Theologies of ancient Greek religion 9781107153479, 9781316607503, 131660750X

Table of contents :
Machine generated contents note: 1. Introduction: what might we mean by the theologies of ancient Greek religion? / Shaul Tor --
2. The story of theology and the theology of the story / Julia Kindt --
3. Theologies of the family in Homer and Hesiod / Barbara Graziosi --
4. Who's afraid of Cypselus? Contested theologies and dynastic dedications / Renaud Gagne --
5. Heraclitus on Apollo's signs and his own: contemplating oracles and philosophical inquiry / Shaul Tor --
6. The `theology' of the Dionysia and Old Comedy / Eric Csapo --
7. Polytheism and tragedy / Simon Goldhill --
8. Gods and men in ancient Greek conceptions of lawgiving / Hannah Willey --
9. Popular theologies: the gift of divine envy / Esther Eidinow --
10. Sacrificial theologies / Robin Osborne --
11. Theologies of statues in Classical Greek art / Milette Gaifman --
12. The gods in the Athenian assembly / Gunther Martin --
13. Plato and the secularisation of Greek theology / Rick Benitez --
14. Providence and religion in Middle Platonism / George Boys-Stones --
15. Narratives of continuity and discontinuity / Peter Van Nuffelen.

Citation preview

T HEO LO G I ES O F A NCI ENT GR EEK R EL I G I ON

Studied for many years by scholars with Christianising assumptions, Greek religion has often been said to be quite unlike Christianity: a matter of particular actions (orthopraxy), rather than particular beliefs (orthodoxies). This volume dares to think that, both in and through religious practices and in and through religious thought and literature, the ancient Greeks engaged in a sustained conversation about the nature of the gods and how to represent and worship them. It excavates the attitudes towards the gods implicit in cult practice and analyses the beliefs about the gods embedded in such diverse texts and contexts as comedy, tragedy, rhetoric, philosophy, ancient Greek blood sacrifice, myth and other forms of storytelling. The result is a richer picture of the supernatural in ancient Greece, and a whole series of fresh questions about how views of and relations to the gods changed over time. is Associate Professor in Ancient Greek History at the University of Nottingham. She has a particular interest in ancient Greek religion and magic. Her publications include Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks (2007, rev. edn 2013), Luck, Fate and Fortune: Antiquity and its Legacy (2011) and Envy, Poison and Death: Women on Trial in Ancient Athens (2015). She has co-edited (jointly with J. Kindt) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion (2015). ESTHER EIDINOW

is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney. Her publications include Rethinking Greek Religion (Cambridge, 2012) and Revisiting Delphi: Religion and Storytelling in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 2016). She has co-edited (jointly with E. Eidinow) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion (2015) and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Ancient History and a senior editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Religion. JULIA KINDT

is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College and of the British Academy. His work ranges widely over Greek history, archaeology and art history. His most recent books are Athens and Athenian Democracy (Cambridge, 2010), The History Written on the Classical Greek Body (Cambridge, 2011)  and Greek History: The Basics (2014). ROBIN OSBORNE

C A M B R I DGE C L A S S I C A L S T UD I E S General editors R. L. HUNTER, R. G. OSBORNE, M. J. MILLETT, G. BETEGH, G. C. HORROCKS, S. P. OAKLEY, W. M. BEARD, T. J. G. WHITMARSH

THEOLOGIES OF ANCIENT GREEK RELIGION

Edited by ESTHER EIDINOW University of Nottingham JULIA KINDT University of Sydney ROBIN OSBORNE University of Cambridge

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107153479 © Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge 2016 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2016 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Names: Eidinow, Esther, 1970– editor. Title: Theologies of ancient Greek religion / edited by Esther Eidinow, University of Nottingham, Julia Kindt, University of Sydney, Robin Osborne, University of Cambridge. Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2016. | Series: Cambridge classical studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016011381 | ISBN 9781107153479 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Greece – Religion. | Theology. Classification: LCC BL783.T44 2016 | DDC 292.20938–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016011381 ISBN 978-1-107-15347-9 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

CONT E NT S

List of figures Notes on contributors Preface Note on spellings and abbreviations

page ix xi xv xvii

1 Introduction: what might we mean by the theologies of ancient Greek religion?

1

ESTHER EIDINOW, JULIA KINDT, ROBIN OSBORNE AND SHAUL TOR

2 The story of theology and the theology of the story

12

JULIA KINDT

3 Theologies of the family in Homer and Hesiod

35

BARBARA GRAZIOSI

4 Who’s afraid of Cypselus? Contested theologies and dynastic dedications

62

RENAUD GAGNÉ

5 Heraclitus on Apollo’s signs and his own: contemplating oracles and philosophical inquiry

89

SHAUL TOR

6 The ‘theology’ of the Dionysia and Old Comedy

117

ERIC CSAPO

7 Polytheism and tragedy

153

SIMON GOLDHILL

8 Gods and men in ancient Greek conceptions of lawgiving

176

HANNAH WILLEY

vii

Contents

9 Popular theologies: the gift of divine envy

205

ESTHER EIDINOW

10

Sacrificial theologies

233

ROBIN OSBORNE

11

Theologies of statues in Classical Greek art

249

MILETTE GAIFMAN

12

The gods in the Athenian assembly

281

GUNTHER MARTIN

13

Plato and the secularisation of Greek theology

301

RICK BENITEZ

14

Providence and religion in Middle Platonism

317

GEORGE BOYS-STONES

15

Narratives of continuity and discontinuity

339

PETER VAN NUFFELEN

Bibliography Index

viii

359 403

F IGURE S

6.1 Attic black-figured column krater, Lydos, ca. 550 BCE. New York MMA 31.11.11. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. page 120 6.2 Attic black-figured cup, ca. 560 BCE, Florence 3897. Courtesy of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana. 121 6.3 Attic black-figured amphora, Swing Painter, 525–520 BCE, Christchurch 41/57. Courtesy of the James Logie Memorial Collection, University of Canterbury. 122 6.4 Attic red-figured fragments by the Berlin Painter, 490–480 BCE, Athens, National Museum, Acropolis Collection 702. Courtesy of the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photo: M. C. Miller. 128 11.1 Bronze statuettes from Dreros. Herakleion, Archaeological Museum, 2445–7. Courtesy of Art Resource N.Y. 252 11.2 Mentiklos’ dedication to Apollo. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 3.997. Courtesy of Boston Museum of Fine Arts. 253 11.3 a, Calyx krater attributed to the Painter b, c, d of the Birth of Dionysos, ca. 380 BCE. Amsterdam, Allard Pierson Museum no. 2579. Courtesy of Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam. 257 11.4 Volute krater attributed to Polygnotos, ca. 440 BCE. J. Paul Getty Museum 79.AE.198. Courtesy of J. Paul Getty Museum. 259 11.5 Plate attributed to Paseas, late sixth century BCE. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, 1913.169, attributed to Paseas. 260 11.6a Parthenon metope, North 25. Courtesy of Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Athens. 271 11.6b Parthenon metope, North 24. Courtesy of Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Athens. 271 ix

List of Figures

11.7a Helen at the statue of Athena. Red-figured oinochoe related to the Heimarmene Painter, ca. 430 BCE. Vatican, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco no. 16535. Courtesy of Art Resource N.Y. 11.7b Menelaos encountering Eros and Aphrodite. Red-figured oinochoe related to the Heimarmene Painter, ca. 430 BCE. Vatican, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco no. 16535. Courtesy of Art Resource N.Y.

x

274

275

N OTES ON C ONT RI BUT OR S

is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He specialises in Plato, with current emphasis on myth, poetry, religion and hermeneutics. RICK BENITEZ

is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Durham University. He is currently working on a new study of ‘Middle’ Platonism for the series Cambridge Source Books in Post-Hellenistic Philosophy. GEORGE BOYS-STONES

is Professor of Classics at the University of Sydney and has special interests in myth, ancient drama and theatre history. He has recently co-edited the volume Greek Theatre in the Fourth Century BC (2014). ERIC CSAPO

is Associate Professor in Ancient Greek History at Nottingham University. She has particular interests in ancient Greek religion and magic. Her publications include Oracles, Curses, and Risk Among the Ancient Greeks (2007, rev. edn 2013), Luck, Fate and Fortune: Antiquity and its Legacy (2011) and Envy, Poison, and Death: Women on Trial in Classical Athens (2015). ESTHER EIDINOW

is Reader in Classics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Pembroke College. He works on early Greek poetry and Greek religion. He is the author of Ancestral Fault in Ancient Greece (2013) and co-editor of Sacrifices humains:  Perspectives croisées et représentations (with Pierre Bonnechère, 2013) and Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy (with Marianne Hopman, 2013). RENAUD GAGNÉ

is Associate Professor of Greek Art and Archaeology in the Departments of Classics and History of Art at Yale University. She is the author of Aniconism in Greek MILETTE GAIFMAN

xi

Notes on contributors

Antiquity (2012) and The Art of Libation in Classical Athens (forthcoming). is Director of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), Professor of Greek Literature and Culture and, from 2014 to 2019, John Harvard Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. His many books include most recently Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (2012), Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity (2011) and The Buried Life of Things:  How Objects Made History in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2014). SIMON GOLDHILL

is Professor of Classics at the University of Durham. She currently directs a major project funded by the European Research Council entitled Living Poets: A New Approach to Ancient Poetry. Her books include Inventing Homer:  The Early Reception of Epic (2002), The Gods of Olympus (2013) and, with Johannes Haubold, The Resonance of Epic (2005) and Homer Iliad Book VI (2010). BARBARA GRAZIOSI

is Associate Professor and Chair of the Depar­ tment of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney. She has a PhD in Classics from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Ancient History from the University of Munich. Her publications include Rethinking Greek Religion (2012) and Revisiting Delphi:  Religion and Storytelling in Ancient Greece (2016). She has co-edited (jointly with Esther Eidinow) The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Religion and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Ancient History and a senior editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Religion. JULIA KINDT

is an Early Career Professor at the University of Zurich. He has published Divine Talk: Religious Argumentation in Demosthenes and is currently working on a commentary on Euripides’ Ion and co-editing the new fragments of the historian Dexippus. GUNTHER MARTIN

xii

Notes on contributors

is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Cambridge. His books include The History Written on the Classical Greek Body (2011), and he is the editor, with P. J. Rhodes, of Greek Historical Inscriptions 404– 323 B.C. (2003) and Greek Historical Inscriptions 478–404 B.C. (forthcoming). ROBIN OSBORNE

is Lecturer in Ancient Philosophy in the Classics and Philosophy Departments at King’s College London. His research focuses in particular on theology, religion and epistemology in early Greek philosophy. He has published papers in this area as well as on Pyrrhonian scepticism. SHAUL TOR

is Professor of Ancient History at Ghent University, Belgium. His current research focuses mainly on Late Antiquity and, in particular, late ancient historiography. His most recent book is Penser la tolérance durant l’antiquité tardive (forthcoming). PETER VAN NUFFELEN

is Lecturer in Ancient History at the Univer­ sity of Cambridge and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College. Her research focuses on various aspects of ancient Greek religion and society. She is currently working on a monograph on the interrelation of law and religion in the Greek city state. HANNAH WILLEY

xiii

PRE FAC E

This volume arises out of a conference in Cambridge on 11–13 July 2012, which was itself a product of conversations that the three editors had enjoyed, both separately and as a group, about the need to discuss more openly the theological ideas implicit as well as explicit within ancient Greek writing and practice. Greek religion, we are repeatedly reminded, knew no dogma, no creed and no holy literature. Because of such obvious differences between ancient Greek religion and modern religions, scholarly efforts to establish the nature of Greek theological speculation have in the past been largely restricted to students of philosophy and tragedy. The bounded and relatively self-contained universe of these two genres seems to be more in line with the kind of theological discourse familiar to us from other religious contexts, most notably, perhaps, that of Christianity. It has been common, and strongly encouraged in certain traditions of Christianity, for a line to be drawn between the activity of Christian theology, which goes on behind closed doors in faculties of Divinity, and the activity of worshipping God, which, it is sometimes suggested, should not be unduly complicated by theological considerations. Given the political and other turmoil caused by disputes over the nature of Christ in the early Church, it is perhaps not surprising that Christians should have desired to restrict the impact of theological argument, but the embedding of this idea that worship of god can occur without issues of the nature of that god being raised is implausible. In terms of keeping the peace and avoiding schism or heresy-hunting, there is certainly no need to keep discussions of theology apart from discussions of religious practice when studying the ancient Greek world. This book seeks to ask how the kind of reflection that informed the representation of divinity in the various contexts xv

Preface

of day-to-day worship and other contacts with the gods relates to the more explicit discussions in epic, tragedy and philosophy. In separate chapters the contributors seek to identify some of the basic theological assumptions and issues that form the background to both literary and philosophical theorising and to the range of religious practices known from ancient Greece. Behind all these considerations looms the much larger question of how the modern conception of ‘theology’ relates to the religious cultures of ancient Greece. One major reason why scholars have been content to leave theology on one side is that investigating theology raises a number of difficult methodological issues. This book sets out to identify not only the existence of religious beliefs that have informed the representations and manifestations of the religious in Greek antiquity, but also the strategies in which such beliefs can be recovered. We aim to understand the manifold ways in which these and other representations of the religious draw on and participate in a much broader conversation in ancient Greece about the nature of the divine and its availability to human knowledge. The wide-ranging chapters do not constitute a systematic discussion of all possible relevant activities or types of evidence, but they do aim to explore Greek discourse(s) about the nature of the divine as manifested in a variety of locations and forms, encompassing both the literary and material evidence. By bringing together scholars with an interest in ancient Greek religion as it evolved throughout Greek literature, drama, philosophy and the material evidence, we hope to bridge the gap between those areas of Greek theological discourse that have been well-researched and new and unmapped territory. We are grateful to all who took part in the Cambridge conference, to contributors to this volume who have joined the project since and to Helen Flitton, Marianna Prizio, Kim Richardson and Michael Sharp. Esther Eidinow Julia Kindt Robin Osborne xvi

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N OTE O N SPEL L I NGS AND AB B RE V IAT IO N S

The transliteration of Greek names is a notorious problem. Familiar names are here Latinised, but less familiar names are not. We have tried to be consistent about the treatment of individual names but have not aimed at overall consistency. Abbreviations of the names of Greek authors follow LSJ. Abbreviations of the titles of classical journals follow L’Année philologique.

Other abbreviations ANRW Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung, ed. H. Temporini, Berlin 1972–97. CEG Carmina epigraphica Graeca, saeculorum VIII–V a. Chr. n., ed. P. A. Hansen, Berlin 1983. DK Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. H. Diels and W. Kranz, 6th edn, Berlin 1952. KRS The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd edn, ed. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield, Cambridge 1983. KS Kleine Schriften, W. Burkert, 8 vols, Göttingen, 2001–11. LIMC Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae, Zurich 1981–2009. PW The Delphic Oracle, vol. 2: The Oracular Responses, ed. H. W. Parke and D. E. W. Wormell, Oxford 1956. RO Greek Historical Inscriptions 404–323 BC, ed. P. J. Rhodes and R. Osborne, Oxford 2003. xvii

CHA PTER 1

INT RODUCT ION What might we mean by the theologies of ancient Greek religion? E S T HE R E I DI NOW, J UL I A KI ND T, RO B IN O S B O R NE A ND S HAUL   T OR

The term theologia first appears in Plato’s Republic (379a5), in the course of a famous conversation discussing how to educate children (the future guardians of his imaginary state) about the true nature of the gods.1 The emphasis there is placed on the power of stories and the dangerous content of traditional tales  – in particular the stories of Homer and Hesiod. As Albert Henrichs has pointed out, this passage demonstrates that theologia is a ‘perfectly good pagan word’, and yet modern scholars have not given theology close examination in part, as Henrichs suggests, because they have tended to respond badly to the apparently Christian connotations of the term ‘­theology’.2 When theology is mentioned by scholars, most have discussed the idea in the plural; some have focused on the writings of the ancient philosophers;3 others have recognised that different theologies may be found in different sections of ­society.4 This question of plurality is of course already there in the Republic: Plato’s characters are discussing how to control and disseminate in a regimented way the great variety of stories Jaeger 1947 argued that theologia comprised rational investigation of God’s nature, Vlastos 1952, following Goldschmidt 1950, that this is a term for stories about the gods. 2 Henrichs 2010: esp. 21. 3 Jaeger 1947. 4 For example, Murray 1925:  68 who discusses popular or philosophical theology; Versnel 2011 explores various manifestations of the co-existence of such divergent theological attitudes, sometimes even within the same text. On the question of an ancient Greek theology or theologies, see also Kindt 2012: ch. 6. 1

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told about the gods. The plurality of ancient Greek theologies is also an underlying theme of this collection: but the chapters in this volume seek to explore it, not control it – and, in fact, the idea of plurality is itself used in two different senses. To begin with, there is the multiplicity of stories: it has become a truism that what Greeks thought about the gods depended on when they lived, where they lived and their more particular social, intellectual and indeed religious context. The chapters in this volume pursue this theme into the territory of theology: all ask what theology is implied by the various words and actions we can attribute to Greeks in antiquity, but they ask it of different words and actions, undertaken by individuals in very different times, places and circumstances. Their concern is to identify particular words and actions, not in order to attribute coherent, or incoherent, views to particular Greeks, but to illuminate significant aspects of a broad range of attitudes to the gods. We are conscious that there are many further sources that we might have investigated  – so although Herodotus variously leaves his mark here, later historians’ theologies go without discussion; although we explore the comic festival, the distinct attitude to the gods that marks New Comedy is absent. Likewise in investigating cult statues, on the one hand, and dedicatory inscriptions, on the other, we leave the question of how the choices made with regard to the appearance of dedications conveyed theological views. Following an opening chapter by Kindt, in which the theologies implicit in stories about the gods are explored, the chapters here are arranged in broadly chronological order – though several chapters deal with practices which were long repeated and cannot be considered to belong to any one age. This is not because we aim, or claim, to tell a story about the ‘development’ of theology among the Greeks – this is no ‘Four (or Five) Stages of Greek Theology’. It is simply because earlier words and actions were available for later Greeks to draw on, while later thoughts were not, at least in that form, available to those who lived earlier. For any reader who is reading sequentially, therefore, a broadly chronological presentation seemed 2

Introduction

to us to be the least confusing, indeed, to put it more positively, potentially the most enlightening order in which to consider this material. Within that broad chronology we have chosen where it seems suitable to group chapters that concern related genres of writing or related activities: thus, we juxtapose comedy to tragedy, sacrifice to worshipping statues, Plato to later philosophers. Constructing the book and its story of Greek theology in this way inevitably obscures as well as enlightens  – and this raises our second use of plurality with relation to ‘theology’, concerning the nuances of meaning of the term ‘theology’ itself. For example, while some chapters here can point to certain textual passages in relation to which an understanding of ‘theology’ as the expression of determinate beliefs about the divine would be viable (e.g. Plato’s contention that god is only ever the cause of good things at R. 379b1–c7), this volume asks whether it would be equally appropriate to describe in such terms the theology of, say, a statue or a civic festival calendar. The manner in which such things relate, or might relate, to beliefs about gods would seem to be much more flexible and underdetermined than that. A  given visual representation of gods could plausibly suggest, or be explicable in terms of, several possible sets of beliefs about the divine, and need not in itself require any of those beliefs. The heterogeneity of the materials that we wish to examine and relate to each other calls for a continuous and context-sensitive process of conceptual elucidation, not a one-size-fits-all definition. Different senses  – and strengths  – of the term ‘theology’ become appropriate in different contexts and in relation to different sorts of material. At the weakest end of the spectrum, one might gloss ‘theology’ etymologically as ‘talking about gods’, where ‘talking’ is construed at its broadest. The term ‘theology’, in this sense, would merely aim to pick out references to gods, whether verbal or pictorial.5 More We are only making an initial theoretical terminological point here: we do not suggest that such a weak sense of theology would ever be interpretively productive or warranted. 5

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Esther Eidinow, Julia Kindt, Robin Osborne, Shaul Tor

strongly, ‘theology’ can signify the verbal or pictorial articulation of certain conceptions of, attitudes towards or questions about gods. For example, we may speak about how activities like prayer and reciprocal gift-giving convey conceptions of gods as capable of registering such actions and as at least liable to react to them. When we speak of ‘theology’ at this level, the level of the articulation of conceptions, representations and questions about gods, we have not yet invoked the category of ‘belief’ as part of our understanding of theology at all. In a stronger sense of ‘theology’, however, we may indeed discuss practices like prayer, divination and reciprocal gift-giving, not only as themselves conveying a concept of interventionist and communicative gods, but as conveying beliefs that there exist interventionist and communicative gods.6 To put it more generally, we may speak of how certain verbal or pictorial representations of gods, or certain practices, suggest, in a more or less underdetermined and vague way, certain possible sets of beliefs about gods and are reasonably explicable in terms of those sets of beliefs. In a yet stronger sense, we can use ‘theology’ to signify more determinate and explicit expressions of particular beliefs about gods. Finally, ‘theology’ can signify, not just the expression of an unmethodical set of beliefs, but an explicit, systematic and generalised theory about the divine or, conversely, explicit and abstracted speculations about divinity which may be either systematically doctrinal or open-ended and aporetic to different extents (and in different cases we may investigate in different ways to what extent theological expressions appear to be supported by implicit or explicit inferences and argumentation).7 So, as well as considering ‘theologies’ in the plural, this volume will also explore some of the ways we may viably and usefully speak about ‘theology’ in relation to ancient Greek thought, practice and material culture. We should focus on the 6 See e.g. Parker’s inferences from these practices 2011: 1–39; cf. Versnel 2011: 552–3. 7 We are in effect working here towards a more fine-grained version of Assmann’s dichotomy (2001: 8–13, 163) between the ‘implicit theology’ embedded in a culture’s acts and texts and the ‘explicit theology’ of metatexts, which operate at a reflective distance from religious activity.

4

Introduction

multiplicity of theologies not only in the sense of different or even divergent views and attitudes concerning gods, but also in terms of what theology – and theologising – fundamentally amount to in different cases and in relation to different texts and objects. Although what theology and theologising amount to across very different materials may be profoundly different, this volume holds – indeed, we think it proves – that they are yet sufficiently related to be thought of as participating in what is recognisably the same conversation. The different senses of theology remain meaningfully related to one another insofar as they constitute different points along what is recognisably the same spectrum, ranging from the weakest sense of making reference to gods to the strongest sense of explicit and abstracted speculative reflections about the divine. As an example, we might contrast the second half of Heraclitus B5 with a fourth-century BCE Apulian red-figure krater (Fig. 11.3), which famously depicts Apollo’s cult statue inside his temple and, next to this, the god playing a lyre.8 Heraclitus reads: ‘And they pray to these images, as if someone (τις) were to converse with houses not recognising who gods and heroes are’ (οὔτι γινώσκων θεοὺς οὐδ’ ἥρωας οἵτινές εἰσι). It is difficult to determine whether it is the very practice of praying to cult statues which is charged with conflating the images which are addressed with the deities themselves or only crass and misguided practitioners (the ‘they’) who do so. On both construals, however, the fragment explicitly articulates an abstracted and generalised criticism of theologically misguided and misleading attitudes to cult statues and their relation to the gods they purport to represent.9 It is a very different sort of theology and theologising that we encounter in the krater. This is theological not only in the weakest sense of making reference APM02579. On this krater, see further Platt 2011:  119–23 and Gaifman below, pp. 256–8, 262–9. 9 The practice itself: Kahn 1979: 266–7; Wildberg 2011: 210, n.14; misguided interpreters: Adomenas 1999: 101–6. C. Osborne 1997: 36–7 locates the theological and interpretive muddle rather in the failure to recognise that the practice of praying to gods by addressing their images makes sense strictly in its particular religious context and that any attempt to recreate the same kind of conversation outside of this context will lead to absurdity. 8

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to gods but in the stronger sense of raising certain questions and gesturing towards different possible responses – in an underdetermined and open-ended manner – concerning the nature of the relation between Apollo and his cultic representations. Does the notable measure of correspondence between god and statue reinforce the appropriateness of anthropomorphic cultic images for anchoring regular interactions with the god? On the other hand, insofar as the krater’s (archaising) ‘statue Apollo’ is not as detailed, full and lifelike as its ‘real Apollo’, are we made to recognise that, in engaging with the statue, we are not in fact engaging with the god himself and that our visual representations of gods (this krater included) are inherently limited? Such different materials as a krater and a philosophical text, then, may evince different theologies, and a fundamentally different sort of theologising, and yet be meaningfully relatable as participants in the same theological conversation. As this suggests, continuous and context-sensitive investigations with and about the category of ‘theology’ may be beneficial not least in getting us to acquire a clearer and more precise understanding of the ways in which Greek theology and theologising amount to different things in different contexts and in relation to different texts or objects, and of the ways in which such different kinds of theologies can interact and interrelate. At the same time, thinking about ancient Greek theologies also promises to highlight the patterns of thought that informed seemingly disparate religious beliefs and practices – patterns that may otherwise go unnoticed. It is in this sense that an interest in ancient Greek theologies advances our understanding of the unity and diversity of ancient Greek religion as well as of the centres and peripheries of ancient Greek religious experience. We therefore offer here not a sequential reading of the volume, which is, after all, the reader’s default option, but some suggestions as to major questions that are best raised by clustering the chapters differently. One major question is about theology and the Greek city. This is a question itself in two parts:  is there a theology of the polis, and, is there a 6

Introduction

politics of theology? The assumption prevalent in much modern scholarship, but also questioned by many scholars – that for the Greeks religion is ‘polis religion’, embedded in the very essence of the Greek city – might suggest that the Greek city was underpinned by, and underpinned, Greek theology. That the political actions of the Greek city had theological implications cannot be disputed  – acts of tyrannicide, for instance, which were formally encouraged in various Greek poleis, have straightforward implications for whether or not rulers have a privileged position in relation to the gods. The formal theology of the city is explored here most directly by Willey in ­chapter 8, investigating law-making and the gods, but it is also in the background in such discussions as Csapo’s in ­chapter 6 of the theology of the Dionysiac festival. Yet Csapo’s discussion itself shows how extraordinarily hard it was for any city to commandeer the gods to its own structures and rules. Relationships within the Greek city emerge here, also, but differently, in Eidinow’s consideration of ‘popular theologies’ in ­chapter 9. She explores the ways in which different stories may receive different emphasis over time, making it possible for different theologies to coexist, but also to conflict. Thus, the inhabitants of communities may choose to accommodate what might otherwise be considered deviant behaviour, but also police any behavioural orthodoxy. But theologies also emerge here as political in a quite different sense – as the basis for factional division. We see this in Martin’s examination of politicians in action, in ­chapter  12, but we also see it in Gagné’s discussion of the Corinthian request, and Olympia’s refusal, to change a dedicatory epigram. Here different conceptions of the relation of the individual to the community turn into different relations between the community and the gods:  did the Cypselids stand between the Corinthians and their gods, or were their names simply temporary ciphers to be replaced when political situations changed? Did monuments dedicated by rulers who failed stand as testimonies to the gods’ faithfulness to the real dedicators, the community, or as testimony to the gods’ judgement on the 7

Esther Eidinow, Julia Kindt, Robin Osborne, Shaul Tor

declared dedicator, the tyrant? And was the political theology of Greek city like or in contrast to the political theology of Croesus’ Lydia? Croesus and the Cypselids alike live for us only in the pages of a story. If these are reflections on political theology they are the reflections of a storyteller. A  number of chapters in this volume continue to meditate on the ancient links that have been made between storytelling and Greek theology. Taking a different approach from the Republic, Graziosi, in ­chapter 3 explores Homer and Hesiod as ‘preferred’ storytellers of ancient Greek religion (‘preferred’ in the sense of ‘particularly authoritative’); Willey’s discussion of lawgivers in ­chapter 8 finds them embedded in stories that crucially frame the reader’s understanding of law in relation to the gods. The theological work of stories has long been central to Christian theology: what status and authority are we prepared to grant to these stories? How do we relate them to each other and to other forms of religious (theological) articulation, most notably in religious practices? Finally, in talking about their respective theologies, can we avoid the pigeonholing that has dominated so much scholarship in the past (see especially Kindt in this volume)? The relation between story and action, under the guise of those heavily charged terms ‘myth’ and ‘ritual’, has long been central to anthropological discussions of religion. One of the things that we did rather deliberately in setting up the conference was to keep the two apart, so as to think separately (even if sometimes in the same chapter, as here in Osborne’s discussion of sacrifice in ­chapter  10) about the implications of actions. But in life, as Csapo’s discussion of the Dionysia makes clear, actions and words were never separate. Does this, however, mean that they were never dissonant, never counteracted each other? The general absence of evidence for explicit argument over ritual practice in Greek antiquity – or our failure to identify the evidence – has contributed to the unwarranted assumption of theological agreement. This has been reinforced by the tendency to construct a uniformity of action for which there is no positive evidence – a tendency parallel to 8

Introduction

the assumption of underlying monotheism that, as Goldhill shows in ­chapter 7, has plagued the interpretation of tragedy. The plurality of texts and contexts in which questions about gods are raised in the ancient Greek world underlies our talk of Greek theologies rather than Greek theology. But the discussions here of philosophical enquiries across Greek antiquity highlight the ways in which this plurality is not trivial but deep-seated. It is in the writings of the philosophers that we find explicit attention being given to the sources of theologies and the authorities underwriting them. But that attention serves to problematise rather than to establish theological authority – starting with Xenophanes’ and Heraclitus’ explicit criticism of Homer. Yet to recognise that there were for many Greeks no unproblematically authoritative articulations of knowledge of the gods is not to join those who dismissed Homer and Hesiod as mere literary fictions with little if any immediate relevance to what real Greeks did in their real lives. Once we accept that no single articulation of the religious can be favoured as offering a straightforward account of religion, whether as thought or as lived, we need to rethink both what Greeks did with the plurality of theologies with which they were faced and what we do with the similarities and differences between individual theologies that variously emerge from these several chapters. The last contribution to this volume, Peter Van Nuffelen’s ‘Narratives of continuity and discontinuity’, turns directly towards such problems of agreement and dissonance. Taking up the theme of narrative and storytelling, Van Nuffelen draws attention to what he calls ‘the theology in the story’. This is found on two levels (at least):  first, in the constructions of continuity and discontinuity used by ancient religious and philosophical groups, not necessarily to represent historical continuity, but for other purposes, such as the creation of identity. Second, in the interpretations of modern scholarship, which is not only influenced by ancient rhetorics, but also by our own theological assumptions. Enquiring into ancient Greek theologies matters not least because it concerns the core of how we conceive of ancient Greek religion. 9

Esther Eidinow, Julia Kindt, Robin Osborne, Shaul Tor

To stress the need to acknowledge theological variety is not to stand in the way of also asking in the case of similarities between individual articulations of the religious, what they reveal about larger structures of theological thought that pervade different areas of academic compartmentalisation and expertise. What, if anything, do the views of Heraclitus on oracular language as a form of divine representation and Greek statuary representations of the gods have in common? The question of the existence of a theology (or theologies) of ancient Greek religion is ultimately the question of the unity of religious structures behind what may at first sight look like a bewildering array of religious beliefs and practices. Older scholarship (most notably those scholars influenced by Jane Ellen Harrison) sought to answer it by pointing to multiple theologies brought together in the interplay of myth and ritual; most recently the political and social structures of the ancient Greek polis have served as a placeholder in which to claim and situate the unity of ancient Greek religion. The challenge offered by this book is to find a way of understanding how Greek theologies worked together without having recourse to the unsatisfactory oppositions between ‘Olympian’ and ‘Chthonic’, ‘literary’ and ‘lived’, ‘public’ and ‘private’, ‘philosophical’ and ‘cult’, ‘polis’ and ‘anti-polis’ with which earlier scholars have sought to divide the broader religious culture of ancient Greece with its many alternative locations and articulations of the religious.10 So, this is a book that seeks to find a place for difference. No longer should inconsistencies between individual theologies be explained away by dismissing some theological stances and favouring others. Emily Kearns put this well: ‘Divergent statements [about the Greek gods] may appear divergent not because Greek religious thought is a chaotic jumble of random ideas, and not only because of differences in individuals and

Some of the recent scholarship addressing these dichotomies includes:  Aleshire 1994; Scullion 1994; Burkert 1995; Kearns 1995; Osborne 1997; Parker 1997, 2011; Sourvinou-Inwood 1997; Betegh 2004; Trepanier 2010; Eidinow 2011; Kindt 2012: esp. 190–4. 10

10

Introduction

individual approaches, but their divergences can also be analysed as an effect of the adoption of different, well-established perspectives.’11 The contributions in this volume seek to build on these observations:  on the one hand, by investigating the different nature and content of some of these perspectives and the individual views that emerge from them; and on the other, by showing how reframing our assumptions about the meaning of ‘theology’ can make sense of these differences within an overall account of ancient Greek religion.

Kearns 1995: 526. 11

11

CHA PTER 2

TH E ST ORY OF T HE OLOGY A N D TH E T HE OLOGY OF T HE  S T O RY J UL I A   KI NDT

Introduction Does ancient Greek religion have a theology? The obvious answer seems to be ‘no’. Ancient Greek religion lacked many of the systems of authority typical of other religious traditions, most notably, perhaps, Christianity. It was not a religion of the book (a ‘bible’), had no definitive formula of belief (a ‘creed’) and no binding doctrine at its core (a ‘dogma’). The existence of such structures of authority, however, seems crucial to the existence of even as generic a definition as Hinnells’, who describes theology as ‘a systematic expression of beliefs, an account of their sources and authority, and a clarification of their relation to other areas of belief’.1 To speak of a theology of ancient Greek religion seems not so much anachronistic as positively misleading. On the whole, ancient Greek religious beliefs articulated themselves in a much more haphazard and piecemeal fashion and throughout a wide variety of texts and contexts. Indeed, much classical scholarship since the 1940s and 50s has dispensed altogether with any discussion of ancient Greek theology. Given that theology seems to be such an obvious misnomer, however, it is surprising to find it featuring with astonishing frequency in current scholarship. A number of classical scholars examining a broad array of religious beliefs and practices make passing reference to it in their published work.2 1 Hinnells 1984: 328. 2 Some examples:  Osborne 2011:  189–94 (‘the theology of godsbodies’); Platt 2011: 31–50 (the ‘visual theology’ of votive reliefs), 114–23 (‘epiphany and the theology of naturalism’); Versnel 2011; Kindt 2012: 155–89, 190–4.

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The story of theology and the theology of the story

Moreover, Walter Burkert, Robert Parker and Albert Henrichs explicitly discuss the scope and meaning of particular aspects of ancient Greek theology  – again attesting to the renewed scholarly interest in this concept.3 The use of theology in these and other studies, however, raises a number of questions: What do we mean by ‘theology’? What role does this concept play in accounts of ancient Greek religion? And following from these: Can (and should) ‘theology’ feature more widely in the study of ancient Greek religion? This chapter suggests some answers to the first two questions and touches tentatively upon the third. To this end it investigates the way in which the conception of ‘theology’ has been useful, is useful and may be useful in classical scholarship. In particular, it juxtaposes the way in which older scholarship embraced the existence of ‘theology’ with the much more reluctant use of this concept in current scholarship. I argue that, perhaps surprisingly, the difference between older scholarship and research since the 1940/50s is grounded less in different conceptions of theology than in changing scholarly attitudes towards what one might want to call ‘the theology of the story’ – the way in which in the ancient Greek world, views about the nature of the gods and their availability to human knowledge were articulated not only explicitly in critical discourse but also, and perhaps above all, in narrative form: as stories. Albert Henrichs has recently commented upon this link between storytelling and Greek theology. He has reminded us that the question of ‘what is a god’ (ti theos;), first explicitly raised by Pindar, is not specific to Greek philosophy alone.4 He points out that theologia, in the literal sense of ‘talking about the gods/god’ (legein peri theōn) or in the sense of ‘verbalised reflections on the “nature” of divinity’ was a form of religious contemplation inherent to Greek poetry (in hymns, 3 Burkert 1977: 372 = Burkert 1985: 246 (on which in more detail below. For easier access all references to and quotes from Burkert 1977 are from the English edition from 1985); Parker 1997; Henrichs 2010. See below for a discussion of theology in the works of these and other scholars. 4 Henrichs 2010: 20 referring to Pindar fr. 140d Snell/Maehler.

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for example) well before the concept of theologia was developed in Greek philosophy.5 Henrichs then goes on to examine the views about the nature of divinity in a number of different authors and genres.6 He has shown that stories about the gods and goddesses circulated widely in Greek thought and literature, that these stories indeed speak to the question of what is a god and that they express overlapping (if not always identical) notions about the nature of divinity. Indeed, the student of ancient Greek religion wishing to map the spectrum of ways in which stories articulate views about the nature of the divine does not have to look very far. We could for example start chronologically with the stories about the Greek gods told by Homer and Hesiod. Or we could turn to Pindar and investigate the ways in which he grounded his praise of human achievement in an elaborate theology of divine influence and power. We could look at the stories of Herodotus, Philostratus or Pausanias  – to name just three major storytellers of the Greek gods from different periods in the history of Greece. We could proceed by genre and investigate the theologies of Greek tragedy, oratory or comedy, for example. Or we could expand our focus to include non-literary modes of storytelling, and consider iconographic representations of the gods on pots. The nexus between storytelling and ancient Greek theological speculation is indeed profound and several contributions in this volume speak to it. Given the multiple ways in which stories seem to articulate theological views, however, it may not be entirely misleading to say that ancient Greek religion was to a significant extent a theology of the story. Yet, as Robert Parker has put it in the context of a discussion of the religious views articulated in Greek tragedy, ‘plots are plots, not credos’.7 In other words, even though different kinds of stories do indeed speak to the question of what is a god, they may do so in radically different ways. Some extra Henrichs 2010: 20–2. 6 Henrichs 2010: 29–37. 7 Parker 1997: 145. 5

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The story of theology and the theology of the story

work is therefore needed to consider what a particular story (or set of stories) contributes to the overall picture we sketch of ancient Greek religion in general and that of the Greek gods more specifically. In particular, the question emerges of how we deal with possible disagreements between different kinds of stories, told by different authors, in different texts and contexts.8 Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this is exactly where the different scholarly positions on the ‘theology of the story’ come into the picture. While older scholarship embraced storytelling as an important manifestation of the religious in ancient Greece, later scholarship has favoured some stories and dismissed others as irrelevant to our understanding of ancient Greek religion. In this chapter I  explain why much current scholarship makes a fundamental distinction between different kinds of religious storytelling and offer some criticism of this position. In lieu of a conclusion I  offer a number of questions that emerge from the ‘story of theology’, questions that are fundamental to a re-evaluation of theology as a productive category in classical scholarship. I  start with a brief overview of ‘the story of theology’ – the way in which ‘theology’ has and has not featured in classical scholarship over time. The story of ancient Greek theology The story of ancient Greek theology is quickly told. It is a brief story with few protagonists, a story with no beginning and certainly no conclusion or sense of closure. If we choose the oeuvre of Jane Ellen Harrison as a point of departure this is because the works of the so-called Cambridge School embraced the idea of a theology as a broadly conceived dimension of the religious in ancient Greece whereas current scholarship discusses the concept in a much narrower way.

8 Inconsistencies in Greek religion: Kindt 2012: 19–25.

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Theology in older scholarship For Harrison theology was largely but not completely synonymous with mythology. I  say ‘largely but not completely’ because even though both terms frequently occur together throughout her oeuvre  – hence creating an impression of equivalence  – there are a number of instances in which she uses theology as the more abstract concept.9 Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, arguably the most succinct formulation of her conception of religion, features a section entitled ‘primitive theology’ in which Harrison seeks to draw out the general features, rules and conventions of the depiction of the gods in Greek mythology.10 Here and elsewhere, she speaks of theology when she bases her deductions on the general patterns of thought behind particular accounts of Greek mythology.11 She also uses theology as a summary term in order to refer to the ­variety of mythological narratives about the Greek gods in a particular context. She speaks for example of ‘Homeric theology’, ‘Hesiodic theology’, ‘Orphic theology’, ‘Olympian theology’, ‘popular theology’ and so forth.12 For Harrison theology and ritual are the twin dimensions in which ancient Greek religion manifests itself. ‘What ritual expresses in action, theology utters in concomitant representation, the gods are images of desire.’13 While ritual and theology are presented here as alternative and ultimately complementary articulations of the religious, elsewhere Harrison pursues 9 Mythology and theology as synonymous concepts:  e.g. Harrison 1903:  162, 163; Harrison 1912: xx, 498. 10 Harrison 1921: 27–34, cf. xliii–l. 11 Theology as an abstraction from Greek mythology:  e.g. Harrison 1903:  185 (on the ‘wheel of mythology’), 332 (on the origins of Greek theology as discussed by Herodotus), 363 (on the anthropomorphic ‘formula’ of Greek theology), 491 (on the unremitting nature of ‘primitive theology’), 619 (‘popular theology’); Harrison 1912 (on the difference between religion and theology as sometimes confused by science). 12 Homeric theology:  Harrison 1903:  315; Harrison 1912:  466; Hesiodic theology: Harrison 1903: 349; Harrison 1912: 72, 466; Orphic theology: Harrison 1903: 459, 613; Harrison 1912:  531; Olympian theology:  Harrison 1903:  9, 613; Harrison 1912: 530; popular theology: Harrison 1903: 620. 13 Harrison 1921:  xlv. See also Harrison 1912:  486. For Harrison ritual is ‘delayed reaction’ and hence representative of ‘unsatisfied desire’. Harrison 1921: xliv. Myth and ritual as twin dimensions of the religious:  Harrison 1921:  xliii:  ‘It has been

16

The story of theology and the theology of the story

a more explicitly ‘ritualist’ line when she argues for the primacy of ritual over mythology and theology.14 For Harrison theology and ritual ultimately work towards the same end in so far as they fulfil the same social function. Both ritual and theology help humans come to terms with their environment. Ritual is a way of embracing and enhancing positive elements in this environment (e.g. in rites of impulsion) or of controlling hostile ones (e.g. in rites of expulsion).15 Theology, in turn, is grounded in the imagination of beings more powerful than ourselves (gods) and allows humans to distance themselves from existential conflicts by projecting those conflicts onto a higher ontological plane distinct from but still fundamentally intelligible to the human cosmos. It is in this sense that for Harrison the emergence of theology is merely a by-product of the social origins of all religions.16 While there is no religion without ritual, the formulation of theology presupposes a more or less defined conception of divinity and is therefore not present in all religious traditions and at all ‘stages’ of their development.17 In ancient Greece, theology is representative in particular of the religion of the Archaic and Classical periods, which revolved around beliefs and practices relating to the anthropomorphic gods living on Mount Olympus (Olympianism).18 The older, prehistoric stratum of ancient Greek religion, which Harrison sought to much disputed whether the myth arises out of the rite or the rite out of the myth, whether a man thinks something because he does it or whether he does it because he thinks it. As a matter of fact the two operations arose together and are practically inseparable.’ 14 E.g. Harrison and Verrall 1890: iii, xxvi; Harrison 1903: 124. Csapo 2005: 156–9 has explained this ‘wavering’ between rival conceptions of the relationship between myth and ritual as the result of the conflict between her conception of religion and the evidence on which it was based. 15 Harrison 1921: xxii. 16 Her interest in the social origins of the religious was inspired by Durkheim’s sociology of religion (Durkheim 1912). See e.g. Harrison 1912: 131, n.2, 139, n.1, 486–7 for an acknowledgement of this influence. 17 Harrison 1912: 488. 18 See e.g. Harrison 1912: 119 for a discussion of the omophagia as ‘part of a religion, that is a system of sanctities, that knew no gods’ and that therefore ‘belongs to a social organization that preceded theology’.

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distinguish in an application of evolutionary anthropology, lacks any concept of divinity and therefore had no theology.19 Theology is thus central to Harrison’s account of Archaic and Classical Greek religion. Central to theology, however, is divine representation. The more elaborate the image humans have of divinity and the more they are able to separate this image from the process in which it is imagined, the more successful they are in projecting the problems, frictions and inconsistencies of human life onto the divine plane.20 Indeed, Harrison explicitly and repeatedly dwells on the gulf that Olympianism constructed between the sphere of humanity and the sphere of the gods.21 Divine representations in the form of stories about the gods (myth) and divine images (art) are crucial in so far as they elaborate and maintain this gulf.22 What sets Greek religion apart is above all the fact that, in contrast to other religious traditions, in ancient Greece this gulf never manifested itself in the form of doctrine and dogma.23 Harrison was by no means the only scholar of her generation to attribute a central role to theology in her depiction of ancient Greek religion. The same is true of her Oxford friend and colleague Gilbert Murray, for example, who referred to various Greek theologies in his account of the four, later five, stages of ancient Greek religion as ‘Olympian theology’, ‘anthropomorphic theology’ and so forth.24 Theology also featured in Rohde’s once-influential account of ancient Greek notions of the immortality of the soul, which refers to Greek theology at various times in order to ground Harrison 1921: xliii. Harrison 1903: 141 speaks of ‘a gentler theology’ that turned the once feared spirits, ghosts, demons and chthonic gods into spiritual entities and protectors against all sorts of evil influences, hence indirectly suggesting the existence of a less gentle theology at the earlier stage. 20 In the Epilegomena she states:  ‘It will readily be seen that for this purpose of a refuge a god of the Olympian type serves best. A god of the daimon type is too near, too intimate for relief. The more completely segregated is the god the better he serves as safety valve.’ Harrison 1921: xlix. 21 See e.g. Harrison 1903: 8, 163; Harrison 1921: xlvi. 22 Harrison 1921: xliii–xlvii. 23 Harrison 1921: xlvi–xlvii. 24 E.g. Murray 1925: 2, 127 (‘Olympian theology’), 12 (‘anthropomorphic theology’), 68 (‘popular’ and ‘philosophical’ Greek theology), 136 (‘Hellenistic theology’). For the concept of theology in older scholarship see also Nägelsbach 1857. 19

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The story of theology and the theology of the story

beliefs in ghosts and spirits in some broader conception of the religious.25 Rohde, in particular, seems to have anticipated Harrison’s conception of theology as an abstraction from mythology, for example when he summarily refers to Greek ‘mythology and the theology founded upon it’.26 Rohde, Harrison and Murray seem to have found the conception of theology ‘good to think with’, allowing them to conceive of the broader structures of the Greek pantheon behind individual accounts of myth and individual representations of the gods in art. Older scholarship did not differentiate between different kinds of stories about the Greek gods and their specific claims to truth. Rather, mythology and theology remained deeply grounded in ritual and thus retained their place in the overall conception of ancient Greek religion. A new paradigm: theology in scholarship since the 1940s and 50s Since the days of Rohde, Harrison and Murray, however, theology has largely disappeared from the radar of scholarly interest, together perhaps with notions of the ‘primitive’, the ritualistic approach and interest in cultural (religious) evolution. In contrast to older scholarship, which embraced the idea of theology, most classical scholars today avoid speaking of Greek theologies altogether. This, I  argue, is due to changes not in the scholarly conception of theology, but in the way in which classical scholarship approaches the stories of ancient Greek religion. Two distinct but related developments have contributed to this turn away from ‘theology’. First, since the 1970s and 80s, scholarly preoccupation with myth itself has undergone some radical changes, which redirected the focus of interest towards other aspects of Greek religious storytelling. Second, 25 Rohde 1890/1894. All references to and quotes from Rohde are from the English edition from 1972. 26 Rohde 1972:  362. Theology as an abstraction from myth:  e.g. Rohde 1972:  32 (Homeric theology); 339, 348, 350, 352, 598 (Orphic theology); 431, 542 (philosophical theology); 131 (theology of Delphi); 208, 411, 417 (popular theology).

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and in many ways following from this, there was also a turn away from religious beliefs – the building blocks of theology as it were – towards religious practices, a ‘pragmatic turn’ in the study of Greek religion. I start with the change in the scholarly study of myth. In the works of Jean-Pierre Vernant, Marcel Detienne, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and other scholars of the so-called Paris School, the stories of ancient Greek religion were subjected to a new kind of analysis. Instead of the associative connections made in older scholarship between fertility myths and the Greek agricultural cycle, for example, this new approach sought to illuminate the structures of a given mythological narrative as a network of correspondences between parallel, complementary and opposing units of meaning.27 At first sight this approach seems uniquely suited to reveal the ‘systematic expression of beliefs’ – I refer here to the generic definition of theology from the beginning of this ­chapter.28 However, the focus was on revealing the structures within a given mythological narrative rather than, as older scholarship had it, the ‘theological’ structures behind such narratives. Moreover, the overall focus shifted from an interest in Greek myths as an articulation of the pantheon to an interest in Greek myths as an articulation of the ancient Greek city and its institutions. If the structures of mythology were believed to reveal anything at all it was the structures of Greek society, not of theology. Marcel Detienne’s study The Gardens of Adonis, for example, looks at the way spices and smells feature in myths and rituals pertaining to Adonis, a handsome young god said by various people to have aroused the desire of Aphrodite and Persephone and who died a premature death on the tusks of a wild boar.29 In his analysis of myths and practices, in particular ritual practices pertaining to Adonis, Detienne exposes a network of opposed elements concerning legitimate (wifely) and illegitimate (extramarital, seductive) A representative sample of the works of the Paris School: Gordon 1981. 28 See p. 12, note 1. 29 Detienne 1972. 27

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The story of theology and the theology of the story

sexuality. He argues that by inverting and distorting the social order, the internal logic of myths and rituals associated with Adonis ultimately reflects on the moral universe of the ancient Greek city. Structuralism did a wonderful job of revealing what is at stake in individual mythological narratives and the ritual practices associated with them. Since the 1970s it has remained arguably the most powerful approach to the study of Greek mythology. At the same time, however, those pursuing this approach made little attempt to integrate it into a more general account of ancient Greek religion. The fact that no scholar of the Paris School ever published a broad, general study of ancient Greek religion in its different manifestations and articulations reveals the scope and limits of structural analysis. Under the influence of structuralism (but by no means identical with it), there was also a distinct move away from a focus on religious beliefs towards the study of religious practices, notably ritual practices. This shift is closely associated with the opposing positions of Walter Burkert and Jean-Pierre Vernant on the meaning of Greek blood sacrifice.30 Despite their disagreement on whether eating or killing should be crucial to our understanding of sacrifice, they unreservedly agree on its ultimate function: instigating group cohesion and solidarity. In other words, both scholars ultimately find the meaning of blood sacrifice on the human plane. As a result, however, in both accounts there is much on the social function of blood sacrifice and surprisingly little on what one might want to call the ‘theology’ of blood sacrifice as a symbolic articulation of the relationship between humanity and divinity. The ‘pragmatic turn’ was linked to the positions of Burkert and Vernant on Greek blood sacrifice as the central ritual of ancient Greek religion but it did not remain limited to it. In particular, the conception of ‘polis religion’ that emerged as a leading paradigm in classical scholarship during the 1970s and 1980s from the works of Burkert and the Paris School strongly favours the focus on religious practices, since religious agency 30 Detienne and Vernant 1971; Burkert 1972.

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is always, in one way or another, related to the polis and her institutions.31 Religion appeared to be a representation and explanation of social and political structures, a way to ‘make sense’ of the realities of life in the ancient Greek city. Much productive work has since been done on the manifold ways in which various identities within and of the city were articulated in festivals, processions, initiation rites and other religious practices. Overall, however, works written under the paradigm of polis religion have little to say about the structures of Greek religious beliefs, not to mention theology. It was not just theology that had fallen out of fashion. More fundamentally, the concept of religious belief itself was challenged and in many quarters directly dismissed as inapplicable to the religions of the ancient world. Under the influence of the pragmatics of polis religion, ancient Greek religion became a matter of communal religious practices, which were considered to be deeply ‘embedded’ in society. As Simon Price succinctly put it: ‘Practice not belief is the key, and to start from questions about faith or personal piety is to impose alien values on ancient Greece.’32 To be fair, this point should not be taken out of context. What Price asserts here is merely the fact that ancient Greek religion differed from other religious traditions, most notably Christianity. With this emphatic statement, however, he represents a certain scholarly position that strongly favours practice as key to our understanding of ancient Greek religion and that sees belief and practice as ultimately separate and separable articulations of the religious. There are, however, two areas in which ‘theology’ persists. In the study of Greek philosophy the term is widely used to refer to the theological systems of individual philosophers. Scholars speak of the ‘theology of Plato’, for example, or the ‘theology of Aristotle’.33 This use of the term derived part of its legitimacy from the fact that theologia as a form of Here and below see in more detail: Kindt 2012: 3–6, 13–16. 32 Price 1999: 3. 33 The theology of Plato: Solmsen 1940; Armleder 1967; Gocer 1998. The theology of Aristotle: Bodéüs 2000. 31

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The story of theology and the theology of the story

explicit abstract reasoning about the nature of the gods was intrinsic to philosophy from Plato onwards.34 Some scholars also used ‘theology’ to describe whole strands of thought  – as in The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, the title of Werner Jaeger’s once-influential but now dated Gifford Lectures, which covered the development of philosophy from the Milesians to Empedocles, Anaxagoras and Diogenes.35 Theology also retained a certain presence in scholarly work on Greek ­tragedy.36 Given that most, if not all, extant Greek tragedies raise and articulate views about the nature of the gods and their interest in and impact on human affairs, it seems not entirely misleading to consider these views together – as a ‘systematic expression of belief’ – and to discuss them under the umbrella of ‘theology’. To speak of the theologies of tragedy and philosophy seems relatively unproblematic in so far as the comparatively bounded and self-reflective universe of these two genres is very much in line with the concept of theology as a systematic, coherent and explicitly formulated body of knowledge derived from the revelatory religious traditions, most notably, Christianity. In much current scholarship, however, the theologies of tragedy and philosophy remain fairly self-contained entities. These theologies do not feature largely in many general accounts of ancient Greek religion.37 For some classical scholars at least, there is an implicit assumption that poetic and philosophical religion can safely be left to the literary and philosophically inclined. The result is a certain pigeonholing of religions. It finds its conceptual base in an elaborate triple division of theologies, which favours some forms of religious storytelling and dismisses others as irrelevant to what real Greeks did in their real lives. First attestation of theologia in Greek literature:  Pl. R. 379A, but see also Xenophanes B34; Empedocles B131 (Burkert 1985: 465, n.2). 35 Jaeger 1947. Theology and philosophy: e.g. Lloyd 1979: 11; Gerson 1990; Drozdek 2007. 36 Theology and Greek tragedy:  e.g. Lloyd-Jones 1956:  57, 2003; Hall 1989:  70, 72, 88; Mikalson 1991: 235; Zelenak 1998: 71; Mastronarde 2002. Theology and Greek comedy: Long 1986: 21. 37 But see e.g. Parker 2005: 136–52. 34

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Polis religion and the theologia tripertita Poetic, philosophical and popular theologies In his classic book Griechische Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche (Stuttgart 1977, English transl. 1985), Walter Burkert discusses theology mostly with regard to the philosophical speculation of Plato and other ancient philosophers.38 He states that ‘[t]‌he concept of mind introduced into theology by Xenophanes has remained dominant there’, hence using this concept to describe aspects of philosophical discourse.39 He also maintains that for Parmenides ‘[b]eing reposes in itself by its own necessity and seems not to require theology’.40 Here and elsewhere Burkert uses ‘theology’ as shorthand for ‘accounts about the gods’ in Greek philosophy. In a section entitled ‘social functions of cult’, however, Burkert uses a broader conception of theologia, when he comments upon the co-existence of various theologies of ancient Greek religion: [T]‌here is a theology of the poets [‘eine Theologie der Dichter’], which need not be believed, and at the same time a theology of the polis [‘eine Theologie der Polis’] which is very much a civic duty [‘Bürgerpflicht’]. Then there is also the natural theology of the philosophers [‘die “Natürliche Theologie” der Philosophen’] which makes an imminent claim to truth and which may be regarded either in a spirit of intellectual commitment or with sceptical reserve.41

Burkert’s main aim is to highlight the existence of a theology of the polis outside or beyond the contexts of Greek literature and philosophy. Yet he draws a fairly firm line between the theologies of the city on the one hand and those of poetry and philosophy on the other. While the theology of the polis is presented as a ‘Bürgerpflicht’ (a ‘civic duty’) – that is a matter of communal and collective responsibility of the ‘Bürger’ (‘citizens’) – the theologies of poetry and philosophy are less See e.g. Burkert 1985: 313, 325, 329, 331. 39 Burkert 1985: 308. 40 Burkert 1985: 310. 41 Burkert 1985: 246–7. The German original is from Burkert 1977: 372. 38

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immediately relevant to ‘the theology of the polis’ because of their tentative, non-committal and contested claims to truth. Burkert does not explicitly develop his conception of a ‘theology of the polis’ but it becomes clear from the discussion of Greek religion throughout his book that the ‘civic duty’ of the theology of the polis manifests itself first and foremost in the principles and practices of ‘polis religion’. He largely avoids the problematic category of belief, personal religion and other, non-civic articulations of the supernatural (e.g. magical practices) which, as I  have shown elsewhere, are largely defined as being outside of the scope of ancient Greek religion and Burkert’s account of it.42 In Burkert’s view philosophical religion may draw on the pantheon of polis religion – as for example is the case in the ideal city of Plato’s Laws – but overall both philosophical and literary/poetic theology is of little consequence to what real Greeks did in their everyday lives. The existence of this kind of pigeonholing of theologies is widespread and its impact profound. It features prominently in Jon Mikalson’s three studies of the theologies of tragedy, philosophy and the city:  Athenian Popular Religion (which came out in 1983), Honor Thy Gods: Popular Religion in Greek Tragedy (published in 1991)  and Greek Popular Religion in Greek Philosophy (published in 2010).43 As the views on the scope and nature of Greek theology presented throughout these three books highlight assumptions that also underlie Burkert’s it is worth discussing them in detail. Indeed Mikalson spells out much of the conceptual basis that implicitly informs Burkert’s conception of polis religion. The way in which Mikalson conceives of the theologies of tragedy, philosophy and the city as separate and separable entities is influenced by the same conception of a tripartite theology already found in Burkert’s oeuvre. And as in Burkert’s Greek Religion, Mikalson’s distinction of three different 42 Kindt 2015. In Kindt 2012: 30–2, I have argued that this focus on religious practices (and the relative neglect of religious beliefs) is typical of scholars working with the model of polis religion as religious practices are always, in one way or the other, tied to the polis. 43 Mikalson 1983, 1991, 2010.

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theologies rests on privileging some forms of religious storytelling, most notably those of oratory, historiography and the epigraphic tradition, over other more ‘literary’ ones. The first book, Athenian Popular Religion, is an important precursor to the other two studies. What Mikalson refers to as ‘popular religion’ is perhaps best thought of as an inventory (he calls it a ‘corpus’) of ‘typical’ Athenian beliefs and practices derived from inscriptions, Greek oratory and the historiographic tradition, in particular Xenophon.44 These sources, he argues, represent the religion of ‘ordinary Athenians during the late fifth and fourth centuries BCE’.45 The philosophical and poetic (tragic) traditions from the same period, in contrast, may draw on Greek popular religion but they also offer their own religious stance, which differs significantly from that of popular religion. They cannot therefore contribute to the corpus of popular religion in a straightforward way and are, for this reason, largely excluded from the analysis in Athenian Popular Religion: ‘The religious theories and views of philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle cannot be assumed to have been widely accepted among the people, unless we choose to disregard the risk of creating a hopelessly romanticised picture of the average Athenian. An even greater caution is required from the dramatists.’46 Philosophy and tragedy only come into the picture once ‘popular religion’ has been derived from the other sources mentioned above. Only once the corpus of popular Athenian beliefs and practices has been completed does Mikalson investigate how it is reflected in the genres of tragedy and philosophy. For this purpose those aspects of the religion of tragedy and philosophy which seem to reflect the beliefs and practices of ‘popular religion’ are separated from other religious views articulated in these genres which find no equivalent in popular religion and therefore  – Mikalson argues  – reflect a specifically tragic or philosophical religious stance. The two books The ‘corpus’ of typical Athenian beliefs and practices: Mikalson 1991: x, 1. 45 Mikalson 1991: 1. 46 Mikalson 1983: 9. 44

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on the religion of tragedy and philosophy do not consider tragic and philosophical religion as such but are focused more narrowly on the representation of ‘popular religion’ in these two genres.47 What brings Mikalson’s three studies together is a shared interest in recovering the principles and practices of Greek (Athenian) ‘popular religion’. The conception of ‘popular religion’ is, however, problematic. It relies on an idealised image of what oratory, historiography and epigraphic evidence are able to reveal, while at the same time downplaying the significance of tragedy as an important articulation of the religious in ancient Greece. The point is that insight into the religion of the ‘average Athenian’ comes at the price of a reduction from and generalization of religious attitudes found in those sources Mikalson deems ‘more reliable’ than tragedy and philosophy. Following from this point, one may wonder whether the religion of oratory, inscriptions and Xenophon  – the sources base for ‘popular religion’ – really is more true to life than the religion of tragedy and philosophy. In ‘Gods cruel and kind: tragic and civic theology’, Robert Parker promotes a different view of what these sources are and are not able to reveal. He shows that even though Greek tragedy and oratory present pictures of the divine that diverge and conflict in many ways it would be wrong to seek a resolution of this disagreement by, for example, dismissing either as a literary fiction. Neither Greek tragedy nor oratory present religion exactly as it was lived. Both theologies are, to some extent, shaped by the conventions of their respective genres and the requirements of the contexts in which they are presented. The friction between the ‘theology’ of Greek tragedy and the ‘theology’ of Greek oratory  – which manifests itself, for example, in the divergent depiction of the benevolent/malevolent attitude of the Greek gods towards the city – cannot ultimately be resolved. This point applies to his treatment of tragedy more than to his account of philosophy, which is more broadly focused. 47

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We should not, however, assume the existence of fully disconnected theologies at work here. Parker comments on the theology of Greek tragedy: ‘The basic articulations of the divine world, the categories by which the gods are classified and powers assigned to each, are those of civic religion.’48 The same point applies to Greek oratory, which also variously relates to the principles and practices of polis religion, for example in its optimistic assumption of divine charis (‘benevolence’) vis-à-vis the city, an assumption that also underlies many institutions of civic religion, including that of blood sacrifice.49 The theologies of both oratory and tragedy, it follows, converse with popular religion by drawing on and relating to the religious experiences of their respective audiences. Parker’s ‘Gods cruel and kind’ is an important contribution to the story of theology – and the theology of the story – in so far as it flags a number of problems which are, I think, central to the study of Greek theological reflection as it evolved throughout various texts and contexts. In exploring the complex relationship between the theologies of Greek tragedy, oratory and the polis Parker has challenged the separation of theologies into civic, poetic and philosophical. In particular, he has made the case for the existence of a number of overlapping theologies, which communicated and corresponded with each other without, however, fully mapping onto each other. The theologia tripertita – a Greek way of thinking about religion? How is this tripartite division of theologies justified, given the profound impact it has on how we conceive of ancient Greek religion? Scholars working with the conception of a theologia tripertita have presented it as a fundamentally Greek way of thinking about the gods. Both Burkert and Mikalson ultimately point to the Stoic philosopher Poseidonios (ca. 135–51 BCE), who is believed by Parker 1997: 147. 49 See Parker 1997: 143–4 on the benevolent gods of oratory. On charis see also Parker 1998. 48

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some to have offered an early formulation of a tripartite theology in his (now lost) work Peri theōn.50 However, the reconstruction of his text is difficult and problematic. It involves the work of Aëtius, a doxographer, probably of the late first century CE, whose lost text (the Placita) was reconstructed by Hermann Diels from later reproductions (Ps.-Plutarch’s Epitome and Stobaeus’ Eclogae) and who is believed to have drawn on Theophrastus.51 Problems with the reconstruction of these sources as well as limits in our knowledge of how precisely they distinguished between different theologies are not, however, flagged as such by both scholars despite the weight these sources are made to carry to account for the tripertita being a Greek concept. However that may be: Peter Van Nuffelen has recently examined how the tripertita was related to the larger attempts of the Roman magistrate and scholar Marcus Terentius Varro (116– 27 BCE) to show how Rome received and transformed ancient Greek wisdom.52 His Antiquitates rerum divinarum (Divine Antiquities) – quoted and examined in detail by Augustine in De civitate dei – famously distinguishes between three different theologies: first, a mythical (poetic) theology, which is quickly dismissed as fabulous; second, a theologia naturalis which includes the religious views of the philosophers, ultimately true, but difficult to attain for normal people; third, a theologia civilis, a kind of ‘civic theology’ as it manifests itself, above all, in the worship of anthropomorphic statues.53 Van Nuffelen argues that even though a transmission of religious ideas from Posidonius to Antiochus to Varro is the most likely scenario, ‘ideas about ancient wisdom came into being in the early first century BC and were immediately found among both Stoics and Platonists’.54 So even though Varro drew on existing Greek views about the nature of divinity, his 50 See Burkert 1985, 444, n.11; Mikalson 2010:  17, n.57. Ancient evidence for and scholarship about the theologia tripertita: Lieberg 1973; Lieberg 1979. 51 Distinction of different theologies: Aetius 1.6.9 (see Diels 1929: 295). 52 Van Nuffelen 2011: 29-47. On Varro and the theologia tripertita see also Lehmann 1983; Lehmann 1997: 193–225; Rüpke 2012: 172–85. 53 Here and below see Van Nuffelen 2011: 34–6. On the tripartite see Augustine De civitate Dei 6.5. (fr. 7 Cardauns). 54 Van Nuffelen 2011: 37.

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theologia tripertita firmly belongs into the intellectual and political milieu of Rome during the first century BC. Indeed, Van Nuffelen suggests that Varro held an ‘ambivalent’ concept of ‘civic theology’ as both different from the earlier ideal natural theology and true to the old knowledge it contained. That Varro’s conception of ‘civic religion’, the core of his theology, is no longer identical with Greek ‘popular religion’ (or ‘polis religion’) becomes evident if we consider what Varro’s conception of ‘civic religion’ entails. As Rüpke states: The term seems to denote the totality of the norms and practices of public and private cult; hence it would signal a normative, not a discursive, theology. It embraces everything that the political unit, or rather its leading class, thought necessary for a correct cult of the gods, and to keep the pax deorum, the ‘peace with the gods,’ at Rome.55

The distinctly Roman flavour of this formulation of ‘civic religion’ is evident, for example, in the emphasis on its normative force as underwritten (and ultimately enforced) by the ‘political unit’ of the Roman leading class. Such categories hardly apply in the Greek context with its much more diffuse structures of political and religious authority. As a result, the question of the normativity of Greek religious beliefs and practices poses itself along altogether different lines in the ancient Greek city than in the city of Rome (see Eidinow on asebeia in this volume). The same applies to the idea of poetic and philosophical modes of reasoning about the gods as distinct and separate theological stances. This was not a distinction that would have made sense to the ‘average Athenian’ of the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE. In the ancient Greek world, the religions of poetry and philosophy conversed with popular religious beliefs and practices. Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, for example, points out that tragic representations of divinity actually draw on a god’s life outside of Greek drama. In response to Mikalson’s conception of tragic religion she argues that, when the Athenian audience made sense of (say) Artemis in a given tragedy they did not do so through neutral filters, they did not construct the goddess 55 Rüpke 2012: 173–4.

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The story of theology and the theology of the story ex novo on the basis of the material presented in the play alone, as we would do an alien deity in a science fiction film; they made sense of the Artemis presented in the tragedy through their assumptions about Artemis, about gods and religion …56

This is not to say that profound differences between the ways in which religion is represented in tragedy, philosophy and other genres do not exist. Tragedy  – insofar as it enacts the polis, her divisions, identities and ideologies – is, however, in a very fundamental way, part of ‘popular religion’, and not just those aspects of religion that found an extension in real life.57 Indeed, part of the subversive genius of a Euripides, for example, springs from the fact that he manipulates the religious attitudes of (let’s say) an Athenian donkey driver, who would have been in the audience of his tragic performances. The same applies to the way in which Aeschylus appeals, for example, to the religious views of the same donkey driver in the Oresteia. To assume that this very donkey driver was not smart enough to understand what was going on, in religious terms, on the tragic stage would be not only to underestimate the cleverness and cunning of the simple Athenian citizen attuned to the power of religious storytelling qua tragic plot; it would also mean to turn the very real experience of a tragic performance into an academic subject with an appeal to an educated elite only. Ancient Greek religion was a heterogeneous phenomenon, which included and embraced multiple religious stances. Greek tragedy was one such stance amongst others – a focal point of religious articulation in which religious discourse and religious practice merged. The same applies to other articulations of the religious, for example in oratory or historiography. To return to the ‘history of theology’ in terms of a conclusion: the paradigmatic role the theologia tripertita has assumed in some current scholarship results in an overly static and artificial picture of ancient Greek religion, in which all inconsistencies are ascribed to separate theological stances. It then Sourvinou-Inwood 1997: 171. See also Sourvinou-Inwood 2003. 57 Greek tragedy enacting the polis:  e.g. Goldhill 1986; Hall 1989:  190–200; Griffin 1998; Rhodes 2003; Carter 2007, 2011. 56

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becomes tempting to explain away such inconsistencies by stating that some of these stances are more true to life than others, which are merely a literary or intellectual fiction. In assigning such an absolute normative force to the principles and practices of polis religion, ancient Greek religion is made to look more dogmatic than it was. Outlook The story of Greek theology has raised a number of questions, which are crucial to the re-evaluation of theology as a productive category in current scholarship. In lieu of a conclusion I group them together under three headings: 1. A theology of the polis? To start with, the idea of the existence of a popular theology  – a theology of the polis, as flagged in different ways by Burkert, Mikalson and ­others  – warrants further consideration. Encompassing the realm of religious practice, it frequently serves as the backdrop against which other theologies are assessed. Yet we may wonder what popular theology is and from what sources it is derived. Should it embrace only the principles and practices of polis religion or do we believe that it includes alternative forms of religious articulation that are outside of civic religion? 2. Storytelling and theology Second, as I have argued above, ancient Greek theology was, to a significant extent, a theology of the story. Yet, we may wonder:  what status and authority are we prepared to grant to different kinds of stories about the gods? How do we relate them to each other and to other forms of religious (theological) articulation, most notably in religious practices? Given the plurality of texts and contexts in which questions about gods are raised in the ancient Greek world we will probably speak of Greek theologies rather than Greek theology, thus acknowledging plurality rather than stressing unity (hence the title of this volume). Returning to the definition of theology from the beginning of this ­chapter  – theology as ‘a systematic 32

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expression of beliefs, an account of their sources and authority, and a clarification of other areas of belief’ – we may wonder what the real or imagined sources of these theologies are. What authorities are underwriting them? How are these theologies related to each other and to other areas of Greek thought?58 Finally, in talking about different kinds of theologies, can we avoid the pigeonholing that has dominated so much scholarship in the past? 3. Theological unity and diversity As we have seen, certain articulations of the religious in the ancient world are frequently dismissed as mere literary fictions with little if any immediate relevance to what real Greeks did in their real lives. Yet once we accept that no single articulation of the religious can be favoured as offering a straightforward account of lived religion, we will need to rethink what we do with the similarities and differences between individual theologies that will no doubt emerge. In the case of similarities between individual articulations of the religious, we may wonder what they reveal about larger structures of theological thought that pervade different areas of academic compartmentalisation and expertise. Are there overlaps between the religion of Greek tragedy and philosophy beyond those discussed by Parker and Sourvinou-Inwood? What, if anything, do the views of Heraclitus on oracular language as a form of divine representation and Greek statuary representations of the gods have in common? The question of the existence of a theology (or theologies) of ancient Greek religion is ultimately the question of the unity of religious structures behind what may at first sight look like a bewildering array of religious beliefs and practices. Older scholarship (most notably those scholars influenced by Jane Ellen Harrison) sought to answer it by pointing to multiple theologies brought together in the interplay of myth and ritual (see above); later the political and social structures of the ancient Greek polis served as a placeholder in which to situate the unity of ancient 58 See note 1 above.

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Greek religion. The challenge now is to integrate ‘polis religion’ into a broader religious culture of ancient Greece which also encompassed alternative locations and articulations of the religious outside of and parallel to official Greek religion.59 This is why differences between different articulations of the religious that will no doubt emerge are at least as interesting. No longer should inconsistencies between individual theologies be explained away by dismissing some theological stances and favouring others. How can we reframe individual theological views within an overall account of ancient Greek religion? As theology does not loom large in current works on ancient Greek mythology and religion this and other questions emerging from the story of theology have so far not been on the radar of classical scholarship.

59 See in more detail Kindt 2012: in particular 190–4.

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CHA PTER 3

TH EO LOGI E S OF T HE FAM ILY IN H OM E R AND HE SIOD BA R BA R A GR A Z I O S I

Divergent receptions I start with some brief observations about the reception of Homer and Hesiod. In antiquity, these two poets were routinely mentioned together as religious experts. Herodotus, for example, declared:  ‘It was Hesiod and Homer who first explained to the Greeks the birth of the gods, gave them their names, assigned them their honours and spheres of expertise, and revealed their appearance.’1 Not all ancient thinkers accepted the religious authority of these two poets, but they generally saw them as offering the same picture of the gods. Xenophanes, the earliest extant author to mention them by name, complained: ‘Homer and Hesiod ascribed to the gods every action / that causes shame and reproach among human beings: / theft, adultery, and cheating each other.’2 Plato followed suit, repeatedly criticising both Homer and Hesiod for their immoral portrayal of the gods. In the second book of the Republic, for example, he mixed quotations from the Theogony and the Homeric epics, explaining why they were objectionable, and mounting ‘a wholesale rejection of traditional Greek polytheism’.3 For Plato, as for others before and after him, criticising Greek views about the gods meant engaging with the epics of both Homer and Hesiod.4 This point is often overlooked in the study of Greek religion:  although there were no sacred Hdt. 2.53.2–3. 2 Xenoph. fr. 21 B 11 DK. 3 Roochnik 2009: 165. 4 For the interaction between the receptions of Hesiod and Homer in antiquity, see Koning 2010, who emphasises their role as religious experts. 1

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texts, the epics of Homer and Hesiod had authority, and inspired sustained theological debate. Very much in contrast with this ancient tendency to treat Homer and Hesiod together as religious experts, modern readers have often underlined the differences between their representations of the gods  – differences of fact (for example concerning the genealogy of Aphrodite),5 but also of tone and approach:  Hesiod seems more abstract, more prone to personification; Homer livelier and more entertaining. Nineteenth-century studies of ancient religion articulate clearly these perceived differences between Homeric and Hesiodic depictions of the gods  – and these studies are, however subterraneously, still influential today. So, for example, approaches to Gaia, the Earth Mother, are shaped by Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht:  Eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der Alten Welt nach ihrer religiösen und recht­ lichen Natur (Basel, 1861).6 As Georgoudi points out, ‘many scholars, whether or not they refer explicitly to Bachofen, have accepted the general, and often vague, notion that a feminine divinity, a mistress of nature, was the dominant religious figure in prehistoric or pre-Hellenic Mediterranean societies’.7 Even those who reject such views of prehistoric religion are often prepared to interpret Gaia in terms of individual cognition and development:  the mother is apprehended first and this – they argue – is the reason why she dominates the early stages of the history of the cosmos in Hesiod’s Theogony.8 On the various versions of the genealogy of Aphrodite in early hexameter epic see, for example, Olson 2012. 6 For an interpretation of this book as a contribution to the history of religion, see Momigliano 1987: 91: ‘It is the purpose of this lecture to try to define the place of Bachofen inside the movement of studies of the history of religion in the nineteenth century. That is not the place where he is often found … but I venture to believe that it is the place in which he, Bachofen, would have liked to find himself.’ For the legacies of Bachofen in anthropology, see Cantarella 1988. 7 Georgoudi 1992: 458. She quotes Jane Harrison 1903 and W. K. C. Guthrie 1950 in support of her statement, and both have of course been influential in subsequent scholarship. 8 See especially Caldwell 1989, quoted below. Strauss Clay 2003 does not offer an explicitly Freudian reading of the Theogony, but makes several points that are compatible with one, starting from her opening premise: ‘Unlike the biblical Genesis, Hesiod’s model for the coming into being of the cosmos is not that of purposeful 5

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Bachofen himself often blended personal and historical perspectives; in this respect, it seems significant that his study of early matriarchy was dedicated to his own mother. More generally, Das Mutterrecht explores the connections between ancient religion and individual desire:  ‘Hesiod’s world, with its dominant mother … how close it is to the pictures of a lost happiness which always centre round the dominance of motherhood’, he wrote.9 It is possible to trace a line between this kind of historical/psychological approach and some recent interpretations of the Theogony. Thus Caldwell, for example, writes:  ‘The transition from symbiosis to separation … appears in the Hesiodic myth as the emergence of Gaia, the mother who is the first object of the child’s perception and the first structuring principle in the child’s life.’10 Although neither Bachofen nor Freud was particularly interested in Hesiod, and although their work is in turn rarely acknowledged by scholars working on early epic, current approaches to the Theogony can easily be connected to nineteenth-century theories about prehistory and the subconscious. Links of this kind become especially productive, in my view, when they are made explicit.11 The case of Homer is different. His gods are seldom thought to reflect deep religious, historical or psychological truths. They are firmly approached as literary creations, examples of ‘sublime frivolity’.12 This frames their interpretation in terms of poetic licence, and social recreation.13 Thus Slatkin, for example, describes the Iliad and the Odyssey as ‘resolutely secular. Indeed, it may be said that the artistic goals and social function of the poems transformed their creation by a designing Creator, but follows instead the procreative pattern of a human family’ (14). See also notes 27 and 28 below. 9 Bachofen 1967:  81. He was particularly interested in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, which he interpreted as historical evidence for matrilinear social structures. 10 Caldwell 1989: 132. 11 Leonard 2013 demonstrates this. 12 The phrase ‘erhabener Unernst’ was coined by Reinhardt 1938: 25; Griffin 1980: 199 offered the apt translation ‘sublime frivolity’. 13 Poetic licence, as a category of literary criticism, was conceived precisely as a means for dealing with the gods in ancient epic: Graziosi 2013a: 167.

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inherited elements and shaped their specific representation of the gods more than did any particular religious belief or practice.’14 Again, this position can easily be traced back to nineteenth-century scholarship. In his Études d’histoire religieuse: Les religions de l’antiquité (Paris, 1857), Ernest Renan, for example, contrasts the depiction of the gods in Hesiod’s Theogony, which he calls ‘un premier rudiment de théologie nationale’, with the salacious stories found in the Homeric epics. He insists that, unlike Hesiod, ‘Homer is a very bad theologian, since his gods are nothing but poetic characters, at the same level as human beings … The most respectable myths become saucy stories in his hands, pretty themes for recitation, with an entirely human colour.’15 This chapter attempts to set up a dialogue between ancient and modern receptions, asking why it is that Homer and Hesiod were said to share the same views about the gods in antiquity, whereas in nineteenth-century scholarship (and today) Hesiod features in grand theories about prehistoric religion and the unconscious, while Homer’s gods are approached as mere literary creations, and often even designated as ‘secular’.16 The point is not to dismiss out of hand modern approaches, or indeed early responses to the gods in epic, but rather to ask to what extent Homer and Hesiod share a coherent understanding of the gods, and what that understanding might involve. These questions seem to me broadly theological in orientation, especially if we adopt a definition of theology as ‘a systematic expression of beliefs’ and ‘a clarification of their relation to other areas of belief’ – for example, a clarification of how Homeric and Hesiodic visions of the gods relate to each other, but also how they fit with broader social, religious and 14 Slatkin 2011: 217. 15 Renan 1857: 64–5, translation my own. 16 As well as Slatkin, quoted above, see, for example, Redfield 1994: 247: ‘the Iliad, although “pervaded from end to end by an elaborate polytheism”, is in virtue of the characteristic ambiguities of its elaboration a founding document of Greek secularism … The role of the gods in the story is destabilizing; they act not so much to decure an intelligible cosmos as to account for the unintelligible variations within it.’ I  find this argument surprising:  ambiguity and unknowability are important aspects of many sacred accounts of the divine.

