Making Time for Greek and Roman Literature (Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies) [1 ed.] 9781032472782, 9781032472829, 9781003385387, 1032472782

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I Out of Time
1 Now, Sleep
2 Untold Times? A Page From Galen
II Engendering Time
3 Fertile Pasts and Sterile Futures in Euripides’ Andromache
4 The History of Sexuality in Xenophon’s Symposium
5 Materna Tempora: Gestational Time and the Ovidian Poetics of Delay
III Shaping Time
6 Hieron of Syracuse and the Politics of Epinician Time
7 “But Now”: The Temporality of Archaic Greek Invective
8 Wasting Time With Petronius
9 The Metaphors and Poetics of Roman Decline
IV Beyond Time
10 Greek Ghosts and Roman Imperial Time
11 Time Stood Still, and It Was Sublime: Proto-Gospel of James 18
Index

Citation preview

Making Time for Greek and Roman Literature

The essays in this collection explore various models of representing temporality in ancient Greek and Roman literature to elucidate how structures of time communicate meaning, as well as the way that the cultural impact of measured time is reflected in ancient texts. This collection serves as a meditation on the different ways that cosmological and experiential time are construed, measured, and manipulated in Greek and Latin literature. It explores both the kinds of time deemed worthy of measurement, as well as time that escapes notice. Likewise, it interrogates how linear time and its representation become politicized and leveraged in the service of emerging and dominant power structures. These essays showcase various contemporary theoretical approaches to temporality in order to build bridges and expose chasms between ancient and modern ideologies of time. Some of the areas explored include the philosophical and social implications of time that is not measured, the insights and limitations provided by queer theory for an investigation of the way sex and gender relate to time, the relationship of time to power, the extent to which temporal discourses intersect with spatial constructs, and finally an exploration of experiences that exceed the boundaries of time. Making Time for Greek and Roman Literature is of interest to scholars of time and temporality in the ancient world, as well as those working on time and temporality in English literature, comparative literature, history, sociology, and gender and sexuality. It is also suitable for those working on Greek and Roman literature and culture more broadly. Kate Gilhuly is Professor of Classical Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens (Cambridge 2009), Erotic Geographies in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture (Routledge 2017), and co-editor with Nancy Worman of Place, Space, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture (Cambridge 2014). Jeffrey P. Ulrich is Assistant Professor of Classics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. His first book, The Shadow of an Ass: Philosophical Choice and Aesthetic Experience in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press, and he is also co-editing a volume entitled Ancient Narrative and Reader Response with Luca Graverini and Carlo Caruso (Ancient Narrative, forthcoming).

Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies

A Cognitive Analysis of the Main Apolline Divinatory Practices Decoding Divination Giulia Frigerio Processions and the Construction of Communities in Antiquity History and Comparative Perspectives Edited by Elena Muñiz-Grijalvo and Alberto del Campo Tejedor Didactic Literature in the Roman World Edited by T. H. M. Gellar-Goad and Christopher B. Polt Atheism at the Agora A History of Unbelief in Ancient Greek Polytheism James C Ford The Geographical Guide of Ptolemy of Alexandria An Analysis Duane W. Roller Revelation and Material Religion in the Roman East Essays in Honor of Steven J. Friesen Edited by Nathan Leach, Daniel Charles Smith, and Tony Keddie The Greeks in Iberia and their Mediterranean Context Edited by Jens A. Krasilnikoff and Benedict Lowe Making Time for Greek and Roman Literature Edited by Kate Gilhuly and Jeffrey P. Ulrich

For more information on this series, visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Monographs-in-ClassicalStudies/book-series/RMCS

Making Time for Greek and Roman Literature

Edited by Kate Gilhuly and Jeffrey P. Ulrich

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Kate Gilhuly and Jeffrey P. Ulrich; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kate Gilhuly and Jeffrey P. Ulrich to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gilhuly, Kate, 1964– editor. | Ulrich, Jeffrey P., editor. Title: Making time for Greek and Roman literature / edited by Kate Gilhuly and Jeffrey P. Ulrich. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge monographs in classical studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023032191 (print) | LCCN 2023032192 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032472782 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032472829 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003385387 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Classical literature—History and criticism. | Time in literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Essays. Classification: LCC PA3015.T6 M35 2024 (print) | LCC PA3015.T6 (ebook) | DDC 880.09—dc23/eng/20230807 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032191 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023032192 ISBN: 978-1-032-47278-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-47282-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-38538-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003385387 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction

vii viii x 1

KATE GILHULY AND JEFFREY P. ULRICH

I

Out of Time 1 Now, Sleep

13 15

ALEX PURVES AND VICTORIA WOHL

2 Untold Times? A Page From Galen

30

JAMES KER

II

Engendering Time 3 Fertile Pasts and Sterile Futures in Euripides’ Andromache

45 47

SARAH OLSEN

4 The History of Sexuality in Xenophon’s Symposium

62

KATE GILHULY

5 Materna Tempora: Gestational Time and the Ovidian Poetics of Delay CAITLIN HINES

84

vi

Contents

III

Shaping Time 6 Hieron of Syracuse and the Politics of Epinician Time

103 105

NIGEL NICHOLSON

7 “But Now”: The Temporality of Archaic Greek Invective

121

KIRK ORMAND

8 Wasting Time With Petronius

140

JEFFREY P. ULRICH

9 The Metaphors and Poetics of Roman Decline

164

ANDREAS T. ZANKER

IV

Beyond Time

185

10 Greek Ghosts and Roman Imperial Time

187

ROBERT CIOFFI

11 Time Stood Still, and It Was Sublime: Proto-Gospel of James 18

205

PATRICK GLAUTHIER

Index

226

Figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4

Elizabeth Heyert, The Sleepers 15, all rights reserved. Elizabeth Heyert, The Sleepers 04, all rights reserved. Elizabeth Heyert, The Sleepers 02, all rights reserved. Elizabeth Heyert, The Sleepers 07, all rights reserved.

14 18 24 26

Contributors

Robert Cioffi is Assistant Professor of Classics at Bard College. His first book, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Greek Novel: Between Representation and Resistance, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Kate Gilhuly is Professor of Classical Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens (Cambridge 2009), Erotic Geographies in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture (Routledge 2017), and co-editor with Nancy Worman of Place, Space, and Landscape in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture (Cambridge 2014). Patrick Glauthier is Assistant Professor of Classics at Dartmouth College. He works primarily on Latin poetry, the sublime, and the intersection of aesthetics and scientific thinking. His current book project is The Scientific Sublime in Imperial Rome: Manilius, Seneca, Lucan, and the Aetna. Caitlin Hines is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on Latin literature of the Augustan age, especially the works of Vergil and Ovid, with special interest in intertextuality, metapoetics, the body, and fertility politics. James Ker is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in imperial Roman literature and culture, including Roman conceptions of time and their reception. His most recent book is The Ordered Day: Quotidian Time and Forms of Life in Ancient Rome (Johns Hopkins 2023). Nigel Nicholson holds the Walter Mintz Chair at Reed College, where he served as Dean of the Faculty from 2013–2020. He is the author of three books: Aristocracy and Athletics in Archaic and Classical Greece (Cambridge 2005), Poetics of Victory in the Greek West: Epinician, Oral Tradition, and the Deinomenid Empire (Oxford 2015), and, with Nathan Selden, The Rhetoric of Medicine: Lessons on Professionalism from Ancient Greece (Oxford 2019). In 2004 he was named Oregon Professor of the Year. Sarah Olsen is an Associate Professor of Classics at Williams College. She is the author of Solo Dance in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature: Representing the Unruly Body (Cambridge University Press 2021) as well as the co-editor, with Mario Telò, of Queer Euripides (Bloomsbury 2022).

Contributors

ix

Kirk Ormand is the Nathan A. Greenberg Professor of Classics at Oberlin College. His books include The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece (Cambridge 2014) and Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (UT Press 2018). He has published articles on Homer, Hesiod, Hipponax, and Heliodorus. Alex Purves is Professor of Classics at UCLA and author of Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative (Cambridge 2010) and Homer and the Poetics of Gesture (Oxford 2019). Jeffrey P. Ulrich is Assistant Professor of Classics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. His first book, The Shadow of an Ass: Philosophical Choice and Aesthetic Experience in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press. He is also co-editing a volume entitled Ancient Narrative and Reader Response with Luca Graverini and Carlo Caruso (Ancient Narrative, forthcoming). Victoria Wohl is Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto. She studies the literature and culture of democratic Athens. Her publications include Love Among the Ruins: The Erotics of Democracy in Classical Athens (Princeton 2002), Law’s Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory (Cambridge 2010), and Euripides and the Politics of Form (Princeton 2015). Andreas T. Zanker is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at Amherst College. He is the author of Greek and Latin Expressions of Meaning: The Classical Origins of a Modern Metaphor (C. H. Beck 2016) and Metaphor in Homer: Time, Speech, and Thought (Cambridge 2019), and co-editor of Horace and Seneca: Interactions, Intertexts, Interpretations (De Gruyter 2019).

Acknowledgments

This book evolved out of a conference that was funded by an award from AALAC, and we are grateful for that support, as well as Andy Shennan’s encouragement and guidance in submitting the application. Wellesley College generously allowed us to host the conference during a lull in the pandemic, and the collegiality and conversations there planted the seeds for this volume. We appreciate the constructive suggestions of the anonymous readers of our book proposal, and are thankful to Amy Davis-Poynter, Marcia Adams, Gilbert Rajkumar Gnanarathinam, and all the people at Taylor and Francis who helped bring this volume to fruition. We are grateful to Rutgers University and Wellesley College for support in the production of this book, and to Kate Hildreth for her help in producing the index.

Introduction Kate Gilhuly and Jeffrey P. Ulrich

Making Time for Greek and Roman Literature explores various models of representing temporality in ancient narratives in order to elucidate how structures of time communicate meaning. It serves as a meditation on the different ways that cosmological and experiential time are construed, measured, and manipulated in Greek and Latin literature. We are interested in both the kinds of time deemed worthy of measurement and time that escapes notice. To that end, we consider the relationship between regimes of temporality and the body – bodies that are in sync with time as well as those that have their own rhythm. Likewise, we interrogate how linear time and its representation become politicized and leveraged in the service of emerging and dominant power structures. In short, this volume exposes the ideological investments that make and unmake time. Since all narrative is bound up with temporality, it would be impossible to produce a comprehensive volume. What distinguishes Making Time is that we showcase various contemporary theoretical approaches to temporality and its limits in order to build bridges and expose chasms between ancient and modern ideologies of time. Some of the areas explored include the philosophical and social implications of time that is not measured; the intersection of sex, gender, and temporality; the relationship of time to power; the ideological rationales employed for controlling time (and space); and finally an exploration of experiences that exceed the boundaries of time. Time is an incorporeal thing and because it cannot be seen, as Seneca recognized, it is devalued (brev. vit. 10.8). But at the same time, its abstraction gives it possibilities and renders it plastic. All of the essays in this collection engage with the notion that narrative time must be constructed, and that the fashioning of temporality encodes ideology. These essays are also in conversation with an array of theoretical approaches to time both ancient and modern, ranging from Aristotle to Augustine, from Johannes Fabian to Wai Chee Dimock. Indeed, the temporal turn has evinced robust engagement among scholars across disciplines, and classics is no exception.1 In this volume, however, rather than focusing on a specific phenomenon, such as the calendar, or a particular historical period or genre, topics which have been well treated by others,2 we intend to showcase a variety of approaches and questions raised by a dynamic group of early- and mid-career scholars who are each engaging with temporality in their own respective sub-specializations of ancient Greek and Latin literature. DOI: 10.4324/9781003385387-1

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In considering contemporary models, we note how frequently theorists depict the construction of time using a binary. Earlier in the 20th century, time was a fascination in the fields of comparative religion and anthropology, where theorists tended to construct problematic oppositions between “primitive” time and modernity, or in Mircea Eliade’s subtly Christian language, between “sacred” and “profane” time.3 Homi Bhabha, by contrast, imagines a now that is a simultaneous multiplicity, but he sees it operating in tension with the time of the Nation.4 Indeed, time is inherently political, or more specifically, a tool for leveraging power – as Johannes Fabian recognized in his polemical response to earlier anthropological discourse, and as historians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries have more recently traced out.5 But time is also generic in character: Bakhtin famously created the category of the chronotope and identified the specific temporalities of the ancient novel in contrast to other genres, especially epic; and recently, Wai Chee Dimock has proposed “updating” Bakhtin by appealing to alternative geometries and to special relativity in order to reshape the spatial and temporal structures we use to understand the novel.6 Foucault’s work, in particular, has been essential to connecting the politics of time to the body and furthermore, elucidating how temporal regimes for controlling the body are related to gender and sexuality. In Discipline and Punish, he writes that “time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power,”7 and in the History of Sexuality, he argues for the temporal contingency of embodied experience – a fundamental premise with which later theorists of sex and gender are still in conversation.8 Developments in feminist theory in the 70’s and 80’s and in queer theory later in the 1990s and aughts explore how time is also imbued – or more precisely, recognized as a construct which is imbued – with a gendered quality. Julia Kristeva’s seminal essay on “Women’s Time,” in which she elucidates an experience of time which stands in its biological, reproductive, and cyclical rhythms in tension with the linear, teleological, and cursive thrust of masculine time — or as she phrases it, the “time of history” – is later echoed in queer theoretical discourse by the oppositional dichotomy of “straight time” and “queer time.”9 The former figures a normative chronology of adolescence, adulthood, marriage, reproduction, child rearing, and retirement, whereas the latter is marked by turning away from this progression toward what is anti-familial, nonreproductive, anachronistic, and out of sync. This has evolved into a questioning of disciplinary boundaries, periodization, and the teleological sequence that informs historical studies.10 All of these binaries, we conjecture, attempt to describe the fundamental disconnect between time as a measurable and quantitative unit and time as experienced by individual subjects. The former, which Wai Chee Dimock labels “numerical time” and traces back to Plato, Aristotle, and Newton, can be juxtaposed, in a model of literary analysis informed by quantum physics, with Dimock’s “nonstandard time,” and translation, in turn, becomes the mechanism of bridging different temporal disconnects or disjunctions.11 For our volume, therefore, Dimock’s appeal to translation provides a shared theoretical framework for how we hope to analyze ancient discourses of time. For while classicists have dealt with the oppression of temporal regimes,12 with the literary and teleological power-dynamics of time,13 and with the apocalyptic and religious manifestations of newly imagined temporalities,14 our

Introduction 3 volume looks not only to the invention(s) and manipulation(s) of numerical time – e.g., in the genre of epinician – but also to attempts in antiquity to recapture, articulate, and translate ancient “literary time” through counterfactual or erased times – e.g., in the appeals to queer time in Greek tragedy. While many of the essays in this volume explore the instability between two conceptions of time, we also seek in the volume to adumbrate experiences that defy articulation in conventional models of time. Therefore, we have bookended our volume with two sections that explore temporalities which elude measurement, ranging from the sleeping to the revenant, from the abject to the sublime. In the interest of resisting a straightforwardly diachronic approach to antiquity, moreover, we have organized our volume according to a thematic and deliberately achronological arrangement, e.g., pairing Greek lyric with Imperial medicine, Greek epinician and invective with the Roman novel, and so on. Thus, our opening section – “Out of Time” – focuses thematically on bodily experiences that seem to evade narrativization in antiquity, either because they are phenomena where we lose track of time (e.g., in sleep) or because they are experienced by the bodies of people whose temporalities go unregistered in the historical record (i.e., slaves). If the first section puts focus on non-narrated bodies, the second homes in more fully on explicitly narrated bodies — namely, on gendered bodies, whose temporalities are governed by normative rhythms. “Engendering Time,” therefore, employs recent theoretical approaches – “queer time” and Julia Kristeva’s “women’s time” – to address, e.g., how characters in Greek tragedy “queer” time through the use of counterfactuals, on the one hand, or how a heteronormative author of the late Classical period, Xenophon, deploys the queerness of time to “straighten out” a queer culture. The third section – “Shaping Time” – turns our focus from the temporal experiences of individual bodies to a more macrocosmic view of how time is organized and shaped to political, social, or ideological ends. In this part of our volume, contributors consider the use of festivals and their commemoration to manipulate the calendar for political purposes, the temporalities of different classes and the transactional orders used to reinforce them, and the hegemonic attempt to control the temporal experience of a group of people during a banquet. Indeed, this section closes with a meditation on the very metaphors we use to spatialize time in everyday life. Finally, “Beyond Time” looks to capture the temporalities of spirits which depart from bodies or of people who still seem to experience time even when bodies cease to move through space. Indeed, as we move from the deeply personal, bodily experience of the sleeper or the slave to the unnarratable encounter with the disembodied ghost or the sublime realization of the human father of God incarnate, we aim to capture temporalities at every level – individual and societal as well as cosmic and divine. The discussion that follows describes the arrangement of our volume and the essays contained in each section. Out of Time In Section I, our contributors strive to elucidate experiences of time that defy narrativization – temporalities which, either because of socio-cultural prejudices or by virtue of the non-experiential nature of the time that passes, are not or cannot be described

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in language. In Chapter 1, “Now, Sleep” Alex Purves and Victoria Wohl approach the questions and opportunities posed by sleep for lyric poetry against the backdrop of ancient philosophical notions of time. In Physics 4.11, Aristotle refers to the story of men who fell asleep in the heroon in Sardinia, who when they woke did not believe that time had passed because they had not perceived it passing: “On waking, they join the later ‘now’ to the former ‘now’ and make them one, extracting the intervening time on account of lack of perception” (218b24–26). Sleep, this anecdote suggests, poses a problem of time. What is the “now” of the sleeper? Aristotle explains time as a perception of change, the difference between one “now” and the next: for him, the “now” both segments time, dividing before from after, and makes it continuous and eternal (Physics 229a4). Sleep intensifies our experience of both time’s division and its duration. On the one hand, as Carolyn Dinshaw notes à propos of the Sardinian sleepers,15 sleep disrupts our sense of time as linear and continuous and isolates us in an impossible present unmoored from past and future. On the other hand, precisely in its oblivion to past and future, sleep affords us a taste of eternity, the boundless “now” that marks the limits of our waking mortal existence. Held in a timeless limbo, the sleeper is extracted from human temporality. Sleep’s asynchrony makes it a rich resource for philosophers theorizing temporality, as Purves and Wohl show in their reading of Aristotle (Physics 4.10–14). But it poses a particular challenge for poets describing the sleep state: “nows” proliferate and time fractures as the moment of writing doubles the moment of sleeping. Tracing these temporal complexities in Simonides 543 PMG and Sappho 186b Voigt, Wohl and Purves show how the poet forges both a theory of time and a poetic presence out of the timeless “now” of sleep. If sleep is one seemingly non-narratable temporality, James Ker’s Chapter 2 “Untold Times? A Page From Galen,” strives to excavate a temporal experience of wakeful time which has escaped the awareness of historians of time due to the lack of recording of the time of marginalized people groups in Roman society. In this chapter, Ker analyzes a passage in book 6 of On Hygiene in which Galen considers whether someone with “a perfect constitution of body,” but “in a slave’s life . . . serving all day” in an imperial court, would have enough time for the exercise and sleep that are needed to maintain good health. Taking this as a potential opportunity to learn about specific time schedules that usually remain “untold” in the historical transcript, Ker sketches a broader evidentiary and theoretical framework for thinking about “told” and “untold” times in the social world of ancient Rome. Galen’s page contains several twists and turns as he invokes the various seasonal, geographic, and sociopolitical factors that come into play in his example, above and beyond medical regimen. In the end, Ker concludes, we must accept that the focus and goals of his example may not be primarily about the time-experience of enslaved persons, and may not concern enslaved persons at all. Engendering Time Section II of our volume looks at the way sexuality can be imbricated in the measuring of time. The first two essays, deploying a queer theoretical approach and engaging with the binary of “straight time” and “queer time,” consider counterfactual times –

Introduction 5 the times of “what if” – which are embedded in Greek literature and which call into question what Lee Edelman terms “reproductive futurism”: the notion that progress and the hope of a future is dependent on (heterosexual) marriage, reproduction, and child rearing.16 Thus, Sarah Olsen’s Chapter 3, “Fertile Pasts and Sterile Futures in Euripides’ Andromache,” focuses on the second choral ode of the play, suggesting that it poses a provocative question: what if the Trojan War had never happened? Drawing from work on queer temporality and counterfactual form, Olsen explores how this ode revisits and revises the mythic past in order to imagine an alternative future. She argues that Euripides paradoxically grounds the barren Trojan present in the fertility of the city’s past, exposing the limits of what Lee Edelman has termed “reproductive futurism” – a cultural politics that figures the child as emblematic of the future and its inherent value. While Euripides’ Andromache, broadly speaking, stages the triumph of such reproductive futurism, this ode offers a crucial site for the exploration of foreclosed futures, using the syntactic form of the past counterfactual and the temporal range of dramatic choral song to unsettle the play’s dominant narrative. This song, therefore, also enables us to consider the temporality of the tragic ode more broadly, as a literary form in which the entanglements of past, present, and future emerge in particularly imaginative and generative ways. Chapter 4, Kate Gilhuly’s “The History of Sexuality in Xenophon’s Symposium,” explores how Xenophon queers time – especially through his engagement with Plato’s Symposium – in order to “straighten out” the future of the Athenian family, and of Greek sexuality in general. Beginning with the anachronism of the text, she notes how Xenophon creates his Symposium in an impossible temporal relationship to Plato’s: although the event is set after the one Plato depicts, the characters nonetheless recall and respond to speeches made at Agathon’s house. Furthermore, Xenophon represents Kallias’ and Autolykos’ relationship, the catalyst for the drinking party, in a way that Xenophon’s readers would have recognized as contrary to fact. Instead of depicting the shocking lascivious behavior the pair were known for, Xenophon represents the two as learning a civic and sexless pederasty from Socrates. The queer image of Autolykos as a desiring eromenos is reconstituted as the chaste son, ready to take on the reins of government. The heterosexual, reproductive future of Athens is further stimulated by the performance of the hired entertainers in the dance of Dionysos and Ariadne. While Gilhuly argues that Xenophon has queered time to re-envision the image of Socrates and his associates in relationship to the interests of the polis, she considers the problem of engaging queer theories of time to trace out what is essentially homophobic. At the same time she notes that queer temporality has illuminated Xenophon’s construction of a kind of political heteronormativity, suggesting that his Symposium anticipates the ideological shift that Foucault traced during the resurgence of Greek culture under the Roman empire, as it valorizes love in heterosexual marriage over pederasty. This section concludes, in turn, with Caitlin Hines’ Chapter 5, “Materna Tempora: Gestational Time and the Ovidian Poetics of Delay,” in which she considers the time of pregnancy in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Fasti, elucidating the narrative erasures or expansions of female labor in the poem. Hines analyzes the frequent instances of temporal compression in Ovidian narratives involving or

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requiring pregnancy, noting that many of Ovid’s mythological women conceive and give birth within a single syntactical breath (e.g., Io, Met. 1.748; Orithyia, Met. 6.711–712; Tacita, Fast. 2.615). The temporality of gestation in Ovidian myth is, Hines argues, decidedly and deliberately efficient: the poet frequently stages acts of conception in titillating – or gruesome – detail, only to fast-forward immediately to the birth of the offspring. The fertile female body is highly valued as a plot device, while the bodily mechanics of that fertility are formulaically abridged or elided. This pattern of temporal disproportion typifies a keen interest in the woman’s body as sexual object and in the products of its fertility, attended by a studied indifference to the necessary time in-between. This chapter demonstrates, however, that Ovid’s distinctive compression of gestational time is not dismissal but deferral, an integral part of a conscious and playful poetics of delay (mora). Through the lens of Kristeva’s theory of “women’s time,” Hines observes how the linear narratives of epic and the rationalizing interventions into the Roman calendar ultimately confront and reject the cyclical and monumental qualities of gestational time. The rare exceptions to Ovid’s patterns of gestational compression, Hines concludes, are illustrative of larger commitments to narrating uniquely Roman histories of fertility and to authorizing those interventions into the Roman calendar which compelled a definitive disjunction between maternal temporalities and civic timekeeping. Shaping Time Under Section III, we have gathered essays focused on the social and political features of time measurement. Calendars and different conceptions of temporality become tools of power or control in certain regimes, and this is true for Archaic and Classical Greece as much as for Imperial Rome. In Chapter 6, “Hieron of Syracuse and the Politics of Epinician Time,” Nigel Nicholson explores the role of the calendar of athletic games in Pindar’s context and the political opportunities that epinician temporality created. Epinician renders the victor and his victory a point of convergence in time. On the one hand, a distant past of varied actors and events, not necessarily connected by family or place, is answered by a much more constricted present and recent past, featuring primarily athletic victories and family actions, with the victor and his victory at the center. On the other hand, the victor’s victory is located on a ritual calendar that operates for all city-states. The victory is thus given an exorbitant status, rendered the culmination of a broad, more widely shared past and a fixed point among the many different festival times. This idea of victory was exploited by Hieron and his allies in their odes, which not only locate their victors within a shared calendar and history that operate above and beyond the individual city-states, but also set them up as the heirs of the past of the Panhellenic festivals themselves. Drawing on a fuller account of epinician temporality than has been offered to date, this chapter thus demonstrates that epinician’s unusual and complicated temporality was tailor-made for the Deinomenids’ larger goal of claiming a central place for themselves in the Greek world. Chapter 7, Kirk Ormand’s “‘But Now’: The Temporality of Archaic Greek Invective” considers temporality in the context of social positioning, juxtaposing

Introduction 7 the temporal strategies of “middling” invective poets, such as Archilochus and Hipponax, with the more unchanging and permanent time of their “elitist” counterparts. Considering Archilochos, Hipponax, and Semonides, Ormand notes these poets tend to position themselves not as members of the elite class – whatever the truth of their economic status – but as “middlers”; he then contrasts them with poets who explicitly adopt a more elitist stance and occasionally engage in invective poetry, analyzing specifically two insult-poems, one by Sappho and one by Anacreon. These poems portray the speaker as inherently superior to their targets, who lack the qualities necessary to be part of the elite class. One way in which this difference in status becomes clear is in the temporal modes of the two groups of poets. With recourse to Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch’s transactional orders,17 Ormand notes that those in the first group – the middlers – tend to tell a sequential narrative in which their target did something terrible, for which he should be punished; the poem serves to enact that punishment by calling out the target’s failure to abide by community standards. The elitist poets, by contrast, portray their targets as inherently and unchangeably sub-par. Their badness is consistent and unchanging. Ormand argues that these two temporal modes are markers of the two groups’ social positioning, and are directly related to their investment, respectively, in the short-term and long-term transactional orders of social relations. The imbrication of temporality, power, and class comes to the fore again in the third chapter in “Shaping Time,” which considers the attempt by a low-class freedman turned elite to tyrannically control time. Thus, Chapter 8, Jeffrey P. Ulrich’s “Wasting Time with Petronius” analyzes a phenomenon akin to the political uses of the calendar which Nicholson elucidates in epinician time – namely, the cultural and sociopolitical dynamics of measuring time in the imperial context of Petronius’ Menippean satire. It has long been recognized that in the wake of recent calendrical and temporal manipulations – e.g., Caesar’s time reforms and Augustus’ mausoleum – Petronius’ ostentatious freedman in the Satyricon is strangely obsessed with time measurement. From the entrance to his atrium, which is fit out with a water-clock and a calendar, to the architecture of his tomb, which likewise has a horologium built into it, Trimalchio anxiously counts down the days to his death. However, Ulrich’s study adds a new appreciation for the different competing devices of time measurement and, more generally, for the polyglot voices longing for alternative temporalities throughout the feast. On the one hand, natural or cosmological time perpetually threatens to undercut Trimalchio’s imperial gestures of temporal control over the organization of the cena. Thus, the crowing of a cock or a sudden bout of diarrhea interrupts the freedman’s attempt to manipulate and redefine the socio-cultural expectations of time. Beyond natural time, however, the voices of other freedmen and characters in the banquet express longing to compress or dilate time – or otherwise to escape the temporal regime with which Trimalchio subjugates his banqueters. Indeed, the generic mechanisms of novelistic discourse invite us to meditate on what it means to “waste time” and whether and how Petronius actively wastes our time as readers. Since the politics of time measurement fundamentally entail an attempt to control space and people’s movements through it, the final chapter in this section zooms

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out to consider at a more metaphorical level the spatialization of time. Andreas T. Zanker in Chapter 9, “The Metaphors and Poetics of Roman Decline,” takes a macroscopic view of the metaphorical language of decline across Latin genres and authors, considering in particular how Roman authors used figurative language both to articulate the supposed decline of Rome and to position their texts in relationship to specific political ideals. The first sections of this chapter consider how descriptions of time are dependent on human experiences of movement through space – e.g., when we talk of “going through life.” In speaking of decline, we blend this metaphor with a further orientational device in which positive experiences are correlated with “up” and bad ones are linked with “down.” Zanker thus elucidates how these correspondences motivate the Latinate words “decline” and “decadence” themselves. He then looks at how Roman authors wrote about decline. Most notably, they used metaphors to depict how it took place. These led to certain corollaries: e.g., if Rome was likened to a building, then it could be demolished by certain types of force. Finally, Zanker concludes by turning to the Roman poetics of decline, noting the prominence of decline narratives in the 1st century CE, their emphatic positioning in texts, and authors’ use of them as a tool of aesthetics and social positioning. Beyond Time Section IV returns, in something of a ring composition, to times that are non-narrated or non-narratable, but in this case, because they are outside or beyond human experience. Thus, Chapter 10, Robert Cioffi’s “Greek Ghosts and Roman Imperial Time,” looks at the temporal experience of ghosts, focusing on the relationship between ghosts and temporality in four Roman Imperial ghost stories told by Lucian, Pausanias, Phlegon of Tralles, and Philostratus. These ghosts haunt houses, continue to fight the battle of Marathon, and bring Achilles back to life a millennium and a half after his death. As historians of religion have shown, ghosts challenge settled and established beliefs about life and death, this world, and the underworld. In this chapter, Cioffi considers not their connection to religious beliefs, but rather how they intersect, in different ways, with a central feature of the Greek literature of the Roman empire – its obsession with the (classical) past. Scholars have shown how important archaism is for these authors as a mode to express their own Hellenism; at the same time, they have also traced the role of schemes of time and temporalities in the self-definition and maintenance of empire. Cioffi argues that ghosts have a habit of disrupting and disturbing both temporal processes. On the one hand, they reveal the many layers of history, connecting the imperial present not just to the Classical past, but also to a much more recent one. On the other hand, they draw attention to a deep – and sometimes discordant – history behind the present, dredging up past grudges, reliving moments of glory, and prophesying far beyond the bounds of the present. If Cioffi elucidates Imperial Greek conceptions of the temporalities of ghosts, Chapter 11, the final chapter of our volume, Patrick Glauthier’s “Time Stood Still, and It Was Sublime: Proto-Gospel of James 18,” turns to a particular moment of divine time – when cosmological time stops but experiential time seems to

Introduction 9 continue. Though Proto-Gospel of James (2nd century CE) exerted an enormous influence on late antique and medieval theology and culture, a crucial passage, Glauthier contends, has not been properly understood. When Mary goes into labor, Joseph leaves to find a midwife. Suddenly, the narrative switches to the first person and Joseph appears to describe the cessation of time (ch. 18.2). When the narrative returns to the third person, we learn that Mary has given birth. In this chapter, Glauthier traces the philosophical tradition that prompts the reader to conclude that time stands still. This tradition, which extends back to Plato, equates time with the movements of the heavenly bodies and/or the universe. From this perspective, the cessation of time indicates a change in cosmic epochs. Just as important, Glauthier demonstrates that Joseph’s experience is programmatically sublime. Building on recent work on the sublime in antiquity, he suggests that the sublimity of Joseph’s experience, conveyed through the language of philosophical discovery and enlightenment, figures the sublime experience of Christian revelation. Collectively, the cessation of time and the history of the sublime provide a framework that allows the well-educated reader to grasp the significance of Christ’s birth. This, in turn, implies that the cultural and intellectual background of the author and original readership are more sophisticated than critics assume. Notes 1 For a sampling of approaches, see, e.g., Rüpke (1995); Stern (2012); Grethlein (2013); Miller and Symons (2020). 2 On the calendar, see Feeney (2007) and Hannah (2005). On “invention(s)” of time in particular periods, see, e.g., Kosmin (2018) and Goldhill (2022). For a recent assessment of quotidian time, see Ker (2023). 3 Eliade (1963: 68–72). 4 Bhaba (1990). 5 See Fabian (1983). On advancements in time measurement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, see Kern (1983) and Ogle (2015). 6 See Bakhtin (1981). On Bakhtin and his reception and use in the field of classics, see Branham (2002). On “updating” Bakhtin, see Dimock (2006). For an alternative approach to the generic nature of time, see Morson and Grave (2013: 34–49). 7 Foucault (1977: 152). 8 Foucault (1978). 9 On “Women’s Time,” see Kristeva (1981). For Kristevan readings in classics, see Spentzou (2003); Gardner (2013); Ulrich (2021). See also Hines in this volume. On “Queer Time,” see Dinshaw (2012); Rohy (2017); Dinshaw et al. (2007). On the uses of “Queer Time” in classics, see Olsen and Gilhuly in this volume. 10 See, e.g., Dinshaw (2012: 19–24). 11 Dimock (2006: 123–42). 12 See, e.g., Feeney (2007). 13 See, e.g., Grethlein (2013). 14 See, e.g., Kosmin (2018) and Goldhill (2022). 15 Dinshaw (2012: 9). 16 For a full explication of the notion of “reproductive futurism,” see Edelman (2004: 1–31). 17 See Parry and Bloch (1989).

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Bibliography Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. M. Holquist. Trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bhaba, H., ed. 1990. Nation and Narration. London, New York: Routledge. Branham, R. B. 2002. Bakhtin and the Classics. Chicago: Northwestern University Press. Dimock, W. C. 2006. Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dinshaw, C. 2012. How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dinshaw, C., L. Edelman, et al. 2007. “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion.” GLQ 13.2–3: 177–95. Edelman, L. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Eliade, M. 1963. The Sacred and the Profane. Trans. W. Trask. Harcourt, New York: Brace & World. Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Feeney, D. 2007. Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History. Berkeley, CA, London: University of California Press. Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M. 1978. The History of Sexuality. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books. Gardner, H. 2013. Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldhill, S. 2022. The Christian Invention of Time: Temporality and the Literature of Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grethlein, J. 2013. Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography: Futures Past from Herodotus to Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hannah, R. 2005. Greek and Roman Calendars: Constructions of Time in the Classical World. London: Duckworth. Ker, J. 2023. The Ordered Day: Quotidian Time and Forms of Life in Ancient Rome. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kern, S. 1983. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kosmin, P. 2018. Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kristeva, J. 1981. “Women’s Time.” Trans. Jardine and Blake. Signs 7.1: 13–35. Miller, K., and S. Symons, eds. 2020. Down to the Hour: Short Time in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Leiden: Brill. Morson, G., and I. Grave, eds. 2013. Prosaics and Other Provocations: Empathy, Open Time, and the Novel. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press. Ogle, V. 2015. The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parry, J., and M. Bloch, eds. 1989. Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rohy, V. 2017. “Exchanging Hours: A Dialogue on Time.” GLQ 23.2: 247–68. Rüpke, J. 1995. Kalendar und Öffentlichkeit: Die Geschichte der Repräsentatio und religiösen Qualifikation von Zeit in Rom. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Introduction 11 Spentzou, E. 2003. Readers and Writers in Ovid’s Heroides: Transgressions of Genre and Gender. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stern, S. 2012. Calendars in Antiquity: Empires, States, Societies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ulrich, J. P. 2021. “Vox omnibus Una: A Re-Assessment of the Feminine Voice in Aeneid 5.” Vergilius 67: 139–60.

I

Out of Time

Figure 1.1 Elizabeth Heyert, The Sleepers 15, all rights reserved.

1

Now, Sleep Alex Purves and Victoria Wohl

In her 2003 photo series “The Sleepers,” Elizabeth Heyert took photos of people sleeping, projected them onto the stone walls of a deserted Sicilian town, then rephotographed the projected images (Figures 1.1–1.4).1 These haunting images capture the peculiar asynchrony of sleep that is the subject of our chapter. Against the backdrop of historical time – represented in the texture of the crumbling stone wall – these sleepers seem to float out of time and invite us to ask “when is the ‘now’ of sleep?” Our chapter explores the fluid interplay between waking and sleeping time in selected fragments of Sappho and Simonides, specifically in Simonides’ “Danae” fragment (fr. 543 PMG), where the mother addresses her sleeping baby, and Sappho’s “Midnight poem” (fr. 168b Voigt), in which the poet speaks from a solitary position within the depths of the night as the constellations and stars pass above her. These poets, in singing about sleep, occupy a peculiar multi-layered “now.” For Simonides in his Danae fragment, the poet stands on the side of wakefulness, addressing the sleeper across a temporal divide. Sappho’s poet, by contrast, speaks from the side of the sleeper, an impossible position that puts her out of rhythm with her environment. For both poets, sleep opens a temporal gap between speaker and addressee in which the lyric utterance can emerge. If asynchrony is the temporal condition of sleep, as philosophers such as Aristotle have argued, it is also – as we will see in Sappho and Simonides – the temporal condition of lyric. We will begin with Aristotle, who explicitly theorizes the temporal perplexities that Simonides and Sappho explore. In Physics 4, Aristotle asks about the nature of the now (τὸ νῦν) and its relation to time as a whole (χρόνος). He defines χρόνος as an ordering of change, κίνησις or μεταβολή (he uses the words interchangeably: 218b19–20). “When there is before and after, then we say there is time. For time is this: the number of change (ἀριθμὸς κινήσεως) in respect to before and after” (219b1–2).2 Time for Aristotle is singular, progressive, and homogeneous; he compares it to a line, and like a line it is both continuous and divisible. The temporal “point” that both unites and divides it is the now (τὸ νῦν, 220a4–6, 222a10–12). The now is the theoretical boundary between past and future: it is what makes time what it is, a homogeneous, singular order of change. It is also, as we shall see, what allows for narrative, one event following another in sequence. But the now in itself has no temporal duration: it is instantaneous and thus, as Aristotle insists, not a part of time (218a3–8). If “time is what is DOI: 10.4324/9781003385387-3

16 Alex Purves and Victoria Wohl between two nows,” as Ursula Coope (2005: 86) writes, the problem of time is closely bound up with the ambiguous temporality of the now.3 The now is important for Aristotle in part because it is the vantage point from which we conventionally mark change (222a20–29, 223a5–13). That is key because time is not just change in the abstract: it has to be perceived. Aristotle illustrates this claim with a peculiar story. In Physics 4.11, he tells of men who fell asleep in the herōon in Sardinia, who when they woke did not believe that time had passed because they had not perceived it passing. Sleep, this anecdote suggests, exacerbates the problem of time. Ἀλλὰ μὴν οὐδ’ ἄνευ γε μεταβολῆς· ὅταν γὰρ μηδὲν αὐτοὶ μεταβάλλωμεν τὴν διάνοιαν ἢ λάθωμεν μεταβάλλοντες, οὐ δοκεῖ ἡμῖν γεγονέναι χρόνος, καθάπερ οὐδὲ τοῖς ἐν Σαρδοῖ μυθολογουμένοις καθεύδειν παρὰ τοῖς ἥρωσιν, ὅταν ἐγερθῶσι· συνάπτουσι γὰρ τῷ πρότερον νῦν τὸ ὕστερον νῦν καὶ ἓν ποιοῦσιν, ἐξαιροῦντες διὰ τὴν ἀναισθησίαν τὸ μεταξύ. ὥσπερ οὖν εἰ μὴ ἦν ἕτερον τὸ νῦν ἀλλὰ ταὐτὸ καὶ ἕν, οὐκ ἂν ἦν χρόνος, οὕτως καὶ ἐπεὶ λανθάνει ἕτερον ὄν, οὐ δοκεῖ εἶναι τὸ μεταξὺ χρόνος. εἰ δὴ τὸ μὴ οἴεσθαι εἶναι χρόνον τότε συμβαίνει ἡμῖν, ὅταν μὴ ὁρίσωμεν μηδεμίαν μεταβολήν, ἀλλ’ἐν ἑνὶ καὶ ἀδιαιρέτῳ φαίνηται ἡ ψυχὴ μένειν, ὅταν δ’ αἰσθώμεθα καὶ ὁρίσωμεν, τότε φαμὲν γεγονέναι χρόνον, φανερὸν ὅτι οὐκ ἔστιν ἄνευ κινήσεως καὶ μεταβολῆς χρόνος. (Arist. Phys. 218b21–219a1) But neither does time exist without change (μεταβολή); for when the state of our minds does not change at all, or we have not noticed (λάθωμεν) its changing, we do not think that time has elapsed, any more than those who are fabled to sleep among the heroes of Sardinia do when they are awakened; for they connect the earlier ‘now’ with the later and make them one, cutting out the interval (τὸ μεταξύ) because of their failure to notice it (διὰ τὴν ἀναισθησίαν). So, just as, if the ‘now’ were not different but one and the same, there would not have been time, so too when its difference escapes our notice (λανθάνει) the interval (τὸ μεταξύ) does not seem to be time. If, then, the non-realization of the existence of time happens to us when we do not distinguish (or ‘delimit’ [ὁρίσωμεν]) any change (μεταβολήν), but the mind seems to stay in one indivisible state, and when we perceive and distinguish we say time has elapsed, evidently time is not independent of movement and change (κινήσεως καὶ μεταβολῆς). (Transl. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye in Barnes 1984: 371) Time requires change, if not in our environment then in ourselves, in our own state of mind (μεταβάλλωμεν τὴν διάνοιαν).4 It also requires perception: if we are unconscious of that change (λάθωμεν μεταβάλλοντες) we think there is no time. Sleep imposes such λήθη: it eliminates our perception of the boundaries (ὁρίσωμεν) between one now and another – and therefore disrupts our sense of time as a continuous sequence of instants. Sleep blurs those different instants into one extended now. “When they are awakened . . . they connect the earlier ‘now’ with the later and make them one, cutting out the interval because of their failure to notice it” (ἐξαιροῦντες διὰ τὴν ἀναισθησίαν τὸ μεταξύ, 218b24–26). Time has passed, but not

Now, Sleep 17 for the oblivious sleepers. It is as if, while they sleep, they fall into the gap between two nows, and that gap itself becomes an enduring, unconscious now. Like Heyert’s Sicilian sleepers, Aristotle’s Sardinian ones float in an undifferentiated moment outside of linear time. In this they exemplify the fact, as Carolyn Dinshaw says, “that our lived sense of time can differ from the measured time of successive linear intervals” (2012: 9). Dinshaw views the now not just as an empty marker of time’s passing, as it is for Aristotle, but as an experience of embodied being, “full of attachments and desires, histories and futures” (3). For her, as for Aristotle, the now is an impossible moment – it has no duration and therefore cannot be experienced – and yet its very impossibility saturates it with affect. Sleep, she argues, is one of a number of conditions – which also include intense longing and profound suffering – that bring out “life’s essential asynchrony” and allow us to “explore the multitemporality of the now” (10, emphasis in original). Sleep is not so much an ellipsis of the now as a corporeal and sensory experience of the now in all its temporal impossibility. Simonides PMG 543 unfolds in this full multitemporal now of sleep and attempts to capture that asynchronous moment in its lyric performance. ὅτε λάρνακι ἐν δαιδαλέᾳ ἄνεμός τέ μιν πνέων κινηθεῖσά τε λίμνα δείματι ἔρειπεν, οὐκ ἀδιάντοισι παρειαῖς ἀμφί τε Περσέι βάλλε φίλαν χέρα εἶπέν τ᾿· “ὦ τέκος, οἷον ἔχω πόνον· σὺ δ᾿ ἀωτεῖς, γαλαθηνῷ δ᾿ ἤτορι κνοώσσεις ἐν ἀτερπέι δούρατι χαλκεογόμφῳ νυκτί λαμπέι κυανέῳ τε δνόφῳ σταλείς· ἄχναν δ᾿ ὕπερθε τεᾶν κομᾶν βαθεῖαν παριόντος κύματος οὐκ ἀλέγεις, οὐδ᾿ ἀνέμου φθόγγον, πορφυρέᾳ κείμενος ἐν χλανίδι, πρόσωπον καλόν. εἰ δέ τοι δεινὸν τό γε δεινὸν ἦν, καί κεν ἐμῶν ῥημάτων λεπτὸν ὑπεῖχες οὖας.

5

10

15

20

κέλομαι , εὗδε βρέφος, εὑδέτω δὲ πόντος, εὑδέτω ἄμετρον κακόν· μεταβουλία δέ τις φανείη, Ζεῦ πάτερ, ἐκ σέο· ὅττι δὲ θαρσαλέον ἔπος εὔχομαι 25 ἢ νόσφι δίκας, σύγγνωθί μοι.”

18 Alex Purves and Victoria Wohl

Figure 1.2 Elizabeth Heyert, The Sleepers 04, all rights reserved.

Now, Sleep 19 . . . When in the intricately-carved chest the blasts of wind and the troubled water prostrated her in fear, with streaming cheeks she put her loving arm about Perseus and said, “My child, what suffering is mine! But you sleep (8), and with babyish heart slumber in the dismal boat with its brazen bolts, sent forth in the unlit night and dark blue murk. You pay no attention (15) to the deep spray above your hair as the wave passes by nor to the sound of the wind, lying in your purple blanket, a lovely face. If this danger were danger to you (18), why, you would turn your tiny ear to my words. Sleep, my baby, (21) I tell you; and let the sea sleep, and let our vast trouble sleep. Let some change of heart appear from you, father Zeus. If anything in my prayer is audacious or unjust, pardon me.” (Transl. Campbell 1991: 437–439) The fragment begins in medias res with the word ὅτε (“when”), which takes us straight into the midst of a storm and situates the fragment temporally within a lost narrative context. At the same time, ὅτε serves to initiate within the fragment a continuous narrative temporality, whereby events follow one another in terms of cause and effect: the wind blows, the sea is moved, and discrete actions happen in historical time (ἔρειπεν, βάλλε, εἶπεν, 5–7). This sequence is set in motion by ἄνεμός . . . πνέων, the breath of the wind, an action that itself generates change or motion (κινηθεῖσα, 3–4). From the start, therefore, we see an anticipation of the ideas that will become explicit in Aristotle, for whom the word κίνησις represents the change/motion that is the precondition for time. In this instance, the aorist participle κινηθεῖσα itself contains a compressed narrative in which the wind has already moved the sea, and which will in turn initiate the emotional drama of the poem. When she speaks at line 7, Danae articulates the affective quality of her present moment. Her address, which occupies the remainder of the fragment (7–27), shifts the poem away from a narrative sequence of nows and activates the “lyric now” of apostrophe.5 Danae will speak over the voice (φθόγγον, 16) of the wind and the fragment is sustained for only so long as neither voice is heard. As a lyric utterance, her cry οἷον ἔχω πόνον (“what suffering is mine!” [7]) situates the whole fragment as a moment in this sequence. But is the πόνος that prompts this cry unending or just one episode in the larger narrative of Danae’s ongoing drama? The indeterminate present tense of ἔχω threatens to dissolve the boundaries of linear time even as it situates the poem in a narrative sequence; it thus opens the poem to the kind of asynchrony that Dinshaw associates with both suffering and sleep,6 one that sets the temporal fixity of ὅτε (“when”) at the fragment’s opening retroactively afloat. And now, sleep. With the second stanza, we move into the λήθη that Aristotle associates with sleep as an extended, undifferentiated now. But whereas for Aristotle this unconscious now falls out of time altogether, for Simonides, the now of sleep has a strong association with the present tense. ἀωτέω (“sleep”) and κνώσσω (“slumber”) are verbs that exist in the Greek language only in the present, and their durative nature is accentuated here by the long vowels of lines 8–9. Both mother and child are suspended in an enduring present moment – Danae in an extended moment of suffering; her son in sleep – a now that seems

20 Alex Purves and Victoria Wohl like it will never end. Anne Carson has emphasized how, from this point on, the poem is constructed as “an alignment of two consciousnesses: one of them [Danae’s] is present, active and accessible to us, the other [Perseus’] has vanished inwardly . . . apparently paying attention to something quite different behind its closed eyes” (1999: 57), yet that is also equally, if inaccessibly, present. Danae attempts to bridge that gap imaginatively through apostrophe; it is her act of speaking that stretches thin the line between their two experiences, as if she were compelling the child to register her experience even as he is spared, by sleep, from suffering through it. The address to the sleeping child puts the paradox of lyric apostrophe front and center. Apostrophe – the making present, vivid, or animate what is absent, inanimate, or dead – relies, as Barbara Johnson (1986) has argued, on the “mute responsiveness” of the addressee; it is necessary that the addressee not respond but listen to the first-person voice of the speaker and by listening enter the hic et nunc of the poem.7 But the form of the apostrophe here is unusual. Danae addresses the child who lies in her arms, yet she does not wake or animate him. Even as the apostrophe invites us, the external addressee, to hear her speech and share the present moment of her experience, the prolongation of that speech depends on her not waking him, on keeping him not only mute but also unhearing. The failure of the child’s response to her apostrophe – his anesthetic slumber – is the condition of possibility for the poem. Moreover, rather than waking the child to bring him into her mental state, Danae imaginatively projects herself – via a sort of reverse apostrophe – into Perseus’ world of sleep. Apostrophe gives Danae imaginative access to an alternate spatiotemporal existence. Spatially, up and down collapse as the deep (βαθεῖαν) spray of a wave towers over his head (13–15).8 Temporally, the baby’s anesthesia opens a register of time that is asynchronous with the storm. In his slumber, he is indifferent to the wave, but it in turn is indifferent to him, passing him by without the kinetic effect of the swell and wind in the opening stanza. The point is underlined by the repetition of the word for wind, ἄνεμος, in 15, now negated: the element that precipitated action at the beginning of the poem is now an unheeded voice (οὐκ ἀλέγεις . . . ἀνέμου/ φθόγγον, 15–16). The unheard voice of the wind is allied with the voice of Danae that we hear but the baby does not – both perform the paradox of apostrophe. This silencing of the wind generalizes the baby’s sleep. Aristotle, as we saw, wonders whether there is time without perception of change and therefore whether there is time during sleep. This is Aristotle’s question but also the question raised by the anesthetic child, and the question Danae is trying to answer. Awake (and apostrophizing), she projects herself into the mysterious mind of the sleeping baby for whom time does not exist. If the movement of the sea, κινηθεῖσά τε λίμνα (4), recalls Aristotelian κίνηεσις, does that motion still exist if the sleeping child does not perceive it? Danae is aware of time’s passing even as she occupies an unconscious state that silences both wind and time. Still addressing her baby, she speaks from two temporalities at once: she hears the voice of the wind (ἀνέμου/ φθόγγον) but also articulates its silence for him (οὐκ ἀλέγεις, “you do not heed,” 15).

