently ‘patriotic’ myths, concerned with the early mythical history of Athens and Attica, and stressing such vital components of the Athenians’ identity as their claim to autochthony. The repertoire included Euripides’ Suppliant Women, Ion, and his Erechtheus, of which considerable fragments survive...
Even in plays set in Athenian territory, the Athenian characters always interact with representatives of other city-states. Some plots seek to display the superiority of Athenian democratic culture over other cities, especially Thebes or Argos, and imply that Athens is entitled to the imperial role of ‘moral policeman’ in Greece. In Euripides’ Suppliant Women Theseus, the mythical founder of the Athenian democracy, is portrayed as a pious and egalitarian constitutional monarch of a democracy (352-353). He takes action against the despotic Thebans to impose ‘the common law of Hellas’ protecting the rights of the dead.
The Athenocentrism of tragedy is revealed when myths involving heroes from other cities are manipulated to serve Athenian interests. Until the sixth century Athens had enshrined little of its own local mythology in poetry and art; it had no hero equal in status to Heracles, Achilles, Orestes, Agamemnon, or Oedipus. There was an attempt in the late sixth and fifth centuries to develop a nexus of myths around the Athenian king Theseus, who appears in several tragedies; but the Argive, Theban, and other non-Athenian heroes from the old epic cycle, while remaining central to tragedy, are often appropriated to the Athenian past, in each case conferring on the city some special advantage.
Edith Hall
***
The main surviving mass of ancient Greek comedy begins only with Aristophanes, who was born within a few years of the mid fifth century, long after the great tragedians and too late to tell us much about the riotous early days of the comic chorus, before the state took it over… In his early plays traditional Athenian comedy, the Old Style, as it came to be called, had already reached its full development; it has, as Aristotle remarked of tragedy, ‘attained its nature’. The chorus was all-important, and the revelation of its dress and dances and music… was central to the competition.
The comic theatre in the fifth century was directly political in a way that tragedy was not; its jokes had a bite and were often meant to be taken seriously. Aristophanes used his chorus at a certain moment in the play to address the audience directly; sometimes the chorus itself, the Birds or Clouds or Wasps or Frogs or whatever, seems to be speaking to us, sometimes the poet himself speaks through them…All the same, real Athenians could be parodied by name ot only thinly disguised, and plays could even be named after them. We know that politicians resented this, which is hardly surprising, but there is no evidence that they ever managed to stamp it out under the fifth-century democracy…
The greatest comic poet we know much about before Aristophanes is Cratinus. They overlapped; young Aristophanes attacked old Cratinus as a drunk who had given up poetry… The nearest contemporaries to Aristophanes in his working lifetime were Eupolis, who started producing comedies in 429 BC and died young in the course of the war, by drowning at sea, and a comic poet called Plato, younger than either of them, at work from about 410 to some time after 390… In the course of his career, Aristophanes spans the first two of the three phases or styles of Greek comedy. We must leave Epicharmus in Sicily out of account; Sicily and Athens in his day were separate planets. But starting in the twenties with vigorous and farcical burlesque, intermingled with savage onslaughts on politicians, he moved through the sadder, and in places more solemn, schemes of comedies such as the Frogs (405 BC) to the revival of comedy after the fall of Athens…
The essential plot of the Frogs is the descent of Dionysus, a god with many human weaknesses, to the underworld, mocked by the Frogs as he learns to row in Charon’s boat; he is searching for a great tragic poet, and chooses between Aeschylus and Euripides by a contest in which they destroy one anther’s lines with parody and mockery…
Of the plays we have, the very first is like a bucket of cold water in the face. It not only sounds, it trumpets the great themes of comic poetry: sex, life on the farm, the good old days, the nightmare of politics, the oddities of religion, the strange manners of the town. It is called the Acharnians (425 BC). The Knights, in the next year, adds to the old mixture some stern moralizing, some furious invective and some lyrical patriotic politics…
His early comedies were political, his latest began to be social. In the second phase of Athenian comedy, to which Aristophanes is virtually our only witness, the chorus withered away to some musical interludes, plots knitted together into coherence, and a kind of realism took over… His Wealth (388 BC) reflects only the transition. What was coming was comedy as the modern world has known it, beginning with Menander.
Peter Levi
***
Plautus frequently parades the fact that his drama is adapted from an original in Greek New Comedy. In doing so he positively embraces the implication that he has debased his model by stating that he has translated it into barbarian. The criticisms of the Greek-speaking snob are not deflected, they are made part of the comic experience…
It is not easy to account for the popularity of Greek mythological tragedy in the early years of the Roman theatre. In comedy, it is possible to analyze the process of adaptation involved in the presentation of Greek New Comedy at Rome. It is clear, for instance, that nobody attempted to Romanize the exuberant fantasies or contemporary political humour of Aristophanes, and the other masters of fifth-century Old Comedy. Rather, the pieces which won such favour with Roman audiences were those which adapted the domestic, bourgeois New Comedy of late fourth- and early third-century authors such as Menander, Diphilos and Philemon.