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philosophical positions.17 It makes sense to investigate these questions by focusing on a specific theme, and that of divine conflict in the Theogony and in Iliad 21 seems ideally suited. This choice is motivated by two considerations. First, the differences between Homeric and Hesiodic depictions of the gods are particularly obvious in relation to this theme: the Hesiodic myth of succession is presented as an issue of cosmic significance, whereas the ‘Theomachia’ of Iliad 21 is introduced as a source of amusement for Zeus (and hence surely also for Homeric audiences). Second, a focus on Olympian family dynamics can be useful not only in order to explore whether Homer and Hesiod share similar beliefs about the gods, but also in order to relate those beliefs to some broader social, historical and ethical concerns. Since the days of Bachofen and Renan, classical scholars have developed a much better understanding of the composition, context and contents of early Greek epic. Largely as a result of Milman Parry’s work, scholars are now agreed that individual hexameter poems belong to a wider epic tradition which shares the same techniques of composition, and displays remarkable linguistic coherence.18 To be sure, some studies try to date specific poems relative to one another on the basis of linguistic variations,19 but such variations are small-scale compared to the overall impression of resonant coherence. In terms of content, individual poems share not only particular expressions, or formulae, but a sense of how the world developed from its origins to life as it is now. This historical vision is, in fact, embedded in the very formulae that characterise the early hexameter tradition:  Zeus is ‘son of Kronos’ and ‘father of gods and men’; the heroes belong to a distant past, are ‘godlike’ and hence much stronger than ‘men such as they are nowadays’.20 Each poem explicitly and Hinells 1984: 328. 18 See Parry 1971, together with the discussion of his legacy offered in Graziosi and Haubold 2005. 19 Janko 1982 is the most influential example of this approach. 20 The expressions ‘son of Kronos’, ‘father of gods and men’ and ‘godlike’ are ubiquitous; for heroes stronger than ‘men such as they are nowadays’ see Hom. Il. 5.302–4, 12.445–9 and 20.285–7. 17

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carefully indicates its place within this shared understanding of the world and its history.21 The Theogony starts at the very beginning of everything; the Homeric epics are set in the age of the heroes; Hesiod’s Works and Days describes the present, a terrible age when men have to work in order to secure a living from the land. The passing of time, and the succession of different ages, affects not only the history of mortals, but also that of the gods. As Strauss Clay argued in The Politics of Olympus: ‘the Homeric poems show us the fully perfected and stable Olympian pantheon in its interaction with the heroes; the Theogony reveals the genesis of the Olympian order and ends with the triumphal accession to power of Zeus. Between theogonic poetry and epic there remains a gap, one that is filled by the Olympian narratives of the longer hymns.’22 Early audiences would not necessarily have known or cared about the relative dates of composition of individual hexameter poems, but they would have recognised that the Theogony gave an account of the beginning of the cosmos, that the age of the heroes came later and that, from the perspective of the present, the heroes themselves were long dead. In order to understand the portrayal of the gods in the Theogony and Iliad 21, it thus seems useful to adopt an approach which takes into account the internal chronology of the poems, rather than possible dates of composition, and ask whether that chronology affects the dynamics of divine conflict. The right of the mother Gaia, the Earth Mother, plays an important role in Hesiod’s Theogony. If we take χάος at 116 to mean something like ‘gaping void’ or ‘chasm’, then she is the very first form of existence in the history of the cosmos.23 Quite what she is, however, remains unclear. From her very first appearance, Gaia seems This point is made at greater length in Graziosi and Haubold 2005. 22 Strauss Clay 1989: 15. 23 See West 1966 ad loc. 21

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to be both material earth and anthropomorphic goddess (Th. 116–18):24 ἤτοι μὲν πρώτιστα χάος γένετ’· αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα Γαῖ’ εὐρύστερνος, πάντων ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεὶ ἀθανάτων οἳ ἔχουσι κάρη νιφόεντος Ὀλύμπου. First came chasm; and then came broad-breasted Earth, secure seat for ever of all the immortals who occupy the peak of snowy Olympus.

The epithet εὐρύστερνος, ‘broad-breasted’, presents the goddess as a figure with a recognisably human appearance.25 The phrase ἕδος ἀσφαλές, by contrast, suggests something rather inanimate, a secure place where the Olympian gods may reside. Line 117 anticipates the trajectory of the whole poem, since in the course of Hesiod’s narrative Gaia gradually loses her anthropomorphic characteristics.26 In the beginning, she behaves very much like an anthropomorphic figure, giving birth to several deities, including one ‘equal to herself’, Ouranos. On becoming her sexual partner, Ouranos tries to constrain her powers of generation, and thus commits the first act of evil in the history of the cosmos (154–60): ὅσσοι γὰρ Γαίης τε καὶ Οὐρανοῦ ἐξεγένοντο, δεινότατοι παίδων, σφετέρῳ δ’ ἤχθοντο τοκῆι ἐξ ἀρχῆς· καὶ τῶν μὲν ὅπως τις πρῶτα γένοιτο, πάντας ἀποκρύπτασκε καὶ ἐς φάος οὐκ ἀνίεσκε Γαίης ἐν κευθμῶνι, κακῷ δ’ ἐπετέρπετο ἔργῳ, Οὐρανός· ἡ δ’ ἐντὸς στοναχίζετο Γαῖα πελώρη στεινομένη, δολίην δὲ κακὴν ἐπεφράσσατο τέχνην. For all those that were born of Gaia and Ouranos were most fearsome children, and their own father loathed them from the beginning. As soon as each of them was born, he hid them all away in a cavern of Gaia, and would not All translations of Hesiod are based on West 1988, with slight adaptations. 25 In early hexameter poetry, the epithet is used only of Gaia, and of her only in the Theogony, though cf. βαθυστέρνου πλάτος αἴης in Cypria fr. 1, quoted below, pp. 47–8. 26 Cf. Strauss Clay 2003: 15: ‘Hesiod describes Gaia proleptically as the “seat of gods of all the gods who inhabit Olympus”, gods who have not yet been born. From the beginning, then, Hesiod alludes to the final disposition of the cosmos, a disposition that is somehow immanent from the outset.’ 24

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Barbara Graziosi let them into the light; and he took pleasure in the evil work, did Heaven, while the huge Earth was tight-pressed inside, and groaned. And then she thought up an evil trick.

Ouranos’ behaviour is explicitly condemned in the poem: not only is he said to indulge in ‘evil work’, but we are told that he takes pleasure in it.27 His violence in turn provokes Gaia to further evil. She makes a sickle, instructs her children about her intention to have Ouranos castrated, hears that Kronos is willing to help her and rejoices in her heart. Kronos, for his part, gives a clear rationale for deciding to help his mother (170–3): ‘Μῆτερ, ἐγώ κεν τοῦτό γ᾽ ὑποσχόμενος τελέσαιμι ἔργον, ἐπεὶ πατρός γε δυσωνύμου οὐκ ἀλεγίζω ἡμετέρου· πρότερος γὰρ ἀεικέα μήσατο ἔργα.’ Ὥς φάτο· γήθησεν δὲ μέγα φρεσὶ Γαῖα πελώρη. ‘Mother, I would undertake this task and accomplish it – I am not afraid of our unspeakable father. After all, he began it by his ugly behaviour.’ So he spoke, and massive Earth was greatly delighted in her heart.

When Ouranos next spreads over Gaia, ‘pulling over the night, and demanding sex’ (176–8), Kronos emerges from the body of his mother and castrates his father.28 As often, the passage is both abstract and anthropomorphic: Hesiod evokes the onset of evening, as the dark sky spreads over the earth, but also describes a scene of terrifying human sex. There are obvious parallels in the behaviour of Gaia and Ouranos: evil action (κακῷ … ἔργῳ) is met with an evil trick (κακὴν … τέχνην).29 Ouranos ‘takes pleasure’ in inflicting pain on Gaia, while she is ‘delighted’ that Kronos supports her castration plans. And yet there are differences too. Ouranos is the Strauss Clay 2003: 17 interprets Kronos’ evil act with a precision which is not, in my view, quite warrented by the details provided in the text: ‘Hesiod relates how Uranus refused to allow his offspring to be born, “but kept all of them hidden and did not allow them to come up into the light” (157) – apparently by blocking the birth canal through continuous sexual intercourse.’ In fact, lines 176–8 suggest that Ouranos demands sex at night, rather than inflicting it continuously. 28 Strauss Clay 2003:  17 rightly points out that ‘Gaia justifies her actions in moral terms based on the doctrine of vengeance’, and further points to a problem: ‘once set in motion … the cycle of revenge, fueled by mutual hatred of parent and child, can only repeat itself’. 29 See further Arthur 1982: 65. 27

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first perpetrator; Gaia acts in self-defence. Ouranos is entirely selfish; Gaia creates a degree of consensus. She is clever, he is a brute. Moreover, although Ouranos is said to be ‘equal’ to Gaia (126), he loses out in their confrontation. After Kronos castrates his father, he in turn faces the danger of succession. Indeed, Gaia and Ouranos prophesy to him that he will be defeated by his son Zeus (463–5).30 As a protective measure against the threat of being deposed, Kronos tries to take over the process of gestation by eating his own children.31 Rhea seeks help from her own parents, Gaia and Ouranos, in order to save her youngest son, Zeus. In the event, Gaia alone comes to her rescue, and ensures that Zeus is saved. We are told that Kronos is ‘tricked by the cunning schemes of Gaia’ (494) and ‘beaten by the strength of his own son’ (496): this is a replay of what happened in the previous generation, since in that case too Gaia’s cunning was accompanied by a son’s violent act against his father. Once in charge, Zeus frees his siblings and liberates the Cyclopes too. They, in turn, grant him the gift of the thunderbolt as a sign of their gratitude. It is precisely by using that weapon, which we are told was once hidden inside Gaia’s body (505), that Zeus finally defeats the Earth Mother. In order to seal his supremacy, Zeus has to vanquish the Titans, and he does so by listening to the advice of Gaia who, we are told, ‘explains everything very clearly’ to him and to the other Olympian gods (626f.). The final titanic conflict is that between Zeus and Typhoeus, who is the youngest and last son of Gaia (821). This confrontation ends with the melting down of Gaia herself, as a form of collateral damage. The most amazing conflagration happens, in fact, after Typhoeus is already dead (857–67): αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ δή μιν δάμασε πληγῇσιν ἱμάσσας, ἤριπε γυιωθείς, στονάχιζε δὲ Γαῖα πελώρη· φλὸξ δὲ κεραυνωθέντος ἀπέσσυτο τοῖο ἄνακτος

…

πληγέντος, πολλὴ δὲ πελώρη καίετο Γαῖα αὐτμῇ θεσπεσίῃ, καὶ ἐτήκετο κασσίτερος ὣς For discussion of this detail see below, p. 44. 31 Arthur 1982 and Zeitlin 1996: 78–9 offer powerful readings of Hesiod’s succession myth as a struggle over reproduction. 30

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Barbara Graziosi τέχνῃ ὑπ’ αἰζηῶν ἐν ἐϋτρήτοις χοάνοισι θαλφθείς, ἠὲ σίδηρος, ὅ περ κρατερώτατός ἐστιν, οὔρεος ἐν βήσσῃσι δαμαζόμενος πυρὶ κηλέῳ τήκεται ἐν χθονὶ δίῃ ὑφ’ Ἡφαίστου παλάμῃσιν· ὣς ἄρα τήκετο Γαῖα σέλαι πυρὸς αἰθομένοιο. When Zeus had overcome Typhoeus, hitting him with his blows, Typhoeus collapsed crippled, and the huge Gaia groaned. Flames shot from the thunderstruck lord where he was smitten, …

The huge Gaia burned far and wide with unbelievable heat, melting like tin heated by the skill of craftsmen in crucibles with bellow-holes, or as iron, which is the strongest substance, when it is overpowered by burning fire in mountain glens, melts in the divine ground by Hephaestus’ craft: even so was Gaia melting in the glare of the conflagration.

This passage contains one of the very few similes in Hesiod’s poetry, and it is used to underline the moment when Zeus melts down Gaia. We may well ask what happens to her after this treatment. For a start, it seems that she never generates horrible monsters like Typhoeus again. More generally, her cunning seems curbed. Editors of texts that describe later phases in the history of the cosmos, after this meltdown, print γαῖα far more often than Γαῖα, although Gaia (the capital goddess) does feature occasionally. Even Ouranos, after his castration, acts twice more in the Theogony, on both occasions together with Gaia, warning patriarchs in danger of being replaced by their sons (463–5 and 891–3). How active these interventions are remains, however, open to question: perhaps the demise of Ouranos functions, in itself, as a piece of advice or prophecy for Kronos and Zeus.32 At any rate, when faced with the danger of succession, Zeus combines the strategies of his father and his grandfather:  he prevents birth and eats his children, by swallowing his pregnant wife Metis.33 That strategy finally works. Metis was due West 1966 ad 463 rightly casts doubt on Ouranos’ levels of participation here, noting that he ‘does not appear elsewhere in an oracular capacity’, whereas ‘Gaia is said to have been the first occupant of the Delphic oracular seat … and elsewhere too there are traces of oracular connections. … Uranos probably appears here and in 891ff. merely as a complement of Gaia.’ 33 See further Arthur 1982: 78. 32

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to deliver twins, a boy and a girl  – but Zeus lets out of his head only the girl, Athena. She remains a virgin, so she cannot switch her loyalties from her father to a son. As a result, Zeus remains ruler and ‘father of gods and men’ for ever more. In the succession myth as a whole, there is a sense of development and change.34 Control over gestation and birth gradually shifts from the mother to the father. Violent conflict starts off absolute and elemental, but gradually begins to include a degree of mediation, consensus and gift-exchange. Ouranos acts on his own behalf; Gaia requires the help of Kronos; Rhea then follows parental advice, and achieves her ends though the active intervention of Gaia. Zeus, finally, acts on the advice of both Gaia and Ouranos, and eventually receives the gift of the thunderbolt in exchange for freeing the Cyclopes. It is with this gift (and token of consensus) that he melts down Gaia herself, and inhibits her powers of generation and cunning. Zeus’ attack on Gaia is necessary, not least because she played a powerful role in the creation of the world, and at every stage in the succession myth:  she now needs to be brought under control. What remains to be seen is what happens to both Gaia and family dynamics after the rule of Zeus is established. Just as Gaia ceases to give birth to gods and monsters, so Zeus himself also stops generating gods, and starts to father mortals. The end of Theogony traces the transition from the generation of gods to that of mortal men. Hermes is the youngest son of Zeus and a goddess (938–9). Dionysus is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman but, our text specifies, both Semele and Dionysus are granted immortality (940–2). Heracles is the next borderline case:  although he is the son of Alcmene, he is given an immortal wife and allowed to live forever (943–4). After that, the Muses are invited to sing of the goddesses who had sex with men and gave birth to godlike mortals (965–8). Next, the Muses are asked about the women who slept with gods and gave birth to the heroes: and this is where the Catalogue of Women begins. The heroic children of these women will die, and therefore the process of generational 34 See Arthur 1982 and Strauss Clay 2003: 12–30.

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succession will be reconfigured as unavoidable and normal. What the male gods refused to accept – generation and generational change – mortals have to accept as the only human form of continuity in the face of death. Viewed from the perspective of ordinary mortals, the behaviour of male gods in the Theogony is objectionable. Human fathers may like to remain in charge forever, but they cannot – nor should they try and resort to the kind of behaviour displayed by Ouranos, Kronos or Zeus. The text of the Theogony makes that clear: explicit value judgements condemn Ouranos’ first act of violence. The condemnation is interesting. From a human perspective, hating one’s own children, preventing them from being born or eating them is of course objectionable. From a divine perspective, however, the wish to remain in power is understandable, and may even seem legitimate. The Theogony solves the problem of divine succession by bringing the generation of gods to an end, and beginning a process of human birth and death: what the gods cannot handle, mortals must bear. It seems noteworthy that, after the rule of Zeus is established, Gaia concerns herself not just with generation, but also with human death. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, for example, she colludes with Zeus, produces a beautiful flower and thereby ensnares Persephone, who falls into Hades while trying to pick it.35 Persephone’s subsequent visits above ground, and returns down into the realm of Hades, mark the seasons, and thus establish an agricultural pattern whereby Gaia provides sustenance for mortals. At the same time, her visits are linked to human death and the afterlife, as the hymn itself, and the Eleusinian mysteries to which it was linked, make clear.36 See further Rudhardt in Foley 1994:  205:  Zeus ‘must open a gap through which Hades might pass in the boundary that separates their two worlds’, and Arthur 1977: 14:  ‘Gaia [Earth] cooperates in the scheme to assert male dominion: Persephone was seduced by the beauty of the narcissus’ (the essay is reprinted in Foley 1994). 36 About Gaia’s appearances in the Hymn, Foley 1994: 53 writes as follows: ‘whereas Gaia earlier grew the narcissus as a trap for Persephone at Zeus’s behest (8–9), Demeter now prevents the earth (Gaia) from sending up the seed (306–7)’. The threat of famine is eventually dispelled, and a regular agricultural pattern is established. Human beings thus live, eat and die, much in the manner described by Apollo in Il. 21.462–7, a passage discussed below. On Gaia and argiculture in the 35

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In another important early text, Gaia is associated with the death of the heroes: the Trojan and the Theban wars are presented as a means of lightening her burden, thus ensuring sustainability and cosmic order.37 A scholiast commenting on the ‘plan of Zeus’ at the beginning of the Iliad takes the expression to refer to the whole Trojan War, rather than the more specific conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon, and claims that, in the Cypria, Zeus planned the war in response to Gaia’s suffering (Cypria fr. 1 EGF): ἄλλοι δὲ ἀπὸ ἱστορίας τινὸς εἶπον εἰρηκέναι τὸν Ὅμηρον. φασὶ γὰρ τὴν Γῆν βαρουμένην ὑπὸ ἀνθρώπων πολυπληθίας, μηδεμιᾶς ἀνθρώπων οὔσης εὐσεβείας, αἰτῆσαι τὸν Δία κουφισθῆναι τοῦ ἄχθους· τὸν δὲ Δία πρῶτον μὲν εὐθὺς ποιῆσαι τὸν Θηβαϊκὸν πόλεμον, δι’ οὗ πολλοὺς πάνυ ἀπώλεσεν, ὕστερον δὲ πάλιν τὸν Ἰλιακόν, συμβούλῳ τῷι Μώμῳ χρησάμενος, ἣν Διὸς βουλὴν Ὅμηρός φησιν, ἐπειδὴ οἷός τε ἦν κεραυνοῖς ἢ κατακλυσμοῖς ἅπαντας διαφθείρειν· ὅπερ τοῦ Μώμου κωλύσαντος, ὑποθεμένου δὲ αὐτῷ γνώμας δύο, τὴν Θέτιδος θνητογαμίαν καὶ θυγατρὸς καλῆς γένναν, ἐξ ὧν ἀμφοτέρων πόλεμος Ἕλλησί τε καὶ βαρβάροις ἐγένετο, ἀφ’ οὗ συνέβη κουφισθῆναι τὴν γῆν πολλῶν ἀναιρεθέντων. ἡ δὲ ἱστορία παρὰ Στασίνῳ τῷ τὰ Κύπρια πεποιηκότι, εἰπόντι οὕτως· ἦν ὅτε μυρία φῦλα κατὰ χθόνα πλαζόμεν’  βάρυστέρνου πλάτος αἴης, Ζεὺς δὲ ἰδὼν ἐλέησε καὶ ἐν πυκιναῖς πραπίδεσσι κουφίσαι ἀνθρώπων παμβώτορα σύνθετο Γαῖαν, ῥιπίσσας πολέμου μεγάλην ἔριν Ἰλιακοῖο, ὄφρα κενώσειεν θανάτῳ βάρος. οἱ δ’ ἐνὶ Τροίῃ ἥρωες κτείνοντο, Διὸς δ’ ἐτελείετο βουλή. Others have said that Homer was referring to a myth. For they say that Gaia, being weighed down by the multitude of people, there being no piety among humankind, asked Zeus to be relieved of the burden. Zeus first and at once brought about the Theban War, by means of which he destroyed very large numbers, and afterwards, the Trojan one, with Blame as his adviser, this being what Homer calls the plan of Zeus, seeing that he was capable of destroying everyone with thunderbolts or floods. Blame prevented this, and proposed two ideas to him, the marriage of Thetis to a mortal and the birth of a beautiful daughter. From these two events war came about between Greeks and barbarians, resulting in the lightening of Gaia as many were killed. The story is found in Stasinus, the author of the Cypria, who says: ‘There was a time when the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, see further Felson Rubin and Deal 1980, revised and reprinted in Foley 1994. 37 For further discussion, see Graziosi and Haubold 2005: ch. 4.

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Barbara Graziosi countless races of men roaming constantly over the land were weighing down the deep-breasted Gaia’s expanse. Zeus took pity when he saw it, and in his complex mind he resolved to relieve all-nurturing Gaia of mankind’s weight by fanning the great conflict of the Trojan War, to void the burden through death. So the warriors at Troy kept being killed, and Zeus’ plan was fulfilled.’

There are several points of contact between this passage and the myth of succession in the Theogony. In both cases, we are confronted with the oppression of Gaia, whose body is weighed down either by Ouranos or by the multitude of mortals. Again, in both cases, violence is used to lighten Gaia’s burden, and make space for new generations. But there are also differences: Zeus, far from having to assert his power over Gaia, whom he already melted down in the Theogony, can now take pity on her and ensure that she remains at peace, by instigating the Theban and the Trojan wars. This kind of logic, whereby human beings suffer in order to preserve the peace of the gods and the stability of the cosmos, finds many parallels in the ancient world. In the Near East, men are said to work to ensure the gods’ leisure.38 In the Greek world, Hermes is taught not to steal from Apollo, and becomes the protector of human thieves.39 Similarly, Aphrodite is punished because she makes Zeus fall in love at her whim, but can inflict her power on mortals without fear of retaliation.40 In the Cypria, at least as summarised by the scholiast, the Theban and the Trojan wars are there to ensure that the divine order remains stable. Gaia instigated conflict among generations of gods, and is now the cause of human wars. Sublime frivolity Although the Cypria presents the Trojan War as a means of preserving divine stability, the gods are never entirely pacified:  as befits a polytheistic system, they maintain their own characters and perspectives, and thus retain also the potential for conflict. 38 See, for example, the Babylonian poem of the flood, Atrahasis, Tablet I (OB version); and Enuma Elish, Tablet VI.7–8. 39 See, especially, the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. 40 This point is well articulated in the longer Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite.

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In the Iliad, they even engage in a ‘battle’ on the Trojan plain, thus in some way paralleling the mortal war that is also raging there. Some mighty lines of poetry introduce the ‘Theomachia’ at 21.385–90: heaven and earth ring out, as the gods line up. The term used is χθών rather than γαῖα (‘the ground’, rather than ‘earth’ in all its depth and vitality), but there is no mistaking the cosmic resonance of the scene.41 Ouranos even ‘sounds the trumpet’, announcing battle – an expression that attracted much debate in antiquity.42 Whatever the exact tone of that phrase, these ‘cosmic sound effects’ are soon punctured by Zeus’ laughter, as he settles on Mt Olympus, and prepares to enjoy the spectacle of the other gods fighting each other on the plain.43 It seems that, right from the outset, we are invited to view this conflict as art, or at least entertainment – not just for Zeus, but also for us, who share the elevated perspective of the poet and the Muses.44 ἐν δ’ ἄλλοισι θεοῖσιν ἔρις πέσε βεβριθυῖα ἀργαλέη, δίχα δέ σφιν ἐνὶ φρεσὶ θυμὸς ἄητο· σὺν δ’ ἔπεσον μεγάλῳ πατάγῳ, βράχε δ’ εὐρεῖα χθών, ἀμφὶ δὲ σάλπιγξεν μέγας οὐρανός. ἄϊε δὲ Ζεὺς ἥμενος Οὐλύμπῳ· ἐγέλασσε δέ οἱ φίλον ἦτορ γηθοσύνῃ, ὅθ’ ὁρᾶτο θεοὺς ἔριδι ξυνιόντας. Then a painful, weighty conflict descended on the other gods, and the spirit in their hearts was blown in contrary directions. They collided with a great crash, and the broad earth groaned, and the great high sky sounded its trumpet; Zeus heard it as he sat on Olympus, and laughed with delight in his dear heart when he saw the gods clashing in strife.45 Compare an earlier passage introducing the battle of the gods, which also has cosmic grandeur: Il. 20.56–65. As Griffin 1980: 185 and Schein 1984: 50–1 rightly note, the passage closely resembles the beginning of the conflict between Zeus and Typhoeus in Hes. Th. 847–52. 42 Plin. Ep. 9.26.6 suggests that readers should consider carefully whether expressions like this one are incredibilia … et inania or magnifica caelestia. Ancient critics generally express their propensity for one or the other view: Demetr. Eloc. 83 argues that Ouranos’ trumpet produces an effect of μικροπρέπεια, whereas Ps.-Longinus 9.6 finds the image striking, novel and powerful. The scholia ad loc. worry that ‘sounding the trumpet’ is a late phenomenon, and does not belong to the age of the heroes. See also Philostr. Her. 5.9–10, p. 162f., quoted below. 43 ‘Cosmic sound effects’ is the phrase used by Richardson 1993 ad 21.387–8. 44 On the divine perspective of the poet of the Iliad and his audiences, see further Graziosi 2013b. 45 Il. 21.385–90. Translations of Homer are based on Verity 2011. 41

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Some ancient readers appreciated the ‘Theomachia’ for its dramatic qualities, while criticising Homer’s theology, on the ground that the gods seemed too human. Thus Philostratus, for example, observed:46 καὶ τὰς μάχας δέ, ὁπόσαι Ποσειδῶνι μὲν πρὸς Ἀπόλλω, Λητοῖ δὲ πρὸς Ἑρμῆν ἐγένοντο, καὶ ὡς ἐμάχοντο ἡ Ἀθηνᾶ τῷ Ἄρει καὶ ὁ Ἥφαιστος τῷ ὕδατι, ταῦτα τὸν Ὀρφέως τρόπον πεφιλοσοφῆσθαι τῷ Ὁμήρῳ φησὶ καὶ οὐ μεμπτὰ εἶναι πρὸς ἔκπληξιν καὶ θεῖα, ὥσπερ τὸ “ἀμφὶ δὲ σάλπιγξε μέγας οὐρανός”, καὶ “ἀνεπήδησεν Ἀιδωνεὺς τοῦ θρόνου τινασσομένης τῆς γῆς ἐκ Ποσειδῶνος.” μέμφεται δὲ τοῦ Ὁμήρου ἐκεῖνα· πρῶτα μὲν ὅτι θεοὺς ἐγκαταμίξας ἀνθρώποις περὶ μὲν τῶν ἀνθρώπων μεγάλα εἴρηκε, περὶ δὲ τῶν θεῶν μικρὰ καὶ φαῦλα … [Protesilaus] says that, like Orpheus, Homer represented truly the battles between Poseidon and Apollo and between Hermes and Leto, as well as how Athena fought with Ares and Hephaistos with the river. And these battles are divine and not contemptible for their thrill, as the verse goes, “Great heaven trumpeted on all sides” [21.388], and also “Aidoneus leapt up from his throne, when the earth was shaken by Poseidon” [20.57–67]. But he finds fault with Homer for the following things. First, because, after intermingling gods and mortals, Homer spoke highly about mortals, but contemptibly and basely about the gods …47

Philostratus praises Homer for achieving ἔκπληξις, ‘the thrill of shock’. This comment fits a well-established tradition of ancient criticism. In the Poetics, Aristotle criticises Homeric depictions of the gods, which he considers unlikely as well as immoral:  ‘probably what is said [about the gods] is neither true nor better than the truth, but rather what Xenophanes ­maintains’.48 Still, he offers a literary argument in defence of Philostr. Her. 25.9f. 47 The translation is based on Berenson MacLean and Bradshaw Aitken 2003. 48 It may be useful to quote the context of this statement in full. Poetics 1460b32–7: πρὸς δὲ τούτοις ἐὰν ἐπιτιμᾶται ὅτι οὐκ ἀληθῆ, ἀλλ᾽ ἴσως δεῖ, οἷον καὶ Σοφοκλῆς ἔφη αὐτὸς μὲν οἵους δεῖ ποιεῖν, Εὐριπίδην δὲ οἷοι εἰσίν, ταύτῃ λυτέον. εἰ δὲ μηδετέρως, ὅτι οὕτω φασίν, οἷον τὰ περὶ θεῶν· ἴσως γὰρ οὔτε βέλτιον οὕτω λέγειν οὔτ᾽ ἀληθῆ, ἀλλ᾽ εἰ ἔτυχεν ὥσπερ Ξενοφάνει· ἀλλ᾽ οὖν φασι. Next, supposing the charge is ‘That is not true’, one can solve the problem by saying ‘But perhaps it ought to be’, just as Sophocles said that he portrayed people as they ought to be and Euripides as they are. If neither of these will do, then ‘Because that is what people say’, as is the case concerning the gods. Probably what is said is neither true nor better than the truth, but rather what Xenophanes maintains – but all the same that is what is said about the gods. 46

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the gods in epic.49 He insists that their depiction can be justified if it contributes to the aim of poetry (namely the katharsis of the emotions) and produces a more thrilling effect than could be achieved by more credible representations:50 ἀδύνατα πεποίηται, ἡμάρτηται· ἀλλ᾽ ὀρθῶς ἔχει, εἰ τυγχάνει τοῦ τέλους τοῦ αὑτῆς (τὸ γὰρ τέλος εἴρηται), εἰ οὕτως ἐκπληκτικώτερον ἢ αὐτὸ ἢ ἄλλο ποιεῖ μέρος. If something impossible has been portrayed, that is an error. But it is justifiable if the poet thus achieves the aim of poetry (what that aim is has been already stated) and makes that part or some other part of the poem more thrilling.

This invitation to judge the Homeric gods according to ‘the aim of poetry’ remains influential. Modern readers seldom discuss the ‘Theomachia’ from a theological perspective, and focus rather on its effectiveness as poetry. They argue that the deep tragedy of human conflict is thrown into relief by the sublime frivolity of the gods, who may well engage in their own Trojan battle, but cannot be taken seriously because, after all, they do not die. Leaf, for example, ascribes to Zeus a literary sensibility, noting that he ‘appears to have a just appreciation of the whole combat as a parody of serious fighting’.51 Scholars who insist that the Homeric gods should, on the contrary, be taken seriously, tend to avoid the ‘Theomachia’, because it would weaken their arguments. Griffin, for example, writes: If the poems are to be taken seriously at all, then it would seem that the gods who preside over them must be taken seriously, too. And it is clear that the gods are not to be taken seriously if they can be treated as an entertaining literary device, either to avert monotony and vary the atmosphere, or to produce situations for the human characters in the poems which are not specifically divine or religious, but simply represent, in striking form, conflicts of ordinary human life.52

This kind of comment easily leads to an awkward, yet frequent, compromise concerning the gods in Homer. Kearns states it most clearly: As long as we focus on the main drift of the poem, and what human–divine relations tell us about the human condition, we have a vision that is at once See further Feeney 1991: 25–9 and Graziosi 2013a: 77–9. 50 Aristotle, Poetics 1460b23–6. 51 Leaf 1900–2 ad 21.390. 52 Griffin 1980: 144f. 49

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Barbara Graziosi heroic and (especially in the case of the Iliad) tragic. If we allow the focus to shift to the Gods themselves – and the poet of the Iliad seems sometimes to encourage this, with his frequent scene-setting on Olympus – the result is entertaining, intriguing, but ultimately problematic.53

On this reading, it seems that the Homeric gods are to be taken seriously when they affect mortals, but can be dismissed as light entertainment when their interactions with one another are described. This observation is useful but, as it stands, offers an insufficient account of the gods in Homer. In what follows, I place Kearns’ observation in a broader interpretative framework, and show that even the ‘Theomachia’ of Iliad 21 offers serious theological insight  – particularly when considered in relation to patterns discernible across the early hexameter tradition. I take as my cue a detail that has so far received little critical attention: gender imbalance. In Iliad 21, females are keen to fight, whereas male gods seem strangely reluctant. To be sure, Ares formally opens hostilities, as suits his role as the god of war. But he claims, with some reason, that he is only paying Athena back for her insults earlier in the narrative (21.396–9), when she had him wounded by a mere mortal (5.855–8). It is, at all events, Athena who delivers the first blow. She hurls a massive rock, and knocks Ares unconscious. Aphrodite then tries to rescue Ares (and here there might be a hint at their illicit affair); at which point Hera gets involved, encouraging Athena to go after Aphrodite too. And so she does, speeding after her with glee. Athena quickly rounds on Aphrodite and hits her on her breasts, knocking her unconscious too. At this point Poseidon suggests to Apollo, with almost comical reluctance, that perhaps the two of them ought to fight each other too (21.436–40): Φοῖβε τίη δὴ νῶϊ διέσταμεν; οὐδὲ ἔοικεν ἀρξάντων ἑτέρων· τὸ μὲν αἴσχιον αἴ κ’ ἀμαχητὶ ἴομεν Οὔλυμπόνδε Διὸς ποτὶ χαλκοβατὲς δῶ. ἄρχε· σὺ γὰρ γενεῆφι νεώτερος· οὐ γὰρ ἔμοιγε καλόν, ἐπεὶ πρότερος γενόμην καὶ πλείονα οἶδα. 53 Kearns 2004: 72f.

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Theologies of the family in Homer and Hesiod ‘Phoebus, why do we two keep our distance? It is not right when the others have begun hostilities, and will be even more shameful if we return to Zeus’ bronze-floored house on Olympus without a fight. You go first; you are younger by birth, and it would not be proper for me to start, since I am older and wiser than you.’

Poseidon continues with a long speech about how he and Apollo together worked in the service of the Trojan king Laomedon for a year – building the walls of Troy and tending his cattle – and how the arrogant king then failed to pay them, and even threatened them with mutilation and slavery. Surely Apollo ought to remember that slight, and stop supporting the Trojans. It must be said that, as an attempt to provoke violence, this speech seems rather weak. It is true that Poseidon rebukes Apollo, but he also reminds him of a joint venture, and an insult they both suffered. In short, it seems that the two gods have cause to resent Laomedon and his people, but hardly each other. Apollo replies with customary detachment (21.462–7): Ἐννοσίγαι’ οὐκ ἄν με σαόφρονα μυθήσαιο ἔμμεναι, εἰ δὴ σοί γε βροτῶν ἕνεκα πτολεμίξω δειλῶν, οἳ φύλλοισιν ἐοικότες ἄλλοτε μέν τε ζαφλεγέες τελέθουσιν ἀρούρης καρπὸν ἔδοντες, ἄλλοτε δὲ φθινύθουσιν ἀκήριοι. ἀλλὰ τάχιστα παυώμεσθα μάχης· οἳ δ’ αὐτοὶ δηριαάσθων. ‘Shaker of the Earth, you would not say I was possessed of a a sound mind if I were to fight with you for the sake of mortals – wretched creatures, who like leaves at one time flourish in a blaze of glory, feeding on the fruits of the tilled earth, and at another wither spiritlessly away. No, let us leave the battle immediately, and let the mortals fight on by themselves.’

Poseidon insists on respecting family structures: Apollo should hit him first, since he is younger, and need not be expected to behave wisely. But Apollo is, of course, wise – and refuses to fight altogether.54 It would make no sense to come to blows over mere mortals, who flourish and die like leaves.55 The seasons, agriculture and death characterise the human condition, On the wisdom which Apollo displays in answering Poseidon, see Otto 1954: 66. 55 On the simile of the leaves, in its different ancient permutations, see Sider 1996. 54

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but need not concern the gods. It is Artemis who tries to rekindle the battle, by supplying a proper insult (21.472–4): φεύγεις δὴ ἑκάεργε, Ποσειδάωνι δὲ νίκην πᾶσαν ἐπέτρεψας, μέλεον δέ οἱ εὖχος ἔδωκας· νηπύτιε τί νυ τόξον ἔχεις ἀνεμώλιον αὔτως; ‘So, Shooter From Afar, you are running away, handing the victory entirely to Poseidon, giving him a chance to boast – for nothing. You fool, what is the point of carrying that futile, useless bow?’

These words are meant to hit where it hurts, since Apollo does not as a rule use his bow in battle. Unlike his sister, he does not even hunt with it. In the Iliad, and in Greek religion more generally, Apollo’s bow and arrows seem somewhat metaphorical:  they bring disease to mortals and animals, but are not generally used in martial contexts.56 So here Artemis, the wild sister, tries to provoke Apollo, but he does not even bother answering her. It is Hera who intervenes, showing Artemis exactly where her arrows might belong. She grabs a few from her quiver and starts slapping Artemis on her cheeks with them, meanwhile holding both her wrists with one hand. As Artemis twists this way and that to free herself, the remaining arrows fall from her quiver, and scatter on the ground  – thus providing a humorous commentary on Artemis’ epithet ἰοχέαιρα, ‘scatterer of arrows’ (21.489–96). When Hera is done, she lets go of Artemis, who runs away like a dove chased by a hawk. Hermes, at this point, considers his options. He has just witnessed the way Hera dealt with Artemis, and fears that Leto – Artemis’ own mother – might inflict a similar indignity on him. He has been lined up to fight against her, but now he thinks better of it, and tells Leto that he could never hope to defeat her, thus effectively waving a white flag.57 Leto agrees to leave Hermes alone, and tidies up after Artemis instead. Just as a mother picks up toys from the 56 See Burkert 1985: 146. 57 According to Richardson 1993 ad 21.497–501, Hermes behaves with ‘ironic courtesy’: this seems a good description, even if Richardson fails to see how it is part of a wider pattern: apart from Ares, the gods in general do not stoop to fighting with females.

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floor, so Leto collects her daughter’s arrows, and finally restores some order to the scene. Meanwhile, Artemis herself reaches Olympus, still tearful and shaking, just like any little girl whose ears have been boxed by a powerful stepmother.58 Zeus takes his daughter onto his lap, laughs gently, and asks her what the matter might be. And with this little domestic scene between Artemis and her daddy, which so charmed Callimachus, the battle of the gods comes to an end.59 Goddesses are out of control in the ‘Theomachia’: they hit each other on their breasts and cheeks, talk wildly and incite violence. The gods, by contrast, are restrained, even reluctant to fight. For all the many detailed observations on the battle of the gods, scholars have failed to account for this general pattern. The reversal of traditional gender roles adds to the impression that we are dealing with a domestic farce. Females hitting each other provide low entertainment – and highlight by contrast the serious fighting that is happening among men on earth. As a literary reading, this kind of observation works well. It does little, however, to answer the theological questions with which I started. In order to explore the possible connections between Homeric and Hesiodic portrayals of the gods, it is useful to return to the history of the cosmos, as embedded in the early epic tradition. At a general level, this history seems to be characterised by two complementary traits: personal weakening on the one hand, and social progress on the other.60 Gods are stronger than heroes, who in turn are stronger than ‘men such as they are nowadays’. At the same time, social norms and structures develop only gradually, as individuals weaken and seek consensus. This is already clear in the transition from the rule of Ouranos to the reign of Zeus. Ouranos attempts to retain his power by force alone. In later generations, the world becomes more complex: more and more gods are born, and power needs to be negotiated between them. 58 Demetrios rightly comments that Hera treats Artemis like a little child, and she behaves like one: Schol. Ge. ad Il. 21.491. 59 On the way Callimachus Hymn 3 reworks the depiction of Artemis in Il. 21, see further Ambühl 2005: 245–95. 60 For further discussion, see Graziosi and Haubold 2005: esp. chs 2 and 4.

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Zeus has supreme authority, but he does not simply rule by force:  he distributes different honours among the gods and rules with the help of his daughter Δίκη, Justice (Th. 902). Thus, for example, he distributes τιμαί among the gods of Olympus, making sure that each enjoys due honour (Th. 74). Even though divine relationships become more sophisticated and consensual in the course of time, the society of the gods remains fairly primitive in comparison with human social structures. The overall framework, on Olympus, is the family: the concept of leadership in a non-biological sense is alien to the gods.61 Another important difference between divine and human society concerns the institution of the city.62 Gods live in ‘Olympian houses’, Ὀλύμπια δώματα, human beings, by contrast, live in city states. If we look at the distribution of the word πόλις in early Greek epic, an interesting pattern emerges: it is absent from the Theogony,63 and makes its first appearance in the age of the demigods as described in the Catalogue of Women, the Iliad and the Odyssey. The myth of the ages, as told in Works and Days 109–201, reveals a similar pattern. The emphasis there is, of course, on the degeneration of individuals, but a counter-history of institutional progress can clearly be discerned. There is little evidence of social organisation in the golden age, and golden-age men are said to roam the earth as perennial nomads after their death (125). Families and houses are first mentioned in the silver age (130f.).64 Bronze-age men too are explicitly said to live in houses, both before and after their death (lines 150 and 153, respectively). Cities make their first appearance in the age of the heroes, if we assume that ‘Thebes of the seven gates’ is Zeus is said to rule as a ‘king’ over the other gods at Hes. Th. 883–5 and 886, but the other gods are not his people or political subjects, they are his family. As Simon 1998: 58 rightly points out, Zeus is powerful partly because he populates Olympus with his own children. On familiar and monarchic models of leadership see below, pp. 58–61. 62 On the history of the πόλις, as portrayed in early hexameter epic, see Haubold 2005. 63 The gods of the Theogony live in houses, not cities: vv. 40, 43, 63, 64, 75, 114, 285, 303, 386, 410, 455, 726–35 (the prison of the Titans), 744, 751–3, 758, 767, 777–9, 783, 804, 816, 933. 64 Hes. Op. 130–1. 61

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envisaged as one.65 The word πόλις finally appears in Hesiod’s description of the Iron Age.66 From an ethical point of view, the gods offer some lessons about how to live in a family, but their affairs do not seem to have a fully-fledged political dimension. In the domestic sphere, however, there is some agreement between different poems: the emphasis is on the need for male restraint, in both the Theogony and Iliad 21. Ouranos, Kronos and Zeus do immense violence to their sexual partners and children in order to cling to their position of supreme power forever. Mortal men cannot do that, nor indeed should they try. Explicit value judgements in the Theogony warn against preventing the process of birth, hating one’s own children or refusing to be succeeded. These are evil things, from a human perspective. Only Zeus can remain in charge forever: mortal fathers must die; it follows that birth and succession are, for them, the only answers to mortality.67 Iliad 21 illustrates how things might be run within a patriarchal family, when one man is (however temporarily) in power, like Zeus. Females can at times get out of control, but the important thing is to keep calm and act with good-humoured detachment. As Apollo points out, it makes no sense to get dragged into a mighty fight over small matters. Precisely because Zeus is firmly in control, he can enjoy the spectacle of the ‘Theomachia’. Other sensible male members of his family likewise refuse to get embroiled. Real conflict happens on the human plane, and at the level of the city, not the patriarchal family. Convergent receptions In the Politics, Aristotle sets out to examine how human society developed ‘from the beginning’, ἐξ ἀρχῆς – an expression that echoes Hesiod’s own opening at the beginning of the succession myth. It is remarkable, in fact, how close Aristotle’s 65 Hes. Op. 162. 66 Hes. Op. 189. 67 Thetis, for all that she is a goddess, understands this. When Achilles grieves bitterly for Patroclus, she suggests to him that he should eat, and sleep with a woman – i.e. affirm what sustains human life in the face of death (24.128–32).

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account is to the Theogony, and more generally to the history of the cosmos as embedded in early hexameter epic.68 Aristotle, like Hesiod, begins with a mating between male and female, ‘for the purpose of generation’ (Pol. 1252a25–8): Εἰ δή τις ἐξ ἀρχῆς τὰ πράγματα φυόμενα βλέψειεν, ὥσπερ ἐν τοῖς ἄλλοις, καὶ ἐν τούτοις κάλλιστ’ ἂν οὕτω θεωρήσειεν. ἀνάγκη δὴ πρῶτον συνδυάζεσθαι τοὺς ἄνευ ἀλλήλων μὴ δυναμένους εἶναι, οἷον θῆλυ μὲν καὶ ἄρρεν τῆς γεννήσεως ἕνεκεν. In this subject [of politics] as in others, the best method of investigation is to study things in the process of development from the beginning. The first coupling together then to which necessity gives rise is that between those who are unable to exist without one another: for instance the union of female and male for the purpose of generation.

This original mating gives rise to the household, and several households together create a settlement. The earliest form of constitution is the monarchy, because just as each man is a ruler in his own household, so one dominant household governs the households of less assertive relatives in the settlement itself, and in more distant colonies. In Aristotle’s view, monarchy is a rather primitive form of government, in that it is an extension of the familial model. He argues that it belongs to societies which have not yet fully developed into city states. He also points out that the familial/monarchic model colours widespread assumptions about the gods (Pol. 1252b25–6): καὶ τοὺς θεοὺς δὲ διὰ τοῦτο πάντες φασὶ βασιλεύεσθαι, ὅτι καὶ αὐτοὶ οἱ μὲν ἔτι καὶ νῦν οἱ δὲ τὸ ἀρχαῖον ἐβασιλεύοντο, ὥσπερ δὲ καὶ τὰ εἴδη ἑαυτοῖς ἀφομοιοῦσιν οἱ ἄνθρωποι, οὕτω καὶ τοὺς βίους τῶν θεῶν. This explains why all people speak of the gods as ruled by a king, because some of them are still so ruled and others used to be. Because human beings imagine that the gods are shaped in their own image, so they suppose that their manner of life is also like their own.

All people have essentially the same view of the gods, and that view is modelled on a social structure known to all different Scholars have generally failed to see this, despite the fact that the opening chapters of the Politics are peppered with references to and even quotations from Homer and Hesiod. So, for example, Phillips Simpson 2002 ad 1252b9 notes one quotation from Hesiod’s Works and Days, but completely fails to acknowledge Aristotle’s sustained engagement with Hesiod’s theology of the family. The same is true of Saunders 1995, both ad 1252b9–15 and ad 1252b15–27 (quotation from the Odyssey). 68

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cultures, namely that of the family/monarchy.69 Only some human societies have developed further, into fully political communities, and the gods have not. Aristotle is clear about this: ‘the city state is a natural development, and man is by nature a political animal; by contrast, someone who is by nature, rather than merely by fortune, citiless is either below or above human … Someone incapable of entering into partnership, or who is so self-sufficient that he has no need to do so, and therefore is not part of a city, must either be a beast or a god.’70 The family answers for the basic animal, human and divine needs of generation. The πόλις provides for the more complex forms of mutual support required by human beings alone. Ethical judgements in favour of male restraint, in both the Theogony and Iliad 21, provide guidance for how to behave in the family, rather than the city. Each patriarch can play Zeus in his own home – each is king of his own castle; and, within that castle, both Hesiod and Homer suggest that he should not be violent. Females can provoke:  the process of generation and succession is, in itself, a challenge to patriarchal rule, but must be accepted because it is the only human answer to death. Moreover, under the rule of one patriarch, female squabbles are best treated with a degree of humour and detachment. Proper conflict is played out between men, and at a political rather than familial level: for all that Helen instigated the Trojan War, it then became something that could not just be settled by Priam as a private family matter.71 It follows that the gods in epic offer no guidance on the problem of human 69 Graziosi 2013a offers a broad-ranging exploration of the gods of Olympus as international figures of the imagination. 70 See Arist. Pol. 1253a1–4 and 27–8: ἡ δ’ αὐτάρκεια καὶ τέλος καὶ βέλτιστον. ἐκ τούτων οὖν φανερὸν ὅτι τῶν φύσει ἡ πόλις ἐστί, καὶ ὅτι ὁ ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον, καὶ ὁ ἄπολις διὰ φύσιν καὶ οὐ διὰ τύχην ἤτοι φαῦλός ἐστιν, ἢ κρείττων ἢ ἄνθρωπος· … ὁ δὲ μὴ δυνάμενος κοινωνεῖν ἢ μηδὲν δεόμενος δι’ αὐτάρκειαν οὐθὲν μέρος πόλεως, ὥστε ἢ θηρίον ἢ θεός. 71 This is something that puzzled some ancient readers. Herodotus, Hist. 2.120, insisted that Helen could not have been in Troy at all, otherwise Priam (as the patriarch in charge) would have surely returned her to Menelaos. Philostratus Her. 25.11, endorsed that view. Homer, however, presents the Trojan community as torn between familial and political allegiances, see further Graziosi and Haubold 2010, esp. Introduction.

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war – which is at times configured precisely as a requirement of divine peace.72 It is this theological standpoint that adds weight to scenes like the encounter between Hector and Andromache in Iliad 6 – where Hector is torn apart by a model of male restraint in the family and male aggression on the battlefield.73 There is no Olympian equivalent to his dilemma. My insistence that the gods of Homer and Hesiod live within the basic structure of the family does not mean, of course, that they have no relevance to human politics. Depending on circumstance, the gods of epic were used to make important political statements. In classical Athens, the difference between political government and the Olympian household was quite obvious, and was reflected in the writings of Aristotle. In the Hellenistic period, by contrast, Olympian and political order were more closely aligned. The actions of rulers could conveniently be explained by reference to the gods, as depicted in Homer and Hesiod: Theocritus, for example, tactfully suggested that Ptolemy Philadelphus behaved like Zeus (rather than an ordinary human pervert), when he married his own sister Arsinoe.74 But the point I want to make here is essentially the point that Aristotle makes: the social structure of the gods is familial. Even the divergent receptions with which I started share this one insight, that the gods of Homer and Hesiod are best interpreted as a family. Hesiod, Bachofen and Freud speak of monstrous acts of domestic violence, buried deep in the history of the cosmos and/or the human psyche. Homer, by contrast, offers more light-hearted scenes of daily life: the uncle who reluctantly allows himself to be dragged into a family feud; the sister who tries to provoke her brother, the stepmother who boxes her ears as a result; the cheeky adolescent bowing to the supposedly superior strength of his step-aunt; the mother who picks up scattered arrows from the ground; the father consoling his sobbing daughter. These scenes are not simply frivolous, See Cypria fr. 1 EGF, quoted above. 73 The precise dynamics of Hector’s dilemma are analysed in Graziosi and Haubold 2010. 74 Theoc. Idyll 17.126–34. 72

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nor do they constitute bad theology. Particularly when set in dialogue with Hesiodic representations of the gods, they reveal a coherent system of beliefs, which intersects with dominant Greek views of history, society and ethics. Hesiod and Homer set up the family as a context where peace must obtain, and where male restraint is necessary. Such restraint comes relatively easily to the gods, once the reign of Zeus is established. It is harder to achieve for mortals, because it must be accompanied by an acceptance of death and succession. This theological and ethical insight has obvious relevance to the poetic projects of Homer and Hesiod, since death and succession are, respectively, key themes in the Iliad and the Theogony – but it seems to me that it sheds light also on ancient society, and that more work could be done to investigate the relationship between the divine and the human family. Greek religion has long been declared a religion of the polis, and this helps to explain why modern scholars fail to notice what Aristotle explicitly states in his Politics, namely that the gods live in a family, and have no need for a city. We need to ask not only whether there is a theology of the polis, as the editors of this volume do in their Introduction, but also whether there are theologies of the family, what bearing they have on specific domestic issues (including violence and intergenerational justice, as discussed in this chapter) and how, given the mismatch between divine and human social structures, they ­relate to politics and the polis.

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CHA PTER 4

WHO’S AF RAID OF CYP S E LU S ? Contested theologies and dynastic dedications R E NAUD  GAGNÉ

καὶ τόδε Φωκυλίδου· πόλις ἐν σκοπέλωι κατὰ κόσμον οἰκεῦσα σμικρὴ κρέσσων Νίνου ἀφραινούσης. And this also from Phocylides. A small city on a hill, if it is run with order, is greater than foolish Nineveh.

The contrast between the ruins of the once-mighty Nineveh and the proud order of the small polis perched on its acropolis inscribed in Phocylides 8 W is a typical image from the poetic wisdom of Archaic Greece.1 The foolishness of the former capital of the great Assyrian empire, probably the largest city of its time, becomes the basis of its downfall.2 It goes without saying that an insignificant number of Greeks ever actually saw the ruins of the massive Assyrian capital in the sixth century BCE, but a memory of its fall eventually entered the common imagination.3 Throughout the Greek world, anyone who had ever heard the two lines of Phocylides could employ them to project a distinction between here and there, to strengthen local pride in the modesty of the well-governed polis and to underline the present dangers of arrogance. This is a message reinforced by distance. The catastrophic height of power embodied by Ninos became an ominous paradigm framing the choices of today. There is nothing more common than such portraits of radical shifts of fortune in Archaic and Classical popular wisdom literature. 1 See West 1978: 37. 2 Cf. Drews 1965. For the size of Nineveh, see Halton 2008; for the fall of Nineveh in Jonah and Nahum, see e.g. Bolin 1995; Ego 2003; Klopper 2003. 3 See e.g. Drews 1970; Anderson 1984.

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The collapse of great power has always exercised the imagination. In early Greece, that was particularly true in the case of the overthrow of dynasties.4 What is it that makes a ruling house lose everything it once had, and move from one extreme of the social spectrum to the other? The story told invariably involved the action of the gods and the limits of human existence, and as such activated fundamental theological issues. If the gods deigned to raise a certain line of descent to such heights at one point, how could they then cast it down so suddenly? The question was a focal point of thought on the nature of divine intervention in human affairs. All the thought patterns and ideas, the concrete references and diffuse connotations, the conflicts and oppositions that constitute the implicit and the explicit expressions of theology could be activated to answer it. As in all theological interrogations of the period, it was a problem pregnant with many potential solutions, a screen for projecting and playing out rival understandings of divine will and human misfortune. In this chapter I will discuss one distinctive aspect of those theological interrogations in our sources: the reinterpretation of the monumental traces left by dynastic grandeur after the fall of a ruling line in early Greece. The immediate presence of visible fragments of failed might in the great shared sanctuaries of Greece gave the stories they embodied an urgency that the memory of Nineveh’s ruins could never attain. They offered a message based on (notional) proximity. Once splendid physical witnesses of megaloprepeia and demonstrative piety, these offerings became familiar icons of fortune reversal and paradigmatic disaster for all to see, and to discuss far and wide beyond the borders of the sanctuaries. Standing out from the forests of offerings that dotted the landscapes of these sanctuaries through their unparalleled value and their association with catastrophe, they were triggers of often radically conflicting theological enquiry, privileged spaces of agonistic confrontation between rival interpretations of divine reward and punishment. They can be described as question marks 4 See McGlew 1993: 81–6, 124–56.

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on the religious system. How did Greek culture negotiate the transition from pious offering to emblem of disaster? How should we assess the various recombinations of meaning subsequently attached to these monuments? I  will use two case studies to illustrate some key points: the great golden kolossos of Cypselus at Olympia, and the famed generosity of Croesus for Delphi. The theology written upon the Cypselid dedications The legendary gifts of the Corinthian tyrants to the major Panhellenic sanctuaries set the stage for all their successors.5 The spectacular dedications made by the Cypselids revolutionised the dedicatory practices of the time. These objects and buildings were there to provoke awe – there was nothing like them when they were first shown.6 Even seven hundred years after its manufacture the chest of Cypselus still inspired the most exuberant praise from Pausanias, a specialist in the evaluation of sanctuary dedications if ever there was one.7 They not only embodied the might of the dynasty, but its claim to shape memory for generations to come, and to channel the presence of divinity in the centres of common religious practice and imagination. They were statements of duration and stability. Marvels of artistry that brought the display of wealth to new heights, these dedications were accorded pride of place in the building programmes of some of the most important sacred Pl. Phdr. 236ab; Thphr. F 128 Wimmer; Ephor. FGrH 70 F 178; Apellas FGrH 266 F 5; Agaclyt. FGrH 411 F 1; D.L. 1.96; Str. 8.3.30; 8.6.20; Paus. 5.2.3 with Maddoli and Saladino 1995:  190–1; Plu. De Pyth. or. 400d–e; schol. to Pl. Phdr. 236b; Hermias, In Platonis Phaedrum scholia 45 Couvreur; Photius, Lexicon, sv Κυψελιδῶν ἀνάθημα; Suda, sv Κυψελιδῶν ἀνάθημα. Most sources are conveniently gathered in Papadopoulos 1980: 83–7. See further Lippold 1924: col. 120; Finley 1970:  107; Salmon 1984:  227, 1997:  66–7; Scott 2010:  42–5, 152. Cf. Arist. Pol. 1313b18–25, with the comments of Anderson 2005: 192–3. For a discussion of the problematic notion of ‘Panhellenism’ in the study of sanctuary offerings, especially Olympia, and the complex game of local identities at play, see Kindt 2012: 123–54; cf. Scott 2010: 256–64. 6 See Papadopoulos 1980: 9–12. According to Bommelaer 1991: 153, the treasury of Cypselus was ‘for centuries one of the oldest buildings of Delphi, if not the oldest’. Scott 2010: 44 describes it as ‘an extremely imposing and impressive dedication’. 7 Paus. 5.17.5; see Salmon 1984: 227; Carter 1989; Arafat 1995. 5

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spaces of Greece. It can be said that the Cypselid dedications were nothing short of ‘dominant’ for many decades in the landscapes of both Delphi and Olympia.8 When the dynasty fell, these prominent monuments became objects of even more intense debate and contestation. In De Pythiae oraculis 400d–e, Plutarch tells us that the citizens of Corinth sent delegations to both Delphi and Olympia, after the Cypselids were toppled, to ask that the inscriptions of the great dedications offered by their former rulers to the two sanctuaries be changed.9 They wanted the treasury of Delphi and the golden kolossos of Olympia to be ascribed to the city as a whole, reinscribed with its name, and the inscriptions of the tyrants to be erased. Literally, they asked to ‘write the city’ (ἐπιγράψαι τῆς πόλεως) on these monuments. The idea was to substitute one memory for another, and to keep the transactional charis linking the two places in the monumental landscape of the sanctuaries. There is no question of contesting the god’s ownership of the anathēma in either case. What is involved is an appropriation of its symbolic value by the polis, and a claim to inherit the dialogue of reciprocity it establishes. Only the exterior, visible epigraphic attribution of the monuments is involved in the claim of Corinth to Delphi and Olympia, not the ascription of the many objects dedicated by Cypselus or Periander to the sanctuaries that were housed in treasuries, and that remained ascribed to them without any question.10 The 8 Scott 2010: 152. 9 See Bourguet 1912: 658; Jacquemin 1999:  216, 221. The ‘traditional’ chronology, which places the fall of the Cypselids at the end of the 580s, rather than the 550s, or even the 530s, as some have proposed, remains the most plausible one. Will 1955: 363–440 probably has the fullest discussion of the problem. See still Ducat 1961; Servais 1969. 10 For an example of a preserved Cypselid dedication on a golden bowl at Olympia (now in Boston), see Lazzarini 1976: 321. The authenticity of that object is generally no longer questioned. It is worth noting that the dedication identifies the Κυψελιδαί as the collective source of the dedication, just as the chest of Cypselus did (Paus. 5.17.5), at least if we can follow Pausanias. Visitors of Plutarch’s time continued to show great interest in the meaning of the Cypselid dedications, even if they obviously no longer made much sense to them:  Plu. Septem sapientium convivium 163f–164b; Deonna 1951. Cf. the colourful theological reading of the Olympian kolossos, thoroughly transformed into a Neoplatonic monument, found in Hermias’ scholia to Phaedrus 236ab.

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claim concerns the web of links that tied the sacred sites’ topography with the spaces and times of the wider Greek world. That renegotiation of the relation that binds dedicator and recipient involves a radical reconfiguration of the varied theological connotations that had accrued around the monuments. Delphi, we are told, accepted the Corinthian demand because it was just (dikaion), and the inscription of the Cypselid thesauros was accordingly modified.11 Not that that change altered people’s perceptions:  Herodotus made a point of identifying Cypselus as the monument’s first holder more than a century after the event, and much later both Plutarch and Pausanias still present that ready identification as a staple of local discussions.12 The Pythia, after all, had famously declared Cypselus to be olbios, and it recognised him and his children as kings.13 The notion that the building was a votive offering thanking the god for saving the founder of the dynasty remained familiar beyond the time of Plutarch.14 Apollo’s role in both the protection and the ascension of the tyrant, and the announcement of his dynasty’s ultimate failure, are embodied in the monument that continued to commemorate the pious vow of the ruler and the collapse of his family at the same time. In contrast with Delphi, Olympia refused to accommodate the demands of Corinth and the name of Cypselus was never erased from the great golden kolossos of Zeus in the sanctuary of Hera.15 The slight was such a severe blow that Corinth decided to exclude the citizens of Elis from Plu. De Pyth. or. 400e. Part of that new inscription might actually have been found: see Bourguet 1912: 659. 12 Hdt. 1.14; Plu. De Pyth. or. 400d–e; Paus. 5.2.3. 13 Hdt. 5.92ε. On oracles and the Cypselids, see Giangiulio 2010. 14 Plu. Septem sapientium convivium 164a. It can be useful to consider that continuity in parallel with the unabated interest of the Hellenistic and Imperial periods in the famous legend of Cypselus’ birth related in Herodotus 5.92. This is largely built around a number of hexametric oracles, notably one that predicted the downfall of his line after two generations. For the intermeshing of folktale, myth, hexametric oracles and narrative in 5.92, see e.g. Vernant 1981/1988; Stahl 1983; Moles 2007. 15 The anathēma is presented as an offering to Zeus in almost all our sources. Strabo (8.3.30), the scholia to Plato and Hermias (see n. 5) identify the kolossos as a representation of Zeus. Agaclytus places it in the sanctuary of Hera. 11

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participation in the Isthmian games.16 From that moment on, the kolossos no longer served as a marker between the sanctuary and a city: instead, it emphatically linked the topography of Olympia to the memory of a fallen regime that had so profoundly impressed itself on the imagination of the Greek world.17 Keeping the name of the Cypselids proudly displayed on one of the dominant features of the sanctuary against the will of Corinth was a bold statement. Reducing that statement to the political dimension of the local power struggles of the time is to cast aside an important part of its symbolic value, and the significance it clearly had for other regions and later times. Just as the contested figure of Periander was to retain a wide and vivid role in later Greek stories about power, wisdom, divine favour and transgression, both as one of the Seven Sages and as a paradigm of cruelty and impiety, the legacy of the Cypselid dynasty continued to be disputed, questioned and challenged over the generations, as Herodotus 5.92 attests particularly well.18 The presence of the golden kolossos in one of the chief locations of Panhellenism must have channelled much of that tension. The conflict over the attribution and the significance of the great dedication had powerful repercussions that spread across the Peloponnese and into the Greek world as a whole. The refusal of Olympia to alter the inscription, and thus the original relation that bound the divine recipient to the dynastic dedicants, had theological ramifications that cut at the root of what votives meant to different people, notably in their interactions with notions of ownership, identity, permanence and memory, justice and piety, and display. The massive sculpture of wrought gold, the sphurēlatos kolossos, had been dedicated in the time of either Cypselus Plu. De Pyth. or. 400e–f; Paus. 5.2.2–3; see Servais 1965: 167. 17 Cf. the tantalising possibility, raised by Servais 1965:  173–4, that some early Classical Corinthian staters stamped an image of the kolossos (image in Lacroix 1949: 72–3). 18 See e.g. McGlew 1993: 61–74; Berger 2007. Cf. still the extensive discussion of later Cypselid traditions in Porzio 1912. 16

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himself or Periander.19 A  spectacular display of pure wealth and experimental artistry, it showcased the aesthetics of a new technology on a scale without precedent in the Greek world.20 It was a marvel. Before Pheidias’ Zeus replaced it as the major representation of the god in the sanctuary, the Cypselid kolossos was the foremost agalma in Olympia.21 The great value of the offering remained proverbial for centuries, and Theophrastus even went so far as to compare it to the pyramids of Egypt as an example of the gigantic spending typical of dynasts.22 Plato took it for granted that everyone knew about it.23 Longinus could still allude to it in passing.24 The long entry of Photius and the Suda on the anathēmata of the Cypselids gives pride of place to the golden monument. The demand of Corinth to Olympia concerned the inscription that accompanied the statue, not the nature or the location of the object. As in Delphi, the city did not contest the monument itself, but attempted to appropriate its value and meaning through writing. It was the battle over the Cypselid inscription that focused the struggle for the statue’s place and meaning in Olympia. What do we know about that inscription? It is a (now) rarely noted fact that Photius, drawing from earlier sources, transmits an elegiac distich that was purported 19 Ephorus FGrH 70 F 178; Plu. De Pyth. or. 400e; Paus. 5.2.3; Phot. Lexicon, sv Κυψελιδῶν ἀνάθημα; see Will 1955: 414. The scholia to Plato and Hermias attribute it to the sons of Periander. Servais 1965: 149 rightly notes that the debate about the identification of the original benefactor suggests that his name was not inscribed on the statue. Most of our sources refer to the kolossos ‘of the Cypselids’. Servais 1965, still accepting the old idea that the word kolossos only came to be associated with massive statues from the time of the kolossos of Rhodes onwards, and defending the views of Roux 1960, which have been convincingly refuted by Dickie 1996, argues for a life-sized statue. Pl. Phdr. 236b hardly suggests ‘environ la taille humaine’, as he writes on p.  163. On the great size of the statue, see Str. 8.6.20. Strabo would not describe the statue as being εὐμεγέθης if its size was not particularly notable, something that fits much better with the fame of the dedication. 20 Pi. Fr. 207 Maehler; A. Pers. 747, Th. 817; see Papadopoulos 1980: 77–80. For Plato (Phdr. 236b), the word points obviously and without discussion to the Olympian kolossos, as it continued to do for Longinus (see note 24). 21 For a comparison of the two statues see Str. 8.3.30. 22 Thphr. F 128 Wimmer. It was clearly no longer in place at the time of Pausanias, who does not describe it in his account of the Heraion (5.16.1–5.20.5; see also 5.2.3). See Servais 1965: 169. 23 Pl. Phdr. 236b; see Morgan 1994. 24 Longin. 36.3. The case is argued very convincingly by de Jonge 2013.

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to have been inscribed on the base of the statue.25 That rather spectacular epigram, I believe, is directly related to the prominent inscription that the Corinthians wanted to destroy. εἰ μὴ ἐγὼ χρυσοῦς σϕυρήλατος εἰμὶ κολοσσός, ἐξώλης εἴη Κυψελιδῶν γενεά.26 If I am not a kolossos of wrought gold, may the race of the Cypselids be destroyed root and branch.

The poem consists of one conditional sentence, a deceptively simple play on the traditional curse formula of exōleia: if X, may the genos of Y be destroyed root and branch.27 We do not know if it was longer than the distich quoted by our sources. Whatever the case, the text that we have was demonstrably copied and parodied before the later third century BCE, which provides us with a firm terminus ante quem.28 The fact that the last line of the epigram is clearly related to a verse from a Theognidean poem (894) seems to contradict the idea that this is a late pastiche.29 A pastiche with wit and humour Although the kolossos epigram used to be a fairly standard object of discussion in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship (see e.g. Geffcken and Herbig 1918, with bibliography), it has inexplicably all but disappeared from view since Servais’ 1965 article. Recent research on early epigrams (see e.g. Day 2010 and Baumbach, Petrovic and Petrovic 2011) does not mention it, and it receives at best a passing comment in scholarship on Archaic Olympia (there is no reference to it in Scott 2010, for instance). 26 Our two main witnesses, Photius’ Lexicon and the Suda, drawing from Didymus Chalcenterus (p. 404 Schmidt), both present it as a distich. In Photius, the poem starts with εἰμὶ. The Suda’s text is almost identical with Photius. One difference is the presence of αὐτὸς ἐγὼ instead of εἰμὶ ἐγὼ at the beginning of the hexameter. The preserved text of both witnesses, in other words, a dedication calling on the destruction of the dedicator, is obviously nonsensical as is; see Servais 1965: 158–9. The αὐτὸς of the Suda is clearly secondary, a correction of εἰμὶ, a verb that would then appear twice in the same line, which is intolerable. The problem is solved with Cobet’s neat conjecture (Cobet 1860: 426) of εἰ μὴ for the first εἰμὶ, easily explained by iotacism. 27 For variations on the traditional formula of exōleia in the Archaic period see Gagné 2013: 159–205. 28 The dependence of both Photius and the Suda on Didymus Chalcenterus, and the fact that both the other authors mentioned in the entry, Apellas and Agaclytus, are anterior to him, was first established by Cohn 1884: 794. For the dates of Apellas (second half of the third century BCE) and Agaclytus, see Jacoby on FGrH 266 and 411. 29 Servais 1965: 165, n.59 recognises the link between the two texts, and the necessary dependence of the Theognidean poem on the epigram. His attempt to argue it away by questioning the date of the Theognidean elegy, which can hardly be later than the sixth century BCE, is not convincing. It would demand a very convoluted trajectory 25

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in mind would arguably contain wit and humour, as does the parody of the text found in Apellas Ponticus cited by Photius and the Suda (see below). Such a short pastiche as the text we have, without wit and humour, produced after the fall of the dynasty, would make little sense indeed, and would hardly have interested contemporaries enough to circulate as it did. Our understanding of the intricacy and variety of inscribed epigrams from the Archaic period has increased greatly in recent decades, and the fact that no exact contemporary parallels can be produced for the text hardly militates against its authenticity. If it did, we would also have to question the authenticity of Cypselus’ chest, for instance, or the very peculiar bronze Cypselid palm tree at Delphi, or even the sphurēlatos kolossos itself, for that matter. That monument was, after all, a wonder without precedent when it was produced. None of the epigram’s vocabulary would be out of place in the Archaic period, and the adaptation of the traditional oath formula of exōleia to a novel use on the monument is far from an implausible proposition. The only other usage of the exōleia formula to have come down to us on an epigraphical text that has a claim to the early Archaic period, the ‘Oath of Founders’ of Cyrene, also involves a kolossos, a rather rare word otherwise. In that text, we are told that kolossoi of wax were ritually destroyed as part of the performance of the horkos ceremony to embody the binding power of the oath on later generations.30 The ephemeral wax kolossoi of Cyrene are reflexes of the same logic as the proud, enduring monument of Olympia with its armour of gold. Their destruction, just as its dedication in the sanctuary, is a claim on the longue durée of the centuries. The striking material property of the kolossos seals the words of a to imagine the formula of that line moving from the totally unrelated Theognidean text to a fictive statue epigram in the Classical or Hellenistic period, whereas the movement from the epigram to the Theognidean poem in the Archaic period, as we will see, can be readily explained (cf. Young 1964: 333–5). The Theognidean text is built on the premise that the line evokes something that is familiar enough to all members of the audience to elicit an understanding of its references and connotations without any further prompt. 30 ML 5.40–51. For discussions and bibliography about the date and interpretation of that text, see Gagné 2013: 171–4.

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wish. But rather than embodying destruction, the Olympian kolossos functions as an assertion of permanence. It would be an astounding feat of chance indeed for that very specific association of kolossos and exōleia to be found coincidentally in both texts. The ritual manipulation of one text becomes the monumental speech act of a statue in another.31 The kolossos epigram uses the immense value of the offering, and the material characteristics of unsullied gold, to channel the great power of the horkos and make a bid on time. It transforms the monument into a solid oath. With Geffcken (1916: 12; 1918), and against Servais (1965: 160), I am entirely open to the idea that the distich was indeed part of a genuine Cypselid epigram. The kolossos epigram, at the very least, whatever its actual origin, circulated and was known in the early sixth century BCE. Worthy of the most precious work of art on which it was (at least nominally) inscribed, then, was a sophisticated, self-assured statement of the Cypselid dynasty given for all to see in the Panhellenic sanctuary. A simple, elegant riddle. The golden kolossos speaks in the first person and says: ‘if I am not a golden kolossos’. That is: if I am not what I am, may this happen. The mirror image of: being what I am, this will not happen. The terrible outcome of the second line is negated by the counterfactual protasis of the first line. The idea of dynastic eradication that is provocatively mentioned in the epigram is at once proudly denied by the presence of the kolossos.32 The continuity of the Cypselid line is thus efficiently tied to the visible nature and value of the statue. The epigram proclaims a link between the great wealth of the dedicators, their protection by the gods and the survival of their line. We do not need to postulate an incomplete text to see that logic operating in the epigram. In the text as we have it, the dangerous power of The old theory of the kolossos as a ritual substitute (Benveniste 1932) cannot be followed, but it remains worthy of serious consideration. Cf. Roux 1960; Vernant 1965/2005; Ducat 1976; Dickie 1996. 32 Ever since the early Archaic period, the logic of symmetrically opposite outcomes was a staple of exōleia statements, with curse and blessing implying each other on both sides of the conditional wish that governs them; see e.g. Hesiod, Op. 280–5; ML 5.40–51; Demosthenes 54.41; Aeschines 2.87; SGDI 5058.40–7; SIG 360; cf. Faraone 2005. 31

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the ritual formula is anchored in the presence of the dedicatory monument. The existence of the precious object stands opposed to the disappearance of the Cypselids. What was a foundational act in Cyrene is a statement of dynastic continuity on the Olympian dedication. The ability of the Cypselids to make a dedication of such value is a manifestation of power that embodies the continuity of the genea. Closer to the proud proclamations of the contemporary Egyptian, Assyrian and Babylonian kings than to Solonian restraint, the kolossos of the tyrants embodied a poised statement of permanence.33 The tangible presence of the statue is the enduring witness of Cypselid dynastic might. Zeus, the object of the dedication, and Hera, the goddess of the sanctuary, are to be the guarantors of its stability. The forms of ritual, poetry and statuary are thus combined to embody a theologically significant assertion of divinely sanctioned power. The traditional claims of the oath formula to endure over generations are channelled by the speech act of the poem. If we allow the possibility that this is indeed the text that was actually inscribed on the statue base, part of it or something related to it, the poem gives us an idea of the stakes at play in changing or keeping the inscription after the fall of the Cypselids. By refusing to erase it, the authorities of Olympia would have maintained a prominent statement of dynastic continuity in full view of the Greek world. In the context of the struggles outlined above, the message of the statue from the tyrants of Corinth was bound to be contested, especially after the fall of the dynasty. One fascinating illustration of the forms opposition to it could take is the version of the epigram preserved in Apellas Ponticus, an author from the Hellenistic period mentioned by Photius and the Suda.34 εἰ μὴ ἐγὼ †ναξὸς† παγχρύσεος εἰμὶ κολοσσός, ἐξώλης εἴη Κυψελιδῶν γενεά.35 33 Cf. Deonna 1951: 192; 198–203. 34 See note 28. 35 The first εἰμὶ of the transmitted text needs to be corrected to εἰ μὴ, as in the original epigram. None of the various interpretations proposed for νάξος (νάξιος in the Suda)

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Minor changes in the words of the hexameter give the distich a radically different meaning. Whereas the verse of the inscribed epigram brought attention to the novel, cutting-edge technique of the sphurelaton, emphasising the precious hammered gold plates fixed on the wooden core of the sculpture, the text quoted by Apellas Ponticus states that the statue is made of solid gold. There is, of course, no such thing as a massive kolossos of solid gold. It is an impossible object. The new version thus turns the witty identity-play of the epigram into a simple counterfactual. As the statue is not made of solid gold, as it can’t be made of solid gold, the epigram completely reverses the logic of the other text with this adynaton. It breaks the protasis and thus becomes a curse on the Cypselids, a real imprecation – it now actually calls on the destruction of the genos root and branch.36 Its statement of impossible wealth acts as a devastating parody of the statue’s arrogant boast. The value of the kolossos is no mark of permanence. The line of tyrants is indeed set for extinction in deed and in fame. There is a fundamental symbolic rift at play in this rewriting of the epigram. The superimposition of one epigram over the other subverts the whole idea of the kolossos. That critical appropriation of the poem illustrates a logic of opposition that is also attested elsewhere. Various sources from the Hellenistic period, for instance, relate tales of conflict between the tyrants and the population of the city: the kolossos would have been formed from tithes levied on the Corinthians seems entirely convincing to me. Geffcken and Herbig 1918, the most detailed discussion of the matter, argue for a ναξός (note the accent) related to νάσσω, which would reinforce the statue’s reference to itself as being made of solid gold – something related to ναστός, as opposed to κενός. Gallavotti 1962 argues instead for an improbable ἄξους, and believes that the χρυσοῦς σϕυρήλατος of the kolossos epigram is in fact a secondary elaboration on the ἄξους παγχρύσεος of the Apellas epigram. See Papadopoulos 1980: 87 for a refutation. Cf. Servais 1965: 154–74, who also believes that the kolossos epigram is a secondary elaboration on the Apellas epigram, without really making a case for that scenario, considering the fact that, unlike the Apellas epigram, it is neither clearly humourous nor is it invective. His reconstruction of the model parodied by the Apellas epigram essentially ends up reconstructing the kolossos epigram, but without the formula of exōleia. Contrary to him, I do not have any a priori difficulty in seeing a creative adaptation of the exōleia formula in the text. 36 See Servais 1965: 167–8.

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and the opponents of the dynasts, or it would have been used to spend the ‘excess wealth’ of the city (and of the opponents of the regime).37 In other words, far from being a just dedication of enduring wealth protected by Zeus, it would instead represent the theft of unlawful acquisition, a monument of injustice. The echoes we hear of these stories could very well come from the narrative used by the city to justify this translation of origins from one party to another. The monuments were never the tyrants’ to give, in that view; the city as a whole paid for them, it was the original benefactor, and that is what the inscriptions should acknowledge. Whatever the case, these stories certainly derive from traditions hostile to the Cypselids.38 Like the version of the epigram found in Apellas Ponticus, they cannot be precisely dated, but they do provide us with an idea of the antagonism generated by the message of the kolossos. One text which can be situated in that broad adversarial context is Theognis 891–4. The poem seems to be complete: οἴ μοι ἀναλκίης· ἀπὸ μὲν Κήρινθος ὄλωλεν, Ληλάντου δ’ ἀγαθὸν κείρεται οἰνόπεδον· οἱ δ’ ἀγαθοὶ φεύγουσι, πόλιν δὲ κακοὶ διέπουσιν. ὡς δὴ Κυψελιδῶν39 Ζεὺς ὀλέσειε γένος. The lack of courage! Not only is Kerinthos utterly destroyed, but the noble vineyards of the Lelantine plain are being cut down. The nobles are in flight and the wretched rule the city. May Zeus indeed annihilate the race of the Cypselids!

I would argue that the last line of the quatrain establishes the poem as an answer to the epigram. The combination of Zeus, the verb ollumi, the genos of Cypselids and the optative is decisive in that regard. What functions as a conditional curse in the epigram is turned into a wish in the poem. The emphatic dē of the first foot very abruptly brings attention to the well-known statement:  ‘May Zeus indeed annihilate the race of Cypselids!’ That last line functions as a conclusion for 37 Arist. Pol. 1313b; Ps.-Arist. Oec. 1346a; Thphr. Fr. 128 Wimmer; Phot. Lexicon, sv Κυψελιδῶν ἀνάθημα; Suda, sv Κυψελιδῶν ἀνάθημα; see Will 1955: 482–4. 38 Something already seen by Cobet 1860. Cf. Servais 1965: 165–8. 39 Κυψελιδῶν is a safe and necessary emendation from Hermann for the nonsensical κυψελίζων or κυψελλίζον of the manuscripts.

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the other three. But how is it related to them? The answers provided by scholars have essentially consisted of variations on biographical and historical readings. A virtual war between Eretria and Chalkis has been conjured by historians on the basis of this text; proto-Cypselid leaders of an Athenian expedition imagined for the occasion; an author with strong personal ties to Euboea and Corinth fabricated; and very precise dates proposed: 510? 506?40 The common idea is that the poem must answer the specific circumstances of an event. The role of the analyst is to recover the occasion and the biography of the poet who lived through this. The nonexistent biography of the elusive Theognis, however, is very shaky ground indeed on which to build such elaborate scenarios.41 It seems preferable to me to read the poem as a message that is not tied to one fleeting moment, a poetic statement that can circulate in reperformance and remain relevant beyond any original occasion. The places and times mentioned by the epigram have significance in and of themselves. There are three temporal points in the text: the past destruction of the perfect olōlen, the potential future destruction of the optative oleseie and the present destruction of keiretai.42 The present, with its two lines in the middle of the poem, is placed at the very centre of the statement. The result of the perfect tense is carried into the present moment, and the optative wish is grounded in it. All this destruction reflects one point: the agathoi are now in exile and base men govern the city. We are not told what city that is, and the indeterminacy of the sentence makes it applicable to any circumstance, the hic et nunc of this and that enunciation in reperformance at any symposium. The very specific reference to the vineyards of the Lelantine plain, in line 2, can 40 See Ferreri 2005 and Selle 2008: 238–9 (with bibliography). 41 As nothing allows us to place Theognis in Euboea and/or Corinth, the poem is still often said to be by someone else, and seen as a late, ‘spurious’ addition to the collection (van Groningen 1966: 341; Selle 2008: 248.). But there is of course far from being a general agreement that authentic poems can clearly be distinguished from non-authentic poems in the Theognidea, or even that such a distinction between the two makes sense in a collection built around the authorising seal of such a distinctive persona. See e.g. Ford 1985; Cerri 1991; Pratt 1995; Edmunds 1997. 42 Cf. van Groningen 1966: 339.

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similarly be read as a figurative indication. Rather than referring to some local, precise skirmish, what the poem is saying by pointing to this famous place is that the Lelantine War is going on right now. The greatest war since the fall of Troy, a paradigmatic moment of poetic memory, nothing less than the greatest war ever fought between Greeks, is being waged at this very moment.43 It is not, however, a conflict of alliances and coalitions this time; polin is every city. This is a generalised civil war between kakoi and agathoi. As the kakoi win, the agathoi are leaving, and the agathon oinopedon is being cut down. In other words, the vineyard that provides the members of the audience at the symposium with the wine in their cup is about to disappear. The city of Kerinthos, on the other hand, is already gone.44 Euboea, once a jewel of the Greek world, is now a nightmare of civic strife. Great might has fallen as a result of this conflict, land and city now lie in ruins. What seemed permanent is no more. Could the new beating heart of the Greek world fall as well? Could Korinthos be the next Kerinthos? Does this have anything to do with the Cypselid rulers found all over the Ionian Sea? Or, alternatively, could what happened in Corinth pave the way for avoiding the fate of the Euboean city? ‘Let the tyrants fall!’ Or: ‘As they’ve already fallen, the tyrants will fall!’ The shout of ‘May Zeus indeed exterminate the race of the Cypselids!’, in that view, becomes an exhortation for oligarchic revolution wherever there are tyrants.45 It marks a contrast with the first words of the poem, which point to the present loss of nerves in the ongoing battle. The text thus functions both when the tyrants are still in power and after they have fallen. Its curse functions as a rallying cry for aristocratic resistance to tyranny and mob rule everywhere. Its pointed message, built on the connotations of shared knowledge, is based on a 43 Th. 1.15.3 (cf. Archil. F 3 W; Hdt. 5.99; Strabo 10.1.11–12; Plu. Septem sapientium convivium 153f.; Amatorius 760e–761b). On the ‘Lelantine War(s)’ see e.g. d’Agostino 1967; Fehling 1979; Lambert 1982; Giannatasio 1993; Parker 1997; Ferreri 2005. 44 On Kerinthos, see Sampson 1975. 45 As van Groningen 1966: 340 notes, Camerarius (1551) already saw the reference to the Cypselids as a generic reference to tyrants, a reading that was abandoned in later centuries by scholars looking for historical precision.