Now, Sleep 21 ἀλέγεις resonates with the many alpha privatives of the poem (ἀδιάντοισι, 5; ἀτερπέι, 10; ἀλαμπέι, 11; ἄμετρον, 22), which might induce the listener to hear this verb, too, as a negation, although it is not.9 It is one of a number of such false privatives in the fragment, including ἀωτεῖς (8), ἀωτεῖς (13), and ἄνεμος (3, 15). The effect is a blurring of the difference between positive and negative. Sleep, like the Freudian unconscious, knows no negation. This blurring is both grammatical and ontological, as we see in the much-discussed counterfactual at lines 18–20. εἰ δέ τοι δεινὸν τό γε δεινὸν ἦν, καί κεν ἐμῶν ῥημάτων λεπτὸν ὑπεῖχες οὖας. If this danger were danger to you, why, you would turn your tiny ear to my words. The counterfactual condition implies a negative state – “if this danger were danger to you” (but it is not), “you would turn your tiny ear to my words” (but you do not) – but does not express it. Instead, its potentiality holds both positive and negative states in abeyance. A gap opens not only between the listener who perceives the danger and the child who does not, but also between reality and perception – between the δεινόν marked as real, substantial, and present by the emphatic article (τό γε) and the nonδεινόν that the child perceives in sleep. At the same time, predication and identity are lost, a fact emphasized by the repetition and circularity, where x is not x and τὸ δεινόν is not δεινόν. Danae’s words (ῥήματα), which never find their way into the child’s slender ear, echo in their own tautology: expressed to us but not to Perseus, they hang in limbo between reality and unreality, positive and negative, sleeper and speaker. But this non-reciprocity is what preserves the now of the poem. If the δεινόν were in fact δεινόν, if the child could hear Danae’s words, the danger would be all too real. The storm would overwhelm the poem, and its lyric moment would collapse. As Danae attempts to articulate sleeping time from the position of being awake, the lyric voice becomes internally asynchronous. This is suggested in the two competing imperatives (“listen!” “sleep!”) of lines 21–22. First there is the imperative of lyric apostrophe: the poet needs a tender ear. He needs a waking listener in order for his poem to take place as an event in time. Hence, Danae’s strong command to the baby, which is also a command to the audience: wake up and listen. This compounds the paradox of her apostrophe that we noted earlier. The structure of the command, moreover, is in tension with its content: listen, go to sleep! (κέλομαι , εὗδε βρέφος). And of course the baby is already sleeping, so the teleological function of the imperative – in which a command is issued in the present in order to elicit an action in the future – is rendered moot: the command has already been fulfilled in the baby’s ongoing slumber. Second, there is the maternal imperative, for Danae does not wake her child from his peaceful oblivion to the real δεινόν that she can see.10 The lullaby cadence of the lines again belies the content of the command, lulling us to sleep even as it urges our attention. This combination of lyric address and lullaby – wake up and keep sleeping – captures the doubleness of the time of sleep.

22 Alex Purves and Victoria Wohl Danae’s command that her baby sleep is also a wish that the world might sleep.11 She tries to generalize his anesthesia so that it stops waves and wind (εὑδέτω δὲ πόντος, εὑδέτω ἄμετρον κακόν, 22). In doing so, she wills that her present moment, with all its suffering, become unmeasured: the child’s non-perception of the passing of time becomes the ἄμετρον κακόν (“vast [lit. measureless] trouble”) of a sleeping world. For Aristotle, time is a measure (μέτρον) of change (ἐπεὶ δ’ ἐστὶν ὁ χρόνος μέτρον κινήσεως, 221a.1). Now Danae, with her ἄμετρον κακόν, attempts to remove her suffering from the measure of time, from the narrative moment marked by πόνος (“suffering”) at the fragment’s start.12 Here we finally do find the asynchrony that Dinshaw attributes to suffering, but one that – as Aristotle would predict – escapes time by escaping measurement. In the soothing repetition of εὑδέτω (“let sleep”), the now of suffering is subsumed into the world of sleeping. The final unexpressed εὑδέτω would be one that Danae calls upon herself: let me sleep. But in Simonides’ poem (in contrast, as we shall see, to Sappho’s), Danae cannot sleep because she is the speaker. If her apostrophe to her baby draws Danae into the immeasurable time of sleep, her prayer to Zeus seems to return her to waking time. “Some change of heart” (μεταβουλία . . . τις, 23) will reintroduce the sequential temporality of chronological time. Aristotle, as we saw earlier, associates time with μεταβολή, a change either in the world or in our state of mind (μεταβάλλωμεν τὴν διάνοιαν, B218b21). Zeus’ μεταβουλία combines the two, enacting the equation of time and perception as a divine performative. Just as the slumbering child can put the winds to rest, Zeus’ change of βουλή promises to transform time, returning us to the narrative temporality of the poem’s opening (ὅτε). Yet that change does not entirely work. Although Simonides evokes the epic trope of the Dios boulē as the engine of narrative (23–24), he does not explicitly root change in Zeus’ mind: instead it is “some” μεταβουλία.13 The uncertainty introduced by the indefinite pronoun τις is continued in the modal temporality of the wish (φανείη). As a potentiality unanchored in time, Danae’s prayer for μεταβουλία continues the timeless now of sleep even as it projects a future in which time restarts and the wind stops blowing. Moreover, with her σύγγνωθί μοι (“forgive me”) at the fragment’s end, Danae retracts her prayer at the moment she realizes it might have been heard. This prayer-apology thus repeats the performative ambiguities of her earlier lyric lullaby. Her call to Zeus, like her song to her sleeping baby, exists in the middle space (τὸ μεταξύ) between being spoken and unheard. Danae’s experience of time stopping when no one perceives it or marks its divisions (ἄμετρον) is replicated within the context of the fragment’s reception. The poem comes down to us through a quotation in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ On Composition, but is presented without metrical delineation, as if it were prose. Dionysius’ explanation for doing so takes the form of an address to the reader, much as Danae apostrophizes her child: ἐκ δὲ τῆς μελικῆς τὰ Σιμωνίδεια ταῦτα· γέγραπται δὲ κατὰ διαστολὰς οὐχ ὧν Ἀριστοφάνης ἢ ἄλλός τις κατεσκεύασε κώλων ἀλλ’ ὧν ὁ πεζὸς λόγος ἀπαιτεῖ. πρόσεχε δὴ τῷ μέλει καὶ ἀναγίνωσκε κατὰ διαστολάς, καὶ εὖ ἴσθ’ ὅτι

Now, Sleep 23 λήσεταί σε ὁ ῥυθμὸς τῆς ᾠδῆς καὶ οὐχ ἕξεις συμβαλεῖν οὔτε στροφὴν οὔτε ἀντίστροφον οὔτ’ ἐπῳδόν, ἀλλὰ φανήσεταί σοι λόγος εἷς εἰρόμενος. ἔστι δὲ ἡ διὰ πελάγους φερομένη Δανάη τὰς ἑαυτῆς ἀποδυρομένη τύχας. (D.H. Comp. 26 [vi 140ss. Radermacher]) From lyric poetry come the following lines of Simonides. They are written out not in the metrical divisions established by Aristophanes or someone else but in the divisions demanded by prose. Pay attention to the song and read it according to divisions, and know well that you will not notice the poem’s rhythm: you will be unable to make out strophe, antistrophe or epode and will think it rather one continuous piece of prose. It is Danae being carried over the sea and bewailing her fate. (Transl. Campbell 1991: 437 [modified]) As Danae paradoxically commands the slumbering Perseus to sleep, so Dionysius instructs us to “know well that you will not notice” (εὖ ἴσθ’ ὅτι λήσεταί σε), as if we, too, were caught in a similar limbo to the child sleeping within the chest.14 Dionysius’ claim rests on the premise that the reader, as if lulled by the continuous motion and sound of “Danae being carried over the sea and bewailing her fate” (ἡ διὰ πελάγους φερομένη Δανάη τάς ἑαυτῆς ἀποδυρομένη τύχας), would be unable to make out the divisions of the verse, experiencing the poem instead as a single continuous and undivided stretch of time (ἀλλὰ φανήσεταί σοι λόγος εἷς εἰρόμενος). We have already discussed how for Aristotle’s Sardinian men, as for Perseus, time appears single and undivided (ἀλλ’ ἐν ἑνὶ καὶ ἀδιαιρέτῳ φαίνηται ἡ ψυχὴ μένειν, “but the mind seems to stay in one indivisible state,” Phys. 218b32) as long as they are asleep. But now the limbo of the sleeper – classified by Aristotle as λήθη a kind of oblivion or forgetting – also transfers to the paratext of Simonides’ fragment, so that the process of reading, like sleeping, leads to a form of forgetfulness (λήσεται) and slipping out of time. Without the διαστολαί (divisions) between strophe, antistrophe, and epode being perceived by the reader, the poem will come to seem one continuous stream of writing (λόγος εἷς), that is to say, prose (εἰρόμενος). The loss of metrical time is doubled by the loss of narrative time in Dionysius’ flat summary of the poem in the final line of the passage, where there is motion (φερομένη) without beginning or end.15 Dionysius’ commentary picks up on the themes of the poem: that time and change – as Aristotle said – depend on perception, and that sleep problematizes that perception in a way that poetry makes especially vivid. Simonides explores the asynchrony of sleep and how to voice it from the position of being awake. In fragment 168b, Sappho explores the same asynchrony from the position of the sleeper,16 but this turns out to be a very complicated proposition for both the speaker and the reader. In the Simonides fragment, sleep and its temporal suspension is, as we have said, the condition of possibility for the poem. In Sappho, by contrast, sleep threatens to nullify the existence of the poem as a lyric performance. The paradox of the sleeping speaker in Sappho (rather than the sleeping recipient) holds the idea of the now in a precarious limbo or middle ground.

24 Alex Purves and Victoria Wohl

Figure 1.3 Elizabeth Heyert, The Sleepers 02, all rights reserved.

Now, Sleep 25 δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα καὶ Πληΐαδες· μέσαι δὲ νύκτες, παρὰ δ’ ἔρχετ’ ὤρα, ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω. The moon has set and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and time goes by, and I lie alone. (Transl. Campbell 1982: 173) Sappho 168b, like Simonides 543, starts in narrative time, with the temporality of its events in sequence – or at least so it seems. ὥραι + ἔρχομαι in Homer is a formula for the passing of time, but it is not entirely clear whether time is passing in this fragment.17 δέδυκε puts us in a perfective state:18 something has happened but instead of a sequence of events, as in Simonides (wind . . . wave . . . fall), we find ourselves in stillness. μέσαι δὲ/ νύκτες could be a precise temporal marker, differentiating a particular now from other nows in a sequence of linear time, except that it is plural and undefined. Is this a specific night or all nights in general? And when precisely is the middle of the night, let alone the “middles” of all nights? Are we then in linear time or in the asynchronous now of the Sardinian sleepers, whose anesthesia removed the perception of the middle (τὸ μεταξύ) altogether? The final line introduces the poetic voice, and it is out of sync with the temporality of the stars. As with the wave that passed by (παρίοντος/ κύματος, 14–15) the sleeping Perseus in Simonides, here time passes by (παρὰ δ’ ἔρχετ’ ὤρα) Sappho, whose position at the end of the poem is sometimes translated as “I lie” and sometimes as “I sleep.”19 Indeed, κατεύδω more often means the latter, and its attachment to Sappho here leaves unclear her status as perceiver. Is she speaking from sleep, or is she, like Danae, describing sleep from the position of being awake? The poem makes it impossible to decide whether Sappho is awake or asleep. Simonides splits the two positions between Danae and Perseus, whereas for Sappho, the two are indistinguishable. Whichever side of sleep Sappho is on, she is alone (μόνα).20 This means that the poem’s implicit apostrophe has no addressee. Her sleep isolates her from the world: Sappho is alone either in bed (I sleep alone) or in time (I alone sleep). If μόνα evokes an address without an addressee, it also evokes desire without an object: whomever she longs for occupies a different now. For Dinshaw, desire – like suffering and sleep – is an experience of the asynchrony of the now. μόνα leaves it unclear whether that now is full or empty, sleeping or waking, satisfied or unsatisfied. Sleep situates Sappho ambiguously not only in relation to time and the world, but also in relation to herself. Danae, too, was lonely, but her loneliness was predicated on a separation from the other forged by sleep. For Sappho, there is sleep but no other: she is alone yet still asynchronous. Sappho’s μόνα and κατεύδω together compound the problem of where to locate both now and you in a poem that frames itself in relation to the passage of time. In Simonides 543, sleep produces the conditions that make the poem possible: the ambiguous communication between the speaker and the oblivious listener and

26 Alex Purves and Victoria Wohl

Figure 1.4 Elizabeth Heyert, The Sleepers 07, all rights reserved.

Now, Sleep 27 the asynchrony of a now divided between two consciousnesses. In Sappho 168b, by contrast, those distinctions are collapsed into a singular, temporally-fractured voice, leaving lyric’s capacity to speak across or between two nows (my now and your now) permanently in question.21 We conclude by returning to Elizabeth Heyert’s Sicilian sleepers. At once ghostly and statue-like, these figures float between the historical past and the viewer’s present. Their isolation in space makes their asynchrony seem like an ontological state, when in fact it is the product of an elaborate artistic process that itself unfolds complexly in time. Heyert describes how for the original photo, she would watch the sleepers for several hours, often becoming sleepy herself. She then projected the photos on the walls of a village in Sicily. The re-photography took more than ten hours and was suspended regularly when local shepherds passed with their flocks.22 Heyert blurs and redoubles time through the juxtaposition of ancient stone material and modern photographic technique and the temporal gap between the moment of the original shoot of the sleepers and the reshoot of their projected images. In the process, she calls attention to both the sympathy and the asynchrony between the sleeping subjects and the vigilant camera.23 Heyert’s photographic eye is as lyrical and ambiguous as Simonides’ and Sappho’s poetic voices; both are eternalized in the floating atemporality of the sleeper. Notes 1 The complete collection is at www.elizabethheyert.com/projects/the-sleepers. Interview and interpretive essays at www.elizabethheyert.com/writings/. 2 See Coope (2005: 85–98). She differentiates number from measure and stresses that for Aristotle time is an ordering, not an enumerating, of changes (87, 96–8, 99–109). On sleep in Aristotle, Heraclitus, and Plato, with further bibliography, see Wohl (2020). 3 Its relation to χρόνος is only one of many perplexing things about τὸ νῦν. Is the now always the same or is each now different? If it is always the same, then time would have no limit: we would live in the same present as Homer. If it is always different, how do we know when the present instant has ceased to exist? (218a8–30). On the aporiai of τὸ νῦν see Coope (2005: 21–9). 4 Cf. 219a3–6: “even if it is dark and we experience no physical change, if there is any κίνησις in our ψυχή, then immediately it seems to us that some time has also passed with the change.” This is why Aristotle will posit that there can be no time without the ψυχή since ψυχή and νοῦς are needed to register number, and time is a number (i.e., numerical measure) of change: 223a16–29. 5 Culler (2015: 211–43). 6 “Sleep and sorrow exemplify that our lived sense of time can differ from the measured time of successive linear intervals” (Dinshaw 2012: 9). 7 Johnson (1986: 28–47). The poet gives the figure voice “not in order to make it speak but in order to make it listen to him – in order to make it listen to him doing nothing but address it” (31). 8 Burnett (1985: 13) notes “the almost oxymoronic quality of ὕπερθε . . . βαθεῖαν at 13–14; the deepest part of the sea is still above their heads.” 9 Cf. Rosenmeyer (1991: 20). 10 Cf. Johnson (1986: 37), on Adrienne Rich: “In each of these poems, then, a kind of competition is implicitly instated between the bearing of children and the writing of poems.” 11 Cf., e.g., Alcman 89; Budelmann (2013).

28 Alex Purves and Victoria Wohl 12 Cf. Od. 23.249, ἀμέτρητος πόνος (of Odysseus’ future) and 19.512, πένθος ἀμέτρητον (οf Penelope’s); Hutchinson (2001 ad loc.), Budelmann (2018 ad loc.). 13 Il. 1.7. The word μεταβουλία is unique in Greek literature; see further Hutchinson (2001 ad loc.). Its closer antecedent is μεταβουλεύω, used in book five of the Odyssey to refer to the gods’ (really Zeus’) change of mind in setting the action of the poem in motion (Od. 5.286). On the Dios boulē at Iliad 1.5 and its relation to the epic plot, see Schein (2022 ad loc.). 14 We thank N. Bryant Kirkland for this observation. The impact of Dionysius’ presentation of this fragment without metrical divisions, so as to show how close in style it is to prose, is discussed in Rosenmeyer (1991: 6–7, 26–7). 15 Note also the correspondence Augustine draws between the experience of time and meter: Aug. Conf. 11.27: et ego metior fidenterque respondeo, quantum exercitato sensu fiditur, illam simplam esse, illam duplam, in spatio scilicet temporis (“and I measure [the syllables in the line Deus creator omnium] and, in so far as I can trust my practiced ear, I respond confidently that one is a single and the other a double quantity – and by quantity, of course, I mean their duration in time” (transl. Pine-Coffin 1961). Dionysius’ removal of the poem’s metrical arrangement thereby disassociates the poem from the lyric’s experiential “now.” 16 The authorship of this fragment is uncertain (it comes down to us without attribution from Hephaestion and is not transmitted in Aeolic dialect) but most editors, including Voigt and Campbell, assign it to Sappho. 17 καὶ ἐπήλυθον ὧραι at line end: Od.2.107, 11.295, 14.294, 19.152, 24.142; H.H.3.351. 18 Sleep is always a present participle when it is a participle and waking up (ἐγρηγορώς) is always in the perfect when a participle. 19 Campbell (1982, translated previously in this chapter) prefers “I lie,” but both meanings are possible (LSJ s.v. καθεύδω), as discussed in detail in Purves (forthcoming a). On the translation of κατεύδω, and on this fragment in general, see Reiner and Kovacs (1993: 145–59). 20 Cf. Purves (forthcoming a and b). 21 On lyric’s ability to bridge the gap between speaker and listener or reader, see Payne (2018), who, following Celan, alerts us to “the tangency of the time of the poem and the time of the reader as the essence of the lyric encounter” (259). 22 www.elizabethheyert.com/conversations-essays/the-sleepers2. She describes the project as a response to her parents’ deaths and a meditation on mortality and transformation. Note also that the town, Poggioreale, was itself a ghost town, abruptly abandoned after a 1968 earthquake: it, too, is trapped in time, embodied in the ghostly sleepers. 23 “I have a troubled relationship to sleep; I have nightmares. I was always amazed at and envious of how people slept; their world seemed better than mine” (www.elizabethheyert.com/conversations-essays/the-sleepers2). Like Danae, Heyert projects herself into the sleepers’ world. But her discussion of the loneliness she felt as she watched the intimacy of sleeping couples also recalls Sappho’s ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω.

Works Cited Barnes, J., ed. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vol. I. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Budelmann, F. 2013. “Alcman’s Nightscapes (Frs. 89 and 90 ‘PMGF’).” HSCP 107: 35–53. Budelmann, F., ed. 2018. Greek Lyric: A Selection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burnett, A. P. 1985. The Art of Bacchylides. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Campbell, D. A. 1982. Greek Lyric I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Campbell, D. A. 1991. Greek Lyric III. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carson, A. 1999. Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Keos With Paul Celan. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Now, Sleep 29 Coope, U. 2005. Time for Aristotle: Physics IV.10–14. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Culler, J. 2015. Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dinshaw, C. 2012. How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Durham: Duke University Press. Hutchinson, G. O. 2001. Greek Lyric Poetry: A Commentary on Selected Larger Pieces. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, B. 1986. “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion.” Diacritics 16: 28–47. Payne, M. 2018. “Fidelity and Farewell: Pindar’s Ethics as Textual Events.” In F. Budelmann and T. Phillips, eds., Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 257–74. Pine-Coffin, R. S. 1961. Saint Augustine: Confessions. Translated With an Introduction. London: Penguin Group. Purves, A. Forthcoming a. “Two Ways of Being Alone: Dual Form in Sappho Fragment 168b.” In S. Nooter and M. Telò, eds., Radical Formalisms: Rethinking the Literary in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond. New York: Bloomsbury. Purves, A. Forthcoming b. “Alcman, Sappho, and the ‘Lyric Present’.” In C. Bloomfield and E. Hall, eds., Time, Tense and Genre in Ancient Greek Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reiner, P., and D. Kovacs. 1993. “ΔΕΔΥΚΕ ΜΕΝ Α ΣΕΛΑΝΝΑ: The Pleiades in MidHeaven (PMG Frag. Adesp. 976 = Sappho, Fr. 168b Voigt).” Mnemosyne 46.2: 145–59. Rosenmeyer, P. A. 1991. “Simonides’ Danae Fragment Reconsidered.” Arethusa 24.1: 5–29. Schein, S. L., ed. 2022. Homer Iliad Book 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wohl, V. 2020. “The Sleep of Reason: Sleep and the Philosophical Soul in Ancient Greece.” Classical Antiquity 39: 126–51.

2

Untold Times? A Page From Galen James Ker

What are the untold times of ancient Rome?1 I propose here to consider just one page from the second-century medical writer Galen as he considers a daily schedule of the sort that is not usually foregrounded in the evidentiary record of Romans’ time experiences. This page was written in the 170s when Marcus Aurelius was emperor, and it comes from On Hygiene, Galen’s work on dietetics – the branch of medicine concerned not with tending illness but with keeping bodies healthy. In this work, Galen has much to say about the role of timing (kairos) in maintaining an appropriate regimen, where adjustments to a person’s routine are essential for keeping them in good health. This longstanding concern in ancient medicine had always taken into account not only a person’s physical condition but also the social conditions and constraints of their lifestyle, including their involvement in labor or occupation (negotium, ἀσχολία) and their access to leisure (otium, σχολή).2 In the first five books of the work, Galen had assumed a “perfectly constituted man” (τὸν ἄριστα κατεσκευασμένον) who was “free to take care of himself in complete civilian leisure” (ἑαυτῷ σχολάζειν ἐλεύθερον ὄντα πολιτικῆς ἀσχολίας ἁπάσης, San. 6.1, trans. Green 1951).3 But our page comes from the sixth and final book, which looks at complicated cases, including “those who, through circumstances of affairs, are unable to eat and drink and exercise at the proper times” (τοὺς κατὰ περίστασίν τινα πραγμάτων ἀδυνατοῦντας ἐν τοῖς προσήκουσι καιροῖς ἐσθίειν τε καὶ πίνειν καὶ γυμνάζεσθαι, 6.1). In this book’s fifth chapter, Galen introduces the hypothetical case of someone whose body can be expected to remain in good health, were it not for their life situation: “Let us assume . . . him who has broadly a perfect constitution of body, in a slave’s life (ἐν βίῳ δουλικῷ), serving all day (δι’ ὅλης ἡμέρας ὑπηρετῶν), either some of the greatest living magistrates or a monarch (ἤτοι τῶν μέγιστα δυναμένων τισὶν ἢ μονάρχων), but leaving his master at the end of the day (χωριζόμενος δὲ περὶ τὰ πέρατα τῆς ἡμέρας)” (6.5).4 The case study, then, appears to concern an enslaved person who attends upon members of a monarchic court. It also concerns the implications of a specific temporal constraint – the fact that up until “the end of the day,” the attendant has no control over his time and his bodily regimen. Galen would seem to be leading us into a thought experiment concerned with the person’s loss of the opportunity to tend to his body that results from the alienation of his time and labor. This page may be an opportunity for us to learn about “untold times” – or at least, about times not usually told. Before we go further in our reading, let me DOI: 10.4324/9781003385387-4

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explain what is meant by my title. In a focus on “untold times,” I aim to look beyond the Roman culture of time and timekeeping that survives in a fairly copious archive containing multiple types of evidence. If we review Roman literature, history, and material culture, we are “told” much about not only historical, calendrical, and biographic time, but also everyday time.5 The diachronic development of daily timekeeping in Rome is chronicled, for example, by Pliny the Elder, when he traces the increments in timekeeping technology in the Roman forum from sundial to water clock: Marcus Varro relates that the first [sundial] in public was set up on a column, alongside the Rostra, in the first Punic war, by the consul Manius Valerius Messala, after the capture of Catania in Sicily [263 BCE] . . . then [in 159 BCE] Scipio Nasica [as censor] . . . was the first to use water to distinguish the hours equally of nights and of days. (HN 7.214–215)6 We can put this together with the material remnants of hundreds of sundials that survive around the Mediterranean, including the oldest specimens in Egypt.7 Synchronic routines of specific Romans or groups of Romans are also represented in full or alluded to in part in numerous forms of literary and epigraphic texts. The most notable are the complete daily rounds described in such texts as Martial’s hour-cataloguing epigram 4.8: The first hour, and the second, wear the greeters down, the third exercises hoarse barristers, . . . . The tenth is the hour of my little books, Euphemus, when your diligence tempers the ambrosial banquets and good Caesar unwinds with heavenly nectar and holds moderate cups in his huge hand. (lines 1–2, 7–10) Such accounts are not to be taken literally, but in Martial’s address to the emperor Domitian’s attendant and his witty fictional refusal of the morning salutatio and diplomatic negotiation of access to the emperor as a literary patron, we learn about the social semiotics of schedules and timing in an elite urban context. Material culture also provides opportunities, as for example in the well-known mosaic type in which we see a parasite or an enslaved time teller announcing the passage of the ninth hour – the time for entrance to the dining room.8 The presence of such data from ancient Rome fueled the early modern genre of neoantiquarian books on the topic of “Daily Life in Ancient Rome.”9 Jérôme Carcopino’s popular volume La vie quotidienne à Rome (1939) was neither the first nor the last in this genre, in which the structure of the Roman day has served as the framework for the very table of contents, guiding the reader’s exploration of ancient Rome through a temporalized tour of the day from salutatio to lucubratio. In my book The Ordered Day: Quotidian Time and Forms of Life in Ancient Rome (Ker 2023), I argue that these “told times” of Roman culture, when considered together, have a complex symbolic impact, with the internal ordering of the

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day serving variously as an ordering of Roman history and of Roman society, and of knowledge about Rome. But the Roman past is also dead and gone, and the Roman times we are told about are infinitely outweighed by those that are lost. In turning here to consider “untold times,” I propose to build upon useful work by others to consider – here in a very limited space – how we might cast our attention beyond the times and time experiences that dominate the archive. The page of Galen is intended to serve here as a test case for what we might glean from a text in which times not usually told are apparently brought into the light. I intend “untold times” to be a polysemous phrase that remains open to meanings that may only emerge in the process of exploration. Rather than providing a detailed taxonomic definition, let me simply confirm that “times” here might include such things as units, occasions, events, activities, practices, lives, histories, and temporalities, while “untold” might be paraphrased by such terms as unsignalled, innumerable, unrepresented, elided, marginalized, silenced, lost, not narrated, and actively forgotten. Let me also mention a few heterogeneous instances of “untold times” that can demonstrate the types of threshold that exist between times that are told and those that are not. Consider, for example, how the half-hour went mostly untracked – how even though timekeeping technology did not at all lack the precision to track it, Romans as a rule did not avail themselves of the ability to do so.10 But there are exceptions to this, such as the one surviving sundial on which summer hours are bifurcated with an extra set of lines, or when Cicero (in summer) mentions a letter-carrier who arrived on the half-hour but was too late to catch someone (Att. 15.24.1),11 or when access to water from the irrigation canal at Lamasba in North Africa includes half-hourly precision.12 These are rare glimpses of otherwise untold (un-tolled) times, at least at the level of technology and timekeeping. But then we may consider in turn how specific groups or individuals, for one reason or another, are not perceived as participating in those times that are explicitly marked. Seneca, for example, satirizes the nocturnal elite by devaluing their time use: “Do you think they know how to live if they don’t know when to live?” (Ep. 122.3). In the process of using their time behavior to call into question their entire way of living, characterizing it as a vita mortua, Seneca tells us many of the details of their time use, yet only en route to un-telling their times in a more significant sense. Much the same can be said of another version of the mosaic previously mentioned in which we see images not only of the diner running to arrive on time for dinner upon the passage of the ninth hour, but the latecomer (ἄκαιρος) whose timing almost leaves him out of the social picture and, in a juxtaposed image, the enslaved worker whose efforts may be facilitating the warming of the leisure facilities enjoyed by the elite users of the dining room or the baths.13 In the modern books on “Daily Life in Ancient Rome,” we see times not only left untold in ways that reflect a lack of evidence, but sometimes even actively untold in ways that amplify ancient marginalization of the non-elite. In their 1930 book for school students entitled Everyday Life in Rome in the Time of Caesar and

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Cicero, Treble and King articulate a nonelite disinterest in time as follows: “The poorer citizens led a somewhat idle life, so time meant little to them. Slaves worked from before daylight till they were released from their tasks, and therefore had no need to reckon the passing of time.”14 Treble and King’s normative conception of time, being entirely conditioned by the hegemonic daily routines of the elite, does not even have a place to imagine slaves waiting to be released from tasks. This is, however, simply a more egregious instance of an error that is widespread in the historiography of time. Stefan Hanss has critiqued how historians of early modern Europe have measured past time culture through anachronistic lenses (for example, in becoming preoccupied with temporal precision, whether or not it appears to be a concern in the “time talk” of their historical subjects) rather than “crafting narratives that do justice to the temporal lives of early modern people.”15 For exploring the question of untold times, there are two general frames of reference that I have found especially helpful. The first is work in Roman studies that has responded creatively and critically to absences in the archive. An example that especially concerns time is The Material Life of Roman Slaves by Sandra Joshel and Lauren Petersen (2014), which connects the task of recovering slaves’ bodily lives – both within and beyond the physical, spatial, and temporal “containment” imposed on them by “master strategies” – to such theories as de Certeau’s everyday tactics of resistance, Scott’s hidden transcript, and Trouillot’s agenda for countering (rather than reproducing) the silence of sources.16 The other frame of reference is work in the social sciences that has gone far beyond Durkheim’s assertion of the social origins of time ontology to explore the ways in which time is implicated in the workings of power and social inequality. In this widespread exploration, which can be sampled in such venues as the journal Time and Society, a representative insight concerns the critical term “temporality” as distinct from mere “time.” As Dustin Goltz puts it, “the notion of ‘temporality’ becomes useful as a term that speaks to questions that interrogate the functions and logics of time, opening time up for reflection, examination, and analysis,” while Govert Valkenburg highlights “the speakability of temporalities” as something precarious and threatened by social injustice.17 To attend to untold temporalities, then, could include attending to ways of experiencing or knowing time that are not registered in normative categories but that may be recuperable if given voice to. This work, then, alerts us to the possibilities for a more radical and critical reparation of “untold times” both in the archive and in modern accounts of Roman culture. In the present chapter, I cannot hope to perform this task in any depth. But in presenting Galen’s case study, as he first clarifies the time conditions involved and then provides an intriguing example from the life of someone “in a slave’s life” in the Antonine court, I hope to determine how far Galen can be understood to be telling times that are usually untold, and also the limits in his telling. Let us resume the case study at the point where Galen introduces the attendant with the excellent constitution who has served “all day” but then is able to leave “at

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the end of the day” (περὶ τὰ πέρατα τῆς ἡμέρας). First, Galen immediately pauses to clarify: And again I must define what I mean by end, for my statement will create a false impression in those who read it, if it should not afford a suitable definition. Therefore if I say that he leaves first for the care of his body when the sun sets, without adding on what day I mean, whether at the summer or the winter solstice, or at either of the equinoxes, or any time in between the stated seasons, it is impossible to make advantageous hypotheses. (San. 6.5) Galen here reminds his readers of something that any Roman already knows: that the extent of daylight and darkness, and of the twelve parts of each (the seasonal hours), were constantly changing throughout the year. Here we see Galen, with his focus on “what day I mean,” placing a premium on precision in timing. Evidently he does so for scientific accuracy as he conveys medical knowledge to a non-specialist audience18 and also for giving the most effective dietetic advice to such an enslaved person on “the care of his body” – especially if we understand the phrase συμφερούσας . . . ὑποθήκας to mean “beneficial suggestions” (trans. Johnston 2018) or “appropriate instructions” (Singer 2023) rather than simply “advantageous hypotheses” (trans. Green 1951). Galen’s precision here is also reflective of the more granular attention he brings, across all his work, to “intra-day timing.”19 This is the term used by Kassandra Miller when characterizing Galen’s quite innovative focus on such concepts as the “critical hour” in the course of a fever by contrast with the Hippocratic interest merely in “critical days.” As Miller points out, Galen had benefitted from developments in scientific knowledge about time variations in specific geographic locations.20 In the present context, Galen’s foregrounding of the question “what day I mean” – literally, “what kind of day I mean” (ὁποίας ἡμέρας) – signals that intraday timing requires attending to the qualitative – both seasonal and geographic – factors that are relevant to considerations of duration and timing. And so Galen next draws attention to geographic factors. He defines seasonal fluctuations in Rome specifically, through comparison with a city further south: Now in the city of the Romans, the longest days and nights are a little more than fifteen equinoctial hours (ὡρῶν ἰσημερινῶν), and the shortest a little less than nine. But in great Alexandria, the longest are fourteen hours and the shortest ten. Galen here, as elsewhere in his writings, invokes the equinoctial hour as a standard metric – a use that we do not typically see in Roman culture except in technical areas such as science or agriculture.21 In agriculture, for example, we encounter two inscribed registers of the months surviving from first-century Italy, on which the length of days and nights in each month is indicated in equinoctial hours, in some months down to the quarter hour.22

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Such information was no doubt helpful for farmers seeking to determine how much daylight would be available for outdoor tasks at different times of the year, as well as whether the extent of darkness would make it necessary and/or feasible to lucubrate. On the so-called Menologium Colotianum, for example, June’s days are fifteen hours and the nights nine, while in December it is the opposite – proportions that correspond almost exactly to what Galen gives for Rome. The geographical comparison with Alexandria, a city where he had also spent time as a medical student, lends special weight to Galen’s observations for dietetics at Rome, allowing him to conclude: Therefore he who in the shortest days and longest nights gets away from his service at sunset can be massaged and bathe at leisure and sleep moderately. But there is no one who in the longest [days and shortest nights] can do any of these things properly. Bearing in mind Galen’s attention to the constraint imposed by the shortness of Roman nights in summer, it is important to recognize the dietetic standards to which he aspires for the person living “in a slave’s life.” He hopes for them to be able to “be massaged and bathe at leisure and sleep moderately” (καὶ τρίψασθαι κατὰ σχολὴν καὶ λούσασθαι δύναται καὶ κοιμηθῆναι συμμέτρως).23 Green’s translation can perhaps be improved upon here: “at leisure,” I suggest, modifies “be massaged” specifically, since later in the same chapter Galen will allude to a practice of skipping the massage and going directly into the bath (cf. οὐδὲ ἄχρι τοῦ τρίψασθαι . . . ἀλλ’ ἄντικρυς εἰς τὸ βαλανεῖον).24 And “sleep moderately,” like Johnston’s “sleep in moderation,” does not convey the needed sense of the adverb συμμέτρως, which must be either “adequately” or “in due proportion;” Singer captures this with “a balanced amount of sleep”25 Such standards for both leisurely self-care and adequate sleep match the precepts in other dietetic writers such as Diocles of Carystus (c. fourth century BCE), at least for those who are “at leisure” (τοὺς σχολάζοντας), clearly suggesting elite status, rather than “forced (ἀναγκαζομένους) to do something else or doing it by choice (προαιρομένους)” (fr. 182.3).26 Galen concludes his statement on the constraints imposed by summer’s short nights with an intriguing and somewhat ambiguous remark: “But there is no one who in the longest [days and shortest nights] can do any of these things properly – nor indeed have I known anyone so unfortunate in life (οὐ μὴν οὐδ’ ἔγνων τινὰ τοιαύτῃ δυστυχίᾳ βίου χρησάμενον).” The way Galen has been proceeding, we might have expected that he was about to point out that in Rome during summer, the brevity of the nights does indeed prevent people from getting sufficient exercise and sleep – that the time squeeze imposed by this combination of social, geographic, and seasonal factors (i.e., day-long servitude at Rome during summer) represents a significant threat to health. But the Greek grammars remind us that in the particle combination οὐ μὴν οὐδέ with which the final sentence is introduced, a speaker “asserts strongly, and against the expectations raised by the preceding context . . . that something is also not the case.”27 This is already evident in Green’s “nor indeed . . . ,” though it is conveyed more clearly by Singer: “But I have not yet known one whose personal

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circumstances were as unfortunate as that.”28 The upshot: Galen has adumbrated a worst-case scenario that might have impeded the health regimen of someone with a perfect constitution, but pivots to claiming that such conditions are, in his experience, not a reality or at least not the threat that they might have been. The question, then, is what prevents this from being the case. What makes things okay after all? Galen answers this by immediately describing an example from the court of the emperor “Antoninus.” He introduces this example with the particle γοῦν, which typically introduces “the ‘minimal evidence’ or the ‘minimal applicability’ for a preceding statement” – or “part proof”:29 ὁ γοῦν ὧν ἴσμεν αὐτοκρατόρων ἑτοιμότατα πρὸς τὴν τοῦ σώματος ἐπιμέλειαν ἀφικόμενος Ἀντωνῖνος ἐν μὲν ταῖς μικραῖς ἡμέραις ἡλίου δύνοντος εἰς τὴν παλαίστραν παρεγίνετο, κατὰ δὲ τὰς μεγίστας ἐνάτης ὥρας ἢ τὸ πλεῖστον δεκάτης, ὡς ἐξεῖναι τοῖς παραμένουσιν αὐτῷ κατὰ τὰς ἡμερησίας πράξεις ἀπαλλαγεῖσι προνοήσασθαι τοῦ σώματος ἐν τῷ λοιπῷ μέρει τῆς ἡμέρας, ὡς ἅμα τῷ δῦναι τὸν ἥλιον εἰς ὕπνον τρέπεσθαι. τῆς γάρ τοι σμικροτάτης νυκτὸς ἴσης οὔσης ἐννέα ταῖς ἰσημεριναῖς ὥραις αὐτάρκης ὁ τοσοῦτος χρόνος αὐτοῖς ὕπνου τυχεῖν. For30 Antoninus, who, of the autocrats I have known, came most readily for the care of his body, on the short days used to enter the gymnasium at sunset, and on the longest at the ninth or at most the tenth hour. So that it was31 possible for those who attended him during his daily affairs, having been dismissed, to care for their body in the remaining part of the day, so that they could go to bed at sunset, for the shortest night being equal to nine equinoctial hours, such time was sufficient for them to get sleep. In the court of Antoninus, then, the time constraint that would have threatened the slave’s dietetic routine did not as a rule pertain. But what type of example do we have here? For Galen’s account of the emperor’s daily habits and its implications for his attendants could be taken in two distinct ways. He could be saying, essentially: even in the case of an emperor who devoted a lot of time to his own exercise and bathing, there was still sufficient time for his attendants complete their own. This is essentially an exemplum a maiore (“even then . . .”), in which the emphasis is on the superlative ἑτοιμότατα (“most readily”)32 and on the longer than usual extent of time it took this emperor to complete his own exercise. Alternatively, he could be saying: even though the summer nights are short in Rome, this pressure was alleviated by the fact that the emperor modified his routine in summer. The example’s function in this instance would be explanatory, in which the emphasis is on the emperor’s seasonal adaptation. Here the sense of ἑτοιμότατα (“most readily”) might be concessive (i.e., even though he devoted a lot of time to his own exercise and bathing, in summer he made sure to finish earlier than sunset), or it might even conceivably be explanatory (i.e., because he was a devotee of exercise and bathing); we may note that the phrase Green translates with “the care of his body” (τὴν τοῦ σώματος ἐπιμέλειαν) could as easily be translated “the care of the body.” I think the second of these readings is

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more plausible within the overall logic of Galen’s discussion, given how much he has pointed to summer nights as a particular challenge. I like to think that Galen is saying: hypothetically the summer nights at Rome might pose a time squeeze, but in my world, the emperor’s clock was sufficiently adaptive that this was never a problem. But it is worth pointing out that both readings put the emperor in a positive light as regards Galen’s topic – in the first instance by highlighting his devotion to a healthy regimen for himself (one which did not prevent others from a healthy regimen), and in the second instance by highlighting how his seasonal adjustments ensured the possibility of a healthy regimen for everyone in the court. Regardless of which of these options we take, an essential conclusion to draw from Galen’s discussion is that “end of the day” turns out to be subject not only to the seasonal and geographic factors of summer in Rome but also to the personal factor of the emperor’s adjustment, a factor that, because he is emperor, is at the same time a sociopolitical factor. The emperor’s adjustment has some general resemblances to the way in which modern daylight savings arbitrarily moves the hour forward or backward in relation to dawn and dusk – though obviously with different motives and effects. Certainly, the way in which the emperor’s adjustment allows for self-care by his attendants may very well be a mere secondary outcome of his routine rather than the primary goal of his adjustments. Galen does not go out of his way to say: this emperor is a model for imitation by other emperors.33 A key phrase in the passage is ὡς ἐξεῖναι, a clause of natural result34 rather than a purpose clause, though it does not exclude the possibility of an intended result, and the translation of Green and Singer, “so that it was possible,” as well as of Johnston, “Consequently, it was possible,” leave the phrase suitably open-ended. But just because the attendants’ self-care is not presented as the primary goal, its status as a secondary outcome is still complimentary to this emperor’s court, portraying it as a place that poses no inherent threat to an attendant’s wellbeing. In introducing a description of the Antonine court, Galen is evidently drawing upon discursive forms in which the daily routine of an emperor or member of the emperor’s household serves as a showcase of their character and profile.35 The main manifestation of this is in imperial biography, where we learn, for example, that Septimius Severus “would pour out adequate water [i.e., into the clepsydra] for those speaking” in a trial (Dio Cass. 76.17.1), or that Vespasian was most approachable at the end of the day, after he had proceeded to the dining room or the bath (Suet. Vesp. 21). We also see this manifested in documents such as the correspondence between Fronto and Marcus Aurelius, which reveals in Marcus’ day such details as his gargling to cure a cold, his standing by his father, the emperor Antoninus Pius, while he sacrificed, and his chatting with his mother in a bedroom (Ep. 4.6).36 Galen’s motive for describing the routine of this court may be primarily medical, but his description will reveal things about the character of the princeps and possibly about Galen’s own role as an observer of it. Indeed, we cannot ignore the fact that Galen advertises his inside knowledge of the workings of the Roman imperial court. Regarding the identity of “Antoninus,” there is no doubt that it is Marcus Aurelius (rather than Antoninus Pius [d. 161]).37 Galen’s use of the past-tense verb παρεγίνετο “used to enter” implies reference to a

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bygone emperor, but he may very well be writing after Marcus’ death in 180. His reference to “autocrats I have known” is also more accurate of his long-time acquaintance with Marcus, since Antoninus Pius had died before Galen first visited Rome in 162. And while we learn outside of Galen’s writings about Antoninus Pius’ attention to his bodily regimen – that he was “not an irregular bather” (οὐκ ἄωρι λούστης) – and we are treated to an episode from the court of Antoninus Pius in which “the gong sounded, that is, [the emperor] was announced to have passed into the bath,” this information comes from the pen of none other than Marcus Aurelius (Med. 1.16, Ep. 4.5.2), whose daily habits shadowed those of his adoptive father. Regardless of whether Marcus’ early ending to his summer days was intended to make time for the bodily care of those who served him, Galen’s case study may be one in which he himself had played a role as an advisor. This prompts the question of Galen’s motive for bringing to light the time experience of persons “in a slave’s life,” for he seems to describe their daily routine, and the routine of the emperor that determined it, not simply to focus on their bodily experience but also to advertise his own access to and influence on the emperor and his household with his advice on dietetics. There is another surprising detail in Galen’s case study of the person with a perfect constitution in a slave’s life. For before moving on, he continues: “Therefore, it must be considered, if such a servant had the custom of exercising in his previous life, whether he should bathe without exercising (εἴτε γυμνάζεσθαι κατὰ τὸν ἔμπροσθεν βίον ὁ τοιοῦτος ὑπηρέτης ἔθος εἶχεν εἴτ’ ἀγύμναστος λούεσθαι).” If this person is a slave, the “previous life” is most likely to be the life prior to enslavement, since it is clearly treated as a time when the person was free to determine his own routine. But the upshot of Galen’s discussion as it continues turns out to be that some people’s constitutions are such that they can tolerate “not having a massage” – something we saw above should ideally be done with “leisure” (σχολή) – and they can simply “pour oil over themselves and enter the bath.” This licenses a clear recommendation: “Such a nature it is not desirable to change to another habit.” Whether or not Galen intends it, a slave’s personal bodily history might reveal that leisure has never been a pressing need and that this person’s bodily care is something that can be maintained in a much shorter span of time, thanks to their excellent constitution – presumably a piece of dangerous knowledge for one hoping to make the fullest demands on a slave’s time. And the phrasing of this section, especially “it must be considered if such a servant . . . ,” suggests that we might indeed be witnessing the type of reasoning that Galen himself brought to bear in the Antonine court – a reasoning with medical implications but also with implications for how a slave might be treated. Would a slave exhibiting this level of physical tolerance, for example, thereby risk being coerced into attending the emperor even after the emperor ended his day and proceeded through massage and bathing? Galen’s page may present times that would otherwise have been left untold: the times eked out by slaves negotiating a schedule that leaves them scant scope for self-care except where an emperor’s exceptional regimen provides them with some resources. Galen seemingly invokes the very real condition of enslavement, even to the point of being conscious of the ways in which the slave’s capacity for time management has been dramatically changed from what it was before.