Some ancient critics praised Menander in particular for his naturalism, for the mirror which he held to life. When he presented an Athenian youth on the stage he wore clothes which had been subject to some degree of stylization but which were not dissimilar to those typical of his class in the world outside the theatre. In a Roman palliate comedy (named after the pallium - Greek-style cloak, to designate the Greek origins of the genre, contrasted with partly Roman 'togate' comedy), every time a character refers to 'my pallium' he is also drawing attention to his theatrical costume, to the marker of the burlesque national identity which he has embraced. Plautus veritably proclaims the Greekness of his comic world, even to the extent of having his characters make comments about Romans as barbarians...
The poets and chorus of Greek Old Comedy frequently step out of their roles and address the theatrical audience directly on issues of dramatic technique, rivalry between authors and the competition between the plays on show, but they do so in the formal section of the drama known as the parabasis. Menandrean New Comedy features a range of divine prologue-speakers who address the audience directly and sketch out the plot of the drama to follow; characters in Menander occasionally recount some off-stage incident to the audience and address them as 'Gentlemen'. Terence in turn will adopt the prologues of Menander, but eliminate all expository content in favour of literary criticism and polemic against competitors. None of these writers, however, comes close to the intense interaction between actor and audience which typifies Plautine comedy.
Matthew Leigh
***
Peter Burian. Myth and muthos:the shaping of tragic plot. In: P.E. Easterling ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge UP, 1997-2004.
Edith Hall. The Sociology of Athenian tragedy. In: P.E. Easterling ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge UP, 1997-2004.
Peter Levi. Greek Drama. In: J. Boardman, J. Griffin, O. Murray ed. The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World. Oxford UP, 1986-1991.
Matthew Leigh. Primitivism and power: The beginnings of Latin literature. In: Oliver Taplin ed. Literature of the Roman World. Oxford UP, 2000-2001
Epic. 'Homer'. Hesiod
‘Epic’ is of course an invented concept, a Western imposition on the natural heterogeneity of long narrative forms from cultures around the world. Stemming ultimately from ancient Greek epos, which spans the field from ‘word’ to ‘tale’ in Homer, and the popular term epopoiia (‘verse composition’), ancient Greek epic has been described as a genre in some depth since Aristotle; once canonized, it became a literary tool of unquestioned usefulness and applicability worldwide, primarily on the cultural and ideological strength of its Greco-Roman origins.
Like all genre labels, ‘epic’ can help focus our vision, creating categories that facilitate comparison and contrast as well as filling in a background against which individual tales can be understood. In that sense it can function as an effective organizing principle, and generic identity can certainly serve as a tool for effective reading. But, as already adumbrated, neither ‘the epic’ nor any other genre is an archetype. The nation and individuals who produce ‘epics’ have no uniform code of generic requirements; indeed, even their internal systems of nomenclature for various kinds of verbal art prove radically divergent... and in applying this concept and label uncritically to long narrative forms from other cultures we run the risk of unintentionally colonizing their verbal art...
Relatively few epics are smaller in extent than the Homeric poems – Beowulf at 3 182 lines and the hundred-odd medieval French chansons de geste at about the same or lesser length are examples – but many are far longer. A more dependable characteristic of epic across cultures is the often-cited feature of ‘omnibus genre’, that is, the extent to which the epic absorbs or is in conversation with other poetic genres in the cultural repertoire. Critics have identified prayers, laments, proverbs, catalogues and inset stories within the Iliad and Odyssey...
The presence of formulas, such as ‘swift-footed Achilles’ or ‘wine-dark sea’, has often been cited as an indication of the Homeric poems’ debt to an ancient Greek oral tradition, as the recurrence of typical scenes like Arming the Hero or Feasting... When Andromache pleads with Hector in Iliad 6 to remain inside Troy with her and Astyanax, her use of traditional scene of Lament – customarily a vehicle for actually mourning the dead – suggests the inevitability of her husband’s demise. The Return story pattern of the Odyssey, mirrored in a host of Indo-European epic traditions, accounts for the order and sequence of the poem, for Penelope’s trademark intransigence, and for the closure of the poem after XXIII, 296...