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direct confrontation with another famous text and an appropriation of its wording. A good part of the Theognidean corpus is notoriously composed of dialogues with other elegiac poetry, and what we have here is simply another such elegiac ­conversation – this time, notably, with a monument.46 The last line of the poem establishes a reference to the statue. But why activate the kolossos epigram specifically? By rewriting the formula of the famous statue in its own verse, the poem captures the message of one of the most famous monuments of the Greek world and coopts it for its own purposes. Zeus himself, the object of the Cypselid dedication, becomes the agent of destruction of the Cypselids in the Theognidean poem. The idea that the rich offering marked the stability of divine favour and inscribed the continuity of the dynasty in the great Panhellenic sanctuary is turned on its head. The kolossos is transformed into a witness of the downfall of the tyrants, a commemoration of the eventual collapse of their unjust rule, over and against the extravagant wealth they had managed to amass. The sphurēlatos kolossos is the perfect embodiment of the counterfeit gold so often decried in the Theognidean corpus, the covering of a worthless core by a glistening illusion. Rather than function as a testament to dynastic continuity, it thus comes to channel a call for the overthrow of illegitimate rulers. The exiled agathoi are on the move, away from their cities, but they have not given up the fight, from Euboea to Corinth, from Corinth to Olympia – the axis traced by the three locations alluded to in the poem. Contrary to the static kolossos, the poem can circulate from symposium to symposium, throughout the poleis of Greece, and proclaim its message of unrest and resistance. The reperformance of the poem inscribes itself on the memory of the monument. The anger levelled at the dynasts of the world is threaded in the language of curses, the projection of a force of generational destruction grounded in the efficient power of divine displeasure. The imprecation of the last line answers the On elegiac conversations between texts and traditions, see Calame 2004; Irwin 2006, with bibliography. Young 1964 is still very much worth reading. 46

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sombre portrait of the world out of joint presented in the first three verses. Zeus is obviously not on the side of the kakoi or the Cypselids in this picture. The pious offering of Olympia, with the inscription on its base, is recast as an emblem of injustice, and a call to arms. The poem shapes a theological stance in opposition to another. The theology of the story of Croesus’ dedications If some fragmentary echoes of the trajectories of the Cypselid dedications can be detected in the cultural imagination of early Greece, the legacy of Croesus obviously left a far more prominent trace. The fact that with the end of Croesus a dynasty not only disappeared, but a whole empire collapsed, made his story stand out especially vividly. The great wealth of the Lydian king focused the legend of his power on issues of exchange and transmission, and his gifts to some of the most important sanctuaries of the Greek world, notably Ephesus, but especially Delphi, brought his fate into direct contact with the concerns of every single Greek city. For more than two hundred years, from the first half of the sixth century BCE to the Third Sacred War, the highly visible offerings of Croesus occupied a critical place in the spatial configuration of Delphi. The anathēmata described by Herodotus in 1.50–2, such as the great lion of refined gold held on rows of precious ingots – more than 16 tonnes of precious metal, according to one estimate – or the two massive krateres at the entrance of the temple, one of gold and the other of silver, were clearly set up, before the great fire of 548 destroyed that arrangement, to stand out in the central core of the ­sanctuary.47 The silver kratēr alone, if Herodotus’ text is to be believed, could hold up to a massive 20,000 litres.48 Relocated ‘at the corner of the forecourt of the temple’ (Herodotus 1.51), 47 Parke 1984 attempts a detailed reconstruction of the historical occasions of the offerings. Flower 1991 discusses the oral traditions surrounding Croesus’ offerings and the question of his piety. On the configuration of the lion monument, see Roux 1990: 234–45. 48 See Asheri 2007: 111–13. See also Fehling 1989: 223; Pritchett 1993: 132–8.

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it served as the centrepiece for the annual Delphic ritual of the Theophania (as well as the Theoxenia, if they are in fact different).49 It is important to underline that, in the sanctuary that stood at the centre of the network of sacred landscapes of the Greek world, the object that channelled the annual appearance of the gods for the city was for centuries a visible embodiment of Croesus’ pious generosity.50 The spatial configuration of votives, their usage and the discourses that surrounded them are matters of great theological significance in Greek religion. Nowhere is this clearer than with the offerings of Croesus at Delphi. Taken as a whole, Croesus’ dedications even surpassed the spectacular gold and silver dedications of his own ancestor Gyges (Herodotus 1.14)  – the gold associated with turannis ever since the time of Archilochus (F 19 W). How could the pious man who had offered the most lavish gifts of all time to the god in Delphi be struck such a catastrophic blow? The emergence of the figure of Croesus as a contested theological paradigm in the later Archaic period is a direct product of that question.51 The failure of pious wealth challenged a dominant narrative of divine action. Not more than a few decades after the fall of Sardis, Croesus had already become an emblematic figure of normative Greek narrative on punishment from the gods, and he could appear in the places usually reserved for myth in poetry and vase painting.52 But what the audience saw on a vase like the famous Louvre G 197 from the Myson Painter, for instance, where Croesus dedicates his royal body to the sacrificial pyre with a pious libation, was not cued to a fixed Pfister 1934; Derow and Forrest 1982: 83–4. For the usage of the silver kratēr at the Theoxenia, see Syll.3 579  =  FD III, 3, 224. For the possible equivalence of the Theophania of Herodotus 1.51 with the much better known Theoxenia, see still Baunack 1899:  893 (GDI 2756); Amandry 1939:  209–12; cf. Jameson 1994; Hedreen 2011. 50 Cf. Kindt’s 2012: 55–89 discussion of ‘tyrant property turned ritual object’ in late fifth-century Athens. 51 Key discussions of the topic include Segal 1971; Oliva 1975; Peron 1978; Burkert 1985; Lamedica 1987; Tarditi 1989; Crane 1996; Frings 1996; Kurke 1999: 130–74; Belloni 1999; Duplouy 2000; Neri 2009; Cairns 2010: 65–6. 52 For the possibility of a Classical tragedy, if not a whole trilogy, written on the story of Croesus, see Page 1962; Snell 1973; Riecks 1975; cf. Chiasson 2003. 49

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tradition, and no one theological programme was activated by the image of the defeated king on his pyre.53 The diversity of possible responses to the theological challenge of the Croesus story is what stands out from the fragmentary record of the tale found in extant literature. Fundamentally opposed understandings of the king’s downfall appear in all of them. Pindar’s First Pythian, written in 470 for Hieron of Syracuse’s victory at the chariot race in Delphi, sets up a distinction between the noble figure of Croesus and the evil Phalaris in the last section of the poem.54 The memory of fame, he says, has two opposite poles, and the examples of Croesus and Phalaris are chosen to embody the contrast between the blame of savage cruelty and the praise of kind excellence.55 The philophrōn areta of Croesus, a reference to his legendary generosity, is a phatis that doesn’t die, a long-lasting celebration of virtue carried by the words of the logioi and aoidoi and performed in choral songs like the present one, or the sympotic occasion suggested at the end of the ode (97–8). The pious generosity of the eastern king is contrasted to the savagery of the contemporary Sicilian tyrant, as embodied in his own monument of shame, the brazen bull; the poem pits monument against monument. All that is mentioned in the text concerning Croesus is the survival of his kind excellence in the words of men, the fact that his generosity endured far beyond his life to reach later generations. The text’s silence concerning the fall of Croesus from power only strengthens the point, the fact that the fame of Croesus’ virtue has indeed endured, something that procures him true felicity, over and above the catastrophic end of his rule and the mortality shared by all men. Poetry is the necessary vehicle of the tyrant’s dedications in time. The unmentioned fate of Croesus is exactly what makes the poetic voice indispensable to the survival of his noble deeds. Through the memory of the logioi and the aoidoi, the generosity of the Lydian king See Duplouy 1999. Cf. the possibly related ARV 2 571, 74. 54 Pi. P. 1.92–4. 55 Gantz 1974. 53

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is rewarded with the immortality of fame, a condition that allows Pindar to elegantly solve the conundrum of tradition posed by Croesus’ fate in favour of pure exemplarity – one not deprived of some typically Pindaric ominous undertones, of course.56 The achievements of the old eastern king meet those of the new western tyrant at the centre of the Greek world. Hieron, and his brother Gelon before him, had offered lavish gifts to Delphi, extravagant gifts, on a scale only comparable to those offered by Croesus before them, and the association between the dedications of the Mermnads and those of the Deinomenids remained a lieu commun of the sanctuary’s monumental memory.57 The interrelation of piety, memory, wealth and the extremes of fortune embodied by the gifts of Croesus made them particularly potent symbols of theological comparison. The programme of the sanctuary’s dedicatory landscape is mirrored in the Pythian ode by the association of the two rulers; the sacred location is thus uprooted into a movable format that can circulate in space and time and serve as a paradigm for all far and wide. Bacchylides’ response to the challenge of Croesus’ downfall in his third ode takes a slightly different direction, and sheds a direct light on all the implications left in the shadow by Pindar’s silences.58 Written in 468 for Hieron’s chariot-race victory at Olympia, it returns to the story of Croesus in much more detail than Pindar. The heart of the ode’s mythical section is occupied by an extensive narrative of Croesus’ last moments on the pyre, and his dialogue with divinity.59 As in Pindar, the emphasis is placed on making sense of Croesus’ generosity in the larger scheme of things. Charis is the operative word in this section of the poem, the notion that the offering of Croesus establishes a form of exchange between the king and divinity, and that a certain reciprocity can be expected.60 Croesus can See Luraghi 2008–9. 57 Theopomp. 115 F 193 FGrH; cf. Scott 2010: 88–90. 58 Segal 1971 and Kurke 1999: 130–74 offer extensive discussions of the differences between the versions of the tale. 59 Lines 24–62; see further Gagné 2013: 331–5. 60 For the semantic range of early Greek charis see e.g. Scott 1983; McLachlan 1992; Parker 1998; Neri 2009; cf. Cairns 2010: 70–1. 56

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bluntly ask: ‘Where is the charis of the gods?’ ([πο]ῦ θεῶν ἐστι[ν] χάρις;).61 The poem’s answer offers a ready clarification. The fact that the Lydian empire fell and that Croesus’ dynasty was overthrown cannot be questioned. The ode simply removes that fact from the relevant considerations. The reason for this event to happen is firmly established as inevitable, a peprōmena krisis (25–6). There is no question of causality involved, and human cognition is taken out of the equation. The theological opacity of that fated event opens a space for shining light on another aspect of divine action in Croesus’ fall. The exchange of reciprocity takes place on a different level. The gods answer Croesus’ question by their actions, confirming that there is indeed a relation of charis established by his pious gifts. Zeus extinguishes the pyre himself, an act that points to his refusal to accept the sacrifice of the king, and Apollo preserves him, keeps him safe (29: phulax). He will be translated to the blessed realm of the Hyperboreans (58–60) with his wife and daughters – that is, not only is his life saved, and given a hallowed status, but the possibility of his line remains intact. As in Pindar, the consequence of the king’s paradigmatic generosity is framed in terms of posterity. But instead of the fame of men, Bacchylides explores the afterlife of piety. It is eusebeia (61) that is singled out as the cause for his salvation, and the excellence of his gifts to divinity that has brought him to the heights of this lofty paradigmatic status.62 His piety has allowed for the efficiency of his prayer. Behind the appearance of collapse and punishment, the poet brings us to see that the king has in fact been rewarded, that the eusebeia of his gifts was not in vain. The counter-intuitive solution of Bacchylides transforms the challenge of the pious downfall into a lesson for rulers (63–6). Some years later, Herodotus opted for a very different take in his telling of the tale of Croesus. Placing it right at the centre of the programmatic first section of Book 1, he thoroughly Lines 37–40. 62 Lines 61–2; see Lamedica 1987. 61

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reframed it to fit the larger architecture of his vast narrative.63 The fall of the Lydian empire serves as a template for the presentation of many dominant themes in the Histories, and the generosity of Croesus to the gods is located at the heart of the theological apparatus of the whole passage. The place of wealth in the determination of a man’s worth is one of the main objects of Croesus’ exchange with Solon, a lesson of wisdom that is placed in direct dialogue with the pyre scene described by Herodotus (1.29–33 and 86–91).64 One key difference with Bacchylides is the fact that the causality of the kingdom’s fall is described at some length as the outcome of a crime committed by Croesus’ ancestor Gyges, and this very emphatically  – at the beginning of the episode, in ­chapter  13, and again at the end, in c­ hapter  91. A  chain of responsibility is in motion that makes Croesus’ generosity something entirely incompatible with the pious charis of Bacchylides 3.  Simply put, the wealth that he so proudly displays to Solon, and which he uses to enrich the various sanctuaries of the eastern Mediterranean, most notably Delphi, was never his to give in the first place. Croesus has been spending the riches that his ancestors stole (see e.g. Hdt. 1.14: ἔσχον … ἀπελόμενοι). His generosity is an illusion. Even reduced to nothing on the pyre, he utterly fails to understand what Solon had told him, and proceeds to accuse the gods of having deceived him with ingratitude and false promises (1.90). With words reminiscent of Bacchylides 3, in a speech that emphasises the importance of the anathēmata dedicated by him to the sanctuary, he essentially asks the god if it is the custom of the Greek gods to lack charis for their benefactors. Phoebus’ answer (as mediated by the Delphic oracle), Apollo’s justification (1.91), arguably one of the most significant expositions of explicit theology in classical literature, presents Croesus with the blunt truth that there is indeed little possible 63 Notable contributions on the topic include Regenbogen 1930; Miller 1963; Krischer 1964; von Fritz 1967; Stahl 1975; Burkert 1985; Chiasson 1986; Shapiro 1996; Harrison 2000: 31–63; Visser 2000; Schwabl 2004; Pelling 2006; Kindt 2006; Versnel 2011: 179–201, 527–37; Grethlein 2010: 197–203; Hollmann 2011. 64 Gagné 2013: 325–43.

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charis in this relation between divine and mortal.65 The limitations of humanity prevent the type of reciprocity requested by the king. The failed understanding of Croesus illustrates his inability to see what hides in plain sight in the language of the gods. And, more importantly, his desire for something that cannot be offered shows the impossibility of the exchange. The few years of respite accorded to the king out of the goodwill of the god further disculpates divinity. In his further reappearances in Book 1, much later, Croesus shows that he has still understood ­little.66 Saved from the pyre, he is allowed to live a long life as a slave (note doulos, for instance, in 1.89), and to die an obscure death, without success, olbos or descendance – the absolute opposite of the models described by Solon to him in his speech of 1.30–1. The text of Herodotus ends the story of Croesus with an extended review of his offerings throughout Greece in chapter  92. That passage serves as the seal of the entire ­ Croesus narrative, the last occasion to reflect on the meaning of his story. It is no coincidence that Herodotus returns to the anathēmata of the dynast at the close of this section. Its description of the dedications that Croesus has made to sanctuaries at the four corners of the Greek world brings the story that has just been told closer to much of the audience. The main point of the passage is to bring our attention back to the origins of that immense wealth distributed by Croesus to so many gods and cities. As it is presented in the text of Herodotus, the fame of Croesus’ generosity will indeed live on, as Pindar claimed in Pythian 1, and it will continue to feed the words of the logioi and the aoidoi, but with a meaning and a teaching of a much more menacing tone than in any other version. It is integrated into a large edifice of reflections on the relations of human and divine. The text does not simply transmit the perspectives of ‘sources’ or ‘local traditions’, such 65 See Scheid-Tissinier 2000. Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus 3.43.3–4 for a fascinating early Christian misunderstanding of the Herodotean story’s theological implications. 66 Hdt. 1.155–6, 207–8, 211; see Heni 1976: 117–18.

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as the elusive Delphic priests so often mentioned in this regard, but it shapes its own vision of the paradigmatic meaning of Croesus’ generosity. An entirely new programme of theology is inscribed on the tradition with this version of the tale, and it attempts to subsume all other accounts, even if it could never contain them. Conclusion The debates that raged over the meaning of the dedications from the Cypselid and Mermnad dynasties, some of the most famous and noteworthy objects of the Greek world at the time, involved fundamental questions of piety, divine agency, reciprocity, representation, ownership, memory and punishment explored by Greek culture. The unprecedented value of the objects, and the spectacular downfall of the families that had dedicated them to the gods, quickly brought those interrogations in contact with the limits and the contradictions of many dominant theological programmes of Greek culture, and set the stage for the constantly renewed inquiry of the type reviewed above. Such textual portraits of the monuments proposed alternative stances in the ever-open contest for shaping the meaning of central figures in the Greek religious imagination. They were, as such, theological indices, fixed markers of meaning in the constantly shifting mosaic of possible thoughts about the gods. The theological index doesn’t explicitly pursue the detailed ramifications of an issue. It traces a suggestive line of orientation for exploring the implications of a theological stance, and using it to channel further thought. It functions as an invitation for creative interpretation. The spatial configuration of the great common sanctuaries, and the stories attached to the contested monuments of fallen regimes, were matters of wide interest over and beyond the directly concerned parties, and the clashes of interpretation played out in poetry and elsewhere involved the thoughts and reflections of people over the four corners of the Greek world. The echoes of opposed perspectives briefly presented here are of course only tiny 85

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fragments of the immense discursive activity that must have been deployed over these questions, and they are all the more precious as witnesses to what has been lost. Some idea of the stakes that were at play in these lost discussions can be summoned from what we know of the great fire of Delphi in 548/7. The destruction of the god’s sanctuary raised obvious theological questions that continued to be addressed into Late Antiquity.67 The fire devastated the temple of Apollo, as well as the greater part of the rich offerings made by Croesus to the sanctuary. The huge golden lion, emblem of the Mermnad dynasty, the most precious and visible monument of the sanctuary at the time, crashed on its base. The damaged lion lost a good part of its mass, and what was left, although it continued to elicit awe, came to embody the extent of the catastrophe for many decades to come.68 The fire that ravaged Delphi happened almost exactly at the same time as the fall of Croesus and the collapse of the Mermnad dynasty  – possibly within months.69 A  striking coincidence. In opposition to the case of Nineveh, the proud ruins of the great eastern capital, this time, could be figuratively seen at the heart of the Greek world itself. The burned, disfigured lion stood there as a provocation, a trace of the pyre from Sardis. In the oracle about the Delphian fire cited by Porphyry (see n.  67), the same reason offered by the Pythia in Herodotus 1.91 to explain the fall of Sardis is used by the Pythia to make sense of the destruction of Delphi. It is difficult to imagine that the great fire of 548/7 and the fall of Sardis in 547/6 were not placed in relation to each other in the imagination of a large number of people at the time when they happened. See for instance the long disculpatory oracle (PW 470)  cited by Porphyry and Eusebius (PE 6.2.2–6.3.1) and mentioned by Theodoret of Cyrrhus (Affectionum graecarum curatio 10.40). The oracle explains the fire by a reference to the overarching power of Aisa. Parke and Wormell’s dating of that oracle to their ‘Ninth Period’ (30 BCE to the End) seems rather arbitrary. 68 According to Diod. 16.65.6, it was melted down in 347/6; see Scott 2010: 124. 69 The precise date of the great fire (548/7) of Delphi is essentially predicated on the Olympiad and Athenian archon year that are mentioned in Paus. 10.5.13 (cf. Hdt. 1.48; 2.180). Jerome places it in 549/8, while the Armenian text of Eusebius gives the date of 547/6; see still Frazer 1898: 328. For the date of Croesus’ defeat, see Cahill and Kroll 2005; Stronach 2008. 67

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In Herodotus, notably, the prelude to the great offerings of Croesus at Delphi is an immense sacrificial pyre (Hdt. 1.50). The sanctuary that benefited so extravagantly from the Lydian king was devastated by flames at exactly the same time as Sardis was taken. The damage affected his offerings particularly severely. Could it be that the story of Croesus’ pyre was related to this fire somehow in the early transmission of the tale? Or rather, could it be that it wasn’t? The sacrificial libation of Croesus which is being poured down on the rising fire of the pyre in Louvre G 197 suggests the piety of his offerings, while the rich clothes and throne that are to be burned down with the king evoke the destruction of his immense wealth. The wooden logs of the pyre are neatly stacked in transversal rows, just as the famous rows of precious ingots that formed the base of the lion statue and burned down with it. In other words, Delphi is there in the background. One moment can be read through the other. The massive monumental reorganisation of the sanctuary that took place after the fire had all of the Mermnad anathēmata moved away from the central open spaces of the temple terrace, and most of these dedications eventually found themselves housed in the Cypselid monument.70 Even then, the work that saw the temple rebuilt continued to be associated with the figure of Croesus, as reflected in the report of Herodotus 6.125, where we are told that the riches of the Alcmaeonids, who oversaw the reconstruction of the temple, were in fact nothing more than a gift of the Lydian king himself, something that can be seen to echo great controversies.71 What such controversies were, especially the earlier ones, how they changed and adapted to each other, we will never know in any detail, but it would be a mistake to reduce their logic entirely to the more strictly political dimensions, or to the Hdt. 1.14, 50–1; Paus. 9.1.5. Note that the great golden kratēr of Croesus was placed in the treasury of the Clazomenians (Hdt. 1.50) – a city with strong Lydian ties – not the treasury of the Corinthians. 71 Cf. Duplouy 1999; Anderson 2005: 189. See also the story of a possible appropriation of a Croesus dedication by the Alcmaeonids for Sparta echoed in Hdt.1.51 (Prontera 1981); cf. Paus.10.5.13. 70

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fallacies of ‘local tradition’. Through the debates and contestations involved in the open-ended process of monumental reinterpretation that we have briefly reviewed here, we can perceive something of the agonistic dynamics that shaped the theology of offerings.72

This chapter was presented at St Andrews, Liverpool, Cardiff and Cambridge. I  would like to thank Franco Basso, Paul Cartledge, Esther Eidinow, Stephen Halliwell, Fiona Hobden, Richard Hunter, Julia Kindt, Nino Luraghi, Robin Osborne and Lucia Prauscello for their generous comments and criticisms. 72

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CHA PTER 5

H ER ACL IT US ON APOL LO ’ S SIGNS AND HIS OW N Contemplating oracles and philosophical inquiry S HAUL   T O R

This chapter will examine one of Heraclitus’ most arresting theological pronouncements (B93): ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει. The lord whose oracle is the one in Delphi neither says nor conceals but gives a sign.

What kind of theology and theologising are at play in this abstracted and generalised reflection about Delphic Apollo and how does this reflection relate to and engage with the more implicit theological conceptions of Apollo conveyed in the Delphic traditions (as we find them for example in Herodotus)? What exactly is Heraclitus saying about Apollo’s mode of communication and what is he implying thereby about his own? If Heraclitus is appropriating here the theology of Apolline divination as a framework within which to understand his own philosophical inquiry, why does he do so, what is involved in this appropriation and what does Apolline philosophical inquiry look like? Scholarly discussions of B93 share the mostly implicit assumption that what Heraclitus says about Apollo is in itself pretty much clear and unproblematic. Commentators take it that interpretive difficulties and dilemmas arise once we come to ask what, if anything, the comment implies about Heraclitus himself or about anything else. I  will argue that Heraclitus’ comment about Apollo is pointedly difficult and paradoxical, not only in its implicit ramifications, but already on the most rudimentary and literal level of its interpretation. We are meant to be puzzled by what Heraclitus says about Apollo and 89

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it is an interpretive failure on our part if we are not so puzzled. I will suggest that, consequently, Heraclitus’ encapsulation of Apollo’s modus operandi is not an unchallenging assertion of a widely familiar point but, on the most rudimentary level of its interpretation, a case of creative, involved and unobvious theological abstraction. Arguing further that Apollo does indeed serve in B93 as a paradigm of emulation for Heraclitus, I will ask how the paradoxical nature of Heraclitus’ theological remark bears on his understanding of his own use of language (and on other, related aspects of his thought) and examine the motivations, scope and limits of the implicit analogy in B93 between god (Apollo) and mortal (Heraclitus). Apollo’s paradox What I find especially paradoxical and difficult about B93 is its striking statement that the lord in Delphi ‘does not say’ or ‘speak’ (οὔτε λέγει). Does Apollo not say all sorts of things (statements, conditionals, questions, imperatives, interjections, etc.) in his oracles and does he not speak those oracles? Nor is the statement that Apollo does not conceal immediately obvious (would we not have thought that the lord in Delphi does ‘conceal’?), nor does it (together with the affirmation: ‘but gives a sign’) instantly elucidate the first negation. By describing the fragment as ‘paradoxical’ in this way I mean that it frustrates immediate understanding and recognition and appears, prima facie, to collide with what we think we know about Apollo. The statement thus stops us in our tracks and forces us to think through the remark in a way that will ultimately lead to an illuminating insight (or insights), which will account for both our initial assumptions and Heraclitus’ initially puzzling statement, but place both in a new light.1 I draw here on Mackenzie’s analysis of how Heraclitean paradoxes typically work (1988:  3, 16–17, 37; cf. 1986:  549–50); cf. also Warren 2007:  67–70. While some of Heraclitus’ paradoxes pose common or garden observations in such a way as to force one to rethink conventional views (e.g. B60, B61), others, like B93, are disorienting and puzzling already on the most rudimentary and literal level of their interpretation (e.g. B32, B62, B80). 1

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Scholars commonly anticipate the paradoxical force of B93 implicitly, and defuse it in advance, by positing (without argument) various over-translations of Heraclitus’ starkly unqualified λέγει. So, by way of illustration, we read that Apollo does not ‘indicate clearly’,2 ‘clarify’,3 ‘reveal’,4 ‘assert’,5 ‘declare’,6 ‘speak out’,7 etc.8 I can see no good textual or philological reason to suppress what is uncontroversially (I take it), in Archaic Ionic prose as elsewhere, the standard sense of the verb: ‘say’ or ‘speak’. The unqualified verb is ubiquitously used to introduce in a very general way any kind of meaningful, articulate speech (including not only statements but also questions, imperatives, etc.), with no implicit restriction to a particular clear, direct, declarative or outright mode of saying or speaking.9,10 There seem to be two underlying motivations for the common over-translations of λέγει (and, more generally, for the attitude to the fragment which these over-translations reflect). 2 Robinson 1987: 57. 3 Mansfeld and Primavesi 2011: 259. 4 Graham 2010:  177; Kindt 2006:  37. Manetti 1993:  17–18 glosses λέγει as ‘reveal completely’. 5 Warren 2007: 59. 6 Kahn 1979: 43. At 123, Kahn writes that οὔτε λέγει denies ‘direct statement’, implying that Apollo does state indirectly. 7 KRS: 209; Marcovich 2001: 51. 8 Many commentators, of course, translate ‘say’ or ‘speak’, but none, to my knowledge, picks out the paradox I address here. Maurizio 2013: 100 is typical of the prevailing attitude in citing the fragment (she translates ‘declare’) and then proceeding as if the rudimentary and literal sense of Heraclitus’ remark about Apollo is in itself self-evident and requires no explication. 9 Countless passages could of course be cited here. By way of more or less arbitrary illustration, cf. Hdt. 4.126: πέμψας Δαρεῖος ἱππέα … ἔλεγε τάδε· κτλ. Note that Darius, like Apollo (as we shall presently see), ‘says’ things through a go-between and that ἔλεγε introduces in a very broad way questions and imperatives as well as assertions. With the appropriate qualifications, the verb can be used to refer to clear, outright and direct speech (e.g. λέγουσα … σαφῆ λόγον, Aeschyl. Ag. 1047; ἐνταῦθα δὴ σαφῶς ἔλεγεν αὐτοῖς ὅτι κτλ., Thuc. 8.53) or – just as naturally – to an unclear, secretive, indirect or riddling sort of speech (e.g. τάδε μέντοι ὡς κρυπτόμενα λέγεται καὶ οὐ σαφηνέως, Hdt. 1.140; ὡς πάντ’ ἄγαν αἰνικτὰ κἀσαφῆ λέγεις, Soph. OT 439 (Oedipus addressing the seer Teiresias); οὕτως ἀσαφῶς ἑκάστοτε περὶ αὐτῶν λέγει, Pl. Cratyl. 427d7; ἀόριστα καὶ ἀσαφῆ πειρῶνται λέγειν, Aeschin. In Ctesiph. 99.2–3). The unqualified verb indicates very generally the act of making any kind of articulate speech, and does not by itself specify a particular way of saying or speaking something. 10 I will later tentatively suggest that, on a certain level of interpretation, we can relate Heraclitus’ use of λέγει in B93 to his term of art logos, but this will not amount to suppressing or eliminating from the account the standard sense ‘say’ or ‘speak’.

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First, these more qualified translations save Heraclitus from asserting what may appear to be an obvious falsehood. Of course Apollo says things in his oracles, but perhaps he does not say things in a direct, outright or clear way. Second, the over-translations make more obvious Heraclitus’ reference to the interpretive predicament of Apollo’s consultants as we so often find them in the Delphic traditions. Those traditions repeatedly convey the idea that Apollo’s oracles communicate in an ambiguous and often figurative manner rather than directly or clearly and, therefore, demand circumspect and reflective interpretation. Consultants who naively assume a superficial and unreflective interpretation often come to sticky ends and embody a cautionary inversion of the proper way to approach Apollo’s oracles. Most famously, Croesus is told that if he marches he will destroy a great kingdom (Hdt. 1.53) and mistakenly takes it as read that he will destroy the Persians’ kingdom as opposed to his own. Again, Tisamenus is told he ‘will win the five greatest contests’ and mistakenly infers that he will win five athletic competitions rather than five battles (Hdt. 9.33).11 By having Heraclitus say that Apollo does not assert things in a direct, outright and clear way, commentators achieve a more obvious reference to this familiar point.12 To take the second point first: on the analysis of the fragment which I  will defend, Heraclitus will still be drawing on and preserving the core theological insight about Apollo’s mode of communication and the interpretive predicament of his consultants which the Delphic traditions convey. But the 11 Examples can be multiplied. For similar Delphic traditions in Herodotus, cf. e.g. 1.55 (with 1.91), 4.163–4, 5.43–5, 6.76–80, 1.165–7, with Maurizio 2013:  111–13; Hölscher 1974:  229–30; cf. also Manetti 1993:  24–9; Barker 2006; Kindt 2006. Fontenrose portrays the historical Delphic oracle as essentially a Yes/No answering service (1978: esp. 233–5). Parker 2000: 80 with nn.14–15 counters effectively, but we are anyway concerned here to relate B93 to the Delphic traditions (and their implicit theology) themselves; on this point, cf. similarly Maurizio 2013: 107–8. 12 The contrast with οὔτε κρύπτει may be another motivation for the over-translations of οὔτε λέγει. I will argue that there is a perfectly good contrast in B93 between ‘does not say’ and ‘does not conceal’. At any rate, the contrast with οὔτε κρύπτει certainly does not warrant reading a very specific mode of speaking into Heraclitus’ pointedly unqualified οὔτε λέγει in such a way as to deflate in advance the paradoxical force of that striking negation.

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way in which Heraclitus’ abstracted and pithy remark encapsulates Apollo’s modus operandi in response to these traditions is much more subtle and less obvious than the over-translations suggest. We must not be lulled by our familiarity with the Delphic traditions into glossing over the precise and difficult way in which Heraclitus puts his point with an unchallenging expression of what we take to be their familiar moral. With regard to the first point, we should embrace rather than try to suppress the fact that Heraclitus is advancing a pointedly surprising and puzzling assertion – although not, on reflection, a blatant falsehood – when he says that the lord in Delphi ‘does not say’ (or: ‘speak’). References to Apollo elsewhere – notably and significantly in Herodotus13 – regularly identify the god as the speaker of Delphic oracles, nor is any question raised on this score even when the Pythia is expressly specified as the one who voices the oracles.14 At Hdt. 7.141, for example, the Pythia issues the Wooden Walls response (ἡ πρόμαντις χρᾷ), and yet Apollo identifies himself within the oracle as its speaker (τόδ’ αὖτις ἔπος ἐρέω ἀδάμαντι πελάσσας) and it is him that the consultants take themselves to be addressing (ὦναξ).15 This general theological backdrop accentuates the paradoxical and initially puzzling force of Heraclitus’ opening assertion that the lord whose oracle is in Delphi does not ‘say’ or ‘speak’. It might be objected that Apollo clearly gives whatever signs he does (σημαίνει) by saying whatever he says in his oracles. Thus, by the time we get to the fragment’s last word, any For the principle of looking to Herodotus, who offers the earliest available corpus of (Ionic) prose after Heraclitus, as a prime guide for the (especially linguistic) expectations of Heraclitus’ audience, see Kahn 1979: 92; Graham 2003: 175–6. 14 Cf. similarly Mikalson 2003: 55, 210; Hollmann 2011: 98, with n.112. 15 For Apollo identifying himself as speaker of the oracles, cf. e.g. Hdt. 4.157 (n.b. ἐλθόντος – again, a masculine participle), 1.47 (οἶδα δ’ ἐγώ κτλ), 1.65–6 (ἐμόν … νηόν), 5.92ε (ἐμὸν δόμον), 6.19, 4.159 (φαμι), 7.220 (φημι); cf. also PW 374 (ἐρέω), PW 487 (ἐξ ἐμέθεν χρησμὸν θεοῦ, ὅττι κεν εἴπω, cf. Parm. B7.5–6: ἐξ ἐμέθεν ῥηθέντα). For the Pythia and others on Apollo as the speaker, cf. e.g. Hdt. 1.91 (προηγόρευε … εἶπε), 6.80 (φάμενος), 8.36 (φάς), 8.122 (ἔφησε); cf. also Hom. Od. 8.79–80 (χρείων μυθήσατο), Tyrt. fr. 4.1–2 (Φοίβου ἀκούσαντες Πυθωνόθεν οἴκαδ’ ἔνεικαν / μαντείας τε θεοῦ καὶ τελέεντ’ ἔπεα), Pl. Ion 534c7–d4. We also get references to oracles as themselves ‘saying’, e.g. Hdt. 6.77 (λέγον), 5.92β (λέγον); cf. the term λόγιον for ‘oracle’, e.g. Hdt. 1.64, 4.178, 8.62, PW 103. 13

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initial puzzles are dispelled. We are reassured that Apollo does indeed speak and say things. Now, the suggestion that the lord at Delphi gives his signs or his signals (σημαίνει) by saying what he says in his oracles is itself highly likely.16 Far from dispelling the paradox, however, this line of thought deepens it. If σημαίνει indicates in this way that Apollo does say things in his oracles, what does Heraclitus mean by also asserting that Apollo ‘does not say’? What are we to make of Heraclitus’ remark? Could the point be that it is the Pythia rather than Apollo who actually says things in the oracles? It is possible, although not clear, that Plutarch read οὔτε λέγει in this way.17 At any rate, such an interpretation would be untenable. First, B93 is focused throughout on ‘the lord whose oracle is the one in Delphi’ as the subject of the verbs and as a communicative agent. There is no suggestion in the verbs of a division of labour between Apollo and the Pythia. Second, Apollo gives us signs which demand interpretation because he refrains from doing whatever it is from which he refrains by neither saying nor concealing. But, on the proposed interpretation, the Pythia does what Apollo Cf. e.g. Hdt. 7.142 where Apollo is taken to have given a sign gesturing towards the Athenian ships (ἔλεγον τὰς νέας σημαίνειν τὸν θεόν) obviously by saying in his oracle what he said about the wooden wall. Cf. Powell, s.v. σημαίνω (6) for further passages in which the signalling or indicating of something (e.g. a historical cause (1.75) or a person (1.5)) is achieved through the use of words. Of course, non-verbal omens can equally ‘signal’, see e.g. Hdt. 1.78, 9.120. (In none of these passages is there any indication that the verb itself carries the force ‘mean’ in the sense of a word’s or phrase’s semantic meaning. Contrast the later semantic use e.g. in Pl. Cratyl. 393a6 (ὁ γὰρ ‘ἄναξ’ καὶ ὁ ‘ἕκτωρ’ σχεδόν τι ταὐτὸν σημαίνει); cf. further LSJ s.v. σημαίνω III.3.) 17 So Fontenrose (1978:  238), who advances this as the correct interpretation of Heraclitus. After citing the fragment (with which he expects familiarity: οἶμαι δὲ σε γιγνώσκειν κτλ, Mor. 404d8), Plutarch comments:  ‘add to these words, which are well said, and think of the god of this place as using the Pythia for our hearing just as the sun uses the moon for our seeing’ (404e1–3). On Fontenrose’s reading, the further point which Plutarch adds is not that Apollo speaks to us through the Pythia (he has, ex hypothesi, already read that into Heraclitus’ οὔτε λέγει), but only the comparison with the sun’s diluting use of the moon. Alternatively, however, it may be that Plutarch’s added point is that Apollo speaks to us through the diluting medium of the Pythia (like the sun’s use of the moon), and that what he extracts from Heraclitus is the distinct (but congruent) point that Apollo withholds something in his oracles, leaving us with signs which somehow fall short of a full communication, in keeping with the general thrust of this passage in Plutarch that what we mortals get from Apollo is something less than the full force of his thought. 16

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refrains from doing (λέγει), with the implausible consequence that we do get what Apollo himself will not give us (οὔτε λέγει) and that, therefore, careful and circumspect interpretation of his difficult signs is not, after all, necessary. We cannot, then, explain οὔτε λέγει by postulating an implicit contrast between Apollo’s role and the Pythia’s role. I suggest that Heraclitus’ paradox points in another direction. Heraclitus highlights the three verbs, λέγει, κρύπτει and σημαίνει, but pointedly and tantalisingly refrains from specifying what they are directed towards in this connection. He begins by asserting that Apollo ‘does not say’ just after establishing and emphasising a context (‘the lord whose oracle is the one in Delphi’), which invites the initial reaction that surely there are some things which the god does say (i.e. the Delphic oracles themselves). In this way, Heraclitus impels us towards raising and reflecting on the following question: what is it that the lord whose oracle is in Delphi does not say (λέγει) or conceal (κρύπτει) but for which he does give a sign or (to convey the structural equivalence of the Greek verbs) which he does ‘signal’ (σημαίνει)? With regard to any Delphic oracle, there will be certain insights – a certain understanding, certain true propositions and useful injunctions – which the inquirer requires and at which the oracle places him in a position to arrive (say, the insight that, if we attack the Persians, we will destroy our own great kingdom, or at least the recognition that this is a very possible outcome). Heraclitus maintains that Apollo does not articulate or express those sought after insights. Nor, however, does he conceal them. Instead, Apollo articulates and expresses other things (other statements, conditionals, questions, imperatives, interjections, riddling images, etc.; say, the conditional that, if we attack the Persians, we will destroy a great kingdom). And these other things, which Apollo does say, will guide the cautious and attuned inquirer and place him in a position to arrive at those insights which he requires and which Apollo leaves categorically unspoken and unarticulated. It is in this sense that Apollo’s oracles act as signs for or ‘signal’ or ‘show’ (σημαίνει) what we require from the oracle. And, equally, it is in this sense that 95

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we could say that what Apollo does is a way of communicating those insights. But Apollo’s mode of communication is precisely not (οὔτε λέγει) a way of saying (speaking, expressing, articulating) those insights. It is important to be clear on this point: B93 does not tell us that Apollo says in an indirect and obscure manner that which he signals. Rather, B93 tells us that Apollo does not say (indirectly, ambiguously, obscurely or otherwise: οὔτε λέγει) that which he signals (ἀλλὰ σημαίνει). The force of σημαίνει in B93 is conditioned by its contrast with the verbs λέγει and κρύπτει. Apollo neither says nor conceals but, instead, signals. The term σημαίνει, then, indicates in the context of this configuration a different kind of communication:  a communication which does not involve or overlap with saying or speaking that which is being communicated. On Heraclitus’ analysis, in sum, what Apollo tells you is not, in fact, the true answer to the inquiry which you put to the oracle. In speaking the oracle, Apollo tells you something else which, however, gestures towards that answer, serving as an orienting but also difficult and a­ mbiguous18 starting point from which the mortal interpreter will then succeed or fail to arrive at the understanding he requires. Part of my suggestion is that the force of the negations οὔτε λέγει and οὔτε κρύπτει is context-sensitive; it is determined and restricted by their contrast with the affirmation: ἀλλὰ σημαίνει. Apollo neither says nor conceals precisely that for which he gives a sign. How might we make some sense (and, indeed, this question arises on any reading of οὔτε λέγει) of Heraclitus’ far from obvious affirmation that the lord in Delphi ‘does not conceal’? In Herodotus, κρύπτειν typically has the sense of taking deliberate action to keep something from view so as to prevent others from becoming aware of it, and it is this same sense of κρύπτειν in the active voice that we seem to get in Heraclitus By describing the oracle as ‘ambiguous’ here, I do not mean that it articulates or expresses the answer ambiguously. On Heraclitus’ account, the oracle (e.g. Croesus’ oracle) will be ambiguous in the sense that, by using it as a starting point for reflection, one could reasonably arrive at multiple and even competing conclusions (competing answers), none of which are themselves articulated in the oracle (ambiguously or otherwise: οὔτε λέγει). 18

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B95:  ἀμαθίην κρύπτειν ἄμεινον.19 In Herodotus, the object of concealment can be anything from a material thing (e.g. spoils from a battle, Hdt. 9.80; cf. 3.87, 3.133, 4.179) to an event or state of affairs. Cambyses and Prexaspes use the term to refer to their prolonged cover-up of the fact (πρῆγμα, 3.65) of Smerdis’ murder (3.65; 3.75). At one point, Prexaspes contrasts ‘concealing’ this affair with ‘saying what happened’ (κρύπτειν … λέγειν τὰ γενόμενα, 3.75). With this particular opposition, Prexaspes contrasts the idea of preventing others from becoming aware of the fact of Smerdis’ murder (κρύπτειν) with the idea of speaking and expressing this fact (λέγειν), not with the stronger and more qualified idea of speaking it in a direct or unambiguous manner.20 Heraclitus’ negations in B93 are, I  suggest, best understood along not dissimilar lines. Apollo does not articulate or express in his oracles the insights and answers for which the consultants asked so as to make them instantly and easily available to them. Nor, however, does Apollo take positive and deliberate action in his oracles to ensure that the inquirers fail to become aware of those insights and answers. Rather, Apollo does something which falls in between those two actions. He articulates the oracles, which act as signs for those insights and answers in the sense discussed above. The statement that Apollo does not conceal is, again, tied to and restricted by the statements which flank it: the thrust of B93 is that Apollo neither speaks nor conceals that which he signals. I argued that Heraclitus’ remark about Apollo is puzzling and difficult on the most rudimentary level of its interpretation. By the same token, B93 does not simply state a principle that was already obvious if implicit in the traditions surrounding Delphic Apollo. Heraclitus’ remark comprises a creative and challenging theological encapsulation of Apollo’s modus operandi, which, nonetheless, preserves and appropriates the I non-committally follow Robinson’s reconstruction of the original word order (1987: 56). 20 Herodotus in this passage and Heraclitus in B93 certainly could have contrasted ‘concealing’ with ‘saying clearly’ (using σαφηνέως, vel sim.), but, as it is, these two texts confront us with contrasts between κρύπτειν and a stark and unqualified λέγειν. Cf. n. 9 above. 19

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broad theological insight which the Delphic traditions implicitly convey concerning the interpretive predicament in which Apollo places his consultants. On Heraclitus’ analysis, Apollo does not in any manner articulate (οὔτε λέγει) that for which he, instead, gives a guiding but difficult and ambiguous sign. That is, the god does not speak those answers and insights for which the consultant asked and which he requires. This theological construal of Delphic Apollo is ingenious and far from obvious. A different observer of the same Delphic traditions could have plausibly arrived at the simpler conclusion (and, indeed, this is what the over-translations of Heraclitus’ stark and unqualified οὔτε λέγει are getting at) that the lord in Delphi does say that which he signals, only he says it in an indirect and equivocal manner. Did Apollo say to Croesus that, if he attacks the Persians, he will destroy his own great kingdom? Or, again, did he say to Arcesilaus that he must not burn the Cyrenaeans who fled to Aglomachus’ tower (see Hdt. 4.163–4)? On Heraclitus’ construal, the answer is ‘no’. In saying to Croesus that, if he attacks, he will destroy a great kingdom, Apollo was saying nothing more or less than just that:  if Croesus marches, he will destroy a great kingdom. Again, in issuing to Arcesilaus the puzzling injunction that, if he finds an oven full of jars, he should not bake the jars, what Apollo can be said to have told Arcesilaus on this point includes nothing more or less than this puzzling expression itself. Nonetheless, Apollo did signal those points which he left unsaid. These statements did, respectively, put Croesus in a position to attain the insight that he will be destroying his own kingdom (or, minimally, that this was a very possible outcome) and Arcesilaus in a position to recognise that he must not burn the Cyrenaeans in the tower. But a competing account of the selfsame oracles could be that Apollo did indeed tell Croesus  – albeit very equivocally  – that he will destroy his own kingdom and that he did indeed say to Arcesilaus  – albeit very obscurely or figuratively  – that he must not burn the Cyrenaeans in the tower. Indeed, this is the conception of Apollo’s oracles which the Pythia in Herodotus suggests when she rebukes a disgruntled Croesus for failing 98

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to ask which kingdom Apollo was in fact talking about in his oracle (χρῆν … ἐπειρέσθαι … κότερα τὴν ἑωυτοῦ ἢ τὴν Κύρου λέγοι ἀρχήν, 1.91).21 And this is the unsophisticated construal of Apollo which Heraclitus rejects when he strikingly and strangely affirms that the god does not say – or conceal – but, instead, gives a sign. Fittingly, Heraclitus’ remark about Apollo is, on its most literal level, not as easy to decipher as it might seem to a reader who glossed over its precise wording and assumed that he was already familiar with the point to which it was alluding. Heraclitus’ encapsulation of Apollo’s mode of communication impels the reader who is attuned to its very deliberate and difficult formulation to theologise: to ask how we might gain some understanding by reflecting on the initially puzzling assertion that the lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither says nor conceals but, instead, gives a sign. Heraclitus’ paradox Does the god Apollo present a paradigm of emulation for the mortal Heraclitus? If so, what is Apolline philosophical inquiry like? How might we understand the parallel sense in which Heraclitus neither says nor conceals but gives a sign? We could only avoid the implication that B93 generates a parallel paradox in the case of Heraclitus (does he not ‘say’ things?) if we denied that Apollo’s use of language is in fact a model for Heraclitus’ own.22 But that way out would be 21 Cf. also Hdt. 3.64 (τὸ δὲ χρηστήριον … ἔλεγε ἄρα). Similarly, Pausanias writes regarding Epaminondas (who was warned to beware πέλαγος and died in a wood called Pelagos): ‘but what the god said to him in advance (προέλεγεν) was the wood Pelagos and not the sea’, Paus. 8.11.10 = PW 258. The point will not be affected if we translate λέγοι in Hdt. 1.91 with ‘meant’. Herodotus will still be using the same verb for ‘mean’ which covers the sense ‘say’ or ‘tell’. That is, Herodotus’ point will be, not that this is what Apollo gestured and oriented Croesus towards by telling him something else in the oracle, but precisely that this is in fact what Apollo actually told Croesus in the oracle, that this is what the god actually said (λέγοι). Heraclitus, by contrast, drives a wedge between what the god says in the oracle and what he gestures and orients his consultant towards by saying whatever he does say in it. 22 Such denials are rare but not non-existent: Barnes 1983: 101; Dilcher 1995: 151.

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implausible. Heraclitus’ style and the challenges it generates for active, reflective and careful interpretation – his authorial rhetoric and pronounced use of dense and pregnant paradoxes, word plays, analogies, riddles and aphorisms – closely recall Apollo’s oracles.23 Lucian taps into long-standing perceptions of Heraclitus ‘the riddler’ (Timon apud D.L. 9.6) and ‘the dark’ (Strab. 14.25, Cic. de fin. 2.15) when he has his prospective buyer of philosophical lives exclaim to Heraclitus:  ‘Hey, are you telling riddles or putting together puzzles? You’re just like Loxias, you make nothing clear’ (vit. auct. 14.21–2).24 The interpretive predicament of those facing Heraclitus’ deliberately crafted remarks fits closely the interpretive predicament which he himself diagnoses in B93 for those who must reflect on Apollo’s difficult signs. Heraclitus’ sayings offer orienting but difficult starting points and points of reference from which, and between which, the capable reader must think critically and independently. In the opening to his book,25 Heraclitus emphasises that people ever fail to comprehend his account (ἀξύνετοι, B1). The trope of misinterpretation and mistaken inferences is of course central in the Delphic traditions. How might Heraclitus understand his own use of language on the model of Apollo’s? In the light of our analysis of B93, the fragment again impels us to raise and reflect on the question: what is this string of verbs directed towards? What is it which Heraclitus neither says (οὔτε λέγει) nor conceals (οὔτε κρύπτει) but for which he, instead, gives a sign (ἀλλὰ σημαίνει)? B93, again, does not tell us that Heraclitus articulates and expresses in an indirect and obscure way that which he signals. Rather, it tells us that Heraclitus does not articulate or express (indirectly, obscurely or otherwise:  οὔτε λέγει) that which he signals. And, again, while there is, trivially, an endless amount See Maurizio 2013 for an interesting examination of stylistic and compositional affinities between Heraclitus and Delphic oracles, especially as given in Herodotus; cf. Hölscher 1974: 229–31; Nightingale 2007: 184; Warren 2007: 59. 24 See further Guthrie 1962: 411–12 for ancient references to Heraclitus’ obscurity. 25 The book most plausibly comprised a collection of brief, self-standing entries (probably significantly ordered), see Granger 2004; cf. Kahn 1979: 7; Warren 2007: 58–9. 23

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of things which are not said by Heraclitus in the fragments (or by Apollo in his oracles), what is at issue here is a particular subset of the things which Heraclitus does not say: those things which Heraclitus does not say (or conceal) in the fragments and for which he offers signs by saying what he does say. My suggestion is that what Heraclitus does not say in the fragments, according to B93, is what he himself labels the ‘hidden nature’ or the ‘unseen attunement’ of things: ‘nature likes to hide’ (φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ, B123); ‘the unseen attunement is better than the evident one’ (ἁρμονίη ἀφανὴς φανερῆς κρείττων, B54). In B93, Heraclitus recognises that he does not actually articulate or express in the fragments the hidden nature and unseen attunement of things so as to make them instantly and easily available to us (οὔτε λέγει).26 Nor (οὔτε κρύπτει) does Heraclitus take positive and deliberate action to ensure that we fail to grasp them (even though nature itself does have a proclivity to elude and frustrate recognition and comprehension:  κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ, B123). Rather (ἀλλὰ σημαίνει), by confronting us with his words, Heraclitus guides and places the attuned inquirer in a position to arrive at insights into the measures and structures of balance and unity which underlie and frame the phenomena we encounter. But these measures and structures are themselves left unspoken in his words. Heraclitus’ practice in the fragments indeed seems to conform to the programmatic comment made in B93, understood along these lines. By way of illustration, Heraclitus does not proffer an account which itself articulates the nature of the relations between pairs of opposites. But his observation (B61) that the same thing, seawater, is both the purest water (for fish) and the foulest water (for humans) places us in a position to gain some insight into the hidden relations of unity and the unseen attunement which obtain between what we previously took to Heraclitus, that is, does not ‘express’ the hidden nature if that means uttering words which in any way (indirectly or otherwise) capture or represent the hidden nature as part of their semantic force. Heraclitus’ words, rather, capture or represent something else, which, however, places the listener or reader in a position to acquire insights into the hidden nature and an understanding of it, in the manner of signs as discussed above. 26

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be the isolated and disjointed opposites of purity and impurity but which, in fact, jointly inhere at once in one and the same thing. Again, Heraclitus’ statement that fire and all things are exchangeable in the way that money and goods are exchangeable (B90) impels us to reflect, and (along with Heraclitus’ other remarks concerning the physical elements) guides and orients our reflections, about the structure of relations between the elements and fire’s special place in that structure. But this exercising analogy does not itself articulate those relations or that special place. It leaves those things unsaid. On the model of B93, Heraclitus’ remarks can have the status of second-order statements of certain principles about the underlying realities, and they can express observations about phenomena in a way that facilitates and guides reflection about the underlying realities, but they do not themselves articulate or express the nature of those realities for which they, instead, give signs.27 An important consequence of this interpretation of Heraclitus’ appropriation of Apollo’s mode of communication is an interesting attitude on his part to the relation between the language he uses and the underlying realities which are the focus of his philosophical reflections. Heraclitus does not actually articulate or express those underlying measures and structures of balance and unity for which he gives signs. In this sense, there is a certain gap, which B93 recognises, between Heraclitus’ words and those underlying realities.28 27 The rubrics of the hidden nature and unseen attunement will extend over what we might distinguish as the different (ontological, cosmological, theological, psychological, etc.) aspects of Heraclitus’ philosophical investigations. It is in giving his signs along the lines understood here that I take Heraclitus to be fulfilling his promise to ‘indicate’ or ‘show’ how each thing is (φράζων ὅκως ἔχει, B1). To take this promise to mean that Heraclitus will tell us or articulate or state how each thing is – hardly an obvious implication of φράζων – will conflict not only with B93 (οὔτε λέγει) but, more importantly, with what we actually get in the fragments. See further Svenbro 1988: 20–2 for a general discussion of the verb φράζειν. Svenbro (not discussing Heraclitus) shows that the fundamental sense of the verb is ‘show’ or ‘indicate’, rather than ‘say’, and that it is very close to, and can naturally be used as a functional equivalent for, σημαίνειν and δηλοῦν. See e.g. Hom. Od. 19.250, 23.206, 24.346; by contrast with saying something: Aesch. Ag. 1061; Hdt. 4.113 (ἔφραζε … σημαίνουσα); of course, things can be ‘indicated’ or ‘shown’ through the medium of speech or writing, e.g. Eur. IT 761–3. 28 Maurizio interestingly suggests that Heraclitus was inspired by the representations of equivocal language and its misinterpretation which he encountered in the

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Heraclitus’ attitude to names offers an instructive parallel. For Heraclitus, names are significant. If properly interpreted, they yield an insight into the natures of their referents. It also seems, however, that names are always deficient:  they never properly manage to express the unified natures of the things they name.29 ‘The name of the bow is life (βίος), but its work is death’ (B48). The bow’s name itself discloses an affinity with life but fails to articulate the unified and complex nature of its referent. It is only by considering both the bow’s name and its function that we can appreciate holistically the interrelation of life and death in it. Again, the one wise thing ‘both wants and does not want to be called by the name of “Zeus” ’ (λέγεσθαι … Ζηνὸς ὄνομα, B32). I  cannot explore here the possible reasons for this inclination and disinclination,30 but the same principle recurs:  the name ‘Zeus’ yields an insight into some aspects of its referent but does not comprise an adequate articulation of its unified and complex nature. B67 appears to identify ‘the god’ (ὁ θεός) with a series of opposites (day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger). The fragment continues:  ‘it alters as when mixed with perfumes it gets named according to the pleasure of each one’ (ὀνομάζεται καθ’ ἡδονὴν ἑκάστου).31 These different antithetical designations do circumscribe partial aspects of the divine, which come to light in its continuous permutations. But they do not even jointly exhaust the nature of divinity. Nor, it seems, could any name express that nature.32 Delphic traditions to reflect himself on ‘how words might or might not correspond to the world, and how language in its polyvalence might occlude the divine and hidden structure of the world’ (2013: 117–18, 114–15). Maurizio’s suggestion coheres nicely with my own interpretations but proceeds along entirely different lines. Maurizio does not offer an analysis of the language and specifics of B93 itself: she cites the fragment (100) and proceeds on the assumption that the rudimentary sense of Heraclitus’ remark about Apollo is itself self-evident and requires no further discussion (cf. n. 8 above). Beyond the remarks cited here, moreover, Maurizio does not explicate in further detail precisely how she construes Heraclitus’ conception of the relation between language and reality. 29 I follow Kirk 1962: 116–22 on both points. 30 For one thing, the name again captures the referent’s affinity with life (ζῆν) but neglects the concomitant opposite death, cf. Kahn 1979: 270–1. 31 Kahn 1979: 276–80 argues convincingly against inserting πῦρ (or some other noun) after ὅκωσπερ. Anyway, with the supplement, the point about naming (ὀνομάζεται κτλ) would still bear also on ‘the god’. 32 On this point in B67, cf. similarly Dilcher 1995: 124–5.

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Heraclitus’ attitude to names suggests a similar sort of gap. The names of things, somewhat reminiscently of the language which makes up Heraclitus’ fragments, will, if properly interpreted, help us to acquire insights into certain realities, but they do not themselves articulate or capture the complex, unified and whole natures of those realities.33 Heraclitus’ approach to sensory experiences offers a further instructively comparable gap. Indeed, scholars have not implausibly found in B93 an implicit programmatic remark about our encounters, not only with Heraclitus’ text, but also with the perceptible world around us.34 We saw that Heraclitus speaks of a hidden nature (B123) and an unseen as opposed to perceptible attunement (ἀφανὴς φανερῆς κρείττων, B54).35 Nonetheless, our sensory experiences, if properly interpreted, do yield insights into those underlying realities:  ‘All those things of which there is sight, hearing, learning from experience:  these I  prefer’ (B55). Again, Heraclitus’ statement that ‘Eyes and ears are poor witnesses for men if they have barbarian souls’ (B107) implies that these organs are not poor witnesses for those possessed of the right kind of souls.36 Scholars have long observed that the term ‘barbarian’ conceptualises the failure to make proper use of the evidence given in what one sees and hears as the failure to understand a language.37 33 On Heraclitus’ attitude to names – in particular to the naming of gods – see further Rowett 2013: 180–7. Rowett (184) notes that, in B93, Heraclitus fixes the reference to Apollo through a description of his status and the location of his oracle rather than through the use of his name (Socrates does something similar at Pl. Apol. 20e7–8 as well as Xen. Mem. 4.3.16), and interestingly relates this feature of the fragment to what she identifies as a general religious worry in Heraclitus and elsewhere about calling or failing to call the gods by the right names. Indeed, we may relate it particularly to the questions which, as we saw just now, Heraclitus seems to raise concerning the very capacity of the divine names we use (B32, B67) to do justice to the nature of what they name and not to fragment divinity in very partial ways (a similar concern may be involved in Heraclitus’ assertion in B15 that what we call ‘Hades’ and ‘Dionysus’ are, in fact, one and the same); on this point, cf. Rowett 2013: 187. 34 Esp. Hölscher 1974: 231–4, cf. e.g. Curd 1991: 541. 35 In this respect, Kahn 1979: 107 seems wrong to speak of our ‘direct experience of the nature of things’. Our direct experiences are of perceptible things, which are related to the unseen attunement and hidden nature which underlie them in the manner of signs. 36 Sensory experiences thus appear to be necessary but insufficient for understanding, Kahn 1979: 106; Hussey 1982: 34; Graham 2008: 177; cf. B40. 37 E.g. Hussey 1982: 34; Graham 2008: 177.

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Perceptible phenomena comprise a kind of language, which the mortal interpreter can succeed or fail to comprehend and from which he can succeed or fail to gain understanding. But (as with names) there is a gap between our sensory experiences and those hidden and unseen realities for which they serve as signs. Perceptible phenomena do not themselves display (or articulate) those realities, which remain unseen and never immediately available. Nonetheless, by intelligently reflecting on our sensory experience as signs for those underlying realities, we are able to gain some insight into them. The Apolline Heraclitus who has emerged so far is conscious of a gap between the language he uses and the hidden and unseen realities for which this language gives signs but which, importantly, it does not articulate. This conscious attitude conforms to Heraclitus’ actual practice in the fragments and is reminiscent of his attitude to the status and heuristic value of names and sensory experiences. Now, to an extent, these conclusions run counter to the standard approach which emphasises that, for Heraclitus, there is a correspondence, structural similarity, equivalence or even identity between language and reality.38 Mourelatos argues powerfully that Heraclitus takes pioneering strides towards a view of reality as not a mere aggregate of things which alternately gain and cede territory but a coherent, harmonious and intelligible system of relations which, as such, shares some of the features of intelligent discourse.39 It is important, and no accident, that Heraclitus uses the one term logos to refer both to his words and to the underlying measures and structures of balance, proportion, order and unity inherent in things (that is, to the ‘hidden nature’ and ‘unseen attunement’ themselves).40 38 E.g. Hölscher 1974:  234, 238; Mourelatos 2008:  322–3 with n.63; Emlyn-Jones 1976: 97–8, 101; Mackenzie 1988: 18; Graham 2008: 177, 183; Long 2009: 108–9; Hülsz 2013: 292. Rankin 1994 rejects the view that Heraclitus takes his language to mimic or mirror or somehow match reality, ‘which he intuited as effectively indescribable in natural language’ (78). He still seems to hold, though, that Heraclitus’ words strive to ‘represent’ reality, but not pictorially or in any kind of straightforward or direct way (71, 74, 77). 39 Mourelatos 2008: 317–24. 40 I take this point (which is not required for my central arguments in this chapter) for granted here. See Long 2009 for an excellent treatment of Heraclitus’ logos; see also

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My arguments here are entirely compatible with Heraclitus’ marked dual use of logos and with Mourelatos’ contention. They require us to qualify rather than discard the view that Heraclitus perceives a kind of affinity between language and reality. Heraclitus’ Apolline attitude to the relation between his language and the unseen realities is, I  suggest, more nuanced and complex than the traditional unqualified and one-sided emphasis on this affinity will allow. Both Heraclitus’ language and the realities which are the focus of his philosophical reflections comprise coherent, harmonious and intelligible systems of relations. This affinity is pointedly highlighted by Heraclitus’ dual use of logos. Heraclitus’ deliberate style and the interpretive challenges it generates, moreover, are an important part of what makes engaging with his sayings an invaluable preparatory exercise for becoming attuned to the cosmic logos. By engaging with Heraclitus’ dense and many-layered sayings, we prepare ourselves for engaging with our perceptual experiences of things, not superficially or at face value, but as signs for something else; we thus acquire the ability to become aware of, and attuned to, the unseen structures of unity and order which underlie our perceptual experiences but are not displayed in them.41 At the same time, however, Heraclitus does not naively imagine that the language he uses (his logos, his sayings) itself formulates, or somehow coincides or is identical with, those unseen structures of reality (the cosmic logos). He recognises – quite correctly – that his sayings do not actually put into words the nature of those unseen realities but, instead, give signs for them. Heraclitus is also keenly aware of the distinction and, Hülsz 2013; cf. Kahn e.g. on B1 (1979: 97–8) and B45 (128–30); Hussey 1982: 56–7; Mourelatos 2008: 322; Nightingale 2007: 185; Warren 2007: 61–2. Some scholars argue that there is no warrant for taking Heraclitus’ logos to refer to any sort of cosmic principle or indeed to anything beyond his own account or discourse, see e.g. Sedley 1992: 32 with n.28; Sedley 2007: 226, n.49. I cannot properly address this question here. It seems difficult to square the minimalist interpretation with the assertion in B2 that the logos is ‘common’ and with the indication in B1 that the logos is or holds good forever (ἐόντος ἀεί) and that people ever fail (and so could, in principle, avoid failing) to understand it (ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι) both before hearing and once they had heard; cf. also the soul’s ‘deep logos’ in B45. 41 For the idea that Heraclitus’ sayings serve as preparatory exercises for engaging properly with sensory experiences, see esp. Graham 2008: 177–81.

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indeed, the gap (somewhat reminiscent of the gap between human names and the natures of their referents) between that logos which is his words and the cosmic logos which is the unseen measures and structures of unity and attunement inherent in things. Heraclitus’ injunction: ‘Listening not to me but to the logos, it is wise to agree (ὁμολογεῖν) that all things are one’ (B50) calls attention to, among other things, this very distinction and gap. Listening to what Heraclitus says is not our ultimate goal. It is an exercise designed to render us attuned to another kind of logos, which Heraclitus’ own logos does not itself articulate. It is to be attuned to and in harmony with this other logos (ὁμολογεῖν) in how we think and act and in what we say (and refrain from trying to say: οὔτε λέγει) that is our ultimate goal.42 As a final note, I tentatively suggest – although I would not press this suggestion – that, on a deeper level of interpretation, we may find in Heraclitus’ οὔτε λέγει a nod to logos (a term of art for Heraclitus). By affirming that he does not λέγει – does not produce a logos – Heraclitus may be acknowledging that, while his ‘signs’ of course amount to a logos (his logos, his sayings), he does not articulate, and his signs are not equivalent to, that logos which inheres in things themselves and which is the ultimate object of our interest. In that sense, Heraclitus indeed does not issue a logos. Elsewhere too Heraclitus arguably uses the verb in a way that evokes logos as a term of art.43 Furthermore, the upshot that, in different senses, Heraclitus both does and does not issue a logos (that his logos is at the same time not a logos) would correspond to similar thought patterns elsewhere in the fragments.44 Apolline and Heraclitean signs: the analogy and its limits What we found in B93 can be described as a distinctive and idiosyncratic kind of imitatio dei. Heraclitus’ creative and involved I return to B50 below. 43 B32 (λέγεσθαι … ὄνομα), B114 (ξὺν νόῳ λέγοντας κτλ), with Kahn 1979: 269–70, 117. 44 B10 (συλλάψιες· ὅλα καὶ οὐχ ὅλα, κτλ), B32 (οὐκ ἐθέλει καὶ ἐθέλει), B61 (καθαρώτατον καὶ μιαρώτατον), B125 (ἴσταται κινούμενος, following Mackenzie 1986). 42

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theological reflection about Apollo and his use of language served for him as a framework within which to think about his own use of language and the nature of his inquiry. What does Apolline philosophical inquiry look like? Heraclitus, we saw, ascribed to Apollo, and adopted from him, a mode of communication in which the most important things – the insights and answers we are really after – are the ones that get left unsaid. Heraclitus’ very appeal to Apollo as a paradigm of emulation, however, raises the question: what are the scope and limits of the implicit analogy in B93 between man and god? To what extent does Heraclitus place himself in relation to his audience in the same position which Apollo occupies in relation to his? In what ways does the business of giving and receiving signs differ in the two cases? Apollo could say what he does not say. He decided to tell Croesus what he did tell him and not to tell him that, if he attacks, he will destroy his own great kingdom. This decision puts mortals in their place. It reflects and, to an extent, determines the mortal condition and the power relations which frame the interactions between gods and men.45 In Hesiod’s Theogony, Zeus, after his victory over Kronos, takes the stone, which Rhea had passed off to Kronos as the new-born Zeus and which led to Kronos’ downfall and to Zeus’ ascension (485–91), and fixes it under Parnassus, in ‘sacred Pytho’:  ‘to be a sign (σῆμα) thereafter, a marvel (θαῦμα) for mortal human beings’ (498–500). The choice of Delphi can hardly be ­accidental.46 Zeus presents to mortal men the stone  – the instrument and symbol of divine deception, itself a verisimilitudinous but specious counterfeit which was passed off as the genuine article (cf. Th. 27–8) – as the emblem of his new cosmic rule and the epitome of the dynamic which governs the communication between mortal and divine. Heraclitus need not be implying every aspect of this theological tradition, but he does draw on it. Apollo’s decision to give signs instead of 45 Merlan 1949: 429 took the key point of B93 to be the expression of a hierarchical relationship which involves ambiguity on the part of gods and risk on the part of mortals. 46 For ‘sacred Pytho’ and Apolline divination, cf. Hom. Od. 8.79–81, h.Hom. 24.1–2; with West 1966: 303.

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saying or concealing is part of what determines his place as a god and the place of those who consult him as mortals. We need not deny altogether that, through the implicit analogy with Apollo, Heraclitus situates himself in a related position of superiority over his audience. Heraclitus issues signs, we struggle with them.47 But could Heraclitus have said what he does not say? We may distinguish two possible responses here. On one view (call it the ‘pedagogical’ interpretation), Heraclitus decides not to articulate the hidden nature and unseen attunement because he holds that proper understanding and philosophical enlightenment should involve us in an active effort of circumspect and creative reflection, for which his remarks should offer only orienting and framing starting points and points of reference.48 On the other view (say, the ‘ontological’ interpretation), Heraclitus takes it that our language is inherently incapable of articulating or expressing the hidden nature and unseen attunement. On this view too, Heraclitus still holds that philosophical enlightenment demands an active effort of circumspect and creative reflection for which his remarks offer only signs. But now this pedagogical stance stems in the first instance from a certain conception of the nature of reality and from the subsequent view that it would not be possible to put into words the hidden nature and unseen attunement. Nothing in the fragments excludes either view. Heraclitus’ reflections, though, on the gap between our experiences and words on the one hand, and the hidden and unseen realities on the other (as discussed above), incline me towards the ontological interpretation. It seemed to be an inherent and irremediable limitation of our language, that the names which we use cannot express the unified natures of their referents, and of our perceptual experiences, that they do not themselves display the hidden and unseen realities which underlie them. After the event, it is often easy to say what it was that Apollo refrained from saying in his 47 Maurizio 2013: 116–17 detects similarities in the rhetorical ways in which Heraclitus in the fragments and Apollo in Delphic oracles construct their authority by disdainfully contrasting their own knowledge with their audience’s ignorance and with established authorities. 48 Plotinus appears to have understood Heraclitus along these lines (Enn. 4.8.1.11–17).

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oracle (or, on a non-Heraclitean account of Apollo, to say clearly what it was that the god said only obscurely). Indeed, such post eventum realisations are a recurrent trope in the Delphic traditions (e.g. Hdt. 6.80). There is no parallel to this change ‘after the event’ with Heraclitus’ signs. The unseen attunement which is the focus of our philosophical reflections never comes to light and seems always to stay at the same distance from our cognitive and expressive capacities. Heraclitus is not, after all, in the business of giving oracles in anything like the normal sense, and it would not be surprising if the analogy between man and god was limited precisely when it came to the factors and constraints which determine Heraclitus’ use of language as opposed to Apollo’s. (In suggesting that Heraclitus opts for his mode of communication because any other would falsify the nature of reality, I am in agreement with a standard take on B93.49 I diverge from this standard take in my understanding of what this mode of communication amounts to. It is not an indirect and riddling way of capturing or expressing the nature of reality in words.50 Rather, Heraclitus neither speaks (indirectly or otherwise:  οὔτε λέγει) nor conceals (οὔτε κρύπτει) the nature of the hidden realities. He resorts to his many-layered, paradoxical and riddling sayings as a way of, instead, giving signs (ἀλλὰ σημαίνει, as discussed above) which facilitate reflection about, insight into and an understanding of that which could not be said.) What kind of attitude led to Croesus’ error and is reflected in it? How does one become better at listening to Apollo? Whatever else, Croesus’ engagement with the oracle is characterised by thinking about it (i) only superficially and without considering that it may not suggest what it appears to suggest at first glance, and (ii) in a self-serving and self-centred manner.51 The assertion 49 E.g. Hölscher 1974:  233–4; Kahn 1979:  124; Rankin 1994:  78 (cf. n.  38 above); Granger 2004: 8, n.17; Nightingale 2007: 183. 50 Contrast Hölscher 1974: 233–4: ‘His language, too, must be one of paradox, simile, and riddle, precisely insofar as it seeks to proclaim the essence of what is’ (my emphases); Kahn 1979: 124: ‘to speak plainly about such a subject would be to falsify it in the telling’; Nightingale 2007: 183: Heraclitus had to find ‘a new language in which to articulate [the world’s] deep and divine structure’. 51 Herodotus picks up on both points when he says that the oracle was ‘specious’ or ‘deceitful’ (κιβδήλου) and that Croesus supposed that it was favourable to

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that, if he marches, Croesus ‘will destroy’ (καταλύσειν, Hdt. 1.53) a great kingdom is compatible with him destroying either his own kingdom or the Persians’ but, at first glance, rather suggests the latter. Croesus is further inclined to this interpretation by assuming that the oracle is spoken from his own partial perspective on things rather than from a synoptic, divine perspective for which his own kingdom and the Persians’ are entirely on a par.52 Above all, Croesus fails to recognise what kind of communication he is facing in the oracle. He fails to recognise that there is a serious and perhaps undecidable interpretive dilemma at play and (on Heraclitus’ account) that what Apollo told him was not actually the answer itself, but an ambiguous starting point from which to work towards the answer. The Delphic traditions do not afford a set of universal or specific rules for a correct interpretive procedure which will guarantee success. They do, however, convey and inculcate certain broad methodological principles, not least through figures like Croesus, who dramatise transgressions of those principles. The traditions thus exercise a kind of habituation:  they condition us to think about and listen to Apollo’s communications in the right ways.53 Heraclitus’ sayings – and especially B93 itself as a secondorder, programmatic statement  – exercise a similar kind of habituation.54 They condition us to engage with them  – and with the phenomenal world around us  – not superficially or at face value but by reading and rereading, with a careful view to different possible directions and with an ear for nuance and detail. In this way, Heraclitus’ sayings teach us how to ‘listen’ (B1, B19, B34, B50, B108). Again, they impel us to think about, say, seawater (B61) or gold (B9) no less from the perspective of fish and donkeys than of humans. More generally, they disabuse us of our deep-seated myopic and parochial inclinations. him (ἐλπίσας πρὸς ἑωυτοῦ, Hdt. 1.75). The same two factors are emphatic e.g. in Cleomenes’ misinterpretation at Hdt. 6.76–80. On this point, cf. Manetti 1993: 28. 53 Croesus himself is ultimately habituated to some extent. After hearing the Pythia’s defense of Apollo’s conduct, he comes to see that the mistake was his and not the god’s (Hdt. 1.91). Cf. Kindt 2012: 50–1 on Parmeniscus’ enlightenment. 54 We saw above how engaging with Heraclitus’ sayings can be thought of as a preparatory exercise for engaging with the world. 52

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They condition us to work towards a viewpoint which is oriented towards not the ‘private’ but the ‘common’ (understood as what is universal and universally available  – the cosmic logos  – as opposed to the partial province of a limited perspective) and which strives towards the divine, synoptic view of things (B2, B41, B72, B89, B113, B114, B102). Heraclitus’ constant references to the exegetical and philosophical failings of his readers, contemporaries and predecessors (e.g. B1, B2, B17, B19, B34, B40, B56, B57, B72, B104, B108) serve  – in place of a Croesus  – as negative paradigms illustrating how not to approach his sayings or our experiences of the world.55 In all this we find further aspects of Heraclitus’ affinities with, and appropriations of, Apollo and the theological traditions surrounding him and his mode of communication.56 Putting aside Croesus’ attitudinal flaws, what in fact determines whether our inferences from the oracle in any particular case are the right or wrong ones to draw seems to be whether the god would consider them right or wrong. The question is whether we have correctly ascertained divine will. In what sense does Apollo’s oracle constitute a sign which points towards the proposition ‘if I attack, I will destroy my own kingdom’ any more than towards the proposition ‘if I attack, I will destroy the Persians’ kingdom’?57 What makes the former proposition but not the latter a correct inference from the sign – i.e. a successful interpretation of what it is a sign for – is that it would be a correct decipherment of divine will. Apollo would consider it a successful inference. The former proposition is the one that, in this sense, Apollo signalled (even while he did not actually speak it) and that Croesus would have, in this particular case, correctly inferred.58 There Contra Maurizio 2013: 117, who writes that there is no parallel in Heraclitus for an interpreter’s incompetent alter ego such as Croesus. 56 I cannot address here Heraclitus’ reflections on inquiries into oneself (B101, B116) as another sort of appropriative engagement with Delphi; on this point see Maurizio 2013: 115. 57 This question can be raised whether we construe the oracle as an ambiguous articulation of the answer or (with Heraclitus) as an ambiguous sign, which does not itself articulate the answer at all (cf. n. 18 above). 58 For (Apolline) oracles as affording an insight into divine will, cf. e.g. the Homeric Hymn to Apollo 130–2, 539a. 55

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is arguably a disanalogy here with Heraclitus. It is not what Heraclitus thinks or wills which determines whether the conclusions and insights which we derived from his signs were the right ones to derive, but only whether these conclusions and insights cohere with the hidden nature and unseen attunement. I  suggested above that Heraclitus’ injunction ‘listening not to me but to the logos …’ (B50) calls attention to the distinction between his own logos and the cosmic logos. On a more rudimentary level of interpretation, however, we can also read this fragment as driving a wedge between Heraclitus himself and his own logos. What Heraclitus himself thinks or wills, or his authority, is not a criterion which determines whether or not we have used his words (his logos) properly. Heraclitus’ sayings may offer an observation which transmits warrant to a certain conclusion (as with the observation that seawater is life-giving for fish but destructive for humans, B61), or make a bare assertion which invites and orients reflection (as with the assertion that the one wise thing both wishes and does not wish to be called ‘Zeus’, B32). But, in all cases, our use of these signs will be more or less successful just to the extent that it renders us more or less attuned to and aware of the hidden realities (not to the extent that we have used them as Heraclitus intended). In another arguable contrast with Apollo’s signs, moreover, more than one successful answer or interpretive inference can be correlated with a Heraclitean sign. It is true that Heraclitus was aware of and preoccupied with riddles as we know them (B56 relates Homer’s failure to solve a riddle posed by children) and it is plausible that the model of the riddle held some programmatic significance for him in relation to the proper way to approach his signs. But we cannot accept the model of the riddle as an entirely appropriate one on which to understand Heraclitus’ sayings.59 The fragments can raise in a less determinate way different questions on different levels and lead to and accommodate multiple possible elaborations as Contra Gallop 1989; Maurizio 2013:  103, 106, cf. also comments in Hölscher 1974: 233, 238; Hussey 1982: 55–6; Graham 2008: 182. 59

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severally legitimate.60 Nor should we imagine that behind every single terse remark by Heraclitus lies a highly specific and fully worked out position or theory to be reconstructed by the reader, as opposed to, at least in some cases, views and insights of a more general and even vague nature (say, concerning different ways in which opposites may be interrelated and interdependent).61 In these respects, Heraclitus’ signs can arguably be more open-ended and underdetermined than Apollo’s. Final remarks In the first instance, I  argued that B93 poses a theological reflection which is paradoxical and difficult on the most rudimentary level of its interpretation. It impels the attuned reader to theologise, to ask what insight about Apollo and his mode of communication we can reach by reflecting on the initially puzzling assertion that ‘the lord whose oracle is the one in Delphi neither says nor conceals but gives a sign’. Correspondingly, Heraclitus’ relation to, and engagement with, the more implicit theology of the Delphic traditions is more complex than previously assumed. B93 does not simply state a theological principle that was already obvious, if implicit, in the traditions about Apollo. Heraclitus advances a creative and far from obvious theological analysis of Apollo’s modus operandi, which, nonetheless, preserves and appropriates the broad theological conception, conveyed in the traditions, of the interpretive predicament generated by Apollo’s oracles. In the second instance, we saw how Heraclitus’ involved theological meditation on Apollo served for him as a framework within which to think in parallel ways about his own mode of communication and about the relation between his language Kahn 1979: 91–2 makes a similar point about interpreting Heraclitus, precisely by contradistinction with interpreting oracles. 61 Schofield 1991: 14–21, 32–4 develops some similar methodological caveats. It is entirely consistent with the remarks made above that we are sometimes warranted in ascribing to Heraclitus certain determinate views or theories, a point on which Betegh 2013: 227 rightly insists. 60

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and the realities which are the focus of his philosophical reflections. Indeed, we saw that Heraclitus’ appropriation of Apollo in this regard as a paradigm of emulation (a kind of imitatio dei which, as we also saw, had its particular scope and limits) is illuminating and important for understanding these central aspects of his thought. What Heraclitus creatively identified in the god, and what he creatively appropriated from him, was above all a mode of communication and inquiry on which the most important things – the insights and answers we are really after – are the ones that get left unsaid. More generally, Heraclitus found in (Apolline) divination an instructive preoccupation with the problem of how limited mortals may gain some insight into matters which lie beyond their perceptual experience, control or even expressive capacities; with the pitfalls which attend the process of acquiring such insights from bits of language or experience which proffer only ambiguous starting points rather than the answers themselves; and with the critical and contemplative skills of reading and listening which enable one to engage in this process in the ideal way.62 Heraclitus has often been portrayed as an enemy of traditional religious thought and practice.63 Conversely, some scholars argue that fragments, which have traditionally been taken to convey such criticisms, in fact criticise misguided and misleading attitudes towards traditional religious practices and their associated patterns of thought rather than those practices and patterns of thought themselves.64 I cannot consider here in a On this last point:  Iamblichus interestingly cites B93 to buttress his claim that dialectic is a gift from the gods and that, through his ambiguous oracles, Apollo impelled his consultants to develop the critical and analytical skills of dialectical inquiry (Epist. ad. Dexipp. apud Stob. Anth. 2.2.5.11–16). Plutarch ascribes to Ammonius the insight that, since philosophy stems from inquiry and inquiry from wonder and puzzlement, it is only fitting that Apollo’s oracular responses – and the other riddles surrounding the god – should generate wonder and puzzlement (On the E at Delphi 385c). In the hands of Platonists, this idea perhaps harks back in particular to Plato’s Apology in which Socrates explains how it was his attempt to understand the puzzling reply which Chaerephon had received at Delphi which led him to undertake his distinctive elenctic inquiries (20e5ff.). 63 Notably, Kahn 1979:  263, 266–7; cf. e.g. Burkert 1985:  309; recently, Gregory 2013: 112–13, 125. 64 See Osborne 1997, especially on B5 and B15, followed by Adomenas 1999; cf. BoysStones 2009: 4. 62

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general way Heraclitus’ engagements with traditional religious thought and practice or address the complex textual problems which the relevant fragments pose. I  only dogmatically state my view that we would be wrong to look for a systematic or universal approach here on Heraclitus’ part, or to imagine that he ever conceived of traditional religious thought and practice as a unified and circumscribed whole to which one could take an approving or disapproving attitude.65 It is indeed difficult to find in Heraclitus’ assertion that ‘corpses are more to be chucked out than faeces’ (B96) anything less than ‘a studied insult to ordinary Greek sentiment’.66 Conversely, B93 – as we examined it – offers a powerful counter-example to Wildberg’s general assessment that ‘one gets indeed the impression that [Heraclitus] regarded religious thought and talk as the product of a sorely deficient ratio, to which he offers his own dialectic as an antidote’.67 Heraclitus did not merely devote involved theological and philosophical reflection to Delphic Apollo: he appropriated his divination as a normative theological framework within which to understand the very nature of his own dialectic.68

65 On this last point, cf. more generally Harrison 2007:  382; Harrison 2006:  132; Betegh 2006: 626. Most 2013 (esp. 164–6) questions the view that Heraclitus possesses or is concerned to convey to his readers a systematic doctrine about religion. He sees Heraclitus as deeply preoccupied with religious and theological questions and as, in different fragments, accommodating, reinterpreting, rejecting and raising open-ended questions about different Greek religious attitudes and practices. 66 Dodds 1951: 181. 67 Wildberg 2011: 215. 68 I am very grateful to the participants at the Theologies conference (Cambridge, July 2012), as well as to the audiences at the B-Club (Cambridge, April 2012) and in KCL (London, February 2012), for their helpful questions and comments. Special thanks are due to Hannah Willey for extended discussions and to Malcolm Schofield, James Warren and David Sedley for their written remarks.