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But at this point is worth asking just what kind of attendant we are dealing with – indeed, whether Galen is certainly referring to enslaved persons. For none of the language he uses of the person in his case study is decisive. He introduces him as being ἐν βίῳ δουλικῷ, “in a slave’s life,” or perhaps better “in a servile life,” and this phrase the reader may very well choose to understand metaphorically. For in the preface to book two, with reference to unhealthy lifestyles among people’s various “forms of life” (βίων εἴδη), Galen had written:38 Some incur such lives from poverty, some from slavery, either descending to them from their parents, or having been taken captive and carried away, which most people consider the only real slavery (ἅσπερ καὶ μόνας δουλείας ὀνομάζουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων). But to me it seems that those who through ambition or zeal have chosen some form of life so involved in affairs of business (εἵλοντο βίον ἐν περιστάσεσι πραγμάτων) that they can have little leisure for the care of their bodies (ὡς ὀλίγιστα δύνασθαι σχολάζειν τῇ τοῦ σώματος ἐπιμελείᾳ) are also willing slaves to hard masters (καὶ οὗτοι δουλεύειν ἑκόντες οὐκ ἀγαθαῖς δεσποίναις). (2.1) Galen may have this kind of metaphorical slavery in mind when he describes elsewhere how his own regimen must adapt to his busy professional schedule (6.7). And most conspicuously for our purposes, just a few lines before the page we have been considering, he equivocates over the terminology of enslavement, referring to “the life of a slave or a business man or whatever you might wish to term it” (βίον δουλικὸν ἢ περισπαστικὸν ἢ ὅπως ἄν τις ὀνομάζειν ἐθέλοι, 6.5, p. 403). This matches the interpretation offered by Singer, who annotates his translation “with a life of servitude” as follows: “it seems clear that what is meant is the life constrained by professional obligations and duties, rather than actual slavery.”39 Galen’s further description of the person as “serving all day” (δι’ ὅλης ἡμέρας ὑπηρετῶν), and later as “waiting upon him” (παραμένουσιν), could refer to anyone in the imperial court whose schedule was subject to that of the emperor – whether slaves, freedmen, aristocratic amici, family members, or indeed, as Singer tentatively suggests, Galen himself.40 We may usefully compare Pliny the Younger’s account of how his uncle would spend most of his day on “his assigned duty” (delegatum sibi officium) from the emperor Vespasian, and then “returning home he would devote to his studies whatever time was remaining (quod reliquum temporis studiis reddebat)” (Plin. Ep. 3.5.9). What about Galen’s reference to this person as “leaving his master” (trans. Green) or “parting from his master” (trans. Johnston)? In fact, Galen makes no explicit mention of a master: the Greek verb χωριζόμενος lacks an object here and means no more than “taking his leave.” And Galen’s reference to the person’s “previous life” (ἔμπροσθεν βίον)? This could simply refer to their life before entering the imperial court. Galen’s page, then, may have told us nothing at all about the experience of enslaved persons. It may be merely a more specific version of the earlier medical writer Celsus’ dietetic advice to the elite Roman for whom officia must be

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navigated: “One whom either domestic or civic duties have detained during the day (quem interdiu vel domestica vel civilia officia tenuerunt) should preserve some time (huic tempus aliquod servandum) for the care of his body” (Med. 1.2.5). At the very least, we must recognize that Galen is primarily concerned with those features of a “servile life” that a person whose lifestyle is simply a form of voluntary “servitude” has in common with those enslaved at birth or after capture. There is ultimately no way to know how or if the example of Antoninus, while it may praise how the emperor’s dietetic routine facilitated the bodily self-care of those who attended him, has benefitted enslaved persons in any way. The unique temporalities of the slave may after all remain untold. And there is also the question of the slave’s entanglement in the very mechanisms by which time was kept and signaled. Kassandra Miller has drawn attention equally to the ways in which slave movements are regulated by the clock, and the ways in which slaves themselves are instrumental in the telling of time.41 Seneca mocks time mismanagement by elite Romans “who are reminded by another (alius admonet) when they should wash, when they should bathe, when they should dine” (Sen. Brev. Vit. 12.9). But whenever “the hour for bathing is announced” (hora balinei nuntiata est, Plin. Ep. 3.1.8) or “the gong sounded” (discus crepuit, Marcus Aurelius, Ep. 4.6.2), we may still look to the time teller themselves with a view to telling their times as well. Notes 1 For discussion of this chapter, I am grateful to the other participants in the “Ancient Temporalities” conference, especially Kate Gilhuly and Jeffrey P. Ulrich, and also to students and faculty at New York University. Jeffrey P. Ulrich made invaluable suggestions on the written chapter. I am also much indebted to Ralph Rosen, and to Peter N. Singer for his responses to several specific questions and for sharing his translation and commentary (Singer 2023). 2 See, for example, Diocles of Carystus, fr. 182, quoted later in this chapter. 3 I use the translation of Green (1951) unless otherwise noted. Green makes some questionable inferences about Galen’s meaning, and as will become clear, the more recent translations by both Johnston (2018) and especially Singer (2023) offer substantial improvements. My Greek text comes from Koch (1923). 4 My reading owes much to the detailed reading of this page in Miller (2017: 138–41). The present discussion revises several of the assumptions made in Ker (2023: 149–50). 5 For a survey of the topics and source materials, see Ker (2023: 9–14). 6 Ker (2023: 88–104). 7 Jones (2016) and the “Ancient Sundials” project, http://repository.edition-topoi.org/ collection/BSDP. 8 Kondoleon (1999: 323–4, fig. 6). 9 Ker (2023: 293–323). 10 Jones (2019). 11 Ker (2023: 59–60, with fig. 7). 12 Debidour (1996). 13 Pamir and Sezgin (2016). 14 Treble and King (1930: 44). 15 Hanss (2019: 284). 16 Joshel and Petersen (2014: 5–7, 9–13). See also Geue and Giusti (2021), an experiment in “listening out for what [Latin texts] do not say, and how they do not speak, while also tracing the ill-defined borders within which scholars and modern authors are legitimized to fill in the silences around which they are built” (4).

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17 Goltz (2022: 1); Valkenburg (2022: 459). 18 As Singer (2023: 22) notes, Galen does not address simply doctors and students, but philiatroi: “literally, ‘medicine lovers’ (or ‘doctor-friendly’ persons),” a “set of elite, educated Romans whom Galen is keen to impress.” Cf. San. 4.5 with Singer (2023: 304 n. 44). 19 Miller (2018: 118). 20 Miller (2017: 140). 21 On the simultaneous use of seasonal and equinoctial hours and the “precise temporal consciousness” involved, see the useful observations in Singer (2023: 377 n. 30). 22 Cf. Ker (2023: 136–7). 23 But compare Singer (2023: 378), who like Green takes the adverb to govern both verbs: “will easily be able to undergo massage and bathing.” 24 Miller (2017: 140 n. 37) rightly notes the further factor that the bath houses had restricted hours. But this does not seem to be a concern for Galen in this passage. He is concerned only to ensure that the person will complete the bath in time to get sufficient sleep. 25 Cf. Diggle et al. (2021) s.v. σύμμετρος. 26 For Diocles, see Van der Eijk (2000–2001). 27 Van Emde Boas et al. (2019: 701). 28 Johnston takes an alternative approach in his translation by supplying an extra verb: “nor have I known anyone employed in such unfortunate life circumstances (do so)” – where “employed in such unfortunate life circumstances” evidently refers to servitude and “do so” must refer to getting enough exercise and sleep. This is perhaps the claim we might have expected based on direction of Galen’s discussion, but it is not compatible with the function of οὐ μὴν οὐδέ mentioned earlier in this chapter. 29 Quotations from van Emde Boas et al. (2019: 692) and Denniston (1959: 451). I thank Jeffrey P. Ulrich for nudging me to scrutinize the implications of Galen’s particles. 30 Essentially the same sense is conveyed by the translations of γοῦν in Johnston (“Anyway . . .”) and Singer (“Indeed . . .”). 31 Green writes “is possible” (and following, “can go to bed,” “such time is sufficient”) reflecting an erroneous Greek text printed in Kühn (ἔξεστι rather than the ἐξεῖναι seen in the manuscripts). That error led to the mistaken claim that Galen’s work was written before the end of Marcus’ reign. See the detailed exposition in Singer (2023: 69). 32 Compare Singer: “was keenest to attend”; Johnston: “attended most promptly.” 33 In other words, the example is “illustrative” rather than “injunctive,” using the terms of Roller (2004: 52). 34 On the construction, see van Emde Boas et al. (2019: 46.7, 46.9). 35 Ker (2023: 151–61); Millar (1977: 209–10, 241–2). 36 Ker (2023: 246–64); and on the discovery of the letters, Richlin (2012). 37 For Antoninus Pius, see Johnston (2018, n. ad loc.); for Marcus Aurelius, SchlangeSchöningen (2003: 194n84). 38 On this passage as a frame of reference for San. 6.5, see Miller (2017: 152–4). 39 Singer (2023: 377 n. 29). 40 Singer (2023: 377, n. 29). Miller (2017: 138–9) surprisingly takes ὑπηρετῶν in its original sense of “serving as a rower” (LSJ s.v. A.I.), not in its standard derived sense of “serving, attending.” 41 Miller (2022).

Works Cited Carcopino, Jérôme. 1939. La vie quotidienne à Rome à l’apogée de l’empire. Paris: Hachette. Debidour, Michel. 1996. “Le problème de l’eau dans une cité de Numidie: L’inscription hydraulique de ‘Lamasba’.” In A. Groslambert, ed., Urbanisme et urbanisation en Numidie militaire. Paris: De Boccard. 153–79. Denniston, J. D. 1959. The Greek Particles. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Diggle, J., et al. 2021. Cambridge Greek Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geue, Tom, and Elena Giusti, eds. 2021. Unspoken Rome: Absence in Latin Literature and Its Reception. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Goltz, Dustin. 2022. “Queer Temporalities.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190228613.013.1182 Green, Robert Montraville. 1951. A Translation of Galen’s Hygiene (De sanitate tuenda). Springfield, IL: Thomas. Hanss, Stefan. 2019. “The Fetish of Accuracy: Perspectives on Early Modern Time(s).” Past and Present 243: 267–84. Johnston, Ian, trans. 2018. Galen: Hygiene. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jones, Alexander R., ed. 2016. Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jones, Alexander R. 2019. “Greco-Roman Sundials: Precision and Displacement.” In Kassandra J. Miller and Sarah L. Symons, eds., Down to the Hour: Short Time in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Leiden: Brill. 125–57. Joshel, Sandra R., and Lauren Hackworth Petersen. 2014. The Material Life of Roman Slaves. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ker, James. 2023. The Ordered Day: Quotidian Time and Forms of Life in Ancient Rome. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Koch, K. 1923. Galeni de sanitate tuenda libri vi. Corpus medicorum Graecorum 5.4.2, 3–198. Leipzig: Teubner. Kondoleon, Christine. 1999. “Timing Spectacles: Roman Domestic Art and Performance.” In Bettina Bergmann and Christine Kondoleon, eds., The Art of Ancient Spectacle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 320–41. Millar, Fergus. 1977. The Emperor in the Roman World (31 BC – AD 337). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Miller, Kassandra Jackson. 2017. “A Doctor on the Clock: Hourly Timekeeping and Galen’s Scientific Method.” PhD diss., University of Chicago, Chicago. Miller, Kassandra Jackson. 2018. “From Critical Days to Critical Hours: Galenic Refinements of Hippocratic Models.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 148.1: 111–38. Miller, Kassandra Jackson. 2022. “Serving Time: The Complicity of Clocks in Roman Slavery.” Paper Delivered at the Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting, January 5–8. https://classicalstudies.org/sessionpanel-title/freedom-and-enslavement Pamir, Hatice, and Nilüfer Sezgin. 2016. “The Sundial and Convivium Scene on the Mosaic from the Rescue Excavation in a Late Antique House of Antioch.” Adalya (The Annual of the Suna and Inan Kirac Research Institute on Mediterranean Civilizations) 19: 251–80. Richlin, Amy. 2012. “The Sanctification of Marcus Aurelius.” In Marcel van Ackeren, ed., A Companion to Marcus Aurelius. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. 497–514. Roller, Matthew. 2004. “Exemplarity in Roman Culture: The Cases of Horatius Cocles and Cloelia.” Classical Philology 99: 1–56. Schlange-Schöningen, Heinrich. 2003. Die römische Gesellschaft bei Galen: Biographie und Sozialgeschichte. Berlin: De Gruyter. Singer, Peter N. 2023. Galen, Writings on Health: Thrasybulus and Health (De sanitate tuenda), Translated With Introduction and Notes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Treble, H. A., and K. M. King. 1930. Everyday Life in Rome in the Time of Caesar and Cicero. Oxford: Clarendon.

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Valkenburg, Govert. 2022. “Temporality in Epistemic Justice.” Time & Society 31.3: 437–54. Van der Eijk, P. J. 2000–2001. Diocles of Carystus: A Collection of the Fragments With Translation and Commentary. 2 vols. Leiden: Brill. van Emde Boas, Evert, et al. 2019. The Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

II

Engendering Time

3

Fertile Pasts and Sterile Futures in Euripides’ Andromache Sarah Olsen

In the second choral ode of Euripides’ Andromache, the chorus wishes that Hecuba had killed her son Paris as an infant – that she, the “one who bore him” (ἁ τεκοῦσα, Andr. 294) “had thrown him, over her head, to an evil doom” (ὑπὲρ κεφαλὰν ἔβαλεν κακὸν . . . νιν μόρον, 293–294).1 The unattainable nature of this wish is expressed by its preface (εἰ γὰρ, “would that,” 293) and the use of the aorist (ἔβαλεν), which locates the events within the immutable past.2 “Would that” Hecuba had eliminated Paris – but she did not, and thus, as the chorus laments, he lived to play a crucial role in the instigation of the Trojan War. The chorus then proceeds to explore the potential ramifications of its wish, singing of how, if Paris had died, Troy would not have suffered the terrible consequences (slaughter and slavery) of its fall. Structured as the apodosis of a past unreal, or counterfactual, conditional, the final antistrophe of the ode underscores the bitter quality of the chorus’ longings. All of these terrible calamities would have been avoided – if only Hecuba had killed her child. This unattainable, past-counterfactual wish operates within a queer temporality. I use the term “queer” not as a synonym for “strange” or even “non-normative,” but more specifically, to describe how this choral longing for an alternative Trojan timeline enacts two important aspects of queerness as theorized by scholars of gender, sexuality, and literature. First, queerness is often conceived as resistance to or departure from dominant cultural narratives, including those expressed in literary forms.3 In a play centrally concerned with the entanglements of past, present, and future, Euripides exploits the chorus’ distinctive ability to imaginatively traverse time and space in order to give voice to the paradox of past-tense possibility.4 Second, the chorus’ specific desire for the death of the infant Paris stands in queer relation to normative reproductive order and its deep investment in the survival of the child – an investment that Lee Edelman (2004, passim) terms “reproductive futurism.” By exposing how Hecuba’s past fertility is painfully bound to the present and future sterility of Troy itself, the chorus undercuts the logic of reproductive futurism and articulates a counterfactual alternative.5 In this chapter, therefore, I will explore how understanding the chorus’ desires as “queer” enables us to better appreciate both the place of this song within the broader themes of Euripides’ Andromache and the complex temporality of choral odes more generally. DOI: 10.4324/9781003385387-6

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Telling Troy In Euripides’ Andromache, the titular character is living in Phthia as the enslaved concubine of Neoptolemus, to whom she has born a son. Neoptolemus, however, has recently married Hermione (daughter of Helen and Menelaus), who sees Andromache as a rival and threat. When the play begins, Neoptolemus has gone to Delphi, and Hermione has seized this opportunity to attempt to kill Andromache and her son. Eventually, after Hermione and her father Menelaus nearly succeed in their plot, Andromache and the child are saved by the timely arrival of Peleus and a dea-ex-machina appearance by Thetis.6 The chorus, made up of Phthian women, is often sympathetic to Andromache yet characteristically unable to affect the course of events, and its early odes focus on first providing the immediate context for the conflict between Andromache and Hermione (eisodos; 117–146), and then, some of the mythic backstory (the ode under consideration here; 274–308).7 As we will see, however, the chorus narrates the origins of the Trojan War in a way that calls attention both to the selective quality of such narration itself as well as the painful possibility of imagining an alternative past. This ode begins with a relatively straightforward kind of narration: each of the initial stanzas is structured around a temporal clause: in the strophe, the chorus says that Troy’s woes began “when” (ὅτ’, 274) Hermes brought the goddesses to Ida; in the antistrophe, we hear what the goddesses did “when” (ἐπεὶ, 284) they arrived at the glen. The use of aorist indicative verbs throughout (ἦλθ’, 275; ἤλυθον, 284; νίψαν, 285; ἔβαν, 287; ἕλε, 289) underscores the clearly defined temporality of this story. But the chorus also immediately signals its interest in the more complicated dimensions of narrative chronology. It begins by telling the audience that “the son of Maia and Zeus [i.e., Hermes]” (ὁ Μαίας τε καὶ Διὸς τόκος, 275–276) “began” or “initiated” (ὑπῆρξεν, 274) “great troubles” (μεγάλων ἀχέων, 274) for the city of Troy. The Greek text, however, delays the introduction of Hermes as the subject of “began” or “initiated” (ὑπῆρξεν, line 274), lending an impersonal air to the song and also foregrounding questions of agency and causality. For a moment, the audience is left to wonder how, in fact, “it all began” – a question the song will both resolve and complicate. The chorus goes on to describe how Hermes led Aphrodite, Athene, and Hera to Paris so that he could issue his famous “judgment.” While the chorus does not recount these events in detail, its references are sufficient to establish its point: that Paris’ selection of Aphrodite as the most beautiful goddess, in exchange for the prize of Helen, caused the Trojan War.8 Yet the chorus does not say that the trouble “began” with the judgment – it chooses instead to locate the “beginning” (ὑπῆρξεν, 274) of Troy’s woes in the moment when Hermes “led” (ἄγων, 278) the goddesses to Ida, a seemingly minor moment in the story. The chorus’ formulation thereby calls attention to a fundamental problem in the construction of literary narrative – the difficulty in establishing a single “beginning” to a chain of events. Why not, for example, say that the trouble “began” when Eris tossed her golden apple into the wedding celebration of Peleus and Thetis? Or with the moment when Helen departed for Troy with Paris? By referring to Hermes via his parents (i.e., his genealogical past), the chorus further creates the sense that the “beginning” is always receding from view – there could always be more “past” to tell.9

Fertile Pasts and Sterile Futures in Euripides’ Andromache 49 The sudden intrusion of an alternative timeline (εἰ γὰρ, 293), placed prominently at the very beginning of the second strophe, invites us to reflect further on the chorus’ role as a narrator of past events. Up to this point, we might see the chorus as providing valuable reminders of the mythic backdrop to the play’s central events – a brief but effective recounting of the conflict between divine women that led, eventually, to the conflict between mortal women (Andromache and Hermione) that animates Euripides’ Andromache. To be sure, the chorus’ narration in the first strophe and antistrophe is not devoid of emotion: they describe the “contest of beauty” as “hateful” (ἔριδι στυγερᾷ . . . εὐμορφίας, 279) and lament that Aphrodite’s “lovely” (τερπνοῖς, 290) words bring “bitter ruin” (πικρὰν δὲ σύγχυσιν, 291) to Troy. But they now make their sympathies explicit, wishing that Hecuba had killed Paris at birth and thereby prevented the destruction of the city. Instead of simply narrating the past, the chorus intervenes with its own unattainable longing for a different past – and thus, a different future. In the second strophe, the chorus bolsters its wish by recalling how “Cassandra shouted that [Hecuba] should kill [Paris]” (βόασε Κασάνδρα κτανεῖν, 297). By asking “whom did she not approach? Which of the elders did she not beg to slaughter the infant?” (τίν᾽ οὐκ ἐπῆλθε, ποῖον οὐκ ἐλίσσετο/δαμογερόντων βρέφος φονεύειν; 299–300), the chorus underscores Cassandra’s desperation and, by extension, its own. Cassandra’s quest to kill Paris failed because of her own unique curse; the chorus – longing for the same outcome – is also doomed to failure by the irreversible passage of time. It cannot go back and kill Paris any more than Cassandra could, at the time, have convinced the elders to heed her prophetic voice. Like Cassandra, the chorus knows that its wishes will not and cannot be fulfilled. The chorus concludes its song by imagining what would have happened had Paris been killed. In the antistrophe, the chorus alludes to the war’s impact on the women of Troy, including a specific address to Andromache, as well as on the Greek youths forced to fight about the walls for ten long years (301–306). It concludes by underscoring the loss of reproductive potential: marriage beds made “empty” and “desolate” (ἔρημ᾽, 307) by the death of husbands at war, and the old men “orphaned” (ὀρφανοὶ, 308), not only by the loss of their sons to war, but also, presumably, by the lost opportunity for any future children or grandchildren. Over the course of its song, the chorus thus deconstructs its own initial impulse to offer a chronological account of the origins of the Trojan War. As the trappings of narration (“it all began when”) give way to a kind of hopeless speculation (“if only . . .”), the chorus simultaneously articulates and obliterates its alternative futures. The intense pathos of this strategy is clear enough, yet I believe we can find a deeper significance in it by considering the interventions made by theorists of queer temporality and reproductive order. To that end, let me re-read this ode in relation to the theoretical perspectives mentioned at the outset. The Chorus in Queer Time Temporality looms large in early twenty-first–century queer theory.10 Annamarie Jagose, drawing on the work of Elizabeth Freeman, describes queer temporality as “a mode of inhabiting time that is attentive to the recursive eddies and back-to-the-future

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loops that often pass undetected or uncherished beneath the official narrations of the linear sequence that is taken to structure normative life” (Jagose 2009: 158). Freeman herself sees the “stubborn lingering of pastness” as a “hallmark of queer affect” (Freeman 2007: 8), a perspective that complements Heather Love’s influential account of “queer backwardness” (Love 2009: 8). These scholars represent a subset of work on queer temporality that attends specifically to the fissures between chronology and teleology, exploring the alternate futures embedded within the archives of the past.11 They examine how queerness unsettles the march of “chrononormativity” (Freeman 2007: 3) – the expected, even apparently inevitable, unfolding of time.12 While queer anachronism has emerged as a method of its own, I am interested here in how the chorus of Euripides’ Andromache enacts a kind of “temporal drag” avant la lettre, unsettling the play’s sexual and reproductive norms by revisiting and revising the mythic past.13 In Jagose’s words, this ode directs our attention to the “recursive eddies” of Trojan mythic history, interrupting its own “linear sequence” to explore the alternatives that dwell within the paradoxical time of the past-counterfactual. Kathryn Schwarz, in a reading of Shakespearean tragedy, suggests that “counterfactuals are queer locutions, at odds with and even hostile to a dominant narrative” (2011: 167), highlighting how this syntactical form is particularly well-suited to the work of speculation and imagination. I share Schwarz’s sense that the counterfactual, through its ability to articulate possibility from the vantage point of the past, is charged with queer potential, but I think that it may be more useful to consider this syntactical form through a slightly wider lens. The counterfactual, I suggest, invites us to ponder a variety of futures (including impossible ones), and in doing so, move fluidly between the queer and the normative.14 Let us turn once more to the chorus’ unattainable wish, as expressed in the second strophe (293–300): εἰ γὰρ ὑπὲρ κεφαλὰν ἔβαλεν κακὸν ἁ τεκοῦσά νιν μόρον πρὶν Ἰδαῖον κατοικίσαι λέπας, 295 ὅτε νιν παρὰ θεσπεσίῳ δάφνᾳ βόασε Κασσάνδρα κτανεῖν, μεγάλαν Πριάμου πόλεως λώβαν. τίν᾽ οὐκ ἐπῆλθε, ποῖον οὐκ ἐλίσσετο δαμογερόντων βρέφος φονεύειν; 300 I wish that the mother who bore him had cast him, over her head, to an evil doom, before he settled on the bare rock of Ida, when Cassandra, beside the oracular laurel, shouted that she should kill him, the great destruction of Priam’s city. Whom did she not approach, which of the elders did she not beg to slaughter the infant? As I noted before, this strophe veers off the path of “straight” narration represented by the indicative temporal clauses of the prior strophe and antistrophe. Yet even as

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it shifts into this speculative mode (εἰ γὰρ, “if only,” 293), the chorus labors under the weight of the known future. In quoting Cassandra’s cries, it generates a striking image of temporal entrapment: Cassandra implores the Trojans to kill the “infant” (βρέφος, 300) Paris, who is already figured as “the great destruction of Priam’s city” (μεγάλαν Πριάμου πόλεως λώβαν, 298).15 The perspective of the present, in which Paris’ actions have already led to the fall of Troy, infiltrates the chorus’ narration of the past, as word order emphasizes how Paris’ fate encircles and constrains the future of his father’s city. The choral repetition of Cassandra’s quest, as I suggested above, seems particularly painful in light of the chorus’ and audience’s present perspective. Not only is Cassandra cursed, such that her predictions will never be heeded, but the time for intervention has long passed: Paris survived, and the city fell. Yet when the chorus asks whether there was any elder “whom she did not approach” (τίν᾽ οὐκ ἐπῆλθε, 299), it would seem to open up the possibility that if she had just found the right listener, she might have persuaded him to kill Paris. The chorus insists upon asking questions that gesture toward alternative futures, even as it persistently underscores the inevitability of the future that ultimately came to pass. It stubbornly lingers in the Trojan past, shouting its unattainable desires in solidarity with the now-dead Cassandra. The chorus continues, in the final antistrophe, to spell out the impossible alternatives that attend its unattainable wish. If only Hecuba had killed Paris, then (301–308): οὔτ᾽ ἂν ἐπ᾽ Ἰλιάσι ζυγὸν ἤλυθε δούλιον σύ τ᾽ ἂν, γύναι, τυράννων ἔσχες ἂν δόμων ἕδρας· παρέλυσε δ᾽ ἂν Ἑλλάδος ἀλγεινοὺς μόχθους οὓς ἀμφὶ Τροίαν 305 δεκέτεις ἀλάληντο νέοι λόγχαις, λέχη τ᾽ ἔρημ᾽ ἂν οὔποτ᾽ ἐξελείπετο καὶ τεκέων ὀρφανοὶ γέροντες. The enslaving yoke would not have come upon the women of Ilium, and you [Andromache], woman, would occupy the throne of royal halls. She [Hecuba, through this act] would have released Hellas from the painful labors which the young men performed around Troy with their spears for ten years, and the marriage beds would not have been left empty and the old men bereft of children.16 In these lines, the chorus emphasizes procreation and generational survival. If Hecuba had killed Paris, not only would Troy still enjoy freedom and prosperity, but the Greeks (Ἑλλάδος, 304), too, would have been spared the terrible consequences of war – including the many untimely deaths of their own “young men” (νέοι, 306). At this juncture, therefore, I believe it will be helpful to further

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consider the relationship between temporal and reproductive orders, and how the choral longings in this ode offer a queer critique of normative procreative hopes and expectations. (Anti-)Reproductive Longings For scholars focused on twentieth and twenty-first–century European and American cultural contexts, the concept of “chrononormativity” (Freeman 2007: 3) has been used to describe a set of norms governing heterosexual pairing and procreation. Jack Halberstam, for example, explores how queerness generates alternatives to “those paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (Halberstam 2005: 2). Queer, in this sense, names that which exceeds, remakes, or diverges from the narratives – the linear plots – of normative romantic, sexual, and procreative life.17 While the parameters of both “queer” and “normative” are thus, to some degree, culturally contingent, the conceptualization of marriage and reproduction as tightly and temporally linked is evident in multiple contexts, including in the Archaic and Classical Greek world. In classical Greek wedding ritual, the bride was apparently given to the husband for the “plowing of legitimate children” (γνησίων/παιδῶν ἐπ’ ἀρότῳ), a phrase that emphasizes the connection between marriage and a specific reproductive future.18 A modern children’s rhyme, while somewhat less sexually explicit, nonetheless reveals a strikingly similar marital and reproductive plot: “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes [X, usually a girl/woman] with the baby carriage.”19 The valorization of such a reproductive “life plot” (especially for women) is further bound up in the construction of norms surrounding inheritance and kinship structures (Halberstam 2005: 5–10, cf. the ancient wedding ritual’s emphasis on “legitimacy”), as well as an underlying assumption that children embody futurity, hope, and the security of familial succession (Edelman 2004). Lest such “reproductive futurism” (Edelman 2004, passim) still seem like an exclusively modern concept, let me note here that Andromache, later in this play, declares that “children are the life, the soul, of all humankind” (πᾶσι δ᾽ ἀνθρώποις ἄρ᾽ ἦν/ψυχὴ τέκν᾽, Andr. 418–419), and insists that “there is hope in this, if [her son] will have been saved,/and it would be a source of reproach to [her], if [she] did not die on behalf of [her] child” (ἐν τῷδε μὲν γὰρ ἐλπίς, εἰ σωθήσεται,/ἐμοὶ δ᾽ ὄνειδος μὴ θανεῖν ὑπὲρ τέκνου, 409–410). Despite the tragic loss of her first son, Astyanax, and her present state of enslavement and peril, Andromache figures her child as a source of life and hope for some undefined future. Indeed, much of this particular play is concerned with the interruption and endurance of reproductive futurism, a theme that is further amplified by the ode under discussion here.20 For Edelman, queerness resides in the rejection of reproductive futurism and all that it entails; it “names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children’” (2004: 3; emphasis in original). While it is crucial to distinguish between Edelman’s interest in repudiating the political valuation of “the Child” with the “lived experiences of . . . historical children” (Edelman 2004: 11), it is striking that Euripides’ chorus here does, literally if counterfactually, call for the death of a child – Paris. When the

Fertile Pasts and Sterile Futures in Euripides’ Andromache 53 chorus wishes that Hecuba had killed Paris as an infant, it would seem to respond to Edelman’s insistence that “we” (meaning queers) pronounce at last the words for which we’re condemned should we speak them or not: that we are the advocates of abortion; that the Child as futurity’s emblem must die; that the future is mere repetition and just as lethal as the past. (2004: 31) The chorus, impossibly advocating the post-natal abortion of Paris, not only fails to “fight for” the child – it actively longs for his death.21 On one level, then, this choral ode upends the underlying logic of reproductive futurism. If children are generally made to represent hope, survival, and the future, this chorus reminds us that Paris is the child who brings death and destruction. The very idea that Hecuba might kill one of her children also undermines the mythic image of Hecuba as the implausibly fertile mother of fifty children.22 Yet the chorus ultimately figures its desire for Paris’ death as a longing for both Greek and Trojan life in a broader sense. As the chorus sings, if Paris has died, then the “marriage beds would not now be left desolate and old men bereft of their children” (λέχη τ᾽ ἔρημ᾽ ἂν οὔποτ᾽ ἐξελείπετο καὶ τεκέων ὀρφανοὶ γέροντες, 307–308). Since the chorus has just referred directly to Greek warriors and their deaths (304–306), it stands to reason that we understand these bereft marriage beds as belonging to the Greek wives left at home. But of course, the Trojans (represented, above all, by Andromache) suffered similar losses, and so we might also read these final lines of this ode somewhat expansively, as referring to destruction of reproductive potential on both sides of the war.23 In addition, by repeating the adjective erēmos (“solitary,” “desolate”), which was previously applied to Paris’ “lonely” pre-Judgment existence, the chorus links the survival and narrative intrusion of Paris with the present “emptiness” of the marriage beds.24 If Paris were still lonely (or better, dead), these beds might yet be full. If Hecuba had killed her child, these “old men” (γέροντες) would not be “bereft,” “orphaned” (ὀρφανοὶ) of theirs. The chorus draws a bright line from the fertility of the past, represented by the emphasis on parent/child markers of identity (Πριαμίδαν, ἁ τεκοῦσα) and the survival of the infant Paris, to the sterility of the present: the empty marriage beds, incapable of hosting further reproduction, and the “orphaned” old men. But the flipside of this counterfactual still favors reproduction. It simply advances the unsettling proposition that the death of one child (Paris) could have ensured the future fertility of both the Trojans and the Greeks. If Hecuba’s fertile past created the barren present and future of Troy, then perhaps the destruction of past reproduction might have opened a door for a more fecund future on both sides. Insofar as the chorus gestures toward a future in which marriage beds are not desolate and old men possess (living) children, it falls short of Edelman’s anti-futurist and anti-reproductive queerness. In fact, we might say that Euripides’ Andromache more broadly dramatizes the triumph of (both Greek and Trojan) reproductive futurism. Hermione’s inability to conceive a child becomes a destructive, monstrous

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form of sterility as she endeavors to kill Andromache’s child, repeating the unsettling idea – voiced in alternate form by this very ode – that the death of one child might somehow secure the future of another. But Andromache’s commitment to her child’s survival is rewarded by the play’s conclusion (1231–1283), wherein the goddess Thetis commands her to marry Helenus, another son of Hecuba and Priam. Thetis’ arrangement ensures the genealogical continuity of Achilles’ line (through Andromache’s son by Neoptolemus) while also gesturing to the possible reinvigoration of the Trojan royal family. A teleological reading of this play would thus affirm the programmatic force of Andromache’s declaration that “children are the life, the soul, of all humankind” (πᾶσι δ᾽ ἀνθρώποις ἄρ᾽ ἦν/ψυχὴ τέκν᾽, 418–419), and perhaps even add that “children are the future.” Yet this play also offers alternatives. The most positive one may be embodied by Thetis, who follows up her command to Andromache by crafting a future for herself and Peleus that restores marital partnership without the twin trappings of reproduction and death.25 Andromache herself, in the midst of her quest to save her child, embraces a statue of Thetis and voices her own longing for dissolution – a moment that I have argued elsewhere constitutes a kind of queer pause within the relentless march of Andromache’s marital and reproductive life (Olsen 2022a). Even Hermione, with her fixation upon Andromache and excessive attachment to her natal – rather than marital – family, embodies a non-normative feminine narrative.26 In its second ode, the chorus thus adds its own voice to this collection of reproductive orientations, narratives, and relations. By linking the fertility of Troy’s past with the sterility of its present and future, it complicates straightforward valorizations of genealogy and procreative futurity. Whirling With Cassandra The notion of a queer repudiation of reproductive kinship and its entanglements can bring one further insight to this ode. Throughout, the chorus refers to its ill-fated Trojan characters without using their proper names, largely favoring terms that foreground social, familial, and reproductive ties. Paris is the “son of Priam” (Πριαμίδαν, 287), Hecuba is the “woman who gave birth” (ἁ τεκοῦσα, 294), and Andromache is “woman” or perhaps “wife” (γύναι, 302), the latter perhaps evoking her widespread characterization as ideal bride and wife.27 Paris, to be sure, is initially described as a “young herdsman living alone” (βοτῆρά τ᾽ ἀμφὶ μονότροπον νεανίαν, 298), his isolation underscored by the “loneliness” (ἔρημόν, 299) of his home. But after the arrival of Hermes and the three goddesses, which sets in motion the tragedy of the Trojan War, he is described in relation to his natal family (Πριαμίδαν, 287; as the object of ἁ τεκοῦσα, 294). Proximity to his parents aligns with the realization of Paris’ destructive potential. This pattern extends to the chorus’ references to two named deities: Hermes is “the child of Maia and Zeus” (ὁ Μαίας τε καὶ Διὸς τόκος, 275–276), while Aphrodite is called Kypris (289), an allusion to her birthplace.28 This referential style corresponds with the ode’s overarching focus on how the destruction of Troy is bound up with the birth of Paris.

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Cassandra, then, stands out: she is the only figure called by her own name, a name which is further embedded within her “shout” to “kill” (βόασε Κασσάνδρα κτανεῖν, 297). The chorus thereby positions Cassandra outside of the systems of genealogical kinship that define the other members of her family, and underscores her anti-reproductive stance vis-à-vis her brother Paris. As I discussed previously, the chorus and Cassandra are linked by their unattainable longings for a different choice, a different Trojan future. While the chorus speaks in the past-counterfactual, Cassandra’s curse is to always speak in the future-less-vivid: if you should believe me, then you would know the future (and perhaps find a way to change it) – but you will not, cannot believe me. The chorus turns to the Trojan past and excavates Cassandra as, in part, a model for its own formal role within the play. Like Cassandra, a tragic chorus can imaginatively traverse time and proclaim various possibilities, yet its words are famously ineffective, incapable of affecting the course of events. Cassandra also serves to expand the ode’s temporal and speculative imagination. The chorus specifically sings: “if only” (εἰ γὰρ, 294) Hecuba had killed Paris. But as the subsequent lines reveal, that wish is dependent upon another condition. Cassandra, after all, is the one who possesses the prophetic, oracular (θεσπεσίῳ, 296) knowledge of Paris’ destructive future. The chorus is thus implicitly claiming: if only Cassandra had been believed, then Hecuba or the city elders (δαμογερόντων, 300) might have killed Paris. In this light, the apodosis offered by the final antistrophe (“then Troy would be fertile and flourishing”) seems anticlimactic, limited in its vision. A Troy in which Cassandra is not condemned to futile “shouts” (βόασε, 297), but is instead capable of speaking efficaciously, would surely be a radically different Troy – not merely a preserved version of the pre-war city. The chorus does not spell out the consequences of this particular “what if”; it does not even explicitly pose that provocative condition (“if Cassandra were believed . . .”). Yet through its exploration of the Trojan past and its unpursued, even unmapped paths, the chorus invites further speculation. Jagose’s image of the “eddy” thus strikes me as a particularly apt one for the temporal poetics of this ode. In the second half of its song, the chorus steers itself into a loop of longing for a Troy that could never have been (Cassandra believed, the child killed) and thus also can never be (the war avoided, the city preserved). The normative narration of the first strophe and antistrophe serves to cast the song’s subsequent queer turn into sharper relief, as an initially straightforward recounting of events gets caught in a swirl of unattainable desires. Like an eddy, this extended choral counterfactual resists the currents of time, fate, and reproductive futurism without actually getting us anywhere. Cassandra, however, might embody a form of eddying potentiality. The chorus sings of how Cassandra “begs,” “supplicates” (ἐλίσσετο, 299) the elders, using a verb that, in its augmented forms, resembles a verb meaning “to spin, whirl, eddy” (ἑλίσσω). “She begged” (elisseto) is distinguished from “she turns herself around” (helisseto) by aspiration alone.29 “Whirling,” as marked by helissō as well as dineō, is also a characteristic choral movement. As Eric Csapo and Naomi Weiss have demonstrated, these terms are used in particularly striking ways by Euripides to

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call attention to the chorus’ own imagined – or projected – movement.30 While this kind of meta-theatrical language has often been associated, above all, with the later plays of Euripides, Weiss in particular has shown how those references build upon models of movement and self-description found in earlier Greek poetry, as well.31 This play on elisseto (beg) and helisseto (whirl) has two effects. First, supplication and spinning alike point to the desperation of Cassandra’s efforts to find someone to believe her predictions and suggestions. Where the one word emphasizes the beseeching content of her speech, the other would endow her movements with a corresponding urgency and frenzy. Second, the similarities between the two terms forge a link between Cassandra’s “begging” (lissō) and the chorus’ own “whirling” (helissō). I do not mean to suggest that we can recover the actual choreography of the chorus in this moment, but rather, to remind us that there was a singing and dancing chorus performing this ode, and a term like helissō could conjure up choral motion in the Greek cultural imagination. Imaginatively layering Cassandra’s desperate begging atop the chorus’ dramatic dancing invites us, once again, to see the connections between Cassandra and the chorus that, here, sings her into being. Whirling about in the “eddy” of Cassandra’s bygone quest, the chorus highlights the futility of its own longings. The alignment of Cassandra and the chorus also reminds us of the relationship between different conditional temporalities. The past-counterfactual of the chorus is resolutely unattainable, but many past-counterfactuals (if x had happened, y would have happened) were once future-less-vivids (if x should happen, y would happen). And the future-less-vivid – Cassandra’s characteristic form – contains a hint of the possibility foreclosed by the past-counterfactual. Further questions lurk beneath the stated “what ifs” (and explicit consequences) of the choral song: what if the less-vivid, seemingly unattainable conditions of the past could have been realized, transformed into vivid possibilities? What if the temporal transition from “could” to “could have” were interrupted? What if the impossible time-bind of Cassandra’s curse (to know the future, without being able to change it) could be broken? **** Unlike Cassandra, the choruses of Greek tragedy do not predict the future with any degree of accuracy.32 In fact, they are often specifically oriented toward the past, toward the repetition and examination of mythic histories and genealogies. As the chorus of Anne Carson’s Antigonick memorably puts it, a chorus is like a lawyer, always “in the business of searching for a precedent.”33 This particular chorus reveals how Andromache’s present crisis is bound up with the curses and choices of the past, yet also attaches itself to the “undetonated energy” (Freeman 2010: xvi) of unattainable conditions, in both their past and future forms.34 Its turn to the past is, in a sense, a way of engaging the future – but through speculation rather than prediction. Perhaps, then, we should see the counterfactual mode as a valuable feature of tragic chorality more broadly. In mining the mythic past for narratives, examples, and images relevant to the present action on stage, the chorus re-opens

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the past as a site of multiple possible futures. It pulls the audience back in time in order to envision futures only visible from the vantage point of the past – futures foreclosed by the present state of affairs.35 I have insisted on describing this pull as “queer,” in part, to highlight its ability to resist and refigure the social, sexual, and reproductive norms that course through Greek tragedy. In the case of Euripides’ Andromache, a teleological reading would privilege the restoration of marriage and genealogical continuity ensured by the title character’s projected future. This choral ode, however, offers a valuable counterweight to that reading, a space to explore what might seem like the dead-ends and discarded conditions of the mythic past.36 It revives Cassandra, in her swirling desperation, in order to ask “what if?” Through its song, the chorus draws the audience into its eddies. Notes 1 I have used Diggle’s OCT text of Andromache. Translations are my own. Many thanks to Kate Gilhuly, Jeffrey P. Ulrich, and all of the participants in the 2021 AALAC “Ancient Temporalities” workshop, to whom I owe many helpful insights and additions. I also received valuable feedback from audiences at Washington University in St. Louis and at UC Berkeley, and I am particularly grateful to Donald Mastronarde, Tim Moore, and Naomi Weiss for their comments and suggestions. 2 For a standard overview of Greek conditional forms, see Smyth (1956: §1780 and §2297), whose terminology I use here. I am interested here in the counterfactual (or the exploration of (im)possibility in the past tense) as a literary and cultural, rather than strictly linguistic, phenomenon; cf. Tordoff (2014); Wohl (2014b), and Lianeri (2016). 3 Cf. de Lauretis (2011: 244), who sees the disruption of narrativity as a necessary (but not wholly sufficient) component of a queer literary or audiovisual text. I discuss this theme later in this chapter. 4 On the temporal interests and entanglements of Euripides’ Andromache, see further Kyriakou (1997) and Mirto (2012). On the temporal range of the tragic chorus, see Gagné and Hopman (2013b: 6, 10–18) and Grethlein (2013). Cf. also Rehm (2002: 215–35) on the interplay of space and time in tragedy, both within and beyond choral lyric. Bassi (2014) and Wohl (2014c) also discuss various forms of counterfactuality/past-tense possibility in Homeric and tragic poetry. Haselswerdt (2022: 59) suggests that “there is always something queer about a tragic Chorus,” observing how “sung choral lyric, the Chorus’ primary communicative mode, is recursive and ruminative, operating at an odd disjunction with the teleological plot.” 5 On the centrality of kin relations and domestic organization to this play, see further Rabinowitz (1987); Storey (1989); Torrance (2005); Papadimitropoulos (2006), and Stavrinou (2014). 6 For the plot of the play and its mythic antecedents, see Stevens (1971: 1–32); Lloyd (1994: 1–12), and Allan (2000). 7 On the chorus of this play, see further Allan (2000: 196–232). Allan explores the relationship of this particular ode to the broader themes of the play (contra Stevens [1971: 127]), observing how, in this song, “past and present cohere in a lyric evocation of human vulnerability, false beauty, and divine deception” (2000: 206). 8 Allan (2000: 208) discusses how this ode effectively underscores the “accumulation” of potential beginnings (archai), comparing it to Herodotean techniques that create “the impression of manifold historical causation.” Cf. also Hedreen (2001) for an analysis of how Greek visual art conveys the narrative of the Trojan War, especially Ch. 5 on depictions of the judgment of Paris and the role of elements like landscape, clothing, and

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Sarah Olsen objects in situating this moment within a temporal narrative. On this interest in origins and causation as distinctively Euripidean, see Dunn (1996: 76–9). I thank Nigel Nicholson for this observation. A special issue of GLQ, edited by Elizabeth Freeman and published in 2007, surveyed the preceding decade or so of work on queer temporality and invited assessments from a range of prominent theorists. The proliferation of work on queer historicism, anachronism, and temporalities in the years since (e.g., Jagose 2009; Love 2009; Muñoz 2009; Keeling 2019) suggests that the subject is far from exhausted, and Freeman herself revisits the issue and its intellectual commitments in a 2019 article. Within the study of ancient Greek literature and culture, see Atack (2020), Telò (2020), and many of the essays in Olsen and Telò (2022). See also Goldberg (1995); Goldberg and Menon (2005), and Freccero (2006) on how historical knowledge inflects our understanding of the past, and how queer modes of analysis can encourage us to attend to the futures that could have (but did not) come to pass. Freeman describes how the “queerness” of the artists whom she studies resides in their “mining the present for signs of undetonated energy from past revolutions” (Freeman 2010: xvi). Freeman’s “chrononormativity” is explicitly indebted to Dana Luciano’s “chronobiopolitics” (Freeman 2010: 3–4; cf. Luciano 2007). For a critical assessment of “queer unhistoricism,” see Traub (2013). Matzner (2016) answers Traub and proposes a model for classical reception studies grounded in queer perspectives on temporality. The term “temporal drag” comes from Freeman (2007) and refers to both a performative engagement with the roles, identities, and interests of the past (“drag” as a noun), as well a force that pulls backward upon the present (“drag” as a verb); see further Freeman (2007: 59–93). I do not mean to suggest that counterfactuals are inevitably queer: as Victoria Wohl pointed out at the conference from which this volume arose, if the Trojan War had never happened, we might reasonably imagine the preservation (rather than the disruption) of multiple (normative) marriages (e.g., Helen and Menelaus; Hector and Andromache). Cf. Allan (2000: 209 n. 55) on the strength of the word lōba; he remarks that “[i]ts use to describe a child is particularly sinister.” Diggle marks off line 305 as corrupt (on metrical grounds). Stevens (1971: 134) offers an assessment of the various solutions; my translation here is meant to capture the sense common to most versions. See further Sedgwick (1997: 26–7); Berlant (1998); Halberstam (2005): 1–21, and Ahmed (2006): 65–107. Berlant (1998: 285) observes that “desires for intimacy that bypass the couple or the life narrative it generates have no alternative plots, let alone few laws and stable places of culture in which to clarify and cultivate them.” This formula is quoted in Men., Pk. 1014–101 as well as Men., Dys. 842–843. While Menander’s plays were produced in the fourth century BCE, this phrase reflects concerns central to the conceptualization of marriage in Greek art, literature, and culture from the Archaic period onward – in particular, the notion that women are given (from father to husband) in marriage for the purpose of producing heirs (see Hes. Theog. 590–612, Oakley and Sinos 1993: 11–12; Ferrari 2003). Eur. Or. 553, wherein the titular character refers to women as “ploughland” (ἄρουρα) for the “seed (τὸ σπέρμα) of men, also affirms this conceptualization of procreativity. Cf. Berlant (1998: 286). On the reproductive futurism of Euripides’ Andromache (and its limits), see further Olsen (2022a). Cf. also Telò (2020) and Bassi (2022) on Edelman and Greek tragedy. Note too, that there is another child who traditionally embodies Trojan futurity: Astyanax (cf. Hom. Il. 6.399–403, 6.476–481 and Eur. Tro. 720–725, 740–74). It is tempting to see an oblique allusion to Astyanax here, too, since Hecuba’s failure to “throw” (ἔβαλεν, 293) away her son ultimately leads to her grandson being thrown to his death from the walls of the city. In other words, the survival of the infant Paris leads directly to the death of the infant Astyanax: a terrible double-bind for the would-be reproductive futurist.

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22 Cf. Eur. Hec. 421, especially as discussed by Bassi (2022). 23 Cf. Eur. Andr. 1037–46, where the chorus similarly highlights the sufferings of both the Greeks and the Trojans; I am grateful to Donald Mastronarde for noting this link. 24 See Barlow (1986: 137 n. 12) on Paris’ emphatic isolation (“austere loneliness”) here as an innovation, distinct from other mythic accounts. 25 See Rabinowitz (1987: 122) and Olsen (2022a). 26 For this reading of Hermione, see further Stavrinou 2016 and Olsen (2022b). 27 Cf. Hom. Il. 22.468–472 and Sappho fr. 44 L-P, as well as Stevens (1971: 87); Foley (2001: 97), and Stavrinou (2014: 389 n. 14). 28 Cf. Hymn. Hom. Ven. 1–2. 29 ἑλίσσω also appears in unaspirated forms, although Euripides generally uses the aspirated present tense. Cf. Eur. Phoen. 1514 (ὡς ἐλελίζω) for a comparable play on the sonic resonance between ἑλίσσω/ἐλελίζω and ἐλελεῦ. 30 Csapo (1999–2000; 2003); Weiss (2018). 31 Weiss (2018: 9–11, 23–58). 32 See Mastronarde (2010: 106–21), who includes a valuable discussion of the comparatively rare moments when a Euripidean chorus seems to possess “a degree of prescience or insight” that exceeds its role within the “temporal continuum” of its play (p. 112). On choral knowledge, see also Foley (2003) and Allan (2000: 197–8). 33 Carson (2012). The original edition of Carson’s Antigonick has no page or line numbers, but this quote comes from her riff on the fourth stasimon of Sophocles’ Antigone, immediately following Antigone’s final appearance in the play. 34 It thus performs something akin to Freeman’s “temporal drag:” a turn to the past that presents a “bind” in the sense of both “a problem” and “an attachment” (cf. Freeman 2010: 59–65; quote at p. 62). Freeman further describes such “drag” as “a usefully distorting pull backwards” (2010: 64), another apt description of the temporal poetics of this ode. 35 My focus here has been on the formal strategies and effects of the choral counterfactual, but for a reflection on how such choral manipulations of time might operate within fifthcentury Athenian dramatic-ritual contexts, see Grethlein (2013) on Aeschylus’ Oresteia. 36 I am thus inclined to see choral odes as a rich site for what Wohl (1998: 182) has described as the “foreclosed possibilities, excluded alternatives, and repressed subversions” of Greek tragedy.