Homeric epic has drawn definition from other stylistic features as well, very prominently from its prologues, catalogues and similes. The Iliad begins with an appeal to the Muse and a sketch of the mythic background to the action that follows, and the Odyssey starts similarly, with particular attention to Odysseus strivings and an exhortation to the Muse to ‘speak also to us’. Correspondingly, The Siri Epic begins with an extensive series of invocations, while South Slavic songs also make use of pripjevi, or prologues, to start up the narrative action.
National character – the epic as a charter of group identity, myth in the service of indigenous social history – is an aspect of many scholars’ concept of the genre. The Iliad glorifies the Achaean achievement in battle and the Odyssey memorializes the post-Troy return to one’s homeland with all the dangers and challenges such a journey and homecoming pose... The ‘epic ethos’ reaches far beyond its most immediate context, and well beyond where document-based history can go: the Kalevala has long fuelled the emergence of the Finns as an individual nation, as well as the discipline of folk-lore studies and the music of Sibelius.
National characters and group identity are often encoded in heroic actions, with a central focus on martial achievement, but there are other sorts of epic vehicles as well. The heroism in the Iliad – the acts of war and winning of kleos on the battlefield, irrespective of whether one lives or dies - is not entirely coincident with heroism in the Odyssey, which consists of winning survival, return and re-establishment of the social order.
John Miles Foley
***
...the straight truth is that we can say next to nothing for certain about the original circumstances of production of our two poems, neither about their audience nor their author nor their context of communication. For a start, they come from a time well before any kind of firm external historical record...
'Homer' never in any way declares who he is, where he comes from, or who he is making poetry for. Even if he did, we would have to treat the declaration with care - it need not be literally true - but he has covered his own tracks so completely that this question does not arise. More than in almost any other poetry, the craftsman suppresses his own presence, and effaces his own identity.
Achilles is uncompromising, overt in his feelings, unhesitatingly ready to die in order to make good his failings: Odysseus, the great survivor, is subtle, always ready to temporize, to disguise, and to lie...
The archetypal anitypes go far beyond the two heroes. The Iliad tells directly of only a few crucial days out of the whole Trojan War; and it is almost entirely set, claustrophobically almost, at Troy. At the same time, the poem extends understanding towards a wide range of characters, and to both sides in the war. While the Odyssey narrates only a small number of days directly - those leading up to Odysseus' return and revenge on Ithake - it covers, by means of flashbacks, a wide spread of places, including the varied story-worlds of Odysseus' adventures. And his adventures (and those of Menelaos) are spread over some ten years. Yet, for all its range of time and place, the Odyssey is centred on one man and his close associates in a way quite different from the multiplicity of the Iliad.
The Odyssey is fundamentally a crime-and-punishment story: the good and the likeable triumph, and the wicked are in the end brought low. It all moves towards reunion and the establishment of a stable and peaceful society, even though that is not fully acheved by the end of the poem (the eventuality is profesied). The Odyssey's overall direction is from suffering and disruption towards restoration and the united family. The Iliad, on the other hand, is not evidently a story of right and wrong; it tells of a world in which all suffer, and where the suffering is not apportioned by deserving. The finest people and the finest relationships - Achilles, Patroklos, Hektor, Andromache, Priam - are destroyed. The best gets wasted; anger and conflict rule human life. The prosperous and civilized city of Troy is to go up in flames; and by no means all of leading Achaians will get home - and even fewer will enjoy the fruits of victorious peace. Two quite different views of the human condition, then, and yet somehow a pair, like non-identical twins.
Oliver Taplin
***
The Theogony, in about 1 000 lines, covers the origin and the genealogies of some 300 gods (many in lists of course) and it all leads up towards the establishment of Zeus as supreme divine ruler. The shorter Works and Days is a kind of discursive collection of wise advice, especially about good husbandry; it tells what a man should do to fit into the natural and moral order of the world. Unlike any other early hexameter poetry, W&D is addressed to fellow contemporaries, mostly to Hesiod's layabout brother Perses, and partly to the local lords whom he accuses of corruption.
Although so different in tone and subject from Homer, Hesiod's poems are in the same hexameter metre, and in a pretty similar style and diction. There has been much dispute over which cane the first, but it may well be that the two poets were contemporaries, or at least their lives may have overlapped. Homer almost certainly came though, from the other side of the Aegean Sea, from the middle part of the Asia Minor coast known as Ionia, near its border with the more northern part known as Aiolis. Even so, it is not impossible that they both participated in the same poetic occasions sometimes. The ancient Greeks certainly liked to believe that they did, and stories about a great 'Contest' between them grew up early, probably within a few generations of their own day. This sets up a kind of contest within the whole nature of poetry: the story-teller of glamorous champions versus the font of homely wisdom…
It was surely Hesiod himself who established the Muses, traditionally from Mount Olympos far to the north, on his local mountain, Helikon. He even seems to have coined, in his Theogony, their canonical nine names…
Hesiod performed his poetry then (or made out that he preformed) at a big public occasion which attracted visitors and competitors. Competition can be good, he claims elsewhere (W&D 25-6). So a picture begins to take shape of poets who travel, and whose venues include big public occasions where they can compete to win attention, prestige, and reward.