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CHA PTER 6

TH E ‘ TH EOLOGY’ OF T HE DI O N YS IA AND OL D COME DY

E R I C   C S A PO

But Rincewind felt he knew holy architecture when he saw it, and the frescoes on the big, and, of course, impressive walls above him didn’t look at all religious. For one thing, the participants were enjoying themselves. Almost certainly, they were enjoying themselves. Yes, they must be. It would be pretty astonishing if they weren’t. T. Pratchett, Sourcery

Scott Scullion, in a recent essay ‘Religion and the gods in Greek comedy’, concluded that Old Comedy is not about religion but about the purely secular concerns of having a good time:1 It seems safe to say that when they sat down to watch a comedy, an Athenian audience was not expecting to learn important things about the meaning and purpose of the festival of Dionysus during which the play was performed, or of any other festival. Rather, festivals are primarily events at which ordinary participants enjoy themselves, eat and drink too much, buy things, watch processions and athletic contests and shows, and perhaps misbehave sexually. That we may assume  – given the overwhelming predominance of the same set of attitudes throughout the plays – was, if not a universal, at any rate a very common attitude.

As stated, this is fair enough, however disappointing it may be to find that comedy has, to quote the ancient proverb, ‘nothing to do with Dionysus’.2 But is it possible that enjoyment, indulgence in food and drink, spectacles and sexual misbehaviour, and even a little shopping, do teach ‘important things about the meaning and purpose of the festival’, and are therefore, in some sense, religious, and further that comedy has a Scullion 2014: 344. 2 The proverb was directed at tragedy and the choral competitions of the Dionysia, never comedy: Khamaileon fr. 38 W; Zen. 5.40; Suda ο 806. 1

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‘theology’, at least to the extent that the enjoyments and indulgences encouraged by the festival (and further developed by comedy) are ‘god-defining’? I will argue that it is, and not in a way that is blandly true of all festivals of all gods or even all festivals of Dionysus. Dionysus Eleuthereus was different from other forms of the god, and the Dionysia was different from other festivals. These differences can be correlated to specific differences between comedy and other ways of having fun. Dionysus Eleuthereus, the Athenian Dionysia and Old Comedy have unique differences that correspond, are interconnected and have theological ramifications. A brief history of Dionysus Eleuthereus Dionysus notoriously was a god of many names and forms. In Attica alone we know the epikleseis Anthius, Auloneus, Demoteles, Dyalus, Eleuthereus, In the Marshes, Iakkhos, Cissus, Lenaios, Melanaigis, Melpomenos, Orthus, Sabazius and Theoenus. There were many festivals that honoured these diverse Dionysoi: City Dionysia, Lenaia, Anthesteria, Haloa, Oskhophoria, specific moments of the Eleusinian mysteries, Theonia (?) and the many deme festivals lumped together as ‘Rural Dionysia’. The City Dionysia, a festival for Dionysus Eleuthereus, was the most important festival of Dionysus and, as we will see, Eleuthereus had a unique personality, though it played a disproportionate role in defining later impressions of Dionysus. Classical Athenians knew that Eleuthereus was a more recent arrival than the Dionysus In the Marshes for whom ‘the more ancient Dionysia’ (i.e. Anthesteria) was celebrated: Thucydides pointed to the relative age of the temples and the fact that Ionians all celebrated the Anthesteria (predating therefore the Ionian migration, ca. 900 BCE).3 How recent was Eleuthereus? The earliest remnant from his sanctuary is a relief, probably 3 Th. 2.15.3–4; Trümpy 1997; Burkert 1985: 227.

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part of an altar, that is stylistically dated ca. 550–530 BCE.4 It shows dancing ithyphallic satyrs (one playing pipes) and a dancing nymph. The altar gives us a terminus ante for the building of the sanctuary of Dionysus Eleuthereus. For the earlier history, we must look elsewhere. Attic art first yields images of Dionysus ca. 580.5 From about this date also come our earliest images of satyrs/silens.6 This may not seem so astonishing since Attic black figure (our main source of knowledge of Archaic art) only really begins around 635, but these are virtually the earliest depictions of Dionysus or satyrs in any medium.7 Dionysus and satyrs almost immediately become the most popular subjects of Attic vase painting. From the beginning they are associated with wine, music, choral dance and erect phalloi. Of particular interest are various processional scenes that begin in Attic art 580–560 BCE. Most important are illustrations of the Return of Hephaestus (Fig.  6.1).8 Hedreen has shown that illustrations of the Return, especially the earliest, are shaped by the experience of a Dionysian procession ‘like the grand procession of the City Dionysia’, characterised by wine, music, abusive behaviour, obscenity and phalloi.9 He wonders if the myth of Hephaestus’ return to Olympus served as an aetiology for such a procession. The myth may have its earliest treatment in Homeric Hymn 1, which is notoriously difficult to date. West recently argued that the myth was ‘well known from sometime before 600’ and urged that ‘it first appeared in our Hymn, or at any rate that it was our Hymn that first made it widely known’.10 The actual procession, 4 Athens NM 3131. Upper date:  Simon 1997:  1129 no.  201; lower date:  Despinis 1996/7: 198. 5 Carpenter 1986: 13; Isler-Kerényi 2001: 27; an earlier but uncertain Cycladic representation: Isler-Kerényi 2001: 35 figs 1–2 (cf. Isler-Kerényi 2009: 62). 6 Isler-Kerényi 2004: esp. 11–18 and 7–11 for Corinthian ‘precursors’. 7 Contrast Herakles iconography, which is known from the early seventh century: Stafford 2012: 18. 8 The Return of Hephaestus remains popular throughout the Archaic and Classical period, Hedreen 1992: 183–4 (Appendix 1) lists forty-nine black-figured examples to ca. 500. For the Return in red figure, see Carpenter 1997: 41–9. 9 Hedreen 2004: esp. 59 (quotation)–60. 10 West 2011, quotations: 30, 34.

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Figure 6.1.  Attic black-figured column krater, Lydos, ca. 550 BCE. New York MMA 31.11.11. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

however, was probably a minor part of the Hymn’s narrative. It was the sixth-century vase painters that developed the processional aspect of the myth.11 From about 580–570 BCE, and quite independently of scenes of the Return, black-figured satyrs begin to perform – quite contrary to their otherwise wild and unruly persona – in regimented and orchestrated files as if processing, and the impression is reinforced by the presence of pipes, a uniform step and the carrying of processional equipment such as askoi, mixing vessels or musical instruments: the painters show every sign of wishing to present the satyrs as a processional chorus and sometimes, removing all doubt, depict exarchoi leading them.12 About 560 BCE, two other varieties of processional chorus make their appearance. Completely unique to Attic vase painting, but more valuable for that reason, is the famous ‘Florence cup’ (Fig. 6.2) showing on either side a chorus bearing a phallos pole.13 We also have a series of over twenty vase paintings, beginning ca. 560 and continuing to ca. 480, that show costumed choruses, usually advancing with orchestrated 11 They may have been anticipated slightly by Corinthian art: Seeberg 1965; Steinhart 2004: 40–4. 12 Hedreen 2007. For exarchos iconography: Csapo 2006/7 (to which add Athens NM 623: Smith 2010: pl. 29a). 13 Attic black-figured cup, unattributed, Florence 3897; Iozzo 2009.

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Figure  6.2.  Attic black-figured cup, ca. 560 BCE, Florence 3897. Courtesy of the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana.

movement in a line, and often led by a piper. Though they are sometimes called ‘animal choruses’ or ‘beast-riders’, they are often not:  we have men on stilts, old men walking on their hands and strutting transvestites (Fig.  6.3).14 They evoke a parade with choruses, colourful costumes and imaginative and funny choreography. What parade? In the city of Athens elaborate processions involving ribaldry, altered identity (costume, masks, role-playing), phalloi and choruses were only attached to Dionysus Eleuthereus. The Anthesteria had no formal processions:  it ‘was not a festival of public pomp and expenditure’ but a time of private parties at home with friends and relatives.15 Opinion to the contrary depends heavily on the interpretation of a series of vases, all painted ca. 500 BCE, that show Dionysus in a wagon shaped like a ship in a procession with satyrs and bovine sacrifices.16 They are still commonly associated with the Anthesteria, but many experts Green 1985; Rothwell 2007; Hedreen 2013 stresses their processional character. 15 Parker 2005: 290 (quotation)–316. 16 Recently Wachsmann 2013: 120–32. The lead strip from Catania (De Miro 1982) is a fake: Tiverios 2013. 14

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Figure 6.3.  Attic black-figured amphora, Swing Painter, 525–520 BCE, Christchurch 41/57. Courtesy of the James Logie Memorial Collection, University of Canterbury.

place them in the City Dionysia and I have argued elsewhere that they are right.17 Choruses of any sort (comic in this case) were only added to the Anthesteria in the time of Lycurgus.18 When Lycurgus undertook to expand the theatre industry, Phanodemus, his ‘Minister of Culture and Propaganda’, provided an aetiological myth claiming that comedy was invented at the Anthesteria but that the Athenians transferred ‘the choral festivities to Dionysus Melanaigis once Eleuther established him’, i.e. the choruses were transferred to the City Dionysia for the god we call Dionysus Eleuthereus (hence Plutarch’s report that the comic choruses at the Anthesteria were a ‘revival’).19 This myth, if anything, proves the absence of choruses from the earlier Anthesteria. Csapo 2012; Csapo 2013b: esp. 20–5. 18 [Plu.] Mor. 841f (Mau). 19 Plu. Mor. 841f; Call. Hec. fr. 85; cf. Suda μ 451; probably sourced from Philochorus (cf. FGrH 328 F 229) and ultimately from Phanodemus: Humphreys 2004: 253–4; Csapo and Wilson forthcoming. For Phanodemus’ (cf. FGrH 3b Suppl. 172: ‘minister of public worship and education’) role in the Lycurgan reforms, see Csapo and Wilson 2014: esp. 420–1. 17

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We know nothing of the procession attested for the Lenaia except that in the fourth century BCE it culminated in bovine sacrifice, but a minor one, judging from the dermatikon accounts, which suggest a sacrifice a third the size of the ‘rural’ Dionysia of Piraeus.20 The Lenaia included no choral element before comedy and tragedy were added in the late 440s to late 430s, unless we are to infer a female chorus from the name of the festival (if from ‘Lenai’ and if ‘Lenai’ really means ‘­maenads’).21 Lenaian choruses, at any rate, did not capture the vase painter’s imagination, unless the ‘Lenaian vases’ really are Lenaian: but these are not processional dances nor necessarily public.22 There remain two only partly Dionysian festival processions. One is the procession of the Oskhophoria, for which a chorus is attested and also transvestism, but it is only the two youths who lead the procession who are disguised (and consistently as women).23 The other is the Iakkhos procession from Athens to Eleusis, which formed part of the celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries. There was choral dance upon arrival and there is evidence (not unproblematic) of ritual abuse:  but there were no costumed and no phallic choruses:  our evidence suggests that worshippers wore ordinary but old clothing.24 Moreover, the equation of Dionysus and Iakkhos probably did not happen before the mid-fifth century BCE and was apparently never complete.25 The sudden appearance of Dionysian imagery and particularly processional imagery ca. 580–570 BCE has been noted, but interpretation was hampered by the belief that Peisistratos created the City Dionysia.26 This belief is vaguely anchored in the supposed claim of the Marmor Parium that Thespis performed ‘in the city’ ca. 536/1. Connor has, D. 21.10; Arist. Ath. 57.1; IG II2 1496, ll. 74, 105, 146; cf. Pritchard 2012: 34 Table 2. 21 Millis and Olson 2012: 178, 204; Parker 2005: 317. 22 See, above all, Frontisi-Ducroux 1991; Parker 2005: 306–12. 23 See Parker 2005: 211–17. 24 Dover 1993: 62–3. 25 Graf 1974: 48–58; see further below. 26 Esp. Carpenter 1986; Shapiro 1989: 84–100; Hedreen 2004. 20

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however, shown that this reading is based on a wilful and reckless emendation of the text by Boeckh that the stone cannot support (the inscription probably originally referred to the Dionysia of Ikarion, not Athens, and Thespis is in any case mythical).27 Peisistratos has also been credited with the creation or transformation of the Panathenaia, but textual and epigraphic evidence, and in particular IG I3 508, now seem to indicate that the reform of the Panathenaia was somewhat earlier than Peisistratos. Robert Parker writes that ‘the Panathenaea was certainly transformed into an athletic festival of Panhellenic appeal in or near the 560s’ and Julia Shear dates the reorganisation of the Panathenaia and the creation of the Great Panathenaia more firmly to 566/5.28 The Peisistratids did welcome and foster a number of cultic transformations that were ‘probably already underway’ before their time and whose hallmarks were ‘a stress on the city, on spectacle, on entertainment provided, so to speak, professionally’.29 The iconographic evidence suggests that the Dionysia was invented in the same (pre-Peisistratid) period as the Panathenaia, doubtless for similar political and religious purposes. The various kinds of choruses found in the iconography continued to be part of the Dionysian parade even after the Dionysia was expanded to include competitions in men’s and boys’ lyric (from 508/9), in tragedy (by ca. 500) and in comedy (ca. 486).30 God of phallic and verbal aggression The Dionysia, ‘Rural’ and the ‘City’, alone had phallic processions: no other Dionysian festival in Athens can be associated with phallic imagery of any kind.31 That the phallos was both Connor 1989: 26–32; Csapo 2015; Csapo and Wilson forthcoming. 28 Parker 1996: 75–6; Shear 2001: 507–15. 29 Parker 1996: 78. 30 For the chronology, see Csapo 2015. 31 Parke 1977:  109; Pickard-Cambridge 1968:  36. The phallic imagery at the Haloa (cakes, ceramics) belongs to the realm of Demeter (Parker 2005: 279; Halliwell 2008:160–77, esp. 172–4). 27

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new and essential to the rites of Dionysus Eleuthereus is suggested by the festival’s aetiology: They say the following about the phallos itself. Pegasos took the image of Dionysus from Eleutherae  – Eleutherae is a city of Boeotia  – and came to Attica. The people of Attica did not receive the god with honour, but their counsel did not go unpunished because the god got angry and a sickness afflicted the men’s genitals and the affliction was incurable. As they succumbed to the sickness which proved beyond all human magic and science they were quick to send ambassadors [to the oracle]. When the ambassadors returned they said the only cure was to celebrate [or possibly ‘process’] the god with all honours. So after they obeyed the report of the oracle, they constructed phalloi, private and public, and with these they kept honouring the god, making [the phallic parades] a memorial to their suffering.

Although the myth is preserved by a scholion to Aristophanes’ Acharnians 243, where Dikaiopolis enacts a Rural Dionysia, presumably for Kholleidai, it clearly refers to Athens. It asserts that the first phallic parades in Attica were performed by ‘the people of Athens’ and that they were performed specifically for Dionysus Eleuthereus upon the command of an oracle. A recent study of the myth concludes that it was probably known in Classical Athens.32 The aetiology is of a well-known type (resistance to the god, punishment of the citizen men by permanent erection, a cure effected by the reception of obscene rites). It is best known from the Monumentum Archilochium dating to the mid-third century BCE. Mnesiepes, however, tells us that he is passing on local legends that ‘have been handed down by the ancients’. One can be reasonably confident that this type of aetiology, if not this specific myth, was circulating by Classical times.33 The Florence cup (Fig.  6.2) indicates phallic processions in Athens by 560 BCE. Some associate the cup with 32 Bacelar 2009. Ceramic sculptures seen by Pausanias confirm that Pegasos ‘introduced Dionysus to the Athenians’ and that Delphi was involved (1.2.5.12–6.1). It is unclear whether the help from Delphi mentioned here and implied by the Σ Acharnians has anything to do with the oracle preserved in D.  21.53–4 (Prandi 1987: 58, n.29). 33 SEG 15, 517 A col. II.1 20–1. Cf. Haloa: Σ Luc. DDeor. 1–5, Rabe, 211.14–212.8; Σ Luc. DMeretr. 7, Rabe, pp.  279–80; Lampsakos:  Comes 1567:  5.15 (from Posidonios?: see Olender 1986: 377–8, but also the cautions of Fowler 2013: 735–7; Satyrs: Σ Clem. Al. Protr. 47.5, p. 314 Stählin.

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a Rural Dionysia, partly because they think it too early for Peisistratos (the presumed creator of the City Dionysia),34 and partly because a transfer from the Rural to the City Dionysia suits traditional assumptions that are ultimately rooted in nineteenth-century anthropology, the view, namely, that phallic rituals were primitive ‘vegetation magic’, and therefore classifiable as pre-Greek and the sort of thing that could only have survived as a custom of conservative and unenlightened ­peasants.35 We have no reason to believe that any Rural Dionysia existed before the City Dionysia. The earliest evidence for deme Dionysia are from Ikarion and Thorikos. Ikarion has no remains related to either the sanctuary or the theatre earlier than the fragmented head of a cult statue of Dionysus dating to the last quarter of the sixth century, and no reliable evidence of a Dionysia before about 460.36 Thorikos is somewhat later: the terrace for the orchestra of the theatre seems to date to the late sixth century, and the earliest epigraphic attestation for dramatic or choral performance is ca. 400.37 The more we learn about the programmes and contents of the various Attic Dionysia, the more it appears that the Attic Dionysia imitate the entertainments of the city, not the other way around.38 Phallic rites are known elsewhere in Greece.39 Conceivably in some places they had notional connections with f­ ertility,40 but at the Athenian Dionysia the primary function of the phallos is transgressive. In the myth of Pegasos just cited, the erections commemorated by the phallic processions are symptoms of Dionysus’ wrath, not his favour, and of sickness and madness, Deubner 1962:  136, n.3; Pickard-Cambridge 1968:  43; Simon 1983:  102; Shapiro 1989: 99. 35 See e.g. Westropp 1885; Farnell 1909: 11–12, 97, 108 (quotation), 197 (quotation), 205 (‘peasant magic’), 265–6 (Florence cup shows ‘an uncouth primitive scene’); Nilsson 1940: 36; Deubner 1962: 139; Boardman 2014: 3; for the eighteenth-century background, Mitter 1977. 36 Despinis 2007; Wilson 2015; Csapo and Wilson forthcoming. 37 SEG 34, 107, SEG 56, 199. 38 Finance is necessarily another matter: Wilson 2010. 39 Hdt. 2.48–9; D.S. 1.22. 40 Halliwell 2008: 191–206 has a subtle discussion of fertility, apotropaic as well as carnival theories, but the latter is confined to Bakhtinian notions of carnival. 34

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not fertility.41 Phallos-bearing at the Athenian Dionysia should be construed as a symbolic violation of taboos relating to sex and violence.42 In rites of this sort, the phallos is not an object of religious awe, but of comic ­laughter.43 This is why, judging from the Florence cup, the phalloi paraded at the Dionysia are not only rudely erect and enormous, but painted in vivid colours, creatively transformed into animal shapes, and carried by noisy and drunken choruses. Another variety of phallic chorus, appearing in Attic red figure from about 490 BCE, is identifiable as ithyphalloi and also clearly linked to the Dionysian parade (Fig. 6.4).44 The ithyphalloi wear outlandish costumes, carry small phalloi on sticks, but can also incongruously attach phalloi to various parts of their bodies (noses, foreheads and necks). The parading of Dionysian phalloi at Athens is a ritual of gobsmackingly anarchic and shameless hilarity. Attic pottery displays the Dionysian phallos behaving with conspicuous obscenity or aggression. The phalloi on the Florence cup are ‘ridden’ by satyrs and komasts in a manner suggestive of anal intercourse.45 Sexual aggression was also a general theme to judge by the song of the ithyphalloi preserved by Semos: ‘make way, open up wide for the god, because, upright and bursting, he wants to march through your midst’, or with just slightly less explicitness by the song that accompanies the phallophoria in Acharnians, where the phallos is addressed as ‘adulterer and pederast’ and the lyrics culminate in a fantasy of rape.46 The iconography shows choruses of ithyphalloi wielding phallos sticks in aggressive postures (one is a wild man in a Cyclops mask ready to thrust with a phallic knife).47 Verbal abuse seems to have accompanied these gestures of phallic aggression. Semos tells us that the phallophoroi ‘charging Madness is similarly prominent in other myths explaining Dionysian rites: e.g. Pl. Lg. 672b (choral dance). 42 Burkert 1985: 166; Henrichs 1987: 94–9; Csapo 1997; Parker 2005: 319–21; Csapo 2013a. 43 Esp. Burkert 1979: 40 and n.6; Parker 2005: 319–20; Halliwell 2008: 181–3; Parker 2011: 205–13; cf. Lissarrague 1990: 56 (the sexuality of satyrs ‘provokes laughter’). 44 Csapo 2013a. 45 Discussion and parallels in Csapo 1997. 46 Semos FGrH 396 F 24; Ar. Ach. 264–79. 47 Studied in Csapo 2013a: esp. 48–50, 60–4. 41

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Figure 6.4.  Attic red-figured fragments by the Berlin Painter, 490–480 BCE, Athens, National Museum, Acropolis Collection 702. Courtesy of the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photo: M. C. Miller.

forward [sc. toward their audience] would mock (ἐτώθαζον) whomever they chose’.48 Still more offensive are the traditions of ‘parade abuse’ and mockery ‘from the wagons’ that, despite received opinion, are primarily if not uniquely connected with the parade of the (City or Rural) Dionysia.49 In Athens, the Dionysia was exclusively the Dionysian festival of phalloi, obscenity, aggression, abusive language and derisive laughter.50 48 Semos FGrH 396 F 24. 49 Csapo 2012. 50 Although ritual abuse is well attested for festivals of Demeter, to a couple of which Dionysus became attached: Halliwell 2008: 160–206.

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The parade became the primary venue for what Halliwell calls the ‘shared acceptance’ of transgressive humour.51 But it is important to note that the limits were not always accepted or respected by all: they were frequently challenged and tested. What most regarded as ritual play, moralists describe as aselgeia or hybris, terms that definitely imply outrage or injury (and would, under normal circumstances, be applied simply to the exposure of erect male genitals, let alone putting them on parade).52 Plato wished to limit or ban all such behaviour at the Dionysia.53 But even gauging whether a specific act was protected by traditional licence could be tricky. The case of Ktesikles is instructive. Ktesikles participated in the Dionysian parade but chanced upon a personal enemy and ended up beating him with a leather thong he was carrying or ­wearing.54 Ktesikles was condemned to death for his hybris, but the revealing thing is that he pleaded ‘the effect of the parade and of drunkenness’ and would have been acquitted, Demosthenes implies, had the jury accepted this plea. The evidence is of course refracted through Demosthenes’ eagerness to make Meidias’ hybris look worse for not being influenced by the atmosphere of the parade, but this shows that Demosthenes perceived a need to anticipate a feeling that Meidias’ crime might also seem extenuated by ‘festival licence’. In a similar vein Demosthenes presents as an indecency Aeschines’ Halliwell 1991b: esp. 283 (quoted below) and Halliwell 2008: 19–38 make a distinction between laughter as ‘playful’ and ‘consequential’: the former characterised by ‘lightness of tone, autonomous enjoyment, psychological relaxation, and a shared acceptance of the self-sufficient presuppositions or conventions of such laughter by all who participate in it’; the latter by ‘direction towards some definite result other than autonomous pleasure (e.g. causing embarrassment or shame, signalling hostility, damaging a reputation, contributing to the defeat of an opponent, delivering public chastisement)’. The Dionysian festival and its comedy are certainly ‘playful’, but, I would argue, frequently and habitually pushed the limits of acceptability. 52 See esp. Pl. Lg. 637a–b. Hybris or aselgeia is a defining feature of pompeia in the lexicographical tradition:  Σ Luc. JTr. 21.44a–b (Rabe); Σ Luc. Eun. 2 (Rabe); Appendix Paroemiographi 1.4.80.1; Σ Ar. Nu. 289 (Holwerda); Σ D. 18.40A–B. For Dionysian hybris: Halliwell 2008: 134–9, 177–8, 208–9. Erect genitals as hybris: P. P 10.36. Cf. Archil. fr. 45 W; Σ X. An. 5.8.3. 53 Pl. Lg. 637a–b, 664c–6c, 812b–c, 815c, 816d–e (and see further below). 54 D. 21.180–1. The scholiast ad loc. (617 and 619 Dilts) supposes that the leather strap (σκῦτος) was part of his satyr costume, i.e. a leather phallos. Cf. σκύτινον αἰδοῖον (Σ Ar. Ach. 243; Σ Clem.Al. Protr. 307.13 Stählin-Treu; Suda φ 60). 51

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brother-in-law’s participation in the parade ‘without a mask’, suggesting that an important signal for the ‘shared acceptance’ of Dionysian transgression was the impersonality and role-patterning of the behaviour.55 In Greek Laughter, Halliwell asks ‘Is Old Comedy a form of ritual laughter?’ He offers four considerations ‘in prima facie support’ for believing it is:  first that comedy was embodied in Dionysian festivities, ‘one of the prime settings for other occurrences of ritual laughter’; secondly, that Aristotle believed that comedy was genetically derived from phallic ritual, ‘a circumstance arguably reflected in the wearing of the phallos by its actors’; thirdly, that comic aeschrology, obscenity and ‘uninhibited personal mockery’ appear in both Old Comedy and Dionysian festivities; and fourthly that ‘Old Comedy displays an inclination to incorporate echoes and adaptations of ritual laughter into its own performances’.56 None of these points is unproblematic (hence ‘prima facie’), but they do have weight. The degree to which the festival context ‘licensed’ these features of Old Comedy is a matter of long debate, and a debate divided between those who, like Halliwell, explain Old Comic licence in religious terms, as part of a Dionysian festival, and those who explain it in political terms, as a form of ‘free speech’ licensed de facto by the Athenian democracy.57 For my part I do not think that politics and religion are in this instance sufficiently separable to permit an either/or solution. The little we know of the history and reception of Old Comedy’s licence is enough to show that it was never static and assured. We repeatedly hear of complaints and even political attempts to curb comic freedom.58 We also know that comic licence was not evenly exploited and, we might assume, not evenly granted throughout the history of Attic comedy, but had its D. 19.287 with Halliwell 2008: 181, n.79; Csapo 2015: 76–7. 56 Halliwell 2008: 206 (quotes)–14. 57 Political interpretation: esp. Henderson 1990; Carey 1994; Sommerstein 2004; ritual interpretation: esp. Halliwell 1991a, 1991b; Bierl 2009. 58 Most notoriously: Old Oligarch AthPol. 2.18; Pl. Phlb. 48a–50b; R. 395e–6a, 606c; Lg. 935c–6b; Isoc. Peace 131; Arist. Pol. 1336b; Σ Ar. Ach. 67; Σ Ar. Av. 1297. On censorship legislation, see esp. Halliwell 1991a. 55

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historical moments: namely, the 440s BCE (‘during the period of Athens’ buoyant prosperity’),59 a period of heightened transgression especially in the years 424–414, the time of the ‘radical democracy’, and, after a startling slump during the oligarchic revolutions of 411 and perhaps 405, a resurgence after the democratic restoration followed by a continuous decline in the fourth century, but with notable exceptions, particularly in the case of Timocles and Philippides. The evidence for this patterning maps comic transgression very closely onto democratic political self-assertion. Politics evidently had something to do with comic licence.60 At times politicians succeeded or nearly succeeded in muting comic poets.61 There is one generally accepted piece of legislation to curb comedy’s ridicule of people ‘by name’, from 440/39 until 437/6 BCE. More significantly Kleon attempted an (allegedly nearly successful) prosecution of Aristophanes in 426 for, amongst other charges, ‘hybris against the people’. Much later we hear of a similar attempt to muzzle Philippides by Stratokles. Licence was never risk free. Comic poets and their victims measured, tested and frequently renegotiated the genre’s ‘freedom’.62 And yet, the most virulent critics of comedy, Plato and Aristotle, find it necessary to concede something to religious practice: Aristotle, for example, does not like obscenity and abuse and wants to ban it from comedy but he is willing to allow ritual abuse because ‘custom permits’ (ἀποδίδωσιν ὁ νόμος).63 The brief lifespan of the most virulent form of personal ridicule shows how comic transgression rides the political winds. Contemporary Athenian citizens were represented by masked actors on stage, and sometimes served as the main characters, in comedies of the period 424–414 BCE, the time of the ‘radical democracy’, and again for a couple years following the Halliwell 1991a: 66. 60 Henderson 2013. 61 Sommerstein 2004; Hartwig 2015. 62 See esp. Hartwig 2015. 63 Arist. Pol. 1336b. Plato too makes limited concession to tradition:  see Halliwell 1991a: 68. 59

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democratic restoration in 403.64 Too obvious perhaps to get much attention is the synchronicity of comedy’s greatest ‘political licence’ with the popularity of its most ritual features. In the fourth century, as personal invective wanes, so too does obscenity (to the point that Aristotle declares it old-fashioned in his day), the phallos as a feature of comic actor’s costume and the relevance and participation of the chorus (to the point that many scholars, modern and ancient, mistakenly speak of its disappearance altogether).65 If the political and ritual features of comedy fade out together, might it be possible that they also ‘fade in’ together? This possibility would seem to be excluded by Aristotle’s claim that comedy evolved from a ritual form, that it developed ‘little by little’ from the chorus of the phallic procession, and presumably therefore had all its ritual apparatus ab initio.66 It is, however, difficult to conceive how a processional form became a static theatrical entertainment ‘little by little’. In any case, comedy was invented in Sicily where there may have been no chorus at all. It is worth considering the possibility that comedy was not genetically derived from the parade but at a given moment generically contrived to look more like the ritual choruses of the parade. There are indeed indications that Attic comedy adopted some of its ritual forms independently of other Dionysian entertainments. The oversized and limp comic phallos, first attested as standard comic equipment in Aristophanes and in late fifth- and fourth-century BCE Attic and West Greek iconography, may not be the ritual survival generally supposed.67 The phalloi of the parade (and of satyr play) are different, normally life-sized and always fully erect when we see them 64 Henderson 2013. Note also the significant fluctuation in the number of komoidoumenoi (real people named in the comedy) in Aristophanic plays during the oligarchic revolution of 412/11. In chronological order the extant plays have: 45 (425), 44 (424), 45 (423), 81 (422), 40 (421), 61 (414), 14 (411), 17 (411), 55 (405), 41 (ca. 392), 19 (388): Csapo 2000: 119–20. 65 Phalloi: Green 2006. Obscenity: Henderson 1991: 29; Papachrysostomou 2008: 19; Arist. EN 1128a 23. Chorus: Konstantakos 2011: 162–74; Hartwig 2014. 66 Arist. Pol. 1449a13. 67 Esp. Ar. Nu. 537–9; Stone 1980: 72–126.

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on phallophoroi, satyrs or the bodies and phallos sticks of ithyphalloi. Moreover, though phalloi were certainly used by comic actors by the last quarter of the fifth century, we have no evidence for their use precisely where we would most expect to find the putative ritual survival, namely in the costume of comic choruses.68 The flabby body costumes, somatia, worn by comic actors are not attested before 450–430 BCE (and the first illustrations are a good deal less flabby than latter depictions).69 The only known antecedent is the costume of komasts, but padded bodies are mainly found on Corinthian komasts, not Attic.70 Moreover, Attic komasts are thought to be mere iconographic imitations of Corinthian images (with no local referent). In any case they cease to be painted in the mid-sixth century, long before the addition of comedy to the Dionysia. Even the comic mask has no direct antecedent in the iconography or literature related to the parade:  masks are best attested for beast choruses and satyrs, not human characters. So, while it is true that phalloi, costume and masks have a place in the early evidence for the worship of Dionysus Eleuthereus, those of comedy are distinctly different in shape and symbolism.71 There is at least room to believe that, instead of evolving ‘little by little’ out of phallic parades, these ‘ritual’ features were assembled and adapted specifically for comedy, either at the time comedy was introduced to the Dionysia or somewhat later. What of obscenity and personal ridicule? Despite Aristotle’s claim that early comedy had an ‘iambic form’, obscene language and personal ridicule are not found in comedy before Kratinos.72 Both ancient and modern scholars believe that Kratinos introduced these ‘ritual’ elements.73 Sommerstein thinks Kratinos’ Stone 1980: 100–2; Revermann 2006: 156–7. 69 First found on a fragment of an Attic red-figured cup, Painter of Heidelberg 211, Agora P 10798a, MMC AV3, dated by Moore 1997: 326, no. 1449 to 450–440 and by MMC to 430; Stone 1980: 127–43 (esp. 128). 70 Smith 2007: 49–56. 71 Foley 2000; Revermann 2006: 145–59. 72 Arist. Po. 1449b 8. 73 PCG T 11, 17–20, 22, 27–8, 30–1, 44; Rosen 1988: 37–58; Halliwell 1991b: 66 and n.71; Sommerstein 2004; Storey 2011: 1.xxv; Henderson 2013: 255; see also Storey 2010: 186 on Magnes. 68

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introduction of personal ridicule in the late 440s was the stimulus for the legislation against personal ridicule in comedy in 440/39 (see above).74 The new form of comic abuse differed from ritual abuse: the ritual abuse known from Attic festivals was probably generic, aimed at classes of people and not personalised like comic abuse.75 In her study of Kratinos, Emmanuela Bakola brilliantly identified a programmatic effort on the poet’s part to create a genuinely and specifically ‘Dionysian’ personality and poetics.76 Did he also introduce some of the other Dionysian forms and practices we find in Old Comedy?77 Might Kratinos have invented a ritual comedy as well as a more political comedy? In his argument that Old Comedy constituted a form of ritual laughter (above) Halliwell drew attention to the frequency with which Old Comedians introduce transgressive ritual into their plays. Halliwell argued that in doing so comedy staked a claim to ritual licence. For example, Aristophanes’ inclusion of a phallic parade in Acharnians succeeds in ‘dramatising a sort of (con)fusion of ritual laughter and Old Comedy which his audience could have felt as rooted in the underlying structures of cultural experience’.78 The purpose of the confusion, I  would argue, is less to offer the audience a reminder of comedy’s ritual sanction than to contribute to an ongoing and active construction of comedy as a sanctioned ritual form. Kratinos’ Dionysalexandros offers some striking examples of the ‘(con)fusion of ritual laughter and Old Comedy’. The papyrus hypothesis shows that the play began with a combination of parodos and parabasis by a chorus of satyrs: ‘When Dionysus appears they mock and jeer at him (ἐπισκώπτουσι καὶ χλευάζουσι).’ In the exodos the satyrs escort Dionysus to the Greek ships, promising not to betray him. The comedy is Sommerstein 2004: 157, n.35. 75 For the character of tothasmos: Halliwell 2008: 167–8; but some sources on pompeia and gephyrismos suggest that citizens were sometimes singled out:  D.H. 7.72.11; Hsch. s.v. gephyris (γ 469). The detail may have been invented to suit a theory of evolution towards Old Comedy. 76 Bakola 2010: passim, and esp. 13–80; cf. Ruffell 2002. 77 Bakola 2010; Csapo 2013a: 69–70. 78 Halliwell 2008: 208. 74

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framed by ritual processions escorting Dionysus, subjecting him to a ritual mockery at the beginning (χλευάζουσι implies a ritual form) and at the end leading him to ships (rather than on ships).79 Kratinos and the more political poets of Old Comedy are disproportionately represented among comedies known or suspected for Dionysian ritual content. These are:  Kratinos’ Boukoloi, Euneidai, Satyroi, Dionysoi; Kallias’ Satyroi; Ekphantides’ Satyroi; Lysippos’ Bakkhai and Thyrsokomos (if different); Aristophanes’ Babylonians (Asiatics introducing Dionysus?), the two rituals of Acharnians and the first half of Frogs (procession80 and in parodos Iakkhos procession); Phrynichos’ Satyroi and Mystai; Ameipsias’ Komastai; Ephippos’ Obeliaphoroi; Diocles’ Bakkhai; Antiphanes’ Bakkhai; Timocles’ Satyroi, Demosatyroi and Dionysiazousai. The earliest of these plays probably date to the 430s BCE and the latest belong to Timocles, a notorious fourth-century emulator of political Old Comedy.81 Other ritual inclusions have contents analogous in some way to Dionysian ritual:  Kratinos’ Thracians (orgiastic music, processions for Bendis), Arkhilokhoi (ritual mockery), possibly Malthakoi and Drapetides (transvestite or effeminate choruses); Aristophanes’ Wasps 1361–79 (ritual mockery, perhaps Eleusinian82), Seasons (orgiastic rites of Sabazios), Lemnian Women (ditto); Eupolis’ Baptai (transvestite chorus for orgiastic rites of Kotyto); Autokrates’ Tympanistai (orgiastic rites for Great Mother?); Antiphanes’ Karians (transvestite or effeminate chorus of orgiastic worshippers); Euboulos’ Orthanes (phallic rites?); and Timocles’ Konisalos (ditto). Once again Kratinos, political Old Comedians and their emulators dominate the pack. 79 POxy 663. For ὲπισκώπτειν and χλευάζειν, see Halliwell 2008: 163, 169, 184, 212. For a ritual interpretation of the scenes, see Bakola 2010: 264–72. 80 Bierl 2011:  335:  ‘Der Weg in die Anderwelt ist also durch Stationen wie in einer Prozession ausgezeichnet deren positive oder negative Charakterisierungen chorisch umgesetzt werden.’ Note in particular the recollection of the Return of Hephaestus with Dionysus leading a man on a donkey, in this case not a cripple but a man disabled by baggage that he holds on his shoulders. 81 Storey 2005: 205–8; forthcoming commentary by Kostas Apostolakis. 82 MacCary 1979 also saw imitation of ithyphalloi.

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Old Comedy is also our main source for some of the ‘new gods’ of the second half of the fifth century BCE, and a source which can be trusted to exaggerate the wild and transgressive character of their cults.83 The comic plots and/or humour frequently turn upon their legitimacy. The comedies could perhaps be read, not merely as confusion of comic and cultic transgression, but as an argument for accepting the licence of comedy as part of a ritual that is, by contrast, established and time-honoured. Kratinos and the political Old Comedians also account for most of the known appearances of Dionysus himself on stage. He is the major character in:  Kratinos’ Dionysalexandros, (presumably) Dionysoi, (more doubtfully) Boukoloi; Aristophanes’ Babylonians and Frogs, (presumably) Dionysus Shipwrecked; and Eupolis’ Taxiarchoi. He appears in: Strattis’ Phoinissai; Phrynichos’ Kronos; Plato’s Adonis; Ameipsias’ Apokotabizontes; Hermippos PCG F 77; a play by Demetrios; (presumably) the plays entitled Dionysus by Magnes and Krates II (PCG T 1); and in Polyzelos’ Birth of Dionysus. All are Old Comedy. The only fourth-century BCE plays that include the god, judging by their titles, are Dionysus in Training by Aristomenes, a poet classifiable as Old Comic, but possibly produced in 394; another Birth of Dionysus by Anaxandrides; the Dionysus of Euboulos; and a Dionysus by Timocles (whose emulation of Old Comedy we noted).84 Angus Bowie states that ritual inclusions of any sort are quantitatively greater and structurally more important to fifth-century comedy than fourth and his lists reveal the most politically engaged Old Comic poets to be also the most ritually engaged.85 The patterns are unlikely to be coincidental. Comedy, I suggest, was made to look more like its now time-honoured festival congeners in the hope that the licence gained by the parade might Parker 1996: 151–98, esp. 158–60, 196–7. 84 Dionysus is addressed in Ekphantides PCG F 4 (Satyroi), possibly also Hermippos PCG F 36, but that does not mean he is a character; conceivably he is prologue speaker for Strattis’ Atalantos PCG F 4. Useful survey in Storey 2005. 85 Bowie 2010:  160–73. On ritual in comedy generally:  Bowie 1993; Lada-Richards 1999; Riu 1999; Bierl 2009. 83

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extend its protection to comedy at a time when comedy was moving into the dangerously new territory of attacking powerful politicians and social institutions. The corollary of this is that Old Comedy actively promoted a theology of Dionysus as a god who licensed free speech, satire and an aggressive, sometimes ‘consequential’ mockery of individuals. This impacted on the comic portrait of the god in an unusual way. The Dionysus we find in such plays as Aristophanes’ Frogs, Kratinos’ Dionysalexandros and Eupolis’ Taxiarchoi is (unlike his creatures:  satyrs, ithyphalloi, choruses of Archilochuses and the like) not a mocker, but the passive and tolerant butt of the aggression and mockery of others, and bears (unlike his tragic counterpart) their slights and ridicule with exemplary good-humoured indulgence. God of choruses The single most ‘ritual’ element in comedy is the chorus. Two things about the Athenian Dionysia made its choruses distinctive. One is that, until drama was added to the program of the Lenaia, the Dionysia (City and Rural) was the only Athenian festival of Dionysus to include choral performances.86 Even outside Attica the Archaic Dionysus could not obviously or securely be called the ‘Lord of Choruses’, or ‘Choreut-Lover’, he became in Classical Athens.87 Peloponnesian komasts had connections with Hera, Artemis and Demeter as well as Dionysus, and ‘dithyramb’ seems to have shared some initial connection with Demeter, Apollo or Poseidon.88 Even the obscene songs with which Archilochus introduced Dionysus For the Lycurgan introduction of choruses to the Anthesteria, see above, p. 122. There were processional choruses for Iakkhos on the ninteenth Boedromion (IG II2 1078, ll. 29–30; Plu. Alc. 34.4), followed by choral dance at the Kallikhoron well (Deubner 1962:  75; Parker 2005:  348). Ithyphalloi were included, perhaps exceptionally, in 291 or 290 BCE, to receive Demetrius Poliorketes, who had established himself as a ‘New Dionysus’ (see Csapo 2008: 267–72, with further literature). 87 B. 5.50–1 (an Athenian dithyramb); Ar. Ra. 403. For various aspects of this debate on Dionysus and tragedy: Scullion 2002; Kowalzig 2008. 88 Komasts:  Csapo and Miller 2007a:  20–1. Demeter: Battezzato 2013; D’Alessio 2013:  129–31;  Prauscello 2013. Apollo:  Ceccarelli and Milanezi 2007; even at Athens a link with Apollo persisted: Wilson 2007a. Poseidon: Csapo 2003: 86, 91; Harvey 2004: 298–9. See further: Lavecchia 2000: 109–21. 86

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to Paros were allegedly performed at a festival of Artemis.89 Dionysus’ connection with comedy was also brittle. Syracuse, where comedy was invented, performed it in a sanctuary of Apollo (or Demeter?).90 We have in any case reason to doubt that Syracusan comedy used a chorus.91 It is perhaps significant that the chorus was the gist of Athens’ claim to the invention of comedy, in particular the etymology of komoidia from komos.92 The second distinctively choral aspect of the Dionysia is the sheer quantity and frequency of choruses:  literally hundreds of choruses in continual performance. Even if Athens produced a single chorus of phallophoroi, the city required its colonists to parade a phallos at the Dionysia.93 Moreover, we learn from an Athenian decree of 372 BCE relating to Paros that the category ‘colony’ was extended to all Ionian cities on the basis of the belief that they had originally been populated by Athens.94 As the requirement in the Paros decree is labelled ‘traditional’ (κ̣ατὰ τὰ πά|[τρια]), and as other inscriptions make it clear that all Athens’ allies in the fifth century were required to bring a cow and panoply to the Greater Panathenaia ‘as if they were colonies’, it seems likely that all the allies of the first and second empire brought a phallos to the Dionysia and a chorus to process it.95 At the height of the first empire, this amounted to two hundred phallic choruses armed with phallos poles massive enough to make their cities stand proud. The iconography of the Florence cup (Fig.  6.2) suggests that the choruses numbered twelve to fifteen (the six heavy lifters on the cup on the outward side of the phallos must notionally be matched by another six on the other side – to these we could SEG 15, 517.53–4. 90 Kowalzig 2008: 144. Cf. MacLachlan 2012. 91 Epicharmus and chorus:  see recently Wilson 2007b:  362–3; Dearden 2012:  276; Willi 2015. 92 Arist. Po. 1448a28–49b1; cf. Anon. On Comedy 1–7 Koster; Et. Magn. 764.1. See also n. 19. 93 IG I3 46, ll. 16–17 (ca. 445). 94 Rhodes and Osborne 2003:  146–49, no.  29. For Athens as mother city of the Ionians: Th. 1.12.4; Isoc. Panath. 43. 95 IG I3 34, 41–2; IG I3 71, 56–8; the requirement may only date from ca. 425: see Parker 1996, 142, n. 80 (with further literature). Note IG I3 71, ll. 57–8 βȏ[ν καὶ πανhοπ]λ[ίαν 89

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add the extra three figures, including an exarchos, on side A).96 Part of the show is to watch the men struggle under the massive weight of the object, while dancing, chanting and moving in step: but if the Florence cup is really a fair index of what might be seen, we have to wonder if the phallophoroi did not move in relays, as they do in an analogous procession in Japan where there are five relays of twelve men carrying a 400 kilogram phallos for 1.5 kilometres (somewhat shorter than the route of the Dionysia). This would give the parade 3,000 to 15,000 phallophoroi alone.97 There are also the choruses of ithyphalloi (Fig.  6.4). These are directly attested in the iconography from about 490 till 380 BCE, but their characteristic phallos stick appears in the hands of Attic satyrs from the late sixth century.98 From ca. 560 till 480 we also have evidence for beast/funny-walker choruses (Fig. 6.3). The impulse to categorise these as ‘comedy’ or ‘precomedy’ has since the 1880s been linked with the frequent animal names given to choruses in Old Comedy. But the images indicate processional movements and hint at little potential for developed narrative, let alone dramatic action. If the choruses have a thematic connection with later comedy, they also have a thematic connection with dithyramb,99 and it is perhaps best to name them simply komoi: like the other choruses of the parade they represent the transformative effect the presence of Dionysus has upon Athens’ inhabitants.100 Other processional performers are suggested by the Return of Hephaestus iconography (Fig.  6.1), the vase paintings of regimented satyr choruses mentioned above and the satyrs shown in accompaniment ἀπάγεν ἐς Παναθ]έναια τὰ με̣[γάλα] hαπάσας· πεμπόντον δ[ὲ ἐν] τ̣ε ̑ι πομπε ̑ι [καθάπερ ἄποι]κ[οι (if the supplement is sound). Csapo 2013a: 58, 2013b: 14. 97 Csapo 2013b: 14. 98 Csapo 2013a: esp. 54, n.42. The earliest textual attestation of this species of performer is in the Arkhilokhoi of Kratinos produced sometime between 435 and 422 (PCG F 16). It is possible, however, that a black-figured cup by the Heidelberg Painter, Amsterdam 3356, ABV 66, 57, Green (1985: 99–100, no. 1), shows an early group of ithyphalloi: see Csapo 2015: n.83. 99 Csapo 2003: 86–90; Rusten 2006: 51–4; Steinhart 2007; Kowalzig 2013; Hedreen 2013. Sceptical and cautious: Osborne 2008. 100 Csapo 2015. 96

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of the ship cart.101 The wearing of (satyr) masks is specifically attested for komoi that formed part of the parade.102 Obeliaphoroi (men carrying enormous loaves of bread on sticks) certainly performed in some way: their clownish personality and coarse humour is suggested by the claim that obeliaphoroi served as a derogatory term for workers and rustics.103 Ephippos found them interesting enough to name a comedy (and presumably a chorus) after them.104 Even ordinary citizens with no assigned function joined the parade and ‘danced’.105 Not only were there many choruses and choreuts, but along the parade’s roughly 2-kilometre path there were s­everal stations at which the choruses stopped for special performances. Xenophon tells us that in the Agora there were performances at every shrine and especially at the Altar of the Twelve Gods: there were probably still other stations before the ­theatre.106 By the second half of the fifth century BCE the parade provided many hours of continuous choral entertainment and must have occupied, together with sacrifices and the distribution of meat, the entire first day of the Dionysia. Dionysus’ reputation as god of choruses was secure by the last decade of the sixth century BCE, when competitions for lyric choruses, tragedy and satyr play were added to the Dionysia. But it is Old Comedy that forms the most chorocentric dramatic genre. Far from being a mere interlude, the chorus provides the basic ‘architecture’ of Aristophanic drama. His favourite plot of the hero with a grand idea for reforming society often turns on the persuasion of the chorus: it strings together the choral structures of parodos, agon, parabasis and exodos in a narrative sequence of obstruction, persuasion, comment and victory.107 We cannot say how typical 101 Csapo 2012 and above at n. 16. 102 D. 19.287; Aeschin. 2.151; Csapo 2015: 77–8. 103 Photius, Lexicon s.v. ὀβελίας ἄρτος 1 Porson. 104 Vase paintings assimilate them both to comic actors and to ithyphalloi:  Csapo 2013a: 74–7. 105 Aeschin. 1.43; D. 22.68 (though ἐξορχησάμενος may be entirely figurative – see Σ ad loc.) 106 Xen. Hipparch. 3.2; cf. Csapo 2015: 94–8; Csapo and Wilson forthcoming. 107 Good summaries by Zimmermann 2010: 460–3, 2014: 141–5.

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the Aristophanic structure is,108 but the greater importance of the chorus to Old Comedy is clear from its size (twenty-four choreuts as opposed to the twelve to fifteen of tragedy and satyr play), from the larger number of choral set pieces and from the use of a greater variety of metre and song than found in any other genre. Continuity with (or assimilation to) the parade can be found in the fact that three of the four most elaborate comic choral set pieces involve processional movement (parodos, parabasis and exodos). The parabasis, ‘a walking up alongside the audience’ to address them face-to-face, involves abusive odes directed against individuals (as Semos reports of the phallophoroi who ‘charged forward [towards the audience] and mocked whomever they chose’).109 Gods of competition and victory Old Comedy thematises competition and victory, themes only latent and underdeveloped in myths like Dionysus and the Pirates or the Return of Hephaestus. In doing so, Old Comedy develops a potentiality of the god that scarcely existed before 508 BCE when the theatre was built and the Dionysia’s first choral competitions took place.110 Comedy was much more openly competitive than other choral genres. Zachary Biles especially has shown how much the competition shaped both form and contents of Old Comic drama.111 Of particular interest are the comic choruses’ direct appeals for support to the audience and judges, or the shaping of the comic exodos into a victory parade for the triumphant comic hero, but one that contains a phallic element – an excellent example of ritual and political (con)fusions – as the hero frequently departs, as if in a wedding procession, in the company of the female personification of his political See esp. Revermann 2006: 299–319. 109 Parabasis:  Prolegomena Xa Koster; Heph. Enchiridion p.72 (Consbruch). Abuse: Eupolis PCG 99, 1–22 and Ar. Ra. 416–30, identified by Fraenkel 1962 as a remnant of an old ritual form, though this is disputed by Storey 2003: 142–3. Biles 2011: 227 and n.75 considers a connection with Eleusinian gephyrismos. 110 For the sychronicity: Csapo 2015. 111 Biles 2011; for Kratinos: Bakola 2010. 108

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quest. These victory komoi also confuse fictional and real competitions in that they merge with overt choral appeals to the judges and audience to grant them an occasion for a real-world victory procession.112 A similar convergence of Dionysian and competitive imagery takes place in the visual arts. A  striking example is offered by the fourth-century BCE monument of Karystios at Delos, which shows a crowing cock with a phallic head, a not too subtle allusion to the manner in which victorious cocks bugger and ‘enslave’ their rivals. The significant thing is that we know from inscriptions that the phallic cock was the icon of Dionysus himself as he was paraded at the Delian Dionysia.113 Athens shared this imagery:  the throne of the priest of Dionysus in the fourth-century Athenian theatre showed cockfights on either side.114 Indeed, the evidence suggests that comedy introduced these aggressively combative beasts into the Dionysian imaginary: the agon of Aristophanes’ first Clouds was staged as a cockfight; and two of our earliest images of comic performers are choreuts dressed as sexually excited cocks with ithyphallic spurs.115 Fighting cocks also came to symbolise the agon of the Rural Dionysia on the Athenian Calendar Relief. It is by crowing like a victorious cock that Dionysus marks the decisive victory of Aeschylus in Frogs 1384. Theatre art and theatre practice did much to develop the image of Dionysus as a victory god. Dionysian victory imagery spread from choregic art to other media. From the late fifth century BCE until Byzantine times victorious Dionysian choruses and actors, tripods and crowns appear on vase painting, wall paintings, mosaics and reliefs, especially for the decoration of tombs and party rooms.116 In practice, Dionysian 113 114 115

See Revermann 2006: 113–18; Biles 2007; Wilson 2007. Cockfights and Dionysian agon-symbolism: Csapo 1993. Miller forthcoming. The ‘beast chorus’ vase with a procession of placid-looking cocks notwithstanding (Attic black-figured amphora, Berlin F 1830). See Σ Ar. Nu. 889; Attic red-figured calyx krater, formerly Malibu 82.AE.83, and an Attic red-figured pelike, Atlanta 2008.4.1 (both illustrated in Csapo 2010a: figs 1.4–5). 116 Green 1995; Biles 2007; Csapo 2010b; Heinemann 2013; Biles and Thorn 2014. 112

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khoregiai became the supreme example of civic philotimia and philonikia.117 The dramatic contests of the Dionysia became the preferred venue in Greece for the announcement of civic crowns.118 Ambitious tyrants, monarchs and generals assiduously pursued connections with the Dionysia or Dionysus. Ancient biographers tells us that Dionysios of Syracuse hankered after a tragic victory in Athens in the same way that his Archaic predecessors struggled to achieve victory in chariot races at Olympia and Delphi.119 Alexander modelled his victory celebrations on Dionysus: he regularly celebrated his victories with, by preference, dramatic competitions; he is said to have led a victory komos invoking Dionysus after his defeat of the Persians; and in India he led a victory procession in direct imitation of Dionysus’ victory parade after his defeat of Asia.120 Alexander’s successors frequently emulated or impersonated Dionysus in the hope that they might share some of his reputation for unfaltering glory and invincibility.121 In the Hellenistic period Dionysus’ victory procession was construed as the first Dionysian parade.122 The parade in turn became a model for Hellenistic and Roman triumphs.123 Euripides’ Bakkhai names Dionysus the kallinikos (1147, 1161). ‘Undefeated’ is the constant epithet of Dionysus in Nonnos’ epic.124 But it was not just the parade that shaped the image of the Dionysian victory procession in Hellenistic times. The popularity of Hellenistic scenes of Dionysus’ victory komos that include Ariadne together with Dionysus in the victory chariot, in direct imitation of a marriage procession, probably owe something to the 117 Wilson 2000: 144–97. 118 Wilson 2000: 144–55; Wilson and Hartwig 2009; Ceccarelli 2010. 119 Duncan 2012. 120 Le Guen 2014; D.S. 17.72.4; Arr. An. 5.1.5–3.7, 6.28.1–2; Plu. Mor. 332a–b. ‘The truth is’, as Beard 2007: 316 succinctly puts it, ‘that the god’s exploits were modelled on Alexander’s, not the other way around’. 121 E.g. Demetrios the Besieger:  Csapo 2008:  271–2 (with further literature); Antigonus: Philostr. VA 4.3.2.10–12. See Le Guen 2001: 2.92. Roman generals and emperors: Antony: Csapo 2010a: 193; Caligula: Hdn. Ab excessu divi Marci 1.3.3. 122 Csapo 2013a: 76 and n.136. 123 Dionysia as model for Hellenistic triumph:  Kowalzig and Wilson 2013b:  25–6; Roman triumphs: Versnel 1970; Beard 2007: 315–18; Rutherford 2013: 418–23. 124 Nonnos 13.425, 14.288, 15.121, 30.326, 34.128, 40.280, 45.234.

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comic komos, with its easy blending of victory and wedding imagery.125 Comedy assumes a competitive Dionysus. Sometimes Dionysus behaves as a competitor (Aristomenes’ Dionysus in Training; Ameipsias’ Apokottabizontes?), or appears on ambitious quests, in disguise as a virtual actor, when, in Storey’s words, he is ‘forced to take on roles and tasks for which he is not naturally suited’.126 To judge from Eupolis’ Taxiarchoi or the Aeacus scene in Aristophanes Frogs (605–73), comedy liked to put Dionysus ‘on trial’, while at other times he takes on the role of arbiter and judge. Dionysus acts as judge of a beauty contests in Kratinos’ Dionysalexandros and of a tragic competition in Aristophanes’ Frogs.127 In a rare appearance on a West Greek comic vase Dionysus sits as a judge of female gymnastic dance.128 In the Athenian theatre his icon was placed front row and centre and his vote seems to have had a notional role in deciding the victory.129 The misnamed Ikarios reliefs celebrate his role as grantor of victory by showing him approach the successful comic poet carrying the victory ribbons.130 From arbiter of art and beauty he develops into an arbiter of taste. A far cry from the elemental and savage Dionysus of tragedy, we find a refined comic Dionysus discoursing on the virtues of fine wines or the proper conduct of symposia, or snobbishly showing off his erudite speech or facility for tragic quotation.131 The comic Dionysus of Frogs is the first critic to elevate the three great tragedians to the status of inimitable ‘classics’ they became in the fourth century BCE.132 Comedy helped build Dionysus into a god of discernment and high culture. Above all, he becomes an arbiter of music in the broad Greek sense of the term, which included most literary and 125 Boardman 2014: 22–5. 126 Storey 2003: 251. 127 Bakola 2010: 285–94. 128 Paestan calyx krater, Asteas, ca. 350; PhV2 80. 129 Marshall and van Willigenburg 2004: 91. 130 Biles 2007: 21. 131 Hermippos PCG F 77; Euboulos PCG F 93; Phrynichus PCG F 10; Eupolis PCG F 268. 132 Hanink 2011, 2014; Nervegna 2014.

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performance art. This was the beginning of a process by which Dionysus became the general god of musical and literary culture par excellence. All musicians (not just ‘Dionysian’, but singers, trumpeters, citharodes etc.) and poets and performers of nearly all genres (epic, monodic, prosodic, hilarotrogoedic, not just dramatists) became by the third century ‘Artists of Dionysus’.133 God of plenty The most obvious difference between the City Dionysia and other festivals is calendrical. One tends to lump Dionysian festivals together as ‘winter’ festivals. But there is, for example, a big difference between the Anthesteria and the Dionysia. The Anthesteria is oriented to the vinicultural year and, insofar as there is a focus, it is upon the opening of the pithoi and the consumption of the previous harvest’s vintage: the names of its first two days, Pithoigia (Opening of the Pithoi) and Choes (Wine Jugs), the existence of a drinking contest, dedications of wine cups and aetiological myths relating to the invention of wine make this clear.134 Wine is of course important to the Dionysia and Lenaia, but agriculture is not. The Dionysia is set at the beginning of the commercial year (and during the empire the virtual fiscal year). The connection between the beginning of the sailing season and the Dionysia was a cliché in antiquity. Far more important for the life of the average citizen in Athens was the fact that merchants could now bring their produce and allies their tribute. The Dionysia functioned to enhance the attraction by adding entertainments to what was surely one of the largest annual markets in the Mediterranean. The Dionysia ended four and a half months of limited maritime commerce.135 As the closure of the seas coincided with See Le Guen 2001:  2.104–30; Aneziri 2003:  207–15; membership of kitharodes wrongly disputed by Power 2010: 85, n.203. 134 Aetiology: Phanodemos FGrH 325 F 11. 135 Casson 1995:  270–3; Morton 2001:  255–65. Some recent literature (Davis 2001: 31–40; Beresford 2013) argues that maritime commerce in winter was more frequent than generally supposed. 133

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the termination of agricultural activity, this had consequences for the food supply. The threat of shortage was particularly acute in the fifth and fourth century BCE when more than half of the grain needed to feed Athens was imported from overseas.136 With scarcity came price-gouging. The price of grain rose sharply towards the end of the winter months, putting basic food supplies beyond many people’s reach. The grain law of 374 alleviated the problem by requiring that a twelfth part of the grain from Lemnos, Imbros and Skyros be gathered in Athens just before the closure of the seas, and that it not be sold in the market before Anthesterion, the last month of winter just before the Dionysia, and at a price agreed upon by the people.137 The Dionysia was therefore the end of a forced Lent and it is not surprising to find that food and material goods are one of the festival’s major themes. The parade displayed wealth and edibles.138 A bull ‘worthy of the god’ (presumably very beefy) led an estimated two hundred cattle provided by Athens.139 Colonists (i.e. allies) were required to bring a cow along with a phallos: in the mid-fifth century BCE this could add another two hundred cows or so to the parade  – a kilo of meat for 80,000 people.140 Other food was conspicuous. The obel-bread carriers paraded loaves of up to 157.5 litres of flour.141 This is clearly food for the eyes. Askophoroi paraded wine in skins made from whole goats that probably held 45–70 litres. The parade thematised abundance and plenitude. Free food and wine did not end with the picnic that followed the sacrifice of 136 Moreno 2007: 323. 137 Rhodes and Osborne 2003: 127 and no. 26; Stroud 1998: 73: ‘It seems evident that the prohibition about introducing a motion in the ekklesia to sell grain any earlier than Anthesterion was to make a certain quantity of wheat and barley available to the public at the time of year when maritime activity was normally reduced, existing supplies of grain were often low, and prices presumably approaching their peak.’ 138 For the processing of gold and silver, see Csapo 2013b: 7–9. 139 IG II2 1496, ll. 80–1; Wilson 2008: 97. 140 Rhodes and Osborne 2003: 146–9, no. 29, ll. 3–6; IG I3 46, ll. 15–17. Calculations: Csapo 2013b. 141 Pollux 6.75. The evidence of the askophoroi etc. is fully discussed in Csapo and Wilson forthcoming.

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the parade:  during the comic contests in particular choregoi saw to it that the audience did not want for food and drink.142 Plenitude is a principal theme of comedy. The comic fragments, particularly those collected by Athenaeus, contain a baffling number of lists of food.143 A  favourite motif of fourth-century BCE comedy is the monologue of the cook who announces his menu in dithyrambic flight: one character delivers a menu in a patter song consisting of thirty lines of edibles, followed, probably, by a wine list of equal length.144 Aristophanes’ triumphant exodoi are usually departures towards an implied or explicit victory feast (to which the audience is sometimes invited).145 Comedy itself can be metaphorically presented as a meal.146 Lists of food are significantly linked to a distinctly Old Comic type of plot that explores the theme of golden age plenitude where men enjoy the αὐτόματος βίος, a life where food and drink sometimes literally spring into their mouths, with no effort beyond enjoyment required of the recipients. Athenaeus tells us that these utopic plays began with Kratinos’ Ploutoi:  they include Krates’ Beasts, Telekleides’ Amphiktyons, Eupolis’ Golden Race (?), Pherekrates’ Miners and Persians, Aristophanes’ Birds, Ekklesiazousai and Wealth, Metagenes’ Thouriopersians, Nikophon’s Sirens and probably several others.147 Even when the plot does not turn on it, the utopic vision is pervasive in Aristophanes.148 Comedy designed a Dionysus to suit this aspect of the festival. Storey describes the comic Dionysus as ‘effeminate and luxury-loving … much averse to hard work and discomfort’, suiting the holiday mood of the recipients of the feast.149 The behaviour of participants in the parade probably inspired Philochorus FGrH 328 F 271: ‘throughout the contest wine is poured out for them [the audience] and dried fruit and nuts are passed around’. Cf. Ar. V. 58–9, Pax 962, Pl. 794–801. For the theorika: Roselli 2011: 87–117. 143 Especially Ath. 1.27d–8d, 6.267e–70a; Wilkins 2000. 144 Anaxandrides PCG F 42, 38–71; cf. Nesselrath 1990: 267–80. 145 See esp. Ar. Pax 1357–9; Ec. 1141–2, 1181–2; Wilson 2007a. 146 Metagenes PCG F 15; Ar. Eq. 538–9, Nu. 523. 147 Athen. 268d7–e6; Ceccarelli 1996:  111–59; Pellegrino 2000; Ruffel 2000; Storey 2010: 211–13. 148 Rosen 2010: 262–77. 149 Storey 2003: 251–2. 142

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our first image in Return of Hephaestus scenes of a drunken Dionysus, but Old Comedy is likely to have inspired the image of the lazy, drunken and pot-bellied Dionysus that is popular in the visual arts from the fourth century BCE onwards.150 By Mithridates’ day one had only to eat and drink more than anyone else to earn the nickname ‘Dionysus’.151 Dionysus is figured not only as the recipient, but as author of the festival’s abundance. Hermippos in the comedy Stevedores launches into a mock-Homeric hymn to Dionysus in which the god is assimilated to the merchant shippers who bring their wares to the Dionysia:  ‘Tell me now you Muses who dwell in Olympus how many good things Dionysus brings here to men in his black ship since the time he began to carry merchandise over the wine-faced sea’ – the fragment continues with a long list of food and luxury items, along with the names of the foreign ports from which they hail.152 Dionysus had a connection with the sea from the early myths of the pirates whom he turned into dolphins and taught to dance, or from his refuge into the sea and the arms of Thetis when attacked by Lycurgus, but the markets of the Dionysia were surely decisive for his reputation as a shipper, a maritime god and a bringer of food, wealth and luxury goods.153 It is this Dionysus, Lord of Plenty, that is represented on the famous Exekias cup (ca. 540 BCE): sailing lazily in a ship surrounded by leaping dolphins, Dionysus holds, notably, a cornucopia in his hand (a motif that is taken up by Classical and early Hellenistic art).154 Arguably it is Dionysus as bringer of plenty that is celebrated in the use of the parade’s ship cart, which Attic artists figure with a rigging of vines and sometimes lush clusters of grapes. Although Dionysus and Iakkhos have much in common (choruses, processions, exhilaration), comedy had a particular motive in linking its Lord of Plenitude with the mistress of Ar. Ra. 128, 200, 204; Brommer 1937: 208, fig. 8 (= ARV2 246 at bottom); Künzl 1968: 39–40; Anderson 1981; Willers 1986; Pochmarski 1990; Corso 2004: 85. 151 Plu. Quaest.conv. 642a. 152 Hermippos PCG F 63. Cf. the lists of food in Ar. Merchant Ships. 153 Kowalzig 2013. 154 Attic black-figured cup by Exekias, Munich 8729 (2044), ABV 146.21; Stewart 2013: 622–3, no. 7, fig. 8 and n.21. 150

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grain, Demeter, and her male companion Iakkhos. It is precisely in the aspect of ‘Giver of Wealth’ (πλουτοδότης) that we find Iakkhos ritually confused in Athens with the ‘son of Semele’.155 Though Orphic doctrine surely paved the way, the assimilation, as Parker notes, appears mainly in literature – indeed drama – not cult or iconography.156 Dionysus may have appeared as the god of the mysteries in Kratinos’ Boukoloi and Dionysalexandros. Aristophanes’ Frogs goes farthest in creating an almost seamless fusion of Dionysus with the chthonic deity and ‘the overwhelming impression that this celebration of the Mysteries is first and foremost in honour of Dionysus himself’.157 Outside of the Frogs, with its resurrection of Aeschylus and hence by implication also of Athens, the eschatological dimensions of Eleusinian cult are primarily of interest to comedy insofar as its utopic ideals are eternalised in the afterworld:  the speaker of the longest fragment of Aristophanes’ Tagenistai envies the dead their blissful plenitude; the chorus of Kratinos’ Ploutoi, composed of those Golden Race daimones whom Hesiod calls ‘wealth-giving’ (πλουτοδόται), brings spontaneous abundance to Athens from down under; the heroes of Pherekrates’ Miners more impatiently dig their way into the underworld to partake of the eternal feast.158 Theoric distributions doubtless added to the sense that Dionysus had indeed brought the plenitude of the αὐτόματος βίος. The Dionysia made the life of unstinting abundance a reality; comedy fed the fantasy that it could last forever. Conclusion Dionysus Eleuthereus played a disproportionately large part in defining the Athenian Dionysus and consequently the primary traits of the Dionysus received by later antiquity and ultimately by us. Dionysus Eleuthereus had no previous history worth 155 Σ Ar. Ra. 479. 156 Parker 2005: 349. See S. Ant. 1146–53; S. TrGF F 959.1–3; E. Ba. 725–6; Csapo 2008. 157 Bowie 1993: 228–53; Bakola 2010: 42–9, 260–72; Biles 2011: 223 (quotation). 158 Ar. PCG F 504; Ruffell 2000: 475–81, 484–5.

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speaking of:  he was possibly chosen to embody the spirit of a new civic festival, sometime in the early sixth century BCE, for precisely this reason. The parade gave him form, meaning and purpose. Then, some seventy or eighty years later, lyric and tragic competitions added their part. But it was comedy, introduced some two decades after tragedy, that picked up and developed the god of the parade. It is the parade that first made Dionysus a god of laughter, of phalloi, of obscenity, of music, of choruses, and a god who makes wine, milk and honey spring from the earth: other Attic forms of Dionysus had (apart from wine) little or none of this. Comedy developed these traits and gave this personality concrete form. I have given reasons for thinking that comedy had a special motive for doing so, namely that comedy wished to share in the licence the parade had acquired. I have also suggested that the motivation became particularly strong when comedy became overtly political and the need for the licence of ‘tradition’ became acute. It is for this reason that we see the most politically engaged comedians most active in dramatising what Halliwell calls the ‘(con)fusion of ritual laughter and Old Comedy’. But drama and especially comedy also added new features to the experience and the figure of Dionysus: he became the god of musical and dramatic competitions and competitors, a god of culture and discernment, and a god of victory. His role as a god of victory came partly from the fact that competitors celebrated their victories in his sanctuary, notionally as his guests and in his company, and partly from the fact that Dionysus himself had appeared on the comic stage as a questing hero, driven by a mad longing or ideal, and, sometimes in strange ways, shared the hero’s triumphant exit. Drawing on Orphic and Eleusinian cult, comedy also played its part in creating the mystic Dionysus as a god of victory over death and a god who presided over an afterlife for his initiates that had the characteristics of a never-ending Dionysia. I do not, however, think that ‘theology’ need be confined to propositions about the nature of a god or gods. When ancients (and moderns) speak of Dionysus they use a different 150

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vocabulary from that applied to other gods. One does not ‘know’ Zeus and better not try to ‘know’ Athena. But Euripides presents a Dionysus who speaks, as freely as does Dickens’ Spirit of Christmas, of worshippers who ‘know him’.159 One does not speak of ‘the Hermetic’ or ‘Artemisian experience’, but Dionysus is spoken of as an experience as much as a god. The knowing and the experiencing are linked. The real ‘theology’ of the parade and comedy is the experience of its inversions of everyday structure, breaking free from the constraints of the workaday world, and the experience of the abundance and sensual gratification of the carnival rite. Dionysus is in essence a god of play. The chorus of Frogs describes its choral dance for Dionysus as a ‘play-loving honour’ (φιλοπαίγμονα τιμάν), just as the god, satyrs, bakkhai, Dionysian dance and Kratinos are frequently described throughout antiquity as ‘play-loving’,160 and because play is always a matter of bending rules, there is always a creative and cognitive aspect to it. The entertainments of the parade were not rituals that fit easily into the standard definition of ritual as stereotyped and repetitive actions. Thus Scott Scullion overlooks what I  argue to be the special meaning and purpose of Dionysus Eleuthereus when he says that ‘an Athenian audience was not expecting to learn important things about the meaning and purpose of the festival of Dionysus … rather, festivals are primarily events at which ordinary participants enjoy themselves, eat and drink too much, buy things, watch processions and athletic contests and shows, and perhaps misbehave sexually’. I  have tried to show that food, drink, markets, processions, contests, shows and sexual transgression (along with obscenity, transgressive behaviour, creative play and shared laughter) are all especially and fundamentally Dionysian. Perhaps if we were dealing with a festival of Zeus or Athena, Scullion would be right, but Dionysus Eleuthereus is the festival experience. The Dionysia See e.g. E. Ba. 859–61, 1345. 160 Ar. Ra. 332; Anacreont. 3.3, 42.2; Anth. Gr. 2.1.360, 11.32.1 Anon. Hymnus in Dionysum (PRoss. Georg. 1.11) 1 Heitsch; Nonnus passim. 159

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was both the proof of his power (like the madness he created after Athens first rejected him) and also the description of his nature. In important ways the parade and Old Comedy combined to create the most coherent and enduring concept of Dionysus and the Dionysian.161

I am most grateful to Dick Green, Julia Kindt and Robin Osborne for advice and to Mario Iozzo and Penelope Minchin-Garvin for photographs and permissions. 161

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CHA PTER 7

PO LY T HE ISM AND T RAGEDY S I M O N GO L DHI L L

Lewis Campbell (1830–1908) is an archetypal intellectual light of the Victorian era.1 He came from a good family in Scotland, had an excellent academic training in Classics, first at the Edinburgh Academy, and then through Glasgow University to Oxford, where he was appointed tutor at Queen’s College; he returned to St Andrew’s in Scotland as Professor of Greek. He resigned his college fellowship in 1857 to become ordained as vicar of Milford in Hampshire, where he served for five years, and where he married. He had always maintained an interest in theology, and was a devout Christian, despite the Dictionary of National Biography, with characteristically evocative phrasing, recognising his ‘mildly bohemian lifestyle’. The combination of religious and academic life is paradigmatic of the period, as are the dual passions for Christianity and classical antiquity. Campbell published widely on both Plato and Sophocles in particular and wrote works which became standards for advanced school pupils and undergraduates – and which are still on some library shelves. He brought together his passions for Greek and theology especially in the Gifford Lectures of 1894–6 on religion in Greek literature – though he also published biographies of his friends Benjamin Jowett and James Clerk Maxwell.2 Campbell’s writings on tragic language in particular are still well worth reading, although he has not had the lasting influence of his great contemporary Richard Jebb.3 See Campbell 1914; Huxley 1908; Craik 1996 – who also wrote the current entry in the DNB. 2 Campbell 1898, 1897; Campbell and Garnett 1882. 3 Especially Campbell 1907. Jebb defeated him for the position of Chair at Glasgow. St Andrews in 1876 had only 130 students in the whole university and was threatened with closure (Craik 1996: 82). 1

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I begin with this potted biography of Lewis Campbell to provide the first steps of a context to help understand a remarkable comment on Sophocles’ Electra, which is my starting point for these reflections on tragedy and polytheism. Electra, wrote Campbell, is ‘dominated by divine law: a scheme imperfectly comprehended but bearing the impress of the Supreme Disposer’.4 At one level, this sentence is made up of three clichés of Victorian thinking. First, that the world and, by extension, any significant representation of the world, testifies to the order that God gives. Providence is a dominant and serious regime of comprehension, especially for the earnest years of the mid-century: Prime Minister Gladstone, the Grand Old Man of Victorian politics, published a pamphlet – of more than a hundred pages – which argued a way to reconcile Homer and the Bible through the dynamics of Providence, and, in the wake of Schliemann’s discoveries, it sold more than 100,000 copies.5 Second, this divine scheme cannot be easily or securely perceived by human beings. The reasons that justify the death, suffering and the miseries of good people are resolutely opaque, for all that the burgeoning circulation of novels delighted in punishing sexual transgression and other improprieties with a comforting narrative certainty that the world all too often seemed to lack. Third, the divine scheme was authored, regulated and enacted by a personal and loving God, whose justice was inevitable and true. The phrase ‘Supreme Disposer’ is a wonderful evocation of a Protestant theodicy which assumes that God does not play with human lives as wanton boys play with flies, but rationally and in a way which will be understood in time: God ‘disposes’ – that is, where any loss is not mere disposal, but an ordered distribution of punishment and reward.6 It is worth remembering that the charismatic religious intellectual F. D. Maurice, who inspired many Victorian thinkers from Charles Kingsley to Alfred Lord Tennyson, was Campbell 1904: 65. Cf., with a strong echo of Matthew Arnold, ‘He has a clear, untroubled vision of the facts of human life, and a deep sense of a Divine Power controlling them’, Campbell 1914: 220. 5 See Gange 2009. 6 ‘Disposer Supreme and Judge of the earth’ is the opening line of a hymn in Hymns Ancient and Modern translated by Isaac Williams, well-known member of the Oxford Movement, from an original by Jean-Baptiste de Santeuil (1686). 4

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sacked from his position at King’s College, London for wondering whether eternal punishment could be tempered by God’s mercy, an idea abhorrent to evangelical certainty that eternal punishment was necessarily an everlasting torment.7 Theodicy was a major moral force in regulating Victorian behaviour, in their own rhetoric and practice. Campbell here sounds indeed like a solid Victorian vicar. At another level, however, Campbell’s judgement is also likely to look to a modern reader like an extraordinary misprision of Greek tragedy’s evident polytheism. How could an ancient Greek play be fitted so simply and without cost to a Protestant monotheistic scheme? When a truly fine scholar makes what seems to our eyes to be a baffling, or even a self-evidently crass, statement, before dismissing it, we should hesitate to make sure we have done the work to understand how it could have come to be said. In what follows, I will attempt three answers to this question. First, I will explore how Campbell’s remark should be regarded as more than a trite or unthinking piece of late Victorian moralising Protestantism, and, indeed, can act as a sign of a thoroughgoing and prevalent Victorian comprehension of Greek tragedy and its place in the order of things. Second, and most briefly, I  will show how the influence of the type of monotheistic thinking Campbell evinces is still felt in modern criticism of tragedy. Third, I  will look at three elements integral to Greek tragedy, to explore the cost of such thinking on our understanding of the genre of tragedy and the place of polytheism within it. Campbell wrote what became his standard school text of Sophocles’ Electra with Evelyn Abbott. Both were celebrated scholars whose books formed the minds and habits of many a student in their writing and understanding of Greek. ‘[Sophocles’] purpose’, they write, ‘is to set forth a revelation of Divine justice, in the punishment of the guilty, the vindication of the dead, who have been wronged, and the restoration of the oppressed. This purpose is maintained by him with On Maurice, see Morris 2005 with further bibliography. 7

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perfect simplicity.’8 Electra is ‘absolutely in the right’.9 This is typical in its evaluation of the moral righteousness of Electra. So Arthur Gilkes, an influential headmaster whose lessons on tragedy were fondly remembered by his pupils, declares that Electra has ‘no sins’ and ‘has won the love of the audience by her patient faith, by her courtesy, by her sorrow’.10 ‘Courtesy’ is perhaps the last word modernist criticism would apply to Sophocles’ heroine – even Electra herself recognises that proper behaviour is impossible under her current circumstances (El. 616–21). A.  E. Haigh too determines that Electra seeks ‘righteous retribution about which there could be no doubt or ­scruple’.11 And many other such examples of the righteousness of Electra, despite her violent pursuit of matricide, could easily be assembled. But it is also a typical evaluation in that it places tragedy specifically within a religious framework: what counts is the revelation of divine justice. Although  – or perhaps because – there is in Sophocles’ drama no courtroom to determine justice, as in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, nor any speech by a deus ex machina as in Euripides’ Electra, nor any extended discussion of Apollo’s oracle, nor any appearance of a god, it is a trope of the extensive tradition of Victorian criticism of Sophocles’ Electra that the religious message of the demonstration of divine justice is the dominant purpose of the play. There is a specific intellectual background to this approach, which goes back to the towering figure of liberal Classics, George Grote. Grote wrote his hugely influential History of Greece in 1846. Grote’s History changed its readers’ lives. As E.  A. Freeman, the Regius Professor of History at Oxford, recalled, Grote’s work was ‘one of the glories of our age and country’: ‘to read the political part of Mr. Grote’s history… is an epoch in a man’s life’.12 The book was reviewed enthusiastically across the intellectual spectrum  – by John Stuart Mill, George Cornewall Lewis, A. P. Stanley – and became a 8 Campbell and Abbott 1886: 307. 9 Campbell and Abbott 1886: 312. 10 Gilkes 1880: 48. For more on Gilkes see Goldhill 2012: 202–4 (with bibliography). 11 Haigh 1896: 191. 12 Freeman 1856: 172.