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Csapo, E. 2003. “The Dolphins of Dionysus.” In Eric Csapo and Margaret C. Miller, eds., Poetry, Theory, Praxis: The Social Life of Myth, Word, and Image: Essays in Honour of William J. Slater. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 69–98. de Lauretis, T. 2011. “Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17: 243–63. Diggle, J. 1984. Euripidis Fabulae. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dunn, F.M. 1996. Tragedy’s End: Closure and Innovation in Euripidean Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dunn, F. 2007. Present Shock in Late Fifth-Century Greece. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Edelman, L. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ferrari, G. 2003. “What Kind of Rite of Passage Was the Ancient Greek Wedding?” In Christopher A. Faraone and David Dodd, eds., Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives: New Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge. 27–42. Foley, H. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Foley, H. 2003. “Choral Identity in Greek Tragedy.” CP 98: 1–30. Freccero, C. 2006. Queer/Early/Modern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Freeman, E. 2007. “Introduction.” GLQ 13. Special Issue: Queer Temporalities: 159–176. Freeman, E. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Freeman, E. 2019. “The Queer Temporalities of Queer Temporalities.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 25: 91–5. Gagné, R., and M. G. Hopman. 2013a. Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gagné, R., and M. G. Hopman. 2013b. “Introduction: The Chorus in the Middle.” In Gagné and Hopman, eds. Goldberg, J. 1995. “The History That Will Be.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1: 385–403. Goldberg, J., and M. Menon. 2005. “Queering History.” PMLA 120: 1608–17. Grethlein, J. 2013. “Choral Intertemporality in the Oresteia.” In Gagné and Hopman, eds. 78–99. Halberstam, J. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: NYU Press. Halberstam, J. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haselswerdt, E. 2022. “Iphigenia in Aulis: Perhaps (Not).” In Olsen and Telò, eds. 53–64. Hedreen, Guy. 2001. Capturing Troy: The Narrative Functions of Landscape in Archaic and Early Classical Greek Art. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Jagose, A. 2009. “Feminism’s Queer Theory.” Feminism and Psychology 19: 157–74. Keeling, K. 2019. Queer Times, Black Futures. New York: NYU Press. Kovacs, D. 1980. The Andromache of Euripides: An Interpretation. Chico, CA: Scholars Press. Kovacs, D. 1995. Euripides. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kyriakou, P. 1997. “All in the Family: Present and Past in Euripides’ Andromache.” Mnemosyne 50: 7–26. Lianeri, A., ed. 2016. Knowing Future Time in and through Greek Historiography. Berlin: de Gruyter. Lloyd, M. 1994. Euripides: Andromache. Warminster: Liverpool University Press. Love, H. 2009. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Luciano, D. 2007. Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: NYU Press.

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Mastronarde, D. 2010. The Art of Euripides: Dramatic Technique and Social Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matzner, S. 2016. “Queer Unhistoricism: Scholars, Metalepsis, and Interventions of the Unruly Past.” In Shane Butler, ed., Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception. London: Bloomsbury. 179–202. Mirto, M. S. 2012. “La figura di Teti e la crisi del gamos eroico nell’Andromaca di Euripide.” Materiali e discussioni per l’analisis dei testi classici 69: 45–69. Muñoz, J. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Oakley, J., and R. Sinos. 1993. The Wedding in Ancient Athens. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Olsen, S. 2022a. “Embracing Thetis in Euripides’ Andromache.” Classical Antiquity 41: 67–90. Olsen, S. 2022b. “Andromache: Catfight in Phthia.” In Telò and Olsen, eds. 145–54. Olsen, S., and M. Telò, eds. 2022. Queer Euripides: Re-readings in Greek Tragedy. London: Bloomsbury. Papadimitropoulos, L. 2006. “Marriage and Strife in Euripides’ Andromache.” GRBS 46: 147–58. Rabinowitz, N. S. 1987. “Proliferating Triangles: Euripides’ Andromache and the Traffic in Women.” Mosaic 17: 111–25. Rabinowitz, N. S. 1993. Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rehm, R. 2002. The Play of Space: Spatial Transformation in Greek Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schwarz, K. 2011. “King John Queer Futility: Or, the Life and Death of King John.” In Madhavi Menon, ed., Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 163–70. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1997. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You.” In Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ed., Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 1–38. Smythe, H. W. 1956. Greek Grammar. Rev. Gordon M. Messing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stavrinou, A. S. 2014. “Inside and Out: The Dynamics of Domestic Space in Euripides’ Andromache.” Hermes 142: 385–403. Stavrinou, A. S. 2016. “Hermione’s Spartan Costume: The Tragic skeue in Euripides’s Andromache.” ICS 41: 1–20. Stevens, P. T. 1971. Euripides’ Andromache. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Storey, I. 1989. “Domestic Disharmony in Euripides’ Andromache.” G&R 36: 16–27. Telò, M. 2020. Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Tordoff, R. 2014. “Counterfactual History and Thucydides.” In Wohl, ed. 101–21. Torrance, I. 2005. “Andromache Aikhmalotos: Concubine or Wife?” Hermathena 179: 39–66. Traub, V. 2013. “The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies.” PMLA 128: 21–39. Weiss, N. 2018. The Music of Tragedy: Performance and Imagination in Euripidean Theater. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Wohl, V. 1998. Intimate Commerce: Exchange, Gender, and Subjectivity in Greek Tragedy. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Wohl, V., ed. 2014a. Probabilities, Hypotheticals, and Counterfactuals in Ancient Greek Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wohl, V. 2014b. “Introduction: Eikos in Ancient Greek Thought.” In Wohl, ed. 1–14. Wohl, V. 2014c. “Play of the Improbable: Euripides’ Unlikely Helen.” In Wohl, ed. 142–59.

4

The History of Sexuality in Xenophon’s Symposium Kate Gilhuly

ἀνεκάς τ᾿ἐπαίρω καί βδελυρὸς σὺ τὸ σκέλος. You raised your leg upwards, you disgusting man.

(Eupolis Autolykos fr. 5)

In the 420s BCE, two elite Athenians, Kallias and Autloykos, had a pederastic affair that was wild, notorious, and lascivious, as contemporary comic fragments suggest. Their relationship, however, is now better known through Xenophon’s depiction, preserved in his Symposium, written some fifty years later, where it is represented as a dry and sexless affair. Xenophon vividly presents a moment in time in which Socrates gives advice that the two men heed, resulting in a date, chaperoned by Autolykos’ father. The liaison is very promising for the future of the polis. But Kallias is not known for the good he did the city; rather, he is infamous for inheriting a vast fortune which he wasted on sex and sophists. Why did Xenophon return to this moment so many years later? And why is his version so at odds with almost everything we know about the characters involved? In this chapter, I want to think about the way that Xenophon complicates temporality in his Symposium, a text that has been so crucial to the study of pederasty in Classical Athens. Historians of sexuality argue that sex is constructed differently in various time periods; what I am suggesting here is that we should also attend to the way time is represented, laying emphasis on the temporal part of the history of sexuality. There are different ways of experiencing and depicting the passing of time. I begin from the premise that this text must not be understood as a historical narrative, but rather as a kind of play with the past, exploring the questions: what if events in the recent past had gone differently?; what if certain people had made different choices? Instead of casting history as part of an inevitable, inexorable march toward a telos, Xenophon re-conceptualizes events in the past through the lens of the polyvalent, indeterminate potential of the present. I explore the implications of the Symposium as it sits uncomfortably at odds with other contemporary versions of events and behaviors.1 Xenophon, I suggest, invents his own history of sexuality that queers time to a normative end, intentionally opposing his fictional version of Socratic pederasty to Plato’s version and the comic poets, and thereby effectively supplanting other versions that are anti-familial and non-reproductive. DOI: 10.4324/9781003385387-7

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Like Sarah Olsen’s Chapter 3 in this volume, I also engage with recent insights about the link between temporality and sexuality among queer theorists, but toward a very different outcome. In this chapter, I suggest that Xenophon manipulates time to reconfigure norms of elite sexual practices, rendering pederasty sexless and valorizing heterosexual marriage. Xenophon’s Symposium is written with a focus on what is good for the polis, and in his view, pederastic sex is not. Xenophon depicts Socrates explicitly engaging with only the speeches of the civic-minded speakers in Plato’s text, Phaedrus and Pausanias (confusing the two), and revising their positions, in order to construct an elite pederasty that supports rather than disrupts normative chronology. He also revises Kallias’ and Autolykos’ relationship, reimagining what seems to have been a salacious sexual affair as civic mentorship. He concludes his text with an erotic tableau that provokes a pressing desire in its viewers for heterosexual conjugal love. Recently, scholars have found that Xenophon’s construction of temporality in his historical texts is sophisticated and artful:2 they identify various strategies he deploys to emphasize the open-endedness of lived time and to convey a sense of the numerous potential consequences of a given act or decision. Jonas Grethlein explores the tension between the open-ended nature of experience and the teleological viewpoint of the historian looking back on events that happened in one particular way.3 He argues that Xenophon’s enargeia is the result of various narrative techniques that he deploys in writing history to emphasize the open-ended potential of experience over the teleology of hindsight, writing: “Instead of capitalizing on the advantage of hindsight, Xenophon goes out of his way to restore presentness to the past. He lets his readers experience the openness which the past had when it was still a present.”4 He notes Xenophon’s penchant for dialogue, which conveys immediacy, his avoidance of a teleological structure for his narrative, use of “sideshadowing” or intertwining allusions to outcomes that were possible, but did not come to fruition, pondered in speeches, as well as depicting them directly in the narrative. Another technique Grethlein discusses is the use of counterfactual history, whereby outcomes that are not eventually realized are explored from the vantage of historical characters imagining their future.5 The Symposium does not deploy the counterfactual as a rhetorical device, but rather, I suggest the entire text serves to animate a past that never was. The vividness of Xenophon’s style, his enargeia, obscures the artfulness, the constructedness of his text. In what follows, I argue that the way Xenophon engages with temporality and sexuality, especially in relationship to Plato’s Symposium, provides information about what motivated him to write this text in the way he did. Xenophon’s writing in general is rife with nostalgic visions of the past that are subtly undercut.6 The final chapter of the Cyropaideia shows the degradation of Persia when Cyrus dies, suggesting that in Xenophon’s view, the order Cyrus created depended on his leadership and was not the result of sustainable institutions he established.7 A similar pattern of periodization is communicated in Xenophon’s Lakedaimonion Politeia: after Xenophon extols the virtues of the Spartan educational system and the chaste role of pederasty within that institution, he clouds this perfect picture by stating, “If anyone should ask me if still now the laws of

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Lykourgos seem to remain undisturbed, this by Zeus I could no longer say confidently!” (Lak. Pol. 14.1.).8 With this brief authorial intervention, Xenophon completely subverts his encomiastic description of Sparta, raising the possibility that Spartan pederasty is no longer admirable. As Philip McCloskey notes, “everything fails in Xenophon.”9 While Xenophon’s depictions of Persia and Sparta sound enthusiastic, consideration of their historical trajectory demonstrate the fragility of these oppressive political regimes.10 In both the Lak. Pol. and the Cyropaiedeia, the glowing narratives of Spartan and Persian polities are subverted by reference to their failure to endure in time. The irony of these texts is embedded in the narrative construction of temporality – it resides in the nostalgic perspective of the narrator. The collision between present and past produces an element of undecidability. Now we are left with the following questions. Does Xenophon really think these regimes are great or not? What went wrong? The Symposium and its characters’ pasts construct a complicated literary temporal trajectory that has an affect that is analogous to those described in the Cyropaideia and the Lak. Pol. In the Symposium, Xenophon intercepts the moral dissolution of Kallias and Autolykos by imagining a scenario in which Kallias responded to good political advice about how elites should relate to the polis.11 Xenophon constructs a distinctive, non-serial kind of nonstandard time, whereby an ideal past is implicitly contrasted with a disappointing subsequent trajectory.12 The attention to the narrative construction of temporality among ancient historians coincides with a temporal turn among queer theorists, who have productively thought through the ways that temporality is implicated in the history of sex and the body. They make an analogy between non-normative sexuality and what recent scholars call queer time. That is to say, there is a temporal dimension to sexuality. As Carolyn Dinshaw notes, queerness represents “forms of desirous, embodied being that are out of sync with the ordinarily linear measurements of everyday life.”13 Valerie Rohy notes that “queer time is nonlinear, antifamilial, non-reproductive, antihistorical, non-normative and anachronistic, while straight time is normative, linear, teleological, genealogical, and developmental.”14 Of particular interest to this argument, especially in relationship to Autolykos, is Lee Edelman’s exploration of the political power of the figure of the Child, as the horizon toward which all politics reach, operating as a tool of oppression against those whose identities do not figure in the scheme of “reproductive futurism.”15 While all of these scholars consider the distinction between normative and non-normative temporality, Rohy finds the opposition between the two to be unsustainable, because “contingency and ephemerality are already contained in clock-time, and they in turn contain it. The instability of these distinctions is less a failure than a different kind of insight, showing the contextual and contingent dimensions of time.”16 This insight is important because as we will discover, Xenophon deploys the hallmarks of queer time, anachronism, and the contrafactual in a construction of Socratic love that valorizes heterosexuality and reconfigures pederasty as chaste political mentorship. The observations of queer theorists about temporality have, I think, enormous explanatory power regarding the implications of Xenophon’s construction of the history of sexuality. The thoroughness with which Xenophon works to revise the

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queer past, to reconfigure the eromenos as the child of the father, and to make pleasure serve the state only become evident when we enter his text through contingent dimensions of time. Xenophon’s Anachronism Xenophon seems to invite us to think about his intentional construction of temporality in the Symposium through the use of anachronism.17 In a discussion of philosophical anachronisms, Athenaios notes that Xenophon claims he was present at Kallias’ house at the symposium he depicts, although he may not have yet been born at the time. Athenaios also notes that in Xenophon’s Symposium, Socrates makes reference to Plato’s depiction of Pausanias in a way that is anachronistic, since Plato’s Symposium is set later than Xenophon’s, although written before it.18 In fact, Xenophon’s Socrates makes a pastiche reference to Plato’s Symposium (178e), attributing to Pausanias an argument that Phaedrus offered in Plato’s text: καίτοι Παυσανίας γε ὁ Ἀγάθωνος τοῦ ποιητοῦ ἐραστὴς ἀπολογούμενος ὑπὲρ τῶν ἀκρασίᾳ ἐγκυλινδουμένων εἴρηκεν ὡς καὶ στράτευμα ἀλκιμώτατον ἂν γένοιτο ἐκ παιδικῶν τε καὶ ἐραστῶν. Moreover Pausanias, the lover of Agathon the poet has said in defense of those wallowing in lack of self-control that the most powerful army would be made out of lovers and beloveds. (Xen. Symp. 8.32)19 Chronologically, neither Pausanias’ nor Phaedrus’ speech would have yet been uttered at the time of Kallias’ party. Thus Xenophon is violating the laws of sequential temporality by having a character respond to something that has not yet been said. As Athenaios remarks, So that it is a marvelous and incredible thing that Socrates, when dining with Kallias, should find fault with things as having been said incorrectly, which had not yet been said at all, and which were not said till four years afterwards at the banquet of Agathon. (Ath. 216c–217a) Henri Morier suggests that the effect of anachronism is to “charm the reader.” It is a ludic rhetoric that insists on an authorial presence “that self-consciously breathes into a work the air of historical difference.”20 The introduction of anachronism into a text calls attention to the fact that it is not a mirror of its time, but rather is a literary construction, and at the same time, demands that the text be considered in the context of its own writing.21 Significantly, anachronism is a watchword of queer temporality because it is a trope that resists the linear progression of normative time and draws attention to the artificial chronology of narrative, raising the specter of undecidability.22 The Symposium is a Socratic text, and all Socratic texts have a special, nostalgic concern for temporality. In a discussion of the form of the Socratic dialogue,

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Diskin Clay discusses Aristotle’s association of Socratic dialogue with mimes (Ar. Poetics 1447b 9–13). Where the mime alternates between two speakers, A and B, who are marked only by their gender, Clay argues that Plato’s contribution to the form was to situate the dialogues in a specific place and historical context. This rooting of the text in time and place affords the author and audience “the ironies of the tragic dramatist.”23 Diogenes Laertius claims that Plato “invented” the genre, because he perfected it (D.L. 3.48), but he credits Xenophon with being the first to write down and publish the words of Socrates (D.L. 2.48). Without getting into a discussion of inventive priority between the two authors, it seems fair to assume that if historical context was a distinctive new feature of the Socratic dialogue, then a heightened awareness of the role of temporality in these dialogues makes perfect sense.24 Using anachronism as a jumping off point, this chapter will consider how complex and creative Xenophon was in constructing and manipulating temporality, and the ambiguities that creates for the history of sexuality. To lay the foundation for this interpretation, I consider the depiction of Autolykos and Kallias against the other narratives of these historical characters between the fictive dates of this text and its publication. While this analysis depends more on implicit interpretation than on explicit textual evidence, it aligns with a pattern of temporal distortion in Xenophon’s writing in general, whereby he represents a past that seems diametrically opposed to a commonly shared version of historical sequence. Cultural Context of the Symposium Xenophon’s Symposium has a distinctly civic focus. It depicts a gathering at the house of Kallias, who was, at the time, one of the wealthiest men in Athens. The guests include a range of men, including some who were well-known actors on the political stage. There were Sophists, Socrates and his followers, businessmen, and hired entertainers, as well as a parasite, Philip. The narrative revolves around the pederastic relationship between Kallias and Autolykos, the victorious young athlete. The occasion is for Kallias to introduce his beloved Autolykos to his social circle, “demonstrating in the variety and nature of their converse how gentlemen behave.”25 The boy’s father, Lykon is also at the party. A contemporary reader would not have been able to ignore all that had happened to these characters between the setting and the writing of the text: Lykon was among those who accused Socrates and got him condemned to death;26 Kharmides, another guest, was counted among the Thirty,27 a group of anti-democratic Athenian elites, in power between 404–403 BCE, who briefly terrorized their political opponents after the Athenian surrender to Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. Both Autolykos28 and Nikeratos29 were killed by them. Despite the dark aftermath of the guests’ interactions, the gathering itself has a light-hearted improvisational feeling about it: Kallias invites Socrates and his followers on a whim when he sees them on the way home from the horse-races (1.3–4). The trial of Socrates was a significant rupture in Athenian democratic history; to depict the philosopher at a party before his trial is necessarily to juxtapose two very different temporal moments.

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Xenophon opens his text signaling a lighter tone: ἀλλ᾽ ἐμοὶ δοκεῖ τῶν καλῶν κἀγαθῶν ἀνδρῶν ἔργα οὐ μόνον τὰ μετὰ σπουδῆς πραττόμενα ἀξιομνημόνευτα εἶναι, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὰ ἐν ταῖς παιδιαῖς. But it seems to me that not only the deeds of elite men that are done seriously but also those done in the spirit of play are worth remembering. (Xen. Symp. 1.1) He introduces his text as inhabiting an off-duty-time frame in contrast to what is “serious,” and yet, the guests still are focused on the good of the city. This Symposium, unlike Plato’s, is rife with entertainments, and as I have argued elsewhere, these displays give Socrates an opportunity to comment extensively on the culture of spectacle so intrinsic to Athenian political and ritual practice.30 In between the entertainments, the guests decide to converse about what each knows that is useful for the city. Some of the guests are earnest, others ironic. Socrates is among the latter, claiming that his contribution to the city lies in his skill in pimping, mastropeia. He later gives a rationale for this claim, suggesting that he fosters a chaste pederasty that inspires lovers to serve the interests of the polis (8.38). The Queer Past in the Background Kallias is remembered in various genres for his immoderate habits, he was a favorite subject of mockery for the comic poets, and his relationship with Autolykos was infamous for its lasciviousness. Kallias came from an illustrious family known for its wealth and valor. His namesake grandfather was a hero who fought in the battle of Marathon, and his father, Hipponikos, was known for his wealth and for his abstemiousness.31 Apparently, Kallias did not follow in his forefathers’ footsteps. In the Frogs, the chorus refers to him in the following way: καὶ Καλλίαν γέ φασι τοῦτον τὸν Ἱπποβίνου κύσθου λεοντῆν ναυμαχεῖν ἐνημμένον. And they say this Kallias the son of Horsefucker fights naval battles wearing a lion skin over his crack. (Ar. Frogs 432–4) A scholiast comments on the patronymic Ἱπποβίνου saying that in this case hippos means large or excessive and the term is similar to πορνομανής, whore-maniac.32 Kallias has tainted his illustrious family through his immoderate ways. This conforms with other aspects of Kallias’ comic reputation. In Birds (284–286), he is depicted as a bird plucked by sycophants and women. A scholiast explains this line,

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saying that Kallias was known for his πορνοκοπία and the amount of money he spent on adultery. Most commonly he is derided for throwing his inheritance away: Kallias was a man born rich who squandered his wealth on prostitutes and lived for the rest of his life in poverty. (Sch. Ar. Ekkl. 810) Eupolis’ play Kolakes, or Flatterers, was set at the house of Kallias, the title suggesting that the host was as willing to sell his favors as to buy his pleasures.33 Plato’s Protagoras is also set at Kallias’ house. The dialogue’s subtitle was “The Sophists,” another indulgence for Kallias: he was said to have spent more money on sophists than everyone else combined (Plato Ap. 20a). When Socrates and Hippocrates arrive at the door, they encounter a eunuch doorkeeper, whose presence connotes exorbitant conspicuous consumption.34 At first, the eunuch slams the door in their faces, thinking that Kallias has been visited by too many sophists already. Socrates is eager to see Prodikos, who is sleeping over in a converted storeroom. This detail is a spatial depiction of Kallias’ wasting his father’s money: where Hipponikos stored up goods, Kallias spends on sophists. Kallias was well known to Xenophon’s audience for his profligacy and extravagance in terms of both sex and sophists. Kallias’ beloved, Autolykos, also attracted the attention of the comic poets: Athenaios records that in 421/420 BCE, Eupolis produced a comedy named after him, depicting his father Lykon being associated with a Rhodian woman and satirizing (χλευάζει) Autolykos’ victory in the pankration.35 Pollux cites the use of πορνεύεσθαι in the same comedy, perhaps referring to the behavior of the boy who Xenophon represents here as modest and chaste. Eupolis (fr. 56 KA) from the Autolykos describes the boy as Εὐτρήσιος, which Dover notes is a double entendre designating a person from Eutresis in Arkadia as well as someone who is “easily penetrated.” Xenophon’s Anachronism It is against this cultural background that Socrates praises Kallias for his choice of Autolykos as a lover: ἀεὶ μὲν οὖν ἔγωγε ἠγάμην τὴν σὴν φύσιν, νῦν δὲ καὶ πολὺ μᾶλλον, ἐπεὶ ὁρῶ σε ἐρῶντα οὐχ ἁβρότητι χλιδαινομένου οὐδὲ μαλακίᾳ θρυπτομένου, ἀλλὰ πᾶσιν ἐπιδεικνυμένου ῥώμην τε καὶ καρτερίαν καὶ ἀνδρείαν καὶ σωφροσύνην. τὸ δὲ τοιούτων ἐπιθυμεῖν τεκμήριόν ἐστι τῆς τοῦ ἐραστοῦ φύσεως. εἰ μὲν οὖν μία ἐστὶν Ἀφροδίτη ἢ διτταί, Οὐρανία τε καὶ Πάνδημος, οὐκ οἶδα: καὶ γὰρ Ζεὺς ὁ αὐτὸς δοκῶν εἶναι πολλὰς ἐπωνυμίας ἔχει: ὅτι γε μέντοι χωρὶς ἑκατέρᾳ βωμοί τε καὶ ναοί εἰσι καὶ θυσίαι τῇ μὲν Πανδήμῳ ῥᾳδιουργότεραι, τῇ δὲ Οὐρανίᾳ ἁγνότεραι, οἶδα. εἰκάσαις δ᾽ ἂν καὶ τοὺς ἔρωτας τὴν μὲν Πάνδημον τῶν σωμάτων ἐπιπέμπειν, τὴν δ᾽ Οὐρανίαν τῆς

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ψυχῆς τε καὶ τῆς φιλίας καὶ τῶν καλῶν ἔργων. ὑφ᾽ οὗ δὴ καὶ σύ, ὦ Καλλία, κατέχεσθαι μοι δοκεῖς ἔρωτος. I have always admired your nature, and now I do even more, since I see that you are the lover not of someone who luxuriates in pleasure, or is enervated by softness, but someone who shows to all vigor, strength, manliness, and self-control. Desire for these things is evidence of the nature of the lover. Whether there is one Aphrodite or two, Heavenly and Vulgar, I do not know, for Zeus seems to be the same, although he has many names. But I do know that each Aphrodite has separate altars and temples and sacrifices. For Vulgar Aphrodite these things are fairly unscrupulous, but for the heavenly one they are more hallowed. You could say that Vulgar Aphrodite acts on the lovers of the body, while the heavenly one acts on lovers of the soul, and of friendship, and good deeds, by which Eros in fact even you, Kallias, seem to me to be held. (8.7–10) Scholars have noticed discrepancies between Xenophon’s depiction of Kallias’ and Autolykos’ relationship here and the way it is represented in comedy. As Dover notes, Whether the alleged homosexual prostitution of Autolykos to Kallias was a central motif of the play, we do not know; the political relationships involving Kallias and Lykon, affected by the public adulation accorded to athletic success, may well have been more important, but so far as the evidence goes it shows that the same homosexual love affair could be looked at in different ways.36 Dover dismisses the variances in depictions of this affair as a matter of perspective. Bernard Huss notes the irony of Lykon praising Socrates as a kalos kagathos whom he later accuses (9.1). Huss discusses the way historical reality infects the representation of the idealized, chaste relationship between Kallias and Autolykos: But Xenophon of course must have known that historically this relationship was far from being chaste: the fragments of Eupolis’ Autolykos, a drama which because of its great success was performed twice, do not permit any doubts on that, even discounting comic exaggeration. The affair between Kallias and Autolykos was wild and known all over Athens!37 Huss argues that the deliberate gap between historical truth and the sympotic fiction allows Xenophon to show the lovers as chaste as long as they were under the guidance of Socrates, with the implication that they slipped into sexual turpitude when they lost touch with him. This interpretation depends on a linear temporal trajectory: different versions of the relationship are rationalized by considering this symposium as part of a historical sequence in the couple’s development, the Socratic “before” they fell into debauchery.

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But these scholars miss Xenophon’s deliberate play with time and its interpretive possibilities. By nestling the obvious anachronistic reference to Plato’s text right at the moment Socrates praises the lovers’ self-restraint, Xenophon suggests that we read the text in relation to its historical context, and further, that we understand that sequential temporality is not how he is evoking that context. On this reading, the whole text is clearly a fantasy of an event that never happened. If Xenophon’s readers are expected to remember the specific course of events more than fifty years earlier, then they would know that Autolykos won in the pankration and then shortly thereafter was mocked for his lewd relationship with Kallias. More likely, they would only remember the most lurid details, and not the exact chronology, identifying the two as examples of debased aristocratic behavior. By writing the perfect version of Kallias from which the known version fell so far short, Xenophon delivers a withering critique without ever directly disparaging the man at all. The image of Autolykos as a self-possessed young beauty who stoically endures the unpleasant desires of his lover is undermined by Autolykos’ sexual reputation; the name Eutresios, well-bored or easily penetrated, is not a coinage that is applicable to a boy who does not like sex with men. It is related to τρῆμα (perforation), which is slang for vagina (Lysistrata 410, Knights 906). According to Henderson, “bored holes are natural in double entendre.”38 While Xenophon’s Socrates may be expressing an ideal of sexual decorum, it is contaminated for his audience as contrary to fact on a point-by-point basis. Socrates advises Kallias, known for his indulgence in short-term pleasures as though he were intent on living a life with lasting impact on the civic good. He praises the boy as someone who does not revel in luxury (ἁβρότητι), who is not unmanned by softness (μαλακίᾳ), but who displays strength, endurance, manliness (ἀνδρείαν), and self-control (σωφροσύνην) (Xen. Symp. 8.8). The use of ἁβρός here is a curious locution, belonging to a word family rarely used in prose but common in Archaic poetry.39 Leslie Kurke has analyzed this word group and the way its connotations changed over time. In lyric poetry, it denoted a luxurious lifestyle characterized by long hair, flowing robes, perfume, and generally cultivating eastern ways and was celebrated by Archaic poets in songs performed for elite audiences, often produced for symposia. In the context of Athenian democracy, though, this aesthetic was associated with tyranny and the East and garnered pejorative associations, and was recast in terms of effeminacy. It is as if he said “It’s a good thing your boyfriend isn’t fey.” Xenophon’s archaizing word choice conveys a kind of disorienting distance between Socrates and the contemporary symposium, and its culture of sexuality, at the same time that it asserts Autolykos’ supposed masculinity.40 Perhaps we should read this word choice as ironic humor. How does this description comport with the image of a boy known from a comedy idiosyncratically named after him and produced twice that from the few fragments we have was clearly homoerotic, indecent, and obscene?41 Perhaps also the Eupolis fragments describing lewd acts of sexuality also refer to Autolykos: σκέλη δὲ καὶ κωλῆνες εὐθὺ τοὐρόφου/“legs and buttocks straight from the roof,” (Eupolis Autolykos fr. 54), and then again, ἀνεκάς τ᾿ἐπαίρω καί βδελυρὸς σὺ τὸ σκέλος/“You raised your leg upwards, you disgusting man” (Eupolis Autolykos fr. 5).

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When Xenophon has Socrates say that Autolykos is not effeminate and given to pleasures, it is spoken in a context where these are precisely the qualities that were associated with the youth. In the Symposium, Xenophon blurs over the common conception of this affair with a revisionist account. So in contrast to Huss’ suggestion that Kallias was good for as long as he was under the guidance of Socrates,42 and giving a temporal wrinkle to Dover’s notion that the relationship could be variously interpreted, I suggest that Xenophon is writing a narrative that is meant to be read as counterfactual. Xenophon creates a playful image of Kallias as a teachable student, only to let that sit uncomfortably beside the other versions depicting him as an extravagant, debauched wastrel. Xenophon plays with temporality by articulating this narrative of respectability that must be thought of over and against the scandalous comic versions. The layering of meaning created by the juxtaposition of different possible sets of behavior in different timeframes renders Xenophon’s commentary on elite pederasty dissonant and incongruous.43 In this distorted temporal context, Socrates utters this crucial articulation of the asymmetry of pederastic sexual relations: οὐδὲ γὰρ ὁ παῖς τῷ ἀνδρὶ ὥσπερ γυνὴ κοινωνεῖ τῶν ἐν τοῖς ἀφροδισίοις εὐφροσυνῶν, ἀλλὰ νήφων μεθύοντα ὑπὸ τῆς ἀφροδίτης θεᾶται/“Also, the boy does not share in the man’s pleasure in intercourse as a woman does; cold sober he looks upon the other drunk with sexual desire” (trans. Dover).44 Now let us consider how this would read to an audience acquainted with Autolykos as well-bored, and perhaps also with the association of him with hanging-from-the-rafters-legs-in-the-air sex. In this image of the boy’s dissociation from his lover’s act, Xenophon seems to depict not merely a different interpretation of a relationship, but in fact the diametric opposite of the lewd, public display of sexuality associated with Kallias and Autolykos. The Anticlimax Xenophon reimagines the past in the service of creating an ideal image of elite pederastic relations. In order to elucidate the strange temporal dynamics of Xenophon’s history of sexuality, I want to take a detour and briefly consider Elizabeth Freeman’s analysis of Nguyen Tan Hoang’s video K.I.P. (2002) as a compelling elucidation of queer time. Freeman’s discussion will serve both as an interesting analog and counterpoint to Xenophon’s text, revealing how Xenophon’s representation of sexuality is illuminated by queer temporality and yet sits uncomfortably with it. Freeman considers an art porn video that recycles a 1970s or early 1980s (pre-AIDS) all male porn film Kip Noll Superstar: Part I. The film represents what the director describes as his own experience of the pornography, a damaged and overused copy which he rented from Tower Records. Since the film had been rewound too many times to the climactic sex scene, what Nguyen called “the hottest part of the tape” appeared over and over again, cyclically returning to itself “as a series of leaps across the bodily gestures or sexual choreographies that we are ordinarily expected to experience as smooth, continuous, and natural.”45 The film shows Nguyen’s face ghostlike, floating, and languidly responding to the image.

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Freeman suggests that Nguyen’s filmic technique of double exposure explores “Kip Noll’s user generated discombobulation of filmic time and erotic sequence in order to jam historical sequence,” (emphasis in original). Freeman analyzes this video that depicts “time out of joint” as a kind of longitudinal queer time. “Nguyen’s diaphanous, lusting queer archivalist gazes hungrily into a scene that excludes him, mouth agape to receive lineal bliss.”46 Like Nguyen, Xenophon is queering time by recalling the past through his anachronistic symposium, but instead of doing so through the gaze of a lusting archivalist, he reanimates the relationship between Kallias and Autolykos through the perspective of Socrates busily trying to take the sex out of pederasty. Both the film and text triangulate lovers and an external perspective. In contrast to K.I.P., however, Xenophon’s Symposium projects an image of a sexual encounter (and who should we think of besides Kallias and Autolykos?) in which Socrates reconfigures the “money shot” into an alienated moment of dissociation. Where Kip Knoll Superstar returns endlessly to the moment of satisfaction, Xenophon overwrites the outlandish pleasure that was thought to be had by Kallias and Autolykos as a one-way relationship characterized by isolation and the psychic distance of the participants, as the sober boy looks on the man drunk with lust. The Foreground: Straight Time for the Polis The exact moment in the text when Xenophon defies his readers’ expectation of sexual climax is precisely the site of one of Xenophon’s anachronistic reference to Ouranian and Pandemian Aphrodite in Plato’s Symposium (Xen. Symp 8.9 quoted previously). The way that Xenophon responds to Plato’s Symposium and his construction of sexual temporality are then intertwined throughout Socrates’ speech. In this section, I will argue that Xenophon manipulates temporality in such a way as to revise Plato’s Socrates and to associate his pederasty with a view toward the good of the polis. Socrates’ admiration of the relationship between Autolykos and Kallias recalls the passage in which Pausanias makes a distinction between the two Aphrodites (180d6ff). The divergence in the texts at this point is significant: for Plato’s Pausanias, Pandemian/Vulgar Aphrodite is not only more bodily and less exalted than Ouranian, but it applies especially to the love of women as opposed to boys. In his reference to Plato, Xenophon notably elides Plato’s association of the feminine with the vulgar.47 The vulgar refers only to the depiction of sexual pederasty, because for Xenophon, heterosexuality is a civic good. In contrast to Plato’s Symposium, in which Socrates appropriates the female role in procreation as a crucial metaphor for his philosophic eros while carefully debasing any erotic activity that engages with actual women, Xenophon’s Socrates discredits actual pederastic sex while using chaste pederastic eros as a metaphor for civic accomplishment. In the process, he valorizes heterosexual love. The prioritization of heterosexuality over pederastic sex rests upon the temporal implications of sexuality. Socrates’ arguments against sexual pederasty persistently make recourse to temporal concerns in pointing out its limitations. When he takes up the case of lovers

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who are enamored of soul and body, he employs the language of flowers: Socrates allows that an erastes who loves both the body and mind of his eromenos might be satisfied for a brief period, but ultimate his physical attraction will fade: ἂν δὲ καὶ ἀμφότερα στέρξωσι, τὸ μὲν τῆς ὥρας ἄνθος ταχὺ δήπου παρακμάζει, ἀπολείποντος δὲ τούτου ἀνάγκη καὶ τὴν φιλίαν συναπομαραίνεσθαι/“And if they love both (soul and body) still the bloom of youth soon goes beyond its prime, and with this leaving, soon also it is necessary for the friendship to wither and die with it” (8.14). The season of beauty is linked to the season of love, and even a soulful love will fade away and die together with the beauty. Socrates also uses the temporality inherent in monetary exchanges to depict the difference between a sexual and chaste pederasty. The eromenos is like a salesman: ἀλλὰ μὴν καὶ ὁ χρημάτων γε ἀπεμπολῶν τὴν ὥραν τί μᾶλλον στέρξει τὸν πριάμενον ἢ ὁ ἐν ἀγορᾷ πωλῶν καὶ ἀποδιδόμενος;/“And certainly the one selling his youth for money, how will he love the one buying it more than a salesman in the market loves his customer?” (8.21); Socrates uses an economic metaphor to characterize pederastic sex as a kind of short-term gratification that is socially disembedded. Concomitantly, the erastes is also defined in temporal market terms when he is compared to a tenant farmer as opposed to an owner: καὶ γὰρ δὴ δοκεῖ μοι ὁ μὲν τῷ εἴδει τὸν νοῦν προσέχων μεμισθωμένῳ χῶρον ἐοικέναι. οὐ γὰρ ὅπως πλείονος ἄξιος γένηται ἐπιμελεῖται, ἀλλ᾽ ὅπως αὐτὸς ὅτι πλεῖστα ὡραῖα καρπώσεται. ὁ δὲ τῆς φιλίας ἐφιέμενος μᾶλλον ἔοικε τῷ τὸν οἰκεῖον ἀγρὸν κεκτημένῳ: πάντοθεν γοῦν φέρων ὅ τι ἂν δύνηται πλείονος ἄξιον ποιεῖ τὸν ἐρώμενον. For it seems to me that the one who pays attention to beauty is similar to someone who rents land. His concern is not how it will become worth more, but how he himself will reap the greatest harvest possible. The one desiring friendship more is similar to the one who owns his own land: bringing whatever resources he is able, he makes the beloved worthy of more. (8.25) In the conclusion of his argument, Socrates continues to revise positions taken by the civic-minded speakers in Plato’s Symposium. Socrates overwrites Phaedrus’ speech in Plato’s text in which he corrects Aeschylus’ claim that Achilles was the lover of Patroklos (180a): καὶ Ἀχιλλεὺς Ὁμήρῳ πεποίηται οὐχ ὡς παιδικοῖς Πατρόκλῳ ἀλλ᾽ ὡς ἑταίρῳ ἀποθανόντι ἐκπρεπέστατα τιμωρῆσαι/“And Achilles is made by Homer to avenge Patroklos most conspicuously not as his boyfriend, but as his dying comrade” (8.31–32). This passage immediately precedes the anachronism that Athenaios noted long ago, where Socrates attributes Phaedrus’ speech to Pausanias: καίτοι Παυσανίας γε ὁ Ἀγάθωνος τοῦ ποιητοῦ ἐραστὴς ἀπολογούμενος ὑπὲρ τῶν ἀκρασίᾳ ἐγκαλινδουμένων εἴρηκεν ὡς καὶ στράτευμα ἀλκιμώτατον ἂν γένοιτο ἐκ παιδικῶν τε καὶ ἐραστῶν. τούτους γὰρ ἂν ἔφη οἴεσθαι μάλιστα αἰδεῖσθαι ἀλλήλους ἀπολείπειν, θαυμαστὰ λέγων, εἴ γε οἱ ψόγου

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Kate Gilhuly τε ἀφροντιστεῖν καὶ ἀναισχυντεῖν πρὸς ἀλλήλους ἐθιζόμενοι, οὗτοι μάλιστα αἰσχυνοῦνται αἰσχρόν τι ποιεῖν. Moreover, Pausanias, the lover of Agathon the poet. making a defense on behalf of those rolling around in incontinence has said that an army of boyfriends and lovers would be the most powerful of all. For these, he says that he thinks would be the most ashamed to leave one another behind – a strange assertion – that those who are accustomed not to care about censure and being shameless toward one another, that these especially would feel shame to do something shameful. (8.32–33)

In Xenophon’s projection, there is no mincing about whether or not it shameful for an eromenos to gratify his lover, as is the case in both Pausanias’ and Phaedrus’ speeches, which are here conveniently lumped together through Xenophon’s misattribution. Rather, both are equally disparaged for participating in what Xenophon’s Socrates depicts as a categorically shameful act. He continues to revise Plato’s sympotic presentation of the Spartans’ sexual culture. Xenophon’s Socrates refers again to Plato when he brings up the difference in pederastic practice in Elis and Boeotia, and continues to contradict Pausanias’ claim that the expectations in Athens and Sparta are ποικίλος/complicated (Pl. Symp. 182b), by saying that in Sparta, expectations about sexual conduct are completely clear: Λακεδαιμόνιοι δὲ οἱ νομίζοντες, ἐὰν καὶ ὀρεχθῇ τις σώματος, μηδενὸς ἂν ἔτι καλοῦ κἀγαθοῦ τοῦτον τυχεῖν/“The Lakedaimonians in contrast believe that if someone even desires the body, that this one will never come to any good” (8.35). Thus, Xenophon’s Socrates, having refuted, revised, and contradicted the positions advanced in Plato’s Symposium that had bearing on the role of pederasty in the polis, brings his speech to an end. He makes no comment on the poetic depictions of eros or the metaphysical pederasty in which Plato’s sympotic speeches culminate, but rather urges Kallias to cultivate civic knowledge – the kind of knowledge that Themistocles, Pericles, and Solon had – and to consider what makes the Spartans outstanding military commanders (8.39). Socrates concludes his speech, putting the polis at the heart of pederasty by aligning himself with the city as an active partner in desire: ἀγαθῶν γὰρ φύσει καὶ τῆς ἀρετῆς φιλοτίμως ἐφιεμένων ἀεί ποτε τῇ πόλει συνεραστὴς ὢν διατελῶ/“I have always been a lover together with the city of noble men ambitiously desiring virtue” (8.49). In a show of comprehension of this realignment of pederasty toward the civic good, Kallias responds to Socrates: οὐκοῦν σύ με, ὦ Σώκρατες, μαστροπεύσεις πρὸς τὴν πόλιν, ὅπως πράττω τὰ πολιτικὰ καὶ ἀεὶ ἀρεστὸς ὦ αὐτῇ;/“Therefore, Socrates you will procure me for the city, so that I may enter politics and always be pleasing to it?” (8.42). Xenophon has moved Socrates back and forth in time, usurping priority for his Symposium and allowing Socrates to respond to and reimagine the conventional erotics of Plato’s civic-minded symposiasts. This vertiginous temporal construction renders the relationship of sexual pederasty to the polis as inconsequential; that is, a relationship that does not follow in time.48 The notorious sexual affair

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between Kallias and Autolykos is papered over with a virtuous mentorship through a revisionist history of sexuality. Lykon and Autolykos then leave the party because it is time for the boy to go (9.1), the once louche eromenos transfigured into the beloved and loving child, the “Child” toward whom the horizon of politics bends, as Edelman has it, and Lykon, one of Socrates’ accusers, is here depicted through a revisionist lens, calling out as he leaves to affirm that Socrates is truly noble, kalos kai agathos (9.1).49 The Present in the Eternal: Civic Ritual, Sex, and Marriage Socrates advocates that pederastic desire be sublimated toward the civic good, and from there the guests turn their attention away from discourse to the here and now. The entertainers return for a final performance that represents Socrates’ ultimate reformation of sexuality. Instead of reading on the potters’ wheel, or turning acrobatic tricks, Socrates had asked the Syracusan to have his entertainers dance figures depicting the Graces, The Hours, and the Nymphs (7.5), minor deities that respectively convey the notions of erotic reciprocity, temporality, and natural forces embodied as erotically desirable maidens. In response, the Syracusan has his troop return to perform the love of Ariadne and Dionysos in a conspicuously heterosexual display, rivaled in Greek literature only by the Apate Dios in the Iliad, the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, and the Cologne Epode: ἐκ δὲ τούτου πρῶτον μὲν θρόνος τις ἔνδον κατετέθη, ἔπειτα δὲ ὁ Συρακόσιος εἰσελθὼν εἶπεν: ὦ ἄνδρες, Ἀριάδνη εἴσεισιν εἰς τὸν ἑαυτῆς τε καὶ Διονύσου θάλαμον: μετὰ δὲ τοῦθ᾽ ἥξει Διόνυσος ὑποπεπωκὼς παρὰ θεοῖς καὶ εἴσεισι πρὸς αὐτήν, ἔπειτα παιξοῦνται πρὸς ἀλλήλους. ἐκ τούτου πρῶτον μὲν ἡ Ἀριάδνη ὡς νύμφη κεκοσμημένη παρῆλθε καὶ ἐκαθέζετο ἐπὶ τοῦ θρόνου. οὔπω δὲ φαινομένου τοῦ Διονύσου ηὐλεῖτο ὁ βακχεῖος ῥυθμός. ἔνθα δὴ ἠγάσθησαν τὸν ὀρχηστοδιδάσκαλον. εὐθὺς μὲν γὰρ ἡ Ἀριάδνη ἀκούσασα τοιοῦτόν τι ἐποίησεν ὡς πᾶς ἂν ἔγνω ὅτι ἀσμένη ἤκουσε: καὶ ὑπήντησε μὲν οὒ οὐδὲ ἀνέστη, δήλη δ᾽ ἦν μόλις ἠρεμοῦσα. ἐπεί γε μὴν κατεῖδεν αὐτὴν ὁ Διόνυσος, ἐπιχορεύσας ὥσπερ ἂν εἴ τις φιλικώτατα ἐκαθέζετο ἐπὶ τῶν γονάτων, καὶ περιλαβὼν ἐφίλησεν αὐτήν. ἡ δ᾽ αἰδουμένῃ μὲν ἐῴκει, ὅμως δὲ φιλικῶς ἀντιπεριελάμβανεν. οἱ δὲ συμπόται ὁρῶντες ἅμα μὲν ἐκρότουν, ἅμα δὲ ἐβόων αὖθις. ὡς δὲ ὁ Διόνυσος ἀνιστάμενος συνανέστησε μεθ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ τὴν Ἀριάδνην, ἐκ τούτου δὴ φιλούντων τε καὶ ἀσπαζομένων ἀλλήλους σχήματα παρῆν θεάσασθαι. οἱ δ᾽ ὁρῶντες ὄντως καλὸν μὲν τὸν Διόνυσον, ὡραίαν δὲ τὴν Ἀριάδνην, οὐ σκώπτοντας δὲ ἀλλ᾽ ἀληθινῶς τοῖς στόμασι φιλοῦντας, πάντες ἀνεπτερωμένοι ἐθεῶντο. καὶ γὰρ ἤκουον τοῦ Διονύσου μὲν ἐπερωτῶντος αὐτὴν εἰ φιλεῖ αὐτόν, τῆς δὲ οὕτως ἐπομνυούσης μὴ μόνον τὸν Διόνυσον ἀλλὰ καὶ τοὺς παρόντας ἅπαντας συνομόσαι ἂν ἦ μὴν τὸν παῖδα καὶ τὴν παῖδα ὑπ᾽ ἀλλήλων φιλεῖσθαι. ἐῴκεσαν γὰρ οὐ δεδιδαγμένοις τὰ σχήματα ἀλλ᾽ ἐφειμένοις πράττειν ἃ πάλαι ἐπεθύμουν. τέλος δὲ οἱ συμπόται ἰδόντες περιβεβληκότας τε ἀλλήλους καὶ ὡς εἰς εὐνὴν ἀπιόντας, οἱ μὲν ἄγαμοι γαμεῖν ἐπώμνυσαν, οἱ δὲ γεγαμηκότες ἀναβάντες

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Kate Gilhuly ἐπὶ τοὺς ἵππους ἀπήλαυνον πρὸς τὰς ἑαυτῶν γυναῖκας, ὅπως τούτων τύχοιεν. Σωκράτης δὲ καὶ τῶν ἄλλων οἱ ὑπομείναντες πρὸς Λύκωνα καὶ τὸν υἱὸν σὺν Καλλίᾳ περιπατήσοντες ἀπῆλθον. αὕτη τοῦ τότε συμποσίου κατάλυσις ἐγένετο. After this, first a throne was put down inside, and then the Syracusan came in and said, “Gentlemen, Ariadne will enter into the marriage chamber she shares with Dionysos, after this, Dionysos, having had a little to drink among the gods, will come to her, and then they will play amorously with one another.” When Dionysos saw her, he danced over and sat in her lap very lovingly, and embracing her, he kissed her. She seemed to be a modest maiden, but nevertheless she embraced him back lovingly. When the symposiasts saw this, they were clapping and at the same time shouting “again!” Then Dionysos stood up and he had Ariadne stand up with him too, and after that it was possible to see the poses of them kissing and embracing each other. The onlookers saw a Dionysos who was truly beautiful, and Ariadne in the bloom of youth, not pretending, but truly kissing with their mouths, and all of them were winged aloft as they watched. For they heard Dionysos asking her if she loved him, and she promised in such a way that not only Dionysos but all those present would swear that the boy and girl were loved by one another. They seemed not to have been taught poses, but as though they were allowed to do what they long desired. Finally, when the symposiasts saw them embrace one another, about to go to their marriage bed, those who were unmarried vowed to get married, and those who were married mounted their horses and rode off to their wives, so that they might meet up with them. Socrates and the others lingering behind went out with Kallias, to join Lykon and his son in their walk. This then was the end of the symposium. (9.2–7)

Xenophon turns to the fullness of the present, the immediacy of performance, and the patent centrality of heterosexuality to civic health for his conclusion. Having couched Socrates’ rejection of pederastic sexuality in a non-sequential framework, he evokes the here and now of real time to frame an arousing depiction of a dance, a mime that is a mythic enactment of heterosexual foreplay.50 One of dance theory’s essential premises is that the live bodily performance “plunges into visibility – in a maniacally charged present, and disappears into memory where it eludes regulation and control.”51 And yet this evanescence is in tension with the temporality of its mnemonic preservation, in this case the trace of the dancing body represented in Xenophon’s writing.52 Where this tension poses a crisis in dance theory, it is productive for Xenophon, replicated in the content of the performance – the live embodiment of a mythic narrative. The tension in the passage between representation and the real is pointed. Karin Schlapbach emphasizes the performative element of the dance: “the scene does not illustrate a natural desire, but its perfectly rehearsed illusion.”53 The audience’s

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reaction is aesthetic, not kinesthetic, as long as they perceive the boy and girl to be performing (with the persistent emphasis on seeing, hearing, and the technical dance term, schemata, or poses), but when the performance seems to be real its impact is changed: the subjective transformation of the spectacle into a performance of reality effects them deeply enough to provoke an impulse to action. That the perceived authenticity is only an illusion is made perfectly clear by the narrator; the audience, however, is overwhelmed by the impression of truthfulness.54 Victoria Wohl interprets the dance as “a performance of the truth” that is Xenophon’s means of depicting the inevitability of erotic desire, in tension with the pure eros of Socrates’ philosophy.55 Both of these readings blur Plato’s Socrates with Xenophon’s, ascribing the negative associations of heterosexual love encoded in Pausanias’ distinction between Pandemian and Ouranian Aphrodite (Plato’s Symposium 180d6) to Xenophon’s depiction of the dance.56 From the point of view of erotic temporalities, I agree with Schlapbach that the tension between the real and the represented is emphasized, but also with Wohl, that we are meant to understand that the attraction between the boy and girl is true love. For the text says that when the girl answered the boy asking if she loved him, it was clear to Dionysos and those present that she truly did. Here we have an epiphany, where the boy hears the girl’s attestation of her love as Dionysos himself. There is a merging of the player and the role that implies the performance is also true. Schlapbach observes that the myth is almost eclipsed by the perceived truth of the play; I suggest that Xenophon’s point is the perfect and easy alignment of the here and now of heterosexuality with the eternal, repeatable, ritual time of the marriage of Dionysos and Ariadne. This erotic tableau supplants the disappointed pederastic sexual expectation created by the depiction of Kallias and Autolykos with an erotic interaction that is not only heterosexual, but with one that is definitively long-term; for Ariadne, it is in fact immortalizing. Surely, this arousing performance is an allusion to the civic ritual of the marriage of Dionysos to the wife of the Archon Basileus, the Basilinna.57 The symposiasts testify to the provocative erotics of the performance not only by responding with a surge of heterosexual desire, but more specifically with an urgent drive for civically sanctioned heterosexual sex in marriage. The language Xenophon uses to describe the rising passions of the crowd, saying they were winged aloft as they watched, ἀνεπτερωμένοι ἐθεῶντο, recalls Plato’s description of the soul growing wings when it sees beauty as metaphor for spiritual pederastic desire in the Phaedrus (247–253).58 This linguistic resonance, transferred to the realm of civically sanctioned heterosexual love, further highlights Xenophon’s heteronormative recasting of Socratic desire. In Xenophon’s Symposium, the symposiasts are tasked with offering what each knows that is good for the city. Socrates offers a critique of pederasty, suggesting it should be reconfigured as sexless homosocial political mentorship. He persistently evokes temporal arguments to denigrate pederastic sex and to

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valorize heterosexual marriage. He reimagines Autolykos the infamous eromenos as the modest son of his devoted father. Xenophon has queered time in the service of heterosexual norm construction. He writes anachronism into his text to create a disorienting sense of time, and then concludes with the here and now aligned with the cyclical repetition of ritual time. Both the queer time and the heterosexual time that Xenophon constructs are layered and complicated: pederastic sex is embedded in a disorienting non-sequential framework. Concomitantly, Xenophon appropriates for his Socrates the authority of priority and the advantage of hindsight. Heterosexuality is endowed with an immediate fullness, depicted through dance in which the evanescent present plunging into history is congruent with the eternal truth of myth and the consistent repetition of civic ritual. In his Symposium, Xenophon imbues time with erotic meaning, writing his own history of sexuality. Conclusion I have suggested that Xenophon’s Symposium is in some ways an uncomfortable fit with queer temporality. That is because he uses the temporal modes most aligned with queer time, anachronism and the contrafactual, to render pederasty sexless and promote heterosexuality, and so in his text, these temporal forms are used to construct heteronormativity. However, insofar as one goal of queer temporality is to expose the construction of sexual norms, this reading is aligned with that end. For I have argued that Xenophon has manipulated and represented time to valorize heterosexual marriage in dialogue with Plato’s texts that are explicitly concerned with eros. This is especially significant because Xenophon’s Symposium anticipates the ideological shift in the Roman Imperial period from a dualistic to a unitary conception of love, a conception of eros that Foucault traced and claims we have inherited.59 Plutarch’s Amatorius is cited as a key text in this development, because it poses the dialogic opposition between the love of boys and the love of women. The arguments in this dialogue are steeped in references to Platonic eros – indeed, “they rely strikingly on the vocabulary and transcendental sense of desire most associated with the love of boys” – and yet, they revise Plato’s thought by giving pride of place to heterosexual marriage.60 In these ways, The Amatorius closely replicates Xenophon’s textual strategy in the Symposium. This significant resonance in turn suggests that while Xenophon’s argument that heterosexual marriage is good for the city might seem banal to us now, it may have struck others differently in other times. Notes 1 Carol Atack (2020) has recently also used queer theory to explore the manipulation of chronology in Plato’s writing and in the depiction of Socrates, and perhaps it is this queer platonic past that Xenophon is recasting in a different sexual matrix in this text. 2 Grethlein (2013); Grethlein and Krebs (2012); Demandt (1993); Gallagher (2018). 3 Grethlein (2013: 1–27). 4 Grethlein (2013: 53).