In W&D Hesiod casts himself as a grim old bugger, tough, without illusions, worn down by hard labour, pessimistic (174-177). But this does not mean that Hesiod's audience listened to him in order to get depressed. What does his poetry offer them, then? Explicitly: vivid wisdom, mythical and religiouy lore, and glorification of the gods, above all of Zeus. But there is an important passage in the Theogony which brings out a further, key reason for audiences to give time to this special form of discourse, poetry. Hesiod is talking of the behaviour and blessings of a good basileus (lord), and emphasizing the importance to him of the poet: (97-103).
Oliver Taplin
***
John Miles Foley. Epic as a genre. In: Robert Fowler ed. The Cambridge Companion to Homer. Cambridge UP, 2004-2007.
Oliver Taplin. The spring of the Muses: Homer and related poetry. In: Oliver Taplin ed. Literature in the Greek World. Oxford UP, 2000-2001.
Like all genre labels, ‘epic’ can help focus our vision, creating categories that facilitate comparison and contrast as well as filling in a background against which individual tales can be understood. In that sense it can function as an effective organizing principle, and generic identity can certainly serve as a tool for effective reading. But, as already adumbrated, neither ‘the epic’ nor any other genre is an archetype. The nation and individuals who produce ‘epics’ have no uniform code of generic requirements; indeed, even their internal systems of nomenclature for various kinds of verbal art prove radically divergent... and in applying this concept and label uncritically to long narrative forms from other cultures we run the risk of unintentionally colonizing their verbal art...
Relatively few epics are smaller in extent than the Homeric poems – Beowulf at 3 182 lines and the hundred-odd medieval French chansons de geste at about the same or lesser length are examples – but many are far longer. A more dependable characteristic of epic across cultures is the often-cited feature of ‘omnibus genre’, that is, the extent to which the epic absorbs or is in conversation with other poetic genres in the cultural repertoire. Critics have identified prayers, laments, proverbs, catalogues and inset stories within the Iliad and Odyssey...
The presence of formulas, such as ‘swift-footed Achilles’ or ‘wine-dark sea’, has often been cited as an indication of the Homeric poems’ debt to an ancient Greek oral tradition, as the recurrence of typical scenes like Arming the Hero or Feasting... When Andromache pleads with Hector in Iliad 6 to remain inside Troy with her and Astyanax, her use of traditional scene of Lament – customarily a vehicle for actually mourning the dead – suggests the inevitability of her husband’s demise. The Return story pattern of the Odyssey, mirrored in a host of Indo-European epic traditions, accounts for the order and sequence of the poem, for Penelope’s trademark intransigence, and for the closure of the poem after XXIII, 296...
Homeric epic has drawn definition from other stylistic features as well, very prominently from its prologues, catalogues and similes. The Iliad begins with an appeal to the Muse and a sketch of the mythic background to the action that follows, and the Odyssey starts similarly, with particular attention to Odysseus strivings and an exhortation to the Muse to ‘speak also to us’. Correspondingly, The Siri Epic begins with an extensive series of invocations, while South Slavic songs also make use of pripjevi, or prologues, to start up the narrative action.
National character – the epic as a charter of group identity, myth in the service of indigenous social history – is an aspect of many scholars’ concept of the genre. The Iliad glorifies the Achaean achievement in battle and the Odyssey memorializes the post-Troy return to one’s homeland with all the dangers and challenges such a journey and homecoming pose... The ‘epic ethos’ reaches far beyond its most immediate context, and well beyond where document-based history can go: the Kalevala has long fuelled the emergence of the Finns as an individual nation, as well as the discipline of folk-lore studies and the music of Sibelius.
National characters and group identity are often encoded in heroic actions, with a central focus on martial achievement, but there are other sorts of epic vehicles as well. The heroism in the Iliad – the acts of war and winning of kleos on the battlefield, irrespective of whether one lives or dies - is not entirely coincident with heroism in the Odyssey, which consists of winning survival, return and re-establishment of the social order.
John Miles Foley
***
...the straight truth is that we can say next to nothing for certain about the original circumstances of production of our two poems, neither about their audience nor their author nor their context of communication. For a start, they come from a time well before any kind of firm external historical record...