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best-seller. It was to a good degree because of Grote that tragedy was read repeatedly within a specific Christian, religious history. Grote’s work has been brilliantly discussed by Frank Turner as a magisterial contribution to the politicisation of ancient history, which transformed the discussion of Athenian ­democracy.13 The conservative account of Greek history that had dominated the historiography before Grote had criticised democracy vehemently along the lines of Plato and his aristocratic chums as the rule of the mob, incoherent, unstable and prey to the corrupt forces of demagoguery. Grote’s history polemically re-established democracy as a positively valued system of liberty and creativity. But Grote’s discussion of myth and religion also had a profound effect on British and continental scholarship. Grote developed a critical, historical and rationalist approach to Greek myth, which drew on Niebuhr’s analysis of Roman mythography – itself a controversial work which was seen as a radical threat by conservative authorities – in which he sought to separate historical narrative from mythological legend in the ancient accounts of early Greece. Perhaps most importantly for my purposes here, Grote saw in Greek history a developmental model at work, in which myth was redrawn by Greek thinkers towards a higher conceptualisation of ethical and spiritual matters. Myth was a ‘mode of thought’, to be transcended eventually by philosophy in the progress of mankind. The reading of Sophocles was repeatedly drawn into the orbit of Grote’s developmental model. So Symonds’ Studies of the Greek Poets might ‘lead one to suspect that he wrote his lectures with Grote’s first volume open on his desk’.14 For Symonds, while Pindar had added to the old Homeric religion a ‘deeper and more awful perception of superhuman mysteries’, Sophocles in particular had added an ethical dimension. This dimension made religion ‘more impregnable within its stronghold of the human heart and reason, less exposed to the Turner 1981; see also Calder and Trzaskoma 1996. 14 Turner 1981: 100. 13

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attacks of logic or the changes of opinion’.15 He forced inherited myths ‘into new moulds such as their authors had never conceived’.16 Sophocles was a sign and symptom of the changing ethical status of mankind. This developmental model was fully Christian in its teleology. Evelyn Abbott, Lewis Campbell’s collaborator, was explicit in this religious, developmental model: ‘The Greeks did not allow the mythology which stood to them in the place of doctrine to restrain them from the endeavour to bring their conception of the Supreme Being into harmony with their conceptions of justice and law. Their religious conceptions became ethical at an early period, and continued to be so to the last, ever growing higher and higher as the conception of life and duty became more elevated.’17 Mythology as a mode of thought is explicitly set in the place of ‘doctrine’, the key Protestant institutional form. But the lack of doctrine did not prevent the Greeks conceptualising and reflecting on ‘the Supreme Being’, once again a monotheistic term, which is more suited to later Greek or to Anglican Britain than to the polytheistic fifth-century polis. The conceptualisation of a Supreme Being is specifically to be brought into harmony with a notion of justice and law – that is, theodicy with its sense of divine scheme of rewards and punishment is paramount. So, through religious thinking, ethics became more elevated, and a sense of duty, that key Victorian value, grew higher and higher. So Sophocles ‘accepts the mysterious fact that the guiltless do suffer, but seeks to explain it by taking a higher view of the nature of such s­uffering’.18 For Abbott, Sophocles is crucial testimony of a Greek journey towards reconciling abstract principles of justice and law with a notion of the Supreme Being. E.  H. Plumptre, eventually Professor of Theology at King’s College, London, was a friend of Maurice and of Frederic Farrar, headmaster of Marlborough and Dean of Canterbury, and was firmly within the same Broad Church resistance to both evangelical and Symonds 1879: 327, 427. 16 Grote 1846: 1.364. 17 Abbott 1880: 38. 18 Abbott 1880: 65. 15

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Tractarian Christianity.19 Tellingly, he wrote a synoptic account of how modern scholarship – including Maurice and Farrar – saw in Marcus Aurelius a ‘seeker after God’ and thus a longing harbinger of Christian monotheism to come. With an even more direct Christian teleology, Plumptre’s widely used book, The Tragedies of Sophocles, not only argued that Sophocles aimed ‘to turn [the mythology of Homer], as far as it could be turned, into an instrument of moral education, and to lead men upwards to the eternal laws of God, and the thought of His righteous order’– again the Anglican tones are not hard to detect, along with Grote’s developmentalism – but also saw in Sophocles ‘testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae’, ‘evidence of a naturally Christian spirit’ – the phrase the early Church Fathers used to rehabilitate certain pagan authors who deserved, they felt, a continuing place in the canon. Sophocles, concluded Plumptre, with a portentous turn into Greek, ‘may have become, to those who followed his guidance rightly, a παιδαγωγὸς εἰς Χριστόν, a “Guide to Christ” ’.20 For Christian writers, from the beginnings of Christianity, the status of the pagan authors was always an issue for negotiation. In Victorian England, Classics dominated the curriculum, while Christianity provided not merely a foundational institutional structure for British society but also the battleground where earnestness, spiritual value and notions of modern progress clashed with an intensity unparalleled since the Reformation.21 Consequently, how the Judaeo-Christian tradition and classical antiquity were to be brought together was a question that produced a great deal of speculative, evolutionary history, which entered public debate with considerable force. So, Bishop Westcott, normally a severely sober scholar, makes the connection between the Church and the institution of Greek tragedy absolutely explicit in a quite extraordinary manner. The tragedians are ‘national preachers’ in a ‘national temple’, he writes, and the ‘sermon’ of the Oresteia is ‘ “a On Farrar see Goldhill 2012: 258–64 with further bibliography. 20 Plumptre 1865: lxxxix, xcviii. 21 See e.g. Larsen 2011; Chadwick 1966; Bebbington 1988; Paz 1992. 19

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natural testimony of the soul” to the reality of sin and inevitable penalty which it carries in itself’,22 as, once more, tragedy testifies to the theodicy of sin and punishment. Aeschylus emerges as a bishop with a national pulpit, not wholly unlike Westcott himself, and the Oresteia appears as a testimonium animae naturaliter, and, though his translation of the standard phrase coyly leaves out Christianae, the ‘reality of sin’ can only be heard as the familiar trope of nineteenth-century preaching. The Oresteia, where Orestes, the matricidal murderer, is exonerated in court, is read as proof of the Christian certainty that sin will be punished. Sophocles is not, for Westcott’s specific version of this teleological Christian scheme, a truly religious figure, but Euripides  – bizarrely  – prefigures the Christian revelation in a startlingly extreme version of the developmental model:  ‘We can then study in Euripides a distinct stage in the preparation of the world for Christianity.’23 The word ‘stage’ tellingly evokes the stadial theory integral to so much nineteenth-century grand theorising about the development of society.24 We are now in a position to frame an understanding of Campbell’s easy turn to the Supreme Disposer. Sophocles and the genre of tragedy became in Victorian England a test case and demonstration of how myth was turned into a higher level of comprehension and expression through philosophy, spiritual value and ethical understanding. This is a narrative which has a Christian teleology, which makes it all the easier to assimilate into the educational establishments of school and university, with their close connection with the Church as an institution and with Christian values as principles of education. Grote’s liberal and intellectually revolutionary historiography became assimilated to an institutionally embedded and intellectually conservative normativity. The punishment of theodicy and the necessary justice of a personal God are the endpoints towards which the teleology is travelling, and it fills the rhetoric not Westcott 1891: 52, 94. 23 Westcott 1891: 140. 24 Marx, along with Tylor, McLennan, Frazer, are crucial to this turn, which becomes formative of anthropology: see Stocking 1987, 1995. 22

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just of Campbell but also of a range of Victorian intellectual writers on tragedy. It is fully part of the Victorian agenda to set Sophocles and tragedy within a Christian, and monotheistic, framework. It is fascinating to see the continuing influence of this thinking on modern scholarship. As I have discussed elsewhere, with a play such as Sophocles’ Electra there is across the twentieth century a certain continuity of critical evaluations in generations of handbooks, ever the most conservative of academic genres, even as the general interpretation of the play and its central figure has by the end of the century undergone a complete sea change.25 These judgements, however, from around the time of the First World War, have lost their embedding in the Christian teleology I  have been outlining. Even when the scholars indicate their active participations in the Church, there is no indication that a positive evaluation of Electra and her act of revenge entails a recognition of tragedy as a stage in human ethical development towards Christianity. So when Herbert Musurillo, a Jesuit priest who is best known for his studies of Christian martyrdom, writes in 1967 that in Sophocles Electra’s and Orestes’ actions are ‘perfectly in accord with both human and divine justice, and demanded by private feeling and decency’,26 there is no apparent attempt to assimilate Apollo to the Supreme Disposer, and no generalised connection between an assumed ideal of Christian ethics and the action of the play’s characters. One of the most interesting examples of this continuity of critical expression is to be found in the extremely influential study Greek Tragedy by H. D. F. Kitto (1897–1982), first published in 1939, but republished several times since, most notably in its 1961 new edition. This is a book that was important precisely because of the way in which it set itself against Victorian criticism in its focus on thematic analysis and the appreciation of dramatic form, as part of how plays create meaning. Unlike Campbell and the other critics with Goldhill 2012: 201–30. 26 Musurillo 1967: 104. 25

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which I began, Kitto, in line with most modern critics, regards Electra as a brutal play, and declares that the scene in which Electra, alone on stage with the horrified chorus, screams ‘Hit her again!’ as her brother murders their mother, is ‘a grim and bloody business’, just as Electra, no paragon of politeness, is a ‘harsh, unlovely woman, a credit to her mother’.27 Yet Kitto too finds a type of theodicy integral to the play’s meaning, and seeks for such an order to be fulfilled in the drama. Sophocles’ gods, he writes, ‘and Apollo their intermediary with men, are conceived as “the powers” who protect his dike’.28 That is, the proper and natural order of things in human affairs, moral and social, must right itself: ‘if the proper order is disturbed by some violence … it must, in the nature of things, restore itself, somehow’.29 The violent disturbance of order that is Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon must prompt an equal and corrective violent response – which annuls the first act of violence and restores balance. ‘It is the nature of things, and Sophocles invites us to see in this the working of a natural law.’30 Natural law defended by the gods, rather than a direct theodicy, is an elegantly rationalist, Enlightenment rewriting of Campbell’s scheme of divine order, both more visible and clear than God’s inevitable but obscure plan, and allowing the gods no more than the role of defending what is natural (Hume’s arguments on miracles spring to mind …). Thus, ultimately, justice is established but it is separated from any hidden divine will: the plan of God and the natural law are one. Sophocles ‘is demonstrating a law in things, that violence must produce its recoil; and the fact that the dike here is so grim and unrelieved is a measure of the hideousness of the original offence’.31 What I  find fascinating is the way in which even Kitto is drawn into the Victorian framing of the question – for all that he wholeheartedly rejects the standard Victorian answer, epitomised for him by Jebb’s introduction 27 Kitto 1961: 132–3. 28 Kitto 1961: 135. 29 Kitto 1961: 135. 30 Kitto 1961: 136. 31 Kitto 1961: 137.

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to his commentary on the play. Elements of the drama that a contemporary analysis might want to stress, such as the psychological costs of the consuming desire for revenge, the failure to ask questions of the need for violence, the very connection of violent action to violent result, the heroic assertion of self-will against social norms, are all subordinated to the Victorian question of the moral order of things. The Victorian monotheistic Supreme Disposer is replaced by an equally singular, inscrutable and inevitable Natural Law. This recognition that monotheistic thinking, which seeks to find a single, supreme authority to which moral questions can be satisfactorily posed and answered – God, Natural Law, the teleology of Christian development towards the Protestant Church – leads to my third section, namely, the costs of such thinking for the interpretation of tragedy. I  want to explore three central categories of agency and action, namely causality, theodicy and ethics. In each case, I will suggest that tragedy’s polytheistic thinking – its ordering of things – is incompatible with the monotheistic thinking established by Victorian scholarship and maintained throughout the twentieth century by its heirs. I will look at some well-known passages, not to offer new critical readings – indeed I shall be following what I intend to be taken as a communis opinio in each e­ xample  – but rather to explore the role of polytheism in the construction of the scene and an engagement with the notions of causality, theodicy and ethics. A foundational moment of the Trojan War and the system of mythic narratives that it produces is the sacrifice of Iphigeneia. The story of the girl sacrificed by her father, Agamemnon, to launch the Greek expedition is told in various forms by each of the tragedians. In Sophocles’ Electra, Electra’s passionate argument with her mother leads her to dismiss the event with disdain (El. 563–76). For her, Agamemnon was hunting in a grove of Artemis, shot a deer and boasted of his success, for which sin of pride Artemis delayed the fleet. ‘There was no other release for the army’, she states baldly (El. 574–6), ‘He was strongly forced to do it.’ The retrospective account allows for emotional distortion, rhetorical dismissiveness and wilfully 163

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selective comprehension of the event. Euripides dramatises the build-up to the event and with characteristically painful irony has the girl justify her own sacrifice on idealistic patriotic Greek grounds, an act set against the cynical political manipulation that has led to the killing.32 But it is Aeschylus’ narrative against which the other accounts inevitably resound, as it is the Oresteia through which Sophocles and Euripides repeatedly rethink the dynamics of familial and political violence. The chorus of Old Men in the Agamemnon offer a retrospective account which is marked by its juxtapositions and gaps. They sing  – authoritatively, as they tell us (A. 104)  – of the omen which launches the expedition, two eagles that kill and eat a pregnant hare. This is interpreted by the seer Calchas in characteristically dense Aeschylean language to indicate the eventual sack of the city of Troy, with the added fear (oion mê: A. 131) that some divine resentment might harm the expedition. The reason given is that (A. 134–7): ‘Reverent Artemis in pity resents the winged dogs of the father who are sacrificing the poor cowering creature with her young at the time of birthing: she hates the feast of the eagles.’ This language of sacrifice leads him to fear ‘another sacrifice’.33 He explains the cause of this future corrupt sacrifice (gar, 155) with an ominous, syntactically confused and imagistically overlaid expression of cause (155–6): ‘For there remains the fearful, backward rising again, house-ruling, tricky, remembering Wrath that revenges through children.’ Every aspect of this phrase establishes a structure of meaning that will turn out to run through the Oresteia: the pattern of fear, the repetitive action of events – and language – that rise up again, drawing us ever backward into the pattern of past causal dynamics, the threat of corrupt rule within the house, the deception that allows the murderous actions of the plot, the constant recollection of prior events as determinative of present disaster, the pattern of violent revenge taken by children or for actions against children.34 See Foley 1985 and, in general on Iphigeneia, Hall 2013. 33 See Zeitlin 1965 on the language of sacrifice here; also Lebeck 1971; Goldhill 1984. 34 See Goldhill 2004 for a fuller exposition of these lines. 32

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Yet this intricate and evocative sense of the complex patterns of causality is instantly followed by a change of metre and address as the chorus turn to reflect on Zeus. This passage is neither a prayer nor a hymn (though often described as such). It is rather a set of generalisations, which at the start echoes the language of hymnic formulas, and which offers a different type of explanation of the connection between events  – a divine pattern of ‘knowledge through experience/suffering’ (pathei mathos, 177)  and the ‘violent grace’ (charis biaios, 182)  that brings ‘restraint even to the unwilling’ (180–1). The language is no less dense and obscure than Calchas’ prophecies, but where Calchas is attempting to articulate the meaning of a particular omen for the life of the household of Agamemnon and the Greek expedition, the chorus here express a general patterning, a general rule of how events can be seen to cohere. This in turn leads into the story of Agamemnon faced by the need to sacrifice his daughter, and – in famous words – the king’s willingness to ‘don the yokestrap of necessity’ (218). There are three points that I  wish to draw from this very brief account of a celebrated passage of lyric. The first is to note the resolutely non-Aristotelian pattern of causation. The eagles are an omen sent by Zeus, Artemis is angry at them doing what eagles do in hunting, and the result is that Agamemnon is faced by the need to kill his daughter. It is certainly hard to locate any sense of human error that leads to punishment. What’s more, the requirement to sacrifice seems to arise from Calchas’ figurative language of sacrifice  – and not from any divine command or human transgression. There is a double sense of causation – on the one hand, the constancy of an ancestral violence in this particular house where deceit and angry revenge persist, and, on the other, the constancy of a general pattern of action where ‘the violent grace of divinities’ leads to a form of restraint or knowledge.35 Yet both patterns of causation are not only articulated in syntactically and semantically overwrought expressivity, but also juxtaposed to each other baldly. There are multiplying and potentially 35 On ancestral fault see now the outstanding study of Gagné 2013.

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conflicting causal dynamics evoked, as the chorus narrates the events on which the tragedy is founded. Second, however else the patterns of causality unfurl, there is a conflict of forces from within the divine sphere. The eagles are the ‘winged dogs of the father’, an omen sent by Zeus, who sent the expedition (62); yet Artemis resents the omen. Calchas calls on Apollo the healer (146) to soften the potential violence of the threat of a corrupt sacrifice. The outrage of a human sacrifice appears to be demanded by a goddess. This conflict between divine forces will be fully dramatised when Orestes is prosecuted by the Furies and defended by Apollo before a court run by Athena and with a jury of Athenian citizens. As Apollo has demanded the murder of his mother, so the Furies demand punishment for that act. To take a further well-known case, in Euripides’ Hippolytus, Aphrodite opens the play by stating that she is outraged because Hippolytus does not respect her in his refusal to have sex  – an attitude which he explains through his devotion to Artemis, a stance apparently supported by Artemis at the end of the play. When Hippolytus is pulled apart by his horses, a fate that is explained by modern critics not merely as the fulfilment of the etymology of his name, but also as an image of the dissolution of his self, pulled apart by conflicting internal forces, this is seen as the mirror of the two goddesses’ conflicting demands.36 Conflict from within the divine sphere enacted out in the human sphere is integral to tragic narrative. This observation leads directly to my third point. The multiple forms of causality and the conflict from within the divine sphere take shape within a particular narrative form. In the parodos of the Agamemnon, the unexplained arrival of the omen and its analysis is juxtaposed to the reflection on Zeus, which is juxtaposed to the drama of Agamemnon’s response. The juxtapositions are stark, and the gaps in the story mark precisely where one might expect causal transitions to be, at least in a simple linear pattern of cause and effect. Conflict and doubt are expressed in and through the disjointed narrative 36 See Zeitlin 1996: 219–84; also Luschnig 1988; Goff 1990; Segal 1993.

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structuring. Polytheism is not fully resolvable to a hierarchical ordering of divine authority but depends on conflicting powers and demands from within the divine sphere. The world full of gods fully informs the causal patterning and the narrative structuring of Greek tragedy. This sense of conflict is strikingly evident when we turn to my second topic of theodicy. For Bishop Westcott, the end of the Oresteia was testimony to the inevitable and proper punishment of sin. Yet here in the court where the case (dikê) is precisely debated by gods (theoi), and indeed, by the self-proclaimed god of truth, Apollo, it still needs Athena’s divine casting vote to reach a decision after the jury’s voting. Even after that, it needs her powers of persuasion for the narrative to reach its closure. That is, even when a play does appear to mark closure precisely through divine expression of justice, the closure requires persuasion of other divine forces – the recognition of conflict overcome. But it is in the dramas of Euripides where theodicy is perhaps most expressly problematised. The end of his Electra, for example, brings down Castor as deus ex machina to deliver one of the most troubling of expressions of divine justice. In language that recalls the Oresteia’s fissuring of the semantics of dikê, the god declares of Clytemnestra’s murder (1244): ‘She, then, has received what is just (dikaia), but you did not do what is just.’ If Clytemnestra deserved to be punished for killing her husband, this cannot exonerate Orestes from recognition that matricide is a crime. A woman’s just punishment can be a son’s unjust crime. This judgement prompts Castor almost to rebuke Apollo, on whose oracle’s advice Orestes had acted (1245–6): Apollo, Apollo! – But because he is my lord, I am silent. He is wise, but he gave unwise oracles.

The silence is a transparent veil of reproach, based on an observed hierarchy of authority challenged by the very comments that follow. According to this god’s authoritative response to the play’s drama, a criticism of Apollo’s authority is not to be uttered. His final apophthegm fissures the very language of authority. Apollo is sophos – he has the knowledge 167

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and status to be called authoritative  – but the utterances he produced as authoritative for humans – his oracles – were not sopha – authoritative in knowledge and judgement. What is more, Castor goes on to declare that Orestes will go to Athens, as in the Oresteia, where he will be successful in escaping punishment, precisely because Apollo instructed him to commit the murder. That is, the authoritative speech of the god lays down that the first trial for murder will exonerate a man whom the god has just declared to have been guilty of doing injustice, because he followed an oracle which he has just declared to have been not wise. At very least, there is a sense that the order Castor brings to events does not fully remove all moral qualms. Theodicy here is formed within a conflict between gods and an uncertainty about the relation between the institutions of authority and justice and the principles they are designed to uphold. The opening of the Troades is equally brutal in the connection between divinity, conflict and the consequences for human agency.37 Athena approaches Poseidon after the fall of Troy, and indicates to him that she has now changed her allegiances. They have fought on opposed sides through the war, but now she is angered at the Greek behaviour, not just in the desecration of her temple by the rape of Cassandra by Ajax in it, but also in the failure of the Greek authorities to take any action against him. Poseidon’s response, however, is striking (E. Tr. 67–8): Why do you leap thus into different moods at different times, And hate too much, and love whomever you happen to?

Athena, the goddess of Athens, is seen by her uncle Poseidon as unstable and violent in her emotions – and he is all too willing to help her in her plan of destroying the returning Greeks. Here is punishment by the gods for transgression  – but it is placed under the sign of an almost arbitrary changeability of divine support. This is the opening scene of a play, each scene of which is concerned with the potential for reversal in human happiness, and which stages such reversals in misery as a prelude 37 See Croally 1994.

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to the anticipated destruction of the play’s present victors.38 Furthermore, in the final and climactic agon, where Helen and Hecuba debate Helen’s guilt and the causes of the Trojan War, Hecuba dismisses Helen’s claims of divine involvement in human action as mere self-interested rhetorical feints (E. Tr. 963–1025). Her own rhetorical flair is undercut by the play’s opening. The Troades juxtaposes its brief divine prologue, where the gods anticipate their punishment of humans, with human attempts to explain the violence and misery of human experience with uncomprehending rationality. The dramatic form of the divine prologue separates the divine action from the human experiences, as the humans attempt to understand the interaction of the divine sphere and their own suffering. Here, too, there is what we could call a polytheistic narrative structure, where the very narrative shape is an expression of the thematic concerns of polytheistic causality and theodicy. With theodicy, too, we see that conflict and change is integral to tragedy’s polytheistic dynamics of transgression and punishment, as well as to the disjunctions between competing rhetorics of explanation. Polytheism’s theodicy is in stark contrast with the montheistic thinking that finds an inevitable natural law or a Supreme Disposer as the transcendent and single source of authority for the play’s sense of justice and order. Not only are nomos and phusis competing models of explanation in standard Greek explanatory thinking of the fifth century, but the polytheistic system also constantly maintains conflict, difference, competition at the heart of divine power and its interactions with human beings. This discussion leads inevitably to my third topic of ethics. It is essential to Christianity that there is an ineluctable link between its idea of God, its religious texts and human ethics. How to behave, from the most mundane forms of social interaction to the grander interactions of war, marriage and politics, is framed as a question within a specifically Christian understanding of morality, and defended and debated as such. Tragedy as a genre, as we saw, was comprehended in nineteenth-century criticism as a stage within a Christian, teleological and ethical 38 See Croally 1994.

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development of humanity. Yet this essential monotheistic connection between divinity, religious doctrine and ethics is far harder to demonstrate within tragedy’s polytheism. Euripides’ Bacchae is a play with close connections to Christianity. It was reworked into the twelfth-century Christian text Christus Patiens, and it is easy to see that a divine figure who has a mortal mother and who is denied recognition in his own country, despite his miracles and spiritually transformative promises, could be especially evocative for Christian readers. Yet the very central dynamic of the Bacchae points in quite a different direction. Certainly the idea of God testing his human worshippers is a common trope of Victorian and earlier Christianity, but in the Bacchae we are presented with the far more challenging image of a god who enjoins and stage-manages the ethically abhorrent act of a mother and her sisters dismembering her son with their bare hands. Corrupt sacrifice is used in tragedy repeatedly as a notion to image transgressive violence.39 Here such transgressive violence is demanded by the god whose rites are thereby corrupted. As with Castor’s criticism of Apollo’s unwise oracles in Euripides’ Electra, so in the Bacchae divine injunction can be in opposition to the norms of ethical behaviour. Now, there is nothing special to polytheism in the misuse of divine examples. The Nurse in Hippolytus can quote the example of Zeus to encourage Phaedra to commit adultery, much as there are a string of dodgy clergymen in Victorian novels (and no doubt in Victorian society too) who can cite scripture in a self-serving or morally abhorrent fashion. But in tragedy, gods can speak for themselves. And when they do so, the connection between divine pronouncement and human ethics is strikingly problematic. Take the case of Athena in Sophocles’ Ajax. As is well known, in Sophocles’ extant plays it is very rare indeed for a divine figure to appear at all, in vivid contrast to Aeschylus’ Oresteia, say, with its divina comedia or Euripides’ repeated divine prologues and dei ex machina. Herakles, the hero, appears at the end of the Philoctetes, and directs the human characters 39 See Zeitlin 1965; Foley 1985.

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back onto the track of the myth of the Trojan War; but otherwise only Athena in the Ajax is staged, and it is quite likely – though this is disputed by stagecraft critics – that she remains unseen to the audience in the theatre, as she does to Odysseus onstage. Rather, in Sophocles’ dramas, divine pronouncements are regularly mediated through human agents and their forms of multiple misrepresentation or incomprehension.40 Now, in the Odyssey, Athena and Odysseus have a close and bantering relationship, which is in evidence here too in the tetchy discussion about whether the goddess should bring out the maddened Ajax in the sight of the less than straightforwardly brave Odysseus, but in the Ajax there is a fascinating disconnect between the goddess’ ethical pronouncements and their reception by the hero. So, after Ajax has retreated inside his tent once again, Athena turns to Odysseus and asks (118–20): Do you see, Odysseus, how great the power of the gods is? Who, I ask you, was either more careful in thought than this man, Or proved himself better at doing the right thing in a crisis?

Athena declares that what has been on display before Odysseus has been the overwhelming power of divinity that has turned a great man to a humiliated victim. But Odysseus does not see things quite the same way (121–6): I don’t know anyone. But I pity him The wretched fellow, although he is my enemy, Because he is yoked to a terrible fate, And in this I regard his condition as no more than my own. For I see that we are nothing more than Images those of us who are alive, or a fleeting shadow.

The goddess asked him to see (horas, 118), but Odysseus sees (horô, 125) something else: he sees not the greatness of the gods but the weakness of humans, a fate shared by Ajax and himself. He allows Ajax to be his enemy, but none the less finds their kindred state more insistent. The battle between them had been about status and glory – the right to inherit the arms of Achilles and to be recognised as the greatest warrior after Achilles. But now Odysseus recognises that mortality limits such claims 40 See Segal 1981 and in general Bushnell 1988.

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in a way which follows Achilles’ own self-recognition in the Odyssey’s depiction of the underworld. ‘Is not the sweetest laugh to laugh at an enemy?’, Athena had asked (79). It would seem that this is not such a moment of triumph after all. Indeed, although Athena closes the scene with a resounding sententia, ‘The gods love the sensible, and hate the bad’, which might seem easy enough to agree with, the rest of the play shows how over-simplified such an expression must seem, when it is so hard to know what it is to be sôphrôn, ‘restrained’, ‘self-controlled’, ‘sensible’, or who is in fact ‘bad’, ‘poor’, ‘not one of us’. There is, in short, a contrast here between Odysseus’ nuanced response to a once great warrior’s downfall and Athena’s more brutal assertion of divine power and the pleasures of triumph. Perhaps the most ethically intricate of Sophocles’ plays is Philoctetes, which revolves around the breaking of and then failure to restore trust, the relationship between overwhelming rage and self-destructiveness, and the dynamics of commitment to authority and the collective against the passions of individual achievement and the partiality of self-interest.41 It dramatises the impossibility of persuading the hero Philoctetes to give up his hatred even to be cured of a crippling and disastrous illness – an impossibility resolved only by the entrance of a divine figure, who can transcend the human contentiousness. Herakles enters to make possible a conclusion in line with the inherited tradition of both Neoptolemus and Philoctetes being present at the sack of Troy (1409–44), but it is worth underlining that, before his appearance, references to the gods fall into very familiar and simple patterns. There are a few prayers – Odysseus to his familiar tutelary divinities, Hermes and Athena, for success (134–5); the chorus to the Earth and then to Sleep, to ease Philoctetes’ pain (391–402, 827–32), for example. There are appeals – to Zeus Hiketesios as Philoctetes supplicates Neoptolemus (484); or ‘by Zeus’, as a standard rhetorical intensive. But, there is no moment in the extensive, heated and articulate intellectual and emotional discussion of what the correct way to behave is, in general or in specific cases, in which any character appeals 41 See Segal 1981; Whitlock Blundell 1989; Goldhill 2012.

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to the gods by way of making an ethical argument. Perhaps it could be argued that an appeal to Zeus Hiketesios in a supplication is an inherent argument – but the appeal is attached solely to the moment in which Philoctetes asks for compliance (neuson), and it echoes the great scene of supplication at the end of Iliad 1 when Zeus does indeed nod, as much as constructing any ethical case. Ethics is a matter between humans, it would seem, and doing the right thing here relies on human values and claims: man is the measure. The oracles which motivate the action come through human mouths and are relayed with different emphases on each occasion they are told. The only piece of ethical advice that Herakles insists upon ex machina is at the end of his speech, when he proclaims (1440–4): ‘Take note of this, when you destroy the land, show piety towards the gods, since Zeus, the father, thinks all else secondary. For piety does not die with a man. If he lives or dies, his piety does not perish.’ It is precisely at the fall of Troy that Neoptolemus, in a famous act of transgression, slays Priam at an altar. The one piece of divine ethical advice, ironically enough, is destined only to mark human moral collapse. In short, it is possible in the polytheistic world of tragedy to allow a god to deliver a speech of moral authority, to ironise and manipulate such authority, to have a god appear brutal, oversimplified or cruel, or to disassociate ethical behaviour from any specifically theological or divine injunction. This sheer range of interaction is fully part of polytheistic narrative. By way of contrast, it may seem telling that in nineteenthcentury Britain it was actually against the law to attempt to represent Jesus on stage. Passion plays, a Catholic institution of the Continent, allowed Jesus no words but those directly reported in the Gospels. Oratorios in a similar way used narrators and scriptural texts to construct an authorised narrative. Ethics were inherently connected to religion, and religious ethics found their source and justification in the word of God represented in the Holy Scriptures. To represent God otherwise is to challenge the foundations of such order. To write even a prose Life of Jesus was to enter a minefield of contested authority, as Strauss, Seeley, Renan, Farrar and others 173

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wilfully found.42 Christian monotheistic commitment is to a single truth in a single if multiply-told narrative. As Gregory of Tours says in the late sixth century, we should say ‘Life’ for a collection of different biographies, rather than ‘Lives’, because (PL 71.1010) ‘although there is a diversity of merits and miracles, nevertheless one life of the body nurtures all men in the world’.43 The particularities of a saint’s existence are interesting to the hagiographer ‘only insofar as it serves the ideal of sameness’.44 The agenda of Christian biography is to provide the master version of the one Christian life. Tragedy’s representation of divinities, talking and offering contested and engaged ethical commentary on an action in which they participate, and tragedy’s profoundly different retellings of the foundational stories of Athenian culture, are fundamentally alien modes to the Christian monotheistic style of narration and the theological ideology which grounds it. Since structuralism found a way to talk about polytheism as a dynamic system  – a model adopted, if adapted, by almost all serious scholars of Greek religion these days  – it would seem crass to analyse a single god or goddess as ‘the god of …’, without reference to the interrelated divine forces and representations in which such a sphere of divine influence takes shape. Similarly, it would seem historically naïve these days to analyse the pervasive institution of sacrifice with a Christian supersessionist dismissal of the seriousness of such religious rites. Yet it is striking how much contemporary criticism of fifth-century tragedy still finds its barely acknowledged roots in a Christian monotheistic tradition – which itself finds support in an Aristotelian reading of tragedy without a city and without the gods, where causality can be carefully reduced to the four aitiai with a Prime Mover comfortably behind things, like a Supreme Disposer. In such a critical tradition, it is the intricate, over-determined, multi-causal complexity of Aeschylus’ world that seems to need accounting for, or the possibility of conflicting and oversimplified demands of the divinities, or the See Pals 1982. 43 Quoted and discussed by Cox Miller 2000: 221–2. 44 Cox Miller 2000: 221. 42

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divorce between ethical action and divine authority – yet that is the world of Greek tragedy’s polytheism. Artemis in Euripides’ Hippolytus turns to Theseus and asks daknei se mûthos, ‘Does the story bite you?’: she tells him how he, as a human, has been misled by a goddess’ anger at his son, and has thus cursed him to death – a divine honour granted him by his father, Poseidon. She promises that she will kill one of Aphrodite’s favourites in return. This agonistic and conflicted dramatic scene hardly sits well with monotheistic expectations of causality, theodicy and ethics, but to be overly surprised or dismayed by such a moment is to allow such expectations to distort tragedy’s polytheistic framework. In a community where polytheism is the familiar horizon of expectation, these multiple and conflicting causalities and violent interactions deepen an audience’s awareness of the complexity of the dynamics of agency and action, but do not provoke the search for a monotheistic, monocausal response – which is so common a reaction of critics who are writing from within a monotheistic framework. Polytheism and its representation in tragedy cannot be reduced to a ‘divine apparatus’: it is absolutely integral not just to the framework of the city in which tragedy is performed, but to the very forms of tragedy’s agonistic narrative. Indeed, where much modern criticism has worried whether Christian tragedy is an impossibility, specifically because of the ever-present promise of redemption within Christian theology,45 it might be better rather to look at how monotheistic thinking itself is a bar to appreciating the essentially conflictual, contested and unresolved narratives of polytheistic causality, theodicy and ethics that Greek tragedy presents.

45 See most influentially Steiner 1961; Williams 1993.

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CHA PTER 8

G O D S AND M E N IN ANCIEN T G R E E K CO NCE PT I ONS OF L AWG IV IN G HA NNA H  WI L L E Y

Julia Kindt, in her recent Rethinking Greek Religion, highlights a theological tension, which she sees as central to Greek conceptions of divinity. Drawing on Vernant’s discussion of the ‘problem of the divine body’, she asks: ‘Is not the very point of divinity to be supernatural, situated outside the human sphere and its corporeal mode of existence?’ Kindt identifies a tension between this otherworldly nature of the gods and the desire to embody these gods in material representations, which render them more tangible, intelligible and accessible to human agents.1 This problem arguably points to a broader theological tension: how and to what extent are supernatural gods implicated in and made to frame and permeate human endeavours and human experience? In what ways are gods like and unlike men? In what follows, I  will explore the manifestations of this kind of theological problem in the domain of Greek thinking about lawgivers and lawgiving. What sort of agency and authority is necessary for legislating? In the opening lines of Plato’s Laws, the Athenian stranger asks his interlocutors, ‘is it a god or some man … to whom you ascribe the authorship of your legal arrangements?’2 Echoes of this Platonic enquiry are found time and again in literary treatments of the early 1 Kindt 2012: 157, see Vernant 1991: 27–49. 2 Pl. Lg. 624a. Some have seen Plato’s own, eventual response to this question as a resounding rejection of the divine-origin understanding of legal authority (e.g. Stalley 1983). Others prefer to emphasise his reinterpretation of the nature of this ‘divine influence’ (e.g. Nightingale 1993: 284–5; cf. Welton 1995: 53ff.; Schofield 2003: 8–9; Brague 2007: 27). It seems to me that Plato very much keeps alive in his presentation of the ideal lawgiver and his elaboration of a law code for Magnesia both strands of legal authority, the human and the divine, and indeed a certain measure of ambiguity between the two, cf. Welton 1995: 53, 63; I return to this point below.

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lawgivers. Are the early lawgivers mortal or divine? What is the nature of the cooperation between god and mortal legislator? Are laws themselves mortal or divine? We shall see that these questions constitute a recurrent preoccupation in Greek thinking about lawgiving, in both literary traditions and the inscribed laws of the poleis.3 In approaching Plato’s question, two overlapping strands of enquiry present themselves. On one level we will ask in what ways human and divine agencies coexist and interrelate in conceptions of the process of lawgiving. If both god and man are involved, how is the balance of agency between them approached? On another level, Plato’s enquiry raises the question of the lawgiver’s identity – is it mortal or divine? What is at stake in this question and how permeable is this boundary? We will find that responses to these concerns are rarely, if ever, straightforward. Instead we find flexibility and indeterminacy. Not only are different responses offered in different contexts and at different times but the responses are often themselves non-committal and open-ended. Indeed, even when a direct response is given by an author  – Cleinias responds to the Athenian stranger that the Cretans’ lawgiver was in fact a god – the alternative hovers implicit in the background. Once the two possibilities are raised, neither is easily forgotten and, above all, the terms of the dilemma are reinforced. We will find that for Greek thinkers legislation is often a product of mortal and divine interaction. Rather than strict alternatives or a simple division of labour, divine and mortal agency frequently exist side by side and often complement and shade into one another, both conceptually and linguistically. For In the course of this chapter, I  will discuss sources from the Archaic through to the Roman period. I  am interested in the later lawgiver traditions not as repositories of supposed historical truths but as cases in their own right of Greek reflections on lawgiving and lawgivers. Again, when integrating into my account such later sources as the lawgiver traditions in Plutarch, I am not suggesting that the particular conceptions on display in them can be simply read back into earlier periods. Rather, I am interested in exploring in a variety of sources from different periods different responses, which display certain profound continuities of approach as well as distinctive features, to what is recognisably the same theological dilemma (as outlined in this introduction) situated in a broadly shared theological framework. 3

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Demosthenes, as we shall see, every law (nomos) is at once ‘an invention and gift from the gods’ and a ‘judgement [or ‘decree’ (dogma)] of wise men’.4 Demosthenes further expands on this characterisation of law as follows: law is common (koinon) and fixed (tetagmenon) and applicable to and obeyed by everyone; it seeks always that which is just and fine and advantageous.5 Law, in this conception, transcends and is independent of any of its particular implementations, embodying universally applicable and permanent principles of justice. It is not hard to see how the superiority of the gods in foresight, knowledge and regulatory capacity would offer unique help in the effort to prescribe in advance, and guarantee the authority of, general rules which will apply to a myriad of as yet unforeseen circumstances. The importance of appeals and references to the involvement of the gods in the sphere of lawgiving does not, however, reside only in their usefulness for achieving certain desirable social or other ends. Very often, the involvement of the gods is not sought for a purpose but assumed as a prior and fundamental condition for legislation. Throughout Greek literature, lawfulness and healthy relations with the gods are two essential and indissociable aspects of the healthy community.6 The perception of the gods’ interest in law, and of the importance of law to the relationship between humans – and human communities  – and the gods, imbues the question of the appropriate way to understand and negotiate divine involvement and divine–human interaction in the field of lawgiving with a measure of urgency.

D. 25.16. The authenticity of this speech has long been disputed. For a recent, judicious discussion see G. Martin 2009: 182ff. Martin cautiously suggests that the speech may indeed be authentic but not intended for delivery in propria persona (201–2). He notes the idiosyncrasy of its religious argumentation (in, for example, its use of poetic and philosophical models) both within the Demosthenic corpus and indeed in the Attic orators more broadly. As we will see, its approach to legislation nonetheless echoes in interesting ways other ancient treatments of lawgiving and its practitioners. 5 D. 25.15–16. 6 One striking example is the simultaneous breakdown of both the city’s laws and its relationship with the gods in Th. 2.52.3ff. 4

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Nor, furthermore, are the universality and fixity of law placed categorically beyond human capacity.7 Through human paideia and appeals to sources of human authority external to the polis, the lawgivers of our tradition are able, to some extent, to transcend their personal circumstance and endow their laws with the sort of universality, permanence and immutability which elsewhere divine involvement bestows. Plutarch, after describing Lycurgus’ legal reforms at Sparta, offers a reflection on the lawgiver’s hopes for his nomothesia: ‘He desired, as far as this could be accomplished by human forethought, to leave his lawgiving immortal and unchanged for future ages.’8 Yet here too we do not find a simple exclusion of divine agency. Lycurgus’ strategy to achieve the immortality of his lawgiving involves centrally both divine and mortal agency and authority. He has his fellow citizens swear an oath that they will abide by his laws until he has returned from a trip to Delphi where he will seek the god’s approval. Once both oath and oracle have been acquired, Lycurgus performs the ultimate mortal act by dying, starving himself to ensure that he will never return to Sparta and release the Spartans from their oath.9 Going back to Demosthenes’ characterisation of law in Against Aristogeiton, the speaker draws a stark contrast between law’s fixed and shared nature and the nature of individual men, which is irregular and unordered (ataktos) and often found wanting (phaulos).10 We are reminded here of 7 Szegedy-Maszack 1978 emphasised the significance of human agency in the lawgiver traditions, contrasting this with the Judaeo-Christian tradition, in which laws are to be received from god and put into practice verbatim (see e.g. J. AJ 3.322). Although it is true that ‘divine inspiration is only one among many sources for law’ in these traditions, in the light of the wider prominence of the gods’ role in Greek lawgiving narratives there is more to be said about the importance, significance and, indeed, centrality of the question of divine involvement in these traditions than Szegedy-Maszack allows. Furthermore, unlike Szegedy-Maszack, I  am interested here in the manifold ways in which human and divine agency are intertwined in these traditions, the complicated nature of their interrelation, and in the question of why gods and mortals are involved as they are. Note that, particularly within the Graeco-Roman tradition, even Moses, the archetypal Judaeo-Christian lawgiver, is extolled for his exceptional wisdom and learning: see e.g. D.S. 40.3.3; J. AJ 4.328. 8 Plu. Lyc. 29.1. 9 See further infra, p. 199. 10 D. 25.15–16.

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another key feature of law. Although, as we noted, laws in a sense transcend their particular implementations, they must nonetheless be applied to particular circumstances. Law must operate in a human society and deal with the messiness of humans and human life – with Demosthenes’ irregular characters of man. The recognition that law must, in the event, apply to and be embroiled in the messiness of human affairs and human nature will offer one explanation for the pronounced role of human endeavour in these accounts. The lawgiver traditions underscore this point in their presentation of the lawgivers as fallible mortal agents, highlighting the gulf between the lawgivers, the communities they legislate for and the gods who aid them. If we typically think of theological enquiries as direct reflections on the nature of the gods, a more indirect but no less significant mode of theologising is found in reflections on the nature of the boundary between man and god. In a sense, gods are always imagined, whether implicitly or explicitly, in comparison with and contrast to humans. In that respect, explorations of the malleable and problematic boundary between mortal and divine agency and identity are a significant component of Greek theological thought. We see in these accounts the flexibility and open-endedness of Greek conceptions of the gods and of their separation from men. The balance of divine and human agency In response to the Athenian Stranger’s question, Cleinias is, as I noted, quick to assert that Zeus and Apollo deserve credit for Crete and Sparta’s laws. Yet, the mortal lawgivers Minos and Lycurgus are subsequently also given their due within the first pages of the dialogue. We are left to question their role and the simplicity of Cleinias’ response. Do they too have a claim to authorial status? What is the nature of the relationship between these divine and human players? Let us examine further the interrelation of divine and human agency in Greek conceptions of lawgiving. 180

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The divine impact on lawgiving was prominent and multifaceted. The topos that ‘the gods are responsible for the laws men enact and follow’11 occurs frequently in our sources and is cashed out in a variety of ways by different authors. Statements range from the open-ended suggestion that the laws of the gods are related in a positive way to those of the polis to outright claims of divine authorship for civic laws, legal procedure or institutions. It will be helpful to establish an overview here of a range of ways in which reflections on lawgiving negotiate this issue. In the more open-ended vein, the precise nature of the relationship between laws in the divine and human spheres is left unelaborated but a kind of kinship is affirmed. Socrates, in Plato’s Crito, imagines the laws of the city claiming kinship with the laws in Hades, who will punish any disservice Socrates does to their civic brethren,12 while for Heraclitus one divine law ‘nourishes all human laws’.13 We regularly encounter claims that certain rules of communal, social and religious life were ‘divine’ laws without further explanation of the precise significance of this designation; various permutations involving fearing the gods, honouring one’s parents and respecting the rights of the dead, guests and suppliants are frequently highlighted as divine, universal or unwritten laws.14 A somewhat less nebulous manifestation of postulated divine agency is found in the recurrent notion that laws are bestowed on men by the gods. The identification of a divine Harris 2006: 51. Harris explores various assertions of this nature made in Classical Athenian literature. See further Harris 2010: 124–5 contra e.g. Burkert 1985: 248. I do not follow Harris in his conclusion that these sources claim total consistency between such ‘laws of the gods’ and the laws of the city. 12 Pl. Cri. 54c. Cf. S. OT 863ff. for the language of kinship relating to laws. Socrates’ laws are further imbued with religious authority when their speech is compared to the strains of the Corybantic flutes, drowning out all else and convincing him entirely (54d). 13 Heraclit. B114: τρέφονται γὰρ πάντες οἱ ἀνθρώπειοι νόμοι ὑπὸ ἑνὸς τοῦ θείου. 14 See X. Mem. 4.4.19ff. for a prolonged treatment of the topos and its associated difficulties (cf. Pl. Lg. 838). See Lloyd 2009: 126–7. See also e.g. A. Eu. 389ff., S. Aj. 1130ff., Ant. 450ff. (cf. D.H. 3.23.19–20), E. Supp. 561ff. and Lys. 6.10. Cf. Hdt. 7.136; Th. 3.84.3 and Isoc. 12.169 for laws ‘common to all men’ (cf. laws common to all Greeks: e.g. E. Supp. 526 and TrGF 853, but note Harris 2006: 54 and n.41) and e.g. Isoc. 4.55 and Pl. Lg. 793a–b for patrioi numol. On these variations, see further Allen 2005: 387ff. 11

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source for law can be entirely general, as in Demosthenes’ striking and (in the context at least of extant Greek oratory) unusual claim that every law is ‘a gift of the gods’.15 Elsewhere, the naming of a specific god conveys the assumption that a particular divinity is suitable for action in the legislative sphere and, where the laws bestowed are those of a particular city or concern a particular area of life, reflects the notion that this god is distinctly affiliated to the institutions or city in question. Indeed, in praising a particular god as the source of a city’s laws an attempt is made to further secure that god’s affiliation. In Hesiod’s Works and Days, dikê, which separates men from beasts, is bestowed on mankind by Zeus.16 We find an echo of this passage in Plato’s Protagoras, where Zeus first sends Hermes to bring aidôs and dikê to men to bring order to their cities and cement their friendships and then lays down a nomos that those who do not partake of these gifts shall die as a nosos of their city.17 While Zeus and Apollo are particularly prominent divine nomothetes, a point which, as we saw, is reflected in Plato’s Laws,18 they are not the only deities associated with nomothesia. The epithet thesmophoros, which may suggest a legislative role, is widely used of Demeter from the early Archaic period onwards.19 In Plato’s Critias the laws of 15 25.16. See supra n.4. Cf. X.  Mem. 4.4.24 for the idea that laws whose transgression automatically carries its own punishment must have originated from the gods, superhuman legislators. 16 Hes. Op. 276ff. See also 36: … ἰθείῃσι δίκῃς, αἵ τ’ ἐκ Διός εἰσιν ἄρισται and e.g. Hom. Il. 1.238, 2.205–6 for themistes as the gift of Zeus. See G. Smith 1922: 187 on Maine 1861. Cf. S. Ant. 471–2, Plu. Mor.356a–b and Pl. R., 589c ff. (on which see Brague 2007: 26) for similar connections drawn between an absence of laws/justice and a bestial, uncivilised existence and between their presence and a divine one. See also Lloyd 2009: 111. 17 Pl. Prt. 322c–d. 18 So Pl. Lg. 624a ff. For Apollo as lawgiver see infra n.41; for Zeus’ lawgiving see, in addition to examples in the text, S. Ant. 450ff. and Pl. Crit. 121b. Cf. E. Hipp. 1328ff. for Zeus enforcing laws among the gods. 19 See e.g. Hdt. 6.91, 134; IPArk 20 (Arcadia, sixth century); IPE ii 13 (Panticapaeum, fourth century); Call. Fr. 1.10 (Pfeiffer), D.S. 1.14; Paus. 1.31.1; 42.6; 2.32.8; 9.16.5; 10.33.12; cf. τὼ Θεσμοφόρω and αἱ Θεσμοφόροι used of Demeter and Persephone: e.g. Ar. Th. 83, Plu. Dio 56; πότνια Θεσμοφόρος of Persephone:  Pi. Fr. 37 (Maehler); and as an epithet of Dionysus: Orph. Hymn 42.1 (Quandt). Note also the epithets θέσμιος/-α (of Demeter:  Paus. 8.15; of Apollo:  Paus. 5.15.7) and δικηφόρος (of Zeus:  A.  Ag. 525). See Stallsmith 2008 for a summary of past interpretations of the term.

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Atlantis are those of Poseidon20 and in the recorded Egyptian aretalogies of Isis, aimed in part at a Greek audience, the goddess describes her own lawgiving in the first person.21 Another theological strategy for integrating divine agency in the sphere of lawgiving is not to ascribe a legislative bent to particular gods but to deify juridical principles and render them agents in the legal sphere. We encounter Dikê, Nomos, Themis and Dikaiosynê establishing (and defending) laws for men.22 Nomos, the king of all,23 is named ‘god for sensible men’ in Ps-Plato’s Eighth Epistle.24 While Dikê, in the Antigone, is said to have laid down laws for men,25 and features prominently in vengeful guise in accounts of divine punishment and law enforcement,26 Themis is associated with divine laws, religious ordinances and oracles.27 If in the examples above it is law and its attendant principles as a whole which are taken to originate in divine agency, elsewhere the gods are called upon or understood to take a special interest in certain areas of law, particularly with regard to offences with ‘religious’ overtones.28 Demosthenes asserts that Pl. Crit. 119c ff. Cf. Pl. Ti. 24c for the διακόσμησιν and σύνταξιν Athena established for the Athenians. See Mikalson 2010:  221ff. for a survey of lawmaking gods in Plato. 21 See D.S. 1.27. Other inscribed versions have been found at Cyme, Andros, Thessalonica, Maronea and Ios (the earliest dating to perhaps the second century BCE), see Fowden 1986:  45ff. Isis’ legislative practice and self-promotion mirror closely those of mortals in the lawgiver traditions, as outlined below. For another god compared explicitly with mortal lawgivers see D.S. 20.70.4. 22 Each of these personifications was the recipient of an Orphic hymn: 62, 64, 79, 63 (Quandt). 23 Pi. Fr. 169a (Maehler); Plu. Mor. 780c ff. 24 Pl. Ep. 354e–f:  θεὸς δὲ ἀνθρώποις σώφροσιν νόμος, cf. Trag.Adesp.  TrGF 471. Cf. Eunomia: Hes. Th. 901ff.; Alc. Fr. 64 (Campbell), Pi. O. 9.15ff.; 13.5ff.; Sol. Fr. 4.32 (West), Bacch. 12.186, 14.55 (Jebb), D. 25.11, Apollod. 1.3.1. 25 Ant. 450ff.: τούσδ’ ἐν ἀνθρώποισιν ὥρισαν νόμους. 26 See e.g. A. TrGF 281a, where she inscribes the names of the lawless on Zeus’ tablets (cf. Trag. Adesp.TrGF 493) and Hes. Op. 256ff., where she sings to Zeus of mortal crimes. See also S. OC. 1380ff.; E. Ba. 992ff.; Sol. Fr. 4.12ff. (West); Pl. Lg. 716a; D. 25.11 (citing Orpheus); Paus. 5.18.2; Plu. Mor. 161f, 564e–f and Parm. B1.14ff. Cf. Plut. Mor. 781b–c. 27 See e.g. A. En 2ff. Pi O. 8.20ff. See also h.Hom. 23. Diodorus (5.67.4–5) derives the terms thesmophylakes, thesmothetai and themisteuein from their connection with the divine Themis. See Stafford 1997 for further discussion of Themis and her associations. 28 A further distinction should of course be drawn between general prohibitions against certain types of behaviour (homicide, rape, etc.) and more specific sets 20

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both the laws on homicide and the dikasteria in which such cases are tried were established by the gods,29 as does Aeschylus in his Eumenides, where Athena advertises her role in establishing homicide procedure and laying down a thesmos for all time.30 Antiphon describes the laws on homicide as received from the gods and ancestors of the current jurors.31 Euripides’ Ion (critically) describes the gods writing and laying down laws for mortals both specifically for supplication32 and more generally.33 By contrast with these typically vague postulations of, or appeals to, the divine origins of law, we sometimes encounter quite concrete explorations of the ways in which divine agency is brought into the human sphere and made to interact with the activity of the human lawgiver. The early lawgivers are depicted enjoying privileged access to or association with the divine, whether through conversation, inspiration or oracular consultation.34 Minos famously consorted with Zeus every nine years.35 Zaleucus was approached by Athena in a dream with details of his legislation.36 Epimenides, who was later associated with Solon’s legislative activities, was said to have received instruction in the arts of catharsis in a dream encounter with Aletheia and Dikê.37 In Plato’s Laws, the interlocutors of rules regulating such behaviour (as Draco’s laws on homicide). We would be wrong, however, to assume that claims of divine authorship are always limited to the former category, see e.g. infra n.29. 29 D. 23.70 (strictly heroes or gods): οἱ ταῦτ’ ἐξ ἀρχῆς τὰ νόμιμα διαθέντες, οἵτινές ποτ’ ἦσαν, εἴθ’ ἥρωες εἴτε θεοί; 81: τοσούτοις δικαστηρίοις καταλυομένοις ὅσοις εἴρηκα, ἃ θεοὶ κατέδειξαν. 30 A. Eu. 483ff. 31 Antiphon 1.3. 32 1312ff. Cf. Paus.7.25.1 for an oracle received at Dodona, demanding that the Athenians leave certain Spartan suppliants unharmed because of the general rule that suppliants are ‘sacred and holy’. 33 441ff.: …τοὺς νόμους ὑμᾶς βροτοῖς γράψαντας. For the belief that the gods institute or support unjust laws, cf. E. Ion 1309ff.; IT 585ff. and A. Eum. 162ff. 34 See Bonner and Smith 1930: 73. 35 [Pl.] Min. 319c, Pl. Lg. 624a–b, Paus. 3.2.4, D.H. 2.61. This tradition was likely born out of the Homeric claim that Minos ἐννέωρος βασίλευε Διὸς μεγάλου ὀαριστής (Od. 19.179), later reconceptualised as a means not just of renewing his rule but specifically of obtaining (advice on) laws. See J. Forsdyke 1952: 17 with Plu. Agis 11.3 for the significance of the nine-year period. 36 Aris. Fr. 548 (Rose), cf. Clem.Alex. Strom. 1.26.170.3. 37 Max.Tyr. 10.1. For comparison between Epimenides’ dream encounter and the model of poetic inspiration most famously depicted in the opening of Hesiod’s

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are imagined to be en route to a Cretan cave.38 As Nightingale remarks, the subtext is clear:  ‘they will seek the sanction of Zeus for their legislation’, as Minos and Lycurgus with whom the dialogue opened sought divine inspiration for their laws.39 Oracular consultation, of course, afforded a central source of divine approval for legislation.40 Different attitudes are displayed about the balance between divine inspiration, or even revelation, and human invention in this context. Delphic Apollo’s involvement ranges from full authorship to rubber-stamping, from the divine revelation of a city’s laws tout court41 to the approval of laws worked out and put to the god by mortal legislator(s),42 with much blurring in between. In recounting Lycurgus’ trip to Delphi, Herodotus highlights this spectrum: ‘Some say that the Pythia also declared to him the [constitution] that is now established at Sparta, but the Lacedaemonians themselves say that Lycurgus brought it from Crete.’43 Herodotus himself refrains from passing judgement. Of course, even when no claims for divine authorship are staked, this need not mean that the gods are in no way involved Theogony, see Brillante 2004: 14. Cf. Theopompus (ap. D.L. 1.115) for Epimenides receiving direct instructions via a φωνὴν ἐξ οὐρανοῦ. We might also compare Parmenides’ encounter with Dikê, B1.14ff. For Parmenides’ legislating see Plu. Mor. 1126b; Str. 6.1.1; Speusippus ap. D.L. 9.23. 38 642b. 39 Nightingale 1993: 282–3. Later sources link other ‘legislators’ to incubation in Zeus’ cave on Crete: see D.H. 2.61 (Minos); Max.Tyr.10.1 (Epimenides) with Strataridaki 1991; Porph. VP 17 and D.L. 8.3 (Pythagoras, on whose legislating see Iambl. VP 33; Porph. VP 21 and D.L. 8.3); on the cave itself see Sakellarakis 1988. Cf. Kingsley 1999: 216 for incubatory techniques as a preparation for lawgiving. 40 Cf. Arist. Ath. 21.6 for Cleisthenes’ recourse to Delphi in the course of his constitutional reforms. 41 Tyrt. Fr. 4 (West). See also Hdt. 1.65.4, D.S. 7.12, 16.57.4, Plu. Lyc. 6.1, 13.6, Mor. 403c and Paus.Lac. ap. Str. 8.5.5. See den Boer 1973: 19 and Nilsson 1941: 610. Cf. Kingsley 1999: 208–9 for the Platonic approach to Apollo in the Laws. In addition to Pl. Lg. 624a see 632d, 634a. Beyond Apollo cf. Epinom. 985c–d, and Lg. 645b–c, 653d, 657a ff., 696a–b with B. Lewis 2010: 11 on divine revelation and its relation to legislation more broadly. 42 X. Lac. 8.5; Plu. Lyc. 29, Ag.Cl.Gr.Comp. 2.3, Plb. 10.2.9–10, Polyaen. Strat. 1.16.1. See Nilsson 1941: 608ff. Cf. e.g. IvO 7 (Elis, sixth century), RO 97 (Cyrene, fourth century), IG xii.9 213.3–4 (Eretria, third century). Cf. also X.  Mem. 4.3.16. See Malkin 1989:  137 for the relative insignificance of the precise nature of Delphi’s involvement. 43 Hdt. 1.65.4. The Greek terms which I gloss here with ‘constitution’ are κόσμος and τὰ νόμιμα πάντα.

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in the life of law in the city. Plutarch reports a fragment of Solon in which he offers prayers to Zeus and requests that he ‘gives these laws of ours success and fame’.44 Even without an authorial role, the gods may still be called upon to facilitate, protect and glorify the laws. With these reflections on communication between gods and men we come to the prominence of human agency and intellect in Greek attitudes to lawgiving. Szegedy-Maszack highlighted the trend in the lawgiver narratives to depict these men as individuals of ‘character and education’, well suited to their legislative role.45 To take just two examples, Diodorus points to the paideia of Charondas and Zaleucus as a reason for their aptitude as lawgivers, while Aristotle praises the accuracy of Charondas’ laws as glaphurôteros – more skilful or polished – than even the work of contemporary legislators.46 What is striking for our enquiry is the way such appeals to the lawgiver’s intellect are so frequently tied up with claims to divine authority. A prominent feature in accounts of the lawgivers’ communion with the gods is contrivance on the part of the legislator, who self-consciously employs divination or inspiration to support his enactments. Thus, Xenophon describes Lycurgus’ trips to Delphi as one of the ‘most excellent … of the many excellent plans (mêchanêmatôn) he contrived to encourage obedience to the laws among the ­citizens’.47 Of course, even when lawgivers consciously recognise the political advantages of divine involvement and so consciously court association with the gods, this need not imply an absence of belief in the reality of divine interventions and the independence of divine will.48 Recourse to the gods is presented as a further demonstration of the skills of the legislator, who employs all available means to support Sol. Fr. 31 (West). See further below for the practice of opening inscribed laws with an invocation and for the divine protection afforded them. 45 Szegedy-Maszack 1978: 208–9, 202. 46 D.S. 12.11.3–4, 12.20; Arist. Pol. 1274b. 47 X. Lac. 8.5. 48 Cf. Aristotle’s (Pol. 1314b38ff.) advice for tyrants. See also Raaflaub 2006: 398. For Xenophon’s own faith in divinatory procedure see e.g. X. An. 3.1.5ff., 6.1.23, 7.1.35. 44

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and protect his enactments.49 Even in those later sources which do display a sceptical suspicion that the lawgivers’ claims to communion with the gods are false, we find recurring a similar emphasis on the lawgivers’ wisdom and ingenuity in appealing to divine authority.50 On Dionysius’ account, Numa seeks to emulate the wisdom (sophia) which Minos and Lycurgus displayed when they sought divine backing.51 Not only can approaching the gods be itself depicted as a sign of human intelligence, but, in our accounts of legislating, active human agency and thought are forcefully interwoven with appeals to active divine involvement. In the case of oracular enquiry this is a familiar concept:  oracles are standardly mediated through human action and require human interpretation. Oracles by no means exclude mortal agency.52 Even in cases of unmediated communication between god and lawgiver or where legislation is attributed explicitly to the gods, we frequently encounter the same stark juxtaposition of divine aid and mortal skill which leaves ambiguous the exact balance of divine and human agency. Ps.-Plato, in his assessment of Minos’ relationship with Zeus, conceives of the god’s involvement in terms of paideia:  hypo Dios pepaideusthai.53 In like manner, Dionysius claims that the Romans attribute the legislator Numa’s ‘mortal wisdom’ to ‘the counsels of the gods’ (anthrôpinên sophian eis theôn hupothêkas), while, for Pausanias, Minos ‘deliberated’ (bouleusasthai) on his laws ‘not without a god’ (ouk aneu theou).54 For Demosthenes, we saw that ‘every law is an invention and gift from the gods’, but, in the same breath, it is also a ‘judgement of wise men’ – a dogma d’anthrôpôn phronimôn.55 In Hesiod’s Theogony, the basileis who possess the hierê dosis of the Muses, which allows 49 Cf. Plutarch’s depiction of Solon (e.g. 14.1, 27), who employs cunning tricks to achieve his ends. 50 See e.g. Plb. 10.2.8ff., Cic. Nat.D. 3.91, D.S. 1.94.2, D.H. 2.61–2, Plu. Num. 4.6ff. and Ephorus ap. Strab.10.4.19 with Szegedy-Maszak 1978: 205. 51 D.H. 2.60. 52 See e.g. Parker 2000: 80. 53 [Pl.] Min. 319c. Cf. Paus. 3.2.4, D.S. 1.27.4 and Pl. Lg. 645b6. 54 D.H. 2.60–1; Paus. 3.2.4. Cf. A. Ag. 176ff. 55 D. 25.16.

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them to ‘determine laws with straight justice’, are described as echephrones – sound-minded.56 Similarly, for Xenophon, man’s ability to enact laws (much like the basileis’ skill in judgement) features among the benefits gods confer on mortals.57 Clearly, men are not here to be thought of as passive receptacles of divine law or aid but nor is human agency and wisdom asserted to the exclusion of divine agency or authority. Indeed, the same blurring of divine and mortal agency can even operate in the opposite direction. When Demosthenes avers that the gods or heroes said to have established the laws on homicide for men did so in a humane manner, the term he uses (anthrôpinôs) conveys the further connotation:  in a human manner or with a view to humans.58 The negotiation of divine and mortal identity I turn now to the second of our two takes on Plato’s question, relating it to the very distinction between gods and men. Here, Herodotus provides a powerful predecessor for our Platonic dilemma. When the Spartan Lycurgus approaches the temple at Delphi, the Pythia’s hexametric address grapples with precisely the same issues in different guise: ‘You have come to my rich temple, Lycurgus, one dear to Zeus and to all who have Olympian homes. I am in doubt whether to pronounce you man or god. But I think rather you are a god, Lycurgus.’59

Apollo himself, who resides on the divine side of the divide between mortal and god, is here uncertain precisely where to draw the line. We are reminded of Most’s diagnosis of the Hes. Th. 80ff. Cf. also ἀσφαλέως (86) and ἐπισταμένως (87) with Gagarin 1992: 63, 1986: 24, n.16. Cf. Hom. Od. 19.109ff. and Plu. Dem. 42.5–6. 57 X. Mem. 4.3.12. Note too that Antiphon1.3 attributes the laws on homicide to the gods and progonoi and that the human role in prosecuting homicide is by no means excluded from Aeschylus’ Eumenides; see e.g. 480ff. 58 D. 23.70. 59 Hdt. 1.65.3:  ἥκεις ὦ Λυκόοργε ἐμὸν ποτὶ πίονα νηόν Ζηνὶ φίλος καὶ πᾶσιν Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾽ ἔχουσι. δίζω ἤ σε θεὸν μαντεύσομαι ἢ ἄνθρωπον. ἀλλ᾽ ἔτι καὶ μᾶλλον θεὸν ἔλπομαι, ὦ Λυκόοργε. See Foucart 1881 for details, such as they are, of an alternative, inscribed text from the sanctuary at Delphi. See Fontenrose 1978: Q7 for other literary versions. 56

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‘unsettling and hence fascinating ambiguity’ of the identity of the theios anêr, who, while ‘ineluctably mortal’ possesses abilities or knowledge which show him to be something more.60 Similar games are played in the literary tradition surrounding Solon, centring on the story of Croesus’ demise in Herodotus and Plutarch. As Gagné well observes, as a narrative of a drastic and highly visible reversal of fortune, Croesus’ fall creates a heightened theological context: it raises questions about the intervention of the gods in the lives of men, and allows for multiple ways of addressing and elaborating them.61 This raises the question:  how does Solon’s insertion into this heightened theological context play into Herodotus’ representation of the Athenian lawgiver and the development of this representation in the later tradition?62 In earlier versions of this episode, the defeated king Croesus had himself chosen to ascend the pyre as a challenge to Apollo to reciprocate his past services to the god, ‘since of all mortals he [had] sent the greatest gifts to holy Pytho’.63 In both Most 2003: 317. Most (318) convincingly traces the theios anêr to the Archaic and Classical periods. See also Richard Martin’s discussion of the early traditions of the Seven Sages (1993) and Kurke’s treatment of early conceptions of sophia and sophistês (2011: ch. 2). Cf. the traditions surrounding Pythagoras, who is characterised variously as a man, a god or a tertium quid: Aris. Fr. 191 and 192 (Rose), Iambl. VP 140 and D.L. 8.4ff. with Hermann 2004: 18 and Burkert 1972: 141–2, 149. 61 Gagné supra this volume: pp. 63, 78ff. 62 That Herodotus’ Solon retains his identity as a lawgiver rather than as merely a generic wise man is, I think, assured by the context of his initial introduction to Croesus at his court – namely his departure from Athens in the wake of his role as legislator so as to avoid having to revoke any of his laws (1.29). Kurke’s discussion of the centrality of the city and of justice to the Herodotean Solon’s understanding of the cosmos and the place of the gods and humanity within it (1999: 150–1) shows how this role as legislator – one who brings order and justice to the city and promotes its success and values – remains key to Solon’s wider presentation in the Histories. See Crane 1996: 75 and Pelling 2006: 151–2 for some of the ways in which Herodotus’ Solon is true to the spirit of what survives of Solon’s poetry. 63 B. 3.61–2. Often brought into comparison with Bacchylides’ version of the myth is a red-figured amphora painted by Myson roughly a generation prior to the composition of Bacchylides’ ode (Louvre G 197). Here the king is depicted in splendid attire, engaged in pouring out a libation while a named servant lights the pyre on which he is seated: wealth and piety remain important themes. Again the question of how best to understand Croesus’ fate proves complex. Here too his ascent is usually interpreted as a voluntary one (see, e.g. Segal 1971: 41), but the viewer’s appreciation of the celebrated serenity of the scene may be counterbalanced by the facing image of Theseus abducting the Amazon Antiope, a myth tied up with Herodotus’ theme of East versus West. Gagné (supra, p. 87) has suggested that the composition 60

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Herodotus and Bacchylides, Croesus proves to be ‘dear to the gods’64 and is saved by divine intervention in the form of a sudden d ­ ownpour.65 On Bacchylides’ account, Croesus is straightforwardly rewarded for his past piety with transportation to live among the Hyperboreans – an immediate and striking affirmation of the reciprocal relationship he has invested in.66 Herodotus’ Croesus, by contrast, has a far more elaborate and complicated relationship with the god – a more explicitly complex and problematised theological framework. Croesus’ gift-giving is, in Herodotus’ narrative, tied up with his oracular consultations and the episode ends not with Croesus’ miraculous salvation but with a final (vicarious) trip to Delphi to question and indeed reproach Apollo.67 Here Croesus is made, eventually, to understand the error of his evaluation of his relationship with the god and of his interpretation of the god’s advice.68 This critique of Croesus’ intellectual and theological attitude in Herodotus’ account prepares the way for Solon’s starring role in the narrative, and allows him to usurp some of the gods’ credit for Croesus’ salvation. When Croesus has lost his kingdom and faces death on the pyre at Cyrus’ hands, he recalls Solon’s previous warning that a man cannot be pronounced blessed before his death and invokes Solon’s name three times. The language strongly may further allude to Croesus’ lavish dedications at Delphi. If ‘Delphi is there in the background’, might we see too an allusion to the other side of Croesus’ engagement in Greece (see Hdt. 1.6.2–3) in the Ionic capitals adorning the throne on which the king sits? For the various traditions surrounding Croesus’ demise see Burkert 1985b. 64 Hdt. 1.87.2: θεοφιλὴς; B. 3.61: δἰ εὐσέβειαν. 65 B. 3.55–6 (sent by Zeus): Hdt.1.87.2 (Apollo’s agency implied), see 1.91.3. A number of scholars have addressed the relationship between these two accounts, focusing on the differing ways they construct divine–mortal interaction and explore the value of wealth, gifts and piety. See in particular Crane 1996; Segal 1971 and Kurke 1999: ch. 4. See Gagné n. 51 supra for further bibliography. 66 B. 3.37ff., 58ff. 67 Hdt. 1.90–1. For the place of Delphic Apollo, his riddling oracles and the uncertainty which he introduces into divine–human relations in Bacchylides’ Third Ode, see Kurke 1999: 138ff. 68 Hdt. 1.91.6. For Croesus’ epistemic and theological failures see Kindt 2006: 37ff. For a qualified defence of Croesus’ approach to the oracle, see Pelling 2006: 153ff. Xenophon (Cyr. 7.2.15ff.) offers more elaborate and spelled-out explanations of Croesus’ failings. For the limits of what Croesus has ultimately learnt see Pelling 2006 and Gagné supra, pp. 83–4.

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echoes that of divine epiphany, as Kurke has shown:  the memory of Solon ‘comes over’ (eselthein) Croesus, a term used elsewhere in Herodotus for the detection of a divine hand in events;69 his recollection of Solon ‘stands beside’ (prosstênai) him, as elsewhere in Herodotus dreams and epiphanic gods are said to do;70 finally, the term used for Croesus’ invocation of Solon (epikaleoito) recurs for the invocation of deities throughout the Histories.71 Here, Solon and Apollo together achieve Croesus’ (and indeed Cyrus’72) salvation: it is Solon’s sage advice that moves Cyrus to repent of his punishment, and it is only after the flames of the pyre prove impossible to quench that Croesus invokes Apollo in turn.73 Connections between Solon and Apollo are not limited to this shared role. In Herodotus, Solon’s words, like the oracle, are ‘spoken with god’.74 His advice plays a narrative role very similar to that of the famous oracles first misunderstood by Croesus and later vindicated75 and thematic and verbal echoes further align his advice with the god’s pronouncements.76 Interestingly, outside Herodotus, Demosthenes too expressly highlights verbal 69 So Hdt. 3.42.4, 8.137.3. 70 So Hdt. 1.87.1, 7.12.1. 71 Kurke 1999:  157ff. So 1.87.1–2, 2.39.1, 3.8.1, 4.60.2, 5.93.1, 7.189.1–2, 8.64.2, 9.61.3–62.1. 72 Plu. Sol. 28.4: δόξαν ἔσχεν ὁ Σόλων ἑνὶ λόγῳ τὸν μὲν σώσας, τὸν δὲ παιδεύσας τῶν βασιλέων. 73 Kurke (1999: 157, 159ff.) herself draws a stark distinction between these two epiphanies and between the narrative strands of Solon and Apollo in the story of Croesus’ ‘salvation’ – for her, the ‘civic’, ‘Solonic epiphany’ answers to the demands of the ‘oracular narrative’, while the intervention of Apollo answers to the ‘competing, incommensurable’ demands of gift-exchange evoked by Croesus’ lavish dedications. I wish to emphasise here how this emphatically epiphanic representation of Solon in a passage which culminates with the direct intervention (and subsequent oracular coda) of Apollo serves to associate the agency of these two figures and, in particular, to elevate the status of the former. 74 Hdt. 1.86.3: τὸ τοῦ Σόλωνος ὥς οἱ εἴη σὺν θεῷ εἰρημένον. 75 Hdt. 1.53ff., 1.71, 1.73, 1.85ff., 1.90–1. Cf. Plu. Sol. 28.4. On such oracles see Harrison 2000: 40ff. Cf. Plu. Sol. 9, 11, 14.4, Mor. 152c for Solon as a consultant at and advocate of Delphi, with Nilsson 1941: 609 on the strictly anecdotal nature of these details. See also Aeschin. 3.108. On parallels between Croesus’ encounter with Solon and his encounters with the oracle, see Ker 2000: 315 and, for Solon’s ‘quasi-oracular position vis-à-vis Croesus’, see Hartog 1999: 190. 76 The digression about the oracle which Croesus received on the subject of his mute son (1.85) returns us explicitly to the question of olbos and echoes Solon’s description of Croesus as basileus pollôn (1.32.5); see Kurke 1999: 156–7 and Pelling 2006: 155.

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echoes between one of Solon’s laws and the god’s oracles.77 Even as Solon is associated with Apollo in these ways, however, Solon and Apollo are also similar in their shared concern to recognise the distinction between man and god and in both relating our understanding of one to our understanding of the other. When Croesus presses Solon on the question of who is the most blessed of all the men he has encountered, Solon replies: ‘You ask me about human affairs, while I know that the divine in its entirety is grudging and disturbing.’78 Later, Apollo’s triumphant and self-assertive response to Croesus’ test enquiry emphatically reaffirms the hierarchical distinction between divine and human knowledge, which Croesus’ test had arguably subverted.79 In his biography of Solon, Plutarch pushes further these hints at a connection between Solon and the divine and goes further in blurring the divide between man and god. In his version, the divine intervention present in Bacchylides and Herodotus is absent and the role of Zeus/Apollo is given over entirely to Solon himself, on whom alone Croesus emphatically calls.80 Furthermore, in a verbal echo of Herodotus’ Lycurgus narrative, Plutarch has Cyrus pose a similar question to the defeated Croesus. When faced with Croesus’ striking triple invocation of Solon, Cyrus asks whether it is ‘a man or a god’ whose aid Croesus seeks in his hour of need.81 This question, like Apollo’s question in Herodotus, challenges us to ask where the dividing line between divine and mortal is to be drawn where the famous sages who have framed our laws are concerned. To return full circle to Plato’s Magnesia, the Athenian Stranger adopts a similar blurring tactic when it comes to the status of his lawgiver. He often addresses directly Magnesia’s imagined nomothete with apostrophes which parallel his D. 43.67 (the law occurs at 43.62, both concern correct funerary practice), see Harris 2010: 124. Cf. Iamb. VP 34 and Ael. VH 4.17 for Pythagoras’ ‘oracles’. 78 See Pelling 2006: 147 for discussion. 79 See Kindt’s (2006: 37ff.) discussion. See Dobson (1979) for a discussion of how this oracle may reveal not only Apollo’s knowledge of Croesus’ actions but an evaluation of his behaviour. 80 Plu. Sol. 28.2: ὃν ἐν τύχαις ἀπόροις μόνον ἀνακαλεῖται. 81 Plu. Sol. 28.2: ὅστις ἀνθρώπων ἢ θεῶν οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ Σόλων. 77

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frequent invocations of the gods and good fortune throughout the dialogue.82 Claims of divine parentage are a fairly direct way of constructing a bridge between the human and divine spheres.83 Later in his Laws, Plato remarks that the lawgivers of old were of divine descent.84 Divine descent was, indeed, variously claimed for Minos, the son of Zeus,85 and Lycurgus, who, being of royal stock at Sparta, had a claim to descent from Herakles.86 Epimenides, who was later brought into connection with Solon’s legislative activities, reportedly proclaimed himself the son of Selene,87 and even Plato himself was afforded a divine father by Speusippus.88 Post-mortum cult represents another way of conveying that the lawgiver’s identity is not straightforwardly or simply mortal. Lycurgus, Diocles, Zaleucus and Charondas are all reported to have been offered worship after their deaths.89 Similarly, in Plato’s Laws, the euthynoi are to be offered heroic honours and status after death.90 A final trope, which suggests neither direct divine agency nor a more than mortal identity, but does convey a special affinity with the divine sphere on the part of the lawgiver, is the tendency to associate lawgivers with religious action and E.g. Pl. Lg. 718a–b. For the discussion depending on divine guidance see e.g. Pl. Lg. 688e, 712b, 739e, 858b, 893b. 83 See supra, n.12, for the idea of familial ties between divine and human laws themselves. 84 Pl. Lg. 853c. Beloch 1924: 350, drawing heavily on onomastics, claimed divinity for all the early lawgivers but has not garnered much support. 85 Hom. Il. 13.450, 14.321–2, Od. 11.568–9; Hes. Frr. 89–90 (Most); A. TrGF 99; Pl. Grg. 523a ff.; Pl. Min. 318d. 86 Plu. Lyc. 1.4 (Lycurgus was ‘eleventh from Herakles’, according to the ‘standard’ genealogy); Hdt. 1.65.4. Note too the tradition, disputed by Simonides as recorded in Plutarch (Lyc. 1.4), that Lycurgus was son of Eunomos. 87 DK 3 B 2. 88 Ap. D.L. 3.2. Most 2003: 319. Note, finally, Isoc. 12.124: the Athenians were the πρώτους … νόμοις χρησαμένους because of their divine descent. 89 Lycurgus: Plu. Lyc. 31.3: ὡς θεῷ, Ephorus ap. Str. 8.5.5; Diocles: D.S. 13.33ff., see Adcock 1927:  99–100; Zaleucus and Charondas:  Iamb. VP 172 for cult offered to ‘Pythagorean’ lawgivers (including Zalmoxis, Zaleucus and Charondas). Cf. D.L. 1.114 for Epimenides’ worship ‘as a god’ on Crete, see Tortorelli Ghidini 2001: 54. Cf. Scarpi 2001: 33 for Epimenides’ (possibly self-styled) approximation to Endymion. See also Kurke 2011: 114 for this as one of ‘two characteristic supernatural outcomes for the prephilosophical master of sophia’ (alongside katabasis). 90 Pl. Lg. 947b ff., see Kingsley 1999: 208. 82

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expertise.91 Plato describes his Athenian Stranger as a mantis,92 while granting the Examiners (euthynoi), priests of Apollo and of the Sun, a judicial role.93 In the later tradition efforts are made to associate religious figures with the great lawgivers. In Plutarch, Lycurgus is associated with Thaletas94 and Solon with Epimenides,95 both Cretans who enjoyed reputations as seers, healers and poets.96 Human and divine constructions of authority We saw above how Demosthenes and Plutarch’s Lycurgus claimed and sought for law a universal, impartial applicability and a fixity and longevity. How do the divine and mortal roles in the lawgiver traditions relate to these features of law? The gods are ineluctably everywhere and forever and they may be hoped to endow laws with an authority of the same nature. The gods demand the respect of the entire community, transcending intra-community struggles or factions. Divinely backed laws thus become universal laws, applying to all members of a community. By standing outside and above human society, the gods can claim a privileged and impartial perspective. In the two primary sources for the legislators’ paideia  – interactions with other legislators and travels Plu. Sol. 9.4, Lyc. 6.1, cf. Plu. Sol. 16.4–5; D.L. 1.115; D.H. 2.23, 2.73–4. Cf. Deut. 11.10, J.  AJ 2.293, 4.303, 320, 329, 4.303, 320 and Feldman 1992a:  292–3, 299ff. for Moses prophesying. Cf. Ker (2000) for the notion that Solon’s departure from Athens cast him in the role of theoros. 92 Pl. Lg. 626d3ff., cf. 634e7ff., with Welton 1995: 60ff. 93 945bff. Cf. 799b, 828b–c, 877d with B. Lewis 2010: 20. Outside the lawgiver traditions numerous parallels for offices which seem to have united religious and legal responsibilities can be found, including that of hieromnamôn (see e.g. IG iv 517, Nomima I.110 (Argos, fifth century), IG iv2.1 40 (Epidaurus, fifth century), IG ii2 1596 (Athens, fourth century)), hiaromaos (see e.g. IvO 1, 4, 10 (Elis, sixth century)) and exêgêtês (see e.g. D. 47.68ff.; Pl. Euthphr. 4c, 9a). Cf. Kingsley 1999: 205ff. on the Molpoi at Miletus. 94 Plu. Lyc. 4.1. 95 Plu. Sol. 12.4–5. See Tortorelli Ghidini 2001 and Demoulin 1901: 80 for the distinct Spartan, Argive and Athenian traditions about this Cretan sage. For Epimenides’ own supposed dual competence in matters religious and legal see D.L. 1.112. Cf. also Solon’s relationship with Egyptian priests, e.g. Pl. Crit. 108d. 96 Str. 10.4.19; Plu. Lyc. 4, Sol. 12.6; Paus. 1.14.4; Ael. VH 12.50; D.L. 1.110 for Epimenides as θεοφιλέστατος and Suda s.v. Epimenides for Epimenides’ skin tattooed with oracles (with Lupi 2001: 189). 91

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abroad – identified by Szegedy-Maszack in the lawgiver traditions,97 we find two sources of mortal authority which work towards these same ends in a manner that is parallel to and compatible with appeals to divine involvement. By claiming association with other lawgivers and sages,98 much like in the Classical period seers advertised their prophetic ancestry or adopted their protégés,99 the lawgivers of the tradition appeal to a source of mortal authority which is external to the community for which they legislate. By creating the image of lawgivers as a type with each generation handing down wisdom to the next and with a pooled body of expertise,100 the lawgiver tradition implies a source of authority which persists beyond the lifespan of any individual lawgiver. Second, and relatedly, paideia is achieved through travel and exposure to foreign knowledge and the laws of other poleis.101 The trope of the wandering sage was prominent from the Archaic period onwards.102 In Montiglio’s words, the wanderers’ ‘liminality grants them the power to watch themselves and others from a privileged vantage point’.103 Clearly this is a useful capacity for

97 Szegedy-Maszack 1978: 202. 98 So, again, see Plu. Lyc. 4.1 and Sol. 12.4–5 for the association of Lycurgus and Solon with Thaletas and Epimenides. Plutarch uses the same word  – προοδοποιεῖν – to characterise both relationships, see Willetts 1962: 311 and Lupi 2001: 188f. Beyond the examples in Szegedy-Maszack: Epimenides was also linked to Pythagoras: D.L. 8.3, contrast Iamb. VP 222; and possibly claimed a connection with Minos by calling himself Aeacus (Minos’ brother and himself a religious founder, purifier and dispenser of judgements: Isoc. 9.15; Pl. Apol. 41a, Gorg. 524a; D.S. 4.61.1ff.; Apollod. 3.12.6; Paus. 2.29.7–8; schol. ad Pi. N. 5.9); D.L. 1.114, see Brillante 2004: 23. See also Pl. Min. 320b–c for Minos ‘educating’ Rhadamanthus and D.S.1.27 for Hermes educating Isis. Cf. Feldman 1992b: 8 on Moses’ supposed influence on Pythagoras inter alios. Cf. finally Clearchus of Soli FHG 323 Fr.69 on Aristotle. 99 See e.g. Theoclymenus’ mantic ancestry and Teiresias’ mantic descendents: Hom. Od. 15.251ff., D.S. 4.66.4ff., Apollod. 3.7.4 and Paus. 7.3.1–2, 9.33.2 with Dillery 2005: 173ff. and Flower 2008: 37ff. 100 See Szegedy-Maszack 1978: 203: ‘Succession connotes legitimacy as well as accumulated wisdom and experience.’ 101 See Szegedy-Maszack’s 1978: 202 catalogue of sources. Cf. Moses, who does not travel extensively himself, but has teachers come from all over to educate him, and is himself a foreigner: Phil. Vit.Mos. 1.5.21 with Feldman 1992a: 306. For Moses educating others see Artapanus ap. Eus. PE 9.27.4. 102 See e.g. Hom. Od. 17.382ff. with Montiglio 2005: 100ff. and Kurke 2011: 112ff. 103 Montiglio 2005: 263.