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5 The locus classicus of counterfactual history is found in Herodotus, Book 7, when he claims that the Athenians’ resistance to Xerxes at sea was crucial to the Greek victory in the Persian Wars: If the Athenians had taken fright at the danger that was bearing down on them and had abandoned their country, or if they had stayed put where they were and surrendered to Xerxes, no one would have tried to resist Xerxes at sea. What would have happened on land then? Even if the Peloponnesians had built wall after defensive wall across the Isthmus, the Lacedaemonians would still have been let down by their allies, not out of deliberate treachery, but because they would have had no choice, in the sense that they would have fallen, one by one, to the Persian fleet. So the Lacedaemonians would have been left all alone, and in that situation they would have shown their mettle and well – and died nobly. Or an alternative scenario, instead of this one, is that before matters went this far, they would have seen that the rest of Greece was collaborating with Xerxes. But in either case, Greece would have come under Persian rule, because I cannot see what good the defensive wall built across the Isthmus would have done with Xerxes controlling the sea. (Hdt. 7.139 trans. Waterfield.) Herodotus’ speculation imagines a different historical outcome than the one he chronicles. He offers alternative versions, projecting himself back in time to consider the war from the standpoint of its present in which different futures are possible. The counterfactual replicates the open-ended potential of the present as opposed to the inevitable order of things that hindsight can project. 6 For example, the Cyropaideia uses Cyrus to depict a particular instantiation of elite leadership; he is a character who combines the best elements of Spartan kings and Athenian politicians. Xenophon departs from the traditional tyrant character to depict Cyrus as an idealized leader, who engages the aristocrats in a kind of meritocracy, while treating craftsmen as incomplete citizens. Philip Stadter characterizes the text as a utopian vision of the individual as political agent in a historical setting. . . . The setting of these events in the imagined past depends on awareness of the present to achieve its goal of future development and change. (Stadter 1991: 470–1) 7 8 9 10

See Stadter (1991: 470). Vivienne Gray (2011: 249) calls this shift in tone a structural contradiction. McCloskey (2017: 231). McCloskey (2017: 231) writes: The coercive education of monarchical Schools of paleo-Persia, neo-Persia and Sparta resulted in the permanent collapse of each society, wshile Athenian education, based by necessity on persuasion rather than coercion, facilitated the reversal of the destruction of democracy in 404BCE and the recovery of the Socratics after Socrates’ execution on 399.

11 Similarly, in the Oikonomikos, Xenophon depicts Kallias’ mother-in-law as a young girl, depicting her learning to be a good wife. This nostalgic past sits in conflict with events of the more recent past, in which Kallias was said to have fallen in love with his motherin-law and introduced their children as citizens. 12 The issues of temporality in the Oikonomikos are distinctive enough that they need to be considered in their own right. Like The Symposium, the narrative imagines an ideal past that conflicts drastically with subsequent, publicly known events. 13 Dinshaw (2012: 4). 14 Rohy (2017: 250). See also Judith Halberstam, who describes queer time as: the dark nightclubs, the perverse turn away from the narrative coherence of adolescence – early adulthood – marriage – reproduction – childrearing – retirement – death, the

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Kate Gilhuly embrace of late childhood in the place of adulthood, or immaturity in the place of responsibility. It is a theory of queerness as a way of being in the world and a critique of the careful social scripts that usher even the most queer among us through major markers of individual development and into normativity. (Dinshaw et al. 2007: 182)

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46

Edelman (2004: 1–31), quote from p. 3. Rohy (2017: 250). Tambling (2010: 23–53). The dramatic date of Plato’s Symposium is 416, Xenophon’s is 422; see Dover (1965: 11). Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. Morier (1961: sv). Luzzi (2009: 70). Rohy (2009: xiv–xvi). Clay (1994: 43). Nussbaum (1979) also argues for the importance of historical context to the reading of Plato’s Symposium. She elucidates the deliberate evocation of a moment when suddenly Athenians of all walks of life are interested in Alcibiades and Socrates at Agathon’s party years earlier, suggesting the setting might be an evocation of the days just before – or right after – the death of Alcibiades. Bowen (1998: 15). Plato’s Ap., passim. Cf. Storey (1985: 320–2; 2003: 93). Xenophon, Hell., 2.3.2; 2.3.39; 2.4.19. See also Huss (1999), who contends that this genial event is a part of the construction of the Aurea Aetas Socratica. He also sees this text as apologetic. Higgins (1977: 17). Nikeratos is introduced as an associate of Kallias, who was tagging along after the horse races. Gilhuly (2009: 98–139). His namesake grandfather fought in the battle of Marathon and his father Hipponicus fought off the Persian incursion into Boeotia (Thuc. 3.91). See also Freeman (1938: 24). Henderson (1991: 165). See also Seasons fr. 583 PMG. Freeman (1938: 27). This fits in with the derision of athletes in Euripides Satyr play, also entitled Autolykos, which is thought to be a parodic version of the mythic character, the trickster grandfather of Odysseus. Dover (1978: 146–7). Huss (1999: 399–400). Henderson (1991: 141–2). It is also found in Xen. Cyr. 8.8.15 and Plat. Alc. 1.122 Kurke (1992: 97–120). In his reading of Colette’s “Ces Plaisirs . . . ,” Michael Lucey reads a similar temporal distance in speech-level as producing a hybrid region of sexuality with no label, an identity that he designates as a kind of “misfit” sexuality. Lucey 2019: 1–48. Storey (2003: 93). Huss (1999: 400–4). The complexity of Xenophon’s depiction of elite erotic behavior is on a par with Plato’s depiction in his Symposium. While Xenophon relies on temporality to show this irony, Plato tends to exploit the possibilities of dialogue, using the gap between his characters’ words and deeds to depict the problems with elite pederasty. Xen Symp. 8.23; Dover (1978: 52). Freeman (2010: 2). Freeman (2010: 18).

The History of Sexuality in Xenophon’s Symposium 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60

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Hobden imports Plato’s version of Pandemian and Ouranian Aphrodite to Xenophon’s text. Jagose (2002: 1–36). Edelman (2004: 2–4). Garelli-François (2002); Wiles (2000); Schlapbach (2018, 172–83). On the integration of performance, writing, and speech in this scene, see Olsen (2020: 126–8). Quote fromPhelan (2004: 148); see also Lepecki (2004: 4). Lepecki (2004: 5). Schlapbach (2018: 175). Schlapbach (2018: 174). Wohl (2004: 359). In this text, Socrates’ marriage is discussed, and he is also identified as a dancer, although not for show. In “Against Neaira,” when Apollodoros describes this ritual, he emphasizes its extended temporal reach, noting the Archaic origins of the rite from the mythic kingship of Theseus, established in ancient times, τὸ γὰρ ἀρχαῖον (59.74), and pointing out that the terms of the rite were written on a stone pillar in the sanctuary of Dionysos, whose letters had been nearly effaced by time: καὶ αὕτη ἡ στήλη ἔτι καὶ νῦν ἕστηκεν, ἀμυδροῖς γράμμασιν Ἀττικοῖς δηλοῦσα τὰ γεγραμμένα (and the pillar still stands even now, showing the inscription with the faint Attic letters) (59.76). Avagianou (1991: 193) claims that the hieros gamos was a rite that gave “legality to eroticism.” See also Gilhuly (2009: 132–3). I thank Jeffrey P. Ulrich for pointing out this resonance to me. Foucault (1986: 198). Goldhill (1995: 156).

Bibliography Anderson, J. K. 1974. Xenophon. New York: Scribner. Atack, C. 2020. “Plato’s Queer Time: Dialogic Moments in the Life and Death of Socrates.” Classical Receptions Journal 12.1: 10–31. Avagianou, A. 1991. Sacred Marriage in the Rituals of Greek Religion. Vol. Bd. 54. Berne, NY: P. Lang. Bowen, A. J. 1998. Xenophon: Symposium. Warminster: Aris and Phillips. Christesen, P. 2006. “Xenophon’s ‘Cyropaedia’and Military Reform in Sparta.” JHS 126: 47–65. Clay, D. 1994. “The Origins of the Socratic Dialogue.” In Vander Waerdt, ed., The Socratic Movement. New York: Cornell University Press. 23–47. Cohen, D. 1987. “Law, Society, and Homosexuality in Classical Athens.” P&P 117: 3–21. Davidson, J. 2001. “Dover, Foucault and Greek Homosexuality: Penetration and the Truth of Sex.” P&P 170: 3–51. Davies, J. 1971. Athenian Propertied Families 600–300 B.C. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Demandt, A. 1993. History That Never Happened. Jefferson: McFarland. Dillery, J. 1995. Xenophon and the History of his Times. New York, London: Routledge. Dimock, W. 2006. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dinshaw, C. 2012. How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dinshaw, C., L. Edelman, R. A. Ferguson, C. Freccero, E. Freeman, J. Halberstam, A. Jagose, C. Nealon, and N. T. Hoang. 2007. “Theorizing Queer Temporalities.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13.2–3: 177–95. Dover, K. 1965. “The Date of Plato’s ‘Symposium’.” Phronesis 10.1: 2–20. Dover, K. 1978. Greek Homosexuality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dover, K., ed. 1980. Plato: Symposium. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Edelman, L. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foucault, M. 1986. The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 3. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. 1990. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2. New York: Vintage Books. Freeman, E. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Freeman, K. 1938. “Portrait of a Millionaire – Callias Son of Hipponicus.” G&R 8.22: 20–35. Gallagher, C. 2018. Telling It Like It Wasn’t : The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Garelli-François, M. 2002. “Le spectacle final du banquet de Xénophon: Le genre et le sens.” Pallas 59: 177–86. Gilhuly, K. 2009. The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens. New York: Cambridge University Press. Goldhill, S. 1995. Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gray, V. 1989. The Character of Xenophon’s Hellenica. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gray, V. 2011. Xenophon’s Mirror of Princes: Reading the Reflections. New York: Oxford University Press. Grethlein, J. 2013. Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography: Futures Past from Herodotus to Augustine. Oxford, New York: Cambridge University Press. Grethlein, J., and C. Krebs. 2012. Time and Narrative in Ancient Historiography: The ‘Plupast’ from Herodotus to Appian. New York: Cambridge University Press. Henderson, J. 1991. The Maculate Muse. New York: Oxford University Press. Higgins, W. E. 1977. Xenophon the Athenian: The Problem of the Individual and the Society of the Polis. Albany: SUNY Press. Hoang, N. T. 2002. K.I.P. Vancouver: Video Out Distribution. Huss, B. 1999. “The Dancing Sokrates and the Laughing Xenophon, or the Other ‘Symposium’.” AJP 120.3: 381–409. Jagose, A. 2002. Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Johnstone, S. 1994. “Virtuous Toil, Vicious Work: Xenophon on Aristocratic Style.” CP 89: 221–52. Jordovic, I. 2016. “Kingdom Versus Empire in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.” Balcanica 2016.47: 35–53. Kurke, L. 1992. “The Politics of Ἁβϱοσύνη in Archaic Greece.” CA 11.1: 91–120. Lepecki, A. 2004. Of the Presence of the Body: Essays on Dance and Performance Theory. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Lu, H. 2011. “Queen Bee and Housewife: Extension of Social Moral Education into Private Sphere in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus.” JCS 6.4: 144–61. Lucey, M. 2019. Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities from Colette to Hervé Guibert. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ludwig, P. W. 2002. Eros and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luzzi, J. 2009. “The Rhetoric of Anachronism.” Comparative Literature 61.1: 69–84. McCloskey, P. 2017. “Xenophon’s Democratic Pedagogy.” Phoenix 71.3/4: 230–49. Momigliano, A. 1971. The Development of Greek Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Morier, H. 1961. Dictionnaire de poetique et de rhetorique. 5th ed. Paris: PUF. Murnaghan, S. 1988. “How a Woman Can Be More Like a Man: The Dialogue Between Ischomachus and His Wife in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus.” Helios 15: 9–22. Murray, P., and P. Wilson. 2004. Music and the Muses: The Culture of ‘Mousikē’ in the Classical Athenian City. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, M. 1979. “The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium.” Philosophy and Literature 3.2: 131–72. Ollier, F. 1961. Banquet, Apologie de Socrate. Paris: Société d’édition “Les Belles Lettres”. Olsen, S. 2020. Solo Dance in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature Representing the Unruly Body. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Phelan, P. 2004. “Trisha Brown’s Orféo: Two Takes on Double Endings.” In Lepecki, ed. 13–28. Rohy, Valerie. 2009. Anachronism and Its Others: Sexuality, Race, Temporality. Albany: SUNY Press. Rohy, Valerie. 2017. “Exchanging Hours: A Dialogue on Time.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 23.2: 247–68. Rood, T. 2012. “The Plupast in Xenophon’s Hellenica.” In Grethlein, ed. 76–94. Schiffman, Z. 2011. The Birth of the Past. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Schlapbach, K. 2018. The Anatomy of Dance Discourse: Literary and Philosophical Approaches to Dance in the Later Graeco-Roman World. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stadter, Philip A. 1991. “Fictional Narrative in the Cyropaideia.” AJP 112.4: 461–91. Stevens, J. A. 1994. “Friendship and Profit in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus.” In Vander Waerdt, ed. 209–37. Storey, I. C. 1985. “The Symposium at ‘Wasps’ 1299 FF.” Phoenix 39.4: 317–33. Storey, I. C. 2003. Eupolis, Poet of Old Comedy. Cambridge, New York: Oxford University Press. Summers, C. 1992. “Homosexuality and Renaissance Literature, or the Anxieties of Anachronism.” South Central Review 9.1: 2–23. Tambling, J. 2010. On Anachronism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thesleff, Holger. 1978. “The Interrelation and Date of the ‘Symposia’ of Plato and Xenophon.” BICS 25: 157–70. Todd, O. J. 1992. Xenophon IV. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vander Waerdt, P. 1994. The Socratic Movement. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wiles, D. 2000. “Théâtre dionysiaque dans le Banquet de Xénophon.” CGITA 13: 107–17. Wohl, V. 2004. “Dirty Dancing: Xenophon’s Symposium.” In Murray and Wilson, eds. 337–63.

5

Materna Tempora Gestational Time and the Ovidian Poetics of Delay1 Caitlin Hines

Ovid’s experiments in mythography, especially those performed in the final decades of his career, disclose an acute preoccupation with time as a guiding principle of narrative structure.2 In the opening of the Metamorphoses, the poet signifies a programmatic intention for his storytelling to chart a chronological course from the origins of the world up to his own day: di, coeptis . . . /aspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi/ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen (“Gods, inspire my undertakings and spin out a continuous song from the first beginning of the world up to my own times”) (Met. 1.2–4).3 The poet’s resolve to direct this song ad mea tempora gestures also toward his Fasti,4 whose first word is tempora and whose fundamental organizing principle is calendrical time, binding together ritual etiologies with the interlocking machineries of cyclical, seasonal, astronomical, and civic time. Questions of time – its movements, its measures, and its meanings – are undoubtedly central to the thematic and structural foundations of these projects. My interest in this chapter lies at the intersection of temporality and fertility in Ovidian poetics, specifically in these mid-career works of mythography that are so engaged with exploring – and complicating – the passage of time.5 As the Fasti incorporate chronological leaps between past and present throughout sequential calendrical books, and as the Metamorphoses proceed in loose adherence to the comprehensive chronology promised in the proem, both poems exhibit a keen interest in human generation and reproductive relationships. The connective tissues between episodes are often traced through lines of generational descent, while numerous episodes featuring the births of heroes and legendary figures run alongside larger preoccupations with fertility, futurity, and generational continuity. Representations of gestational time in later Ovidian myth are, I argue, decidedly and deliberately efficient.6 The narrators frequently stage the moment of conception in titillating or gruesome detail, only to fast-forward immediately to the birth of offspring.7 The fertile female body is valued highly as a plot device, while the bodily mechanics of that fertility are habitually abridged or elided. In chronicling the fates of entire familial lines and recording the origins of complex ritual histories, some manipulation of narrative time is naturally required; Ovid’s narrators regularly compress broad swaths of time in order to focus on the discrete episodes that they deem most worthy of narrative space. Such temporal distortion is a necessary and common feature of storytelling, since any reader demanding DOI: 10.4324/9781003385387-8

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exact correspondence between narrative action and everyday timekeeping is in for a never-ending story.8 Nevertheless, the particular choices that an author or narrator makes regarding the sites of ellipsis are significant, especially where those choices form a distinct pattern.9 After establishing that a consistent pattern of temporal compression is applied to the progression of pregnancy in later Ovidian mythography, I read this abbreviation of gestational time against a self-conscious, playful Ovidian poetics of delay. I suggest that Ovid’s persistent and sometimes acrobatic avoidance of narrating the processes of female fertility, in addition to its entanglement with the pressing narratological priorities of progression and momentum, becomes implicated in broader ideological discourses about women’s bodies, especially when they prove to be indicative (or even determinative) of narrative and civic modes of measuring time. Through the lens of Kristeva’s theory of “women’s time,” we can observe how the linear narratives of epic and the rationalizing interventions into the Roman calendar ultimately confront and reject the cyclical and monumental qualities of gestational time. The rare exceptions to Ovid’s patterns of gestational compression, I conclude, are illustrative of larger commitments to narrating uniquely Roman histories of fertility and to authorizing those interventions into the Roman calendar which compelled a definitive disjunction between maternal temporalities and civic timekeeping. Materna Tempora and Women’s Time The process of measuring the duration of pregnancy was, unsurprisingly, an inexact science in antiquity. Medical sources typically admit a fair amount of variation for the period of gestation, offering more confidence in the health risks of short pregnancies (with seven months typically identified as the absolute lower limit for viability) than clarity about the processes governing its upper limits.10 Philosophical texts likewise acknowledge a variability of duration, with some upholding the superstition that risk of death is highest for a child born in the eighth month (as opposed to the seventh, ninth, or tenth).11 Legal materials are generally preoccupied with gestational time as a matter of establishing paternity: the Twelve Tables’ exclusion of legitimate inheritance for a child born ten months after the death of its father (post decem menses mortis natus non admittetur ad legitimam hereditatem, Dig. 38.16.3.11) suggests a predominant suspicion that gestation should conclude by month ten. The examination of gestational time compiled by Aulus Gellius (Noctes Atticae 3.16), who synthesizes evidence from sources as wide-ranging as Plautus, Varro, Hippocrates, and Hadrian, is demonstrative of the range of claims circulating in antiquity about the duration of human pregnancy. Gellius starts from a summary of the beliefs that constituted generally accepted knowledge (multa opinio . . . eaque iam pro vero recepta, NA 3.16.1), asserting that most understand the lower limit of pregnancy to be seven months, and the upper limit the end of the tenth month; his subsequent examination and critique of a broad selection of primary evidence underscores the potential for thoughtful individuals to consider pieces of this “conventional wisdom” doubtful or entirely incorrect.12 Even without drawing precise

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conclusions about the gestational period, Gellius’ careful research underscores the degree of uncertainty that consistently attended the process of measuring gestational time.13 Ovid’s poetic world offers comparative consistency for the duration of a normal pregnancy. In legendary history, as the Fasti reports, Romulus used the period between conception and birth as his standard of measure for the calendar year: quod satis est, utero matris dum prodeat infans,/hoc anno statuit temporis esse satis (“The amount of time required for an infant to come forth from its mother’s womb, this [Romulus] established to be the duration of a year”) (Fast. 1.33–34). The correlation of annual measurements with gestational time reappears in Book 3, as the narrator revisits Romulus’ calendar (Fast. 3.121–124): annus erat, decimum cum Luna receperat orbem, hic numerus magno tunc in honore fuit, seu quia tot digiti, per quos numerare solemus, seu quia bis quino femina mense parit . . . It was a year when the moon had undertaken her tenth cycle: this number was at that time highly esteemed, either because we have the same number of fingers, on which we are accustomed to count, or because women give birth in the tenth month . . . The lunar cycle, as a reference point allowing for rapid narrative movement through multiple months,14 appears commonly in Ovid to signify the passage of a full gestational period. The regular appearance of the numbers nine or ten (and related ordinals/adverbs) alongside the lunar cycles that measure out pregnancy suggests a consistency of gestational time within the poetic landscape, in which typical pregnancies reach their conclusion within the ninth or tenth month after conception.15 The clearest indication of a full and healthy gestation period comes just before a prayer to Lucina in the Fasti, where successful completion of the Lupercalia ritual renders vir into pater and nupta into mater after ten lunar cycles (Luna resumebat decimo nova cornua motu, Fast. 2.447–448). It is generally within the context of typical pregnancies that we observe the regularized elision of narrative time. We must turn, therefore, to an atypical pregnancy – the birth of Bacchus – for a fuller Ovidian explication of what is elsewhere left implicit. The twice-born god’s unorthodox gestation, interrupted by his mother’s obliteration and resumed within his father’s thigh, establishes what the parameters for normal fetal growth ought to be: imperfectus adhuc infans genetricis ab alvo/ eripitur patrioque tener (si credere dignum est)/insuitur femori maternaque tempora complet (“The infant, still incomplete, is removed from his mother’s belly and [if you can believe it!] is sewn, delicate, into his father’s thigh and there fulfills maternal times”) (Met. 3.310–312). The gestational period is, properly, a span of time characteristic of the mother (materna tempora), framed explicitly as maternal only here where paternal substitution for the mother’s womb becomes necessary. It is a period of time whose fulfillment (complet) is required for the formation of

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a complete (as opposed to imperfectus) child. The phrase materna tempora also restricts the value of “maternal time” to a function of fertility; despite the broad temporal sweep of the social category of mater, materna tempora refers specifically and exclusively to gestation. As we explore the narrative significance of maternal temporality in Ovid, we might do well to note productive affinities with Julia Kristeva’s theory of “women’s time,” which the French theorist defines as fundamentally cyclical and repetitive.16 Kristeva points explicitly to gestation as a key aspect of this feminine temporality, affiliated with “the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature.”17 Women’s time, for Kristeva, is also monumental, defined by its eternity and opposed to the linear progression and teleology that mark “the time of history.”18 Romulus’ reported decision to measure the calendar year according to the gestational period conforms to a vision of women’s time as cosmically significant; as we will observe in what follows, however, the new Roman calendar undermines the monumentality of feminine cycles and systematizes their displacement from methods of measuring time. Just as pregnancy is treated as obstructive to the linear flow of narrative time, we will see how the gradual undoing of gestation’s centrality to civic timekeeping marks a disruption or rejection of the monumental, cosmic significance of women’s bodies and women’s time at Rome.19 Compression It is unsurprising that poems so vast in chronological scope as the Metamorphoses and the Fasti must employ temporal shortcuts, but it is also notable that materna tempora become a primary casualty of the narrators’ temporal economy. Even when the storytellers map their narrative routes through pathways of human generation, pregnancy is rarely granted much narrative space; the narrators’ interest in the woman tends to wane as soon as her body is denatured from sexual object to generative vessel. Indeed, the consummation of male lust with a female partner so frequently triggers an immediate “cut-scene” to the birth of a child that the act of conception becomes a dependable predictor of compressed narrative time. A survey of the lexical and syntactical patterns that structure Ovidian episodes involving pregnancy will demonstrate the extent to which the standard 9–10-month period is condensed in temporal disproportion to its surrounding narrative contexts. As mentioned previously, tracking the progression of months through the cycles of the moon is a typical Ovidian strategy for leaping through time from conception to birth: lines like Luna novum decies inplerat cornibus orbem (“the moon had filled her new orb ten times”) (Fast. 2.175) and perque novem erravit redeuntis cornua lunae (“she wandered for nine cycles of the moon”) (Met. 10.479) allow the pregnant woman’s belly to grow rapidly and in parallel with the waxing of the moon.20 That this rapid lunar cycling happens nine or ten times is sometimes the only context clue provided to suggest that the woman is pregnant. After Pygmalion marries his ivory statue, for example, the narrator21 allows the lunar cycle to narrate the pregnancy for him (Met. 10.295–297): coniugio, quod fecit, adest dea, iamque coactis/cornibus in plenum noviens lunaribus orbem/illa Paphon genuit (“The goddess was present for

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the marriage which she had accomplished, and once the moon had joined its horns nine times into a full orb, [Eburna] gave birth to Paphos”). In numerous episodes containing reproduction, the narrator does not refer at all to the passage of time, whose progression is implicit in the birth of offspring; for these pregnant characters, conception and birth can happen within a single syntactical breath. For Orithyia, pursued and raped by Boreas, the transition to marriage and motherhood occurs in hyper-abbreviated sequence as she experiences a rapid conversion from frightened fugitive to wife and mother: illic et gelidi coniunx Actaea tyranni/et genetrix facta est, partus enixa gemellos (“There the Attic girl was made the wife of the frozen tyrant and a mother, having given birth to twin offspring”) (Met. 6.711–712). A similarly synchronized transition occurs for Tacita, in Book 2 of the Fasti, who becomes pregnant and gives birth within the space of a single line: fitque gravis geminosque parit (“she becomes pregnant and bears twins”) (2.615). These elisions of the post-sexual mechanics of reproduction are highly characteristic of Ovidian treatments of materna tempora. Birth is a rapid aside, and pregnancy worth mentioning (if mentioned at all) only as an intermediate stage between sex and childbirth. The marriage of Procne and Tereus, in Book 6 of the Metamorphoses, is twice joined in syntactic parallel to the birth of their child. The terrible omen of the screech owl governs both occasions: hac ave coniuncti Procne Tereusque, parentes/hac ave sunt facti (“by this bird Procne and Tereus were joined, by this bird they were made parents”) (6.433–434). The passive formulation parentes . . . sunt facti elides the pregnancy and equalizes the parents’ contributions, as though Itys sprang into being without energy or labor from his mother. Marriage and parenthood are joined once again in temporal and grammatical parallel two lines later: diemque/quaque data est claro Pandione nata tyranno/quaque erat ortus Itys, festum iussere vocari (“The day on which Pandion’s daughter was given in marriage to the famous tyrant, and the day on which Itys was born, they ordered to be designated as festival days”) (6.435–437). The blending of two distinct festivals, almost certainly occurring on separate dates, into a collective festum blurs the distinction between the two occasions that they celebrate, framing marriage and reproduction as such natural partners that the passage of time between them requires no explication; sex and childbirth coordinate in perfect parataxis. The requisite time for pregnancy becomes, in narrative terms, both unnecessary and unreal, compressed so smoothly as to become imperceptible. Procne’s labor, moreover, is once again sublimated, with Itys framed as the subject of his own birth (erat ortus Itys) and Procne identified by a patronymic phrase (Pandione nata) that transforms her from one bearing into one born. The linear progression of generational time supplants and elides gestation. Sometimes the duration of a pregnancy is compressed so tightly as to produce an apparent anachronism, as after Peleus’ pursuit and capture of Thetis: confessam amplectitur heros/et potitur votis ingentique implet Achille./felix et nato, felix et coniuge Peleus (“The hero embraces her once she has revealed herself and achieves his desires and fills her with great Achilles. Happy in his son, happy in his wife was Peleus”) (Met. 11.264–266). In correlation with the proleptic naming of Achilles at the moment of his conception, the narrator allows Peleus to delight in

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his offspring before there is any indication that he has married Thetis; this suggests either an unusual variation on the myth in which Thetis bears Achilles before their marriage, or a non-linear treatment of Achilles’ birth that effectively compresses Thetis’ pregnancy out of existence. Embedded within Peleus’ designation as felix is also a celebration of his successful fertility; the fact that he performs the verb implet likewise allows him to displace Thetis and fulfill the function of growth himself.22 In this Ovidian representation of the conception of Greece’s most storied hero, then, narrative technique centers the father’s reproductive vigor while permitting the mother – and her pregnancy – to disappear entirely. The duration of other pregnancies is reduced to the periphrasis of a single word. Epaphus, for example, after the lengthy narrative of Io’s abduction, rape, transformation, and imprisonment, “is believed to have been born from the seed of great Jupiter” (magni genitus de semine . . ./creditur esse Iovis, Met. 1.748–749) after a mere tandem (“at length”); Io does not appear in the sentence at all.23 Following the expansive narrative focus on the coercive violence enacted upon her body (1.583– 747), the compression and erasure of its aftermath is striking. Similarly, in Book 2 of the Fasti, the wide-ranging tale of Romulus’ and Remus’ childhood begins with Rhea Silvia having already birthed them (ediderat, 2.384).24 This is the only mention of the twins’ mother in the entire episode, despite the fact that its broader purpose is to explain the origins of the Lupercalia, a festival which the narrator explicitly connects to fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth. In addition to explaining the goat-hide whipping practice as a ritual solution to community infertility, the episode concludes with a prayer on behalf of pregnant women: parce, precor, gravidis, facilis Lucina, puellis,/maturumque utero molliter aufer onus! (“Be merciful, I pray, agreeable Lucina, to pregnant girls, and gently bring forth the burden when it is ready from the womb!”) (2.451–452). This episode, though it digresses at length about Romulus and Remus, maintains the telos of explaining a fertility ritual. The narrator seems willing enough to meditate on community reproductive health, yet the woman whose pregnancy initiated the Roman bloodline serves merely as an introductory device. These patterns of temporal disproportion typify a keen interest in the woman’s body as an object of sexual desire and in the products of its fertility, shadowed by a studied and almost comical indifference to the necessary time in between. There is a suggestive and perhaps willful erasure of women’s labor in the paratactic assimilation of the labels coniunx and genetrix, in the compression of gestational time into a single word, and in the grammatical relegation of birthing mothers to the passive voice or the pluperfect tense. Though Silvia appears only momentarily in Fasti 2, the brevity of her role there, and its attendant irony, turn out to be a narrative trick. Book 3 of the Fasti, dedicated to the month of Mars, returns to her story and rewinds, this time starting from the story of her assault. We learn of the twins’ conception after she awakens from the deep sleep during which Mars raped her: somnus abit, iacet illa gravis, iam scilicet intra/viscera Romanae conditor Urbis erat (“Sleep departs, she lies pregnant; certainly then the founder of the Roman city was within her womb”) (Fast. 3.23–24). Next, the pregnant Silvia relates the contents of a lengthy allegorical

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dream, during which time, the narrator asserts, Romulus and Remus grow within her womb (interea crescente Remo, crescente Quirino/caelesti tumidus pondere venter erat, “Meanwhile as Remus and Quirinus grew, her womb was swollen by heavenly weight”) (3.41–42). Her pregnancy is then punctuated by the characteristically succinct Silvia fit mater (“Silvia becomes a mother”) (3.45). Through the unusually long narrative duration of Silvia’s pregnancy, then, Ovid retroactively corrects for the puzzling disconnect between the centrality of fertility and the hyper-efficiency of Silvia’s role as mother in the Lupercal passage. Given this fairly unusual treatment of pregnancy – a resistance to the larger narrative instinct to elide a period of 9–10 months the moment conception occurs – the question arises: why is Silvia permitted to remain visible in the story, while pregnant, for some expanse of narrative time, while most pregnant women are compelled to give birth in nearly the same narrative moment that they conceive? My answer to this question hinges upon a metapoetic reading of pregnancy as an important component of the Ovidian poetics of delay. Pregnancy and Delay The poetics of delay and deferral, as they operate in Ovid and in Roman poetry more broadly, manifest thematically through the application of narrative techniques (e.g., digression, interruption, postponement) for which both the Metamorphoses and Fasti are notorious.25 Geue and Rosati, in particular, have explored the Ovidian poetics of delay in these works as a feature interwoven carefully with the pressures of narrative pacing and evident in the keen awareness of proper timing that structures the narrators’ attention to the flow of the story.26 In lexical terms, mora appears to be the nominal form most immediately representative of temporal suspension or postponement.27 This word has also been invested with a particular significance in Roman poetry, as Reed has demonstrated, through its anagrammatic relationship with those key terms of Vergilian epic amor and Roma.28 Ovid’s own awareness of these anagrams has been observed by Hanses, who identifies a gamma acrostic of amor (and its mirror image, Roma) in the Ars Amatoria and argues that the nearby phrase rescribe moram indexes and invites anagrammatic wordplay.29 Gardner, moreover, in her Kristevan exploration of gendered time in Roman elegy, establishes mora as fundamentally characteristic of women’s time in elegiac poetics, where the puella actively transcends and disrupts the linear progression of time.30 By the time that Ovid begins composing his later works of mythography, therefore, mora is already implicated in a complex system of civic, generic, and gendered ideologies. It is my contention that mora – as it is affiliated with both the non-linear temporality of women’s time and the urgent civic priorities embedded in the ever-meaningful constellation of amor-mora-Roma – plays a central role in the narratologies and ideologies of gestation in the Metamorphoses and the Fasti. Variations on the formula mora est appear frequently in both poems, either to affirm the appropriateness of a digression because of its brevity (e.g., parva docere mora est, Fast. 3.408; discere nulla mora est, Fast. 3.768) or to reject a digression on the grounds of its length (e.g., dicere longa mora est, Met. 5.463

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and Fast. 1.492).31 Narrators both external and internal demonstrate awareness of these demands for narrative concision.32 In the Metamorphoses, Jupiter sidesteps some details of his journey to meet Lycaon with the assertion that “it would take a long time to explain” (longa mora est . . ./enumerare) (Met. 1.214–215), while the Fasti’s narrator and Flora both affirm their awareness of appropriate narrative pacing with the respective declarations that non faciet longas fabula nostra moras (“my story won’t cause long delays”) (2.248) and longa referre mora est (“it would be a long delay to relate”) (5.311). Mars, too, understands narrative delay to be a burden to the listener, as he concludes his own lengthy explanation of possible causae for the Matronalia with an introspective question: quid moror et variis onero tua pectora causis? (“Why do I delay and burden your heart with different explanations?”) (Fast. 3.249).33 In these ways, both the Metamorphoses and the Fasti delight in a self-contradictory poetics of delay, combining lengthy digressions and frustrated expectations with a concurrent intolerance for waiting around.34 By invoking mora in mimetic decision-making moments about narrative direction and pacing, the mythographic narrators reveal their awareness of how the indulgence or evasion of a wandering narrative path will influence the momentum of the work. These explicit judgments about narrative delay imply in broader terms that these narrators have carefully selected every story and individual detail; when they choose to compress, or elide, or bypass entirely, they do so judiciously and in the interest of rhythm and pacing. Delays, especially long ones, are rarely worthwhile – or so the narrators profess. I contend that mora, including its metanarrative dimensions, has a special relationship with gestational time in the Metamorphoses and the Fasti. In the wake of the flood that extinguished nearly all life in Book 1 of the Metamorphoses, Ovid’s narrator describes the rebirth of the world. Here, the growth of new life is framed in direct comparison with human gestation as being accomplished by means of delay: fecundaque semina rerum,/vivaci nutrita solo ceu matris in alvo,/creverunt faciemque aliquam cepere morando (“the fertile seeds of things, nourished by the vigorous earth as though in a mother’s womb, grew and took on form by a process of delay”) (Met. 1.419–421). The narrator thus establishes in a programmatic episode an unmistakable connection between human pregnancy and delay (morando). Gestation is, fundamentally, mora: it requires patience and the passage of time for new things, whether human or animal, to grow and change. The Fasti makes the same connection. In Book 5, the character of Flora, who aids Juno in achieving parthenogenesis with a magical flower, reports that she once tested the blossom’s power on a barren cow. Flora reports: tetigi, nec mora, mater erat (“I touched her, and – no delay – she was a mother”) (Fasti 5.254). The paradox embedded within this pairing of nec mora and mater erat underscores the ordinary necessity of mora to motherhood.35 The instantaneous motherhood produced by this miraculous flower is highly reminiscent of the narrative compression experienced by most of the mothers we have surveyed so far: nec mora, mater erat could just as easily apply to Orithyia, Tacita, Procne, and Io, at least in terms of narrative time. It takes the extraordinary magic of a supernatural flower – or

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the narrative magic of a storyteller – to successfully extricate mora from motherhood. Our narrators’ typical compression of the time between conception and birth underscores that potential for pregnancy to serve not just as a biological delay, as in Metamorphoses 1, but as a narrative one. It is significant, therefore, that in those moments when pregnancy does serve as a central or expansive part of a narrative episode – that is, in the course of the rare exception to the general rule of narrative compression previously outlined – mora tends also to feature prominently. Take, for example, the pregnancy of Callisto, whose story appears twice in later Ovidian mythography;36 both versions are marked by explicit indications of agitation with delay. In Book 2 of the Fasti, the narrator classifies Callisto’s reluctance to disrobe before the other nymphs as a form of mora: nymphae velamina ponunt,/hanc pudet, et tardae dat mala signa morae (“the nymphs set aside their garments, [Callisto] is ashamed, and gives injurious proofs of slow delay”) (Fast. 2.169–170). In light of Ovid’s use of morando in Met. 1 to characterize the process of human gestation, the word mora here may contain sly reference to Callisto’s pregnancy itself, so that the signa morae become evidence not just of her hesitation to disrobe, but of the condition that provides the grounds for that hesitation. Moreover, given that the formula mora est is commonly invoked elsewhere by the mythographic narrator to reject overlong digressions, the association of tarda with mora also becomes a winking metatextual irritation with the unwelcome impact of Callisto’s reluctance on the pace of the story. In this way, mora points both to the pregnancy (the truth of which Callisto betrays by her own hesitation) and to the deceleration of the narrative necessitated by Callisto’s reluctance to reveal her condition (and thus, her disinclination to participate in the teleological thrust of masculine time).37 In the version of Callisto’s story that appears in the Metamorphoses, delay features prominently once again, both in the disrobing scene and in the later realization of Juno’s punishment. In this version, when the nymphs set aside their garments (cunctae velamina ponunt, Met. 2.460), “Callisto alone seeks out delays” (una moras quaerit, 2.461). The corresponding designations of cunctae and una emphasize Callisto’s social isolation from her cohort; her solitude in hesitating to disrobe parallels the more consequential distinction that separates her from the nymphs. Once again, we can press on the ambiguity of mora, this time in coordination with the verb quaero, to retrieve an additional layer of meaning: Callisto alone actively seeks out mora, and Callisto alone (among her community of sworn virgins) has acquired a pregnancy.38 After Callisto’s banishment by Diana, Juno herself becomes entangled in the discourse of delay: senserat hoc olim magni matrona Tonantis distuleratque graves in idonea tempora poenas. causa morae nulla est, et iam puer Arcas (id ipsum indoluit Iuno) fuerat de paelice natus.