'Homer' never in any way declares who he is, where he comes from, or who he is making poetry for. Even if he did, we would have to treat the declaration with care - it need not be literally true - but he has covered his own tracks so completely that this question does not arise. More than in almost any other poetry, the craftsman suppresses his own presence, and effaces his own identity.
Achilles is uncompromising, overt in his feelings, unhesitatingly ready to die in order to make good his failings: Odysseus, the great survivor, is subtle, always ready to temporize, to disguise, and to lie...
The archetypal anitypes go far beyond the two heroes. The Iliad tells directly of only a few crucial days out of the whole Trojan War; and it is almost entirely set, claustrophobically almost, at Troy. At the same time, the poem extends understanding towards a wide range of characters, and to both sides in the war. While the Odyssey narrates only a small number of days directly - those leading up to Odysseus' return and revenge on Ithake - it covers, by means of flashbacks, a wide spread of places, including the varied story-worlds of Odysseus' adventures. And his adventures (and those of Menelaos) are spread over some ten years. Yet, for all its range of time and place, the Odyssey is centred on one man and his close associates in a way quite different from the multiplicity of the Iliad.
The Odyssey is fundamentally a crime-and-punishment story: the good and the likeable triumph, and the wicked are in the end brought low. It all moves towards reunion and the establishment of a stable and peaceful society, even though that is not fully acheved by the end of the poem (the eventuality is profesied). The Odyssey's overall direction is from suffering and disruption towards restoration and the united family. The Iliad, on the other hand, is not evidently a story of right and wrong; it tells of a world in which all suffer, and where the suffering is not apportioned by deserving. The finest people and the finest relationships - Achilles, Patroklos, Hektor, Andromache, Priam - are destroyed. The best gets wasted; anger and conflict rule human life. The prosperous and civilized city of Troy is to go up in flames; and by no means all of leading Achaians will get home - and even fewer will enjoy the fruits of victorious peace. Two quite different views of the human condition, then, and yet somehow a pair, like non-identical twins.
Oliver Taplin
***
The Theogony, in about 1 000 lines, covers the origin and the genealogies of some 300 gods (many in lists of course) and it all leads up towards the establishment of Zeus as supreme divine ruler. The shorter Works and Days is a kind of discursive collection of wise advice, especially about good husbandry; it tells what a man should do to fit into the natural and moral order of the world. Unlike any other early hexameter poetry, W&D is addressed to fellow contemporaries, mostly to Hesiod's layabout brother Perses, and partly to the local lords whom he accuses of corruption.
Although so different in tone and subject from Homer, Hesiod's poems are in the same hexameter metre, and in a pretty similar style and diction. There has been much dispute over which cane the first, but it may well be that the two poets were contemporaries, or at least their lives may have overlapped. Homer almost certainly came though, from the other side of the Aegean Sea, from the middle part of the Asia Minor coast known as Ionia, near its border with the more northern part known as Aiolis. Even so, it is not impossible that they both participated in the same poetic occasions sometimes. The ancient Greeks certainly liked to believe that they did, and stories about a great 'Contest' between them grew up early, probably within a few generations of their own day. This sets up a kind of contest within the whole nature of poetry: the story-teller of glamorous champions versus the font of homely wisdom…
It was surely Hesiod himself who established the Muses, traditionally from Mount Olympos far to the north, on his local mountain, Helikon. He even seems to have coined, in his Theogony, their canonical nine names…
Hesiod performed his poetry then (or made out that he preformed) at a big public occasion which attracted visitors and competitors. Competition can be good, he claims elsewhere (W&D 25-6). So a picture begins to take shape of poets who travel, and whose venues include big public occasions where they can compete to win attention, prestige, and reward.
In W&D Hesiod casts himself as a grim old bugger, tough, without illusions, worn down by hard labour, pessimistic (174-177). But this does not mean that Hesiod's audience listened to him in order to get depressed. What does his poetry offer them, then? Explicitly: vivid wisdom, mythical and religiouy lore, and glorification of the gods, above all of Zeus. But there is an important passage in the Theogony which brings out a further, key reason for audiences to give time to this special form of discourse, poetry. Hesiod is talking of the behaviour and blessings of a good basileus (lord), and emphasizing the importance to him of the poet: (97-103).
Oliver Taplin
***
John Miles Foley. Epic as a genre. In: Robert Fowler ed. The Cambridge Companion to Homer. Cambridge UP, 2004-2007.
Oliver Taplin. The spring of the Muses: Homer and related poetry. In: Oliver Taplin ed. Literature in the Greek World. Oxford UP, 2000-2001.
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