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a would-be legislator, possessed of a privileged and impartial perspective reminiscent of the gods.104 The lawgivers’ mortal claim to impartial universality is further intimately related to their status as outsiders and ­wanderers.105 Several of the famed lawgivers up for discussion in the second book of Aristotle’s Politics are in fact outsiders to the communities for which they legislate.106 As Montiglio notes, the Laws is ‘the only Platonic dialogue that casts an Athenian as a stranger and takes place abroad’.107 Comparably, in Herodotus, the Pythia recommends the troubled Cyreneans seek an outsider, a man from Mantinea, in order to regain civic order; the legislator Demonax is the result.108 Like the oracles and foreign seers whose aid the Archaic and Classical poleis sought at times of crisis,109 such outsiders provided an external source of authority, while reducing the threat of political bias.110 Given the frequency with which political or social turmoil feature in the lawgiver traditions, the claim to be an unbiased arbitrator, mortal or divine, was a powerful one. Even those who could not claim outsider status are often represented as strictly occupying the middle ground within the state or showing reluctance to find themselves centre stage (or to remain there).111 This feeds into the same rhetoric of impartiality. Aristotle describes Solon, Lycurgus and Charondas as ‘middle For wandering gods see Montiglio 2005: 73ff. and Burnett 1970: 24, n.8. 105 Cf. Most 2003: 317 on the theios anêr as outsider. 106 Aris. Pol. 1274a. See Harris 2006: 11–12 pace Bonner and Smith 1930: 72. Cf. Kõiv 2003:  25 and Jameson, Jordan and Kotansky’s suggestion (1993:  58–9) that the Selinus purity law resulted from a visit from a foreign expert. 107 Montiglio 2005:  161. See Nightingale 1993:  284 for other ways in which the nomothete’s outsider status and anonymity is emphasised. 108 Hdt. 4.161. Cf. Isoc. 6.31, D.S. 8.27.1, Paus. 4.15.6. Cf. also Plu. Sol. 10; Ael. VH 7.19 for the Lacedaemonians as arbiters between the Athenians and Megarians. 109 See e.g. Hdt. 7.140ff., Plu. Ag. 9, 11.3, schol. ad Hom. Od. 3.267; D.S. 8.28; [Plu.] Mor. 1146c. Cf. again the traditions which bring Epimenides and Thaletas into the legislative narratives of Athens and Sparta, supra nn.94 and 95. Epimenides, in this tradition, is an outsider not just to Athens but to human society at large. See D.L. 1.112:  χρόνον τινὰ ἐκπατῆσαι, with Gigante 2001:  18. See further Capriglione 2001:  49; Scarpi 2001:  33–4; Brillante 2004: 22f. and Dillery 2005: 181ff. 110 See Kõiv 2003: 23–4; J. Lewis 2007: 11. 111 See Bonner and Smith 1930: 72 and Willetts 1988: 111. 104

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men’ in his Politics,112 while Solon depicts himself stood resolutely between the opposing parties to civil unrest and mediating between them.113 Zaleucus enjoys a checkered career in the tradition, described variously as shepherd, slave and noble.114 Even Lycurgus, who was of royal stock and, on Plutarch’s account, in possession of strong reputation, power and numerous friends,115 repeatedly absented himself from the community so as not to be accused of reaping the benefits of his prominent position.116 By lacking allegiance to a single family or faction, a lawgiver could, in a sense, be felt to belong to the community as a whole.117 A desire for permanence and immutability similarly finds expression in the lawgiver traditions beyond appeals to divine backing. Plutarch imagines Solon breaking off his friendship with Chilon when the latter suggested that rules are subject to revision,118 while Diodorus relates the famous account of Charondas’ ‘most incredible’ innovation aimed at preventing unnecessary revision of his laws: anyone proposing a change in the laws was to do so with his neck in a noose ready to be put to death if his proposal met with disapproval.119 In each case, the perceived severity of early legislation120 and its focus on achieving longevity and consistency are translated into the lives and personalities of the lawgivers themselves.121 Arist. Pol. 1296a. 113 Sol. Fr. 36.26–7 (West), see Lloyd 1979:  243 and Ker 2000:  322ff. Cf. Plu. Sol. 14.1–2. See Szegedy-Maszak 1993: 208 for comparison with Thucydides’ Pericles, who is above affiliation to a particular political faction. For this, Plutarch (Per. 39) tells us, he acquired the nickname ‘the Olympian’, again highlighting the association between impartiality and proximity to the gods. Cf. D.L. 1.75 on Pittacus. 114 See Aris. Fr. 548 (Rose) and D.S. 12.20 with Camassa 1988: 135; Van Compernolle 1981; and Link 1992. Cf. Feldman 1992a: 289 for Moses’ status. 115 Plu. Sol. 16.1. 116 Ephorus ap. Strab. 10.4.19. 117 See Plu. Lyc. 31.4 for Lycurgus having no descendants at Sparta. Cf. a similar phenomenon with respect to the heroic dead, see e.g. Boedeker 1993:  169 on Orestes’ cult at Sparta, and with respect to tyrants, see Vernant 1982:  33–4. Cf. Van Effenterre and Ruzé 1994: 1.9, n.6. 118 Plu. Mor. 151f. 119 D.S. 12.17. Cf. D.S. 1.27.4 for the professed immutability of Isis’ laws. 120 Draco, famously, was said to have written his laws in blood and despaired at the absence of penalties harsher than death: Demades ap. Plu. Sol. 17.2. 121 Comparable are the frequently harsh entrenchment formulae found in early laws, not only as punishment for breaching enactments but for damaging the inscriptions themselves. Often such threats rely on the gods as penal agents, reminding us of the uniquely long-lasting permanence divine involvement affords. For a range of 112

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Indeed, more striking still are those stories where the lawgiver himself breaks one of his own laws and ‘submits to punishment rather than exempt himself or change the law’.122 Charondas, finding himself unwittingly armed in the assembly, in contravention of his own law, was said to have committed suicide rather than have his laws go unenforced.123 Zaleucus and Diocles were also said to have died at the hands of their own laws,124 while an alternate tradition has Zaleucus lose an eye in similar circumstances.125 In the words of Diodorus’ Charondas: ‘You must save either the law or the man.’126 Thus, with their own lives and persons, the lawgivers underline in striking fashion that their laws are ineluctable, applicable to all and immutable. A final, related way in which a desire for impartiality and for permanence for their laws is achieved by mortal means is through the sacrifice of the mortal lawgiver – whether through his death or departure, extricating the laws from dependence on the present authority of the lawgiver himself. In this context, too, we encounter a combination of divine and mortal agency and authority. Both Solon and Lycurgus are said to have extracted oaths from their fellow citizens to safeguard their laws before leaving their home cities.127 For Ker, the tradition that Solon left ‘for the sake of theoria’128 further imbues his departure with religious significance and further protects his law code.129 Just as, for instance, the annual Athenian theoria to Delos required abstention from public executions for the instantiations of such divine involvement see e.g. IvO 9 (Olympia, sixth century), Nomima I.19 (Halicarnassus, fifth century), IG ii2 43 (Athens, fourth century), RO 78 (Xanthus, fourth century). 122 Szegedy-Maszack 1978: 207. 123 D.S. 12.19. 124 Eustath. Ad Il. 1.131.27ff.; D.S. 13.33. See also Suda s.v. Drakôn for Draco’s demise. 125 Ael. VH 13.24 (mentioned amongst others harmed by their own laws). Cf. the story that Lycurgus lost an eye defending his laws:  Plu. Lyc. 11, Sol. 16.1, Mor. 227a–b; Paus. 3.18.2. Cf. Apollod. 2.8.3 with Camassa 1988:  134 on the oikist Oxylus. 126 D.S. 12.16.5. 127 Hdt. 1.29.2; Plu. Lyc. 29.2–3. 128 Hdt. 1.30.1, [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 11.1. 129 Ker 2000: esp. 315ff.

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sake of the city’s purity, so Solon’s period of theoria was set up as one during which his laws could not be overthrown nor stasis renewed.130 While Solon left Athens for only ten years, Lycurgus left for Delphi and never returned. As we saw, he allegedly starved himself to death, the ultimate mortal act, as a sacrifice for his law code and his city.131 For Allen, the lack of any ‘specific, named mortal author’ allows for a sense in which a law derives from the community as a whole.132 A law not fixed in time or locality to the lifetime of a given individual is free to claim universality, and continue to claim relevance to the community after the death or departure of its mortal source of authority.133 What we find here, though, is not an attempt to write the mortal legislator out of the picture. The lawgiver’s departure or death aims, through very human means, at achieving immutability and permanence for their laws, but it does not constitute a denial of individual human agency and authority. I  hope to have shown that we would be wrong to imagine that it is only with the death or departure of the legislator that his legislation may attain impartiality and relevance for the entire community in perpetuity. Allen’s claim that the attribution (whether accurate or not) of numerous laws to Solon in the fifth and fourth centuries is ‘the exception that proves the rule’ is far from satisfactory.134 The features of the lawgiver traditions identified above demonstrate some of the ways in which the unique concentration in the person of the lawgiver of divine and mortal sources of authority ensure that claims to long-lasting communal relevance and impartiality are not stifled but actually enhanced by the figure of the lawgiver, whether alive or dead.135 Thus the Ker 2000: 319–20. For the theoria to Delos see Pl. Phd. 58b–c. 131 Plu. Lyc. 29.5. 132 Allen 2005: 389. Cf. Gagarin 2008: 108 for ‘depersonalisation’ as a result of publicly inscribing law. 133 See S. Ant. 453ff. 134 Allen 2005: 391. Contrast Thomas 1994 for a nuanced assessment of such appeals to Solon’s authority. 135 Indeed, alongside the trope of the lawgiver’s departure, we encounter a frequent tendency within the literary tradition to associate legislators with their enactments to the point of near identification. See Osborne 1997:  80, cf. Feldman 1992a: 293, 289f. 130

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lawgiver can bring the same authority through their presence as can be achieved through their absence. Furthermore, the qualities of the lawgivers as mortal men offer something essential to their role as legislators. We saw how mortal wisdom and association with the divine are presented as integral to legislation. But the failings and mortality of mortal men as mortal men are equally integral to their role as legislators in the tradition.136 Our lawgivers are often depicted as subject to human folly, human imperfections, and so, as we have seen, falling victim to their own laws and meeting sticky ends.137 We are thus emphatically and repeatedly reminded that these men fall short of divine perfection. One reason for this may be the need to reflect the involvement of laws with specific and imperfect human affairs. We have seen how the lawgivers’ involvement with the gods and claims to external authority enable them to transcend the particularities of polis life and to create an ideal of law which transcends any individual regulation in its normative role for the community as a whole. Justice, we saw, is a divine principle. It is linked to and protected by the gods, and the community as a whole should aspire to it not least by enacting good laws. Law, however, must simultaneously operate within a mortal society and apply, however imperfectly, to particular human situations and to particular mortal men. As the Athenian Stranger reflects in Plato’s Laws, ‘We are not legislating, like the ancient lawgivers, for heroes and sons of gods … we, on the contrary, are nowadays but mortal men legislating for the seed of men.’138 136 See Osborne’s (1997:  74)  observation that the lawgiver traditions demonstrate a clear understanding of human weakness, pace den Boer 1973: 20. 137 For mortal folly, see e.g. Plu. Sol. 15.6–7 and D.S. 12.19. Cf. Exod. 2.11–2 and Num. 19.1–22.1 for Moses’ ‘mistakes’, with Feldman 1992b: 16 for Josephus’ reaction. Cf. Dougherty 1993 on murderous oikists. For Zaleucus’ and Lycurgus’ blinding see infra, n.125. For Moses’ speech impediment see Exod. 4.10, cf. Battus (Hdt. 4.155; Pi. P. 4.59ff.), whose disability provokes his visit to the oracle, which prefigures his role as oikist. Cf. Vernant 1982, Jameson 1986 on the nexus of ideas connecting lameness and tyranny in Greek literature. Contrast the need for priests to be ὁλόκλαρος, see Wilgaux 2009. 138 Pl. Lg. 853c.

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Divine and mortal authority in inscribed law We explored how different authors at different times and in different ways who dealt with the question of lawgiving and told stories about lawgivers grappled with the same questions about the sort of authority necessary for legislating and the ways in which divine and mortal agency and identity interact and interrelate in the legislative process. We discussed some of the ways in which the general theological problems of the nature of the gods’ involvement in the human sphere, and the nature of the malleable boundary between gods and men, manifested themselves in the domain of Greek thinking about laws, lawgiving and lawgivers. We approached these questions through the dual prisms of the boundary and interrelation between human and divine agency and the boundary and interrelation between human and divine identity. We saw how the theologically open-ended nature of Greek polytheism led to a proliferation of different mechanisms employed to achieve and to showcase different levels of divine involvement. I offer in conclusion some brief remarks about some of the ways in which similar theological dilemmas manifest themselves in inscribed law. We find here a similar prominence of gods and a similarly flexible and open-ended approach to the precise nature of divine involvement in the enactment of laws and to the complex duality of human and divine agency. I  focus here on three points: invocation, religious setting and human agency, taking the so-called constitutional law from Dreros as a point of reference. Our earliest surviving Greek law was inscribed on a wall of the temple of Apollo Delphinius at Dreros sometime in the seventh century BCE. The religious context and the opening invocation thios oloion, along with a closing reference to the swearers of an oath, render unmistakable the prominence of the divine in this legal context. Both invocation and inscription in a religious setting are common features of early inscribed law, which have provoked a wide range of scholarly interpretations. Behind the invocation theos/theoi, scholars have seen anything from the voice of the god speaking through 201

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the inscription,139 to a prayer to the god to protect the law or to curse its transgressors,140 a dedication to the god to honour them, or simply a blessing in the god’s name.141 Given the open-ended nature of these invocations and, indeed, the diversity of the formulae which we encounter142 (recalling the mostly open-ended but sometimes specific appeals to a divine origin for laws in the literary traditions), it would seem inadvisable to expect a precise, one-size-fits-all explication of this practice. The open-endedness and vagueness of their theological significance is, more plausibly, inherent to them and may even reflect an unwillingness to proclaim a precise understanding of the exact nature of divine involvement. An invocation may, for example, serve both to call on a god to witness the regulation (and, by extension, to witness the community’s or individuals’ having taken appropriate action in regard to one another and to the gods themselves by enacting these laws), while also effecting the gods’ involvement and advertising it to the mortal audience; it may express both the hope for divine approval and support for the community’s actions, while simultaneously assuming such approval and advertising it to the mortal audience. Scholars have recognised that the display of laws in sanctuary contexts similarly ‘conveyed … divine authority’,143 while Van Effenterre and Van Effenterre 1994: 94, discussed below. 140 Pounder 1984: 245ff., who argues for a Near Eastern provenance for this practice. 141 Both views expressed by Larfeld 1902: 591; see Pounder 1984: 245. See Chaniotis 1996: 83ff. for a fuller scholarship review and the interpretation that these invocations serve as signposts for the religious rites performed at assembly meetings. 142 We find the generic invocation in the plural (e.g. IG i3 34 (Attica, fifth century), Nomima I.16 (Gortyn, sixth century), RO 27 (Oropus, third century) and 73 (Eretria, fourth century)) and (occasionally, as at Dreros) singular (e.g. RO 3 (Delos, fifth century), 82 (Cimolus, fourth century)), both on its own and alongside the exclamation agathê tychê (e.g. Nomima I.8 (Gortyn, fifth century), RO 14 (Mantinea, fourth century), 32 (Tegea, fourth century), LSS 23 (Epidaurus, third century)). Laws and decrees will also sometimes open with named deities, often in the genitive or dative (e.g. LSS 30 (Thalamis, fifth century); LSCG 19 (Athens, fourth century), 113 (Thasos, fifth century), 154 (Cos, third century) and RO 32 (Tegea, fourth century)), and we also have civic decrees and treaties headed by reliefs depicting the gods (e.g. IG i3 123 (Athens, fifth century), RO 10 (Athens, fourth century) and 32 (Tegea, fourth century)). For diversity in recording practices more broadly, see Thomas 1989: 76. 143 Gagarin 2005:  91–2. Cf. Hölkeskamp 1992b:  101; Thomas 1996:  28ff; Perlman 2002: 198. 139

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again disagreeing as to the precise force of this authority. The Van Effenterres went as far as suggesting that invocations in a temple setting indicate that the voice of the god is speaking through an inscription.144 Similarly Perlman, reacting to the absence of ‘human’ enactment formulae in our earliest laws from Dreros, compared them to ‘oracular ­pronouncements’.145 Scholars, then, often tend to assume that where divine authority is sought or proclaimed, it must be specifically or exclusively oracular discourse at stake and that claims for such divine authority cannot coexist with claims for human authority. Against this tendency, however, we should resist the temptation to reduce the variety of Greek appeals to the divine to the single mechanism of direct divine authorship and recognise that such appeals need not, as we saw, exclude human agency.146 The placement of civic law in a temple setting bespeaks a long-lasting relationship between the city and the deity to whom the sanctuary belongs. And yet, the precise nature of this relationship, and the precise nature of the god’s involvement – whether as audience, guarantor, protector, enforcer or even (co-)author of these laws  – which the temple setting expresses, is, once again, flexibly open-ended and vague and, as with inscribed invocations, does not allow for a one-size-fits-all explication of its theological significance. Finally, inscribed laws often positively reflect an emphasis on mortal legislative agency while appealing to divine authority. In our Dreros law, the gods’ involvement is both courted and assumed through the invocation, the temple setting and the oath. This is not, however, a divine dictum issued by revelation: ‘it was decided by the polis’. Whatever the true legislative process lying behind such an expression – and this is irretrievably unexpressed147  – the language used renders the human Van Effenterre and Van Effenterre 1994: 94–5. 145 Perlman 2002: 199. Cf. Petroviĉ and Petroviĉ 2006 for leges sacrae which seek to engender the impression that they are in fact oracular pronouncements. See also Nock 1958: 418. 146 Cf. Beard 1991: 38, 49–50 on not overprivileging the divine voice as a means of access to the gods in the ancient world. 147 See Bertrand 1990: 104–5 and Osborne 1999: 345–6 for a comparable reticence in inscribed (particularly Athenian) decrees. 144

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community a unified and active legislative agent. Here, I suggest, we find another expression of the same drive towards a notion of law as possessed of a universal authority and applicability for the city as a whole which we traced in the lawgiver traditions. The temple setting too points to a united mortal community. As Hölkeskamp observes, civic sanctuaries represent not just the god to whom they are dedicated, but a community’s collective and unifying efforts of workmanship and organisation in making that dedication.148 Both temples and just laws serve as markers of a community’s success and both serve not only as an appropriate dedication to the gods but also as proof of a successful relationship between the community and its gods, comprising a human endeavour which merits that relationship and which is achieved because of it.149

Hölkeskamp 1992a: 69. 149 I am grateful to participants at the conference and, in particular, to Robin Osborne, Renaud Gagné, Robert Parker and Shaul Tor for further discussion. 148

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PO P UL AR T HE OLOGIE S The gift of divine envy E S T HE R E I DI NOW

Introduction In Aristophanes’ Wealth, Khremylos, the protagonist of the play, inquires of the old man Wealth how he came to be blind. The reply is that it was inflicted on him by Zeus: Wealth had told the god that he planned to go to the just, the wise and the moderate, and Zeus – to stop him from identifying these individuals – had blinded him. Wealth concludes: ‘so much does he feel phthonos towards the good’.1 In this little comic moment we find an age-old trope – the punishment by the gods of apparently undeserving mortals. But what kind of emotion is this divine phthonos? It has been compared to other episodes where the gods demonstrate ill-will towards mortals, for example, Hesiod’s account of Zeus’ response to Prometheus’ trickery; but the comparison is not quite exact, since in those stories the divine emotion is anger, and Zeus has been provoked.2 In Wealth’s account, in contrast, those who suffer are innocent; in fact, they are identified by their good character, while Zeus appears to have acted in a fit of gratuitous divine spite. Why would those who are in all ways deserving, who are about to be justly rewarded, earn such divine hostility? This chapter concerns the nature of ‘popular theology’, or rather, as we will see, ‘theologies’, and it starts with this passage from Wealth because it will use divine phthonos as a way into, and as a case study for, some ideas about this topic. Although, or perhaps because, it is generally agreed to be a tenet of popular belief, divine phthonos rarely gets much Ar. Pl. 87–92. 2 Hes. Th. 551–612, Op. 42–105; e.g. as suggested by Sommerstein 2001: ad loc. 1

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attention in discussions of ancient Greek religion.3 In part, this may be because of its implicit status in our mental furniture: as a ‘zero-order belief’ it is ‘so taken for granted that we are apt not to notice [it] at all’, let alone hold it up to academic inquiry.4 There is also a part played by the intellectual legacy that distinguishes ‘religion’ from ‘superstition’, surely exacerbated by post-Enlightenment attitudes to fate.5 And besides, to those more used to a beneficent deity, it casts the divine in such an unappealing light.6 Divine phthonos cannot be folded neatly within a traditional theodicy: it is rather, as one great classical scholar put it, ‘a kind of philosophy of life and its vicissitudes rather than a religious conception’.7 Whether or not this means that divine phthonos can be described as an element of ancient Greek theology depends, in turn, on our definitions of that term: if theology requires ‘the systematic study of the existence and nature of the divine and its relationship to and influence upon other beings’, divine phthonos certainly appears to resist this designation.8 The apparent ambiguity of its nature (and likely origin) has prompted much debate:  some scholars deny any complication; others observe the multiplicity of ideas that jostle for 3 Popular belief:  as a selection, Dodds 1951:  29–31; Walcot 1978:  47; Herrmann 2003: 64. See Parker 2011: xii, although he emphasises that his exclusion of ‘speculation about divine justice, fate, human responsibility and the like’ and concentration on cult practice ‘is based not on a judgment about what might constitute “real” religion, but more mundanely on the wish to do one thing at a time’. 4 Bem 1970: 5. 5 For example, Hume (1875: 2.334) argued that man required an enlightened rationality to think in theist terms; the uninstructed were likely to sink into polytheistic – and personalised  – views of the working of the universe; cited and discussed by Brown 1981: 14. 6 E.g. Walcot (1978: 48–9) discusses Eduard Fraenkel’s apparent discomfort with the ‘cruder conceptions’ (1950: 349, on Ag. 762) of divine phthonos in his commentary on Ag. 750–62, by which he meant the emotion of phthonos or envy, preferring to see it in its more ‘purified conception’ (p. 350) as a tool of justice. 7 Popular superstition: e.g. Dodds 1951: 30; Cairns 2005: 314. Lloyd-Jones 1971: 69 argues that it starts as a superstition but becomes a ‘comparatively advanced theology’. Quotation:  Nilsson (1947:  86–7) describing the links between the evil eye and envy of the gods. 8 Collins English Dictionary 2013, s.v. ‘Theology’ (www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/ english/theology).

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attention under this concept.9 It has been interpreted as a blast of malice, likely to be wholly undeserved by its targets; a revelation of godly avarice; an instrument of divine justice, delivered as punishment for some impiety (be it action or character); a godly slapdown intended to keep mortals under control; and/or a mechanism for the maintenance of cosmic boundaries.10 This does not give the impression of a systematic ‘theology’. If, in turn, the existence, the messiness, of these multiple dimensions  – often expressed in the form of stories or fables – suggests instead ‘popular’ theology, this simply emphasises rather than resolves the problem. If we accept the definition above, the idea of ‘popular theology’ is itself an oxymoron; more to the point, it begs the question of a contrasting ‘official’ theology. Even a single ‘theology’ appears to be of limited relevance to ancient Greek culture, in which there was, famously, no text, no church, no centralised religious authority. And yet, there was shared religious practice – and this difficult idea has been successfully described using the notion of ‘embeddedness’. Originally formulated in this context by Robert Parker, who drew on economic theories, embeddedness depicts ancient 9 Lanzillotta 2010 argues that that there is no ‘envy of the gods’ in the sense that previous scholars have asserted, and that this is only a ‘modern construct’. He argues that phthonos refers simply (p. 76) ‘to the divine right to veto human happiness’. However, in the rest of his paper, he introduces other motivations, including avarice. He offers four paradigms for the ways in which the envy of the gods has been interpreted by modern scholars: simple human-style envy (which he narrows to envy of mortal happiness); religious morality, in which mortals are punished for overreaching themselves; an ‘egalitarian explanation’, a conception that emerges from Classical Athens, in which phthonos reflects the political and social principles of the time, and describes how the gods regulate the allocation of fortune; and, finally, what he calls the evil-eye model ‘that resorts to anthropological issues’ (79). Lanzillotta adduces Rakoczy 1996 for his final paradigm, the evil-eye model  – he does not develop connections between model 1 and 4, although the motivation behind the evil eye is usually mortal envy (see Dickie 1995, 1999, with occasional supernatural origin discussed on p. 12). His criticisms of previous scholarship for the tendency to deal with ancient religion as if it were a monolithic whole that remained static over time, and for not considering the nature of human envy (79–80), overlook those who do in fact examine one or other or both of these discussions (e.g. Ranulf 1933–4; Dodds 1951: 30, Lloyd-Jones 1971: 69–70) of these dimensions. 10 See further below, pp. 215–17.

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Greek religion as inseparable from the formal social structures of the polis, and successfully evokes shared religion as inseparable from daily life.11 Such a potent concept could offer some insights into the processes of a theology, popular or not, but in current scholarship there is little detail about how embeddedness worked in practice; indeed, different scholars have interpreted the term in different ways.12 Despite powerfully evoking the place of religion in daily life, the concept of ‘embeddedness’ leaves questions about the development, transmission and acquisition of shared religious ideas, let alone a ‘theology’, unanswered. In trying to locate ancient Greek popular theologies, I will examine the category of ‘popular theology’ and the idea of ‘embedded religion’, and ask whether, and if so how, we can bring them together to explore the creation, expression and transmission of such a phenomenon as divine phthonos.13 This will involve (re)formulating both concepts in concert with recent sociological theories concerning networks, both social and cognitive, and the role played in social formation by narratives. I will argue that the process of embedding is reflected in the process by which popular theologies are created as cultural productions that draw on aspects of popular culture. As use of ‘narratives’ here suggests, this chapter will suggest that theologies is a more helpful formulation than theology for discussion of our subject, and will draw attention to the ways in which such theological narratives are fluid, dynamic and emergent. In the second half of the chapter, it will return to divine phthonos as an illustrative case study: examining how narratives about divine phthonos draw on aspects of popular culture to offer ­reflection on mortal–divine relationships.

Parker 1986:  254–74. Economic embeddedness in Polanyi 1944, 1957/1971 and Polanyi, Arensberg and Pearson 1957. Parker’s model of embeddedness resonates with Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood’s model of polis religion (Sourvinou-Inwood 1988, 1990), although his was published earlier. 12 Examples drawn from scholars of ancient Greek religion who have used this concept explicitly: Bremmer 1994: 2; Gordon 2006: 21–2; Price 1999: 3. 13 This chapter (although published later) was written before and therefore was drawn on and developed in discussions in Eidinow 2015a and 2015b: esp. 149–55. 11

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The problem of popular theology ‘Popular theology’ is intriguingly elusive as a topic of historical study. In contrast, discussions of popular religion in different historical periods are ample, and, since they highlight problems relevant to this discussion, they offer a useful place to begin. Across scholarship on different historical periods and contexts we find a division made between ‘popular religion’, which is often defined by exclusion, that is by what it is not, and ‘official religion’.14 It appears we are still influenced by a Humean two-tiered system: ‘Plainly, some solid and seemingly unmovable cultural furniture has piled up somewhere in that capacious lumber room, the back of our mind.’15 When we turn to ancient Greek scholarship, this also seems to be the case: for example, in On Greek Religion Robert Parker does not refer to popular religion explicitly, but does discuss the control, or rather lack of it, that polis religion exerted over groups who might choose to change some detail of their cult practice, setting up an implicit dichotomy between ‘official’ and ‘not-official’. In the course of this, he quotes Plato’s famous passage in the Laws to illustrate the kinds of religious practices that may occur ‘below the level of the group’.16 This approach sets up an ambiguous division between ‘polis religion’ and the religious practice of those who actually comprised that polis. Similarly, Jon Mikalson’s argument that popular religion is the ‘religion of ordinary people’ raises the question of who counted as ordinary, and to what ‘ordinary’ might stand in opposition.17 Those questions are only partly answered by the further elaboration of popular religion as ‘those beliefs which an Athenian citizen thought he could express publicly, and for which he expected to find general acceptance among his peers’.18 14 See, for example, in Old Testament studies, Gomes 2003, cf. Carrol 2000; early modern period, Edwards 2008. 15 Brown 1981: 12. 16 Parker 2011: 59–60. Pl. Lg. 909d–910. 17 Mikalson 1983: 3, and he distinguishes this from Nilsson’s exploration of the practices and beliefs of the Greek peasant (Nilsson 1947). 18 Mikalson 1983: 12; cf. also ibid. ix: ‘publicly expressed and casually accepted by the great majority of Athenian citizens’, and (5) ‘what was acceptable to the majority of Athenians of the late fifth and fourth centuries’.

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Both descriptions  – of the religion of the polis or that of ordinary people  – intimate that ‘official’ religion was established, unquestioned and unchanging. Yet other evidence indicates that decisions made by the polis, or rather the people that comprised it, about the acceptable/unacceptable nature of religious practices were fluid, keyed to context and, importantly, decentralised. As an example, an analysis of the use of the term asebeia in the forensic speeches shows that it was as likely to have been prompted by other negative social dynamics – including political ambition, personal enmity and competition, envy and fear (of occult aggression) – as a sense of religious certitude. The orators would manipulate the nuances of meaning of the term in order to make their particular argument more effective.19 In response to both Parker’s and Mikalson’s descriptions we might add that evidence suggests we may need to consider divisions more nuanced than those between ‘polis and popular’ or ‘official and unofficial’ religious practice. The details given about fellow practitioners by the writer of the Derveni Papyrus, or authors of certain of the Hippocratic treatises, suggest that there were many different kinds of sentiment concerning mortal relations with the gods being expressed both publicly and below the level of the group. Without denying the significant organising role of the polis, the distinctions appear to be not between an official religion and a single other, but among myriad differently nuanced religious activities conducted in different contexts.20 This is not to suggest that any category of religious activity – whether we call it popular or not – should be seen as dominant; it might be more useful to picture many voices talking all at once.21 This polyvocal conception of ancient religious activity aligns with some modern approaches to popular theology. Current approaches to popular theology still presuppose different strata See Eidinow 2015a. 20 As Berlinerblau 1993: 7 on Israelite ‘popular religion’ in the Old Testament: ‘One of the major drawbacks of the term “popular religion” in general, is that it fosters the impression of one religious movement, one “popular religion”, which stands as a unified antithesis of an Official religion.’ 21 Gordon (1999: 163) uses a similar image (‘everybody talking at once’) to describe the emergence of ‘magic’. 19

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of beliefs, but offer more nuanced views of their interaction. Kathryn Tanner paraphrases it as ‘theologies of the people’, which she describes as ‘theologies without much textual or even extended verbal expression which are simply found, more often than not, fully embedded in the religious practices and lived relations of those who, with reference to intellectual training, social standing, economic attainment or institutional position, cannot be counted among the elites of church and society’.22 She emphasises that this theology is not a single category, but multiple, or rather, manifold, occupying a spectrum, ranging from the theologies of those who are closer to the church to those who are intellectually or institutionally more marginalised. Other scholars working in this area emphasise the practical character of popular theologies, and the ways in which they offer their practitioners psychological or actual support. This aspect supersedes concerns with logic, religious purity or consistency: anything and everything that works is welcomed, such that isolated elements from other theologies or religious practices may be included without necessarily bringing their context with them.23 This leads to elaborate syncreticity, and also creativity, as these different pieces are connected to each other and to other aspects of a theology. One of the resulting characteristics of popular theologies is their responsiveness to context and the changing circumstances and needs of those who hold them. In creating this definition, Tanner identifies ‘popular theology’ as a form of popular culture, and argues for its generative relationship with a concomitant elite theology.24 Arguing that popular culture should neither be romanticised (isolated from elite dynamics as an autonomous ‘completely authentic production of the people’) nor cast as the passive receptivity of ideas generated by an elite, she draws attention to the ways in which popular culture exists in response to, and as an appropriation 22 Tanner 1996: 101. 23 Tanner 1996: 103, citing Schreiter 1986; Scott 1990; Brown 1991, Rabateau 1978 (the last two providing case studies rather than an overview of the features of popular theology). 24 Drawing on Hall 1980, 1981, 1988 and de Certeau 1984 on popular culture.

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of, what elites produce.25 And she argues that this reflects the relationship of elite and popular theological discourse. In turn, elite theology similarly absorbs and remakes the cultural productions of wider society: ‘Rather than being a self-sufficient sort of cultural production formed in isolation from the wider culture in which theologians participate, theological discourse is a kind of parasitic cultural production living off the host cultures that it finds and does not produce.’26 In addition, they work with other theological productions, appropriating past theologies, ‘often breaking them apart in the process’ in order to repurpose them ‘within new discursive organisations’ that meet with current value judgments.27 She stresses that in terms of content, elite and popular forms are likely to overlap considerably, in fact will be hard to distinguish – and are likely to compete (elite with elite and popular with popular, as much as elite with popular). As a result, we need to study them in the setting in which they are expressed, and explore the processes of cultural transformation that they involve. Throughout this discussion Tanner draws attention to the discursive nature of theology, and, both implicitly and ­explicitly, the ways in which theology ‘is speaking’, ‘voiced’ or ‘said’, or how ‘the theologian now utters [what is commonly said in the wider culture] in some novel way from a different point of view’.28 This emphasis on the role of what we might call ­narrative  – on the stories that are told, and the ways in which they are told – is also reflected in a reformulation of the process of ‘embedding’, to which I will turn next. The embedding of popular theology Turner’s description of theology has ushered in the notion of embeddedness, a concept also used to describe ancient Greek Tanner 1996: 104–6; quotations 104. She distinguishes (105) between elite productions, elite productions intended for popular consumption (‘mass-marketed cultural commodities’) and popular culture (‘working with the materials provided by cultural elites’). 26 Tanner 1996: 113. 27 Tanner 1996: 116. 28 For example, Tanner 1996: 114. 25

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religion. In the scholarship on this subject, this formulation is both powerful and useful, but, as noted above, its lack of detail means that it can be interpreted in a variety of different ways. Moreover, it tends to be used as a description of a fixed state; any underlying cognitive processes of transmission, acquisition, reflection and experience are not included, or even explicitly denied.29 This may be in part because ‘embeddedness’ in this formulation focuses on the role of the social group: Parker’s original analysis starts at the level of the household and this is reflected in the emphasis found in other scholars on the ritual, public and communal aspects of religion; little attention is paid to individual experience or action.30 However, by elaborating the original model of embeddedness it may be possible to develop these aspects.31 In the field of economic sociology, the original notion of embeddedness has been expanded by Mark Granovetter, whose approach highlights the role of the individual – or rather individuals and their networks of social relations. A network model of this kind offers a way of depicting what it means for an individual to be embedded in an institution – not only in terms of the position of the individual in that institution, but also the nature of his or her participation in its creation. Although as formulated, Granovetter’s original approach rested on the assumption that cultural phenomena and social phenomena are as one, the idea that social networks offer conduits for transmitting and acquiring ideas can clearly help to explore the nature of the interface between shared, external culture and internal cognition, and the processes 29 For example, Simon Price 1993, who emphasised the role of the individual, and drew attention to religion’s public and private aspects, argued that practice, rather than faith or personal piety, are the key to understanding ancient Greek religion; while Richard Gordon 2006: 21–2 appears to suggest that the embedded nature of Greek religion limited the possibility of questioning or criticising the religious: but later in the same essay, he appears to retreat from this and, like Mikalson (as discussed above), turns instead to the idea that social constraints precluded the expression of any such question. 30 As noted, the arguments in this section are developed more fully in Eidinow 2015a in the context of an exploration of evidence for cognitive networks. 31 Granovetter 1985, 2002; Gareth Dale 2011 has examined the influences shaping Polanyi’s conception of embeddedness, and the development of his ideas, and I am indebted to his work, and to the discussions of Krippner et al. 2004.

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by which cultural meanings converge  – as research in social network analysis and the cognitive study of religions suggests.32 Narratives (verbal and embodied, implicit and explicit) deployed by individuals and groups engaged in the ongoing creation of both relationships and meaning play a key role in the formation of social structures.33 Shared concepts, explanations, expectations, assumptions, and understandings of the world  – distributed through stories (literary, oral, ritual and visual)  – may help to create common traditions (in all their variety), but they also provide the material for innovation. As mentioned above, an analysis of use of the term asebeia in the forensic speeches reveals how law court speakers nuanced the meaning of this concept for particular contexts and purposes. Religious concepts and meanings develop in and consist of the ties between individuals and groups who are connected – rather than staying within the limits of one group. As already noted, the evidence for religious activity within ancient Greek society reflects a similar process. Rather than discussing any single theology, we need to look for multiple narratives – popular theologies – developing simultaneously, within and among individuals and groups, spread via, and reflecting, relationship ties of various kinds. Turning back to Tanner’s analysis of the relationships between theology and popular culture, described above, we can see how this networked approach to embeddedness through the creation of stories aligns with her approach to the cultural production of theologies. The network of narratives that embeds individuals within their religious culture, and 32 See Mützel 2009: 87; Pachuki and Breiger 2010; Mische 2011. One response in economic sociology (by Zukin and DiMaggio 1990: 13–20) suggested four categories of embeddedness  – cognitive, cultural, social structure and political institutions. Cognitive approaches: see e.g. Cerulo 2002; Geertz and Jensen 2011; White 2011. 33 Sociologists have extended the dynamic construction of ties to include other forms of discursive and performative interaction; see Mische 2011: 13–15, and in cognitive studies, see Geertz 2011: 14. For example, Somers 1994; Bearman and Stovel 2000; McLean 2007. See further Pachuki and Breiger 2010. White 2008 offers one example of the ways in which stories are created through interactions between individuals, which in turn create social networks. In creating stories we draw on shared story sets, comprising common plots, which help us to describe and interact with each other and the world around us. These stories constitute culture, shaping and being shaped by institutions.

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vice versa, maps the cultural production of theologies that she describes. These are, by the nature of their production, interactive, both in terms of their content (drawing on past and present ‘theologies’, wider elements of popular culture) and their context (developing according to circumstances of the production of each narrative  – the context of their telling, the relationship between speaker and audience). It is the cultural production of a particular ancient Greek theology to which I turn next. Phthonos Mortal phthonos: the gift As an example of a theological narrative, I come back to the divine dynamic that ruined Wealth’s plans, divine phthonos. Explanations of this phenomenon usually start from mortal phthonos, that is the ‘envy’ that Aristotle describes in which one feels pain at the well-being of another.34 For some scholars this indicates that the Greeks perceived the gods as being in competition with mortals and vice versa – reflecting mortal dynamics. Indeed, Peter Walcot explained divine phthonos as the projection onto the gods of a very mortal zero-sum competition for the acquisition of goods, happiness or hierarchy that developed alongside the rise of the Eastern rulers, whose wealth and power were so great that they became proverbial.35 Henry Immerwahr argued something similar:  starting from the observation that in Herodotus’ work, the characters Solon, Amasis, Artabanus and Themistocles apply the idea of divine phthonos to great kings and tyrants, he suggested that this reflected political ideas current in the fifth century, when mortal phthonos was seen as an obstacle to the rise of despotism. Thus, ‘the divine preserves first of all the boundary between men and gods; but it also preserves the order of society by preventing conquest and absolute rule’; however, in contrast, Herodotus himself saw it as a sign of the essential disunity Arist. EN 2.12, 1108b5–6. 35 Walcot 1978: 22, 31 and 36. 34

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of the Greeks, reflected in local and international politics.36 Svend Ranulf saw this competition as purely local, charting mortal and divine phthonos developing hand-in-hand, noting its particular rise in fifth-century Athens, along with the development of the process of the legal procedure of graphe.37 As he underlined, phthonos must be understood to describe not only an emotion of the underdog towards his superiors, but also a feeling held by those who are successful, including both mortals and gods, to those beneath them. He emphasised that neither jealousy nor envy is quite the right translation for the Greek idea of divine phthonos – since it needs to evoke the kind of emotion that a tyrant may hold towards his subjects.38 More recently, arguments have been put forward that encompass a number of these ideas: thus, Douglas Cairns has argued for a mortal political paradigm in which phthonos reflected the bottom-up envy of the successful by the masses: but whereas this emotion was ineffectual, the phthonos of the gods in contrast ensured that those mortals who overreached themselves were slapped down into place. Not only did such an ideology serve the masses very well, it also included an element of justification, since the grounds for such a punishment necessitated a ‘minimal notion of human offence’.39 The underlying attempt to bridge different views of the gods – concerned with both jealousy and justice – is made more explicit in Matthew Immerwahr 1966: 313–14. For divine phthonos as a way of ensuring moral standards and mortal divine hierarchies, see Rohde 1901: 2.329; Nilsson 1941: 699. 37 Ranulf 1933–4/1974 explored divine phthonos as part of a larger project analysing the links between the development of the disinterested tendency to inflict punishment (manifest in criminal law) and the social phenomenon of envy (see 2–3 and 158–61). Underlying this concept was an ongoing belief in the (54) ‘general destructive activity of the gods’ towards mortals, which afflicted both the innocent and those guilty of impiety. He establishes three types of divine destructive activity (90–1): ‘1) disasters caused by the gods in punishment of wrongs committed, 2) disasters caused by the gods merely from capriciousness or for their own convenience, 3) disasters caused by the gods out of jealousy’, but argues (111) that they are all fundamentally of Type III, that is, prompted by jealousy. Nevertheless, he also saw this as linked to the Athenian system of criminal law: the gods were seen as ‘guardians of justice’ (20), but perceptions of their behaviour at particular times turned on socio-political changes, and concomitant dispositions to phthonos among different social classes. 38 Ranulf 1933–4/1974: 68. 39 Cairns 2003: 249. 36

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Dickie’s argument that, at least with regard to the literature of the fifth century BCE, we must simply be prepared to find a set of ideas that appear to contradict one another: the envy of the gods could be described as both moral in its effects and, simultaneously, could be jealous and vindictive.40 But just how moral was it – and just how envious? In what follows I want to introduce a different aspect of popular culture that I  will argue is important for the shaping of conceptions of divine phthonos, and which can help to explain its role in these theological narratives: the role of (mortal) phthonos in the social dynamic of reciprocity, and the giving and receiving of gifts. Scholars have used the work of Marcel Mauss to examine this aspect of ancient society and have focused on how ‘the gift’ facilitated social cohesion, shaping relations in Archaic society, especially, but not only, among the elite.41 Far less attention, if any, has been paid to the negative elements of the gift and related social dynamics, particularly the resentments that gift exchange might engender.42 My suggestion is that (mortal) phthonos was specifically associated with these darker emotions, and that it was associated with resentment at giving (that is, at the expectation that one has to give); resentment at receiving (which is, in the end, a resentment at the expectation that one has to give in return); resentment of others’ receiving (but you do not necessarily want what they have or you may have to give as well); and resentment at others’ giving (but you do not want to have to give or to receive). Below, I give some examples from Homeric epic to illustrate these suggestions, and also to demonstrate the nuances with Dickie 1987 examines the presentation of divine phthonos in Herodotus and argues against the idea that this manifests a sense of divine justice. He observes (119) that this is the version of divine phthonos that Aristotle is anxious to argue against (Metaphys. 982b32–983a4). 41 See also Hornblower 2006: 30–3 on use of Mauss’ work to understand the world of Pindar. On reciprocity in Homer and Hesiod, see Ulf 2006: esp. 87. 42 Although Van Wees 1998: esp. 32–3 does discuss examples from anthropology of competitive reciprocity, noting (33) that ‘the antagonistic nature of reciprocity as a force for status differentiation seems to sit uneasily with its conciliatory nature as a force for social integration’. He goes on to stress that such competitive reciprocity is ‘most of the time … an effective, and on the whole preferable, alternative to violent competition for status’. 40

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which this concept could be used in different social contexts. Of the ten examples of its use in the Homeric poems, eight occur in the Odyssey, a work that comments particularly on the complex habits and customs, expectations and behaviours relating to forms of gift exchange: for Odysseus, the gift is a method of survival and the perceptions surrounding the giving of gifts can mean life or death for those involved. In that context, I want to draw attention to the ways in which phthonos and its cognates were used rhetorically, so that what I will call ‘phthonos talk’ offered a potent force for mortal negotiations around the system of gift exchange, reciprocity and related social dynamics.43 Homeric phthonos When the hero Odysseus returns to his home disguised as a beggar, his wife Penelope, who has not recognised him, offers the weary traveller the usual rituals of hospitality, instructing the maids to prepare him a bed with bright coverlets, to bathe him so that he can come to dinner.44 Odysseus refuses these gifts and will only allow his feet to be washed if it is done by an older woman, ‘who has suffered as I  have suffered’, and he uses a particular phrase, ouk an phthoneoimi, to say that ‘I would not begrudge/deny/refuse such a one to touch my feet’.45 The language of this refusal might seem odd to us at first: after all, Odysseus is in the role of a beggar, being offered a gift – who is he to refuse to accept it?46 But using this language in In contrast, in the Iliad the context of battle serves to underline the characters’ view that there are more important values than survival; the gifts of the Iliad tie into a system of exchange that emphasises individual heroic values, e.g. Sarpedon’s explanation to Glaucus that the land they receive from their people means they must fight well in order to earn kleos in battle, Hom. Il. 12.310–21, and see von Reden 2003: 66. Von Reden 2003: 59 also argues for a difference in the meaning of gifts between the two epics, but she draws attention to the difference between trade and gift exchange; as she points out, the gifts of the Odyssey are still often made in contexts of gift exchange. 44 Penelope’s instruction and Odysseus’ refusal: Hom. Od. 19.317–48 (and see Rutherford 1992 ad loc.). 45 Autenreith s.v. offers a cluster of definitions for phthoneo. 46 Walcot 1978: 22 argues that phthonein ‘can be used in Homer when it means not much more than “to be unwilling”’, and gives as his example Hera’s interchange 43

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this way represents far more than simply surly play-acting by Odysseus, in role as the curmudgeonly traveller. His statement is part of phthonos talk, which is used specifically in situations that involve giving and receiving gifts. Some of these involve an individual asking to give a gift him or herself. Nausicaa asks her father for mules so that she can ride down to the beach and do her fateful laundry, and Alcinous announces that he will not begrudge her the mules, or anything else she wants:  οὔτε τοι ἡμιόνων φθονέω, τέκος, οὔτε τευ ἄλλου.47 Similarly, Odysseus announces that he will not begrudge Alcinous the details of the underworld that he has asked to hear: οὐκ ἂν εγώ γε/τούτων σοι φθονέοιμι καὶ οἰκτρότερ᾿ ἄλλ᾿ ἀγορεύειν48; and in the underworld itself, Teiresias explains to Odysseus that those spirits to whom he begrudges the blood will go back to the House of Hades: ᾧ δέ κ᾿ ἐπιφθονέῃς, ὁ δέ τοι πάλιν εἶσιν ὀπίσσω.49 Two other passages suggest additional dimensions of phthonos. These are still related to the idea of giving and receiving gifts, but concern phthonos as a response to another’s gift giving, and in both the term appears as part of a reprimand. The first occurs early on in the poem, in Odysseus’ house, when Penelope loses her temper with a minstrel’s sad songs and scolds him, telling him not to sing such material again.50 Her son, Telemachus, reprimands her, using the notion of phthonos. His comments make the association with giving and receiving gifts explicit.51 He asks ‘Why do you begrudge (phthoneeis) the minstrel who wants to give pleasure by whatever way his mind suggests?’ This aspect occurs again in Odysseus’ interchange with Arnaeus (known as Irus) the beggar, but with a further facet. Odysseus is seated on the threshold of his own house, disguised as a vagrant, when Arnaeus arrives and tries with Zeus (Hom. Il. 4.51–6) on which see further below. See discussion of lack of divine phthonos in Homer: Dodds 1951: 29–31. 47 Hom. Od. 6.68. 48 Hom. Od. 11.380–1. 49 Hom. Od. 11.149. 50 Hom. Od. 1.346. 51 See discussion by von Reden 2003: 70 on the commodification of song in the epics.

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to see him off.52 Odysseus responds by announcing his own lack of phthonos towards him for the gifts he receives, and then reprimands him for his phthonos towards others, specifically Odysseus. Here phthonos is described as being aimed at the recipients of others’ gifts, rather than felt by one who gives a gift. These examples also highlight some important aspects of phthonos talk, in particular the ways in which it is voiced. It appears that although phthonos and its cognates can be used to describe one’s own response or that of another, this occurs in importantly different ways. When individuals talk about ­phthonos and themselves, they tend to deny the presence of phthonos; in contrast, statements made about others and phthonos tend to be statements of attribution. These are usually challenging – either reprimands or insults (or the one understood as the other)  – and can lead to conflict. An example of the latter occurs towards the end of the poem, when Telemachus tells off Antinous for begrudging the gift of food to a beggar (who is of course Odysseus).53 This leads, in turn, to a confrontation between Antinous and Odysseus himself, in which Antinous’ phthonetic behavior is revealed to be not only socially but even cosmically short-sighted: as Odysseus’ speech and the following interchange make clear, through his behaviour, Antinous is not simply being ungenerous. His refusal to participate in the system of giving and receiving gifts ignores the fragility of the mortal state, elaborated by Odysseus’ tale of his own adventures, and underlined by the suggestion of one of the wooers that the beggar may be a god in disguise. More specifically, as readers of the poem know, it also seals his more immediate fate at the hands of Odysseus. Finally, returning to the scene with which we started, we can see that Odysseus’ use of phthonos, so odd to a modern ear, is actually appropriate. There are a number of good reasons why Odysseus might refuse Penelope’s offer and ask for an Hom. Od. 18.16 and 18. As Jones 1988: 166 observes, Odysseus has in the past been generous to visitors, see 1.176–7; for rivalry between beggars, see Hes. Op. 24–6, discussed further below. 53 Hom. Od. 17.400. 52

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older woman – the younger women are treacherous and one, Melantho, has already insulted him by suggesting that he will try to take advantage of them.54 In refusing the gift as offered, he is also demonstrating what kind of a man he is.55 But now we can see that Odysseus is using the language of phthonos in a distinctive way: although he is the recipient of a gift, he is using phthonos talk in the pattern of one who is giving a gift rather than receiving one. This is a subtle use of language intended to signal the different status of this beggar: his phthonos talk is a negotiation, a readjustment of his position as a guest. Phthonos talk is a way of signalling information about the nature of participation in the crucial social system of giving and receiving gifts. As these examples show, when individuals deny that they have phthonos, they are stating their capacity, and willingness, to be involved in basic reciprocal relationships; in contrast, an attribution of phthonos makes an accusation that a person is unwilling to do so. But these are also statements about wider social and cosmological concerns: giving and receiving gifts, and processes of reciprocity, are about looking after members of the community, protecting groups and individuals from experiences of fortune and misfortune. Indeed, in a number of these examples, the remarks made concerning phthonos include observations about the role of the gods in allocating some of the gifts at issue. For example, when Telemachus lectures Penelope, he notes how Zeus not the minstrel is responsible for the sad events of the song; in his instructions on phthonos Odysseus tells Arnaeus that the gods are responsible for good fortune. These examples suggest that phthonos can be associated with mortal responses to the gifts of the gods: what of the gods themselves? It has been argued that ‘we fail to detect in the Homeric poems anything comparable to the concept of divine envy associated with Herodotus, Aeschylus or Pindar in the fifth century BCE’, but before we turn to examples from those authors, perhaps one final Homeric example Hom. Od. 19.65. 55 As Jones 1988: 179–80. 54

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may give some initial insight into divine phthonos.56 We turn to the Iliad, as Hera, boiling with rage that Zeus may want to save Troy, speculates how she may offer him her favourite cities to be sacked.57 She announces that she may feel phthonos but would not act on it – the reason she gives is that Zeus is far more powerful than she is, so there would be no point. Here is a god experiencing phthonos of the mortal kind we have observed: as mortals feel phthonos for each other at giving and receiving gifts (some of them from the gods), in the same way, Hera herself professes to feel phthonos at a situation in which she must unwillingly give a gift. However, the use of phthonos talk has a different emphasis. As above for Odysseus, this digression about phthonos is part of Hera’s negotiation with Zeus, but it stands apart for the bald assertion made by the goddess:  no cautious mortal denial of phthonos here. Rather, although she acknowledges his greater power, his claim to phthonos leads into the detailed claim to status with which she ends her offer to him. Divine phthonos: a gift that can never be repaid The examples from Homeric epic suggest that in these works, in terms of human relationships, phthonos and its cognates were used to describe the darker emotions associated with the dynamics of giving and receiving gifts: feelings of resentment and anger at being involved in a system that required one to give or to receive, and to observe and respond to others giving or receiving. It may be that Hera’s assertion of phthonos in the Iliad is evidence for the direct projection of mortal ideas about phthonos onto the divine. Whether or not we accept this, when we turn to later examples of divine phthonos, an association with giving and receiving gifts is, I would argue, still apparent. However, just as Hera’s use of phthonos talk differed from the mortal model, so divine phthonos can be seen to comprise fundamental differences from the mortal dynamic of reciprocity, Walcot 1978: 22–3; cf. Lanzillotta 2010: 85. 57 Hom. Il. 4.55 and 56. 56

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both in the acts of giving and receiving and the nature of the gifts. Turning first to the dynamic of giving and receiving, Mauss suggests that the gifts mortals make to the gods are compelling, irresistible: ‘The purpose of destruction by sacrifice is precisely that it is an act of giving that is necessarily reciprocated.’58 As Godelier notes, this analysis is puzzling: there is no acknowledgement of the difference in power between man and deity, of the sheer mystery and unknowability of the gods.59 These crucial aspects of man’s relationship with divinity are clearly illustrated by ancient Greek narratives about divine phthonos, which repeatedly draw attention to the ways in which the gods undermine mortal notions of reciprocity, and in which the unexpected, and often uncertain, provisions of fortune, both good and bad, set in motion a divine destabilisation of the system of reciprocity.60 Coming back to Walcot’s quotation above, we turn to examples from Herodotus, Pindar and Aeschylus. Herodotus’ Histories supplies some very clear examples: a first, and famous example occurs in Solon’s famous instruction to Croesus, where the sage describes the divine as phthoneron (prone to envy) and tarachodes (troublesome).61 But the gods are not being criticised for being competitive or acquisitive, as some scholars have argued.62 This is not a lesson about the dangers of excess, even if it does take place in the king’s treasury: rather, Solon is warning Croesus about risks that accompany the gifts of the gods. Solon emphasises to Croesus the difference between being olbios (prosperous) and eutuches (lucky): being prosperous may look better at first glance, but it cannot be relied upon; nor can a gift from the gods, who may choose to rip 58 Mauss 2002: 16. 59 Godelier 1999: 29–31. 60 As noted, the arguments and examples of this section are expanded in Eidinow 2015b, where the social role of mortal phthonos is examined in more detail. 61 Hdt. 1.32.1. 62 Contra Lanzillotta 2010: 91, who suggests that in this episode (Hdt. 1.32.8–9) and that of Polycrates’ ring (Hdt. 3.40) the gods are motivated by avarice (the gods ‘simply keep for themselves, as divine privilege, the right to enjoy happiness without counterpoint’).

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it away. The story of Polycrates, whose apparent good fortune is his death warrant, provides another example. It is linked to Solon’s earlier explanation by some phthonetic vocabulary, specifically, the description of the divine as phthoneron.63 As Herodotus describes, and his friend King Amasis recognises, Polycrates’ fate is sealed by his constant, unremitting good fortune – the continuous gifts of the gods requiring a reciprocity that is both impossible and, in the end, irrelevant.64 Polycrates considers himself to be eutuches, and, as Amasis explains, this can only be temporary:  the gift cannot be returned, the debt cannot be repaid. As well as demonstrating how the divine dynamic of giving and receiving gifts warps its mortal model, these narratives about divine phthonos draw our attention to the gap between mortal and divine perceptions of what is a worthwhile gift. Divine gifts occur in a very different currency from that of mortal gift exchange. This is made clear in the anecdotes that Solon uses to illustrate his lesson for Croesus: first, the glorious death of Tellus, then the unexpected deaths of Cleobis and Biton. These stories may be read as drawing attention to Croesus’ short-sighted behaviour, although, if we pause to reflect, the Lydian king’s pride in the wealth he has amassed is only human.65 But not only do these stories reveal the uncertainty of life (as we might expect from the larger context), they also underline the very different nature of the gifts that the gods provide. Indeed, we can argue that it is the gift of what appears to be good fortune itself that creates dangers. This point is made superlatively by Pindar in his epinikian poems, which draw attention to the ways in which good fortune attracts mortal phthonos. For those who are successful it is impossible to escape; for those who are not successful, it is almost inevitable that they will feel it towards those who are.66 Obviously in this Hdt. 3.40. 64 Kurke 1999: 109 notes that Polycrates must give something back to the gods, and sees the anthropological parallels (making the Maussian reference) but does not link this to phthonos. 65 See Pelling 2006. Tellus: Hdt. 1.30.3–5; Cleobis and Biton: Hdt. 1.31. 66 Parth. 1.8: phthonos lies on every man for his achievement, e.g. Pi. P. 1.81–3, 7.18– 19; N. 8.33. P. 11.30 and 54–7 may describe how those who have ‘won the peak’ 63

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context, those on the receiving end of this emotion include in particular the athletes for whom Pindar is writing: those who, like Hagesias of Syracuse, drive ‘first around the twelve-lap course’, and on whom ‘Charis sheds a glorious appearance’.67 Phthonos is perceived to be a part of the nexus of dynamics between an individual and the group of his fellows: after all, politai are the last people to recognise a glorious a­ chievement.68 As praise poet, Pindar’s role is to smooth the successful athlete’s return into the political and mortal community he has briefly left behind, highlighting the roles and activities to be performed that will keep the system of community dynamics well oiled with praise and favours.69 Crucially, this system of exchange is underpinned by the presence and role of the gods, including fate and tuche.70 It is their granting, or not, of favour, their gifts, that can bring a man victory (and mortal phthonos) and/or cause him to topple from victory to disaster.71 And, as discussed, although the gods are part of the mortal system of gifts and reciprocity, their very presence in the system, the nature of their gifts, introduces a crucial note of uncertainty. Indeed, one of the arguments that Pindar occasionally makes cannot be free of the hybris or insolence of those who are envious; I. 2.43; and Fr. 104c ‘Envy attaches to every excellent quality a man possesses.’ Pi. O. 6.74–7. 68 Pi. O. 5.15–16: those who strive are recognised ‘even by their fellow citizens’. Kurke 2013: 175; Stoddart 1990: 24 takes this to be a Pindaric ‘joke’ on the topos of envy – whether it is or not, it alludes to a common understanding of civic relations. 69 Pindar explicitly notes his role as a ‘shepherd’ of the words of renown that follow hymns of praise, and he sets his own praise beside that of the community: Pi. O. 11.8–9, P. 5.108–15. 70 Pi. O. 7.89–91, 9.28–9 and 100–4, O. 10.21, 14.5–6; I. 5.11; P. 1.41–2, 8.76–7. See Kurke 2013: 129–34 for gift exchange imagery reinforced by the victor’s relationship with the gods in O. 6.77–8; P. 5.23–31, 5.30–1, 8.61–6; N. 10.49–54; I. 1.52–4, 2.13–29, 6.3–7. It is not clear whether or not Kurke sees these as metaphorical uses of gift exchange (see esp. 136–9). Unpredictability of life, except for families blessed by the gods: O. 8.12–14, 12.10–12a, 13.105–6; P. 5.54–5, 7.19–21, N. 6.1–7; I. 3.18, 4.4–21. Tuche: I. 4.31–5, Fr. 38; fates: I. 6.16–18; fate: O. 2.21 and 35; P. 12.30; Fr. 232. Kurke 2013:  77–94 recognises the role of the gods in the system of gift exchange (84), but chiefly emphasises how this model between divinity and mortal ratifies aristocratic gift exchange. The role of the gods in this system can indeed be described as a reflection and reinforcement of social dynamics among the elite, but it seems more likely, or just as importantly, that this system of mortal exchange was perceived as providing a model for divine–mortal transactions. 71 The sentiment is perhaps most succinctly and famously expressed in Pi. P. 8.95, see also P. 7.19–21, 10.21–2, I. 7.39 and references above. 67

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(both to the individual athlete, against seeking higher status, and for living virtuously, and to the audience, for giving praise to those who deserve it) is the unknowability of one’s own fate. Just as easily as the gods may give their favours, they may then remove or deny them.72 Continuing our examination, we find that Aeschylus offers some further nuanced examples: the first occurs in the Agamemnon, which contains a number of descriptions of the potential dangers of prosperity.73 Despite these opportunities for invoking divine phthonos, the concept appears only once, and almost indirectly. The chorus is describing a complex of situations that can lead to experiences of misfortune: they describe punishment for wrongdoing, for being excessive. But their reference to divine phthonos is slightly different: ‘I choose an aphthonon olbon (unenvied good fortune)’ they sing. The problem, as they describe it, seems to lie in the olbos and feelings (of others) that it may attract, rather than the nature of the person who experiences olbos, or indeed its magnitude.74 A second example, from the Persae, also highlights the dangers of good fortune. The ghost of Darius provides ample description of the Persians’ wicked and impious acts – and we are told that the Persian army will be punished for their treatment of the images of the gods and the temples.75 Nevertheless, in detailing the evils they will suffer in punishment, phthonos is not mentioned; instead we find a narrative about the punishment of hybris, greed and excessive pride; Zeus is a chastiser (kolastes) or punisher (­euthunos).76 Phthonos does occur, but earlier in the play, and with a different emphasis: the messenger is describing King Xerxes’ mistakes after he has been presented with what appears to be a foolproof plan from an apparently treacherous Greek. Rather than questioning its wisdom, Xerxes simply accepts it at face value – that is, as the messenger says, ‘he ignores the cleverness 72 Pi. P. 2.89–90, 93–6. 73 E.g. Aesch. Ag. 750–62 and 1005–13. 74 Aesch. Ag. 468–70. 75 Aesch. Pers. 808–15. 76 Aesch. Pers. 821–8.

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of the Greeks and the phthonos of the gods’.77 The emphasis is not on punishment at this point, but on the sneakiness of the divine ruse: beware not just Greeks bearing gifts, but also the gods bearing Greeks as gifts. For a further example, and staying with Xerxes’ defeat, let us return to Herodotus, to the pronouncement placed in the mouth of Themistocles. The Athenian general describes the victory of the Greeks and certainly notes that Xerxes is impious and wicked. However, he does not give this as the reason for his failure: this information about Xerxes’ character is ‘a statement of pure matter of fact’.78 Rather, Xerxes’ lack of success in conquering Europe and Asia is because the gods and heroes simply ‘begrudged’ (ephthonesan) them.79 And, incidentally, this fits far better with Herodotus’ not unsympathetic picture of Xerxes, as being only temporarily eutuches, a victim of divine machinations who tries to escape his fate, but is warned by an apparition in a dream not to try.80 Reinforcing this impression, Xerxes’ uncle Artabanus has also drawn the same conclusions about the gods as Solon voiced to Croesus, that they are simply phthoneroi towards men.81 A few further and final examples from Herodotus: we find another case of the gift of the gods undoing its recipient in the terrible fate of Pheretime, queen of Cyrene, mother of Arcesilaus III.82 She suffers a horrible death after she has wreaked vengeance on her enemies, and Herodotus notes that ἀνθρώποισι αἱ λίην ἰσχυραὶ τιμωρίαι πρὸς θεῶν ἐπίφθονοι γίνονται, that is, literally, that for men, too strong vengeance provokes phthonos from the gods. At first sight this is simply a punishment for excess, and yet compare the case of Hermotimos.83 Castrated as a youth by Panionios, he gets his revenge by castrating this man, and also his family, in turn. Herodotus tells us that this revenge ‘is the greatest that we know of’, but it Aesch. Pers. 362. 78 See Macan 1908 ad loc. 79 Hdt. 8.109.3. 80 Hdt. 7.16. 81 Hdt. 7.45.1. 82 Pheretime: Hdt. 4.205. 83 Hdt. 8.105–6. 77

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does not provoke divine phthonos. In Pheretime’s case, phthonos denotes the divine gift, an opportunity to avenge herself is a gift that she embraces too completely.84 In conclusion, some essential aspects of divine gift giving can be assembled. First, its unpredictability: the appearance and disappearance of gifts is wholly unexpected, or, if they are prefigured, those signs are likely to be ambiguous or even downright contradictory. Second, its immeasurability:  the ‘gifts’ themselves are likely to be delivered in a currency that is fundamentally counter-intuitive in nature, subverting our mortal understanding of what is valuable, so that fortune is actually misfortune and vice versa, or it is better to die than to live, etc. In these ways, divine gift giving mirrors but perverts the mortal system of gift giving; destabilising expectations and assumptions, drawing attention to the power of the gods and their unfathomable motivations. Just as mortal phthonos describes the dark feelings that may accompany the giving and receiving of gifts among mortals, the attribution of divine phthonos is similarly associated with the unwelcome and uncertain aspects of divine gifts. As I have argued elsewhere, all these narratives offer some reflection on mortal relationships with the gods, explaining experiences of fortune and misfortune by setting them within a recognisable social model, albeit perverting or destabilising it.85 Where phthonos talk provided Homeric characters with a potent force for their negotiations of status, the phthonos talk we find in narratives of divine phthonos offers another kind of negotiation – as mortals attempt to explain the nature of fortune/misfortune. We can see how different narratives lay 84 See also the discussion by Hornblower 2013:  35, who discusses these episodes in terms of gender distinctions, citing Nilsson 1967: 761. Scullion 2006 gives Pheretime as one example of Herodotean divinity balancing extremes and checking excess. A  second use of the term epiphthonos occurs when Herodotus is explaining how the Athenians played the crucial role in the Persian defeat – and he admits that his opinion may be epiphthonon; that is, it may be looked on with phthonos (Hdt. 7.139); see also Hdt. 9.79.2, where the general Pausanias uses epiphthoneo to indicate condemnation of the act of insulting the dead. 85 Eidinow 2015b: esp. 154–5.

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emphasis on different aspects of this basic idea, and how it is used to interrogate simplistic ideas of mortal–moral and mortal–divine relations. The narratives spun by Pindar develop associations between the gifts of good fortune and the resulting risks of hybris and pride and the phthonos of the gods; Herodotus’ narratives seem to emphasise, but often call into question, maintenance of allocations of fortune and misfortune. As a final example, I want to turn, briefly, to one more narrative or set of narratives concerning divine phthonos. In these, in turn, the paradigm we have seen is itself subverted, and it is the absence of phthonos that becomes the mark of the supreme creator. Plato manipulates the concept of divine phthonos – and its associations with the gift – but adapts it to his own particular agenda, using it to evoke the experience and expression of his philosophy, and leading, finally, to a reflection on the nature of the divine. First, in earlier dialogues there are references to the concept of phthonos between mortals. The inherent idea of gifting that this concept involves is used to illustrate the ideal method of philosophy:  so, as Herrmann has pointed out, in his discussions of the notion of phthonos in Plato’s dialogues, in the Protagoras cognates of phthonos are used to describe the process of communicating one’s knowledge freely.86 This idea of generosity is repeated in the Symposium, where the achievement of philosophia aphthonos (‘plentiful philosophy’) is contrasted with the possessive, even violent, behaviour of an envious lover (Socrates describing Alcibiades) who constrains the activities and explorations of the beloved.87 In the Phaedrus, the image of a lover occurs again, but this time these are ‘true lovers’, without phthonos, who freely encourage their beloved Herrmann 2003:  59, who cites Pl. Prt. 320c with 327a–b. I  am indebted to Herrmann’s discussion of phthonos in Plato’s dialogues and its association with philosophical process. Herrmann emphasises the term’s (and its cognates’) relationship to honour and competition, and (76) argues that Plato was picturing a ‘radically different way of living a life’. He argues (73) that Plato is playing on a root meaning of ‘hinder/debar/refuse/deny’ rather than ‘envy’ and does not make a link between the two via the social process of gifts/reciprocity. 87 Pl. Smp. 210d6 and 213d2 (see Hermann 2003: 59). 86

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to share in the conduct and nature of the god they follow, by imitation of the god, education and persuasion. This imagery helps to make sense of the chorus of gods in this dialogue, who are also lacking phthonos:  these deities help other souls to become divine; they are, like the lover of this dialogue, generous with their gifts.88 Finally, in the Timaeus, Plato depicts a supreme being – and one of his chief characteristics is that he is without phthonos: his character such that he ‘wanted all things to become, as nearly as possible, like himself’.89 In this final image, the supremely good, supremely generous deity, we have, cast in a negative form, affirmation of divine phthonos as the dark side of the gift. Conclusion These final Platonic adaptations of phthonos return us to the suggestions made in the first half of this chapter, that is, that we may benefit from interpreting ‘popular theology’ as as theologies; more specifically, as comprising myriad narratives reflecting on mortal relations with the gods, developed within relational contexts, which draw on, and develop, elements of popular culture. This approach aligns with a conception of ancient Greek religion as an embedded network: fluid and dynamic, developed in and consisting of the ties between agents within a network, comprising not only a social structure, but also a configuration of dynamic relational meanings revealed through narratives. The second half of this chapter explored some of the ancient narratives relating to divine phthonos. This concept appears in narratives that are concerned with the vicissitudes of fortune and misfortune. I have argued that the concept of divine phthonos drew on elements of popular ­culture  – specifically the social dynamics of giving and receiving gifts (including the allocation of good or bad fortunes) and reciprocity, and the negative emotions that Herrmann 2003: 58, who cites Pl. Phdr. (true lovers): 253b7–c2 and 256e3–257a2; (chorus of gods) 247a7. 89 Pl. Ti. 29e; Herrmann 2003: 64 (citing Schmidt 1882: 79–84, 142f.). 88

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this involves. This can be seen in examples from the Homeric epics, which suggest that the use of phthonos in those poems concerns attitudes to the social process of giving and receiving gifts and reciprocity, and that ‘phthonos talk’ is used as a related negotiation of status. Similarly, narratives of divine phthonos can be said to provide a negotiation of meaning with the unseen: they were used to clarify the sense of apparently random events of fortune and misfortune by offering justifications, validations, consolations and explanations. In this process, different authors emphasise different aspects of events, some stressing links with excess, others with pride, still others with cosmological order, or a blend of all three. But even as they offered explanations, these narratives also acknowledged that any sense mortals might try to make of the situations these narratives described was limited. These narratives reveal the gap between mortal and divine – in both actions and perceptions of value. They circle the apparent injustice of misfortune by offering a compelling irony:  while apparently suggesting a way of making sense of experience, through reference to the mortal paradigm of reciprocity, they nevertheless reinforce how the gods stand outside that paradigm, and do not conform to mortal expectations. In these narratives, instead of finding accounts that simply emphasise chance, or underline the dangers of impiety, we are forced to contemplate the unmortal nature of the gods, the terrible unreliability of divine behaviour; they express man’s unbearably uncertain relationship with his gods. Coming full circle, we see that the episode in Wealth with which this chapter started brings all these themes together and plays them to the extreme: it shows a situation in which gifts are to be given – but not to those whom we think deserve them. Khremylos makes the association between gifts, reciprocity and phthonos explicit:  on hearing Wealth’s explanation, he remarks that ‘it’s only thanks to the virtuous and the honest that he [Zeus] gets any worship’.90 But expectations are As Sommerstein 2001: on ll. 93–4, ‘thus Zeus is guilty of ingratitude and of violating the fundamental Greek ethical rule that one should treat well those by whom one has been well treated’. 90

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thwarted, the gift giving is perverted, the paradigm of reciprocity undermined by the divine. The comedy of the moment is bitter-sweet:  the underlying injustice that Khremylos and Wealth observe is one that the members of the audience themselves will no doubt have experienced, although this narrative of popular theology was played for laughs.

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SACRI F ICIAL T HE OLOGI E S RO B I N O S B O R NE

The practice of killing animals in the context of relating to supernatural powers, or of relating to supernatural powers in the context of killing animals, is widely known cross-culturally. The sheer frequency with which animal sacrifice is known, if we allow ourselves to use this name for both of these practices, has encouraged scholars to think that wherever it occurs it is central to the religion involved. But if we are looking for a single theology of animal sacrifice, we will necessarily focus on the killing of animals. For as soon as we look further into what is done by different people in different times and places we find that the nature of the animal killed, the mode of killing, what is done with the killed animal, all these vary from time to time and place to place. A universal theory of animal sacrifice will be a theory that is centred on killing.1 It is no surprise, therefore, that both René Girard and Walter Burkert in their classic accounts of animal sacrifice published in the same year, forty years ago, championed theories of sacrifice that centre on killing.2 For Burkert the act of killing produces anxiety which is allayed by ritualising the killing. For Girard the public killing of animals mimics the private killing of men, and offers an alternative that aims to stand in the way of endless cycles of killing of men.3 The only feature of Greek I am grateful to the participants in the conference for their discussion, and to Caroline Vout for comments on an earlier draft. Cf. Frankfurter 2011. Frankfurter cites with approval McClymond’s 2004 contention that killing was mostly secondary to e.g. ritual dedication of animals or acquisition of meat, but this ignores the fact that it is the killing alone that is common to worlds where dedication or meat are the primary aims. 2 Burkert 1972/1983; Girard 1972/1977. 3 If the thought of an endless cycle of killing is reminiscent of Hebrew scripture and Christian theology, that is not entirely coincidental. On Burkert and Girard see most recently Graf 2012. Cf. Ullucci 2011. 1

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animal sacrifice that might particularly support Burkert’s view – the nodding of the animal to indicate consent – is not a regular feature of accounts of Greek animal sacrifice but occurs only in very particular circumstances, as Naiden has shown, indicating at least that Greeks were not themselves conscious that allaying anxiety was their primary aim in every sacrifice.4 Girard drew attention to rituals in Greece other than sacrifice which involved the expulsion of a particular individual, who in some sense stood in for the group as a whole. For Girard this was evidence that ‘generative violence penetrates all forms of mythology and ritual’.5 In both cases what in fact is being shown is that some features of some Greek rituals fit with features that are found more widely distributed. In the case of both these theories, we might reasonably ask what they are theories of. While we might expect that a theory about the way in which killing animals occurred in the context of men relating to the supernatural would be a theory about the supernatural, actually it is easier to see both theories as being theories about men. That is, whether one foregrounds guilt at killing or whether one foregrounds mimetic desire, what is at issue is primarily human psychology. We can only create a theology in either case if we posit that it is a god or gods who puts into men’s minds feelings of anxiety about killing, or if we posit animal sacrifice as something from which god saves men by intervening directly in the cycle (as with Christianity). Rather paradoxically, on either the Burkert or the Girard view, the theological justification for men sacrificing to the gods does not stem from the gods in any sense wanting sacrifice, but arises because men have come to think that gods should not, and therefore do not, like killing; ritualising killing, on this view, allows men to assuage that putative divine dislike. If these theories seem to be an impoverished view of sacrifice, and a pretty bare view of the gods, the reason is not hard to seek.6 Where killing is the only feature of sacrifice Naiden 2007. Cf. Henrichs 1998: 58–63 (‘Tieropfer und Schuldgefühl’). 5 Girard 1972/1977: 297. 6 It might be objected that my own presentation of Burkert’s and Girard’s views is itself impoverished. The challenge I wish to lay down is whether any of the further 4

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that is noted in the theory, it is inevitable that killing turns out to be all that the theory is about, and all that the gods to whom sacrifice is made care about. The titles of Burkert’s and Girard’s books say it all: ‘Man the killer’ and ‘Violence and the sacred’. Unfortunately, they really do say it all. It is only on a very depressing view of the level of violence (between humans, and between the human and the animal world) that sacrifice acquires a vital role. By contrast to Girard and Burkert, Vernant’s account of Greek sacrifice is very much an account of Greek sacrifice.7 Vernant rests his account not on the mere fact of killing, but upon the account of sacrifice offered by Hesiod. Hesiod makes the particular practices of sacrifice in the Greek world a consequence of a decision by Prometheus. Prometheus is responsible for dividing up slaughtered cattle in such a way as to give Zeus the choice between fat and bones, on the one hand, and muscle meat on the other. Zeus chooses the fat and bones both knowing what they are and yet annoyed by the trick, and then he and Prometheus play games with each other over whether Prometheus will have access to fire in order to cook the meat. It is fundamental to the myth that sacrificial ritual as practised by the Greeks is a consequence of a struggle about exactly what capacities humankind should have. But Hesiod also links this disputed exchange with the fact that men need to practise arable agriculture in order to live.8 Hesiod’s contribution is to make sacrifice very much part of an agricultural world, not the world of the hunter-gatherer. In privileging Hesiod’s account, Vernant puts the emphasis in sacrifice not on killing the animal but on dividing it up and sharing it out. Unlike Girard’s and Burkert’s stories, which are about humans, Vernant’s story really is a story about the gods  – there is certainly a theology here. And the theology is both about gods’ knowledge and the possibilities of human actions of which gods are ignorant, and about gods’ elaboration that either scholar provides alters the fundamental basis of their argument. Vernant 1974/1980, 1979/1989, 1981/1991. 8 Hes. Tg. 535–616, Op. 42–105. 7

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responsibilities for how the world is divided up. It is a view that combines certainty about the limits of human capacity with uncertainty about how total is the gods’ control over how men choose to deploy those capacities. Hesiod’s gods are responsible for the order of the world. If in some ways men are peculiarly disprivileged – as, for instance, in not being able to live simply by gathering what grows naturally – in other respects they are peculiarly privileged – they can dominate at least parts of the animal world and they can communicate with the gods. Vernant’s view of sacrifice is part and parcel of his conviction that to be human for the Greeks was to take a place ‘Between the Beasts and the Gods’.9 The gods allow mortals free will, but may nevertheless intervene to make life easier or more difficult for them. Mortals can bargain with gods, but have to allow that gods have superior power. Every time men sacrifice animals they make a decision about the division of the carcass which takes advantage of human free choice, acknowledges and reproduces the separation of gods from humans, and negotiates power relations by raising the question of who has power and who is powerless. Vernant’s discussion of Greek sacrifice has the advantage both that it is distinctly a story about Greek sacrifice and that it is a story about sacrifice that says something about the gods.10 Nevertheless, it is a remarkable feature of the account that it relies almost entirely on the view of a single ancient author, and a view, besides, of which later ancient writers seem to have taken, as far as we can see, rather little notice.11 Prometheus’ trickery certainly attracted later attention, as did 9 Vernant 1972/1977. 10 By contrast, Naiden’s recent contribution offers a theory of Greek sacrifice which, while saying something about the gods, does not provide a story of sacrifice at all – animal sacrifice just becomes one of many ways in which men seek, and may either succeed or fail, to please the gods (Naiden 2013). That animal sacrifice was indeed one of many forms of offering is clear, but it is no form of explanation of why it was adopted at all, let alone why it was accorded centrality, to observe that. 11 Particularly revealing here is the myth in Plato Prt. 320c–321d, where the gods give Prometheus and Epimetheus the task of distributing faculties to mortals and where Prometheus steals fire from Hephaistos because Epimetheus has given humans no clothes; the issue of division of powers is here, but without any link to animal sacrifice.