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The wife of the great Thunderer had perceived this [pregnancy] long before and had postponed serious penalties until the right time. There is no reason for delay, and already the boy Arcas (Juno grieved at this very thing) had been born from her rival. (2.466–469) Causa morae nulla est refers most immediately to the end of Juno’s waiting period, which she had apparently extended until the birth of Arcas had rendered Callisto’s body a more acceptable target. The change of verb tenses, however, with the parallel pluperfects senserat, distulerat, and fuerat surrounding the present tense est, allow us to interpret mora also as a gesture toward narrative delay. This temporary switch to the present tense could be taken as a method for vividness in a narrative moment that is otherwise framed in the more-than-perfect past, or it could be a step away from the narrative past to the narrator’s present,39 in which his impatience produces an emphatic avowal that there is not, in the present storytelling moment, any more reason for delay. Indeed, Juno’s preoccupation with time, as clarified by her deferral of punishment until just the right moment (idonea tempora), feels precisely like the considerations that a thoughtful storyteller might make in structuring an exciting narrative. Juno and the narrator are united in respecting the directives of careful timing, especially since Callisto’s pregnancy has been a frustrating source of delay for both of them (a delay, we should note, that Callisto herself has participated actively in prolonging: una moras quaerit). Callisto is placed directly at odds with Juno and the narrator, both of whom are eager for her pregnancy to conclude – for that mora to be removed – so that the real action can begin. Within the phrase causa morae nulla est, therefore, Ovid once again conceptually intertwines pregnancy with narrative delay, whereby the absence of mora indicates both the end of the pregnancy and the removal of a primary obstacle to narrative action. Within this whimsical Ovidian framework, with its easy slippage between mora and pregnancy, where pregnancy fundamentally constitutes a process of delay, the narration of pregnancy must inevitably generate a delay in the narrative. Gestational mora becomes an unendurable narrative mora, whose consequences for narrative pacing (at least, from our narrators’ perspectives) are universally evident in their reluctance to treat pregnancy at any length. Myrrha’s pregnant flight from her father’s wrath and transformation into a tree constitutes another exception to the general rule of compressed gestational time. Her story, embedded within the larger song of Orpheus that occupies much of Metamorphoses 10, demonstrates the extent to which the association between pregnancy and delay holds even in episodes governed by internal narrators.40 Her pregnancy progresses quickly as she flees into exile with a lunar formula that allows the weight of her belly to become instantly unmanageable: perque novem erravit redeuntis cornua lunae/cum tandem terra requievit fessa Sabaea;/vixque uteri portabat onus (“She wandered for nine cycles of the moon, until at last she settled weary in the land of the Sabaeans; and scarcely could she support the weight of her womb”) (Met. 10.479–481). It is at this point that Myrrha’s prayer for divine

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punishment initiates a slow and agonizing transformation into a tree. This process, as Orpheus narrates it, finds its torturous crux just after the bark reaches Myrrha’s womb (Met. 10.495–498): iamque gravem crescens uterum praestrinxerat arbor pectoraque obruerat collumque operire parabat: non tulit illa moram venientique obvia ligno subsedit mersitque suos in cortice vultus. And already the growing tree had bound up her heavy womb and buried her chest and was preparing to cover her neck: she could not bear the delay and sank down into the path of the encroaching wood and submerged her face in the bark. This moment of focalization, in which we come to understand Myrrha’s desperation for the transformation to be complete, centers around the mora that she can no longer endure. This mora, once again, works to signify both narrative delay and pregnancy. As Myrrha is tormented by Orpheus’ prolonged description of her pain,41 her only pathway for resisting his narrative expansion is to sink more quickly into the tree; the physical and moral weight of her pregnancy (of which we are reminded by gravem uterum) presents an equally unendurable mora.42 Seemingly cognizant of the narratological constraints that govern her torment, Myrrha leans into her transformation to deny her narrator the satisfaction of prolonging her agony; but, of course, this act of resistance is ultimately futile, as Orpheus will inflict upon her a gruesome and protracted scene of labor and childbirth (Met. 10.503–514) during which, he is careful to emphasize, she suffers immensely.43 Alcmene, too, demonstrates awareness of the dynamics of mora as they relate to pregnancy and narrative progression. When she tells Iole the harrowing tale of her extended labor, the unique relationship between speaker and internal audience – that is, a woman relating her experience of childbirth to another woman who is currently pregnant – compels her to begin with a prayer that Iole will not suffer in childbirth as she did (Met. 9.281–284): incipit Alcmene: ‘faveant tibi numina saltem corripiantque moras, tum cum matura vocabis praepositam timidis parientibus Ilithyiam, quam mihi difficilem Iunonis gratia fecit.’ Alcmene begins: “May the gods at least protect you and shorten the delays at the time when you, at full-term, will call upon Ilithyia, who watches over frightened women during childbirth, whom the favor of Juno made inaccessible to me.” Once again, the pairing of mora with an ambiguous verb allows for layered readings: here corripiant moras could suggest swift progress in childbirth or, as the OLD (s.v. corripio 8) suggests of this precise line, a temporal compression in narratological

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terms: “to reduce, shorten, diminish; to abridge (literary work).” Since Alcmene invokes this prayer at the outset of her own literary endeavor, we are invited to understand these morae as pointing both to the duration of physical discomfort experienced in pregnancy and childbirth and to the narratological considerations that might lead one to abridge or compress features within a story. It is remarkable, in the first place, that Ovid’s narrator allows Alcmene to tell her own story, when all other stories of pregnancy in this epic are related in the third person; more remarkable, still, that Alcmene, invested with special authority over the delivery of her own narrative, immediately demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the narrative delays that accompany stories where pregnancy cannot be elided. In prefacing her story with a self-conscious gesture toward mora that emphasizes, above all, its compressibility, Alcmene anticipates the extent to which her impending tale is unavoidably entangled in the poetics of mora because the extension of a pregnancy comprises the entire causa of the story. Though Alcmene originally had no control over the delays imposed upon her by Juno, when granted the opportunity to craft a retrospective version of her own experience, she reveals an intention to assume control – as only a narrator can do – over the pacing of her own story. Mora, already a metanarrative marker of authorial attention to the passage of time, thus becomes closely entangled in the Metamorphoses and Fasti with tales of suffering pregnant women. Where Callisto’s pregnancy inspires the wrathful impatience of characters frustrated by the (narrative) delay it presents, Myrrha and Alcmene both manage to exert control over the operation of mora within their own episodes. Distinct narrators are granted specificity in their treatments of pregnancy as delay, while the characters within those stories are required to react to and contend with those specificities. In these ways, the Ovidian entanglements of pregnancy with mora produce not a simple or straightforward impression of narrative annoyance with pregnant characters, but a witty series of interlocking developments in metanarrative, where the peculiar priorities of unique narrative voices shape approaches to temporal compression and dilation. Mora, Roma, and Reconfigurations of Annual Time Let us return now to Silvia’s apparent privilege within Ovid’s mythographic world: why is she the only pregnant woman within the Metamorphoses or Fasti who experiences neither elision nor extraordinary suffering? The answer, perhaps, lies in Silvia’s particular importance as mother of the Roman bloodline: how could such an important pregnancy possibly pose a narrative inconvenience? We have established that it is exceedingly rare for the external narrators to allow a character to remain pregnant for multiple lines; those women whose pregnancies last for any span of narrative time inevitably suffer a great deal of physical pain. The choice to feature a pregnant and pain-free Silvia cannot therefore be an incidental exception for narrators otherwise uninterested in the post-coital mechanics of human fertility. The narrative duration of Silvia’s pregnancy, and its exclusion from the otherwise consistent metanarrative focus on pregnancy as delay, provides evidence of careful attention to specifically Roman histories of fertility. Silvia is, after all, central to

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the Fasti’s larger program (as determined by its external narrator), since she sits squarely at the crossroads of Roman foundational history and divine origins.44 To account for the total absence of mora from the narration of Silvia’s pregnancy, despite the comparative dilation of narrative time that accompanies it, we might return to the significance of its anagrams Roma and amor in Latin verse, both of which are central to this episode in Roman mythmaking. As an almost perfect opposite to Dido, Vergil’s epic instantiation of both mora and amor,45 Silvia presents no obstacle to the founding of Roma; on the contrary, she enables it. Fittingly, she is first identified in Fasti 3 as Romana sacerdos (3.9); after the twins are conceived, she is said to contain within her womb the Romanae conditor Urbis (3.24). Roma itself is ever-present in this episode, not just as the outcome of this pregnancy but also as a reminder of Romulus’ eventual supremacy: when the twins growing in Silvia’s womb are called crescente Remo, crescente Quirino (3.41),46 we are reminded of Remus’ unsuitability for leadership not only by the honorary designation of divine title being granted to Romulus alone,47 but also, I would argue, by the near-miss anagram of Remo and Roma.48 The conclusion to this episode, which occurs just before the narrator begins his day-by-day progression through the month of March, addresses Julius Caesar’s reform of the Roman calendar. In his efforts to correct for seasonal misalignments (errabant etiam nunc tempora, Fast. 3.155), the narrator reports, Caesar calculated his interventions according to a careful reckoning of astronomical time: ille moras solis, quibus in sua signa rediret,/traditur exactis disposuisse notis (“He is said to have arranged with thorough notations the sun’s morae, by which it returned to its constellations”) (3.161–162).49 The narrator’s invocation of the fairly rare astronomical referent for mora50 interweaves the thematics of delay into a larger system of time-reckoning, and on this occasion invests it with a constructive rather than obstructive influence. Here the observation of the sun’s mora facilitates more precise conformity to an authoritative cosmological system, generating a truer measure of calendrical time as gauged by the relational movements of the sun and stars. This mora is desirable from the narrator’s perspective, since the reformation of the calendar is closely intertwined with the motivations and structures of the Fasti.51 The appearance, moreover, of mora in so central a passage – central not just numerically, but thematically, as it starts from the conception of Romulus and Remus and ends with calendrical reforms – recasts it as an appropriate shift in pacing rather than a frustrating impediment to the flow of time. The narrator therefore excuses mora from his treatment of Silvia’s pregnancy only to have Caesar reintroduce mora as an essential feature of his calendrical system at the end of the same episode. As a result, the original measure of a year, which Romulus had designed to correspond to the duration of pregnancy (Fast. 1.33–34; 3.121–124), gives way with finality to a more accurate method of reckoning.52 The mora of pregnancy and its attendant narrative frustrations yield to the measures of the morae solis, which correct for a miscalculation originally correlated with gestational time. The Romans are shown, as history progresses, to reject trust in the reproductive timelines of a woman’s body in favor of the rational

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authority of the cosmos; Ovid’s narrator even characterizes those abiding by the ten-month calendar as indociles et adhuc ratione carentes (“ignorant and still lacking reason”) (Fast. 3.119).53 Though any frustrations with the narrative obstacles presented by pregnancy are apparently sublimated by the exceptional significance of Silvia’s maternal relationship to Roma at the start of Book 3, mora itself still intervenes before that episode’s end to reconfigure pregnancy as an irrational and flawed measure of civically significant time. If delay is ultimately a feminine process in the Roman imagination, then the narratological mora necessitated by pregnancy underscores the paradox of gestational time as both disruptive and essential to linear progression, whereby gestation interrupts and mystifies the orderly progress of historical time even as it remains necessary to the forward movement of new generations. Read against Kristeva’s theory of “women’s time,” Ovidian mora-poetics amplify the ideological dislocation of maternal time from the teleological drive of both epic and civic frameworks of temporality, first exemplifying narrative vexation with the non-linear progression of women’s time, and then situating gestation in cosmic misalignment with the meticulous and authoritative astronomical reckonings that determine the new shape of the year. The unusual respect that the Ovidian narrator offers to Silvia during her pregnancy – that is, the fact that she occupies narrative space but is not made to suffer – still does not preclude his efforts to actively disarticulate mora, precisely when it matters most to Roma, from the cyclical and monumental temporalities of the fertile female body. Notes 1 This chapter has benefited from audience feedback in a number of venues, including the AALAC workshop on ancient temporalities (organized by Kate Gilhuly and Jeffrey P. Ulrich), the Columbia Classics Colloquium, and my home Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati. Thanks are due also to Richard Thomas, Stephanie Crooks, Brett Stine, Joseph Howley, Anna Conser, and Ashley Simone for insightful comments and support in this project’s development. 2 Hinds (1999: 53–4). On time in the Metamorphoses, and specifically Ovid’s rejection or subversion of his chronographic models and their “canonical and authoritative timestructures” (24), see Feeney (1999); see also Zissos and Gildenhard (1999), Rosati (2002: 276–86), and Nikolopoulos (2004: 41–68), who focuses in particular on time and narratology. Time is central enough to the Fasti that most scholarship on the text engages to some extent with questions of temporality: seminal works include Newlands (1995), Volk (1997), and Geue (2010). 3 For the Metamorphoses, I follow the edition of Tarrant (2004); for the Fasti, Bömer (1957). All translations are my own. 4 Barchiesi (1991: 6–7). 5 This limitation to the Metamorphoses and Fasti is to some extent a matter of managing scope; there is surely productive work to be done on gestational time in, e.g., Heroides 11 (Canace), or the abortion diptych Amores 2.13–2.14. Though the narrative voices of the two selected works are distinct from each other and internally multiplicative, I treat the external narrators (the ones who frame embedded stories) as characters with special investment in the pace of their storytelling and primary authority over choices of exclusion. Without collapsing the distinctions between the two, I rely on the likely simultaneity of their compositions and underlying similarities in narrative technique as

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Caitlin Hines a compelling reason to treat them together: as Miller (2002) suggests, the Fasti and the Metamorphoses share significant overlap in narratological features like “asymmetrical design . . . wit, abrupt transitions, indirection, and other sorts of narrative surprise” (188). Recent work has explored the complex thematics of fertility and motherhood in Roman poetry (e.g., Keith 2000; McAuley 2016); Ovid’s treatment of the timespan between conception and birth remains understudied. Zissos and Gildenhard (1999: 42–6) apply this idea of narrative “fast-forward” to Ocyrhoe in Met. 2, suggesting that her name points metapoetically to “the impulse to speedy plot development” (46). This instinct pervades the narrative structures of the Metamorphoses even as its apparent opposite – a tendency toward delay and deferral (on which, see more later in this chapter) – continuously obstructs narrative flow. This narrative compression of time’s duration is what narratological theorists have termed “ellipsis”; for an application of Gerard Genette’s narratological theories to the Metamorphoses, see Nikolopoulos (2004, esp. 41–68 on time); see also Klein (2005). See Ulrich in this volume, pp. 140–163, for an examination of temporal compression and expansion in the Cena Trimalchionis. The Metamorphoses and Fasti provide especially fertile ground for exploring temporal compression as a feature of narratological technique. Feeney (1999: 16) emphasizes the presence of “frames of exclusion as well as inclusion, with their own strategies and ideologies” as central to all ancient works of chronography. Geue (2010: 116–23) notes the significance of such choices for the Fasti, and the narrator’s anxious awareness of “the politics of inclusion/exclusion” (123); Robinson (2011: 9) emphasizes that the Fasti’s narrator “has greater freedom than at first appears when deciding what to talk about, and how to talk about it.” On Ovid’s storytelling technique in the Metamorphoses, Solodow (1988: 36) argues that Ovid “reminds us of [storytelling’s] conventions and artificialities and exposes them to view”; Rosati (2002) likewise notes the epic’s inclinations toward complex metanarrative. Other considerations of narration and narrative technique in these texts include Nagle (1989), Newlands (1992), Barchiesi (2002), Nikolopoulos (2004), and Spentzou (2009: 386–8, with further bibliography). Though the month seems to be the standard unit of measurement for pregnancy in antiquity, there is variation in its duration (depending on whether one refers to the lunar or solar month, or to a consistent stretch of days, as in the 40-day tessarakontad established by the author of the Peri Oktamenou). Hanson (1987) offers thorough discussion of Greek and Roman medical opinions on the gestational period, including the “complex numerology for calculating duration of pregnancy” (599). Note that the Romans would have used inclusive counting in these situations; on the evidence in documentary papyri for describing which month of pregnancy a woman was experiencing, see Montevecchi (1979). e.g., Cic. Nat. D. 2.69; Arist. Hist. an. 7.4.583b-584b. See Hanson (1987 passim) on the eighth-month superstition and possible social motivations behind its pervasiveness. Howley (2018: 190–201) offers a sensitive reading of Gellius’ research strategies in 3.16, demonstrating that the author engages in careful source criticism and remains ever aware of the layers of mediation introduced by others’ (mis)interpretations. Such are the observations and conclusions that survive in the technical literature; we might do well to remember that pregnancy and childbirth were regular events in Roman life, and even those not invested in medical, legal, or philosophical inquiries into gestational time would nevertheless have the benefit of lived experience for understanding pregnancy and childbirth as a process spanning a roughly consistent period. The Romans with the most precise understanding of gestational time were most likely the women experiencing pregnancy and the obstetrices who attended them. The use of lunar months to elide time is not unique to Ovid (see e.g., Verg. Aen. 3.645), but it does seem to be his particular specialty: examples not related to gestation include Her. 2.3–5, Met. 2.344, 7.530–531, 8.11. For durations of more than a year, the sun is the more frequent referent (e.g., Met. 6.438–439: iam tempora Titan/quinque per autumnos repetiti duxerat anni).

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15 Fast. 2.175 (Callisto), 2.447 (Lupercalia), 3.43–44 (Silvia); Met. 10.296 (Eburna), 10.479 (Myrrha); see further discussion of these episodes later in this chapter, and cf. Althaea’s retrospective reference to the bis mensum quinque labores of her pregnancy with Meleager (Met. 8.500). This poetic synchronicity of gestational time as a 9–10-month period extends beyond Ovid, as in Verg. Ecl. 4.61: matri longa decem tulerunt fastidia menses. 16 Kristeva (1981). For recent, thoughtful integrations of Kristeva into studies of Latin poetry, see Gardner (2013) (esp. 21–28 and 145–180), who explores the “temporal transcendence” of the elegiac puella and her close association with the thematics of delay (on which, see more later in this chapter); and Ulrich (2021), who models the usefulness of “women’s time” for interpreting contrafactual histories that disrupt linear progressions of time in Vergil’s Aeneid (esp. in Book 5) as representative of feminine subjectivity. 17 Kristeva (1981: 16). 18 Kristeva (1981: 17). 19 My thanks to Jeffrey P. Ulrich for suggesting the usefulness of Kristeva for framing the tensions between gendered patterns of cyclical and linear time. 20 Sometimes this period is expressed via the subtraction of two months from a full year’s duration, as of Silvia at Fast. 3.43–44. 21 Orpheus narrates Pygmalion’s tale; for more on his distinct function in narrating the progression of gestational time, see later in this chapter. 22 cf. maternaque tempora complet, Met. 3.312, as discussed earlier in the chapter (of Bacchus’ gestation), an even more explicit example of the displacement of the mother’s reproductive function. 23 Some editors (e.g., Heinsius) prefer huic to nunc at the start of line 748, in which case Io would appear as a demonstrative in an oblique case, but the reading is uncertain (other lectiones include hinc and tunc). 24 On Ovid’s use of the name Silvia here (rather than the more common variation Ilia), see Robinson (2011: 264). 25 See Geue (2010: 104–6) on the broad thematic significance of mora in Roman epic and elegy and passim on the central significance of delay to the poetics of the Fasti. Klein (2005) reads Ovidian delay in both poems as studied rhetorical and Callimachean gestures. On delay and subversive temporalities in the Metamorphoses, see Feeney (1999); in the view of Solodow (1988: 35), “the essential narrative technique [of the Metamorphoses] militates against a sense of movement.” Rosati (2002: 284–6) identifies mora in relation to “narrative economy” (284) as a specific concern of Ovid’s internal narrators. 26 Geue (2010); Rosati (2002). 27 Alongside its verbal form morari; cunctari is common enough in verse, but its nominal form cunctatio does not appear in extant Latin verse until Statius and Juvenal. 28 Reed (2016), who emphasizes that Vergil is not alone in this wordplay or even necessarily its originator. 29 Hanses (2016); postque brevem rescribe moram appears at Ars am. 3.473, and the telestich at 3.507–510. See also Hanses’ discussion of the relevance of ROMA-AMOR word squares in imperial graffiti and Debrohun (2003: 33–85 and passim) on the polarity of amor and Roma in Propertius. Other engagements with elegiac amor-mora wordplay in Ovid include Sissa (2010) and Houghton (2013); see also Pucci (1978) on the same in Propertius. 30 Gardner (2013: 153–61 and passim). The erotic mora of elegy – a genre generally allergic to reproduction – operates under social conditions distinct from those governing gestational mora, but the essential character of women’s time as a form of delay that frustrates forward momentum applies to pregnancy and erotic deferral alike. 31 For invocations of mora as integral to and demonstrative of Ovidian narrative techniques, see Klein (2005). 32 See again Rosati (2002: 282–6) for mora as a central concern of self-aware narrators. 33 On this passage as evidence that the expert informants, like Mars, in the Fasti are not as authoritative as one might expect, see Newlands (1992: 44–5).

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34 What Geue (2010: 115) calls “extreme narrative impatience, a desire to get to the end which brooks no delay.” 35 We must confront some slippage here in the precise moment when a woman becomes a mater: does it happen as soon as she becomes pregnant, or only after she gives birth? The latter seems to hold true generally for women in Ovidian mythography, even though in this episode mater erat seems to reference only impregnation. Given that it directly follows a ten-month formula, Silvia fit mater (Fasti 3.45) seems to signify birth, suggesting that Silvia was not yet a mother while pregnant. Even so, materna tempora (as discussed previously in Met. 3.312) refers clearly to gestation, suggesting that motherhood – or at least the proper application of the adjective maternus – could apply to one who is pregnant but has not yet given birth. 36 On the relationship between the two Ovidian Callistos, see Newlands (1995: 156–7); Robinson (2011: 162–3, 168, and 169–78 passim). 37 Robinson (2011: 178–9) notes the thematic significance of delay in the episode directly following Callisto’s, which features the Fabii and Fabius Maximus Cunctator. 38 In this version, moreover, Callisto is not granted the time to disrobe on her own; someone unspecified (the impatient nymphs? Diana herself?) intervenes, such that “her garment was torn away from her as she hesitated” (dubitanti vestis adempta est, Met. 2.461). 39 See Volk (1997, esp. 296–302) on tense and temporal adverbs as techniques for reminding the audience about the poet’s constant positioning in the here and now. Zissos and Gildenhard (1999: 39–42) identify numerous “chronological contradictions” in this passage (via its proximity to the programmatic time-ordering at the Palace of the Sun and Ovid’s treatment of Callisto’s descent from Lycaon), such that “time essentially falls back upon itself in this episode” (42). The sudden tense change in this line, alongside the layered properties of mora, further amplify the troubled chronologies here. 40 On the relationship between external and internal narrators in the Metamorphoses, see Barchiesi (2001: 50–78); Rosati (2002); Nikolopoulos (2004); for the Fasti, Newlands (1995: 51–86). On the specificity of Orpheus’ voice as a metadiegetic narrator, see Barchiesi (2001: 55–62). 41 Here we might press on the narratological implications of perstringo, which in contexts of speaking indicates brief contact with a particular subject (Lewis & Short s.v. II.B.b); we might also consider the significance of the verb crescere as a marker of narrative progression and storytelling immediacy (see n.46). 42 Gardner (2013: 174) identifies Myrrha’s eternal imprisonment as a tree with Kristeva’s “monumental temporality” (though in reference to a separate and much briefer Ovidian treatment of Myrrha at Rem. 99–100). 43 Rosati (2002: 286) notes that the rapid growth of Adonis which follows (nuper erat genitus, modo formosissimus infans,/iam iuvenis, iam vir, Met. 10.522–523) “formulates a commentary on the subject of the swiftness of narrated time, demonstrating authorially how, if need be, the time of the narration too can be accelerated to advantage.” 44 Ursini (2008: 100–1) notes the mathematical centrality of the phrase Silvia fit mater within the episode of Romulus and Remus’ birth – precisely 17 lines precede and follow it. 45 Reed (2016). 46 Note the emphatic repetition of crescere. For Volk (1997), crescere at Fast. 2.1 (cum carmine crescit et anno) participates in forming the impression of “poetic simultaneity” that characterizes the Fasti’s narrative technique; Geue (2010: 109) likewise identifies the verb as programmatic for temporal and poetic progression; Heyworth (2019: 86) calls crescere “a marker of increasing generic elevation.” 47 Heyworth (2019 ad loc.). 48 cf. Ennius Annales 77 Skutsch: certabant urbem Romam Remoramne vocarent (“[Romulus and Remus] were competing over whether they would name the city Roma or Remora”); Reed (2016) points to this moment as a model for Vergilian play with mora and Rome’s foundations, suggesting that “mora is in a sense rejected from the name along with Remus’ authentication of the city” (99).

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49 Commentators puzzle over the precise meaning of these lines, and translators vary quite a bit in their handling of mora; Heyworth 2019: 114 suggests that “the progress through the whole year is evoked by reference to the slower progress (‘lingering’) of the sun against the background of the stars (about four minutes a day), or perhaps to its ‘sojourns’ in the various star signs.” 50 Astronomical usages and interpretations of mora helpfully summarized by Ursini (2008: 194–5). This is the only such usage of mora in the entirety of the Fasti, which feels significant given the frequency of the work’s attention to the movements of the heavens. 51 Pasco-Pranger (2002) explores the political and poetic implications of the Fasti’s larger relationship to the Julio-Claudian calendar, and especially its new holidays; see also King (2006) on the civic calendar as a “medium of male homosocial rivalry” (18). King traces the historical and legendary transitions of the Roman calendar from lunar to lunisolar (Republican and pre-Julian) to solar, demonstrating that the Julian reforms’ dispensation of the need for subjective judgments about intercalation ultimately excluded a number of elite males from participation in civic timekeeping (23–34). 52 The Romans attributed their first set of calendrical reforms to Numa (as Ovid reports at Fast. 3.151–154), who was supposedly responsible for the original expansion to a 12-month system. Caesar’s intervention corrected for the rolling necessity of more than twenty intercalary days per year. See King (2006: 24–6 and 33–4). 53 Note the transition here from lunar to solar units, where the former had been associated with gestational time through formulaic compressions and the recent reaffirmation of Romulus’ calendar as based on lunar cycles (Fast 3.121–124). Silvia’s gestational period (3.43–44) was also uniquely calculated with reference to the solar year.

Works Cited Barchiesi, A. 1991. “Discordant Muses.” PCPhS 37: 1–21. Barchiesi, A. 2001. Edited and translated by Matt Fox and Simone Marchesi. Speaking Volumes: Narrative and Intertext in Ovid and Other Latin Poets. London: Duckworth. Barchiesi, A. 2002. “Narrative Technique and Narratology in the Metamorphoses.” In Philip Hardie, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Ovid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 180–99. Bömer, F. 1957. Die Fasten. Band I: Einleitung, Text, und Übersetzung. Heidelberg: Winter. Debrohun, J. B. 2003. Roman Propertius and the Reinvention of Elegy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Feeney, D. 1999. “Mea Tempora: Patterning of Time in the Metamorphoses.” In Philip Hardie, Alessandro Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds, eds., Ovidian Transformations: Essays on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Its Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society. 13–30. Gardner, H. 2013. Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geue, T. 2010. “Festina Lente: Progress and Delay in Ovid’s Fasti.” Ramus 39: 104–29. Hanses, M. 2016. “Love’s Letters: an Amor-Roma Telestich at Ovid, Ars Amatoria 3.507– 10.” In Phillip Mitsis and Ioannis Ziogas, eds., Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry. Berlin: De Gruyter. 199–211. Hanson, A. E. 1987. “The Eight Months’ Child and the Etiquette of Birth: ‘Obsit Omen!’.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 61: 589–602. Heyworth, S. J. 2019. Ovid: Fasti Book III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hinds, S. 1999. “After Exile: Time and Teleology from Metamorphoses to Ibis.” In Philip Hardie, Alessandro Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds, eds., Ovidian Transformations: Essays on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Its Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society. 48–67. Houghton, L. B. T. 2013. “Ovid, Remedia Amoris 95: verba dat omnis amor.” CQ 63: 447–9.

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Howley, J. 2018. Aulus Gellius and Roman Reading Culture: Text, Presence, and Imperial Knowledge in the Noctes Atticae. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keith, A. 2000. Engendering Rome: Women in Latin Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King, R. J. 2006. Desiring Rome: Male Subjectivity and Reading Ovid’s Fasti. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Klein, F. 2005. “Rursus pomi iactu remorata secundi (Met. X, 671). La mora et la poétique ovidienne de la brièveté.” Dictynna 2. https://doi.org/10.4000/dictynna.133 Kristeva, J. 1981. “Women’s Time.” Translated by Alice Jardine and Harry Blake. Signs 7: 13–35. Lewis, C. T., and C. Short. 1879. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McAuley, M. 2016. Reproducing Rome: Motherhood in Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, and Statius. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, J. F. 2002. “The Fasti: Style, Structure, and Time.” In Barbara Weiden Boyd, ed., Brill’s Companion to Ovid. Leiden: Brill. 167–96. Montevecchi, O. 1979. “Πόσων μηνῶν ἐστιν: P. Oxy. XLVI, 3312.” ZPE 34: 113–17. Nagle, B. R. 1989. “Ovid’s Metamorphoses: A Narratological Catalogue.” SyllClass 1: 97–125. Newlands, C. 1992. “Ovid’s Narrator in the Fasti.” Arethusa 25: 33–54. Newlands, C. 1995. Playing With Time: Ovid and the Fasti. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Nikolopoulos, A. D. 2004. Ovidius Polytropos: Metanarrative in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Hildesheim: Olms. Pasco-Pranger, M. 2002. “Added Days: Calendrical Poetics and the Julio-Claudian Holidays.” In Geraldine Herbert-Brown, ed., Ovid’s Fasti: Historical Readings at Its Bimillenium. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 251–74. Pucci, P. 1978. “Lingering on the Threshold.” Glyph 3: 52–73. Reed, J. 2016. “Mora in the Aeneid.” In Phillip Mitsis and Ioannis Ziogas, eds., Wordplay and Powerplay in Latin Poetry. Berlin: De Gruyter. 87–106. Robinson, M. 2011. A Commentary on Ovid’s Fasti, Book 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosati, G. 2002. “Narrative Techniques and Narrative Structures in the Metamorphoses.” In Barbara Weiden Boyd, ed., Brill’s Companion to Ovid. Leiden: Brill. 271–304. Sissa, G. 2010. “Amor Mora Metamorphosis Roma.” In Mattia De Poli, ed., Maschile e Femminile: Genere ed Eros nel Mondo Greco. Atti del Convegno Università degli Studi di Padova 22–23 ottobre 2009. Padova: SARGON. 7–38. Solodow, J. B. 1988. The World of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Chapel Hill, London: University of North Carolina Press. Spentzou, E. 2009. “Theorizing Ovid.” In Peter E. Knox, ed., A Companion to Ovid. Chichester, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. 381–93. Tarrant, R. J. 2004. P. Ovidi Nasonis Metamorphoses. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ulrich, J. 2021. “Vox omnibus una: A Reassessment of the Feminine Voice in Aeneid 5.” Vergilius 67: 139–60. Ursini, F. 2008. Ovidio, Fasti 3. Commento filologico e critico-interpretativo ai vv. 1–516. Milano: Edizioni SPOLIA. Volk, K. 1997. “Cum carmine crescit et annus: Ovid’s Fasti and the Poetics of Simultaneity.” TAPhA 127: 287–313. Zissos, A., and I. Gildenhard. 1999. “Problems of Time in Metamorphoses 2.” In Philip Hardie, Alessandro Barchiesi, and Stephen Hinds, eds., Ovidian Transformations: Essays on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Its Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society. 31–47.

III

Shaping Time

6

Hieron of Syracuse and the Politics of Epinician Time Nigel Nicholson1

Time has a very distinctive shape in epinician poetry. Almost every ode of any length detours into the distant past; the victor’s victory is narrated alongside and through the description of heroic deeds in order to give it meaning through a relation to these great deeds of the past. Time appears as a “featureless continuum,”2 with epinician emphasizing the layering of different moments upon each other, their analogy, and their connection and similarity, rather than, say, a linear flow or development of actions from past to present.3 This past seems both long ago and alive in the present; the present seems to fulfill the past, to be its focal point, and to renew and continue it in the present. As Peter Rose has noted, the appeal to the heroic past is a significant political gambit; the past is offered as an anchor that can validate the victor and his victory if he can be rendered a “worthy successor to the paradigmatic figures of the past” through an active demonstration of similarity or kinship to them.4 This manipulation of time, this layering of past on present, is often noted. Much more rarely noted is the way that epinician locates its victors in relation to a cyclical time – the regular, recurrent, even impersonal festival time of the Olympics and other festivals.5 This chapter will explore this festival time in the odes composed for Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse from 478–467 BCE, and his associates to celebrate their wins at the Olympics of 476 BCE, and examine how this time was manipulated to set Hieron at the center of the Greek world and advance his radical political vision of a supralocal political order. Hieron sought to identify epinician with his regime in the years immediately following the Persian wars, commissioning many more odes than any other patron and encouraging his associates to commission odes for their own wins. At the same time, he was unusually interested in refiguring space and time as a means to affirming and reinforcing his political position at home and abroad. Eviatar Zerubavel, Vanessa Ogle, and others have emphasized that political interests shaped and motivated how time has been organized in the modern era, and shown that time was organized in ways that furthered specific political, social, and cultural agendas;6 similar work has been done on the reforms made to the Roman calendar by Julius Caesar and Augustus.7 The odes for Hieron and his associates provide us with a glimpse of how one significant powerbroker in the much more decentralized Greek world of the fifth century tried to make time work in his interest. DOI: 10.4324/9781003385387-10

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There was, of course, no comparable level of standardization for time in the ancient world to the modern, but there were some vehicles through which a shared time – a time above and above the myriad local temporalities – was promoted, disseminated, and at least partially imposed on people. One such vehicle was the Olympic Games and, to a lesser extent, the other festivals that attracted competitors, spectators, and other attendees from many Greek cities. Victories at such festivals could make victors famous, and in that sense put them on the Greek map, but that map also had strong, and largely overlooked, temporal dimensions. Victory not only lodged victors in the broader Greek consciousness, but also located them within a shared, centralized Greek temporality. It was this temporality that Hieron sought not only to inhabit but also to make his own. Festival Time As well as being set in relation to the past, the victor’s achievement is set within the cyclical festival time of the Olympics and other festivals. These times were not the same as the local times of the victor’s hometown. There was no centralized Greek calendar; each city-state ran on its own calendar, “as if time were enclosed within their walls,” as Paolo Vivante says so well.8 These local calendars were organized in lunar months of thirty or twenty-nine days, depending on when the new moon fell, but the months had many different names in different cities (and often the same names denoted months that often fell at different times of the year), and the frequent – but non-standardized – intercalations of months that were needed to prevent the lunar calendar from becoming significantly disconnected from the seasons meant that which months were aligned across city-states would change and change back from year to year and even from month to month. In some months, cities would also have made different determinations about when the month started.9 Festivals were tied to the lunar cycle, but there was no standard moment in the lunar cycle for a festival; the month was divided into three phases – the waxing moon, the full moon, and the waning moon – and festivals could occur in all three phases. The Olympics concluded with the day of the full moon (i.e. the following day) in the middle of the month, the Panathenaea took place during the last days of its month, and the Nemean games either began or concluded on the 18th of its month.10 Moreover, some festivals – like the Theban Iolaea or the Aeginetan Delphinia – were annual, some – the Isthmian and Nemean – were biennial, and some – like the Olympic, Pythian and Panathenaic games – were quadrennial.11 Such complexity was of little importance to most people, but to the athletes who competed frequently at a high level – and thus traveled regularly between festival sites – it posed considerable challenges. That the great Theogenes of Thasos was able to accrue well north of a thousand victories in boxing and pancration may have been a remarkable feat of athletics, but it was also a remarkable feat of information gathering and toggling between calendars.12 The larger festivals and the wealthier city-states sought to rise above this confusion by publicizing their celebration in advance in all Greek city-states through envoys or heralds who were dispatched some months in advance.13 This was an

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enormous undertaking, given the number of Greek city-states, and cannot have been something that many city-states could have afforded or thought worth their while, or that the wealthier city-states thought worthwhile for their smaller festivals; perhaps a more local series of announcements to neighboring cities was made for them. Smaller festivals thus likely had few competitors from further afield, which would have both lowered the level of competition and underlined their status as smaller festivals. By contrast, in sending out heralds or envoys to announce their dates, the large festivals set themselves on – or sought to set themselves on – a supralocal calendar, or even perhaps to set up their own civic calendar as a more important, supralocal calendar. One might compare here the various efforts of powerful European nation states to make their own time standard, either for a broader region, or as the grounds against which all other times would be calibrated.14 To be able to impose one’s own time on others was both symbol and demonstration of political power. The date of the Olympic Games was set differently from that of other festivals. It was not, in fact, primarily tied to a local civic calendar – in the fifth century, this would have been the calendar of Elis, the city that administered the games – but to the summer solstice: athletes gathered every four years at Olympia for the onemonth training period on the first full moon after the summer solstice. This meant that the festival fell sometimes in the Elean month of Apollonius and sometimes in its month of Parthenius.15 This does not seem to have been true of the other major festivals, which, like the Panathenaea, seem to have been anchored to the lunar festival calendar of the administering city-state,16 so that this tie to the solar calendar made the Olympics seem to belong to a more universal time than the local festivals (as well as, perhaps, framing official decisions as less self-interested than at other festivals). Indeed, the four-yearly proclamation of the Olympics could have provided a mechanism through which the local intercalations of months and days by civic officials could be reviewed and corrected. The Olympic festival was the closest the Greek city-states had to a shared festival event that imposed itself on all the local calendars, both because it was concertedly publicized around the Greek world and because it correlated with – and was known to be correlated with – the summer solstice. Epinician locates its athletes – both Olympic and other victors – within these cyclical festival times. Pindar’s Olympian 4 opens with the poet declaring that Zeus’ “circling Horae” (the goddesses of the seasons, Ὧραι . . . ἑλισσόμεναί, 1–2) have sent him to bear witness to the Olympics, while the opening of Nemean 3 sets the ode or Aegina itself in relation to the “Nemean holy month” (ἐν ἱερομηνίᾳ Νεμεάδι, 2).17 Often the dates are very specific. Bacchylides 7, also for an Olympic victor, opens with an invocation to the final day of the Olympics, “the sixteenth day of the fifty months” (πεντήκοντα μηνῶν ἁμέραν/ἑκκαιδεκάταν, 2–3) – fifty months represents the number of lunar months between each Olympics).18 In describing a victor’s past victories in the Theban Iolaea (also known as the Heraclaea), Pindar makes it explicit that the pancratium, “the endpoint of the annual contests” (ἐτείων τέρμ᾽ ἀέθλων, Is. 4.67), takes place “on the second day” of the festival (δεύτερον ἆμαρ, Is. 4.67). Tellingly, though, in an ode for an Aeginetan, the Aeginetan Delphinia

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is described by reference to “the local month that Apollo loves” (μείς τ᾽ ἐπιχώριος, ὃν φίλησ᾽ Ἀπόλλων, Nemean 5.45); smaller festivals remain firmly anchored to and identified with their local calendars.19 Even here, however, the emphasis on the particular time of the games serves to mark the victor as someone who can move between times, someone who is not caught within the temporal constraints of his hometown but who operates on a temporal plane above and beyond the city-state. (Olympic) Festival Time in Hieron’s Epinicians Hieron, the ruler of Syracuse and much of Sicily from 478–467 BCE, utilized this element of epinician temporality as part of his larger efforts to set himself at the center of the Greek world and promote a vision of that world where not just time but also people and power were not “enclosed within [a city’s] walls.” Hieron identified himself closely with the genre of epinician, binding it tightly to his rule from early in his reign right up to his death. He was not the first Sicilian victor or even the first Sicilian ruler to commission an epinician ode, but, starting after his second Pythian horse race victory in 478 BCE, he generated epinicians at an unparalleled rate, commissioning seven odes in total, from both Pindar and Bacchylides, and celebrating at least four different victories, with pairs of odes from Pindar and Bacchylides celebrating the same victory on at least two occasions. In addition, his associates and allies were also prolific patrons of Pindaric epinician, commissioning seven or more further odes.20 The Olympic Games of 476 BCE were a key platform for this epinician onslaught. These were the first games after the Persian wars, and there is some suggestion that some mainland leaders sought to frame the Sicilian Greeks, who took no part in the Persian war, as somehow not belonging at the Games. Themistocles, the great Athenian general central to the victory, is said to have called upon the assembled crowds to pull down the pavilions that Hieron had set up to house himself and his delegation, and provide space for entertaining guests, during the festival.21 This story may be a fabrication, but the successes of Athens, Sparta, Aegina, and others in the Persian wars certainly provided a good opportunity to marginalize the Sicilian Greeks.22 Unfortunately for these cities, Hieron and the cities associated with him responded with an impressive victory haul, making clear not only that the these cities belonged at Olympia, but that they merited a privileged place there. Hieron himself won the horse race; Theron of Acragas, who would very soon (certainly before the victory was commemorated in epinician) recognize Hieron’s overlordship if he had not already, won the chariot race; two boxers from Epizephyrian Locri, a city on the toe of Italy that was firmly within Hieron’s sphere of influence, won the open and the boys’ boxing; an otherwise unknown Syracusan won the hoplite race; and another Syracusan, Hagesias, may even have won his mule-cart victory in that year, though it is usually dated to 472 BCE or 468 BCE.23 Five or six of the fifteen available crowns were claimed by Hieron and competitors from his orbit; Themistocles won nothing (and may not have been competing), and neither did any other Athenian. Winning events was not enough; Hieron also set his stamp on the genre of epinician itself. He himself commissioned two odes to celebrate his horse win, one from

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Pindar and one from Bacchylides. Theron commissioned two odes from Pindar, as did Archestratus of Epizephyrian Locri, the father of the victorious boy boxer, and, if Hagesias’ victory dates to 476 BCE, his Pindaric ode also records a victory in that festival.24 Each of these secondary productions – those for Theron, Archestratus, and Hagesias – advertise their patrons affiliation with Hieron through shared themes and images, and, in the case of Hagesias’ ode, explicitly naming Hieron.25 Simply by virtue of their extraordinary density, these odes tightly bound Hieron and his associates to the Olympic festival – the festival of 476 BCE and the Olympics in general – but we also find the ritual time of the festival emphasized, with two of the odes describing the presence of the full moon at the festival. In Olympian 3, one of the odes for Theron, the conclusion of the first Olympic festival is described as the moment when “the month-dividing moon with its gold chariot had during the evening lit up its whole eye in return to [Heracles]” (a “month-dividing moon” is a full moon; διχόμηνις ὅλον χρυσάρματος,/ἑσπέρας ὀφθαλμὸν ἀντέφλεξε Μήνα, 19–20), while, when the first games are described in Olympian 10, one of the odes for Archestratus’ son Hagesidamus, their conclusion is marked by “the lovely light of the fair-faced moon” – by implication, the full moon – “lighting up the evening” (ἐν δ’ ἕσπερον/ἔφλεξεν εὐώπιδος/σελάνας ἐρατὸν φάος, 73–75). The claim to festival time is thus particularly explicit in these odes, but it is crucial that the festival time claimed is Olympic festival time, which had a claim to being the shared, centralized Hellenic time because, as noted previously, it was widely publicized and itself operated beyond Elean time, being correlated with the summer solstice. These west-Greek victors, these odes proclaim, belong within this this special, supralocal Olympic time, and, like this Olympic time, operate above and beyond their local city-state contexts. The Olympics offer not just the most glittering prize of all, but also a ritual temporality on a different level to the other festival sites. Further, the festival time these odes claim for the west-Greek victors is not just the horizontal, cyclical time through which the date of new festivals is determined, but also a version of a vertical, historical time. Olympians 3 and 10 also stress that the festival is quadrennial or “penteteric” (Ol. 3.21, 10.57), and this points to a second way in which the claim to Olympia represents a claim to transcend the local. The Olympic festival also organized time vertically, back and forward through the years with punctuations every fourth year, as well as horizontally, across each year. Olympiads were not yet being used to mark historical events at this point,26 and there is considerable doubt about what records were kept in this period, the first half of the fifth century.27 On balance, it seems that some victor lists were kept and thus that Pindar’s claim about the first games occurred in a context where victor lists were made; it is likely that archon lists were kept at Athens by 500 and we seem to have victor lists from Sparta dating to around the same time, and victor lists would have aided in Elis’ self-representation as the bureaucratic authority at Olympia.28 What we do know, however, is that whether there were some records or no records, good records or bad records, records just for recent games or records that purported to reach back further, Hieron’s epinician onslaught of 476 BCE represented the victor lists as stable, shared knowledge.

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When Pindar describes the foundation of Olympia in Olympian 10, he says that Time, “who alone proves precise truth,” was present, and describes Time as declaring the full details of the foundation and the first Olympic Games:29 ταύτᾳ δ’ ἐν πρωτογόνῳ τελετᾷ παρέσταν μὲν ἄρα Μοῖραι σχεδόν ὅ τ’ ἐξελέγχων μόνος ἀλάθειαν ἐτήτυμον Χρόνος. τὸ δὲ σαφανὲς ἰὼν πόρσω κατέφρασεν, ὁπᾷ τὰν πολέμοιο δόσιν ἀκρόθινα διελὼν ἔθυε καὶ πενταετηρίδ’ ὅπως ἄρα ἔστασεν ἑορτὰν σὺν Ὀλυμπιάδι πρώτᾳ νικαφορίαισί τε· In this firstborn rite the Fates stood close by and he who alone proves precise truth, Time. Going forward he declared the clear truth, how [Heracles] divided out the gift of war, the first fruits, and sacrificed it and how he founded a quadrennial festival with the first Olympiad and with its victories. (Pindar, Olympian 10.51–59) Pindar continues by asking who the victors were in this first contest (“Who then won the new crown with hands, feet and chariot . . .?,” τίς δὴ ποταίνιον/ἔλαχε στέφανον/χείρεσσι ποσίν τε καὶ ἅρματι, 60–61), and then lists all six of the original victors: Oeonus of Midea, son of Licymnius, in the sprint; Echemus of Tegea in the wrestling; Doryclus of Tiryns in the boxing; Samus of Mantinea, son of Halirothius, in the chariot race; Phrastor in the javelin; and Niceus in the discus (64–72). This list is clearly part of the “clear truth” that Time declared (the first Olympiad’s victories are included in the list of what Time declares), and, as Maria Pavlou sharply observes, the poet represents this information as information that he has no need for a Muse to supply.30 Pavlou suggests that this means that there were victory lists kept at Olympia. This highly ideological moment cannot, however, cannot be taken as simple evidence of Elean practice (and, of course, Hippias’ account of the first games was very different, placing only one event in the first Olympics, so it would be a surprise if Pindar’s list was widely recognized as standard),31 but we can say that this moment represents this victor information as standard, uncontroversial, and widely available. The details of the victors on Pindar’s list are important: the victors are an international group, at least by the standards of these early days. The cities of four of the victors are given, and all are different. The victor list thus agglomerates in one list victories that were important to a variety of different city-states. This panhellenic

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reach, the fact that the victor lists were not the lists of individual city-states, was precisely the attraction of the Olympiad dating system to later chronographers,32 but we find it here paraded and manipulated in the 470s BCE by Pindar’s ode. Pindar sets up the Olympic victor lists as a shared, centralized historical record for the whole Greek world, and it is this shared, centralized historical record into which the Hieron and his associates insert themselves by virtue of their victories at Olympia. Owning Olympic Time The claim made to Olympic time by these odes is not, however, merely a claim to participation or belonging in the time; the odes attempt a much more radical appropriation of this time by locating the west-Greek Hieron and his associates at its center and framing their wins as pivotal moments in the Olympic story, the point when the past of Olympia finds its fulfillment in the present. Hieron and his associates become the heirs to Olympia’s past, the owners of a special connection to the shared time – whether the past or the recurrent calendar – that Olympia represents. To articulate this argument, we need first to revisit in more detail the nature of the relationship between past and present that epinician articulates. As noted in the introduction to this chapter, epinician is well known for layering the past upon present, rendering time as a “featureless continuum,”33 rather than a linear sequence of events. What counts as the victor’s past should be surprising, however: it is not always, or even typically, the past of the victor’s ancestors, and thus the heroes of the epinician past are not necessarily genealogically connected to the victor. The events and actors of the distant past do not represent the reason for the present so much as demonstrate its principles or significance. Past and present are still genuinely connected in epinician’s vision; the shared significance represents a substantial connection between the victor and the past figure, a connection which the victor has created through his active demonstration of excellence. This is true even when there is a genealogical connection: the genealogical connection is only the start; what matters is that the victor through his victory has fulfilled the promise of his ancestry and made that connection more meaningful through his actions. What can count as the victor’s past in epinician is thus more expansive than his family or familial connections. Certainly, a regular connection is genealogical, or at least represented as such in epinician’s telling: Hagesias, the mule-cart victor, is said in Pindar’s Olympian 6 to be directly descended from Iamus, the eponymous ancestor of the Iamids who is said to have established the oracle of Zeus at Olympia, and Olympian 2 claims Oedipus and Thersander as ancestors for Theron of Acragas.34 But far from all connections are of this sort. Another set of links is provided by the victor’s hometown; past heroes from the city with no ancestral relation to the victor can be brought into relation with the victor. Thus, what links Aristocleidas in Pindar’s Nemean 3 to Peleus, Telamon and Achilles is not a shared family but a shared land: “the land, where the Myrmidons formerly/ dwelled” (χώρας . . . Μυρμιδόνες ἵνα πρότεροι/ᾤκησαν, Ne. 3.13–14).35 Both these kinds of connections have a causal component – the victor is the way he is by

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virtue of being born into this family or that city – but the causal component is certainly weaker in this second group. Moreover, other kinds of connection lack any kind of causal relations. Sometimes the connection is simply one of likeness, and proclaimed to be simply one of likeness. Victor and hero can both exemplify a theme – the amazing things gods bring about in Pindar’s Pythian 10, or the importance of immortalizing achievement in poetry in Isthmian 4 – or a fine saying: “Hagesias, that eulogy suits you, which justly/from his tongue Adrastus over the seer son of Oecles, Amphiaraus,/spoke . . .” (Ἁγησία, τὶν δ’ αἶνος ἑτοῖμος, ὃν ἐν δίκᾳ/ἀπὸ γλώσσας Ἄδραστος μάντιν Οἰκλείδαν ποτ’ ἐς Ἀμφιάρηον/φθέγξατ’, Pi. Ol. 6.12–14).36 The meaning of a present action thus may be captured by – and represented in terms of – an ancestral origin, but it does not need to be; the past offers paradigms before it offers causal connections. Indeed, in several cases, it is clear that Pindar preferred to link the victor to heroes with no genealogical connection when heroic ancestors were available,37 or omitted to mention a genealogical connection between hero and victor in favor of emphasizing relations of likeness.38 Again, it would be a mistake to think that these relations of likeness are less substantial than the ancestral connections; the likeness is, in fact, the more substantial connection, supervening on and making meaningful any ancestral relation. Through his deeds, the victor establishes himself as the fulfillment of this past moment, the point where it finds form in the present. More than a genealogical connection, these likenesses expose the real order of things; they are not less intimate or less real, not just figures of speech, but revelations of substance. This may seem a strange way to think about the past, but it is central to the work that epinician does; epinician, in fact, provided a vehicle for claiming a past that we might think was not someone’s to claim, and we can see that with Hieron’s odes in 476 BCE. The past that these odes claim for their victors is the past of the Olympic festival itself. Hieron’s ode narrates the chariot race of Pelops against Oenomaus and describes the establishment of Pelops’ cult at Olympia; one of Archestratus’ odes tells how Heracles marked out the sacred spaces of Olympia and established the festival, and then includes the first slate of winners; and one of Theron’s odes tells how Heracles secured olive trees for Olympia so that the victors could be crowned with their leaves.39 Hagesias’ ode, which, as noted previously, may actually date to 476 BCE also, continues this focus on Olympia, narrating (perhaps for the first time, and perhaps with considerable embellishment)40 the story of how one of Hagesias’ ancestors, Iamus, came to establish the oracle of Zeus at Olympia when Heracles founded the Games.41 Narratives about Olympia’s past should strike us as unusual if not unique for epinician; while the foundation of the Nemean games and the Adrastea in Sicyon are narrated in other odes, no other ode for an Olympian victor tells the past of Olympia.42 Yet in the odes for the victories of Hieron and his associates at the games of 476 BCE, we find three or four such narratives. Olympia’s past is the past that these odes offer for their victors. Olympia’s beginnings are thus not just a convenient subject for an Olympic victor, but the special past of that victor, a past specially fitted to the victor – just as Oedipus and Thersander are part of the special past of Theron in Pindar’s Olympian 2, or as Achilles and Peleus are part of the special past of Aeginetan victors