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his punishment, and Pandora acquired something of a life of her own (and even an alternative name), but Prometheus’ role in sacrifice is not one to which later authors advert.12 The three things that are explained together by Hesiod  – sacrificial practice, fire and women  – are elsewhere disaggregated and explained separately, even if the story involves the same characters.13 For all that Hesiod repeats his complex story in two different contexts, it is a story that is very much context-dependent. In Works and Days it stands at the head of the account, making clear that the human condition is a consequence of humankind’s peculiar relationship to the gods – so that Perses should buckle down and act accordingly. In Theogony it immediately precedes the final showdown between Zeus and the Titans, which marks the end of the old order and the beginning of the new. The particular relationship with humankind is therefore made foundational both for humans and for Zeus himself. We may suspect that it is because these stories are context-dependent that later Greeks take so little interest in them. Christians are liable to think  – since this is their own ­practice  – that those who engage in rituals are conscious of the inception of the ritual and in some sense perform the ritual to keep the memory of the original ritual moment alive. But for Greeks of the Classical period there is no reason to believe that every sacrifice was a memorial of Prometheus’ original division of meat at Mekone.14 Mekone was said by Strabo (C 382) and others to be the earlier name for Sikyon, but it is notable that no later writer who tells us this mentions that it was the site of Prometheus’ famous division of meat. The Prometheus Bound makes no mention of the division of meat at Mekone (just as it makes no mention of Pandora). When Plato interests himself in Prometheus in Protagoras it is for his role in creating men in the first place, not for anything to do with sacrifice. When Aristophanes introduces 12 There is no entry for ‘sacrifice’ in the index to Hunter’s study of the ancient reception of Works and Days, Hunter 2014. 13 Cf. West 1966: 305–6. 14 Cf. Parker 2011: 140–1.

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Prometheus as a character in Birds (1494–1552), to bring a message to Peisetairos that the gods are starving because of the lack of smoke from sacrifice, now that Cloudcuckooland is in the way, it is hard not to think that Prometheus has been chosen for this role because of his own links with sacrifice, but there is no explicit allusion at all to those links. All the signs are that Prometheus’ responsibility for humans having fire was repeatedly celebrated, not least in torch races at festivals in his honour, but that Prometheus’ involvement in inventing a fundamental part of sacrificial ritual was of no ongoing interest. We might be keen to see the punishment that Zeus chooses for Prometheus, the pecking of the liver, as closely linked to sacrificial division, in which the innards are given a peculiar role, but no ancient source glosses the punishment in a way that alludes to this. From this point of view, Vernant is doing something quite close to what Girard and Burkert do. That is, he picks out a feature of sacrifice which it serves his purpose to stress, without regard for whether or not that feature was stressed by Greeks themselves.15 And that Vernant’s claims about sacrifice have theological implications only makes the element of arbitrariness in his choice more, rather than less, problematic. But what happens if we look not at features of Greek sacrifice that happen to attract our attention but at the features that the Greeks themselves worried about? Scholars have often expressed surprise and regret that there are not more numerous and detailed descriptions of sacrifice in Greek texts. As they try to describe what happened they find themselves either resorting to sacrifice in Homer (e.g. Od. 3.4–11, 417–63) or to the comic Naiden 2013: 317–21 has made much of the ‘emic’/‘etic’ distinction, but Vernant’s practice shows just how problematic such a distinction is. Hesiod’s was certainly an ‘emic’ account, but the decision to make it the core account is distinctly ‘etic’ and might be said in fact to give Hesiod’s account an entirely ‘etic’ role. Naiden himself insists that ‘theology’ is an ‘etic’ term (2013: 320–1); while I do not consider use of ‘etic’ terms a vice – it is in my view inevitable – his claims that ‘theology’ ‘implies a doctrine, a scripture, and education’ (by which he means formal schooling) seems to me simply false. Neither in the modern nor in the ancient world has the fact that views of the gods – what Naiden terms ‘Greek beliefs’ – were implicit, seldom recorded and acquired without schooling prevented them constituting a theological position. 15

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scene in Aristophanes’ Peace (937–1059), or to amalgamating the two into some sort of ‘ideal type’ of ­sacrifice.16 Those literary descriptions are certainly not useless  – we should, for instance, take note of the fact that Aristophanes makes a joke about the inappropriateness of killing (an animal) to celebrate the goddess Peace. But they are far less useful than the archaeological evidence. The archaeological evidence for sacrifice comes in three forms. First, there are the actual remains at sanctuaries, where studies of altars and of bones are increasingly revealing a diversity of practice, over both place and time.17 Second, there are visual representations of sacrifice, primarily on painted pottery. Attention was first drawn to this evidence by Berthiaume and Durand, and it has been systematically collected by van Straten.18 What makes it hard to use for theological purposes is that only one exceptional pot, the Ricci hydria, offers a full sequence of ritual actions; the vast bulk of the imagery focuses on a single point in the sacrificial ritual, with different points more and less popular at different moments. The theological significance of what is represented, and of what is not represented, is hard to establish, and the context in which the scene is shown (both in terms of the use of the pot and the other scenes on the pot) needs to be taken into account. Third, regulations for sacrificial practice are laid down in what are known as ‘sacred laws’.19 These epigraphic documents offer not a full description of a sacrifice but the rules for particular parts of sacrificial ritual. The partiality and the narrow focus of these inscribed texts is in some ways parallel to the partiality and narrow focus of the visual imagery, but in this case the context is firmly that of the sanctuary itself, and so the very partiality can be taken to reveal those features of sacrificial ritual So most recently Naiden 2013: 15–25. For the scene in Peace, discussed in the context of comic discussions of sacrifice more generally, see Redfield 2012. 17 Cf. e.g. Ekroth and Wallenstein 2013. 18 Durand 1979/1989; Berthiaume 1982; Durand and Schnapp 1984/1989; van Straten 1995. 19 Originally collected by de Prott and Ziehen 1896–1906, the most accessible collection is still the three volumes of Sokolowski 1955, 1962, 1969, now supplemented by Lupu 2005. 16

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that were felt to need particularly careful regulation or which were subject to choice and change. What aspects of sacrifice were of concern to individuals and groups emerges from epigraphic documents of various sorts. Calendars of sacrifices variously specify the nature of the sacrifice, identifying the date of the sacrifice (at least to the month), who is to perform (what) and who may be present at the sacrifice, the god or hero to whom the animal is offered, the species of animal and any particular features  – age, colour, sex, etc.  – of that animal that are required (‘a pregnant sow’), the price to be paid for the victim and what happens to the meat (holocaust, eaten on the spot, sold). We can sometimes see why a particular calendar concentrates on particular details (so when the Salaminioi are busy dividing up responsibilities it is not surprising that there is emphasis on cost (OR 37)), but although there is no reason to think that all the details specified indicate purely theological concerns, what is detailed certainly points to issues that were subject to discussion in the vicinity of dealings with the supernatural; even if the prime reason for worrying about cost is about equalising expense between different groups, what drives price differential is differences in the nature of the animal sacrificed, and concern over cost only highlights that the choice of animal was important. In addition to calendars, there are inscriptions which record particular regulations for particular sacrifices, often in the form of prescriptions or proscriptions on sacrificing certain types of animals or on certain sorts of people (foreigners, women) taking part. In other cases a tariff is set for the privilege of sacrificing. Separate again are regulations about particular festivals, which may describe what is to be done in considerable detail. Indeed it is these that reveal most about particular sensibilities and are the richest source of sacrificial theology. In order to focus the question, I concentrate in what follows on a small number of examples, identifying their particular concerns and the theological implications of those concerns. 240

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I begin with one of the large sample of sacred laws from Cos, a calendar datable to the middle of the fourth century BCE.20 The Cos calendar is exceptional in that although some of the entries are relatively minimal, giving date, divinity, sacrificial animal, identity of sacrifice and perks (e.g. A  55–6, or 57–8), many provide some form of additional information about the nature of the rite. So, for the sacrifice to Demeter on Batromios 23 we are told that ‘two new cups are provided’; for that on Carneios 10 to Argive Royal Hera of the Marshes we are told that ‘what has to be wrapped in the skin is wrapped in the skin and what is wrapped in the skin is sacrificed on the hearth in the temple and a broad flat cake made from half a hekteus of barley. None of these to be taken out of the temple (naos)’ (ll. B.5–10). Most extreme is the entry with which the surviving part of the inscription opens: the first forty-four lines of the inscription contain a detailed prescription for a sacrifice to Zeus Polieus and associated rites. After initial prescriptions about prayers, now largely lost, a great deal of space is devoted to how the ox is chosen (though the qualities an ox has to display or what an ox has to do to be selected are never clear). Provision of the ox for sacrifice is made here an honour (as well as a liturgy). So too one of the hieropoioi is picked out to slaughter the ox, and required to remain sexually pure for a night before doing so. Much remains obscure about exactly what happens when in this ritual (most particularly whether or not a second ox is sacrificed to Hestia). Nevertheless, from the theological point of view there is plenty of material to discuss – above all the importance of choosing the right animal. That gods might be concerned about what animal is sacrificed to them is clear from many regulations, and most of all from prohibitions.21 But here the concern for the animal goes beyond its species, beyond its condition, to something particular that causes its selection. Whatever quality or action it is LSCG 151, RO 62. 21 For some prescriptions and proscriptions of particular animals see Lupu 2005: 57–8. 20

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that causes one particular ox to be selected, the assumption is that that quality or action makes the animal particularly fit to be offered to Zeus Polieus. Or rather, perhaps, to Zeus in any guise. For in the month Carneios the ritual surrounding the selection of an ox for Zeus Machaneus (lines B10ff.) is said to be identical to that for Zeus Polieus. Although it is only for Zeus that the selection procedure is detailed, and only for Zeus that the animal is given a monetary valuation that is announced by the herald (A 26–7), the need for selection seems to extend to Hera and Athena, or at least to Athena Machanis. For although Athena Polieus (A 55) receives an offering on the same day as Zeus Polieus, it is only Athena Machanis (B21), receiving an offering on the same day as Zeus Machaneus, who gets a ‘select’ heifer (krita). It is not clear to me whether this is the same heifer that the city buys for the Carneia for not less than 50 dr. (B26–7), but it is notable that a minimum price is specified for the sacrifice, also in Carneios, to Argive Royal Hera of the Marshes (B 3ff.), of a choice heifer. It is hard not to see both some sort of hierarchy and a reflection of a gendered world here. Not only does the issue of choice or no choice pick out Zeus, Hera and Athena, but Zeus gets an ox, Hera and Athena heifers (of specified minimum price), while Dionysus, Demeter, Rhea, Apollo and Leto get pigs or sheep, and the Graces a goat. The heifer for Hera is hardly a surprise, given her association with cows and indeed with marriage. The heifer for Athena is more surprising  – except that Athena (like Hera at Samos) was thought the appropriate recipient of numerous dedications of nubile korai, as on the Athenian Acropolis, and the heifer is the most obviously nubile of offerings.22 The only other deity to get an ox is Herakles, who famously killed Augeas when he reneged on his promise to give him a tenth of his cattle for cleaning the eponymous stables in a single day;23 here Herakles is given an ox in the context of a whole series of sacrifices beside his sanctuary or The finest appreciation of the Acropolis korai remains Payne (Payne and Young 1936). For the emphasis on nubility in korai, see Osborne 1994: 88–95. 23 Apollod. 2.5.5. 22

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to him. Gods it seems, as far as the Coans are concerned, not only like or dislike different animal species, but may not be satisfied with any old specimen. What differentiates these animals is partly their value to humans – an ox is more valuable than a heifer, and a heifer than a ewe, and so on. But it is certainly not explicit that it is the most valuable ox that is selected for sacrifice to Zeus (even though its value is clearly important enough to be announced). Is the repeated specification that the victim should be teleios a matter of insisting that people must not try to get away with a juvenile of the species? Or is this a matter of ‘perfection’?24 In the case of Athena Polias and of Demeter, the Coans insist on the ewe which is sacrificed being pregnant (in the case of the victim for Demeter, both pregnant and telea). Leto also receives a ewe (D5), as does Artemis (D18), but in neither of these cases is it required to be pregnant, simply telea. Pregnancy and Athena hardly go together, and the value of a pregnant animal might be all that is at issue, but the possibility of fertility being symbolically appropriate certainly applies to Demeter (we will see this again at Mykonos, in a moment).25 Likewise we might note that Dionysus is the only god to whom a kid is sacrificed (though the Graces get a goat). The contrast of sheep to Apollo and kid to Dionysus again offers symbolic possibilities. It looks as if we should entertain a theology in which the Olympian gods enjoy a hierarchy, with Zeus at the top and with Hera and Athena at the next level down. The offerings made do not merely respect position in that hierarchy but also offer some characterisation of the deity. The animals here are distinguished not only by value and species but by what is done with them. The ox sacrificed for Zeus Polieus is elaborately divided, with particular portions not just for the priest but for other officials (thurifer, hieropoioi, heralds etc., A 49 to 55). The priest’s portions vary from sacrifice to sacrifice and are not consistent for the same animal: the 24 For discussion, see Lupu 2005: 129. 25 ‘With almost no exceptions, sacrifices of pregnant animals are offered in sacred laws to divinities which are most readily affiliated with fertility’, Lupu 2005: 142, commenting on the Thorikos calendar (his no. 1), with examples, in which this pregnant ewe to Athena Polias figures as the ‘possible exception’.

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priest who sacrifices a pregnant ewe to Athena Polias gets skin and leg, but the priest who sacrifices a full-grown pregnant ewe to Demeter gets only the ears.26 Relatively elaborate division is found also of the goat offered to the Graces (D5ff.) and of the sheep offered to Zeus Machaneus. Pigs offered as part of the preliminaries to ox sacrifices to Zeus are burnt, as is the lamb offered in preliminaries to the ox sacrifice to Herakles. The meat from the sacrifice to Zeus Polieus is not to be taken from the polis, the meat from the pigs sacrificed to Dionysus and the pregnant ewe sacrificed to Rhea (B 3–5) is not to be taken away, though the meat from the kids sacrificed to Dionysus on the same occasions (A 57–8, 61–3) may be. Taking away the meat from the sheep sacrificed to Apollo and the ewe sacrificed to Leto is, by contrast, explicitly allowed (D 1–5). Holocaust sacrifices give everything to the god, and are understandable in those terms.27 Insistence upon consumption on the spot creates a feast and obliges those who will enjoy the meat to take part in the ritual. When taking the meat away is explicitly allowed, these instances are marked by minimal ritual engagement:  explicitly it is the priest who provides the offerings in both cases – as if this is a ritual which a priest might perform on his own. We might take two opposite views of these cases; either, rather like the opposite case of the holocaust victim, the god alone is the focus, and this is an act performed for the benefit of the god; or, alternatively, this is a sacrifice undertaken in order to create a supply of meat – some deity needs to be the recipient of the sacrifice, but it is the taking away of the meat that is the object of the exercise. Other calendars offer many parallels with the Cos calendar, but also some stipulations of a different kind. In particular, stipulations about who can or cannot take part. The Mykonos calendar, explicitly occasioned by the synoikismos of the cities on the island, and dating to around 200 BCE, provides some

Compare the variation from deity to deity in what the priest receives in the early fourth-century BCE deme decree from Aixone (SEG 46.173). IG i3 255 appears to vary perquisites according to deity. 27 See especially Jameson 1999. 26

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nice examples that more or less cover the full range.28 This is another calendar which has a rich variety of ritual details and detailed specification of the nature, and in some cases the price, of the animals. But it also has various concerns with who participates. So, on Poseideon 12 there are two sacrifices to Poseidon, one to Poseidon Temenites of the finest white ram uncastrated (or rather ‘with balls’, enorkhes), and the other to Poseidon Phykios, of a white lamb with balls. At this second sacrifice, it is not permitted for a woman to be present. On 10 Lenaion there is a sacrifice ‘for a harvest’ to Demeter of a sow pregnant with its first litter, to Kore of a full-grown boar, and to Zeus Bouleus (a corruption, it appears of ‘Eubouleus’) of a piglet. ‘Let any of the women of Mykonos go to the feast and as many of the women living in Mykonos have been initiated into Demeter.’29 Two days later, on the twelfth, there is a sacrifice to Dionysus Leneus and to Zeus Chthonius for a harvest and to Ge Chthonie: ‘no foreigner is permitted’.30 Although it is hardly surprising that women’s attendance is enjoined on a day when there are sacrifices to Demeter and Kore, forbidden on a day when there are sacrifices to Poseidon, the hostility to foreigners on a day when the three gods sacrificed to seem the least political of all is more difficult to account for.31 Reviewed as a whole, these Cos and Mykonos calendars suggest that sacrifice is good for relating to the gods because, in a polytheistic system, it enables a differentiated set of relations. The gods are both assumed to like order – having a calendar ensures that they get sacrifices regularly and know what they are getting (as Lysias (30) stresses in the Nicomachus case). This is surely one of the reasons why it is domesticated and not wild animals that are sacrificed: success in the hunt is always potentially random, and hunted animals may or may not be available at any moment, for reasons that cannot be LSCG 96. 29 LSCG 96.20–2. 30 LSCG 96.25–6. 31 For other prohibitions of women cf. LSCG 82 (sacrifice to Anakes at Elatea), LSS 63 (sacrifice to Herakles on Thasos), LSS 88–9 (Lindos). Foreigners are excluded from the whole sanctuary (probably the Archegesion) by LSS 49 (SEG 44.678) (Delos) in a measure which Butz 1994 suggests may have been aimed at the Athenians. 28

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put at the door of humans. Making sure that domesticated animals are always available, and available in the right condition, is, by contrast, something for which humans can reasonably (be expected to) take responsibility. (We might note further that the moment of offering of a sacrificed animal is always clear, for it is the moment of slaughter; although some small animals were hunted with nets and might, conceivably, have been sacrificed (we do in fact find the sacrifice of a hare32), most hunting itself kills the hunted animal, and to offer a carcass to the gods is not at all the same as killing an animal for the gods.) These sacrifices attribute to the gods various preferences and dislikes, and also signal the relative standing of different gods and goddesses. Ceremonial can be enhanced or reduced to produce a greater or lesser display of respect, and offers a range of models for the way in which divine power should be acknowledged. At the same time as marking that not all gods are equal and alike, these sacrifices signal also that the human community is differentiated, not merely in the view of its members, but in the eyes of the gods. Regulation over who attends a sacrifice and stipulation of particular qualities for those taking roles in the ritual suggests that the gods are expected to have some concern for the identity and behaviour of those who take particular part in offering animals to them. What, we might reasonably ask, differentiates the offering of sacrifice from the offering of some other material object or action?33 Why is it sacrificial animals that the gods receive regularly according to a calendar, rather than some other gift or service? One obvious answer is because sacrifice involves a group. Or at least these sacrifices involve groups. It is not only the gods that need to know when they will receive sacrifices but also the human community that needs to know when it is supposed to be offering sacrifices. Sacrifices are not simply a LSCG 125.5 (from Mytilene). 33 It is unclear to me why Naiden (2013) thinks that putting sacrifice back into the wider category of ‘offering’ in itself solves all puzzles about sacrifice:  ‘Rather than make “sacrifices” according to the category of ritual, Greeks made offerings according to need, often burnt offerings’ (2013: 330). 32

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sharing between a human and a god, but a sharing between one human and another:  sacrifices recognise and reproduce both the order of the gods and the order of humankind. Other offerings are not shared in the same way, but given entirely to the gods. But the second answer is surely that sacrifice does something both to the gods and to the humans involved. It is fundamental to sacrifice that the gods want to share. That there will be a sharing is simply assumed in the Prometheus story  – it is the necessary inequality of the shares that creates the particular form of exchange that follows. This sharing is recognised, arguably, not least in the moments when it is forgone, when an animal is burnt whole for the gods. At Cos, at least, it is notable that such burning whole of an animal is never an independent event, but always a preliminary to further sacrifice. The sharing involved in sacrifice is an act of communication from humans to gods, but also by implication from gods to humans. Sacrifice will have failed if it does not bring divine favour – it is the presumption of the specification of sacrificial action that the god will be pleased if the action is undertaken in this way – although the pleasure of the gods cannot simply be taken for granted.34 Holocaust sacrifices give something additional to the gods, and arguably in Cos that is seen as a desirable preparation for the following sacrifice from which men will take nourishment. We might go further. Sarah Peirce rightly insisted that discussions of sacrifice needed to take account of the fact that sacrifices are joyous occasions, and are shown as such in Greek vase iconography.35 What sacrifices do to gods and to men are assumed to be not different but alike. Gods take nourishment from sacrifices, as men do (cf. Aristophanes’ Birds), and men take pleasure from sacrifices, as gods do. The thought that the gods might come down and feast, as in the Theoxenia, only spells out this homology rather literally. 34 It is the emphasis on the gods’ rejection of many sacrifices that is Naiden’s most important contribution to the discussion on sacrifice (2013: ch. 4 and Appendix A). 35 Peirce 1993.

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Any sort of supernatural power might like a gift, but the only way of knowing what gift a supernatural power likes is to presuppose that the supernatural power shares the likings of the giver. Sacrifice is built upon the assumption that gods are like humans (like enough in Hesiod to be miffed at having to have something different from what the humans get). The preferences and differentiations of animal and of company (that is, whether women or foreigners are present) offered by different festivals further construct the gods as like humans, that is as doing different sorts of things in different groups, some of them exclusive, some inclusive. The point of this chapter has not been to offer a theory of sacrifice but to think about the theological implications of Greek sacrificial practices. Greek sacrificial practices were immensely various, and the two inscriptions discussed here only give us part of the range of that practice. But they enable us to see, I hope, the main ways in which, in making sacrifices, individuals and groups within Classical and Hellenistic Greek cities were telling, or at least implying, certain stories about the gods – they were, indeed, doing theology.

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CHA PTER 1 1

TH EO LOGIE S OF STAT UE S IN CLASSICAL GRE E K ART MI L E T T E GA I F MA N

The term theology is uncommon in the scholarly literature of Classical art. Unlike ‘ideal’ ‘beauty’, or ‘democracy’, until recent years ‘theology’ has hardly been used in accounts of Greek art and architecture of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.1 The choice of whether or not to deploy this particular word is not a matter of temporary trends among different schools of thought; it speaks to profound assumptions. For ‘theology’ carries a set of connotations that at least superficially may appear entirely incompatible with Greek art. In this chapter, I take the questions raised by the term’s deployment in relation to Greek art as a point of departure for a discussion of ancient ideas regarding the relationship between divinities and statues of gods. In particular, I consider a visual discourse that appears on painted vases and relief sculpture of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and closely examine two examples, a South Italian vase and a metope from the Parthenon. I argue that the variety of Classical imagery featuring representations of statues of gods articulates complex perceptions of the relationship between material objects and divine beings that together constitute multiple theologies of statues. Theology and Greek art? Is the deployment of the term ‘theology’ viable in the context of a discussion of ancient Greek art? The objection to such My thanks to Esther Edinow, Julia Kindt and Robin Osborne for the kind of invitation to contribute to this volume. I am also thankful to Barbara Graziosi, Verity Platt and Richard Neer for our conversations related to the subject, to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript and particularly to Jaś Elsner for his comments on an earlier draft. Platt 2011: 31. 1

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usage of the word is obvious: while Greek art was deeply embedded in a polytheistic religious system, ‘theology’ is often taken to pertain to Christianity. Indeed, one formal definition of the term indicates that theology is:  ‘the study or science which treats of God, His nature and attributes, and His relations with man and the universe; “the science of things divine” (Hooker); divinity.’2 However, already from the seventeenth century, ‘theology’ has been applied to the study of any religion, including pagan systems of belief.3 Still, like other terms with strong Christian associations, ‘theology’ appears problematic in relation to Greek art, for its use holds the danger of ascribing Christian ideas to a pagan visual tradition. The objection to the term extends further. Unlike other religious systems, that of the ancient Greeks was distinguished by its lack of firm and coherent doctrine.4 If ‘theology’ signifies a coherent system based on scripture and/or a set of sanctified laws then it is inapplicable for Greek religion.5 Against these possible objections, it is worthwhile to keep in mind that in modern English ‘theology’ does not pertain solely to Christianity and/or a firm religious doctrine. The ancient Greek word, theologia, the origins of ‘theology’ and its usage in Greek antiquity, centuries prior to the rise of Christianity, only speak to the modern word’s applicability in discussions of a wide range of religions, particularly of pagan antiquity.6 Even without entering the long history of the term, there is a case to be made for its deployment in relation to Greek art, despite this move’s possible problems. Unlike ‘religion’, or ‘religious thought/ideology’, which encompasses the sacred more broadly, when ‘theology’ is introduced to the discussion of Greek art, it highlights a particular aspect of Greek visual tradition; it focuses the attention on issues related directly to the gods, and the relationship between images and the Oxford English Dictionary, online edition. Consulted September 2013. 3 Oxford English Dictionary, online edition. Consulted September 2013. 4 Parker 2011. 5 Notably, in Schefold 1959: 10, the German word theologie signifies a rigid doctrine incompatible with Greek religion. 6 Rudolph 2001. 2

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divine. Compare for instance, the title of Richard Gordon’s seminal article:  ‘The Real and the Imaginary:  Production and Religion in the Graeco-Roman World’ with Verity Platt’s chapter titled:  ‘Greek Votive Reliefs:  An Exercise in Visual Theologies’.7 Both Gordon and Platt discuss the significance of images of gods in Greek art, yet their headings encapsulate profoundly different approaches. For Gordon, ancient images straddle the space between realities of material production and ancient religious imagination, while according to Platt carved images make statements about the nature of divinities and the relationship between mortals and immortals. One approach does not contradict the other, yet there is still a profound difference between ‘theology’ and ‘religious imagination’. Without obstructing consideration of the economy of image making, or the actualities of Greek ritual practices, ‘theology’ focuses our attention on subjective and nuanced issues entailed in worshippers’ perceptions of gods and religious experiences. In other words, ‘theology’ forces us to consider the very core of ancient engagement with the divine. The issues highlighted by the deployment of the adjective ‘theological’ are particularly pertinent to the study of Greek sculpture; three-dimensional statues were widely incorporated in ancient Greek worship, already from the rise of the Greek polis. Take, for instance, the three figures from the temple at Dreros on Crete (Fig. 11.1), and Mantiklos’ dedication to Apollo that is said to be from Thebes (Fig.  11.2). These bronze statuettes from ca. 700 BCE are familiar examples of early Greek sculpture.8 The two instances have elicited ample discussion of their numerous aspects, including their date, iconography, identification, style, sources of influences and mode of production.9 Both cases offer fundamental insights Gordon 1979; Platt 2011: 31–50. 8 A. F. Stewart 1990: 1.4. 9 On Dreros figures see the first account in Marinatos 1935; Marinatos 1936. For further discussions see e.g. Boardman 1978:  11, 14, 81; Romano 1980:  284–93; Mattusch 1988: 42–5; Romano 2000; Bumke 2004: 45–54. On Mantiklos see earliest account in Frœhner 1895. See further e.g. Hill 1939; Alscher 1954:  1.46–9; True 1988; Papalexandrou 2005: 84–6. 7

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Figure 11.1.  Bronze statuettes from Dreros. Herakleion, Archaeological Museum, 2445–7. Courtesy of Art Resource N.Y.

regarding Greek visual culture of their time. The Dreros triad constitutes an important early instance of hammered bronze in three-dimensional imagery and evidence for technological investment in art. Mantiklos’ inscription furnishes a primary example of early writing and dedicatory practices.10 Much of the scholarly discussion of these objects revolved around the challenges they present, such as their uncertain identifications. For while it is often assumed that the three statuettes from Dreros represent Apollo, Artemis and Leto because of their original grouping together, this prevalent classification 10 Casson 1935.

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Figure 11.2.  Mentiklos’ dedication to Apollo. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 3.997. Courtesy of Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

cannot be confirmed beyond doubt, particularly whether the female bronzes are goddesses or women, because their height is half that of the male figure. Similarly, we will never be sure if Mantiklos dedicated to Apollo an image of the god or a man. All we have are the two hexameters inscribed on the figure’s bronze thighs: Μάντικλός μ’ ἀνέθεκε ϝεκαβ.όλοι ἀργυροτόξσοι / τᾶς {δ}δεκάτας· τὺ δὲ Φοίβε δίδοι χαρίϝετταν ἀμοιβ[άν] (‘Mantiklos set me up for the far-shooting, silver-bowed (god), out of the tithe. As for you, Phoibos, grant a charis-filled return’).11 The lines in verse tell us that the male figure was given as a tithe to CEG 326. Translation from: Day 2010: 36, with further discussion of the inscription at 36–48. 11

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the Far-Shooter in hope of divine favour. In both cases, the archaeological record and state of preservation complicate the picture further; the often-held assumption that the Dreros statuettes served as so-called cult statues has been called into question because of the missing documentation of their precise original placement in the temple.12 Along similar lines, the idea that Mantiklos’ dedication is a free-standing statue may be reconsidered given that the figure is not fully preserved and is missing its legs.13 The limited evidence challenges any empirically grounded interpretation and attempt at identifying and classifying the statues. In both cases, however, the bronzes appear to have been of primary importance in worship. Even if we cannot be certain that the statuettes of Dreros were genuinely ‘cult statues’, by which I mean images that were a focus of ritual, they appear to have belonged to the part of the sanctuary in which the ceremonies and sacrifices were conducted.14 Their relative monumentality compared to all other finds from the shrine, in addition to their material and mode of production, suggest that they are likely to have had some significant meaning. The dedicatory text inscribed on the male bronze said to be from Thebes situates the object on which it is written – whether free-standing or part of a larger object – as the key for Mantiklos’ hoped-for exchange with Apollo. In light of these observations, would it be completely inappropriate to explore the statues’ theological significance? Although one may reject such a line of inquiry and assert that we cannot give a full account of the bronzes’ original theological meaning for lack of evidence, let us consider the consequences of introducing ‘theological’ to the discussion. Once asked to examine possible theological aspects, the emphasis moves away from a purely taxonomic approach to consideration of the ancient perception of these images, particularly their relationship to the gods. Instead of worrying about Romano 2000; Bumke 2004: 45–54. 13 Papalexandrou 2005: 84–6. 14 Romano 1980: 284–93. 12

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classifications and identifications, we are prompted to pose a different set of questions, such as:  Could the bronze statues have been perceived as the god(s) themselves and, if so, under what circumstances? Were they seen as imbued with something of the divine? Were there particular elements in their appearance and materiality that rendered them powerful in the eyes of ancient worshippers? Were certain behaviours and rituals around these statues thought to bring worshippers in close proximity to the gods? While answers to such inquiries and the entire discussion are bound to be hypothetical, the adjective ‘theological’ highlights the possible pertinence of these bronze images in their original context. Once we allow the Dreros statuettes to have some theological import, albeit unknown, complex artistry is not merely the result of the ability to hammer and manipulate bronze but also an articulation of profound religious ideas, while choice of size can become a marker of potential divine presence. If Mantiklos’ dedication is granted a theological meaning, the text meandering across the figure’s thighs not only indicates that it is a valuable object in a transaction between worshipper and god, but also reveals that the figure with its unique visual force gives material affirmation to Mantiklos’ devotion and future hopes. The exercise of including ‘theology’ in the scholarly discourse of Greek art may often fail to yield irrefutable affirmations, but it may help sharpen our grasp of the complex relationship between visual culture and religion in Greek antiquity. A visual discourse on statues of gods ‘Theology’ and its derivatives are mostly absent from the literature on Greek statues of gods. Still, scholars have examined certain theological problems pertaining to images of divinities. In particular, the question of how the ancient Greeks perceived the relationship between statues of gods and the divine has received some attention. Studies that focus primarily on ancient writings highlight the coexistence of varying views, which range from complete identification between material 255

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object and divinity to clear distinction between the two.15 Greek engagement with the complex relationship between gods and their representations is witnessed not only in ancient texts but also in ancient imagery. A well-known example is the fragmented calyx krater from Tarentum (modern Taranto), in Southern Italy, that is dated to ca. 380 BCE and is today at the Allard-Pierson Museum in Amsterdam (Figs 11.3a–d).16 The vase features two portrayals of Apollo: a statue placed within a pedimental temple and, next to it, the living god sitting outside and playing the lyre. As Platt noted, by inviting the viewer to compare and contrast the two images of the same god, the painted pot explores theological questions regarding the representation of the divine.17 The Amsterdam krater belongs to a large group of Attic and South Italian painted pots featuring images of statues that are clearly identifiable as material objects.18 These representations of representations emerge in Greek visual culture at the time of the rise of naturalism in the turn from the sixth to the fifth century BCE. Depictions of statues and animated divinities side by side are first witnessed in the middle of the fifth century BCE.19 By presenting three-dimensional representations next to living deities this corpus of painted pots explores the relationship between image and its prototype. The focus on representation of gods, goddesses and heroes, rather than mortals and inanimate objects, renders this group of vases theological in essence. These painted pots articulate a variety of theological positions on the representation of the divine that together constitute a discourse about human life and its relation to what is supra-material.

15 Scheer 2000; Graf 2001. 16 Amsterdam, Allard Pierson Museum no.  2579, attributed to the Painter of the Birth of Dionsysos. RVAp I, 36 no.  10; LIMC Apollon, 236 no.  428. See further e.g. Furtwängler et  al. 1932:  340–2; Schneider-Hermann 1972: 31–4; Alroth 1992: 39; Spivey 1996: 47; de Cesare 1997: 94–7; Oenbrink 1997: 126–7; Osborne 2011: 213–14. 17 Platt 2011: 31–50. 18 Schefold 1937; Alroth 1992; Oenbrink 1997; de Cesare 1997. 19 Mazzoldi 1997.

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b

c Figure 11.3a, b, c, d.  Calyx krater attributed to the Painter of the Birth of Dionysos, ca. 380 BCE. Amsterdam, Allard Pierson Museum no. 2579. Courtesy of Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam.

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d Figure 11.3 (cont.)

An early example of this visual phenomenon is seen on a fragmented volute krater attributed to Polygnotos and dated to ca. 440 BCE (Fig. 11.4).20 The vase depicts the episode in the Trojan cycle in which Cassandra is being attacked by Ajax son of Oileus at Athena’s statue, an assault and sacrilege that led to the warrior’s ultimate demise.21 Two figures of the goddess are observable; in the centre stands a frontal and relatively small statue of the divinity holding a spear, and next to it, in profile, is a much larger head of the animated Athena, who wears an elaborately decorated Attic helmet. The name ΑΘΕΝΑ is written in between the goddess and her statue and identifies both. Labels also accompany the other two protagonists. Cassandra is the young woman to the left of the statue and Ajax is the man who stretches his right arm towards her. On this vase, the violent attack takes place in the presence of the goddess’ material image and the living divinity. The visual force of the Getty krater’s depiction of the scene becomes clearer when compared with earlier renditions of the same subject, such as the one shown on a plate from the 20 J. Paul Getty Museum 79.AE.198; Matheson 1986; Matheson 1995: 46; Oenbrink 1997: 53–4; Naiden 2006: 152–3. 21 Moret 1975:  11–27; Touchefeu 1981; Paoletti 1994; Mazzoldi 1997; Mangold 2000: 34–62.

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Figure 11.4.  Volute krater attributed to Polygnotos, ca. 440 BCE. J. Paul Getty Museum 79.AE.198. Courtesy of J. Paul Getty Museum.

late sixth century BCE (Fig. 11.5).22 On the plate, a helmeted man grabs the arms of a small nude woman who latches on to a large armed female figure. The accompanying inscriptions identify the protagonists as Ajax, Cassandra and Athena, yet it is unclear how the depiction of Athena is to be understood. The plate raises a profound theological question: Was the goddess present during the attack? Is the armed female figure to be understood as a statue, distinct from the goddess? Might this be the goddess in person? Or perhaps the statue and the goddess are both represented in a single figure? At first glance, the female figure appears as an animated divinity about to throw her weapon at the attacker, yet her stiff pose, and feet that are close together, suggest that she may be construed as a statue. The plate presents Athena’s relationship to the enfolding drama as ambiguous. In contrast, the Getty krater does New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, 1913.169, attributed to Paseas. ARV2 163, no. 4. Matheson 2011: 42–4 with earlier bibliography. 22

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Figure 11.5.  Plate attributed to Paseas, late sixth century BCE. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery, 1913.169, attributed to Paseas.

not leave room for doubt: Athena is distinct from her representation, and she witnesses the assault at her sacred image. The vase makes a harsh statement: supplication at the statue of the goddess and divine presence at the holy site do not necessarily lead to the divinity’s protection. The example of the Getty krater demonstrates that the relative simplicity and low cost of painted pottery need not undermine its complexity. The imagery such as the one shown on this vase reveals that interest in the nature of representation pervaded different strata of Greek society and was not only a concern of theoreticians, but was also explored among pot painters who were engaged in the act of image making, and through their humble art propagated particular ideas regarding images in different parts of society. The visual engagement with 260

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statues of gods was conducted not only through vases that were mostly viewed in private settings and small groups, but also in relief sculpture displayed in public religious arenas.23 Carved portrayals of divine images seen in sanctuaries had immediate relevance to their immediate environments; in these places statues constituted the primary focus of worship. Like ancient theological texts, depictions of statues of gods invite careful analysis that takes into account the particularities of the medium (e.g. shape of pot, format and position of relief) and the overall contexts in which they were most probably viewed (e.g. small gathering, public shrine). Furthermore, imagery of statues of gods and animated divinities side by side demands familiarity with the visual tradition in which it was conceived, such as its visual cues, deployment of attributes, distinctive styles and usage of inscriptions. For these visual means articulate complex theological ideas on the statues of gods. Let me consider some of these visual tools, starting with the Greek language of artistic styles. On the Getty krater, for example, the frontal figure gazing at the viewer and holding a spear is presented as Archaic, for she has a richly decorated peplos, carefully arranged curls and a slight hint of a smile. In the context of the vase’s mid-fifth century BCE naturalism, the statue is visibly older. In a scene that references the Trojan cycle, the archaising style has further consequences; the hieratic image is to be understood as a specific object, namely Athena’s ancient statue – the Palladion.24 Stylistic analysis is useful not only for taxonomic purposes but also for unpacking a range of meanings,25 for distinctions in style were significant within ancient Greek visual culture, specifically from the Classical period onwards.26 On the Getty vase, styles distinguish between the goddess and her material representation, and at the same time In addition to my discussion below of one Parthenon metope, see also other discussion of other metopes in Schwab 2002; see also a statue shown on the east pediment of the temple of Asclepius at Epidaurus: Schultz 2007: 167, and a statue shown on the Bassae frieze: Platt 2011: 114–19 with further bibliography. 24 For similar examples see Demargne 1984: 955–1044, 966–8, 1019. 25 Neer 2005. 26 For styles and the construction of the sacred see Elsner forthcoming. 23

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underscore the affinity between human and divine; the naturalistic profiles of Athena and her suppliant parallel and closely resemble each other. Athena opens her mouth slightly as she leans forward and watches the victim. Cassandra does not look back. The young woman seems unaware of the goddess’ watching eyes. She seeks shelter under the ancient statue’s weapon, yet the stationary spear offers only an undelivered promise of protection. Returning to the Amsterdam krater, we may observe a variety of other visual cues deployed in the ancient visual discourse on statues. For example, the architectural frame, the relatively small size and the bright skin tone indicate that a material object stands inside a temple. By contrast, the seated male figure is recognisable as an animated being because of his skin tone, slightly bent head and position of the fingers on the instrument’s strings. The letters ΑΠΟΛΛ, written to his right, render his identity unmistakable. As we have already seen, labels are deployed as one of the visual strategies to identify figures, yet they may have further consequences. In contrast to the example of Athena on the Getty krater, where the name is between the goddess and her statue and is therefore associated with both, on the vase in Amsterdam the label is linked with the living divinity. Apollo is named, whereas his material representation is to be recognised through visual means. The Amsterdam krater contrasts different modes of identification of figures, and highlights the role of attributes in the Greek visual tradition. For even without the label, both the animated god and the statue inside the temple are recognisable as Apollo. Both are clean-shaven, youthful and have long flowing locks as befit the god. And both have his attributes:  the animated figure wears a laurel wreath and plays a lyre, while the statue inside the temple holds the god’s weapon, the bow. In order to gain a firm grasp of the painted vase one must be conversant in Greek visual culture. For only a viewer who knows Apollo’s distinctive iconography can tell without difficulty that both figures represent the same divinity. The language of attributes does more than enable identification; it articulates a complex relationship between the god 262

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and his representation. Physical resemblance proclaims strong affinities between the two, namely that the statue captures some of the god’s salient features, such as his youthfulness and attractive body. At the same time, the difference in attributes suggests that traits presented by the statue are not necessarily reflective of the nature of the god. While the gleaming statue projects power through its weapon, Apollo playing his lyre invites us to imagine divine music. The god engenders inspiration, whereas his material representation demands awe. A visual meditation on Apollo’s statue Having considered some of the features of the Greek visual discourse on statues of gods, let me examine in greater length the Amsterdam krater, a case in point for how a painted pot can articulate a broad range of theological ideas regarding a statue’s materiality, appearance, position in time and space, and relationship to viewers, worshippers and the performance of ritual. On the krater, the statue and the god differ in their size and materiality.27 The statue seems grand, with its head nearly reaching the roof of the temple, yet it fits in its entirety within the architectural frame. The animated god, by contrast, can hardly be contained within the pictorial space; if Apollo were to stand up straight, he would break the vase’s upper edge. The manner in which the god is framed on the vase recalls Pheidias’ monumental chryselephantine Zeus. At Olympia, the head of the Father of the Gods nearly touched the temple’s roof so that he appeared uncontainable within his own abode.28 On the Amsterdam krater, the stature of the shining statue does not even come close to that of the god, who is larger than life. Apollo’s skin is rendered in red-figured technique so that it appears to be soft and smooth. The decorated garment covering his left knee emphasises the appearance of living flesh. 27 On materiality, I follow here Platt 2011: 121. 28 The problem of Pheidias’ statue not ‘fitting’ in the temple was commented on in Str. 8.3.30. See discussion in Gordon 1979: 14. For a Roman gem that represents Pheidias’ statue and captures its visual effect see Richter 1966. See further on this framing strategy in Gaifman forthcoming.

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By contrast, the statue’s line work, brown shading, white highlights and gold wash emphasise the figure’s musculature and create the effect of shiny metal. The object is made from a material that was manipulated by a skilful hand. Notably, this three-dimensional metalwork recalls two statues, namely the bronze known as the Piraeus Apollo whose disputed date is possibly ca. 500 BCE and the so-called Kassel Apollo  – a Roman statue said to be a copy of a lost bronze original from ca. 440 BCE.29 The resemblances to two different known statues demonstrate that it is sometimes difficult to assess a figure’s model or style. Still, comparison of the depicted statue to these existing statues shows that the fourth-century BCE South Italian vase references earlier statuary from mainland Greece and at the same time makes a powerful comment; the appearance of the statue is not dictated solely by the wish to replicate Apollo’s appearance, it is also guided by the qualities of its material, the process of its making and artistic traditions. The artifice attracts the beholder’s eye. The vase presents it as an object made to be seen, to shine at worshippers and to exchange direct glances with them on the occasions when the temple is not closed. The opening of the doors revealing the statue inside may generate an experience of the apparition of the god, an epiphany. Apollo, in contrast, appears to be consumed in his own world, for he turns his gaze to the side and thereby prevents eye contact with any beholder. He is disengaged from worshippers. Next to him sits a fragmented female figure who appears to be a goddess, for she is of similar height, wears decorated clothes and a bracelet (Fig. 11.3b). In fact, the two spears in her right hand and the strap which cuts across her breast suggest that she is likely to be Artemis. While the statue faces out towards mortals, the god enjoys the company of other immortals. The painted pot raises a profound question: is the For comparison with the Peiraeus Apollo, see Spivey 1996:  47; for the so-called Kassel Apollo, see Schneider-Hermann 1972: 31–3. The date of the Peiraeus Apollo has been the subject of an ongoing dispute. It is now generally agreed that the statue was made either in the last quarter of the sixth century BCE or in the first quarter of the fifth century BCE and that it is not a Hellenistic archaising image. See Moullou 2003 with further bibliography. 29

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real Apollo visible to visitors to the temple? Perhaps only his statue is available to them on certain occasions. For the god dwells in his own sphere in the company of other divine beings and may remain completely invisible even if he is nearby. Apollo is caught in mid-action playing his music, whereas his statue remains inactive. Frozen in time, its left thigh tilted forward and arms holding out the vessel and weapon, it signals only the possibility of motion. The material object is fixed within the building, the doors of which may be closed. The representation of the divine is constrained by time and space. Outside the temple, Apollo may come and go as he wishes, yet inside the temple his metal image asserts the constancy of his presence in his abode. Most discussions of the Amsterdam krater focus on the scene of Apollo by the temple, yet the surviving fragment includes other elements that not only add to our understanding of the scene, but also shed additional light on the vase’s visual and theological force. Behind the temple stands a large tripod and next to it a partially preserved satyr with a fillet tied around his head (Fig.  11.3c). He tilts a kantharos above the tambourine that is struck by a female figure, whose body is mostly missing. Next to her sits a youthful male figure holding a flowering fennel branch (Fig. 11.3d). He has a fillet and an ivy crown around his head and a mantle over his left shoulder that leaves his torso exposed. Although most of his body is lost, his identity is confirmed thanks to the inscription above his head: ΔΙΟΝΥΣΟΣ. The combination of a tripod – a monument that by the Classical period came to be strongly associated with the Pythian oracle30 – and Dionysus, who was worshipped at the oracular shrine under Mt Parnassus, in addition to the image of Apollo and his temple, makes the vase’s allusion to Delphi unmistakable.31 The implied reference to Delphi layers the painted pot with additional meanings. For the visual comment on Apollo’s statue could be construed as part of a broader visual meditation Papalexandrou 2005: 190–2. 31 Similarly Schneider-Hermann 1972: 33. 30

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on one of antiquity’s holiest sites. A reference to Delphi on a Tarentine vase made in the early fourth century BCE may have carried more specific significance for the vase’s original patrons and audiences, because the city erected victory monuments at the shrine in the fifth century BCE, and reinscribed them in the second half of the fourth century BCE.32 What comments are being made here? Consider how the image presents the tripod, for example. Equalling the height of the building next to it, it is a seat neither of Apollo nor of the Pythia, as it is portrayed in some Classical images.33 Rather the three-legged metal object is a triumphant Delphic monument in its own right. Painted above the now-lost handle and in between Apollo’s temple and the Dionysiac satyr, the tripod demarcates the space and simultaneously connects two divine spheres. The Amsterdam krater also reflects upon the complex relationship between Apollo and Dionysus at Delphi. Although not identical, the two gods resemble each other in appearance, dress and attitude; they share size, long curls and exposed torso. Both have a mantle and a distinctive crown and both tilt their head to the side. While Dionysus is in the company of at least two followers, Apollo has at least one female companion, probably Artemis. The Apolline and the Dionysiac are presented as two comparable counterparts at Delphi. On the krater, the Apolline and the Dionysiac belong to the same space, yet they cannot be seen together because of their positions on the pot’s surface. Consequently, the gods’ spheres emerge as two facets of the same holy site. Both realms are filled with music, although the sounds are not the same; one is fused with the beats of a tambourine, and the other with the strums of a divine lyre. The vase’s visual comment joins ancient accounts about the two divinities in Delphi,34 as well as fifth- and fourth-century BCE engagements with the Scott 2010: 75–7, 122–3. A golden Apollo inside the temple and next to Dionysus’ tomb is also mentioned in a passage in Eusebius’ Chron. a. Abr. 712/20, which compiles different sources. See Felix Jacoby’s commentary in FGrH 328 F7a. 33 Papalexandrou 2005: 190–2. 34 Consider e.g. Plu. De E apud Delphos 388–99. See further discussion in Amandry 1950: 196–200; Sourvinou-Inwood 2005: 162–8. 32

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relationship between the paean and the dithyramb, the types of songs associated with these gods.35 Furthermore, Dionysus’ depiction as Apollo’s counterpart, whose entourage occupies a large space in the Pythian shrine, inevitably brings to mind the fourth-century BCE rise in Dionysiac worship in Delphi, a development that is first attested in ca. 400 BCE, the same general period as the vase’s time of production.36 It would be tempting to see here some reflection of cultic realities, yet above all, the vase reveals engagement with the sanctuary’s monuments and cults. What light does the Delphic dimension of the vase shed on Apollo’s statue? Can the depiction be understood as a representation of the image that once stood inside the Pythian’s temple? Obviously, one cannot tell whether the anonymous maker of the vase attempted to replicate an image that he or she may have seen or heard of. The vase’s statue, however, recalls Pausanias’ second-century CE mention of a golden statue of Apollo inside the god’s Pythian temple.37 Furthermore, second-century CE Delphic coins from the reign of Hadrian feature a nude male figure holding out a libation bowl and leaning on a pillar,38 and issues from the age of Faustina the Elder show a pedimental temple with a statue of a youthful nude male figure leaning on a pillar.39 Although one may wish to link this late evidence to the statue of the Amsterdam krater, one must proceed with caution.40 The Imperial coin imagery is too varied to give a precise idea about the exact appearance Apollo’s statue in his temple at Delphi at any period.41 Ancient B. Ode 16, the fourth-century BCE paean to Dionysus by Philodamus of Scarpheia that was inscribed in Delphi in 340/339 BCE. See further Rutherford 1994: 116–18; Rutherford 2001: 88, 133–4; Fearn 2007: 171–4; Leven 2014: 307–17 with further bibliography. 36 Worship of Dionysus in Delphi is first witnessed archaeologically in ca. 400 BCE in the inscription of the Labyadae ordaining sacrifices to the god. See CID no. 9 D lines 43–5. Notably, Dionysus and his entourage appeared on the west pediment of the newly rebuilt temple of Apollo that was completed in ca. 320s. See further Roux 1976: 176–7; A. Stewart 1982; Jacquemin 1999: 29. 37 Paus. 10.24.5. 38 Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1888: 119; Roux 1976, pl. XX, 36. 39 Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1888: 119–21, pl. X, XXIV; Roux 1976, pl. XX, 35. 40 As for example Lacroix 1974: 48; Roux 1976: 132, n.1. 41 Imhoof-Blumer and Gardner 1888: 119–21. 35

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texts are vague as well, and mention numerous objects housed in the temple at Delphi, including, among others, a wooden statue presumably of the god,42 a golden Apollo and an Apollo Moiragetes.43 Ancient evidence does not help confirm whether the statue shown on the vase reflects an actual object. Rather, it highlights the vase’s visual rhetoric. Against the testimonia that the building was filled with offerings and artefacts, the vase presents the statue alone. If the vase is taken as a meditation on Delphi specifically, then it presents Apollo’s statue as a primary point of attention for pilgrims visiting the shrine. In the envisioned site of the oracle, the shiny image is the object that communicates with the world outside and invites worshippers into the god’s realm. Whether or not the Amsterdam krater is taken to reference Delphi, the statue emerges as the object that engages with outside beholders, not only with its gaze, but also with its extended libation bowl. The depicted statue and its phiale resemble statues of gods holding out the dish that are first witnessed in the turn from the sixth to the fifth century BCE.44 Apollo in particular is the god most often shown actively engaged in performing the ritual. The krater’s depicted statue, however, only alludes to the possibility that liquid could be poured into the vessel in the manner often seen in Classical imagery.45 For the statue is not active, it holds out the phiale in a manner that would suggest possible interaction with the figure; specifically of letting liquid into the phiale so that it would trickle down to the ground. The statue’s potential ritual is juxtaposed with the satyr’s actual ritual shown on the other side of the pot. The follower of 42 Pi P. 5 40–2 – andrias inside the temple. Lucian Phal. 1.6 – a xoanon within the temple. 43 Paus. 10.24.4–5. 44 On images of gods with the phiale Gaifman 2013: 46–9; Patton 2009 with earlier bibliography. 45 See, for instance, a red-figured stamnos attributed to the Berlin Painter, ca. 490 BCE, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art 1988.40, showing Zeus and Hera extending phialai towards Athena, who is about to pour liquid into their dishes. See also a red-figured amphora attributed to the Westreenen Painter, 450–440 BCE, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art 41.162.109, with a woman pouring a libation to the phiale of a soldier.

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the god of the vine lets liquid – presumably wine – trickle down from a kantharos, Dionysus’ distinctive vessel. In a painting on a krater – a vessel for mixing wine and water – the reference to wine libations has specific relevance; the pot’s form construes its potential viewers as participants in the symposium, the occasion of libations, wine consumption and music. The vase’s imagery invites its sympotic audience to follow the satyr’s model and be inspired by a Dionysiac tambourine and an Apolline lyre. In this context, the statue’s extended libation bowl stands out. Unlike the gods and their companions, who are immersed in their own world and only offer models and sources of inspiration, the statue alludes to its viewers’ active engagement with the divine. It catches the eye, and invites its audience to imagine an interaction with Apollo by pouring some wine into the dish. The depicted statue renders the symposium an occasion in which the proximity to the divine lyre-player and far-shooter is created not only through music and song, but also through rituals. The Amsterdam fragment brings into focus the precise role of the statue and the object’s relation to Apollo. The way the figures are labelled places the statue in a similar position to the satyr and the tambourine player. For inscriptions accompany only the two animated gods. From this perspective, Apollo’s metal image is analogous to Dionysus’ merry companions. The statue is part of the god’s entourage, yet it is inanimate. In fact, a small detail presents it as similar to an attribute. For Apollo touches the bottom of the temple with his right hand. Like the lyre in his left hand, the temple and its statue belong to the god. The statue is one of the god’s possessions, which offer his viewers and worshippers different ways of experiencing his presence. Side by side with the lyre’s sounds, the statue presents a specific and awe-inspiring timeless vision of the divine that is fixed in a particular location. And while engaging the eye, the statue alludes to active participation in a ritual exchange. On the Amsterdam krater, the god’s image has a complex relation to the divinity, which allows it to be an experiential vehicle for its viewers to come closer to Apollo. 269

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Magnifying an ancient statue on the Athenian Acropolis Let me turn now to the Athenian Acropolis, where visitors in the latter decades of the fifth century BCE could have seen depictions of statues among the Parthenon’s sculptural reliefs. At least two of the building’s ninety-two metopes included an image of an ancient statue, namely South 21 and North 25. Both metopes, however, have a grim history. South 21 was among the metopes destroyed in the explosion of 1687, yet Jacques Carrey’s drawings from 1674 indicate that it portrayed two women clinging to a female statue.46 North 25 still exists, although it was subjected to Christian iconoclasm, a testament to its theological import in the eyes of anti-pagans.47 Despite its sorry state, North 25 invites careful examination. For like the Getty krater, it originally juxtaposed a statue of a divinity and a goddess in a mythological context. In contrast to the painted pot, however, North 25 was in public view and constituted a part of the Parthenon’s complex pictorial programme. Marching along the central passageway of the Acropolis, viewers of the Doric frieze could have seen the metope’s portrayal of an ancient image of a divinity, as they walked close to Athena’s most venerated object and the primary focus of worship on the Acropolis, the so-called Athena Polias. Cult practice, myth and representation were rendered inextricable. Consider first the metope’s extant parts. On the right side stands a small figure in profile on a base (Fig. 11.6a).48 The surviving tips of its feet beneath a long heavy garment suggest that this is a female statue. To its left stands a woman in a peplos, who stretches her arm towards the statue. The flat silhouette above her shoulder is most likely the remains of her veil. Further to the left is another female figure wearing a chiton and a himation. She is accompanied by a small The identity of the figure represented by the statue is unclear. The two prominent theories are that it was a statue of Artemis or Athena. See Brommer 1967:  109; Berger 1986: 92–3. For discussion of other possible representations of statues on the north metopes see Schwab 2002. 47 Pollini 2007; Kaldellis 2009: 41–7. 48 Brommer 1967: 50; Berger 1986: 38–9; Schwab 2005: 184–7. 46

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Figure 11.6a.  Parthenon metope, North 25. Courtesy of Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Athens.

Figure 11.6b.  Parthenon metope, North 24. Courtesy of Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Athens.

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winged male figure hovering above her shoulder, who is recognisable as Eros and identifies her as Aphrodite. The central woman’s gesture, and particularly her act of touching the statue, suggests that she seeks protection at a divinity’s image. North 25 presents a statue of a goddess next to the animated Aphrodite and Eros. Recalling the roughly contemporary Getty krater and its depiction of Cassandra being attacked under the Palladion’s spear, North 25 shows a woman holding on to a statue of a goddess in the presence of another female divinity. In both instances, the style of the statue is visibly older than that of the other figures. On the metope, the contrast in stylistic features can be observed in the rendition of the figures’ clothes. The statue’s smooth long garment caressing its legs and reaching the floor differs from the intricate rich folds of the woman’s and Aphrodite’s drapery. On North 25, the portrayed statue is visibly Archaic,49 whereas the other figures conform to the Parthenon’s High Classical style. What is the subject of North 25? The scene of the metope recalls Cassandra at the statue of Athena, yet the presence of Aphrodite and Eros suggests a different scene. Specifically, the goddess of love and her winged companion bring to mind Helen, the unfaithful wife who sought refuge from Menelaos’ attack in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Fifth-century BCE dramatists related how Menelaos could not resist his wife’s feminine charms, put down his sword, and took her back,50 whereas scholiasts listed sixth-century BCE poets who gave a full account of the story. Of particular relevance to the metope is the version attributed to the lyric poet Ibykos, who is credited with recounting Helen’s escape to the sanctuary of Aphrodite, and her acceptance by her husband, who dropped his sword.51 Helen’s flight from Menelaos was also captured in varying versions on painted pots.52 In one case, Menelaos 49 I follow here Ernst Berger’s minute analysis, see Berger 1986: 86. 50 E. Andr. 627–31; Ar. Lys. 155–6. 51 For detailed discussion of the sources and scholia see Clement 1958: 47–52. 52 For overview see Kahil 1988: 559–61. See also discussions in Clement 1958; Moret 1975: 31–9; de Cesare 1997: 184–5.

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chases Helen as she is met by Aphrodite’s open arms.53 In another example, the Trojan queen is presumed to be the woman fleeing an armed man as she is about to set foot in a temple with a seated goddess, apparently Aphrodite.54 Notably, on vases, the divinity involved may vary. For example, an amphora attributed to the Berlin Painter that is presumed to portray the same mythological subject shows a chasing warrior dropping his sword, and a woman who stretches her arms towards a statue of Apollo.55 Among the variety of references to the story of Helen’s flight from Menelaos, a jug that is today in the Vatican and dated to ca. 430 BCE is a noteworthy parallel to North 25.56 On the vase’s right face (seen when the jug is held in the right hand), Helen, identified by an inscription, touches the statue of a helmeted goddess with a shield and a spear, namely Athena (Fig. 11.7a). The area of the vase beneath the spout depicts the armed Menelaos, who is also labelled, encountering Eros and Aphrodite when he rushes in Helen’s direction (Fig.  11.7b). The Vatican jug and North 25 share a similar sequence of figures: a female statue in profile on the right, a woman touching the statue, and then Aphrodite and Eros further to the left. The similarities are strengthened once North 25 is assumed to be a continuation the adjacent metope, North 24 (Fig. 11.6b), which shows a warrior moving to the left and holding a shield. The warrior of North 24 resembles the jug’s Menelaos. The figures of the Vatican jug are not identical to those of North 24 and North 25; the jug’s left face shows a figure of Peitho whereas on the metope there is an additional male figure following the warrior. The cumulative evidence, however, has led Skyphos signed by Makron as painter, dated to 490–480 BCE. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts,13.186. ARV2 p. 458 no. 1. 54 Red-figured cup attributed to the Foundry Painter dated to ca. 490–480 BCE. Tarquinia, National Museum, no. RC5291. ARV2 p.  405 no.  1.  Kahil 1988:  541 no. 244, with further bibliography. 55 Red-figured neck amphora attributed to the Berlin Painter, ca. 470 BCE. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, no. 741 ARV2 p. 203 no. 101. 56 Red-figured oinochoe related to the Heimarmene Painter, ca. 430 BCE. Vatican, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco no. 16535. ARV2 p. 1173 no. 1. Delivorrias 1984: 141, no. 1480; Kahil 1988: 543, no. 272bis; de Cesare 1997: 184–5, 233 no. 42; Oenbrink 1997: 369, no. 25; Schwab 2005: 185–7. 53

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Figure 11.7a.  Helen at the statue of Athena. Red-figured oinochoe related to the Heimarmene Painter, ca. 430 BCE. Vatican, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco no. 16535. Courtesy of Art Resource N.Y.

to the long-standing scholarly consensus that North 24 and 25 are connected to each other, and that together they show Menelaos pursuing Helen, who seeks divine protection at a statue, while Aphrodite and Eros intervene.57 Additional texts and visual comparanda help elucidate North 25, yet the identity of the deity represented by the archaising statue is still unclear. Does the metope portray Helen standing between Aphrodite and Eros and the goddess’ own representation? Or is Helen shown here reaching out to Athena’s ancient image? Although the latter interpretation is more widely accepted, both are worth considering.58 For in Berger 1986: 37–9. 58 For a similar position that either reconstruction is possible see Castriota 1992: 292. 57

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Figure 11.7b.  Menelaos encountering Eros and Aphrodite. Red-figured oinochoe related to the Heimarmene Painter, ca. 430 BCE. Vatican, Museo Gregoriano Etrusco no. 16535. Courtesy of Art Resource N.Y.

either case, the metope would have made a statement on the power of the statue and its relation to the divine that would have had direct relevance to the ritual environment in which North 25 was displayed. According to Ernst Berger’s close study of the metope, the statue shown on North 25 must represent Aphrodite. First, he argues, a close examination of the relief’s surface reveals no apparent marks that would suggest that the figure held a shield and a spear. He reconstructs her with arms by her side.59 Second, he notes, following the Homeric narrative, it is inconceivable to imagine Helen seeking help at the statue 59 Berger 1986: 38–9.

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of the goddess who was hostile to her from the outset. In his view, the presence of Apollo in some of the vases depicting the scene poses no such difficulty. Furthermore, the pots’ portraying a statue of Athena in the same mythological context could be taken to reference the Trojan cycle, a visual hint that was unnecessary among the Parthenon’s north metopes. If one were to accept this position, North 25 should be imagined with two figures of Aphrodite side by side. What might have been the consequences of such an image on the Parthenon? The state of the metope limits our answer but some observations can be made. Since the animated goddess was in naturalistic style, her femininity was likely more accentuated than that of her material representation. Aphrodite’s body facing the outside onlookers in the relief’s centre would have caught the eye, whereas the small statue in profile would have been of lesser visual impact. In North 25, one may presume, there was a significant discrepancy between the attractiveness of the ancient statue and the divinity it represented. Aphrodite outshone her own image. The metope would have raised the profound question: can any image of the goddess of corporeal beauty truly capture her appearance? Helen’s attitude is also telling. Aphrodite’s protégée moves towards the goddess’ image and touches it. Whether the escaping adulteress sees her divine patroness by her side is unclear, and yet the most beautiful woman seeks the ancient object. In this case, touching the statue proves to be powerful. For unlike Cassandra, who was not shielded from the assault of Ajax the Lesser, as Helen comes into physical contact with the statue, Aphrodite stands by her side and Eros facing left is ready to ward off the cuckold husband’s attack. The idea that touching Aphrodite’s statue has yielded divine protection would have had specific resonance in the metope’s location facing north. For Aphrodite and Eros had a thriving cult on the north slope of the Acropolis, witnessed in rock-cut inscriptions and votive niches.60 Furthermore, processors climbing up by the Broneer 1933; see Rosenzweig 2004: 33–40, including a discussion of a possible cult statue of the shrine. 60

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Nike bastion passed the sanctuary of Aphrodite Pandemus and Peitho on the south-west slope of the Acropolis, a cult said to have been founded by Theseus. The possible connections between the metope and its cultic environment may be even stronger. For the scene of the carved image evoked not only the powers of Aphrodite and Eros but also of Peitho, Persuasion; at least this is how it was understood by the makers of the Vatican jug. The image of Helen finding protection at the ancient statue of Aphrodite would have offered a mythological frame for worshippers to imagine a successful supplication, and would have affirmed the veneration of the goddess of love, Eros and possibly Persuasion.61 There is a second option. According to most reconstructions, the statue shown on North 25 was an ancient image of Athena, a Palladion. The arguments in favour of Athena are largely based on the evidence from vases, particularly the jug in the Vatican. In addition, statues of Aphrodite are found in Greek vase imagery only in the final decades of the fifth century BCE, long after the completion of the Parthenon’s metopes. Against this position, one should still keep Berger’s objections in mind and at least hypothesise that the Parthenon, with its idiosyncrasies, could have had a different version of the scene than the one preserved on the surviving vases. There is, however, great appeal in the idea that the figure was the ancient Palladion, and not because of visual comparanda. For if this is the correct reconstruction, then the Parthenon would have presented an unexpected turn of events from a Homeric perspective. The adulterous wife would have been shown reaching out to an ancient image of the less likely divinity, namely that of Athena. The metope would have made a noteworthy comment: even Helen can find refuge at the Palladion and while clinging to the warrior goddess be shielded by her divine guardians, Aphrodite and Eros. Helen’s act as portrayed on the metope would have extolled the power of the mythological image and would have added On the cult and the site see Rosenzweig 2004: 14–19. Evidence for ritual focused on statues is found in a decree from 283/2 BCE indicating that the statues of the shrine were to be washed during a procession in honour of Aphrodite Pandemus. See Parker 2005: 461. 61

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another dimension to Athenian perceptions of the Trojan Palladion, an object with a unique pedigree in the Athenian context. According to varying myths, the Athenians came to possess the Palladion in the aftermath of the Trojan War and that holy statue was protective of their city.62 The depicted ancient image would have been in close proximity to the Athena Polias that was safeguarded in the area to the north.63 It may have been close to another ancient statue, which may have been kept in a small shrine in the north colonnade of the Parthenon.64 A depiction of a mythological image of Athena has particular pertinence on the Acropolis; Athens’ holiest image, as Pausanias described it in the second century CE,65 and the primary focus of the Panathenaia, was effectively invisible to the public. Unlike the iconic Parthenos, the statue, known to have fallen from the sky, was mostly out of view and left no clear traces in the visual record so that we cannot reconstruct its exact appearance.66 Nonetheless, visitors marching on the Acropolis would have been able to envision an ancient image of Athens’ patron goddess as a powerful protective object. The possibility that an ancient statue of Athena was represented in North 25 raises another question: how was Athena’s presence understood in the relief ? Was the goddess thought to be present but hidden from sight? Were her naturalistic representations on other parts of the building’s sculptural programme deemed sufficient to indicate that she was nearby? Could she have been thought to be somehow present in the statue itself ? The metope as it stands does not give answers, only raises questions. However, the absence of an animated Athena in the Sourvinou-Inwood 2011: 246–62. 63 The complexities of the records demand caution, and the precise location of the Athena Polias in the course of the second half of the fifth century BCE may have changed. It appears, however, most likely that ultimately the Athena Polias was kept in the temple to the north of the Parthenon known today as the Erechtheion. See Hurwit 1999: 202–4. For varying views on the situation in the course of the fifth century BCE see, for example, Ferrari 2002; Pakkanen 2006. 64 Korres 1994: 45–6; Hurwit 1999: 23; Schwab 2002: 296. 65 Paus. 1.26.6. 66 On the obscure appearance of the Athena Polias see e.g. Herington 1955; Mansfield 1985:  135–88; for the Polias’ contrast with the iconicity of the Parthenos, see Gaifman 2006. 62

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metope renders Helen’s act at the statue all the more powerful. For as the woman touches the object, her own divine patroness remains by her side. The significance of the proximity of Aphrodite and Eros becomes apparent when the metope is compared to the Vatican jug. On the vase, the emphasis is on the gods’ confrontation with Menelaos. Helen touching Athena’s statue is seen on the jug’s side face and she is on her own. If North 25 showed a Palladion, then Athena’s image and the animated Aphrodite flank Helen on either side. Whether Athena is present becomes of lesser import; for Helen proves the force of her act. She manages to elicit her patroness’ aid, as Eros awaits the armed Menelaos. Walking by the Parthenon, viewers would have been reminded of one instant in which reaching to the ancient statue of Athena proved to be protective. The cases examined in this chapter exemplify a broader phenomenon in Greek visual culture. Like ancient texts, ancient images do not present a uniform theological position on representations of divinities; there are varying degrees of kinship between the two, and different consequences for human attitudes towards statues of gods. We encounter a vibrant visual discourse made of multiple options that demand close consideration of each individual instance. Texts and images, however, operate differently. Authors invite their readers to imagine artefacts on the basis of words and thereby demand a shift from the textual to the visual. By contrast, image makers who present viewers with depictions of statues of gods remain in the realm of the visual and highlight aspects of material objects that are often hard to grasp from written sources, namely the artefacts’ appearance, and the range of human and divine physical interactions with them.67 Consequently, portrayals of statues of gods side by side with animated divinities present nuanced theological positions on the relationship between deities and material objects that are hard to detect in texts. Whereas textual accounts either indicate a clear differentiation between materials and the 67 On texts and images and history, see Osborne 2011.

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supra-material or a complete blurring of the two,68 the examples discussed here demonstrate that in imagery divinity and artefact can be distinct and at the same time linked together through a wide range of visual features. The sophistication and nuance seen in the imagery analysed in this chapter have a bearing on the broad question of the adoption of ‘theology’ as a key concept in an examination of Greek art. The examples discussed here are among numerous representations of statues of gods that encompass a broad range of divinities, various forms of statuary and a variety of mythological, cultic and social contexts. Arguably, not all instances within this corpus reveal the same degree of visual complexity and interest in theological issues. Within this corpus, however, the myth of Cassandra fleeing Ajax stands out as a popular subject that is continuously depicted from the Archaic to the Late Classical periods.69 The story of the assaulted young woman raises the profound theological problem of a goddess’ relation to her own image; how could the suppliant be violated at the holy statue? Was Athena present and what was her response? At the very least, the numerous and varying depictions of the subject speak to a vibrant interest in this difficult question for centuries. In fact, the Parthenon’s portrayal of Helen approaching the ancient statue of a goddess is inevitably in dialogue with the renditions of Cassandra’s flight, when it presents a female suppliant protected by a goddess and left unharmed. Although not all depictions of statues of gods may have the same religious weight, the cases discussed here invite historians of Greek art and religion to examine this imagery and Greek art more broadly with an eye for their theological dimensions. There is much to be gained from such an endeavour.

See Scheer 2000; Graf 2001. 69 A search in the Beazley Archive (www.beazley.ox.ac.uk) reveals at least sixty-five representations of the Ajax and Cassandra scene in Attic vases and the subject is also repeated in South Italian vases. See Moret 1975: 11–27; Touchefeu 1981; Paoletti 1994; de Cesare 1997: 230–7; Mazzoldi 1997; Matheson 1986; Matheson 1995: 46; Oenbrink 1997: 53–4; Mangold 2000: 34–62; Naiden 2006: 152–3. 68

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TH E G O D S IN T HE AT HE NIAN A S S E M B LY GUNT HE R   M A RT I N

There has been no dearth of recent scholarly debate about the relationship between polis and religion. The degree to which the state controlled the religious activity in its territory has been well explored and it is generally agreed that the legislative body of a polis was one of the most important regulators of religion.1 The opposite direction of influence – the role of religion in the decision-making of the legislator, in this chapter the Athenian assembly2  – has received much less attention:  how important is religion in the assembly meetings, and what kind of presence (if any) do the gods have there? The answers to these questions, however elusive they may be, are the pathway to the implied ‘theology’ underlying the assembly meetings. This chapter will offer a brief survey of three parts of the assembly: the part framing the discussions, the debate on sacred matters (ἱερά) and the subsequent points of the agenda concerning non-sacred business (ὅσια).

Sourvinou-Inwood 1990 is seminal. For reservations, or rather warnings of exaggerations, see e.g. Kindt 2012: 16–35. 2 On the assembly and religion see now Parker 2011: 41–8. In this chapter, I treat the assembly of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE without further distinction, although it was not the only legislative body throughout this period: in the fourth century, the assembly could only pass decrees (ψηφίσματα) but not laws (νόμοι). I shall use the term statute here to cover everything the assembly passed. The evidence for attitudes towards the gods and religion in the two centuries differs, so it is difficult to say whether much changed along with the legislative procedure: Thucydides and most of Aristophanes cover the time before the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War, while the extant speeches from the assembly are younger than that. I am glad to note that Hannah Willey in the last section of her contribution in this volume, and I arrive at reconcilable or even similar views about the laws we find inscribed. In other instances, the common name nomothesia must not blur the different traditions on and practices of ‘lawgiving’ that our chapters deal with and the distinction between ‘the divine origins of law [singular]’ (Willey, p. 281–4) and the day-to-day business of passing laws and decrees [plural] in Classical Athens. 1

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The preliminaries Assembly meetings began with a series of religious acts, in some of which the gods were directly invoked. A sacrifice was performed and the herald made the official prayers: ἐπειδὰν τὸ καθάρσιον περιενεχθῇ καὶ ὁ κῆρυξ τὰς πατρίους εὐχὰς εὔξηται, προχειροτονεῖν κελεύει τοὺς προέδρους περὶ ἱερῶν τῶν πατρίων καὶ κήρυξι καὶ πρεσβείαις καὶ ὁσίων. When the purifying sacrifice has been carried round and the herald has spoken the traditional prayers, the prohedroi are commanded to take a vote on the traditional sacred matters, on heralds and ambassadors, and on the non-sacred matters. (Aeschin. 1.23)

In Aeschines’ description, the sacrifice formally demarcates the assembly, both spatially (περι-φέρειν) and in terms of its pure ritual status: the carrying round of a piglet reinstates the character of the assembly place as sacred space. The ‘prayers’ that Aeschines mentions are parodied by Aristophanes in the Thesmophoriazusae: εὔχεσθε τοῖς θεοῖσι τοῖς Ὀλυμπίοις καὶ ταῖς Ὀλυμπίαισι, καὶ τοῖς Πυθίοις καὶ ταῖσι Πυθίαισι, καὶ τοῖς Δηλίοις καὶ ταῖσι Δηλίαισι, τοῖς τ’ ἄλλοις θεοῖς, εἴ τις ἐπιβουλεύει τι τῷ δήμῳ κακὸν τῷ τῶν γυναικῶν, ἢ ’πικηρυκεύεται … κακῶς ἀπολέσθαι τοῦτον αὐτὸν κᾠκίαν ἀρᾶσθε, ταῖς δ’ ἄλλαισιν ἡμῖν τοὺς θεοὺς εὔχεσθε πάσαις πολλὰ δοῦναι κἀγαθά. Pray to the Olympian gods and goddesses, to the Pythian gods and goddesses, to the Delian gods and goddesses and to the other gods. If one hatches plans against the dêmos of the women or sends ambassadors (sc. for peace) … curse that person himself and his house so that they perish wretchedly, but to the rest of us women pray that the gods give many good things to all. (Ar. Th. 331–6, 349–51)

Aristophanes’ women hold an assembly that imitates the men’s proceedings.3 Their prayer is probably close to its model; that makes it our best source of information about the real prayer, Cf. Austin/Olson 2004: 150. The term ἐκκλησία is used in l. 301; the formula that opened the discussion occurs in l. 379. 3

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and other, less parodic, evidence does not alter the picture.4 The prayer has a remarkably negative character: it is almost exclusively a curse and is even called a curse in one source;5 while the prayer for those well-disposed towards the city is merely an appendix (less than two of twenty-one lines), the request that the gods punish those who subvert the process of deliberation is much more prominent and extended. If the curse can have any effect on the present debate, it is to deter those who plan to pervert the deliberation and intend to speak against interest of the Athenian commonwealth. It does not describe any immediate interference of the gods. So the gods are not asked to prevent those who fall under the curse from speaking or to suppress their contributions, but to hit them afterwards. Nor are they called upon, for example, to inspire the politicians or generally lead the discussion in the direction that is most beneficial to the state (contrast the church services customary in many countries ahead of the opening of parliament). We have no record of any official religious act during the debate, but in the aftermath of a decision the gods could again be involved. They could be asked to sanction laws on religious matters. In the unusual case of the law about the Sacred Orgas the Delphic Apollo was even given the choice between two different decrees (IG II2 204 = RO 58). Any decree or law could also be put under divine protection by adding an invocation at the head of the text. It is again Aeschines who seems to imply that it was at the mover’s discretion to add gods to the text of the decree. γράψει δ’ ἐν τοῖς ψηφίσμασιν εὐχὰς ὑπὲρ τῆς πόλεως ταῖς σεμναῖς θεαῖς. In our decrees he will write prayers to the Solemn Goddesses on behalf of the city. (Aeschin. 1.188) Rhodes 1985:  36–7. There is no doubt that the prayer started with a clear and weighty invocation of the gods; we have to allow for exaggeration, but many elements are only slightly altered. 5 Din. 2.16: ‘At first in each they curse (ἀρὰς ποιούμενοι) the wicked.’ In §14, Dinarchus calls the same act a prayer (εὐξάμενον, sc. the herald), and it is likely that Aeschines’ εὐχαί does not refer to any other prayers: the start with εὔχεσθε in Aristophanes suggests that his women’s prayer was not preceded by another one. 4

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So the gods are requested to watch both the debate and the statute resulting from it. Religious acts provide the frame within which the deliberative process takes place. The gods are invited, as it were, but they will become active only when the debate is over. They hand out rewards or punishment to the participants and guarantee that the decision found is implemented in a salutary way (cf. the more specific ἀγαθῇ τύχῃ on the inscriptions instead of θεοί etc.). In the debate itself, that means in the exchange of arguments, the gods are much less consistently brought to the fore, as the following brief survey of the most important phenomena will show. The debate on τὰ ἱερά At half of the forty regular assembly meetings per year the Athenians reserved the first three items on the agenda for ἱερά, that is ‘sacred matters’,6 Aeschines’ περὶ ἱερῶν τῶν πατρίων in the first quote. His distinction between ἱερά and ὅσια leads us to the terminology of public funding, which provides an analogy, if it is not rather the same phenomenon on a more general level: public finances are divided broadly into two different categories, also called ἱερά and ὅσια. There has been controversy about the dichotomy, in particular about the second of these terms, but on finances the matter is relatively clear: τὰ ἱερά are funds that are owned by the god and must be restored if removed (i.e. ‘borrowed’ from the god). They can only be spent for sacred purposes, for otherwise it would be temple robbery. τὰ ὅσια are the funds at the disposal of the state and can be used for whatever the δῆμος wishes.7 The term ὅσιον is a negative one:  the money is not tainted, not ἀνόσιον. That means the gods have no reason to disapprove of its use, but it is not their concern – or if it is, then only because it is spent in a way that must cause direct offence to them (and becomes ἀνόσιον). If we transfer this distinction to politics, most of the political Arist. Ath. 43.6. 7 Samons 2000: 327; Jay-Robert 2009: 123–5, although her definition of ὅσια as the realm of the law is irritating; Martin 2009: 6 with n.17. On hosios see Peels 2015, esp. 225–30. 6

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debate is ὅσιον: as long as the gods’ property and entitlements are not infringed, the Athenians are free in their decision. The city organises herself and her dealings as she pleases, and every member of the assembly is entitled to speak and vote as it seems good to him. At times issues of ἱερά must have been controversial, and perhaps none more so than the establishment of new cults. Robert Garland supposes that much debate preceded the admission of the exotic Bendis into the Athenian pantheon. Both the Thracian origin of the goddess and the considerable expenditure in connection with her cult are likely to have provoked resistance. It would be interesting to know the arguments that have been put forward on either side: from the necessity to bind the Thracians closer to Athens and to strengthen divine support for the city at the eve of the Peloponnesian War to the fear that the traditional gods might be neglected, there is plenty of room for disagreement. But Garland considers it ‘inconceivable that the sponsors of the new goddess … argued their case along wholly secular lines’.8 Our main problem is that we know only the result of the debate; about the way in which it was reached all we have are plausible assumptions. The richest body of evidence for the bulk of ‘sacred matters’ is the inscribed statutes that were passed in the assembly. As far as we can judge, they are mostly quite technical: it is the cult practice – not the gods – that is at the centre of the decree. The key questions in the debate seem to concern the regulations of worship and the operation of sanctuaries: how much is to be sacrificed and when, who is to perform which function, and which requirements need to be fulfilled, for example, for entry into the sanctuary. See for example IG II2 47.23–36: Ἀθηνόδω[ρος] εἶπεν· περὶ ὧν ὁ ἱε-/ρεὺς λέγει ὁ τοῦ Ἀσκληπιō Εὐθύδημος, ἐψηφίσθ-/αι τῶι δήμωι· ὅπως ἂν τά τε προθύματα θύηται // ἃ ἐξηγε̑ται Εὐθύ[δ]η[μ]ος ἱερεὺς τō Ἀσκληπιō κα-/ὶ ἡ ἄλλη θυσία γίγνηται ὑπὲρ τō δήμο τō Ἀθηναίω-/ν, ἐψηφίσθαι τῶι δήμωι τοὺς ἐπιστάτας τοῦ Ἀσκ-/ληπιείο θύεν τὰ προθύματα ἃ ἐξηγε̑ται [Εὐ]θύδη-/μος ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀργυρίο τō ἐκ τō λιθοτομε̣[ί]ō [․․․]ο․-//[․]ο ἐξαιρομένο, τὸ δὲ ἄλλο ἀργύριον [κα]τα[βά]λλ-/[ε]ν ἐς τὴν οἰκοδομίαν τοῦ ἱερō· ὅπως δ ἂν καὶ Ἀθ-/ηναῖοι κρέα νέμωνται 8 Garland 1992: 113.