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in the various Aeginetan odes, or the colonization of Rhodes is part of Diagoras’ special past in Olympian 7. In the odes celebrating the 476 BCE Olympics, Hieron and his associates could have been linked simply to ancestral traditions (as Theron is in Olympian 2) or to local traditions (for example, about Heracles),43 but they are marked instead as specially connected to Olympia; they are rendered the fulfillment of these Olympic foundation moments, the point where the deeds of Olympia’s past find form in the present. The collapse of difference between Syracuse and Olympia is caught by the swift movement from one to the other in Pindar’s ode for Hieron: “the Syracusan king who delights in horses; his glory shines/in the wellmanned colony of Lydian Pelops” (Συρακόσιον ἱπποχάρμαν βασιλῆα. λάμπει δὲ οἱ κλέος/ἐν εὐάνορι Λυδοῦ Πέλοπος ἀποικίᾳ, 23–24). It takes a moment to realize that this “colony” is not Syracuse, but Olympia – but rather than pulling the two cities apart, we should let the walls between them come down. The story of Olympia’s colonization is, in fact, the story of Hieron’s Syracuse. This appropriation of the Olympic past by Hieron and his associates can be understood in terms of both present space and present time. First, it serves as a claim to the physical space of Olympia, a particular right to be present and compete in this shared, Hellenic venue, to make sacrifices and offerings there, to put their stamp on the place with large, space-defining monumental dedications, whether treasuries, chariot groups, or temporary pavilions (a claim to which their many important dedications provided concrete testament).44 Second, Hieron and his people stake a particular claim to Olympia’s transcendent temporalities: its shared historical record that tabulated and would continue to tabulate the various Olympic victors from different city-states as the years passed, and its supralocal festival time rooted in the summer solstice and advertised across the Greek world. Hieron and his associates – Hieron above all – are defined not just as people who operate beyond the confines of individual cities, but as central, defining figures in Olympia’s supralocal order. They become a hub, a fixed point among the multiplicity of calendars, the multiplicity of office lists, and the multiplicity of pasts – the privileged moment when a shared festival calendar and shared historical record converged. This thesis may seem exorbitant, but the claim to times that operated above the city-state or that applied to all city-states aligns easily with the Hieronian vision of the city-state more generally, a vision that was itself exorbitant. Hieron and Gelon – his brother and predecessor as tyrant of Syracuse – had little respect for the walls of individual cities, whether literally or figuratively; the city was secondary to the imperial block, the territory, or the larger population. The two leaders regularly expanded and contracted their cities, depopulating and repopulating them, radically reducing or destroying some (Camarina, Euboea, and Megara Hyblaea) while reorganizing and developing others (Naxos, Leontini, Aetna, Syracuse).45 Under Gelon and Hieron the various coinages in Sicily and the toe of Italy moved toward a single standard, that of Syracuse, the result of a mix of direct intervention and the indirect pressure of the success of Syracuse’s massive issues; the unification of standards over and above the individual cities was symbolized by the broad adoption of the famous four-horse chariot emblem of the Syracusan tetradrachms, or variations on the design (such as the mule-cart on the issues of Rhegium and

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Messene).46 Individuals within the regime paraded multiple civic affiliations: Hieron himself is of Aetna in one ode that celebrates his Pythian chariot win, and of Syracuse in the other; a military captain, Chromius, is of Syracuse and Aetna and Sicily; while in an Olympic dedication, another captain, Praxiteles, declares himself as Syracusan, Camarinaean, and a former resident of Mantinea, and uses letter forms that seem to undermine the idea of stable local ethnic identities.47 Richard Neer and Leslie Kurke argue that Hieron actively sought to redefine the boundaries and relations of contemporary space and build an “imaginary world system” that was “explicitly suprapolitical and transregional,” no longer framed by traditional spatial boundaries, but organized by kinship, shared mythical connections, travel and pilgrimage routes, and above all, the power of the Hieron and Gelon themselves.48 Such a system was symbolized by Olympia, a shared space with a shared time where the fluidity and even inadequacy of city affiliation were put on display. Hieron’s appropriation of Olympic temporality was thus only one part – the temporal version – of his larger efforts to reimagine and supersede the city-state. Conclusion The sequence of epinician odes commissioned by Hieron and his supporters for victories at the Olympics of 476 BCE display a very different level of temporal manipulation to what we see in the other odes. A typical ode will bring past and present into contact in order to elevate and enhance the victor’s standing and situate its victor in the more sacred, less local time of the contest, but here Hieron and Pindar have leveraged the possibilities of epinician temporality for a much more ambitious project. The unparalleled combination of three (or maybe four) interlinked odes for three (or four) west-Greek victors at the Olympics of 476 BCE combine to stake an intense and intimate claim not just to a festival time, but to the festival time of the Olympics specifically – a more privileged festival time because of its broad reach and links to the summer solstice rather than the local Elean calendar, and because of the importance of the Olympic historical record that tabulated victors from potentially any city-state. This claim to belong to a supralocal time, a time above and beyond the individual city-state where Hieron and his associates represented a fixed point among the multiplicity of calendars and office lists, was part of a much larger political project that made Olympia its symbol: the imagination and advancement of a supralocal, supra-polis political order, with Hieron as its driver and epicenter. In his exploration of the ambitious efforts of the French Republic of the 1790s to remake the temporal order, and quantitative order in general, Eviatar Zerubavel also considers how durable these efforts proved.49 While the change to a metric system of weights and measures survived, the root-and-branch reforms to the calendar proved far too disruptive of traditions and routines, and were walked back thirteen years later. A similar pattern can be seen with the ambitious efforts of Hieron and Gelon to rethink and remake the spatio-temporal order of their world. The more unified system of coinage, including their four-horse chariot emblem, survived the fall of their regime, which happened soon after Hieron’s death (from natural

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causes), but the old city-state order reasserted itself through a period of civil war. We can assume that Hieron’s efforts to place himself and his elite west-Greek associates at the center of Olympia, while it left some impressive physical monuments at Olympia and spawned the odd imitator, was – after his death – easily ignored.50 The ownership and control of time for political ends would, however, continue to be a major preoccupation of Sicilian tyrants. Plutarch tells us of a “conspicuous and high sundial” that Dionysius I or Dionysius II had set up in the fourth century BCE in the Achradina district of Syracuse51 (civic sundials were a fourth-century BCE technology).52 Much as Hieron sought to proclaim his power by setting himself up through epinician as a fixed point among the many local temporalities, this sundial proclaimed the later dynasty’s power by demonstrating its control of time on the level of the neighborhood.53 Dion, the uncle by marriage of Dionysius II, well understood the meaning of this sundial. When he sought to depose Dionysius II in the 350s BCE, he used the sundial as a platform from which to harangue the citizens of Syracuse and exhort them to “take hold of liberty.” Notes 1 My thanks go to the editors and other participants in the Ancient Temporalities Conference at Wellesley in 2021 for their comments on this chapter and for a highly productive conference. 2 Csapo and Miller (1998: 98). 3 Vivante (1972); D’Alessio (2005); Grethlein (2010); Pavlou (2012); and see also Bakhtin (1981: 18–19). For a narratological analysis, see Nünlist (2007) and also Hamilton (1974: 14–15, 56–88). 4 Rose (1992: 172). Pavlou (2012: 103–5) emphasizes that the present does not repeat the past as part of a regular cycle of recurrence, but through the active efforts of the victor. Cf. also Thomas (1989: 100–8) and Csapo and Miller (1998: 97–100) who label this temporality aristocratic, but see also (Clarke 2008: 12–13). 5 Vivante (1972: 108–9) is an exception. 6 Zerubavel (1977, 1987: 347–53); Ogle (2015). 7 Wallace-Hadrill (2005: 58–62); Feeney (2007: 138–211). 8 Vivante (1972: 128); also Feeney (2007: 16–18, 195–6). 9 Clarke (2008: 7–27); Hannah (2013: 354–8); also Mikalson (1975: 1–24), cf. Hannah (2009: 59–62). 10 For the Olympics, see Lee (1991: 46–8, 2001). The date of the Panathenaea was tied to the Athenian month of Hecatombaeon; Mikalson (1975: 34, 197–9); Shear (2021: 1–6. Mikalson also seeks to date other Attic festivals, some of which had athletic contests; see also Shear (2021: 324–33). Schol. ad Pi. Ne. hyp. d, e states that the Nemean games occurred on the 18th of a month called Panemos. This was presumably an Argive month, and must represent a new date – in the name of the month rather than the day of the month on which it happened – from the date the games bore prior to the late fifth century, when they were under Cleonae’s control. The Pythian games, at least at one point c.500, fell in the same month as the Panathenaea, as Pi. Ol. 13.37–9 makes clear. 11 For the penteteric constitution of the Great Panathenaea in the first half of the sixth century, see Shear (2021: 5–6). 12 Pleket (2010: 168 [originally 1974]) speaks of Theogenes winning on average “a victory a week.” This conjures up ideas of weekends being the obvious setting for games, with athletes traveling between contests during the week. But there was no week to corral these contests; the days on which they occurred were scattered without order throughout the month.

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13 Miller (2004: 115, 130, cf.219–20); Kyle (2015: 112, 139, 151). 14 Cf. Zerubavel (1977); Ogle (2015, especially 20–46). 15 Miller (1975); Lee (1991: 47); Kyle (2015: 111). Schol. ad Pi. Ol. 3.35g. This represents an interesting balancing act for the Eleans. As Scott (2010: 32–40, 154–62) shows, the Eleans sought to exert their administrative authority over Olympia and the Olympics in the latter half of the sixth century; that they did not anchor the date to the Elean calendar shows that they considered this a successful way of claiming the calendric time of other city-states (and did not identify it with Pisa). 16 Schol. ad Pi. Ne. hyp. d, e states that Nemea occurred on the 18th of a month called Panemos. This was presumably an Argive month, and must represent a new date – in the name of the month rather than the day of the month on which it happened – from the date the games bore prior to the late fifth century, when they were under Cleonae’s control. The date of the Panathenaea was tied to the Athenian month of Hecatombaeon; Mikalson (1975: 34, 197–9); Shear (2021: 1–6). The Pythian games, at least at one point c.500, fell in the same month as the Panathenaea, as Pi. Ol. 13.37–9 makes clear. 17 Pfeijffer (1999: 245) suggests that the ode was performed a year after the victory, “in the Nemean season,” while Eckerman (2014) suggests it may be Aegina itself that receives many guests in the Nemean month. 18 As Lee (1991) shows, while some Olympics were separated by fifty months, astronomical tables establish that there were actually forty-nine months between the Olympics of 456 BCE and 452 BCE, the date of the victory celebrated in Bacch. 7; see the table in Miller (1975). Likely, as Lee argues, Bacchylides is counting inclusively or simply speaking in general terms. 19 On this cryptic passage and the Aeginetan Delphinia, see Pfeijffer (1999: 173–5), Fearn (2011: 188–90), and Polinskaya (2013: 219–24). We should be skeptical of the scholiast’s claim, accepted by Fearn, that the passage implies that the relevant Nemean games happened during the Aeginetan month of Delphinius; it is no more than a conjecture. Fearn further proposes that Aeginetan elites were seeking to link local festival time with the Panhellenic calendar by linking their contest to the Nemean games; this would involve, however, complete cession of control over intercalation to Cleonae, a much smaller city-state. What we see here, rather, is the poet placing the victor in panhellenic time as well as in the more parochial time of Aegina. At Pi. Py. 8.79–80, Pindar describes the Aeginetan contest of Hera as “local” (ἐπιχώριος) to distinguish it from the much more important Argive Heraea. 20 Hieron: Pi. Ol. 1, Py. 1–3, Bacch. 3–5; Archestratus: Pi. Ol. 10–11. Hagesias: Pi. Ol. 6; Chromius: Pi. Ne. 1, 9. Theron: Pi. Ol. 2–3. It seems preferable to date Theron’s commissions after the reconciliation with Hieron, which involved recognizing his seniority. Bonanno (2010: 109–10) suggests that Ol. 2 dates prior to the reconciliation and Ol. 3 after; for the sake of this argument, the date of Ol. 2 is less important, as that ode makes no claims to an Olympic past. Pi. Is. 2 is usually dated to the period of Hieron’s more direct control of Acragas, and I have argued that this is true for Pi. Ol. 12 also, but either way, the number of odes collecting around Hieron is far beyond anything we see elsewhere without these additions. See further Morgan (2015: 72–3, 88–93); Nicholson (2016: 123–34, 180–96, 241–2, 237–61). The occasion of Pi. Py. 2 is, extraordinarily, unclear. I find the argument of Young (1983: 42–8) that the ode celebrates the Olympic chariot win of 468 BCE persuasive. I have also argued that Psaumis, patron of Pi. Ol. 4 and [Pi.] Ol. 5, was a Deinomenid captain, but the odes date well after Hieron’s death, and his regime’s collapse; see Nicholson (2011). 21 Plut. Them. 25.1; cf. Aelian VH 9.5. 22 Morgan (2015: 138–9). 23 The victors in 476 BCE for all events except the mule-cart and the kalpe, a kind of horse race, are recorded in a victor list discovered at Oxyrhynchus; see Christesen (2007: 202– 6, 382–4, 480). For the relations of Hieron and Theron, cf. Bonanno (2010: 109–10) and

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27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

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36 37

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n.20 in this chapter. Hagesias’ victory is usually dated to 472 BCE or 468 BCE on the basis of the reference to Aetnaean Zeus, which is often tied closely to the foundation of Aetna in 476 or 475 BCE (e.g. Morgan 2015: 359–61), but as Luraghi (1997: 74) points out, 476 BCE cannot be excluded. Luraghi (1994: 339–41) shows that Hieron likely established the cult on the slopes of Etna prior to his foundation of Aetna. Hieron: Pi. Ol. 1, Bacch. 5; Theron: Pi. Ol. 2–3; Archestratus (and his son Hagesidamus): Pi. Ol. 10–11; Hagesias: Pi. Ol. 6. Nicholson (2016: 123–34). On the development of the Olympiadic dating system through which Olympiads were used to date other events, see Clarke (2008: 64–168), Christesen (2007: 277–89), and Feeney (2007: 16–19). There are seeds of the idea as early as Thuc. 3.8.1, 5.49.1, although Thucydides only reaches for Olympiads when the event in question actually happened at the Olympics; cf. Christesen (2007: 472–3). Thomas (1989: 287–8) doubts that records were kept, but Christesen (2007: 76–146) argues from his exhaustive study that inscribed victor lists were publicly posted at Olympia as early as the first half of the sixth century, although some would have been lost. For the date of the Athenian archon lists, see Thomas (1989: 287–8); Clarke (2008: 20–1). For Elis’ assertion of control at Olympia, through decrees as well as buildings, in the second half of the sixth century, see Scott (2010: 32–40, 154–62). On this complicated passage, see especially Kromer (1976). Pavlou (2012: 105–6). Golden (1998: 43–5). Feeney (2007: 85) and Clarke (2008: 66–7, 86–7, 109–21). Csapo and Miller (1998: 98). Pi. Ol. 6.71–81 (with Flower 2008; Foster 2017: 108–35); Pi. Ol. 2.43–7 (with Grethlein 2010: 24–33). Argeius of Ceos is descended from Euxantius, son of Minos (Bacch. 1.140, with Bernardini 2000: 142); Aristagoras of Tenedos from Pisander and Melanippus (Pi. Ne. 11.33–7, with Thomas 1989: 106); and Arcesilas of Cyrene, from Euphemus the Argonaut (Py. 4.38–65, with Nünlist 2007: 234n.4; Pavlou 2012: 98–101). Cf. also Pindar Ne. 6.45–7, Pi. Ne. 10.49–54 and Is. 1.12–14. Burnett (2005: 25–6) describes how the Aeginetan patrons of Pindar’s odes claimed to be “spiritual heirs to Homer’s most notorious heroes,” but did not claim descent from them. The family of Achilles and Ajax was seen as having originated in Aegina, but also having left the island. Cf. Pi. Ol. 4.18–20, Py. 6.19–23, Py. 8.38–56. Pi. Is. 4.31–60 utilizes Ajax and Heracles, when the victor is related to the Labdacids; cf. Is. 3.17. Similarly, while Pi. Ol. 2.35–47 cites Oedipus’ family, which is bound to the victor by ancestry, Pi. Py. 6.19–46, for the victor’s brother, speaks instead of Nestor and Antilochus. As ancestral rulers of Ialysus, Diagoras’ family likely claimed a connection to Ialysus, one of the grandsons of Rhodes whose inheritance of the island is described in Pi. Ol. 7.71–6, but any such link is left unsaid; see Cairns (2005: 64–5, 78). Pi. Ol. 1.23–96, 10.43–77, 3.6–38. Cf. Flower (2008). Pi. Ol. 6.27–70. Nemean games: Bacch. 9.10–20, 13.44–57; Adrastaea: Pi. Ne. 9.8–17. Various of Heracles’ exploits were located or locatable in Sicily and Italy; cf. Pi. Ol. 10.15–6 (Cycnus), Pi. Ne. 1.67–9 (fighting the giants on the Phlegraean plain), Pi. Ol. 12 (which speaks of the springs of Himera without mention of Heracles, although one story had him creating them). See further Nicholson (2016: 128–31, 258–60), and Lewis (2020: 84–94, 132–5, 231–3). Cf. also Pi. Py. 1.15–28 (Typhos under Etna) and the local mythology preserved in the poetry of Simonides and Aeschylus; see Dougherty (1993: 85–93), Morgan (2015: 95–105), and Lewis (2020: 79–80, 166–71). Note also that Hieron’s family feature in some stories around the cult of Demeter; cf. Lewis (2020: 73–136).

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44 The scale of Deinomenid dedications was unprecedented. Gelon and Hieron dedicated a new treasury for Syracuse and significantly renovated the old treasury of Gela; each dedicated a victory statue consisting of a full-scale chariot. See Kurke and Neer (2019: 223–35, 240–54) and also (Morgan 2015: 30–45, 73–80), although Morgan dates the renovation of the Geloan treasury earlier. Their associates dedicated a variety of statues, including that of Phormis which became a famous landmark because it disturbed horses (Paus. 5.27.1–4). Some of these, either individually or in groups, must have particularly imposed themselves on foot traffic (Smith 2007: 99; Scott 2010: 177). 45 Morgan (2015: 46–69); Amara (2020: 223–35); Frasca (2020); Mignosa (2020). For the history of this period, see Funke (2006: 161–8); Nicholson (2016: 85–98). 46 Nicholson (2016: 144–7). 47 Hieron: Pi. Py. 1.29–33, Bacch. 4.1–3; Chromius: Pi. Ne. 1.1–6, 13–15, Ne. 9.1–3; Praxiteles: CEG 380, with Kurke and Neer (2019: 226–34). 48 Kurke and Neer (2019: 223). More generally: Kurke and Neer (2019: 221–76); also Foster (2013, 2017: 108–35); Morgan (2015: 52–61, 359–412); Lewis (2020: 49–63, 79–84, 116–36, 171–8). 49 Zerubavel (1977). 50 The most important imitator was Arcesilas of Cyrene, who left his mark on Delphi as the subject of two magnificent odes for his chariot win of 462 (Pi. Py. 4 and 5), and the dedicator of several monuments. See Kurke and Neer (2019: 184–8) and Pi. Py. 5.34–42, with Nicholson (2005: 44). 51 Plut. Dion 29. It was probably one of several set up by the dynasty; Pliny NH 7.60 reports that one was taken from Catane to Rome as spoils during the first Punic War (where it, of course, would not have worked). 52 Hannah (2009: 73–4, 2013: 351). 53 The later Hieron, Hieron II, also used this sundial as a sign of his power, copying it in the ceiling of a library in a remarkable ship that he presented to Ptolemy III; see Athenaeus 5.207e.

Works Cited Amara, Giulio. 2020. “Quanti templi per la vittoria di Himera? Nuove evidenze dall’Athenaion di Siracusa.” In Melanie Jonasch, ed., The Fight for Greek Sicily: Society, Politics, and Landscape. Oxford: Oxbow Books. 213–41. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. and Trans. Michael Holquist and Carol Emerson. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bernardini, Paola. 2000. “La lode di Argeo di Ceo e del padre Pantide nell’ Epinicio 1 di Bacchilide.” In Andrea Bagordo and Bernhard Zimmermann, eds., Bakchylides: 100 Jahre nach seiner Wiederentdeckung. Munich: C H Beck. 131–46. Bonanno, Daniela. 2010. Ierone Il Dinomenide: Storia e Rappresentazione. Kokalos Suppl. 21. Pisa: Fabrizio Serra. Burnett, Anne Pippin. 2005. Pindar’s Songs for Young Athletes of Aigina. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cairns, Francis 2005. “Pindar Olympian 7: Rhodes, Athens, and the Diagorids.” Eikasmos 16: 63–91. Christesen, Paul. 2007. Olympic Victor Lists and Ancient Greek History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clarke, Katherine. 2008. Making Time for the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Csapo, Eric, and Margaret Miller. 1998. “Democracy, Empire and Art: Towards a Politics of Time and Narrative.” In Deborah Boedeker and Kurt Raaflaub, eds., Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-Century Athens. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 87–125.

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D’Alessio, Giovan Battista. 2005. “Ordered from the Catalogue: Pindar, Bacchylides, and Hesiodic Genealogical Poetry.” In Richard Hunter, ed., The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Constructions and Reconstructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 217–38. Dougherty, Carol. 1993. The Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Archaic Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eckerman, Chris. 2014. “On the Performance of Pindar’s Nemean 3.” Mnemosyne 67: 289–92. Fearn, David. 2011. “Aeginetan Epinician Culture: Naming, Ritual, and Politics.” In David Fearn, ed., Aegina: Contexts for Choral Lyric Poetry. Myth, History, and Identity in the Fifth Century BC. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 175–226. Feeney, Denis. 2007. Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Flower, Michael. 2008. “The Iamidae: A Mantic Family and Its Public Image.” In Beate Dignas and Kai Trampedach, eds., Practitioners of the Divine: Greek Priests and Religious Officials from Homer to Heliodorus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 187–206. Foster, Margaret. 2013. “Hagesias as Sunoikistêr: Seercraft and Colonial Ideology in Pindar’s Sixth Olympian Ode.” Classical Antiquity 32: 283–321. Foster, Margaret. 2017. The Seer and the City: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Ideology in Ancient Greece. Oakland: University of California Press. Frasca, Massimo. 2020. “War and Society in Greek Leontinoi.” In Melanie Jonasch, ed., The Fight for Greek Sicily: Society, Politics, and Landscape. Oxford: Oxbow Books. 271–84. Funke, Peter. 2006. “Western Greece (Magna Graecia).” In Konrad Kinzl, ed., A Companion to the Greek Classical World. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 153–73. Golden, Mark. 1998. Sport and Society in Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grethlein, Jonas. 2010. The Greeks and Their Past: Poetry, Oratory and History in the Fifth Century BCE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamilton, Richard. 1974. Epinikion: General Form in the Odes of Pindar. The Hague: Mouton. Hannah, Robert. 2009. Time in Antiquity. London: Routledge. Hannah, Robert. 2013. “Greek Government and the Organization of Time.” In Hans Beck, ed., A Companion to Ancient Greek Government. Chichester, Sussex: Wiley. 349–65. Kromer, Gretchen. 1976. “The Value of Time in Pindar’s Olympian 10.” Hermes 104: 420–36. Kurke, Leslie, and Richard Neer. 2019. Pindar, Song and Space: Towards a Lyric Archaeology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kyle, Donald. 2015. Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World. 2nd ed. Chichester, Sussex: Wiley. Lee, Hugh. 1991. “A ‘Fifty-Month’ Olympiad in Bacchylides’ Ode 7.2?” Klio 73: 46–8. Lee, Hugh. 2001. The Program and Schedule of the Ancient Olympic Games. Hildesheim: Weidmann. Lewis, Virginia. 2020. Myth, Locality, and Identity in Pindar’s Sicilian Odes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Luraghi, Nino. 1994. Tirannidi arcaiche in Sicilia e Magna Grecia: Da Panezio di Leontini alla caduta dei Dinomenidi. Florence: Leo S. Olschki. Luraghi, Nino. 1997. “Un mantis eleo nella Siracusa di Ierone: Agesia di Siracusa, Iamide di Stinfalo.” Klio 79: 69–86. Mignosa, Valentina. 2020. “When War Changes a City. Fortifications and Urban Landscapes in Tyrant-Ruled Syracuse.” In Melanie Jonasch, ed., The Fight for Greek Sicily: Society, Politics, and Landscape. Oxford: Oxbow Books. 242–70. Mikalson, Jon. 1975. The Sacred and Civil Calendar of the Athenian Year. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Miller, Stephen. 1975. “The Date of Olympic Festivals.” MDAI 90: 215–31. Miller, Stephen. 2004. Ancient Greek Athletics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Morgan, Kathryn. 2015. Pindar and the Construction of the Syracusan Monarchy in the Fifth Century B.C. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nicholson, Nigel. 2005. Aristocracy and Athletics in Archaic and Classical Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nicholson, Nigel. 2011. “Pindar’s Olympian 4: Psaumis and Camarina after the Deinomenids.” CPh 106: 93–114. Nicholson, Nigel. 2016. The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West: Epinician, Oral Tradition and the Deinomenid Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nünlist, René. 2007. “Pindar and Bacchylides.” In Irene de Jong and René Nünlist, eds., Time in Ancient Greek Literature. Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative. Vol. 2. Mnemosyne. Vol. 291. Leiden: Brill. 233–51. Ogle, Vanessa. 2015. The Global Transformation of Time 1870–1950. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pavlou, Maria. 2012. “Pindar and the Reconstruction of the Past.” In John Marincola, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, and Calum Maciver, eds., Greek Notions of the Past in the Archaic and Classical Eras: History without Historians. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 95–112. Pfeijffer, Ilja. 1999. Three Aeginetan Odes of Pindar: A Commentary on Nemean V, Nemean III, & Pythian VIII. Leiden: Brill. Pleket, Henri. 2010. “Games. Prizes, Athletes and Ideology: Some Aspects of the History of Sport in the Greco-Roman World.” In Jason König, ed., Greek Athletics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 145–74. Polinskaya, Irene. 2013. A Local History of Greek Polytheism: Gods, People and the Land of Aigina, 800–400 BCE. Leiden: Brill. Rose, Peter. 1992. Sons of the Gods, Children of the Earth: Ideology and Literary Form in Ancient Greece. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Scott, Michael. 2010. Delphi and Olympia. The Spatial Politics of Panhellenism in the Archaic and Classical Periods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shear, Julia. 2021. Serving Athena: The Festival of the Panathenaia and the Construction of Athenian Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Roland. 2007. “Pindar, Athletes and the Early Greek Statue Habit.” In Simon Hornblower and Catherine Morgan, eds., Pindar’s Poetry, Patrons, and Festivals: From Archaic Greece to the Roman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 183–239. Thomas, Rosalind. 1989. Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vivante, Paolo. 1972. “On Time in Pindar.” Arethusa 5: 107–31. Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew. 2005. “Mutatas Formas: The Augustan Transformation of Roman Knowledge.” In Karl Galinsky, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 55–84. Young, David. 1983. “Pindar Pythians 2 and 3: Inscriptional ποτέ and the Poetic Epistle.” HSCPh 87: 30–48. Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1977. “The French Republican Calendar: A Case Study in the Sociology of Time.” American Sociological Review 42: 868–77. Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1987. “The Language of Time: Toward a Semiotics of Temporality.” The Sociological Quarterly 28: 343–56.

7

“But Now” The Temporality of Archaic Greek Invective Kirk Ormand

A passage from the Iliad that is often taken as a precursor to later Greek invective poetry is striking for the temporal mode adopted by its speaker. A man named Thersites has just stood up in the Achaean council and roundly criticized Agamemnon; his speech echoes in important ways the language of Achilles, who has been feuding with the leader of the Greek troops.1 In response, Odysseus stands and berates Thersites before striking him on the head with a scepter, and his critique of the dissident speaker has less to do with what he has said than who he is. It seeks to establish, in other words, a stable social order that is figured as timeless, unchanging. Θερσῖτ’ ἀκριτόμυθε, λιγύς περ ἐὼν ἀγορητής, ἴσχεο, μηδ’ ἔθελ’ οἶος ἐριζέμεναι βασιλεῦσιν· οὐ γὰρ ἐγὼ σέο φημὶ χερειότερον βροτὸν ἄλλον ἔμμεναι, ὅσσοι ἅμ’ Ἀτρεΐδῃς ὑπὸ Ἴλιον ἦλθον. τὼ οὐκ ἂν βασιλῆας ἀνὰ στόμ’ ἔχων ἀγορεύοις, καί σφιν ὀνείδεά τε προφέροις, νόστόν τε φυλάσσοις. Thersites, you babbler, though you are clear in counsel, hold, do not wish to compete with kings, alone as you are. For I say that no other man is worse than you, as many as have come to Ilion with the son of Atreus. You may not debate with kings, holding them in your mouth, or bring forward reproaches against them, or guard your homecoming. (Il. 2.246–251) Nothing in Odysseus’ speech refers to a specific event. Rather, Odysseus simply claims that Thersites does not have the necessary status to make the speech that he has made. And having forcefully established the social hierarchy, Odysseus is credited by the listening Achaeans with bringing about a permanent arrangement of that social order: the bystanders say “never again will his [Thersites’] heart stir him to contend with kings in words of reproach” (Il. 2.276–277). In this brief moment of invective interaction within an elitist hexameter text, in other words, two things happen: Odysseus firmly establishes the rules of social hierarchy, and the narrative claims that that hierarchy is unchanged and unchanging, DOI: 10.4324/9781003385387-11

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forever. That is, perhaps, unremarkable for a speech from a basileus in a heroic text. But this feature of immutability distinguishes Odysseus’ speech from the form of invective that comes about in the Archaic period, generally associated with iambic poetry, in two ways. The poets best known for iambic poetry – Archilochus and Hipponax – both write in a different register with regard to class status,2 and that different approach to class status is marked, I argue, by a different temporal mode. I begin by noting that the biographical traditions that surround the poetry of Archilochus and Hipponax suggest that their poetry was spurred on because of feuds with particular individuals, resulting from specific events.3 Archilochus famously attacked Lycambes, allegedly over a dispute concerning marriage to one of his daughters, with the effect that some number of his daughters (two, sometimes three) are said to have hanged themselves.4 A parallel story is told about Hipponax, who seems to have abused a sculptor – or, perhaps, an erotic rival – named Boupalos. In some versions, this Boupalos is also said to have hanged himself as a result.5 The parallels in their biographies should make us suspicious, but also give us useful information: in antiquity, Hipponax and Archilochus were thought of as sharing some essential literary quality. They write poetry in response to events, and they suggest that their poetry will bring about a change in the social status of their enemies. That series of changes is marked by a specific use of the temporal phrase “but now” (nun de) and this usage is, in turn, indicative of their relation to social class. Social Positioning Of the three poets best known as “iambic,” Archilochus and Hipponax are unequivocally also poets who belong to what Leslie Kurke and Ian Morris have identified as championing a “middling” form of discourse.6 (Semonides of Amorgos is a bit harder to pin down, and I will turn to him at the end of this chapter.) Morris and Kurke have argued that within the elite class in the Archaic period, we begin to see the emergence of a discourse that emphasizes “a moderate style of life under the supreme authority of the polis, rejecting both extremes of excessive wealth and aristocratic display and of abject poverty.”7 This discourse is both political and aesthetic in nature: in addition to emphasizing one’s ties to the community, middling poetry highlights practical, tempered behavior rather than focusing on aristocratic beauty and luxury. In response to this “middling ideology,” Kurke suggests, we also see an elitist discourse of a more obvious sort, “mobilizing the heroic past, special links to the gods, and a lifestyle of Easterninfluenced luxury (habrosunê) to reassert the propriety of aristocratic preeminence.”8 Elitist discourses – we can think here of the Homeric epics, or of the luxurious erotic poetry that is generally collected under the modern term “lyric” – also tend to emphasize a notion of social class that is guaranteed by birth rather than wealth, since wealth, it appears, was becoming suspiciously more changeable in the Archaic period. And most importantly of all, as Kurke has shown, the two forms of discourse rely on distinct but mutually dependent economies: elitist discourse is defined by the economy of aristocratic gift-exchange, in which the

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value of goods exchanged is sublimated into the stable social relationships that such exchange creates. Middling discourse is characterized, on the other hand, by the fickle mechanism of market exchange, in which values are mutable, cheating one another is part of the game, and even the coins involved in the exchange run the risk of being counterfeit. It is important to understand that these two “economies” are mutually dependent: elitist discourse can only define itself as superior by positioning noble gift-exchange against the unstable, untrustworthy commercial exchange of middlers.9 And middlers can only present themselves as practical and civic-minded by positioning themselves against the wasteful luxuries of elitist authors and characters. Built into these different economies is also a critical aspect of temporality. Elitist texts are invested in maintaining the current social order (as in the example of Thersites), and therefore appeal to a notion of temporal stasis.10 That quality of immutability is supported by the sorts of economic exchanges characterized as “long-term” by Bloch and Parry in their cross-cultural study: the long-term transactional order is, as they argue, “concerned with the attempt to maintain a static and timeless order.”11 This timeless order is also characterized by an appeal to an alleged moral order; the long-term economy often has connections to the divine, on which elitist discourse generally relies to justify their aesthetic and poetic mode. Iambic poets, on the other hand, respond to events in which they claim that the rules of sociality have been broken, and therefore they enact change in the temporal now, often with catastrophic results. When we look at the poets of the early Archaic period, Archilochus is perhaps the middling poet par excellence (though not all the time, nor in every poem). Several of his shorter fragments appear deliberately to reject the elitist aesthetic of epic, even while borrowing epic language. In fr. 114, for example, the speaker describes the sort of leader he would prefer on the field of battle: οὐ φιλέω μέγαν στρατηγὸν οὐδὲ διαπεπλιγμένον οὐδὲ βοστρύχοισι γαῦρον οὐδ’ ὑπεξυρημένον, ἀλλά μοι σμικρός τις εἴη καὶ περὶ κνήμας ἰδεῖν ῥοικός, ἀσφαλέως βεβηκὼς ποσσί, καρδίης πλέως. I do not love a big general, nor one with a large stride, nor proud of his curly locks, nor half-shaved; But let there be for me a small one, bandy-legged around the shins, standing firmly on his feet, full of heart. The physical qualities that characterize Homeric heroes – and which are, in those epics, visual guarantees of their noble birth, social status, and right to rule – are of little value to the speaker. He is happy to have a general who is practical in battle, even if his bow-legged stance is less than aesthetically perfect and his hair does not curl like hyacinths. What matters is that he is full of heart, a personal quality that is not necessarily linked to physical beauty or even physical size. Hipponax, though he is different from Archilochus in some fundamental ways, also seems to belong

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to this tradition. His speaking persona, though often not self-aware and the object of our disdaining gaze, is deliberately lower-class; as M.L. West characterizes him: His sexual adventures, besides being more sordid than any others in ancient literature, have at the same time a farcical element in them. . . . They are presented as one ingredient in a picaresque life full of brawling, burglary, poverty and cheap drink.12 The speakers of these two poets’ poems, in other words, are middlers (at best – Hipponax may be a sub-middler): they invite us to enjoy an anti-elitist aesthetic, to celebrate the practical, the low-born, and the immediately gratifying rather than the timeless, the noble, and the inherently good. It is important to point out that the “middling” poets themselves belong to the elite class. The middlers are not a rising underclass, preparing to seize the means of production. Rather, middling poetry is a particular strand of upper-class discourse, a different way of mobilizing class status within Archaic elite poetry.13 And so, as we will see, when Archilochus engages in invective, he does so with an eye that looks longingly toward the kind of social and temporal stability that elitist discourse promises; but he does so from a point of view that acknowledges, even as it resents, the mutability of human relations. These different approaches to mutability (and thus, temporality) are better understood through narratological analysis, which identifies two distinct temporal modes. As Rene Nünlist explains, narrative can represent either subsequent singulative narration or simultaneous iterative narration.14 The first mode consists of straightforward sequences of events, even if they include a certain level of temporal complexity: for example, a brief passage at the end of Archilochus’ famous Cologne epode: παρθένον δ’ ἐν ἄνθε[σιν τηλ]εθάεσσι λαβὼν ἔκλινα, μαλθακῆι δ̣[έ μιν χλαί]νηι καλύψας, αὐχέν’ ἀγκάληις ἔχω[ν, Then, seizing the young woman in the blooming flowers, I laid her down, and covering her with a soft cloak, holding her neck in my arm . . . (Arch. fr. 196a. 42–45) The events are sequential and happen once in a series of moments in time. Epic, of course, also includes a great deal of this sort of sequential action, but poetry in the elite mode also tends to enumerate series of events that take place repeatedly or permanently, the kinds of things that happen “all the time.” Simultaneous iterative narration, then, can relate ritual events that are either indefinitely repeated, or divine events that occur permanently: “We come here to celebrate the

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yearly festival of Demeter,” or “And so Zeus piled pain upon pain for humans.” It should not come as a surprise that this mode of time is particularly prominent in the Homeric Hymns, poems that are concerned with divine expressions of power, human interactions with the divine, and the establishment of cyclically repeated religious ritual.15 Although most poets are perfectly capable of using either temporal mode, these two different modes tend to be used for different purposes.16 Simultaneous iterative narration appears in poems that are concerned to explain why the world is as it is, now and presumably always. Subsequent singulative narration can be used in a variety of modes, including that of simple historical narrative, but it can also be used to highlight a change in status or in the state of a personal relationship. It is the latter sort of shift in interpersonal relations that iambic invective poetry describes and hopes to enact. Feuds, Events, Time Archilochus was known in antiquity for his feud with one Lycambes, apparently over a promised marriage to one of his daughters. The details of this disagreement have been preserved for us in several testimonia, including Hellenistic epigrams, Horace’s Epodes, and the scholia on Ovid’s Ibis.17 One must admit that the fragments of the poems that we have are not nearly as explicit about this conflict as are the biographical traditions. But there are several fragments that seem to refer to a disagreement that sounds rather like the later tradition, beginning with fragments 172 and 173: πάτερ Λυκάμβα, ποῖον ἐφράσω τόδε; τίς σὰς παρήειρε φρένας ἧις τὸ πρὶν ἠρήρησθα; νῦν δὲ δὴ πολὺς ἀστοῖσι φαίνεαι γέλως. Father Lycambes, what sort of thing have you said? Who has stolen your wits, to which you were previously attached? But now you are a huge joke among the townsfolk. (fr. 172) ὅρκον δ’ ἐνοσφίσθης μέγαν ἅλας τε καὶ τράπεζαν. You have turned your back on a great oath a violation of salt and table . . .

(fr. 173)

It is not exactly certain that these two fragments go together, but most scholars have agreed that they constitute part of a narrative sequence, and it is a narrative sequence that has a particular structure.18 From fragment 172, even in isolation, it

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is clear that the character Lycambes has said something, and this sets in motion a clear break in their relationship, expressed in temporal terms. Before (prin), Lycambes was a man of good sense – he was “fitted to” his wits. But now (nun de), as a result of whatever it was that he said, our Archilochean narrator suggests that he has become an object of ridicule. As their relationship has been damaged, the narrator argues, so has Lycambes’ status in the community. Once respected, he is now laughed at.19 And if fragment 173 is part of this narrative sequence, we know what it is that Lycambes did to bring about this series of events: he broke an oath of some sort, “salt and table” being, apparently, metonymic for an oath of friendship.20 The story of Lycambes breaking an oath and Archilochus attacking him, then, belongs to a subsequent singulative narrative mode. Lycambes broke an oath, and now their personal relationship is (irrevocably) changed. A number of other poems of Archilochus seem to belong to this particular – probably fictional – sequence of events, but it must be admitted that most of them do not include the names Lycambes or Neobule. The famous fragment 196a, published in 1974, does include a narrative of the speaker trying to seduce a woman, most probably identified as Neobule’s sister. In the course of his rather tortured proposal, there are some lines of invective against Neobule, but it is, I would argue, a bit of a stretch to call this a properly “invective” poem.21 It is, perhaps, a narrative poem that refers to the invective tradition, and it may well be one of the main sources of the biographical tradition about Archilochus and Neobule. It is true that the speaker rejects Neobule on temporal grounds: she is pepeira (“overripe”), and more explicitly, her “flower of partheneia” has perished, as has the “charm” which she had before (fr. 196a.24–28). But it seems a mistake to make too much of this particular misogynist narrative of faded charms, which is one that is applied broadly to women in Archaic Greece, cutting across genres and class lines.22 On the other hand, sometimes the narrative trope of a broken oath that we saw in fr. 173 leads not to immediate change, but to a series of wishes for immediate – and particularly nasty – change. One of the most striking poems in the invective mode is also one of uncertain authorship, alternately known as fr. 321a of Archilochus (Swift)23 or fr. 115 of Hipponax.24 The fragment, of which the readable parts starts mid-narrative, begins with a wish: κύμ[ατι] πλα[ζόμ]ενος̣ κἀν Σαλμυδ[ησσ]ῶ̣ι̣ γυμνὸν εὐφρονε̣.[ Θρήϊκες ἀκρό[κ]ομοι λάβοιεν – ἔνθα πόλλ’ ἀναπλήσαι κακὰ δούλιον ἄρτον ἔδων – ῥίγει πεπηγότ’ αὐτόν· ἐκ δὲ τοῦ χνόου φυκία πόλλ’ ἐπέ̣χοι, κροτέοι δ’ ὀδόντας, ὡς [κ]ύ̣ων ἐπὶ στόμα κείμενος ἀκρασίηι ἄκρον παρὰ ῥηγμῖνα κυμα . . . δ̣ο̣υ̣· ταῦτ’ ἐθέλοιμ’ ἂ̣ν ἰδεῖ̣ν, ὅς μ’ ἠδίκησε, λ̣[ὰ]ξ δ’ ἐπ’ ὁρκίοις ἔβη, (15) τὸ πρὶν ἑταῖρος [ἐ]ών.25

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battered in the waves . . . And may the top-knotted Thracians kindly seize him, naked, in Salmydessos, – – and may he fill out many evils, eating the bread of slavery – rigid with cold. And from the brine may he vomit forth much slime, and may his teeth chatter, lying like a dog face down in helplessness, at the outermost breakers . . . waves (?) This is what I’d like to see, Since he wronged me, trampling his oaths, who before was a companion. This is one of the strongest bits of invective in the iambic corpus. We do not learn here exactly what the target of the invective did to the speaker, nor do we learn what he was like or will be like. But what we do see is the same temporal structure that we saw earlier. Before this, the target was a hetairos, a companion, a word with elitist (even Homeric) trappings. But then he “trampled on oaths,” and as far as the speaker is concerned, that changes everything. The speaker wants him to wash up on foreign shores, naked, stiff, teeth chattering, dog-like, and to be enslaved. From then to now everything about their relationship has changed, and so the speaker hopes that the target’s status will change, as well. It is worth noting that the hopedfor future is probably best characterized as an example of simultaneous iterative narration – he wants this state of woe to go on and on – but the act that brings about that hope is a moment of subsequent singulative narration. The act of trampling the oaths has created a rift between then and now. What, then, about Hipponax? Hipponax is rather difficult to pin down, not least because his poetry – where we have significant fragments of it – appears to be more in the form of a parodic narrative than a straightforward attack. According to the biographical tradition, Hipponax insulted a man named Boupalos – and indeed, in several fragments, a character named Boupalos comes in for sexually explicit rough treatment. Fragment 84 is one of the more famous (and relatively intact) examples: ἐδάκνομέν τε κἀφ̣[ιλέομεν διὲκ θυρέων̣ βλέ[ποντες μὴ ἥμεας λάβ[ γυμνοὺς ἐρυ.[ ἔσπευδε δ’ ἡ μ[ὲν ἐγὼ δ’ ἐβίνε[ον ]τ̣ε̣ κ̣α̣[ὶ ἐπ’ ἄκρον ἕλκlων ὥσπεlρ ἀλλᾶlντα ψήχων, ] κλαίειν κ̣ελεύ̣[ων Βού]π̣αλο[ν ]κ[αί] μ’ αὐτίκ’ ἐξ[..(.)]σεν ἐκ δεπ̣[ ]καὶ δὴ ’πὶ τοῖς ἔργο̣ισιν εἴχομ[εν

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]ἐγὼ μὲν ὥσπ[ερ ῥ]υ̣σ̣ὸν ἱστι..[ σφάζειν ὑπέτ̣[. . .]φαλο̣υ̣τ̣[ We were biting and having sex looking through the door Lest he [seize] us. . . . (us?) naked She was hurrying I was screwing . . . and drawing up the tip, as though drying a sausage ordering Boupalos to cry out And at once [someone did something] to me And after these deeds we had I like a wrinkled sail . . . to slaughter. . . . (fr. 84.11–21) If we interpret this as one of Hipponax’s invectives against Boupalos, the most that we can say about its temporality is that it seems to be a past tense narrative. Most of the verbs are in the imperfect, indicating ongoing action in the past, though it seems likely enough that there were events that took place in the aorist lost in the ellipses. It is possible to construct a narrative in which Hipponax and Boupalos are erotic rivals, and the poet enacts his revenge on Boupalos by claiming to have had sex with his lover, an act which takes up, as Carey notes, at least twelve verses.26 If the conjecture in line 17 is correct, and somehow the act of sex is compared to “drying a sausage,” the narrator is using a strikingly working-class metaphor.27 But this is all pretty conjectural; the act of invective seems to take place through the narrative, rather than as a result of it. On the other hand, there are a few poems that seem closer in poetic mode and temporal structure to Archilochus. The other poem on the papyrus that gave us fr. 115 (Archilochus 321a), for example, includes the following bit of narrative (Hipponax fr. 117.4–11): ταῦτα δ’ Ἱππῶνα[ξ ο]ἶδεν ἄριστα βροτῶν, οἶ]δ̣ε̣ν δὲ κἀρίφαντος· ἆ μάκαρ ὅ̣τ[ις μ̣η̣δαμά κώ σ’ ἔϊδε τ]ρ̣[άγ]ου π̣νέοντα φῶρα. τῶι χυτ̣ρ̣ε̣ῖ̣ [δὲ νῦν Αἰσχυλίδηι πο̣λέμει̣· ἐκεῖνος ἤμε̣ρσ̣έ̣[ν σε τῆς ἀπαρτί]ης, πᾶς δὲ πέφη̣ν̣ε̣ δό̣[λος. Hipponax knows these things best of all mortals, and Ariphantos knows them too. Ah, blessed

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whoever has never seen you, thief who smells (of goat?). But now, fight with Aischulides. For he has stolen [your household goods?] and all [your?] trickery has been revealed. Again, the narrative is pretty difficult to piece together, and we should note that the only temporal adverb in the fragment is a supplement of the editor. But it is at least possible that the speaker is saying something like “You’re fighting the wrong guy. Aischulides took your stuff, and now I know what kind of thief you are.” The moral sentiment is not quite “you trampled on our oaths of friendship,” but one can see how it might be read as a sort of lower-class, less serious, parody of it. More convincing, perhaps, is fr. 26 of Hipponax, which seems to have a clear structure of act leading to punishment: ὁ μὲν γὰρ αὐτῶν ἡσυχῆι τε καὶ ῥύδην θύννάν τε καὶ μυσσωτὸν ἡμέρας πάσας δαινύμενος ὥσπερ Λαμψακηνὸς εὐνοῦχος κατέφαγε δὴ τὸν κλῆρον· ὥστε χρὴ σκάπτειν πέτρας {τ’} ὀρείας, σῦκα μέτρια τρώγων καὶ κρίθινον κόλλικα, δούλιον χόρτον. For one of them, dining at his ease and lavishly on tuna and cheese-sauce every day, like a eunuch from Lampsakos, ate up his inheritance. And so he must dig a rocky hillside, eating cheap figs and rough barley-bread, slave fodder. This takes us back to the wish that Archilochus had for his former friend, whom he wished to see shipwrecked off Salmydessos, though here there is no single act against the narrator that has brought about this moralizing result. But we do see here a narrative of insatiable desire pitted against finite resources, and the result for the target is not a happy one: much like the targets of Archilochus’ poems, his actions have resulted in a very real change of status. He has moved from a life of eastern luxury – tuna with cheese and honey by the Hellespont – to eating the roughest sort of low-status food. What he did then has caused his change in status now, and the motion is downward. None of this is to suggest that one might not find in Hipponax a good bit of simultaneous iterative narration, or that he might not see inherited status as having a kind of permanence. Indeed, I suspect that beneath the bumbling, obscene, un–self-aware persona of much of Hipponax’s poetry is a conservative elitist, who invites us, as part of the reading class, to laugh at the misfortunes not only of the targets of the invective, but of the narrator, as well.28 His is a different kind of invective than that of Archilochus, as Brown has argued, despite the apparent

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parallels of their ancient biographies,29 and we see that difference in a different temporal structure, in which his target’s punishment takes place in past tense narrative rather than a wish for future misfortune as a result of some past action. In both Archilochus and Hipponax, however, we can identify (sometimes) a structure of subsequent singulative narration, in which the poet’s target has violated some fundamental social structure and is now subject to an invective speech-act that calls for, and perhaps enacts, a diminished social status. We have seen this most clearly in Archilochus 321a (=Hipponax 115), one of the most brutal bits of invective in the corpus. By way of contrast, let us look at another unusually harsh bit of invective, this from a poet who is not primarily known for attack poetry. Anacreon from Teos in Asia minor is known best as a luxuriant love-poet, especially associated with eastern habrosyne (“delicacy”) and elitist ideals; an ancient and anachronistic tradition had him as the lover of Sappho. But in his corpus is a poem of attack against one Artemon, in some ways similar in tone to the harsher invectives of Archilochus. The meter, as Budelmann describes it, is a series of iambochoriambic stanzas (PMG 388):30 πρὶν μὲν ἔχων βερβέριον, καλύμματ’ ἐσφηκωμένα, καὶ ξυλίνους ἀστραγάλους ἐν ὠσὶ καὶ ψιλὸν περὶ πλευρῆισι βοός, νήπλυτον εἴλυμα κακῆς ἀσπίδος, ἀρτοπώλισιν κἀθελοπόρνοισιν ὁμιλέων ὁ πονηρὸς Ἀρτέμων, κίβδηλον εὑρίσκων βίον, πολλὰ μὲν ἐν δουρὶ τιθεὶς αὐχένα, πολλὰ δ’ ἐν τροχῶι, πολλὰ δὲ νῶτον σκυτίνηι μάστιγι θωμιχθείς, κόμην πώγωνά τ’ ἐκτετιλμένος· νῦν δ’ ἐπιβαίνει σατινέων χρύσεα φορέων καθέρματα †παῖς Κύκης† καὶ σκιαδίσκην ἐλεφαντίνην φορεῖ γυναιξὶν αὔτως . Before he had a Persian cap, and narrow scarf, and wooden dice in his ears, and the worn of an ox on his ribs, the unwashed cover of a bad shield; hanging out with bread-women and ready whores, the slut Artemon, finding a counterfeit life, Many times putting his neck in the stocks, many times on the wheel, Many times his back whipped with a leather thong, his hair and buttocks plucked. But now he goes about in dainty chariots, wearing golden earrings, The son of Kukê, and he carries an ivory parasol, just like a woman . . . This poem contains a range of intertwined features, but my primary point is that the temporal form of the invective is no longer the same as in Archilochus. What is

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under attack here is not what Artemon has done, per se, but rather who he is continuously – and that is being expressed in terms that are relentlessly class-based, expressed from the top looking down.31 When we are first introduced to him, we are told how he was before: he was effeminate and poor. The dice in the ears are a bit obscure, but what really marks him is his initial cloak. He had wrapped himself in a dirty skin, and the dirty skin has a bad pedigree: it is a layer of hide which formerly wrapped bad shield. Shields are always important: a shield is the essential equipment of a Homeric warrior, which is why Achilles must wait for a nice one before returning to battle, and why it is so shocking when the middler Archilochus announces in fr. 7 that he left his shield by a bush. Here, the shield is an ignoble one, and its detritus has literally become Artemon’s cloak.32 The notion that he looks for a kibdêlon (“counterfeit”) means of life is also a charged word; as Leslie Kurke has shown, the elitist distrust of “counterfeit” coins becomes, in the Archaic period, a kind of code, a rejection of the mercantile economy and the kinds of people who engage in it.33 Here Artemon himself is kibdêlon: untrustworthy, in the sense that he wants to look better than he is. That said, the poem appears to have a similar temporal structure to the poems we have been looking at: It begins with the way things were before (prin, 1) and closes with a statement about how things are now (nun de, 10). But the point of the poem is not that things have changed, as in the instance of Lycambes’ violation of the oath. The point of the poem is that the more things have changed, the more they have stayed the same. Artemon’s economic circumstances have changed drastically, but his character has not. As the poem ends, we see him in dainty chariots, wearing golden earrings, and carrying a parasol fit for a woman. He was a cheap dandy before, but all that has changed now is that he has put on the trappings of luxury: his wooden earrings have been exchanged for golden ones. We should note that his chariots in line 9 are satineis, a word used most notably by Sappho, in fr. 44 about the wedding of Hector and Andromache, where they are chariots explicitly for women. There can be little doubt that the final line, where Artemon is likened to a woman, is meant to be insulting. The insult, however, comes about not because of Artemon’s new actions, but because of his new social status, which is in contrast, at least as Anacreon sees it, to his essential character. The entire point of Anacreon’s poem is that Artemon cannot buy class. And this, it turns out, is a point of view that is entirely consistent in the elitist poets. Class, for them, is stable, immutable, pure – as Kurke has eloquently shown, likened to and demonstrated by the purity of gold.34 Acquired wealth, by contrast, is shifty, untrustworthy, a product of a mercantile economy that is to be rejected. These two worldviews, then, are also marked by different temporalities. Everything in Anacreon’s poem is a matter of simultaneous iterative narration. Artemon used to do lots of things; now he does lots of other things, and those actions are ongoing. He used to be tortured, whipped, plucked. When, exactly? All the time – during the indefinite iterative time that is used to describe character rather than specific events. Now he carries ivory parasols in the same kind of iterative time. As Budelmann observes, the poem is a “sketch of a transformation from rags to riches, in which both rags and riches are grotesque and disreputable.”35

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Though grammatically the same, this prin . . . nun de is structurally the opposite of Archilochus’. It seems to me that this temporal mode is characteristic of the elitist poems of attack. We can look at one of the meaner poems of Sappho, clearly not a middler, but also known in antiquity for her production of invective.36 κατθάνοισα δὲ κείσηι οὐδέ ποτα μναμοσύνα σέθεν ἔσσετ’ οὐδὲ †ποκ’†ὔστερον· οὐ γὰρ πεδέχηις βρόδων τὼν ἐκ Πιερίας· ἀλλ’ ἀφάνης κἀν Ἀίδα δόμωι φοιτάσηις πεδ’ ἀμαύρων νεκύων ἐκπεποταμένα. When you die, you will lie there and there will be no memory of you, not afterwards. For you have no share of the roses of the Pierides. But invisible in the house of Hades you will wander among the dusky shades having fluttered (there). (Sappho fr. 55) This poem is also an attack that imagines a future in response to a present, but the temporality is once again that period of indefinite time, characterized by simultaneous iterative events. The target has no share in the roses of the Pierides – i.e. poetry – now, but not any specific now; rather in a generalized present. The result has to do not with any specific result, but with an ongoing result for the rest of time. The target will die, because everyone does, but the key is that when that happens she will be forgotten, will become just another of those nameless shades down in Hades, “made markedly invisible by her exile from Sappho’s inner circle.”37 Some commentators connect this fragment, at least conceptually, with fr. 147, where Sappho is quoted as saying simply, “Someone, I say, will remember us in the future.”38 That is an attractive possibility, though far from certain. Be that as it may, it seems that when Sappho goes into an invective mode, she also attacks not a specific event but what is perceived as consistent and ongoing character. It is also worth noting that we have this fragment quoted several times: Stobaeus quotes it as directed toward an “uneducated” woman; Plutarch as directed toward a wealthy woman in one citation, but toward an “unlearned, unpoetic woman” elsewhere.39 Our ancient sources, in other words, saw it as an attack on character, not on a particular event.40 With these poems, I have now sketched out my argument. Our middling, iambic poets tend to punch up, and in doing so, they both resent the temporal mutabilities of human interaction and want to bring them about. An event happened, and now, the speaker says, our relationship has fundamentally changed and you will suffer social degradation (or have already). Elitist poets, on the other hand, punch down. They hold fast to an immutable social order, and their critique of the target insists that nothing fundamental has changed and, in the case of Anacreon, resists the failed social climbing of the target. I do not want to pretend that this schema holds true for every line of every iambic or every elitist poet. We are dealing with relatively large corpora of poetry, and mainly poetry that is fragmentary. I also do not mean to argue

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that every line of Archilochus falls into one mode, and every line of Anacreon into another. But it does seem to me that the pattern holds true for the most part. Muddling the Middle Semonides is an even more shadowy figure than either Archilochus or Hipponax; like Archilochus, he is supposed to have been involved in a colonization effort – in his case, of Amorgos. And although he seems to have written iambics that were similar, in some ways, to those of Archilochus and Hipponax, these for the most part do not survive outside of single-line quotations.41 What does survive, in addition to an iambic lament on the constantly woeful state of the human condition, is our longest extant piece of Archaic iambic invective writing: the justly infamous diatribe against wives, Semonides’ poem 7. As has often been noted, this poem shares some aspects of outlook with Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days. Indeed, Nicole Loraux read it several decades ago as a kind of riff on the “tribes of women” who are said to be descended from Pandora in the Theogony.42 Robin Osborne has argued, however, that we should view this poem as fundamentally different in terms of audience and performance context than the poems of Hesiod, or the Homeric Hymns with which it shares some features.43 Whereas Hesiod and the Hymns seem plausibly to have been composed for performance at a religious festival, and in some cases make reference to such festivals, Semonides, he argues, fits more neatly in the context of a symposium, an all-male drinking party. In such a context, Robin Osborne suggests, the audience treats the information given to them about women – which is to say, their wives – with a mixture of humor and shared sense of superiority.44 I agree in general with Osborne’s perceptive argument, but I also want to say that it is quite difficult to pin down Semonides with regard to his class outlook. The poem is not an invective against any particular woman (or man), but rather is a diatribe against wives, each of whom the poet posits as derived from various animals and/or natural entities. So the woman derived from the pig is said to be dirty and to wallow around in the muck all day, whereas the woman derived from the sea can be friendly and smiling – in which case she is highly attractive to whatever stranger sees her – but on another day, she is anektos, insufferable, to see or be near. And so it goes. One of our first indications of the speaker’s attitude toward the elite social classes comes when he introduces the woman derived from the horse. Horses, and horse ownership, were always associated with the elite, and this woman fits into that mold: τὴν δ’ ἵππος ἁβρὴ χαιτέεσσ’ ἐγείνατο, ἣ δούλι’ ἔργα καὶ δύην περιτρέπει, κοὔτ’ ἂν μύλης ψαύσειεν, οὔτε κόσκινον ἄρειεν, οὔτε κόπρον ἐξ οἴκου βάλοι, οὔτε πρὸς ἰπνὸν ἀσβόλην ἀλεομένη ἵζοιτ’. ἀνάγκηι δ’ ἄνδρα ποιεῖται φίλον· λοῦται δὲ πάσης ἡμέρης ἄπο ῥύπον δίς, ἄλλοτε τρίς, καὶ μύροις ἀλείφεται, αἰεὶ δὲ χαίτην ἐκτενισμένην φορεῖ

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βαθεῖαν, ἀνθέμοισιν ἐσκιασμένην. κᾱλὸν μὲν ὦν θέημα τοιαύτη γυνὴ ἄλλοισι, τῶι δ’ ἔχοντι γίνεται κακόν, ἢν μή τις ἢ τύραννος ἢ σκηπτοῦχος ἦι, ὅστις τοιούτοις θυμὸν ἀγλαΐζεται. The horse, delicate and long-haired, bore another, who turns from slaves’ work and trouble, and would not touch a millstone, or lift a sieve, or throw dung out of the house, or sit by the oven, since she avoids soot. She makes her husband a friend to necessity. She washes off the dirt twice every day, sometimes thrice, and anoints with perfumes, and always wears her hair combed out, long, shadowed with flowers. Such a wife is a beautiful sight for others, but for the one having her she becomes an evil, unless he is a tyrant or scepter-bearer, whoever gladdens his heart with such things. (Semonides 7.57–70) Having a wife who is good for others to look at is never really a good thing, and when it becomes clear that such a wife will put a real strain on the imagined husband’s household, it seems that this poet is positioning himself as opposed to luxury, to the conspicuous trappings that create such problems for normal folk. When he says that only a tyrant or king can afford to have such a wife, we are reminded of Archilochus, whose narrator says at one point, οὐδ’ ἀγαίομαι/θεῶν ἔργα, μεγάλης δ’ οὐκ ἐρέω τυραννίδος/ἀπόπροθεν γάρ ἐστιν ὀφθαλμῶν ἐμῶν (“I am not envious of the works of the gods, nor do I desire great tyranny; for it is far from my eyes”) (fr. 19.2–4). Only an immeasurably rich person could afford such a wife without risking a change to his social class, as in Hipponax fr. 26 (discussed earlier in this chapter). When, however, the speaker in Semonides finally gets around to the one good type of woman, namely the bee-woman, it turns out that he is not entirely opposed to certain elitist values: τὴν δ’ ἐκ μελίσσης· τήν τις εὐτυχεῖ λαβών· κείνηι γὰρ οἴηι μῶμος οὐ προσιζάνει, θάλλει δ’ ὑπ’ αὐτῆς κἀπαέξεται βίος, φίλη δὲ σὺν φιλέοντι γηράσκει πόσει τεκοῦσα καλὸν κὠνομάκλυτον γένος. κἀριπρεπὴς μὲν ἐν γυναιξὶ γίνεται πάσηισι, θείη δ’ ἀμφιδέδρομεν χάρις. οὐδ’ ἐν γυναιξὶν ἥδεται καθημένη ὅκου λέγουσιν ἀφροδισίους λόγους.

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τοίας γυναῖκας ἀνδράσιν χαρίζεται Ζεὺς τὰς ἀρίστας καὶ πολυφραδεστάτας· One from the bee. He is fortunate, obtaining her. For on this one alone, blame does not take a seat, and livelihood blooms and increases because of her. Beloved, she grows old with her beloved husband giving birth to noble, famous-named children, and she is splendid among all women, and a divine grace surrounds her. Nor does she take pleasure in sitting with women, when they talk about sex. Zeus makes such women a gift for men, the most noble and most thoughtful (women). (Semonides 7.83–93) Not only is this one good type of woman described with the adjectives aristê and ariprepês, which carry clear connotations of elitist birth and status, but the children that she gives birth to are of the sort that could be Homeric heroes. They are kalon (which can be fairly colorless, but often has the connotation of “noble”) and “famous-named,” onomakluton. This is all elitist language, and it is clear that the poet sees certain aspects of the aristocratic tradition as valuable and desirable. He may not be interested in the more finicky aspects of what he sees as wealthy behavior, but he is not opposed to the kind of idealized upper-class woman who helps her husband, increases his wealth, and produces a line of famous offspring for him. In terms of narrative structure, Semonides’ poem 7 is one long exercise in simultaneous iterative narration. The entire point of the poem is to describe a state of affairs that, it seems, is constantly ongoing, constantly repeating itself. Men keep getting involved with women, most of them bad. Men contribute to this ongoing state of poor performance by failing to recognize what is obvious to the poet; the coda to the poem explains that every man thinks his own wife is virtuous, but recognizes the faults of his neighbors: κεχηνότος γὰρ ἀνδρός, οἱ δὲ γείτονες χαίρουσ’ ὁρῶντες καὶ τόν, ὡς ἁμαρτάνει. τὴν ἣν δ’ ἕκαστος αἰνέσει μεμνημένος γυναῖκα, τὴν δὲ τοὐτέρου μωμήσεται· ἴ̄σην δ’ ἔχοντες μοῖραν οὐ γινώσκομεν. Ζεὺς γὰρ μέγιστον τοῦτ’ ἐποίησεν κακόν, καὶ δεσμὸν ἀμφέθηκεν ἄρρηκτον πέδην, ἐξ οὗ τε τοὺς μὲν Ἀΐδης ἐδέξατο γυναικὸς εἵνεκ’ ἀμφιδηριωμένους. While a man gapes, his neighbors laugh, seeing him, how he makes a mistake.

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Each one praises his own wife, thinking of her, but will find fault with the wife of another. We do not realize that we hold the same portion. For Zeus made this greatest evil, and has placed around us a chain of unbreakable fetters, from the moment when Hades received those men who fought on account of a woman. (Semonides 7.110–118) Here I would like to suggest that Semonides is a bit more slippery than has sometimes been recognized. If it is not easy to pin him down with regard to his attitude towards social class, it is also not easy to pin him down in terms of temporal structure. The entire poem – all 118 lines – do, indeed, describe an apparently endless present moment, an ongoing state of affairs. But in the last line of the poem, just when we think that no single event will ever be narrated, the poet surprises us by suggesting that this state of affairs has a distinct beginning. Most scholars, here, see the last line as a reference to Helen, and the opening lines of the Iliad (where Achilles’ rage sends many souls down to Hades).45 This sorry human state did not always exist, and it is somehow the result of a specific masculine act: the abduction of Helen, and the Greek expedition to bring her back. That act is itself, of course, a function of the quintessentially elitist hexameter epic tradition. Semonides knits together, in a sense, that elitist worldview with the sorry but ongoing state of how things are now, and does so, I would argue, by writing a poem that is not so much invective as meta-invective. He attacks no individual women, or even individual men. Rather, he explains where invective comes from: it comes from men who think that their own wives are virtuous and beautiful, but all other men’s wives are some flavor of terrible. It comes from men who think that they are the heroes of epic, and all other men are the object of Hipponactean satire. As such it stands outside, in a sense, of both the worldview of Anacreon’s attack on low-born status, and of Archilochus’ lamentation over the fickleness of human promises. Temporality, Once More Now, if this general schema stands up – if the elitist poets typically see human character as unchanging, whereas the middling poets use invective to attack their enemies because of specific social events – it is worth thinking about how and why these different temporalities come about.46 Any answer must be tentative, but I do think that the two different temporalities correspond to different modes of economy. As Kurke has outlined the distinction between elitist and middling texts, elitist discourse values Bloch and Parry’s “long-term transactional order,”47 which is to say, forms of exchange such as sacrifice to the gods and gift-exchange between nobles. These forms of exchange are always understood as social acts of exchange rather than commercial ones, and it is always asserted that such exchanges function for the social good. It is through gift-exchange that status-equivalent nobles become guestfriends. By contrast, the commercial exchanges of the short-term transactional order

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are motivated by personal profit and are not imagined to uphold the cosmic order. They are also, needless to say, characterized in elitist texts as untrustworthy, creating an arbitrary and potentially deceptive valuation of things.48 And as Bloch and Parry point out, this short-term order constitutes a distinct threat: “When the short-term cycle threatens to replace the long-term cycle then the world is rotten.”49 When, therefore, Archilochus cries out because Lycambes has broken his oath, he is, in a sense, crying out for the death of the elitist point of view, a point of view in which men were trustworthy, and promises were kept because that was the guarantee of the social order. When presented with events that break that social order, the middling poet is forced to re-evaluate the present, and he produces iambic narratives marked by prin . . . nun de – “before . . . but now.” That “but now” is the lament of the middler, who no longer has the luxury of believing in the stability of noble birth, the pistos hetairos, and the long-term transactional order. For Anacreon, by contrast, Artemon poses a threat to the economic order, but the poet claims that he cannot change the moral order: he can get rich, but he cannot achieve trusted nobility. For Anacreon, “but now” means simply that Artemon is every bit as despicable as he was “before.”50 Notes 1 See Kirk (1985: 142 ad l. 240). 2 The word iambic clearly implies a link to a metrical form, but ancient discussions of iambic poetry suggest that the genre was defined as much by content as by meter (see Aristotle Poetics 1448b31). Andrea Rotstein concludes that the “iambic” is a “soft” genre – more of a position on a sliding scale than a form with specific requirements See Brown (1997: 14–15); Rotstein (2010: 120). 3 Rosen (2007: 468). 4 This story underlies much criticism of Archilochus. For useful discussions, see Carey (1986); Swift (2019: 4, 7–8). 5 See Rosen (1988), with bibliography. 6 See especially Kurke (1999: 14–23); Morris (1996). Kurke and Morris build their notion of middling discourse on the model of long-term and short-term economic orders, as explained by Bloch and Parry (1989; see especially 23–28). 7 Kurke (1999: 20, emphasis in original). 8 Kurke (1999: 20). 9 Bloch and Parry (1989: 24). 10 I owe this precise formulation to Kate Gilhuly. 11 Bloch and Parry (1989: 24). 12 West (1974: 29). See also Brown (1997: 84); Carey (2009: 162–7). 13 Morris (1996: 27). 14 Nünlist (2007: 53–5). 15 Nünlist (2007: 53–5). 16 As Eva Stehle has recently shown (though she does not use Nünlist’s terminology), Sappho tends to talk about events in an indefinite and iterative past time when she talks about her own relations to the gods, especially Aphrodite, and that indefinite past time marked by pote, “once,” is a time, for her, of “erotic plenitude.” When she speaks of the present time, usually in subsequent singulative narration, it is “first of all, a time of limitations recognized” (Stehle 2009: 124). 17 Notably AP 7.351, 7.352; Horace Epodes 6.11–14; Ovid Ibis 53–4 and scholia. All of the evidence is collected by Swift (2019: 4 n.22).

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18 See Swift (2019: 332 ad fr. 173). 19 Brown (1997: 57) suggests that “the implications of γέλως in fr.172 are more serious than many commentators have allowed.” 20 Swift (2019: 332 ad fr. 173); Brown (1997: 58). 21 Though see Brown (1997: 67–8); Carey (2009: 156–8). As both scholars point out, the narrative would destroy Neobulê’s reputation, and therefore may have the effect of an invective poem. 22 Anacreon fr. 432 uses the exact same word, evidently spoken by a woman of herself – pepeira – in a poem which Herodian considered an iambus. 23 Numbered 79a Diehls. 24 The problem of authorship is complicated. Briefly, the fragment appears on the same papyrus as fr. 117, which most scholars feel confident in attributing to Hipponax because the poem probably includes the name Hipponax. Hipponax is one of those poets who, like Sappho, speaks of himself in the third person frequently. On the other hand, fr. 115 assumes a high moral tone and positions itself as using invective to sustain shared community values – something that we see frequently in Archilochus, but not elsewhere in Hipponax. On this basis, Carey argues for Archilochean authorship (Carey 2008: 92). See Swift (2019: 424–5 ad fr. 321a) for a useful summary. 25 Text is that of Swift (2019). 26 Carey (2008: 100). Carey provides a clear and useful analysis of the narrative persona of Hipponax’s poetry. 27 See Rosen (1988: 38–9). 28 So also Carey (2008: 99). 29 Brown (1997: 80, 87). 30 Budelman (2018: 197 ad fr. 388 PMG). 31 For a useful discussion, see Bruce (2011). 32 See Bruce (2011: 308). 33 Kurke (1999: 101–11). 34 Kurke (1999: 42–3). 35 Budelmann (2018: 196 ad fr. 388 PMG). 36 For a full and lucid discussion, see Rosenmeyer (2006). Rosenmeyer treats fr. 55 at 29–30. 37 Rosenmeyer (2006: 30). 38 See, e.g., Lardinois (2008: 81). 39 Stobaeus 3.4.12; Plutarch praec. coniug. 4–8; quaest. conviv. 3.1.2. 40 Rosenmeyer (2006: 30) suggests that “the term ‘uneducated’ is shorthand for ‘outside the group’ and that Sappho is ostracizing her with a damnatio memoriae that is more metaphorical than real.” 41 Brown (1997: 70–9) provides a useful discussion. 42 Loraux (1993: 90–117). 43 Osborne (2001). 44 Osborne (2001: 53–4). 45 See, e.g., Osborne (2005: 22–3); Allan (2019: 105–6 ad 117–18). 46 One substantial counter example, as Alex Purves reminded me, is Alcaeus fr. 129. In that poem, Alcaeus – surely an elitist poet – speaks of a character named “Pot-belly” who, again, has trampled on oaths, and calls for an avenger to pursue him as a result. In this poem, it seems that Alcaeus is borrowing a page from Archilochus. 47 Bloch and Parry (1989: 24). 48 Bloch and Parry (1989: 23–8); Kurke (1999: 14–23). 49 Bloch and Parry (1989: 28). 50 I would like to thank Jeffrey P. Ulrich and Kate Gilhuly for organizing an invigorating and wide-ranging conference in the early days of our emergence from the COVID-19 crisis, and for numerous suggestions and improvements to my argument. My thanks also to the many participants who provided sharp questions and helped clarify my thinking. I remember in particular Alex Purves, Victoria Wohl, and Sarah Olsen; my apologies to other participants whose suggestions I may have forgotten or overlooked.

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Works Cited Allan, W., ed. and comm. 2019. Greek Elegy and Iambus: A Selection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bloch, M., and J. Parry. 1989. “Introduction: Money and the Morality of Exchange.” In M. Bloch and J. Parry, eds., Money and the Morality of Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1–32. Brown, C. 1997. “Iambos.” In Douglas Gerber, ed., A Companion to the Greek Lyric Poets (Mnemosyne supplement 173). Leiden: Brill. 11–88. Bruce, W. 2011. “A Note on Anacreon 388.” CQ 61: 306–9. Budelmann, F., ed. and comm. 2018. Greek Lyric: A Selection. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Carey, C. 1986. “Archilochus and Lycambes.” CQ 36: 60–7. Carey, C. 2008. “Hipponax Narrator.” Acta Antiqua 48: 89–102. Carey, C. 2009. “Iambos.” In F. Budelmann, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 149–67. Kirk, G. S. 1985. The Iliad: A Commentary, Vol. 1: Books 1–4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kurke, L. 1999. Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lardinois, A. 2008. “‘Someone, I Say, Will Remember Us’: Oral Memory in Sappho’s Poetry.” In E. Anne Mackay, ed., Orality, Literacy, Memory in the Ancient Greek and Roman World. Leiden: Brill. 79–96. Loraux, N. 1993 [1984]. The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division between the Sexes. Trans. C. Levine. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Morris, I. 1996. “The Strong Principle of Equality and the Archaic Origins of Greek Democracy.” In J. Ober and C. Hedrick, eds., Demokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 19–48. Nünlist, R. 2007. “Homeric Hymns.” In I. J. F. de Jong and R. Nünlist, eds., Time in Ancient Greek Literature. Leiden: Brill. 53–62. Osborne, R. 2001. “The Use of Abuse: Semonides 7.” PCPS 47: 47–64. Osborne, R. 2005. “Ordering Women in Hesiod’s Catalogue.” In R. Hunter, ed., The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Constructions and Reconstructions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 5–24. Rosen, R. 1988. “Hipponax, Boupalos, and the Conventions of the Psogos.” TAPA 118: 29–41. Rosen, R. 2007. “The Hellenistic Epigrams on Archilochus and Hipponax.” In P. Bing and J. S. Bruss, eds., Brill’s Companion to Hellenistic Epigram. Boston, Leiden: Brill, 459–76. Rosenmeyer, P. 2006. “Sappho’s Iambics.” Letras Clássicas 10: 11–26. Rotstein, A. 2010. The Idea of Iambos. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stehle, E. 2009. “‘Once’ and ‘Now’: Temporal Markers and Sappho’s Self Representation.” In E. Greene and M. Skinner, eds., Classics@Volume 4: The New Sappho on Old Age; Textual and Philosophical Issues. Washington, DC: The Center for Hellenic Studies. 118–30. Online edition of March 11, 2011: http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/ pageR?tn=Artic leWrapp Swift, L. 2019. Archilochus: The Poems. Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. West, M. L. 1974. Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus. New York: Walter de Gruyter.

8

Wasting Time With Petronius* Jeffrey P. Ulrich

Introduction In the year 1886, shortly after the first International Meridian Conference held in Washington, DC, one of the most influential proponents of a uniform global time, the Canadian engineer Sanford Fleming, published a brief pamphlet entitled “TimeReckoning for the Twentieth Century.” After praising earlier, historical attempts to add clarity to the “chronological confusion” and “obscurity” of antiquity, such as Caesar’s calendar and Pope Gregory XIII’s intercalation of the calendar, Fleming advocates the need for a new form of time regulation, a precise standardization of hours, minutes, and seconds across the globe. The advent of new technologies which recalibrate notions of simultaneity in space, such as the telegraph or the complex system(s) of railroads, Fleming argues: practically [subject] the whole surface of the globe to the observation of civilized communities in each individual locality . . . [leaving] no interval of time between widely separated places proportionate to their distances apart . . . [and bringing] into close contact the opposite sides of the earth where daylight and darkness prevail at the same period.1 Unlike in antiquity, where those who dwelled on the opposite side of the earth (allegedly) lived according to a diurnal rhythm entirely inverted from the axis mundi of Rome,2 modernity is characterized by an unparalleled unification (and thus, homogeneity) of space. So, Fleming concludes: By this agency noon, midnight, sunrise, sunset, and the whole range of intermediate gradations of the day, are all observed and recognized at the same moment.3 Time reform was necessary, in other words, because technological advances had so transformed space, with a planet of observers participating in the “same moment,” that it had collapsed distances between individual localities which previously had no need for the shared rhythms of a calibrated clock. We surely have no reason in the 21st century to doubt the necessity, not to speak of the deleterious effects, of a globalized time, which seems to become more DOI: 10.4324/9781003385387-12

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pronounced through technological advances every day. At the turn of the 20th century, however, the standardization of time and the political organization of a “global” time had far-reaching effects on culture and daily life, as Stephen Kern demonstrated in his path-breaking study4 – effects which could be seen in local life not only in socio-economic terms,5 but also in artistic-literary output, such as the rejection of Euclidean space in the Cubist movement or the jumbled temporalities of the stream-of-consciousness novel. The alienation from local time, which necessarily entails a disconnection from local customs, traditions, and communities, seems at the same time to be reflected in artistic movements that seek to capture the psychological sense of loss which attends delocalization. Significant for the project I undertake in this essay, then, such alienation, which stems from the regulation of time, is registered first and foremost in transformations in genre – expressive innovations that try to cope with the palpable awareness of one’s contingency and of time’s swift passing. Although the estate of an obscenely wealthy freedman in southern Italy in the late 1st century CE – the setting and period under consideration here – represents a very different landscape from the turn of the 20th century in terms of the global reach of standardized time, I submit that an analogous phenomenon is taking place in the shifting cultural meanings and economies of time in the Imperial period. There is an oppressive regime of linearity – in many cases, divorced from earlier cultural values or the myths which imbued them with meaning – nonetheless accompanied by an attendant desire to escape the tyranny of such temporal regulation.6 We encounter in Seneca’s On the Brevity of Life, for instance, a strikingly novel conception of time (1.3): Non exiguum temporis habemus, sed multum perdimus. Satis longa vita et in maximarum rerum consummationem large data est, si tota bene collocaretur. We don’t have a small amount of time, but rather, we waste/lose a lot. Life is long enough – it has been abundantly provided for the completion of the greatest matters, that is, if it were entirely well disposed.7 This is the first period in the history of ideas (at least, in Roman culture) when we see units of time assessed in terms of their utility – a temporality disconnected, that is, in a Marxist sense from socio-cultural meanings, abstracted into divisible segments, and then reevaluated according to an inherent, or “consumer,” economic value. I see this abstraction of time evidenced most perceptibly in the metaphor of “wasting time” with which Seneca opens his moralizing treatise and which gives the title to this chapter.8 By contrast to the temporal prodigality of contemporary Romans, we ought to use the life which nature gave us, according to Seneca, in a more meaningful way: “for the completion of the greatest matters” (in maximarum rerum consummationem).9 So also, Trimalchio’s elaborate banquet on his lavish estate displays, as scholars have long recognized, an obsessive meditation on the passing of time and its inexorable push toward death.10 The first piece of information we learn about Trimalchio, therefore, is that he “has a sundial and a trumpeter in his triclinium so that he might

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know at any point just how much of his life he has wasted” (Sat. 26.9: horologium in triclinio et bucinatorem habet subornatum, ut subinde sciat quantum de vita perdiderit).11 Petronius adopts the same guiding metaphor as Seneca, in other words, of time as a divisible unit susceptible to wasteful deployment or disregard.12 As often with the arbiter elegantiae, however, the sentiment is parodically turned on its head: Petronius’ freedman uses the evolving technologies of time measurement to keep careful track of “just how much of his life he has wasted” (or perhaps, “lost”), and the phrase quantum de vita perdiderit becomes something of a mantra for the remainder of Trimalchio’s cena. But what has long gone overlooked, and what I intend to explore more thoroughly here, is how Trimalchio, much like Seneca’s moralizing persona in On the Brevity of Life, endorses a strikingly Marxist view of time:13 he attempts to carve up time into abstracted units of economic value and redefine their cultural meanings; by doing so, he strives to regulate the temporal experience of those subjected to his whims. The landscape of Trimalchio’s estate is governed not only by self-consciously inverted, or “antipodean,” rhythms of the sort which Seneca laments contemporaneously in Ep. 122 (see again n. 2 in this chapter), but it is also arbitrarily manipulated as a mode of subjugation.14 Whereas Seneca advocates a utilitarian approach to his abstracted conception of time in On the Brevity of Life, Trimalchio delights not in the “completion” of the greatest affairs through the careful management of one’s time, but rather, in the self-consciously ostentatious and prodigal “consumption” or “loss” of the units of time he has carefully abstracted, enumerated, and organized into a life. Yet, although Trimalchio attempts to regulate the time of his banquet and its meaning for banqueters, Petronius, the “hidden author” (to borrow Gian Biagio Conte’s terminology)15 uses the inchoate genre of the novel to stage different models of escape or resistance to the oppressive linearity of Trimalchio’s time hegemony. As we shall see in what follows, Petronius gives voice not only to expressions of disgust or desire for escape by his narrator, Encolpius, but also narrates via Encolpius a repertory of responses from alien, foreign, and/or subjugated characters – e.g., from the other freedmen of the banquet.16 In sum, the politics of Trimalchio’s time-space control – his subjection of his entire estate to the observation of an “antipodean” temporality and moreover, to a purposeful regime of wasteful consumption – invites a subversive response at the level of genre to the oppressive regulation of a capricious master. The incorporation of “alien” and polyglottal voices of resistance to Trimalchio’s time function as a generic check, as it were, on the overwhelming feedback loop – the “labyrinthine” landscape, to use Encolpius’ phrasing – which threatens to inveigle the banqueter (and by extension, the reader).17 In the interest of precision, I note here that in what follows, we will consider the collisions and contestations of many competing ways of understanding and experiencing time. At the cultural level, we will analyze the ways in which Trimalchio tries to colonize cosmological as well as calendrical time – that is, both natural and socio-cultural rhythms – by subordinating them to his own quotidian time. Moreover, although banqueters remain entrapped in the banquet and cannot escape, Trimalchio’s imperial gestures extend to geographical boundaries and bodies in space, as travel time and/or the time needed to accomplish certain tasks are elided

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by means of Trimalchio’s technological know-how. Where the issue of genre and the auctor’s manipulation of it enters into the discussion, however, is through yet another temporality: narrative time. For just as Trimalchio wastes the time of his banqueters through a labyrinthine banquet of endlessly repetitive but thoroughly variegated display, so also, Petronius wastes our time as readers through the text as labyrinth – and in so doing, offers something of a riposte to Seneca’s idealized usage of time. Given that time is the one commodity which we cannot recoup according to Seneca’s ideology,18 whether or not we as readers choose to “lose” or intentionally “waste” ours with Petronius functions paradoxically as a response to the oppressive overreach of the imperial mechanization of time. Trimalchio’s Time Scholars have long recognized that the cena Trimalchionis is bookended by clocks – from the horologium, which we have already seen in Trimalchio’s triclinium, to the timepiece he builds into the middle of his tomb architecture “so that anyone who looks at the hours, like it or not, has to read [his] name” (Sat. 71.11: horologium in medio, ut quisquis horas inspiciet, velit nolit, nomen meum legat).19 In addition to surrounding himself with technologies to keep track of time, Trimalchio also obsessively counts down the time he has left on earth: near the end of the cena, for instance, we learn that he once visited a Greek astrologer, Serapa, who predicted the day of his death; at Sat. 77.2, Trimalchio tells his guests that he “now has 30 years, 4 months, and 2 days left to live” (nunc mi restare vitae annos triginta et menses quattuor et dies duos), where the nunc suggests that he maintains an up-todate balance sheet of the remainder of his time on earth.20 Trimalchio’s fascination with regulating time, which Peter Toohey has likened to his related attempt to control his digestion,21 has helped scholars to home in more precisely on what Bakhtin meant by coining the “adventure time of everyday,” as the measured time of quotidian life seems perpetually to intrude upon or interrupt the subjective, timeless, and repetitive experience of novelistic narrative. Indeed, unlike in the ideal Greek romances, time in the Roman novels, Bakhtin argues: is deprived of its unity and wholeness – it is chopped up into separate segments . . . The everyday world is scattered, fragmented, deprived of essential connections. It is not permeated with a single temporal sequence, which has its own specific systematization and ineluctability.22 Bakhtin’s formulation, however, is notoriously limited in its specific application to our two extant Roman novels, dealing primarily as he does with the conversion narrative of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. In his analysis of the Satyricon, by contrast, he merely glances cursorily over Petronius’ general treatment of time.23 Despite R. Bracht Branham’s noteworthy attempt to perform a more thorough application of Bakhtin’s “everyday time” to Petronius,24 I would nonetheless suggest that the generic contours of the Satyricon – its spongelike absorption or consumption of other genres and its regurgitation of those authorized generic forms into new and

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asymmetrically carved up blobs25 – aim to confront the contemporary politics and governing ideologies of controlling time. I begin my analysis here with moments of explicit time measurement, and so, I turn to a passage near the end of the cena, which corresponds intratextually to the horologium with which the feast is introduced. As the banquet is nearing its close and dawn is fast approaching, the dissolute freedman makes an Epicurean pronouncement – “let us drink and dine until dawn” (Sat. 73.6: itaque tangomenas faciamus et usque in lucem cenemus) – only to be interrupted by one of nature’s mechanisms for demarcating the arrival of dawn, the crowing of a cock. Disturbed by this foreboding omen, Trimalchio pours some wine under the table and then demands that this herald be hunted down and killed (Sat. 74.2): “non sine causa” inquit “hic bucinus signum dedit; nam aut incendium oportet fiat, aut aliquis in vicinia animam abiciet. Longe a nobis. Itaque quisquis hunc indicem attulerit, corollarium accipiet.” Dicto citius de vicinia gallus allatus est, quem Trimalchio occidi iussit, ut aeno coctus fieret. “This trumpeter gave a signal for some reason,” he said. “For either a fire is about to break out, or someone will give up the ghost in a neighboring house. Keep it far from us. Therefore, whoever brings me this sign will receive a present.” And before he finished speaking, the cock was brought to him from nearby, and Trimalchio ordered that it be killed and cooked up in bronze. Trimalchio’s reaction is often explained by reference to Roman superstitions about the cock’s crow, which was thought to portend ominous things, especially when it arrived too early.26 However, this farmyard cock, which is pitted as a natural “trumpeter” (bucinus) against Trimalchio’s own artificial (and mechanical?) bucinator in his triclinium,27 also represents a competing device of time measurement within the freedman’s regime, as the gallus gallinaceus is, according to Pliny the Elder, nature’s tool “for rousing mortals to work and for interrupting sleep” (Nat. 10.24.46: excitandis in opera mortalibus rumpendoque somno). When faced with nature’s mechanism for demarcating day from night, Trimalchio’s first recourse is to ensure that it becomes incorporated into his agenda of time consumption.28 Or in other words, in an extraordinary literalization of Seneca’s abstractions of time, the freedman captures the marker of cosmological time and transforms it into yet another substance upon which to feast. Importantly, this transformation of time happens “faster than a word” (dicto citius), whereby Trimalchio’s speech-act functions as an alternative index to assert temporal dominance.29 This collision of cosmological time with Trimalchio’s own carefully orchestrated regime is rehearsed frequently throughout the banquet. When Encolpius and his companions enter the triclinium, the narrator marvels at the decorations on the doorposts, which likewise mix quotidian banality with lofty calendrical motifs linked to astrology. One doorpost has the inscription – “Our Gaius dines out on the 30th and 31st of December” (Sat. 30.3: III et pridie Kalendas Ianuarias C. noster foras cenat) – which memorializes a trivial event in a prominent position for guests entering the dining room by linking it to a specific date on the calendar, the close

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of the year and the annual “doorway” to January. Upon gazing at the other post, in turn, Encolpius tells us (Sat. 30.4): altera lunae cursum stellarumque septem imagines pictas; et qui dies boni quique incommodi essent, distinguente bulla notabantur. [it] has the path of the moon and painted images of seven stars; and the lucky and unlucky days [are] marked out with a distinguishing stud. Gareth Schmeling considers Trimalchio’s demarcation of days to be a parody of official calendars, and Christine Kondoleon, in an important chapter on calendrical mosaics across the empire, reads Trimalchio’s doorposts as a “more mundane” version of what we find in the domestic iconography of time measurement from Pompeii to North Africa to Antioch.30 If it is parody, however, I would suggest that the content of the joke lies in the stark juxtaposition, and indeed, the hierarchization of two temporal regimes: the subordination of astronomical/zodiacal time and its accompanying discourse of “good and bad days” to the whims of a freedman’s program of consumption. Though vital tools for measuring public time, the cosmos themselves are leveraged in service of the private dining calendar of “our Gaius.” We see a similar usurpation of the cosmological to Trimalchio’s banal regime of consumption in the famous Zodiac plate, the first course to appear after appetizers, which Trimalchio’s carver arranges on a circular platter (Sat. 35.2: rotundum . . . repositorium) to replicate the astrological signs and their symbolic significance. The foods he chooses to display are intended to represent the signs for which they metonymically stand: a slab of beef placed over Taurus, testicles and kidneys over Gemini, and so on and so forth. In fact, in an introductory description pregnant with intertextual and generic significance, Encolpius describes the “novelty” (novitas) of this “dish” (  ferculum), which “had the twelve signs positioned in orbit over which the arranger had placed food appropriate and fitting to the material” (Sat. 35.2: duodecim habebat signa in orbe deposita, super quae proprium convenientemque materiae structor imposuerat cibum). It is worth recalling that the phrase conveniens . . . materiae, in particular, is deployed twice in Ovid’s elegiac corpus to represent the relationship between form and content, between artisticliterary presentation and the substance behind a work of art.31 In Petronius’ reworking of the phrase, then, the parody, which becomes tragedy in Ovid as the poetic persona transitions from the Amores to the Tristia, is transformed into a kind of burlesque allegory. Not only does Petronius adapt an Ovidian idiom about the relationship between form and content to color the obsessive food-play that becomes a persistent motif of the cena, but he actually reverses the relationship between human expression (i.e., generic form) and the substantial realities hidden under its guise: pleasures for consumption – “feasts decocted into many courses” (Ep. 122.3: epulis et quidem in multa fericula discoctis), as Seneca would contemporaneously describe the “antipodean” Romans who lead their “whole time in inverted wakefulness” (totum perversae vigiliae tempus) – become the guiding rhythm of the cosmos. Food, its arrangement and organization, acquires an eschatological significance, as

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Trimalchio later goes on to interpret the symbolic value of each food-star-sign and its relationship to human types in a mock-Platonic reincarnation tale.32 The Zodiac plate, in other words, is arranged to model a self-contained cosmos, an imago mundi akin to other allegories of the orbis which organize human life either by shared cultural rhythms (e.g., Homer’s shield of Achilles in Iliad 18) or alternatively, by a teleological vision of linear, historical time (e.g., Aeneas’ shield in Aeneid 8).33 Significantly, later allegorizing interpretations of the Homeric shield, especially that of Crates, saw the rim around shield as representing the Zodiac with all its star signs governing the earth. This view of the imago mundi persisted in literature and art, moreover, well into the Imperial period, as Philip Hardie has shown, for instance, in Pompeian art and in the tabulae Iliacae.34 Such an underlying allegorical symbolism for the circular disk was connected from the Hellenistic period onward to ideologies of kingship and later on, in the Imperial period, to the governing power of the princeps: this latter ideological superimposition begins, of course, with Augustus, whose battle of Actium is arranged “in the middle” (8.675: in medio) of the sidereus clipeus. It is tempting to suggest, then, that the Zodiac plate reorganizes the orbis as a parody of the imago mundi tradition of the shield, where Trimalchio makes the rim of the rotundum . . . repositorium a consumable Zodiac and arranges it such that “mother earth is set in the middle, rounded like an egg and hav[ing] all good things in her, as if she were a honeycomb” (Sat. 39.15: terra mater est in medio quasi ovum corrutundata, et omnia bona in se habet tamquam favus). In this way, Trimalchio would be mimicking how the Homeric shield represents the cycles of human life – “the turning of the world and its bringing about good and evil such that humans are born and die” (39.13: sic orbis vertitur . . . et semper aliquid mali facit, ut homines aut nascantur aut pereant). But simultaneously, he would be appropriating this object of cosmological significance – a gift from the gods in Homer and therefore, an affirmation of divine lineage35 – for his own consumptive temporal regime. Thus, when the guests, immediately disgusted by the ostentatious display, approach this “base fare” (Sat. 35.7: tam viles . . . cibos), it is à propos that Trimalchio offers a toast which exposes his regime of prodigality in another Epicurean proclamation colored with semantic ambiguity (Sat. 35.7): “suadeo” inquit Trimalchio “cenemus; hoc est ius cenae.” “I urge you,” Trimalchio said, “eat up. This is the sauce/law of the banquet.” There is a double-meaning of ius in this line: the “law” guiding appropriate behaviors and temporal organization of the banquet is transformed by Trimalchio’s speech-act into mere flavorful “juice” or “sauce” to add pleasure to the experience of consumption. This is no “trite” pun, as Schmeling reads it.36 Rather, it is tempting to connect this play on ius to a much later instance, where it appears in the riddle of the “Clepsydra” in the 4th or 5th century CE Aenigmata symposia: there, a personified water-clock refers to itself as the “law of good speaking” and deploys the same lexical ambiguity – the “sauce/law for a greedy tongue” (ius

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avidae linguae): by doing so, the poem simultaneously refigures the time-keeping device to act as a container holding liquid for consumption.37 In Trimalchio’s exclamation, by contrast, the law allows banqueters to consume the entire cosmos, to reenact in play the equivalence Trimalchio draws between time and consumption, between existence and food.38 While Trimalchio routinely attempts to transform units of time into objects of consumption throughout the banquet, the highly individualized temporality of Trimalchio’s world is most apparent in an offhand remark made by one of Encolpius’ fellow-banqueters named Hermeros. This is the first freedman to speak – save Trimalchio – and he points to “Fortunata,” Trimalchio’s wife and a woman whose name, of course, recalls the guiding principle of most novelistic narratives (Fortuna). He explains at Sat. 37.4: Et modo modo quid fuit? Ignoscet mihi genius tuus, noluisses de manu illius panem accipere. Nunc, nec quid nec quare, in caelum abiit et Trimalchionis topanta est. ad summam, mero meridie si dixerit illi tenebras esse, credet. And just recently, what was she? You’ll pardon me for saying so, but you wouldn’t have wanted to take bread from her hand. And now, for no reason whatsoever, she’s gone off into the sky and she’s become Trimalchio’s everything [topanta = τὸ πάντα]. In sum, if she tells him that it is dark out at high noon, he will believe it. According to Pliny the Elder’s discussion of the “observation of the hours” in the Natural History (Nat. 7.212: in horarum observatione), the recognition of “highnoon” (meridies) is the very first technical innovation in time measurement after the announcement of the rising and setting of the sun, which he claims is found in the 12 tables. Indeed, very early on in Roman time accounting, meridies was announced by a magistrate of the consuls “when from the curia he saw the sun between the Beaks and the Greek Lodging” (accenso consulum id pronuntiante cum a curia inter Rostra et Graecostasim prospexisset solem).39 But once again, in the banquet of Petronius’ dissolute freedman, a specific time, which already possesses a long socio-cultural legacy, is reoriented according to the whims of a parvenu: Fortunata goes from being absolutely “nothing” (quid fuit) to achieving apotheosis (in caelum abiit) and indeed, even to being capable of reversing day and night. This parallels, furthermore, Trimalchio’s own self-fashioned autobiographical narrative from slave origins to apotheosized divinity in the murals which decorate his atrium (cf. Sat. 29.3). We have seen thus far how Trimalchio’s time regime collides with a regulation more (seemingly) guided by nature, and have analyzed, moreover, how capriciously he redefines times which possess otherwise cosmological or calendrical significance. Before we turn to Petronius’ staging of alternative temporalities, however, it is worth taking a few moments to consider how Trimalchio’s temporal regime extends also to space, since the Bakhtinian chronotope is likewise apparent in the freedman’s remapping and redefinition of space. The impulse to transform space under the empire has, of course, also been long appreciated by scholars, e.g.,

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in the attempts through trade and importation to make Rome a city that consumes, metabolizes, and/or regurgitates the whole world.40 In Trimalchio’s attempts to blur the boundaries of space and reshape natural borders and bodies in unnatural ways, however, we see again a parodic reworking of this imperial impulse exaggerated to the point of absurdity. At Sat. 38.1–3, for instance – between the revelation of the Zodiac plate and Trimalchio’s performative exegesis of it – Encolpius learns from Hermeros about Trimalchio’s endeavors to transform his estate into a producer of delicacies from the furthest reaches of the empire: omnia domi nascuntur: lana, citrea, piper; lacte gallinaceum si quaesieris, invenies. ad summam, parum illi bona lana nascebatur: arietes a Tarento emit et eos culavit in gregem. mel Atticum ut domi nasceretur, apes ab Athenis iussit afferri; obiter et vernaculae quae sunt, meliusculae a Graeculis fient. ecce intra hos dies scripsit, ut illi ex India semen boletorum mitteretur. nam mulam quidem nullam habet quae non ex onagro nata sit . . . tanta est animi beatitudo. All things are produced at his house: wool, citrus fruit, pepper; if you ask for chicken’s milk, you’ll find it. For instance, he wasn’t producing enough good wool: so, he purchased rams from Tarentum and banged them into his herd. To get Attic honey produced at home, he ordered bees to be brought in from Athens; by the way, domestic bees will become somewhat better from mixing with Greeklings. Also, look: within the last few days, he ordered for a seed of mushroom spawn to be sent from India. And indeed, he has no mule which was not born from a wild ass . . . so great is the blessedness of his soul. To be sure, this hyperbole functions as a kind of paradoxography characteristic of the ancient novel: “Mushroom spawn would hardly have come from India,” Schmeling conscientiously reminds us; “mushrooms [do not] have seeds.”41 However, the importation of exoticisms from all over the globe – and importantly, the movement from the Italian peninsula to the outer periphery of the empire (i.e., from Tarentum to Athens to India) – also constitutes an ideological redefinition of space. The locative domi – “at home” – takes on a drastically different meaning in a globalized empire, which has intermingled its native subjugated population (vernaculae) with “exotic” varieties from abroad to produce new and exciting delicacies. All mulae, Hermeros suggests, have a foreign origin, “born” (