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We have very little evidence for the course of the debates that resulted in this and similar decisions, but the contribution of an ‘expert’ is worth noting. A  ‘theological’ debate about the gods seems unlikely. Euthydemus, the priest of Asclepius, apparently spoke (l. 24 λέγει) and expounded (l. 26 ἐξηγε̑ται)9 concerning sacrifices; either he or another person (such as Athenodorus, the mover of the decree) made suggestions for the funding of the sacrifices, about what is to happen with the rest of the means, and about the distribution of meat. Euthydemus’ priestly authority may have warranted that the motion was passed without much controversy. Even if it met with resistance in the assembly, disagreement would probably concern the financial arrangements or the emphasis on feeding the Athenians.10 As Robin Osborne shows in his contribution to this volume, statutes such as this enable us to draw conclusions about the Greeks’ conceptions of the gods. Looking at it from the other end, we may surmise that the assembly did not discuss which animals were appropriate to be sacrificed to a particular deity, let  alone what were the nature and needs of the gods  – the 9 The verb underlines that he was not just one of those priests that came to their temporary job by accident but that he possessed expertise comparable to that of an exegete (on the two different types of sacred officials cf. Garland 1990: 77–82). 10 Riders, which might give an indication of resistance or disagreement with successful proposals, do not alter the picture but deal with the same level of technicality or the publication of the statutes: cf. e.g. IG I3 78.47–59. They do not, as far as I see, offer an alternative view on the divine.

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consistency concerning the principles makes it clear that these matters were probably as little contentious as the general idea that the gods do demand a certain amount of respect. The question may rather have been how best to put that respect and the reverence of the δῆμος into practice – and perhaps financially how costly an expression of respect was necessary and appropriate. So in these debates, the assembly saw to it that the gods received the worship that they were entitled to and that was necessary to satisfy them. The rationale behind this procedure could be left unspoken (at least in the statutes):  if the gods are not satisfied, they withdraw their protection or even turn against the Athenians.11 τὰ ὅσια (and unclear instances) The idea that the gods must be paid respect and not be offended is not restricted to sacred business but could also encroach on the section on ὅσια. This originates from the character of the ‘non-sacred’ business outlined above, which is far from being strictly ‘secular’. If it can be argued that a proposal possibly violates the gods’ rights or ignores their demands, i.e. if it can be conceived that the city’s good relationship with them may be at risk, there is a potential opportunity for speakers to bring up divine matters and raise objections against proposals. To do so, however, they must suggest that the matter has enough weight to touch the gods. In the debate about the recall of Alcibiades in 411, the Eleusinian priestly families of Eumolpidae and Kerykes protested by invoking (Th. 8.53.2 ἐπιθειαζόντων) the gods. The reason was that Alcibiades was under a curse for the profanation of the mysteries. It has been suspected that they were called upon by the state officials to comment in their capacity 11 Evidence from the assembly for an explicit statement of this rationale is missing. The prosecutor of Nicomachus, however, discusses legislation passed by the assembly to revise the old laws. He insinuates a link between the sacrifices ordered by Solon’s kyrbeis and Athens’ success, and a change of her luck that will follow the redrafting of the laws by the defendant (Lys. 30.18–19).

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as guardians of the mysteries.12 Even if they raised their objections on their own accord, the way Thucydides identifies them shows that they were certainly not perceived as private individuals. Alcibiades’ (alleged) offences against the mysteries warrant the intervention of the men associated with the cult in the political debate: recalling someone the city itself had ordered to curse conjures up the threat that the gods punish the city that consciously harbours a delinquent. The stakes were high, and the Athenians were aware that their decision could determine the fate of their city: Peisander, who had negotiated with Alcibiades and proposed his recall, ‘coming forward in the face of much protest and outrage, called forth each one of the protesters and asked him what hope he had for the salvation of the city.’13 In the end, the religious argument was not impervious: for when Alcibiades was eventually recalled, the δῆμος instructed the Eleusinian priests to revoke the curse – so the Eumolpidae’s and Kerykes’ objection was accepted, but the Athenians found a way to eliminate the danger of cursing themselves.14 The seriousness of the situation in 411 BCE, which Peisander emphasises, facilitates the employment of religious arguments. It is, above all, at turning points – or events that a speaker wishes to be perceived in that way  – that religion could be dragged into the public debate. When Aristophanes attributes to the Athenians a general susceptibility for omens and oracles (the personified Demos in Knights is said to σιβυλλιᾶν, l. 61), he may be describing a disposition for which the war served as a catalyst. The Athenians’ propensity to predictions may even have increased in acute crises: Thucydides reports an upsurge in oracles before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War15 and mentions that diviners had promised that the Sicilian campaign would be a success.16 Hornblower 2008: ad loc. 13 Th. 8.53.2 (tr. Lattimore 1998). 14 Plu. Alc. 33.3. 15 Th. 2.8.2, ‘Many prophecies were declared and interpreters of oracles made many recitations both among those making ready for war and in other cities’ (tr. Lattimore 1998). 16 He also mentions disputes about the wording of an old oracle at the height of the plague (Th. 2.54.2–3). However, he does not specify whether people discussed 12

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Even if only with hindsight after the failure of the expedition, the Athenians interpreted their decision in 415 as influenced by the oracles:17 ὠργίζοντο δὲ καὶ τοῖς χρησμολόγοις τε καὶ μάντεσι καὶ ὁπόσοι τι τότε αὐτοὺς θειάσαντες ἐπήλπισαν ὡς λήψονται Σικελίαν They were furious at the oracle collectors, seers, and anyone whose divinations had made them hope that they would capture Sicily. (Th. 8.1.1, tr. Lattimore, adapted)

Much more important and serious were oracles that instead of coming from dubious sources such as Bacis and being sold on the streets were issued by the Delphic Apollo and other established oracles. The Athenian state (just as the other Greek poleis) made inquiries about particular issues, such as the dispatch of a colony and military and diplomatic matters that concerned Athens’ relations to the external world.18 So important matters of state could prompt a consultation of an oracle. The Athenians had sent to Delphi when Xerxes invaded Greece and had received the famous oracle about the wooden walls, which the assembly had to decode.19 A similar consultation was apparently proposed by one Ameiniades, just before Philip of Macedon entered central Greece and threatened to it in the assembly or just on the streets and in the agora (ἐγένετο μὲν οὖν ἔρις τοῖς ἀνθρώποις). Cf. also Th. 2.21.3, ‘They formed groups in violent disagreement, some demanding that they go out, others opposing this, and prophets recited prophecies of every sort, which they were eager to hear according to individual inclination’ (tr. Lattimore 1998). 17 Thucydides does not state whether the diviners read out the prophecies on the Pnyx. The assembly, however, appears more suitable for a pronouncement on matters of the state than a private consultation, and we know of other cases where oracle collectors were even called upon by the δῆμος. Plutarch’s account of these events also gives the impression of discussions of experts in the assembly (Plu. Nic. 13.1–2, ‘It is said that the priesthood also strongly opposed the expedition. But Alcibiades, who used other diviners, promised on the basis of some ancient oracles that the Athenians would gain great glory from Sicily. To his advantage some public messengers came from Ammon with an oracle that predicted that the Athenians would capture all the Syracusans; the oracles that indicated the opposite they did not report, for fear of saying something of ill omen.’ Cf. Paus. 8.11.12). 18 Parker 1985: 306–10. For oracles other than Delphi cf. e.g. n.17. Domestic matters were not the object of consultations. This and the fact that the oracle seems never to reject a specific proposal (Parker 1985: 316) may suggest that the oracle had the particular function of legitimation. 19 Hdt. 7.142–3.

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invade Thebes and Athens, a turning point that led to the battle of Chaeroneia: ἀλλ’ οὐ προύλεγον, οὐ προεσήμαινον οἱ θεοὶ φυλάξασθαι, μόνον γε οὐκ ἀνθρώπων φωνὰς προσκτησάμενοι; οὐδεμίαν τοι πώποτε ἔγωγε μᾶλλον πόλιν ἑώρακα ὑπὸ μὲν τῶν θεῶν σῳζομένην, ὑπὸ δὲ τῶν ῥητόρων ἐνίων ἀπολλυμένην. οὐχ ἱκανὸν ἦν τὸ τοῖς μυστηρίοις φανὲν σημεῖον, ἡ τῶν μυστῶν τελευτή; οὐ περὶ τούτων Ἀμεινιάδης μὲν προύλεγεν εὐλαβεῖσθαι καὶ πέμπειν εἰς Δελφοὺς ἐπερησομένους τὸν θεὸν ὅ τι χρὴ πράττειν, Δημοσθένης δὲ ἀντέλεγε φιλιππίζειν τὴν Πυθίαν φάσκων. But did not the gods forewarn us, not admonish us to be on our guard, all but adopting a human voice? As far as I am concerned, I have never seen a city more under the protection of the gods but ruined by a few orators. Was the portent at the mysteries, the death of the initiates, not clear enough? Did not Ameiniades warn us to take precautions and send to Delphi to ask the god what we should do? And did Demosthenes not speak against him and claimed the Pythia acted in the interest of Philip? (Aeschin. 3.130)

Aeschines is likely to misrepresent events, but if what he says is at least plausible to his audience, the incident at the mysteries was brought up as a matter that combined religious urgency with a political twist:20 Ameiniades’ proposal leaves no doubt that he saw it as a portent from the start and intended to have the oracle give an interpretation. But the religious component is not isolated: the political situation is also delicate, and Ameiniades’ suggestion must have carried the notion that the portent had political significance and was related to the conflict between Athens and Macedon. If such an interpretation had not been obvious (as a consequence of the dramatic political situation), Demosthenes could not have so easily rejected the consultation of Delphi on the grounds of the oracle’s alleged political bias. Again the seriousness of events in both the religious and the political sphere prompts the blurring of the two aspects in the assembly: the situation is such that an incident at one of the most important festivals is interpreted as a political intervention of the The most appropriate setting for this episode would be the meeting of the council immediately after the mysteries, which discussed the conduct of the mysteries (cf. Andoc. 1.111, Mikalson 1975: 60–1) on Boedromion 24. But Demosthenes was not a member of the council in that year, and there is no good reason why he should have been invited to speak to that point. We do not know at which part of the meeting Ameiniades made his proposal. It deals with religious matters, but not with τὰ πάτρια ἱερά in the sense that the laws and decrees suggest. In any case, it illustrates how politics and religion could intertwine. 20

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gods, and the resulting consultation of the oracle would again likely have had an impact on the political plane: Demosthenes’ intervention suggests that he expected Apollo’s response to consist in a political demand to the detriment of Athens – one which the city would have been virtually obliged to follow on account of Delphi’s religious authority. His answer is to diminish the religious significance of the oracle and pronounce that the institution is politically biased: the Pythia, that means the human personnel of the oracle, is disassociated from Apollo; Demosthenes questions that she speaks with oracular authority rather than with a political agenda. That tactic is not approved by Aeschines, and we must not assume that the Athenians, even if they followed Demosthenes in this case, were prepared generally to accept such discrediting of the oracle. Despite the political potential that is here ascribed to Delphi, it is worth noting the limitations that are set to the gods’ influence on Athenian politics through their oracles. First, oracular pronouncements need to be solicited – they do not pre-exist, waiting to be presented to the assembly. That means the city has to become active; Apollo does not influence the city’s business unless he is asked and the city thereby subjects herself to his advice (i.e. decides to forfeit her sovereignty to make her own decision). Second, the oracles on non-sacred matters only help in affairs that affect the city’s relation to the outside world: oracles concerning strictly domestic ὅσιον legislation or jurisdiction are not attested.21 So far the instances of religion being used in the debate of ὅσια political issues had been related in texts that did not emanate directly from assemblies. This may give the wrong impression that such references are frequent. In addition, the religious element in the debate is often used by authors to mark the debate or the contribution as of extraordinary weight. The direct evidence from the assembly, i.e. the fifteen extant assembly speeches in the Corpus Demosthenicum, can serve as corrective.22 From Cf. Parker 1985: 310. 22 D. 1–10, 13–17, not all by Demosthenes. Other speeches that seem to address the assembly are later fabrications (D. 11, Andoc. 3, Lys. 34), but they conform to the principles stated here. 21

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these speeches emerges a picture that differs remarkably from the passages that have been presented up to now. They suggest that religion was largely kept out of the discussion:  most speeches contain only isolated and insignificant references to gods or religion, insofar as they do not carry emphasis on the religious element: the gods are mentioned mostly in the form of invocations and in incidental references (e.g. to their sanctuaries or festivals). The latter reflect the fact that sanctuaries were important landmarks or that the social community was in many respects identical with the religious community. Thus when, for example, the Propylaea occur in a list together with ship sheds (D. 13.28), we may not wish to assign to the mention a particular religious significance – just as a community called ‘Corpus Christi’, be it in Cambridge, Oxford or in Texas, can be mentioned without any religious connotations being intended. The gods need not therefore be presumed absent (i.e. the matter is not ‘secular’), but in most cases they seem to have no relevance for the matter at issue. Formulaic invocations are, for the most part, void of any particular religious significance, as they have assumed a different value of expression: νὴ Δία is primarily an exclamation, a marker of emphasis, and certainly does not suggest any involvement of the father of the gods.23 The matter is different if the formulation deviates from the standard: one of the strongest instances comes at the end of the Third Philippic. In the closing words the speaker expresses, in general terms, his hope for the blessing of the city:  that the decisions of the people turn out well (9.76). He adds the rare invocation ὦ πάντες θεοί.24 Τhe passage demonstrates the relationship between the deliberation and the gods: ἐγὼ μὲν δὴ ταῦτα λέγω, ταῦτα γράφω … εἰ δέ τις ἔχει τούτων τι βέλτιον, λεγέτω καὶ συμβουλευέτω. ὅτι δ’ ὑμῖν δόξει, τοῦτ’, ὦ πάντες θεοί, συνενέγκοι. This is all I am going to say and propose … If someone has something better than this, he shall speak and add his advice. Whatever you decide, by all gods, may it be beneficial. E.g. when Demosthenes imitates a dialogue (4.10): ‘Is Philip dead?’ – ‘No, by Zeus (μὰ Δί’), but injured.’ 24 Only Dem. 6.37 (in very similar use) and Dem. 18.324. All three instances occur at the very end of the speech. 23

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The gods are invoked, without, however, being credited with a clear role. They are neither meant to influence the assembly so as to decide on a certain course of action, nor are they expected afterwards to steer events in a direction so that with hindsight the decision will seem to have been the right one.25 Rather, events will run their course without any external intervention. The vote is open, as the indefinite relative ὅτι signals. At the same time, Demosthenes wishes that the decision itself be expedient and have a positive effect. The sentence, therefore, is not so much a prayer, i.e. a request to the gods, as a pious wish, i.e. the expression of a hope: Demosthenes cannot determine the outcome of the debate, but as a good Athenian he hopes that it will prove beneficial. The invocation of the gods is therefore best interpreted as Demosthenes calling the gods to witness his sincerity and the intensity of his wish: at a highly emotional point at the end of the speech, after all the arguments have been put forward, Demosthenes turns his eyes away from the political bickering to the greater good of his polis. He moves away from the particular arguments for one side and concentrates on the spirit of the assembly:  the attempt to find the best course of action to the benefit of Athens, and by invoking the gods he also emphasises that this spirit is in harmony with them. Demosthenes conveys that he does not accuse his opponents of consciously making proposals that are against divine will or detrimental to the city. Instead, the interest of Athens comes first, no matter whose motion wins the day. The gods are envisaged at their most active in a trope that is taken from the stock of Athenian public ideology (and potentially that of many other poleis) and underlies the political discourse:  the idea that the gods are on the city’s side and care for her strength and preservation. Aristophanes’ Knights has Paphlagon and Agoracritus tell of dreams in which the city’s patron goddess Athena showers blessings onto Athens (1168–87). In the extant speeches, the favours Ar. Nu. 587–9 expresses hope of just that:  ‘They say that the city is badly counselled, but that the gods will put right whatever you bungle.’ 25

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are not attributed to a specific god. Aeschines (3.130, quoted above: ‘I have never seen a city more under the protection of the gods but ruined by a few orators’) even suggests that the gods are united in protecting the city  – an idea not contradicted in other texts. Qua trope the idea is undisputed in public discourse, even when the actual course of history seems to speak against it.26 It makes sense that it be so: from a rhetorical angle it is easier to win the ears of one’s audience and motivate them with the positive message that their city is beloved by the gods. But the frequency and the commonplace nature of the idea of the gods’ support can also be explained quite pragmatically: there is no point in an orator standing up and advising the people to embark on a certain policy if he is convinced that the gods hate the place. Hence the trope virtually formulates a precondition of public debate – it is not itself debated in the assembly. Rather, the assembly starts on the assumption that the gods at least are not biased against the city. Calling the gods friends of the city is a patriotic eulogy; the regular use is reassuring or encouraging, not argumentative. Demosthenes, by contrast, gives the trope a twist and uses it in an inverted form to propose a particular course of action. He suggests that the gods in their benevolence have created the present situation and that the city owes it to them to act accordingly (D. 1.10, 15.2). He thereby insinuates the existence of an obligation, but stops short of saying that the gods themselves intend that reaction. Once, however, in an exceptional gambit, he goes further, stating explicitly that a god wanted to provoke a certain reaction, in other words that the god intended to influence the assembly. But his argument is a paradox, and Philip of Macedon has conquered several important cities that either belonged to the Athenians or were in their sphere of influence. This would have been cause to doubt that divine favour has been bestowed on Athens, but Cf. Aeschin. 3.130, quoted above, Dem. 18.253:  so even after the battle of Chaeroneia and Athens’ loss of influence or even independence, Demosthenes tries to reconcile the defeat with the idea of divine favour. The dogma-like character of the idea is explored in Parker 1997. 26

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Demosthenes’ interpretation of events turns the situation on its head: δοκεῖ δέ μοι θεῶν τις, ὦ ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, τοῖς γιγνομένοις ὑπὲρ τῆς πόλεως αἰσχυνόμενος τὴν φιλοπραγμοσύνην ταύτην ἐμβαλεῖν Φιλίππῳ. εἰ γὰρ ἔχων ἃ κατέστραπται καὶ προείληφεν ἡσυχίαν ἔχειν ἤθελε καὶ μηδὲν ἔπραττεν ἔτι, ἀποχρῆν ἐνίοις ὑμῶν ἄν μοι δοκεῖ, ἐξ ὧν αἰσχύνην καὶ ἀνανδρίαν καὶ πάντα τὰ αἴσχιστα ὠφληκότες ἂν ἦμεν δημοσίᾳ· νῦν δ’ ἐπιχειρῶν ἀεί τινι καὶ τοῦ πλείονος ὀρεγόμενος ἴσως ἂν ἐκκαλέσαιθ’ ὑμᾶς, εἴπερ μὴ παντάπασιν ἀπεγνώκατε. It seems to me, men of Athens, that some god, out of shame for the things that are done in the name of the city, has instilled this restlessness into Philip. For if he wanted to stay content with what he has conquered and occupied and did not keep going, I believe it might be tolerable for some of you – and we would bring us as a state shame and a cowardly reputation and the deepest disgrace. But being as he is, by always trying something and being out for more, he may stir you into action, if you have not given up all hope. (D. 4.12)

The gods’ benevolence here manifests itself in their driving Athens into despair. This is their way of saving her and making her great. The situation is good because it is so bad that the Athenians cannot tolerate it any longer and will stand up against Philip. The argument implies that it is necessary for the Athenians to rise: the unidentified god has created a situation in which the Athenians need to react – apparently with full intention (αἰσχυνόμενος) in order to provoke a reaction. The idea expressed in this paragraph is so much against the common-sense view of divine favours that one is inclined to regard the paradox, the shock- and wake-up effect, as the ultimate aim of this passage. By the use of the trope, and in particular by the idiosyncratic fashion in which he uses it here, Demosthenes alerts his audience to their sluggish effort in a war. The pronounced form of drawing in the gods (if compared with the usual reluctance to do so) in combination with the counter-intuitive construction of the argument is suitable to show the fault lines of the trope, the belief – or the dogma – that everything is alright even where it is not. It may border on irony, rendering void the significance of divine protection, if it comprises the enemy’s successes. Nevertheless, it is enlightening to look at the idea of the divine that is presupposed in Demosthenes’ line of thought:  the deity  – unidentified and 295

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possibly unidentifiable for both the speaker and us – takes an interest in human affairs and even has predilections. The feeling he (the masculine αἰσχυνόμενος may just be generic) nurtures is human, and the way he works is by instilling a state of mind (i.e. φιλοπραγμοσύνη) in a mortal. The situation that is thereby created is meant to compel the Athenians to react; the motive that drives them, however, is not the obligation towards the god but self-serving. That is not to exclude that some people in the audience would perceive such an obligation and be wary of an offence against the deity. The wish to satisfy and atone the god has been seen earlier in this chapter and may be transferred to this passage. It is, however, necessary to note that Demosthenes does not embark on this line of thought. A second limitation apparent even in this most explicit passage in the extant speeches is that, again, the god is not conceived as interfering in the political process directly. The way he makes the Athenians reach a decision is by setting up a situation to which they must react on their own initiative, thus playing on their psychology. All his ‘actions’ take place before the Athenians debate about the matter and in a distant place (the whereabouts of Philip). Instead of changing the psychological state of the Athenians he chooses an oblique approach and changes Philip’s.27 Conclusion Before I try to outline some of the ideas of the gods that were conveyed in the assembly, it is worth pointing out what is and what is not said of them. There is no indication whatsoever of any controversy about the gods themselves. Their existence is taken for granted; who they are and how they live seems either irrelevant or uncontroversial to such a degree that no mention is required. Moreover, in public debate presumably nobody of sound mind would introduce into the discourse the idea that I have argued elsewhere (Martin 2009:  234–5) that Demosthenes used the trope repeatedly to suggest particular significance and raise his own profile in an early period of his career, when he was a young and upcoming orator trying to make a name for himself in Athenian politics. 27

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Athena or one of the other gods is not powerful enough to deserve quite so many sacrifices on the state’s expense. Even in the case of new gods it may be doubted that the characteristics of the deities – rather than their cults, the relevant practices and their appropriateness for Athens – were a matter of contention. Concerning the gods’ importance for the debate, it turns out that the label of ‘polis religion’ ascribes to the state – and thus the assembly – a dominant role, which forgets the important part the gods themselves play (at least nominally):  the city channelled religious practice in ways expedient to herself, but the purpose is to please or at least satisfy the gods in order to retain their protection and not to make them her enemies. So the gods are in theory the normative authority. In the end, it is they who determine what is required: they can express their will concerning religious practice via oracular responses to the city or their sacred officials and other ‘experts’ can expound how their sympathy can be won. Where new cults were admitted to attract, retain or integrate groups of inhabitants, it is possible to assume some degree of instrumentalisation of gods (in the form of their cults) for political and economic ends, but this is probably an exception. So the gods appear as a power that must not be alienated and with which the Athenians do not deal on equal footing. The organisation and regulation of worship through the assembly has the aim of ensuring their continued support for Athens: any change could be seen as straying from the proven tradition of τὰ πάτρια.28 The continuation of inherited practice, on the other hand, avoids the danger of any involuntary offence and a change in the relationship. In matters that are not (directly) cult-related the warnings that the gods might be offended or their rights violated follow the same idea, admonishing to prevent divine retribution. They show that the gods must be considered even in matters of politics in which the state seems to be autonomous. In all this it is not stated explicitly that the gods are going to haunt the city if they are 28 Cf. n.11.

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slighted, but that can be easily inferred and the omission is likely to be euphemistic in purpose. The impression that may be left by the Athenians’ wish to please and the fear of angering the gods  – in the absence of talk about the gods as anthropomorphic beings – is that the objects of their veneration are rather capricious and easily displeased. Otherwise the gods remain abstract entities. This lack of any clear indication about the gods as individuals contrasts conspicuously with the depictions on some inscribed statutes.29 The iconography of the gods there is close to that of their cult statues. So if we assume that the same ideas of the gods underly the image and the text, the conception of the gods in the debate does not seem to differ in any obvious way from that we are familiar with from cult. In the debate, and that means in a genre where it is key to alienate as few people as possible, deviance from the mainstream of public discourse might have been counterproductive. But our sources (speeches, other literary texts, inscriptions) suggest the formal debate dispensed with concretely envisaging the gods altogether. More generally, references to religion (beyond the incidental level) and even more to the gods are rare in the direct evidence from the debate (i.e. the speeches); and in other evidence religion often has a special status and is used as an indicator of the seriousness of a matter. So despite the possibility to draw in the gods in things without a clear religious element, there does not seem to be a propensity regularly to construct arguments that describe the gods as concerned (which has a strong normative appeal, where it is used). On the contrary, claiming a potential interest of the gods in a matter needs to be reasonable: speakers are free to link political measures to the danger of provoking the gods, but the connection has to be plausible to the audience. The evidence suggests that the bar was high:  Demosthenes is quite cautious in crediting events to the actions of a god (δοκεῖ δέ μοι),30 and Cleon is ridiculed E.g. Athens EM 6598 (IG I3 101) and AM inv. 1333 (IG I3 127). 30 The same formulation in 1.10; in 15.2 the causation by the gods is not made explicit at all. 29

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by Aristophanes for excessively citing oracles. The gods, it appears, do not care too much about the organisation of the fleet or similar matters. And while some turns in the course of a war may be ascribed to them with hindsight – albeit with great reluctance to name a specific originator – Demosthenes never undertakes to predict that a god will be on the side of the Athenians.31 References to gods are reserved for serious ­matters  – as they have great potential force, given what is at stake if the gods are provoked. In this way, the gods mostly remain at the periphery of the assembly. They do not directly interfere in the preliminary sacrifice and prayer or in the protection of the laws or in the debate proper. Only if the assembly has chosen to request a god’s advice through an oracle does he determine the decision. Demosthenes is the one who comes closest to ascribing to a god the intention of actively influencing the assembly. But in the way he does it, the paradoxicality undermines the credibility. He presents motives on the parts of both god and mortals that are very different from the pattern of offence and wrath that is implied elsewhere; he also avoids any direct connection between the god and the Athenians’ choice. We end up with a theology that restricts itself and prefers avoiding definite statements to making claims that are wrong or incredible and in this way potentially unpropitious and rhetorically counterproductive. On matters of limited significance and those concerning only the internal organisation of the polis, cautiousness seems to have been greater still, and even oracles as an instrument of granting the god an influence on the decision were foregone. So while the gods were integrated in the political process through the initial sacrifice and prayer and through their protective role afterwards, the debate does not give them too much space. The relatively low presence of the gods does, however, have an important effect on the status of the assembly: for the δῆμος remains autonomous in its discussions. The assembly Contrast Apollo’s promise before the start of the Peloponnesian War to help the members of the Peloponnesian League (Th. 1.123.1). 31

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meeting is a platform on which only the mortals discuss and come to decisions. The non-interference of the gods leaves the responsibility for decisions firmly with the human decision makers:  neither the orators nor the attendant citizens have a chance of shifting the blame onto the gods. Both remain accountable for what they have said and voted for in the assembly. It is up to the assembly to weigh up the advantages and disadvantages of the relevant move and, if necessary, bear the consequences of its bad judgement.32

I am grateful to the editors for the invitation to the original conference and to the participants for the discussion. This chapter was written during a fellowship by the Swiss National Science Foundation, which I  would also like to thank for its support. 32

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CHA PTER 1 3

PLATO A ND T HE SE CUL ARI S AT IO N O F GRE E K T HE OLOGY R I C K B E NI T E Z

This chapter considers Plato’s thinking about the gods as a countercurrent in the development of theology among the ancient Greek philosophers. It begins by redescribing the ancient distinction between theology and natural philosophy as a distinction between mythical theology and philosophical theology. It then considers two tendencies in the philosophical secularisation of theology. One tendency is metaphysical:  the gods are reduced to abstract principles. Another is meta-ethical: the gods are reduced to teleological perfection. Plato’s involvement in this secularisation is ambiguous. On the one hand, he does more than any philosopher before him to provide rational grounds for abstract metaphysical and meta-ethical philosophical theology. On the other hand, he seems to go out of his way to preserve myth and religion. The best explanation for Plato’s position is found in the heuristic value of myth. Mythical theology and philosophical theology In the sixth book of his Theologia platonica, Marsilio Ficino defines the human soul as divine, indivisible and produced by an incorporeal creator. He then makes the remarkable claim, ‘The ancient theologians [theologi] teach us this:  Zoroaster, Mercury, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, and Plato, whose footsteps Aristotle, the natural philosopher [physicus], for the most part follows’ (6.1.7, tr./ed. Allen/Hankins, 2002:  125–7). The first six figures in Ficino’s sequence represent a direct succession.1 To speak of Aristotle following This chapter is supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council. 1 See Slavenburg 2012: ch. 18 section 6, The Prisca Theologia.

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Plato’s footsteps nearly marks him out as a seventh. Yet Ficino stops short of that, and distinguishes between theologians, on the one hand, and the natural philosopher Aristotle, on the other. His careful terminology recalls a distinction observed by Aristotle himself, between ‘theologians’ (θεόλογοι) and ‘natural philosophers’ (φύσικοι, φυσιολόγοι).2 Aristotle’s distinction is worth examining more carefully, because it is clear that many of those he considered to be natural philosophers were concerned with gods and divine things. Thales, for example, thought that ‘all things are full of gods’.3 Anaximander regarded Time as the assessor and punisher of cosmic wrongdoing.4 Heraclitus refers to ‘the gods’ generically and to specific, familiar Greek gods no less than twenty times.5 Parmenides’ poetry is rich in mythological imagery, with references to deities including the Heliades, Nux and Hemar, Dike, Ananke and Eros. The fragments of Empedocles frequently mention ‘the gods’,6 and refer, by name, to Zeus, 2 Aristotle merely observes the distinction; he does not define it. Nevertheless, it is clearly in operation at Metaph. 1071b26–8 and 1075b24–7, and 1000a5–14 (where initially the distinction is between τοῖς νῦν καὶ τοῖς πρότερον, and the latter are identified as θεόλογοι at 1000a9). Cf. also 1091a34–b1 and 983b27–34. For more on Aristotle’s distinction see Vlastos 1952 and Granger 2007. 3 Arist. de An. 411a8: ὃθεν ἲσος και Θαλῆς ᾠήθη πάντα πλήρη θεῶν εἶναι. All translations in this chapter, unless otherwise noted, are my own. 4 See Anaximand. fr. 1: διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν (all Presocratic fragments quoted in this chapter are numbered according to the arrangement of the ‘B’ fragments in Diels-Kranz 1952). For Time as a god in Anaximander see Jaeger 1947: 67–8. That Time is personified in this fragment seems clear enough. The cosmic powers must suffer a penalty (δίκη) for their wrongdoing (ἀδικία), and they must pay a retribution (τίσις) according to Time’s assessment (τάξις). Vlastos 1952: 108, n.51 concedes that τάξιν is equivalent to ‘ordinance’ or ‘decree’, but suggests that it is ‘pure metaphor’, because ‘the idea of Time as an agent, issuing ordinances and decrees, has absolutely no place in the system as we know it.’ This seems a strange way to undermine the only actual fragment of the system as we have it. 5 This includes ten references by Heraclitus to ‘the gods’ or ‘a god’ (ffr. 5, 24, 30, 53, 79 [δαίμονος], 83, 92, 102, 114, 127, 132), and ten references to particular gods or deities (ffr. 15 [Dionysus, Hades]; 32, 64, 120 [Zeus, Thunderbolt]; 94 [Helios, Erinues]; 98 [Hades, possibly a place name but with theological implications]; 93 [Apollo, referred to as the ‘Lord whose oracle is at Delphi’]). Many other fragments might indicate deities depending on context and interpretation, e.g. ffr. 16, 41, 52, 62, 66. I exclude for the moment fr. 67; it is peculiar in using the singular θεός plus definite article (rare in Heraclitus). I also exclude the use by Heraclitus of the adjective θεῖον, which may indicate a departure from traditional views (see ffr. 78, 114). 6 The phrase ‘the gods’ is used generically by Empedocles twenty-one times. Three times he refers to the gods as ‘highest in honour’ (ffr. 21, 23, 146), a phrase that suggests conventional deities are signified.

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Poseidon, Ares, Aphrodite, Cypris, Nestis, Charis, Cydoemus and Calliope.7 Many of these are old deities familiar from epic and other sources of myth and religion. Moreover, the natural philosophers were not just concerned with old gods. They discovered new gods in new places. Anaximander and Anaximenes may have referred to τὸ ἄπειρον and αἔρ, respectively, as divine.8 Heraclitus speaks of ‘the God’ (ὁ θεός) who is ‘day night winter summer war peace satiety hunger’ (fr. 67),9 evidently a god like none before. Xenophanes reacts to descriptions of gods in Homer and Hesiod (fr. 11), and in place of them describes ‘one God, greatest among gods and men, similar to mortals in neither body nor mind’ (fr. 23). Empedocles refers to the sphere of all things, integrated by the agency of Love, as a ‘holy mind’ (fr. 134, cf. ffr. 27–9). Anaxagoras, while he did not refer to νοῦς as divine, at any rate made it ‘infinite’, ‘unmixed’, ‘self-sufficient’, ‘all-knowing’ and ‘greatest in strength’ (fr. 12). Aristotle is too well aware of these views to suggest that the natural philosophers were not interested in theology. On the contrary, he construes their investigations of first principles in terms of the ‘understanding of divine things’ (τις τῶν θείων [sc. ἐπιστήμη], 983a7) – ‘for God seems to be among the causes of all things and to be a first principle (ἀρχή)’ (983a8–9)  – and he treated this understanding as ‘most honourable’ (983a4) and ‘second to none’ (983a11). Evidently, Aristotle considers himself to be following in their footsteps (and taking a few of his own) in the passages of Metaphysics where he discusses divine science. He even coins a new term, θεολογική, to describe it.10 So 7 I have omitted two additional entities, Neikos and Philia, since it is unclear whether to interpret them as divinities. The extent to which Empedocles borrows these names/terms from religious sources is also unclear. There are possibly other deities named in Empedocles, depending on interpretation. 8 For Anaximander see Arist. Ph. 203b11; for Anaximenes see Cicero Nat. D. 1.26. 9 Most translations of this fragment punctuate with commas (to separate pairs of opposites from each other) or even hyphens (to bind opposites together). I  have intentionally omitted the punctuation, because it is no part of Heraclitus’ arrangement, and because his syntactical ambiguity is notorious (see Arist. Rh. 1407b17) and probably intentional. 10 The first recorded occurrence of θεολογική appears at Arist. Metaph. 1026a19. Aristotle only uses the term once more: Metaph. 1064b3. These are the only two occurrences before Dionysus Halicarnassus.

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his distinction between θεόλογοι and φύσικοι cannot be that the former were concerned with the gods and divine things, while the latter are concerned only with nature and natural things. Aristotle’s distinction is not based on the objects targeted, but rather on the manner in which those objects are represented. While it is difficult to be sure exactly who Aristotle would identify as οἱ θεόλογοι, it seems likely that they do not include the most ancient poets or the natural philosophers, but certain men in between, who spoke ‘mythically’ (μυθικῶς), either in whole or in part.11 To speak mythically about the gods, however, is not simply or not even to use poetic language.12 It is, Aristotle says, to speak in a way that is ‘beyond us’ (ὑπὲρ ἡμᾶς, 1000a15). For that reason, he concludes that the ‘mythical subtleties’ of the θεόλογοι are not worthy of serious consideration (1000a18–19).13 Ross’ remark that ‘this is Aristotle’s regular word in speaking of the early cosmologists as opposed to the physicists’ (1924: 1.130) is unhelpful. Aristotle only refers to θεόλογοι five times:  Metaph. 1000a9, 1071a27, 1075b26, 1091a34 and 983b29 [θεολογήσαντας]. In only two of these passages does he mention any names. In the first (1000a9ff.), οἱ μὲν οὖν περὶ ‘Ησίοδον are associated with οἱ θεόλογοι. This would seem to place the θεόλογοι after Hesiod, but beyond that nothing is clear. In the second (1091a33ff.), Aristotle describes the view of οἱ θεόλογοι that the good and the beautiful are not first causes. He then notes the agreement of the ancient poets (οἱ δὲ ποιηταὶ οἱ ἀρχαῖοι ταύτῃ ὁμοίως, 1091b4), which seems to imply that these men are not the θεόλογοι. There follows an ambiguous and possibly garbled statement:  ‘Nevertheless, it results that such things are said by these (τούτοις, b6) on account of the changing rulers of things, since those of them (ἐπεὶ οἱ … αυτῶν, b8) who are mixed, in that they don’t say everything mythically (μυθικῶς), like Pherecydes and some others, make the original progenitor [the] best [thing], also the Magi, and some of the later sages (τῶν … σοφῶν, b10–11) like Empedocles and Anaxagoras’ (1091b6–11). It is natural to take τούτοις in b6 to refer to the ancient poets, but οἱ … αυτῶν in b8 must refer to a subset of τούτοις, and it seems impossible that Aristotle should include Pherecydes among the ancient poets, since he is neither ἀρχαῖος nor ποιητής. It is more likely that Aristotle means that Pherecydes (and possibly the Magi) are θεόλογοι, and that these occupy a place between the ancients and the natural philosophers. That would be consistent with 1000a9ff. and also with 1074a38–b13, where Aristotle distinguishes, as coming between οἱ ἀρχαίοι (b1) and those of his own time (cf. μέχρι τοῦ νῦν, b13), a group of persons who spoke μυθικῶς (b4). For the view that Aristotle’s θεόλογοι include Homer and Hesiod, see Mansfeld 1985. Despite this, Mansfeld agrees that Aristotle was distinguishing between mythical and philosophical perspectives (1985: 111, 126). 12 If that were the case, Aristotle should say that Empedocles speaks mythically throughout his work, and therefore was not a natural scientist. But he explicitly calls Empedocles φυσιολόγον, despite his use of poetry (Rh. 1447b19). 13 In fact, Aristotle generally shows little regard for those who are fond of myth. He allows, with qualification, that the myth-lover is a philosopher (ὁ φιλόμυθος 11

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The English words ‘theologian’ and ‘natural philosopher’ present the distinction found in Ficino and Aristotle in a distorted way. The theologians and the natural philosophers both have much to say about the gods. The distinction is rather between ‘mythical theology’, understood as thinking about the gods expressed in esoteric terms, and ‘philosophical theology’, understood as thinking about the gods expressed, as far as possible, in clear and univocal terms. Expressed this way, Aristotle’s and Ficino’s distinctions match up rather neatly: Zoroaster, Mercury, Orpheus, Aglaophemus and Pythagoras all belong on the mythical side,14 while Aristotle himself belongs on the philosophical side. But where does Plato belong? Ficino may have been mistaken to place him in such a fantastic succession. Plato has too much in common with philosophical theology for that. Yet he is not a ‘natural philosopher’ – in some places he reacts against natural philosophy  – and he resists taking the final steps towards the philosophical theology represented in Aristotle and the doxographic tradition. To see that, however, we first need a clearer picture of the main trends in that tradition. Two tendencies in philosophical theology The most complete narrative of philosophical theology comes from Aristotle and the doxographic tradition. Jaap Mansfeld and David Runia have argued that ‘[r]‌ight from its origin in the writings of Aristotle and Theophrastus the doxographical tradition was a body of doctrine with pronounced “secular” φιλόσοφος πώς ἐστιν, Metaph. 982b17), but his explanation – ὁ γὰρ μῦθος σύγκειται ἐκ θαυμασίων – shows that the myth-lover is a wonder-mongerer, whereas the philosopher wants to resolve wonder by understanding the causes. Elsewhere, he describes myth-lovers as ἀδολέσχας and distinguishes myth-loving sharply from love of learning (EN 1117b34). 14 Aristotle does not mention Zoroaster, Mercury (Hermes Trismegistus) or Aglaophemus. He mentions ‘verses ascribed to Orpheus’ (τοῖς καλουμένοις ‘Ορϕέως ἔπεσιν) only in one passing remark (HA 734a19), and practically never refers to Pythagoras himself (possibly only once, at Rhet. 1398b15). It is likely that he did not give much credence to stories about these men (for his doubt about Orpheus, see Cic. Nat. D. I.38.107). He may have regarded the beliefs of some of their followers, however, as belonging to mythical theology rather than philosophical theology.

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features’.15 These secular features include the omission of mythological material (Runia, 1997: 103), and the demythologisation (Mansfeld:  ‘de-theologization’, 2013:  331)  of concepts such as god, the divine and soul. In particular, we can observe two tendencies in the tradition. First, there is a tendency to regard philosophical theology as reducing the gods from persons to abstract principles. This ‘metaphysical’ reduction also generally involves a reduction in the number of divine beings, ultimately referring them to one primary principle: a divine ἀρχή.16 Secondly, there is a tendency to regard philosophical theology as reducing the gods from agents to a standard of teleological perfection. This ‘meta-ethical’ reduction stems from reflection about what is befitting the nature of (a) god. Such reflections lead to ideas of goodness and perfection that provide direction for the universe. Both tendencies can be observed in Aristotle’s theology. He clearly regards metaphysical reduction as progress. Well before he uses the name ‘God’ for the first unmoved mover, he calls it ‘eternal’, ‘substance’, ‘actuality’ (ἀΐδιον καὶ οὐσία καὶ ἐνέργεια, 1072a25) and ‘first principle’ (ἀρχή, 1072b11, cf. ἀρχὴ καὶ τὸ πρῶτον τῶν ὄντων, 1073a23). After a brief five lines in which he reassigns the name ‘God’ to this object (1072b25–30), Aristotle returns to abstract descriptors. It is ‘substance and eternal and motionless and separate from perceptible things’ (οὐσία τις ἀΐδιος καὶ ἀκίνητος καὶ κεχωρισμένη τῶν αἰσθητῶν, 1073a4–5). It ‘has no size … but rather is without part and indivisible’ (μέγεθος οὐδὲν ἔχειν … ἀλλ’ ἀμερὴς καὶ ἀδιαίρετός ἐστιν, 1073a5–7). Aristotle admits that the most venerable ancients were right to think that the first substances were gods (ὅτι θεοὺς … τὰς πρώτας οὐσίας εἶναι, 1074b9), but apart from that, he says, ‘this is the only one of their beliefs that is clear to us’ (1074b13–14). There is also evidence of the meta-ethical reduction in Aristotle. Some of it is littered in statements that imply a 15 This claim is made by Runia 1997: 103 and repeated by Mansfeld 2013: 331. For comprehensive discussion of the doxographic tradition and its theological biases, see Mansfeld and Runia 2009–10. 16 For a comprehensive survey of this tendency from the Milesians to the Stoics, see Drozdek 2007.

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rejection of the imperfect gods of poetry. For example he says that ‘it is not possible for the divine to admit of envy’ (983a2–3, evidently because envy would not befit a god). Elsewhere, he asks, ‘how can gods who need food be eternal?’ (1000a17–19). Clearer, more sustained evidence is contained in Metaphysics XII.9, where Aristotle considers difficulties about the nature of God’s thinking. ‘It seems to be the most divine of phenomena’, he says, ‘but what it must be like so that it could be such a thing holds difficulties’ (1074b15–17). In what follows it is clear that a conception of divinity as perfection drives Aristotle’s considerations. For example, he asks: ‘if [God] thought nothing, what would be the dignity (τὸ σέμνον) in that?’ (1074b17–18). ‘Does it make no difference’, he continues, ‘whether [God] thinks the beautiful or any chance thing? Are there not things that are untoward (ἄτοπον) for God to think?’ (1074b23–5). He draws a conclusion that reveals a strong perfectionist tendency:  ‘Clearly [God] thinks what is most divine and most honourable, and that does not change; for any change would be change for the worse’ (1074b25–7). These considerations reveal a theology that reduces gods from agents that eat and drink, have random or untoward thoughts, or feel envy, to a being that thinks forever only on the most divine thing. Aristotle’s first principle, being unmoved, is incapable of agency, but that does not exclude it from providing direction: it moves things ‘ὡς ἐρώμενον’ (1072b4). This expression should probably not be translated ‘as an object of love’ (Ross). There is nothing to indicate that the first principle could be endearing in any way. It is more likely a terminology irony (like Aristotle’s uses of ὁ θεός in 1072b25–30). The first principle is ‘beloved’ in the sense of being a ‘that towards which’, that is to say, a teleological principle. There is some direct evidence of metaphysical and metaethical reduction in the Presocratics,17 though whether there For the metaphysical reduction see:  Xenophanes (ffr. 11, 15, 16, 23), Heraclitus (ffr. 41, 67), Parmenides (fr. 8), Empedocles (ffr. 27, 28, 134), Anaxagoras (fr. 12.2, 12.7). For reduction towards perfection see: Xenophanes (ffr. 12, 26), Parmenides (fr. 8.3, 8.4, 8.9, 8.32, 8.42), Anaxagoras (fr. 12.9), For teleological tendencies see Heraclitus (ffr. 64, 94), Parmenides (fr. 12.3), Empedocles (ffr. 17, 20, 21, 22, 27, 30, 17

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was really anything like a consistent secularisation of mythical theology is difficult to tell. What we can say, however, is that Aristotle and the doxographic tradition generally represent Presocratic theology that way, and that puts us in a sufficient position to ask what Plato’s place in such a progression would be. This could have important consequences for a history of theology. If Plato fits snugly into the progression, there is reason to treat philosophers’ secularisation of theology as more than just a construal by Aristotle and the doxographical tradition. If he does not, the story of philosophers’ involvement with theology is more complex than the tradition acknowledges. Plato and secularised theology It is not hard to find support in Plato for the two tendencies in philosophical theology just described. In fact, both the metaphysical and the meta-ethical reductions figure prominently in a central theological passage of the Republic (377–83). The context is a concern that Socrates has about tales of gods usurping their fathers and committing barbarous acts. Socrates and Adimantus condemn the stories of Homer and Hesiod about the gods (377d), particularly for ‘picturing [the gods] badly’ (εἰκάζῃ τις κακῶς, 377e1). Socrates says that by ‘picturing badly’ he means inaccurately, like painters who make their paintings ‘nothing like’ (μηδὲν ἐοικότα, 377e2) their models. Acceptable stories must, he insists, portray God ‘such as he really happens to be’ (οἷος τυγχάνει ὁ θεὸς ὤν, 379a7). This shows that the passage is metaphysical as well as meta-ethical: it is concerned with the moral propriety of Greek myths, but it is also concerned with the being of God and his attributes. These attributes include not only moral perfections like ‘good’ (ἀγαθός, 379b1), ‘beneficial’ (ὀφηλιμόν, 379b11), ‘best’ (ἄριστα, 381b4) and ‘fairest’ (καλλιστος, 381c8), but also reductive ontological properties like ‘simple’ (ἁπλοῦν, 380d5) and ‘unaltering’ 73, 75, 86, 95, 115). On the teleological tendency see Solmsen 1963, especially the distinction between procreative and creative cosmogonies (479–81).

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(οὔτε αὐτὸς μεθίσταται, 382e9). Because God is already always ‘the best in every way’ (381b4), he has no desire to change (381c). In fact, it is only a short inference from here to the conclusion, drawn elsewhere in Plato, that the gods do not feel any desire at all.18 Moves like those in Aristotle’s metaphysical reduction are plain to see in this passage. There is first of all a startling switch from the plural οἱ θέοι to the singular ὁ θεός. The plural alone is used in the introduction of the theme, from 377e to 379a. Then, immediately after Socrates asks, ‘What would be the patterns for [sc. correct] theology?’ (οἱ τύποι περὶ θεολογίας τίνες ἂν εἶεν; 379a5–6) he begins to use the singular. The plural reappears frequently when referring to the content of particular myths or to directions for mythmakers,19 but Socrates consistently returns to the singular when referring to what should be said, or when drawing theological inferences.20 While this need not indicate a monotheistic tendency, it suggests an abstract theology in which the nature of divine being, considered as a whole, is the focus. Furthermore, in the central part of the passage (380d1–6) Socrates asks Adimantus: ‘Do you think that God is … capable of making himself appear … now in one form (ἰδέα), now in another, instantly changing himself and altering his own shape (εἶδος), into many forms (μορφάς) … or that he is simple (ἁπλοῦν) and least of all able to depart from his own form (ἰδέα)?’ After a few short exchanges they conclude (381c7–9): ‘It is impossible … even for [a]‌god to want to alter himself (αὑτὸν ἀλλοιοῦν), but, so it seems, each of them, being as fair and good as possible, abides forever simply in his own form (ἕκαστος αὐτῶν μένει ἀεὶ ἁπλῶς ἐν τῇ αὑτοῦ μορϕῇ).’ Although the subject of this passage is theology, the language is the same as that used elsewhere See Pl. Ly. 281b, Smp. 202c, 203c; Phlb. 33b. 19 See Pl. Rep. 379d1, 379e4, 380a6, 380b5, 380c6, 381d2, 381e3, 381e5, 383e3, 383b4, 383c1. 20 See Pl. Rep. 380b1, 380b3, 380b6, 380c8, 380d1, 381b4, 381b6, 381c2, 381c7, 382c1, 382d5, 382e4, 382e8. There are three possible exceptions (381c5, 382a5, 382c3) but in all of these cases the relevant expression is θέοι καὶ ἀνθρώποι, and the plural may be explained as part of a common inclusive phrase. 18

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of Platonic forms,21 and clearly exhibits a tendency towards metaphysical abstraction. The meta-ethical reduction is evident in the same passage. Consider Socrates’ insistence that God is the cause (αἴτιον) exclusively of good things. This assertion is repeated twelve times in a little over one Stephanus page (379b–380d). At the heart of the repetition is an intriguing alteration of expression. Socrates drops the concrete subject ‘God’ and instead uses the abstract subject ‘the good’ (τὸ ἀγαθόν): ‘Then the good isn’t the cause of everything’, he says, ‘but rather the cause of good things, not the cause of bad ones’ (Οὐκ ἄρα πάντων γε αἴτιον τὸ ἀγαθόν, ἀλλὰ τῶν μὲν εὖ ἐχόντων αἴτιον, τῶν δὲ κακῶν ἀναίτιον, 379b15–16). This little instance of the meta-ethical reduction looks forward to Book VI and the discussion of the Form of the Good. According to many secularising Plato scholars, the Form of the Good replaces god in Plato’s philosophy. These scholars even view the Demiurge of Plato’s Timaeus just as a mythical stand-in for the Form of the Good.22 Yet for most of these See e.g. Pl. Smp. 208a8 with 211a1–b5, Phd. 78c6, d2, Dd5, 79d5, e4, Pl. R. 500c–d, 585d. 22 See Cornford 1912; Shorey 1933; Gosling 1973; Vlastos 1973; Ashbaugh 1988; Hampton 1990; Murdoch 1992; Dorter 1994. Cornford describes the Demiurge as ‘impossible’, ‘unworthy’ and ‘lower’, but he explains Plato’s language in the Timaeus as ‘[that] of religion, not of science’ (260–1). Shorey treats the language of the Timaeus as only so much ‘rhetoric and literary art employed to give [it] consistent coloring and unity of tone’ (329). Though he calls the Demiurge ‘no abstract metaphysical principle’, he makes it clear that this is merely an ‘artistic instrument’ (349, cf. 344). Vlastos remarks about the Demiurge that, ‘if you cannot expunge the supernatural, you can rationalise it, turning it paradoxically into the very source of the rational order’ (182). Gosling describes the Timaeus as presenting the ‘same basic picture’ (68) as Republic VI, taking the latter as the script for interpreting the former. Ashbaugh remarks that ‘it is possible to demystify the demiurge’ by identifying it as the ‘best possible cognition of physical things, a constitutive, rational grasp which maintains intact the distinctions between intelligible and sensible things’ (61–2). Hampton says, ‘In the Timaeus, the causal power of the Good is represented by the active ordering of the cosmos by the Demiurge, while the other Forms serve as the passive models to which “he” directs “his” gaze. But this can be seen as just a mythical representation of the fact that the cosmos embodies – albeit incompletely – principles of order’ (90, my emphasis). Murdoch says, ‘Plato would have found the idea of a supernatural or cosmic Thou, or a covenant with such a being, devoid of sense’ (477). Dorter writes: ‘When Plato does attempt to give more than a hint of content to the Idea of the good, he eschews any formal methodology whatever and resorts to the ambiguous world of myth’ (242, D. explicitly includes the myth of the Timaeus). For an alternative view see Despland 1985; Benitez 1995. 21

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scholars, the Form of the Good is completely abstract:  it is merely, as Gail Fine put it, ‘the teleological structure of things’.23 If they are right, then Plato is not just in the sweep of philosophers involved in the meta-ethical reduction, he is riding the crest of the wave. It is impossible to read Plato’s dialogues, however, and turn a deaf ear to all the passages that express something altogether more religious and mythical. The dialogues of all periods are filled with assertions both about the existence and the actions of the gods. The Socratic dialogues maintain a peculiar but discernable commitment to them.24 The middle dialogues argue repeatedly and earnestly for the immortality of the soul, often affixing eschatological myths to the arguments.25 In the Phaedo (63b5–c7), Socrates speaks of his expectation to enter the company of wise and good gods after his death, and he asserts with extraordinary confidence that he will find in the other world divine masters who are supremely good.26 The late dialogues exhibit a fervent piety, from the invocation of the gods by Timaeus at the start of his speech, to the pilgrimage to the cave of Zeus in the Laws. Indeed, we often find Plato’s characters making prayers and occasionally even having them answered!27 23 See Fine 1991: 97. In addition: Gosling, for instance, claims that the vision of the form of the Good is just ‘the vision of how everything fits’ (1973: 118). Thus, the Good is nothing else than a ‘harmonious’ system (67–8). Dorter suggests that the Good exceeds being because ‘reality is shaped by the teleology of goodness’ (1994: 24). 24 Socrates’ statements in the Apology, that he has been stationed by the god of Delphi in service to Athens (28D), or his statement that ‘the gods’ do not neglect the good man (41c) hardly seem insincere; nor for that matter does his final statement in the Crito, that he should stay and suffer the death penalty, ‘since God points the way’ (ἐπειδὴ ταύτῃ ὁ θεὸς ὑφηγεῖται, 53e2). Or again, at Euthyphro 15a1, just after Socrates has finished saying that he doesn’t like anything that isn’t true, he asserts that it is ‘altogether clear’ (παντὶ δῆλον) that all good things for us are given by the gods. There are many other tokens of religious belief strewn across the early dialogues, in little remarks here and there, where eliminating them would have been easy and inconsequential. 25 See Pl. Phd. 107dff., R. 614aff., Phdr. 246aff. 26 Note how in this passage Socrates begins with an emphatic expression of personal commitment (ἐγὼ γάρ, B5) and then repeatedly emphasises his certainty: εἰ μὲν μὴ ᾤμην (B6), νῦν δὲ εὖ ἴστε (B9, C6), διισχυρισαίμην (C7). 27 See e.g. Pl. Phlb. 20b, 25b. For characters (esp. Socrates) in later dialogues making prayers generally see: Pl. Lg. 887c, Ti. 27c, Cri. 106b, Phdr, 257b, 278b. Cf. references to praying at Pl. Plt. 290d, Lg. 628c, 687–8, 731c, 801a, 931b–d.

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Moreover, across the whole corpus there are expressions of religious beliefs to which Plato seems to have more than a little attachment. These beliefs, which ostensibly depend on mythical theology, include:  a recognition of divine inspiration as the source of vision and understanding,28 a supposition of bonds of friendship and love between men and gods29 and a commitment to the value of service to the gods.30 Recently, John Mikalson (2010) has detailed Plato’s adherence to a whole range of traditional Greek religious beliefs and practices. The evidence is thorough enough to place a burden of explanation on those who regard Plato as secularising theology.31 According to the most common explanation, mythical theology and the religion that stems from it appear in Plato’s dialogues as homily for the masses.32 Some evidence for this view comes from the programmes for education outlined in the Republic and Laws. Both dialogues stress the importance of pious myths told by mothers and nurses to their children. These tales should have a genuine likeness to their subjects (R. 377e), and should be sung over infants ‘like charms’ (Lg. 887d4). They should be heard again in sacrifices and prayers, and seen in the spectacles that accompany them, and treated with utmost seriousness (Lg. 887d7). And their effect should be to instil faith that the existence of the gods is beyond a shadow of a doubt. And it is not just the young who would benefit from such beliefs. It is regular to find, accompanying Plato’s myths, a pragmatic coda emphasising the usefulness of belief, whether See Pl. Ion 534c, Men. 81a, 99c–d, Phd. 84b, Phdr. 238–65b, Ti. 71e; and possibly Cra. 425e. 29 See Pl. Ap. 41c, Euthyphr. 4e, Ly. 214b; Prt. 345c, Grg. 508a; Mx. 246c; Smp. 202a, 212b; Phd. 63b, 80d; Phlb. 39e, Ti. 27e, 53b. 30 See Pl. Ap. 28e; Euthphr. 12–13; Phd. 62e, 66b–67b, 81a–81c, 84d–85b, Phdr. 255a; R. 427b–c, 469a, 579a–b; and Leg. 716–717, 723e–724a, 740a, 776b, 930e–931e. 31 Mikalson does not express an opinion on this particular point. His brief is not mythical versus philosophical theology, but rather the engagement of philosophers with popular religion. Accordingly, he distinguishes between theology and popular religion right from the start (2010: 2) and devotes his attention almost exclusively to the latter. He does suggest (2010: 238–41) that Plato wanted to reform religion as well as theology, but this suggestion has no specific implications about whether Plato’s intended reforms involve secularised theology or not. 32 For two recent defences of this view see Fraenkel 2013; Partenie 2010: introduction. 28

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or not the story is actually true.33 In short, according to this explanation, mythical theology operates, just as Aristotle says it does, ‘with a view to persuasion of the many and to legal and pragmatic utility’ (Metaph. 1074b4–5). On this view, the true theology is the philosophical, secularised one; mythical theology is for the masses. Plato’s philosophical mythology There is good evidence, however, that this was not Plato’s approach. It comes from a passage in Laws X, where the Athenian reviews some of the early accounts about the gods. It will be worth our while to quote the opening portion of this passage in full: We have in my own community literary narratives … which treat of the gods, some of them in verse, and others again in prose. The most ancient of these narratives relate that the primitive realities were the sky, and so forth. When the story has got a little way past this starting point it recounts the birth of the gods, and their subsequent conduct toward each other. Now whether in other respects the effect of these stories on those who hear them is good or the reverse is not lightly to be decided, in view of their antiquity, but as concerns their bearing on the tendance and reverence due to parents, I could certainly never commend them as salutary, nor as true at all. However, we may dismiss the primitive stories without more ado; let them be told in any way heaven pleases. But the theories of our modern men of enlightenment must be held to account for the mischief they cause. Now the effect of their compositions is this. When you and I produce our evidence of the existence of gods, and allege this very point – the deity or divinity of sun and moon, planets and earth – the converts of these sages will reply that they are but earth and stones, incapable of minding human conduct, however plausibly we have coated them over with a varnish of sugared eloquence. (Pl.Lg. 886b10–e2, trans. A. E. Taylor)

Here we see that Plato anticipated Aristotle’s distinction of θεόλογοι from φύσικοι. Importantly he regards them all as being concerned with the gods.34 The Athenian speaks of certain See Pl. Grg. 526d, Men. 81d (cf. 86b), Phd. 114d, R 621b. 34 Vlastos (1952: 102, n.24) gets the distinction wrong. He says that the passage ‘distinguishes between (a) those who “speak about the gods” and propound “theogonies” and (b) those “recent wise men” (νέων καὶ σοφῶν) whose cosmology is materialistic.’ But the text clearly indicates that ‘those who speak about the gods (οἱ … λέγοντες περὶ θεῶν, c1) include both ‘the most ancient of these’ (οἱ μὲν παλαιότατοι, c2) as well 33

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accounts about the gods (λόγοι … περὶ θεῶν, 886b10–c1), some in verse and some in prose. The older, versified λόγοι discuss theogony (θεογονίαν, 886c3). Although the Athenian scorns these λόγοι, he contrasts them with the even more objectionable λόγοι of contemporary thinkers, who assert that ‘Sun, Moon, Stars and Earth’ (886d6) are merely ‘earth and stones’ (886d8).35 These are later described as generating things not by theogony, but ‘by nature or chance’ (φύσιν καὶ τύχην, 889a5).36 The speeches that follow report the views of various Presocratics, albeit anonymously (esp. 889b–890b). There are echoes of Anaxagoras and Empedocles, but the language seems designed to roll the views of many into one. At any rate, the contemporary thinkers are ultimately said to include ‘all who have ever engaged in inquiry about nature’ (ὁπόσοι πώποτε τῶν περὶ φύσεως ἐφήψαντο ζητημάτων, 891c8–9). The Athenian describes his attack on the natural philosophers as both ‘dispassionate’ (μὴ θυμῳ, 887c7) and ‘sufficiently probative’ (cf. τεκμήρια … ἱκανά, 885e2–3). Consequently, the passage suggests that Plato cannot have too much sympathy with the Aristotelian approach to theology, despite the many things he says elsewhere that seem to lend support to it. While we need not agree with Solmsen (1936:  208)  that ‘[i]‌t seems certain that what Plato aims at in this book is a restoration of the gods to their old position and dignity’, it seems clear that he has much more affinity for the older, mythical theology than for the new theology of the natural philosophers. He opposes the θεόλογοι because their stories are false, but he opposes the φύσικοι because their entire approach to theology is wrong-headed. as ‘the wise among us nowadays’ (τὰ δὲ τῶν νέων ἡμῖν καὶ σοφῶν, d2), and the distinction between ‘those [sc. logoi] in meter and those without [meter]’ at c1–2 further supports this. 35 Presumably γῆν (d6) is meant, as goddess (cf. ὡς θεοὺς καὶ θεῖα ὄντα, d6–7) to be distinguished from γῆν (d8) as material, but there is no grammatical marker for the distinction. 36 The phrase is used repeatedly throughout the subsequent passage. There is also a suggestion of a third alternative at 888e6, which contrasts with both the theogonies of the old poets and the cosmogonies of the new thinkers, namely the production of things by craft (τέχνῃ).

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But why should Plato have more affinity for the θεόλογοι than the φύσικοι? The answer comes from an unexpected quarter. In many dialogues, he expresses difficulty in coming to know or express anything accurate about the gods.37 In the Cratylus Socrates says that ‘of the gods we know nothing, either about them or their names’ (400d7–8). A little later he says that ‘knowing nothing of the truth about them [sc. the gods] we picture them according to human beliefs’ (425c1–3). It is clear from the sequel, however, that Socrates treats our state of unknowing as contingent; he does not say the gods are unknowable. Similarly, at Timaeus 28c3–5, Timaeus declares that ‘the father and maker’ of the universe is ‘a task’ (ἔργον) to discover and, having discovered him, he is impossible to explain to all. Yet this statement does not imply the impossibility of having any understanding, or of being able to communicate what little one understands to others. That would defy Timaeus’ entire subsequent discourse. Rather, these statements reflect a theological uncertainty like that previously expressed by Xenophanes, a poet who seems not to be included in the Athenian’s diatribe against natural philosophy in the Laws, and who is treated rather ambiguously by Aristotle.38 Xenophanes had said, ‘Indeed not from the beginning did gods intimate all things to mortals, but as they search in time they discover better’ (fr. 18, trans. Lesher). This statement does not express agnosticism about the gods so much as a faithfulness in their benevolent reward for our hard work. It is reminiscent of the attitude of Socrates in the Meno that ‘if we think we must seek what we don’t know, we will be better, braver and less dull (ἀγροί) than if we think that what we don’t know we cannot discover, and nor must we look’ (86b7–c2). This is not homily for the masses so much as heuristics for everyone. See for example Pl. Ti. 28c3–5, Cra. 425c1–3, Phdr. 247c3–5. Compare also R 506d–e and Phlb. 61a–b. For the view that Plato’s ontology commits him to a belief that God is in fact knowable, see Wolfson 1947. 38 Aristotle only mentions Xenophanes three times in connection with philosophy: Cael. 294a23; Metaph. 986b21, where he says that Xenophanes ‘makes nothing clear’; and Metaph. 986b27, where he says that Xenophanes is ‘rather crude’ (ἀγροικότεροι). 37

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When, in the Phaedrus, Socrates dismisses the activity of demythologising, he does so because it would require the ‘full rectification’ (cf. ἐπανορθοῦσθαι, 229d6) of the ‘definition’ (εἶδος, d6) of centaurs and chimerae and all sorts of other beings – and that, he observes rather drily, would ‘require a lot of time’ (πολλῆς … σχολῆς δεήσει, 229e3–4). The problem with the demythologisation is that it pretends to replace a myth with a logos that is fully rectified, but it really only replaces one picture with another. However more detailed or likely the rectification is, there are necessarily (as the Athenian in the Laws says, speaking specifically about the rectification of pictures) ‘countless omissions’ (πάμπολλα ἀνάγκη παραλείπεσθαι τοιαῦτα, 769d5–6). Plato is not really one of Ficino’s theologi. But it is not quite accurate to say, either, that in Platonic theology myth is inherently inferior to secularised logos. Like Aristotle’s θεόλογοι he does speak μυθικῶς, but he does so with good philosophical reason. With regard to the gods and the forms, the beautiful lie and the likely story are all we have: ‘because we don’t know the truth about antiquity, we liken the false to the true as much as possible and so make it useful’ (R. 382d1–3).

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Introduction It has been well and often observed that Platonism, as it emerged at the end of the Hellenistic era, is distinguished by its ‘religious’ character; even that it might in some sense be considered as a religion.1 The observation is typically linked to particular themes within Platonism: the immortality of the soul and its fate after death, for example; or the description of god in terms which suggest a reciprocal, ‘personal’ relationship with him as our benefactor and father, and a proper object of our love. But a stronger case still suggests itself at certain points in the Platonists’ own second-order commentary on their project. Plutarch represents the cosmos as a ‘temple’, and in doing so assimilates philosophical inquiry to initiation into the mysteries; Theon of Smyrna actually works out an elaborate correspondence between degrees of initiation and stages in the philosophical curriculum.2 That this is not simply the metaphorical appropriation of religious language is suggested by the fact that Platonists do in fact read, and so claim common cause with, ‘conventional’ religious traditions, understanding them as forerunners and guides in the attempt to do just what Platonism is doing.3

1 E.g. Dörrie 1976, 1981. Plutarch’s ‘religious’ character has been especially remarked on: e.g. Dillon 1986; Brenk 1987, 1988; and see discussions in Hirsch-Luipold 2005. 2 Respectively, Plu. On Tranquillity 477cd, and Theon On the Utility of Mathematics 14.18–16.2 Hiller. The image of the cosmos as temple is also found in Dio Chrysostom (Oration 12.34); but I am not aware of anything comparable to Theon’s elaboration of its implications in non-Platonist sources of the era. 3 See Boys-Stones 2001: ch. 6 and Frazier 2005 for Plutarch in particular. Numenius envisages a philosophical methodology which involves confirming research results

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And yet it also easy to feel that there is at the very least some tension in what we expect from a ‘religious’ account of god and what we very quickly find in the more detailed philosophical analysis offered by Platonists. The god whom we are supposed to love as a beneficent father is revealed to be an impersonal, transcendent and eternal form, the form of the good; his thoughts are of forms too, not of us; he is variously assimilated to the Pythagorean One, and the Aristotelian self-thinking intellect; he is so far above our own categories of understanding that he is precisely not anything we can think of him (or perhaps better: it) at all.4 In this chapter I attempt to show that there is, in fact, no tension here. Platonist metaphysics, I shall argue, unfolds into an account of the world and of our place within it which quite naturally justifies a description of it in religious terms  – an account, indeed, which goes a long way even to justify the description of it given by conventional religion. (Platonism is not, then, as it were another religion, but a pre-eminent reflex – and vindication – of the religion that was already there.) This fact is obscured by an assumption that ‘religious’ language is used precisely as an alternative to rational explanatory account perhaps because its objects defy philosophical explanation. There is, however, one case where this assumption can be put to the test. It concerns the term ‘providence’ (pronoia) – a term which, since it suggests the personal concern of god for us, is often taken to belong to the ‘religious’ description of god, and seems to operate in contrast to what metaphysicians might say.5 We can test our assumptions about against what can be inferred from the ritual practices of ancient nations (fr. 1a des Places); Apuleius viewed initiation into mystery cults as part of his philosophical search for truth (Apol. 55). 4 All of these thoughts are exemplified in the account of god in Alcin. Didaskalikos ch. 10. Note that my discussion of Platonism assumes for the sake of simplicity a system (such as that of Atticus) in which the first cause, the form of the good, is identical with the demiurge; but everything that it says applies mutatis mutandis to more complex hierarchies, such as that of Numenius, in which the Good is prior to the demiurge (and no one in the pre-Plotinian tradition thinks that there is a principle prior to the Good). 5 See e.g. Bozonis 1976; Ferrari 1999. I  do not want to argue backwards from Neoplatonist discussions in this chapter, but it is worth noting that one would not

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the Platonist understanding of ‘providence’ because we are fortunate enough to possess an extended fragment from a work by the second-century Platonist Atticus which involves a finely nuanced debate over the operation and scope of providence. The terms of this debate allow us an unusual opportunity to see what a Platonist of this period thinks essential in the idea of providence, and to trace the rational structures by which a particular conception of it can be defended. The results will be surprising to anyone who thinks that a metaphysical principle cannot present itself to us as the proper object of service and worship.6 Atticus against Aristotle Atticus wrote about providence in a book, known to us through extensive quotations by Eusebius, which warned against using be tempted to the assumption in the first place if one did start from them. Plotinus, for example, insists that we not think of divine providence in anthropomorphic terms (I take it that this is point of Enneads 3.2.1.10–15; cf. 3.2.1.44–5), and in general that we distance the idea of divine providence from acts of discursive ‘reasoning’ (3.2.2.8–9; 3.2.3.4–5; 3.2.14.1–6). Similarly Proclus, Commentary on the Timaeus i.414.7–416.5 Diehl (cf. Torraca 1993): providence is simply goodness in action (ἐνέργεια γὰρ ἡ πρόνοια τῆς ἀγαθότητος, 415.8–9). 6 Previous literature on the Platonist notion of providence, in addition to works cited in n.1, includes Dörrie 1977 and Dragona-Monachou 1994. The present chapter seeks something like a definition of providence, and limits itself to texts which are useful to this end; further Middle Platonist discussions include Plutarch, On Delay in Divine Punishment; also Abandoned Oracles 414F and On the Face in the Moon 927B for the role of providence in philosophical explanation; Philo of Alexandria, On Providence (fragments) (and see discussion in Frick 1999). For providence in the narratives of Plutarch’s Lives, see e.g. Vernière 1983; Swain 1989. Drews 2009: 411–642, esp. e.g. 456–7, 588, makes the topic central to a reading of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Providence is regularly associated with two further topics: the reward and punishment of virtue and vice (to the fore in Atticus fr. 3, and the theme of Plutarch, On Delay in Divine Punishment; cf. Philo, On Providence fr. 2 = Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 8.14) and the creation and maintenance of the world (cf. esp. Atticus fr. 4 des Places; Plutarch, Face in the Moon 927A; Philo, On the Creation of the World 10). In light of my discussion in what follows, I take it that the ‘metaphysical’ explanation for this, and other associations, is that cosmic orderliness is at issue (esp. Philo, On Providence fr. 2.1: the challenge is how to maintain a belief in providence in the face of apparent disorder; cf. later Plotinus, Enneads 3.2.2) – and that there is a substantial convergence of what is good and what is well ordered in Platonist thought. In this case, to be ‘provident’ (to be the cause of good for something) is to be a cause of orderliness.

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Aristotle as a guide in the interpretation of Plato.7 Providence, he says, is just one of the areas in which Aristotle’s thought could not be more different from that of Plato – and an unusually important area, one on which our whole happiness depends (fr. 3.9–11 des Places). Atticus’ headline position, at least as it is often cited, is that Plato ascribes providence to god and Aristotle does not. If this were an accurate report, then it would look as if Atticus’ point must be that there is something about the nature of Plato’s demiurge that makes him capable of a form of other-concern which is lacking in Aristotle’s first principle. This has some superficial plausibility, because Aristotle’s first principle notoriously is a self-thinking thinker, self-obsessed as it were in principle. Plato’s demiurge, by contrast, is characterised in  terms of his unbegrudging nature, and his desire to share the perfection he enjoys (Ti. 29e). On closer inspection, however, Atticus’ argument turns out to be rather more nuanced than this. Two things in particular call into serious doubt the idea that he rested his case on a contrast like this between the Aristotelian and Platonist gods. The first is that Atticus himself put no weight at all on the metaphysical character of Aristotle’s god  – in other words, there is no sign that this is what struck him as the problem with Aristotle; the second is that Atticus almost certainly allowed that Aristotle’s god is capable of providential activity after all – but only denied that he exercises it towards human beings. If Atticus does not attack the metaphysical character of Aristotle’s god, or reckon that the problem with Aristotle’s theory of providence lies with an ‘impersonal’ view of the deity, is this because Atticus’ assumptions about Aristotle’s god are very different from our own? Probably not. There is some evidence that Atticus takes Aristotle’s god to be the ‘first On Atticus in general (about whose biography we know next to nothing), and the title and purpose of his anti-Aristotelian work, see Karamanolis 2006: ch. 4, esp. 151–6. I have given a translation of the full text of fr. 3 des Places (concerning providence) as an appendix to this chapter. As noted above (n.6), fr. 4 also deals with providence, in relation to Atticus’ belief that the cosmos has a beginning. This is another view that is sometimes taken to be a mark of faith rather than reasoned argument: see e.g. Trabattoni 1987. I have argued against this in Boys-Stones 2011. 7

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unmoved mover’ of Metaphysics Λ, just as we would tend to do: it must be this that he has in mind when he talks (in fr. 8 des Places, quoted below) about a single principle in Aristotle which is responsible for movement throughout in the cosmos. But in this case, it is likely that Atticus also thinks of this god as the self-thinking intellect of Λ.9 – a determinedly ‘impersonal’ deity. This is all the more likely, because we know that, for his own part, Atticus identified god with the form of the good (fr. 12 des Places). If Atticus puts no weight here on any difference between Plato and Aristotle on the intrinsic nature of god, the obvious conclusions are (a) that he sees no relevant difference between them, and (b) that he himself believes in a god who can be squarely located within the territory of the metaphysician. If this is right, then it turns out already that Atticus does not assume that the language of ‘providence’ makes any determination of the intrinsic nature of god (beyond, presumably, his being a cause of good). It certainly does not suggest a ‘religious’ perspective on god as opposed to a metaphysical perspective. In fact (and this is my second point), Atticus probably does not even think that Aristotle’s god fails to exercise providence.8 This may seem surprising; but he does not say as much, and it seems more consistent with what he does say to assume that he followed the universal assumption of his day that Aristotle’s god does exercise providence  – but only towards the heavenly bodies (or, to be more accurate, that his gods, including the heavenly bodies themselves, keep providence to themselves). The specification that what worries him is the absence of providence from the human realm is a point Atticus makes insistently throughout fr. 3: (57–9) Both alike [Aristotle and Epicurus] think the gods have no concern for men, and provide the unjust with the same freedom from fear of the gods … (71–2) We are looking for a providence that is distinguished by its concern for us … (81–5) This extraordinary sleuth of nature, this unerring judge of matters divine, placed human affairs under the very sight of the gods and let them go unheeded and uncared for, organised by ‘nature’ rather than god’s reason … (96–8) He does not allow that there is anything outside the cosmos, and does not bring the gods into contact with things on earth … 8 Pace Karamanolis 2006: 160.

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By contrast, says Atticus, Plato ensured that god ‘cares for everything, including men’ (3.22–4). The surviving works of Aristotle, as it happens, say nothing at all about providence, so the fact that Atticus does not simply help himself to the position that he does away with is further indication that he must have accepted the widespread belief about Aristotle’s views on the matter. This belief is spelled out by Eusebius in introducing his quotation from Atticus (fr. 3.3–8):9 Moses and the Hebrew prophets, and indeed Plato, who is in agreement with them in these matters, have set out their views on universal providence with great clarity. But Aristotle brings the realm of the divine to a halt at the moon …

This is the real object of Atticus’ disagreement, and the reason why he thinks that Aristotle is a dangerous guide to Platonic theology. It is not after all that Aristotle’s god is too metaphysical, and it is not that he fails to be provident. The problem is that his providence is only enjoyed in the heavens. But this qualified position is invaluable evidence for what ‘providence’ is taken to mean. If we can understand what sense Atticus might have made of the doctrine that providence only extends as far as the moon, we will be well on our way to understanding what the very term ‘providence’ means in the context of his debate with Aristotle. Providence ‘as far as the moon’ The claim that Aristotle held that providence reached as far as, but no further than, the moon is, it should be emphasised, extremely well attested in later reports of Aristotle and his school – by friends, foes and doxographers alike.10 (There is no 9 The elision of Aristotle with Epicurus in fr. 3.51ff. would also have involved less argument and qualification if Atticus could have said, simply, that both denied providence outright. 10 See references in Moraux 1984: 571, n.33; and, for discussion of the different treatments of the claim within the Peripatetic tradition, Sharples 2002: 22–36 (and cf. 1983, esp.  144–52). The only Peripatetic text which clearly rejects the view is the Ps.-Aristotelian work On the Universe (although even it argues that the effects of providence are somehow weaker below the heavens: 6, 397b30). On the Universe,

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question that Atticus is adopting a controversial or polemical stance in assuming that it holds of Aristotle.) And although ancient commentators do not gloss it for us, and modern commentators have despaired of understanding it all,11 there may be quite a straightforward explanation for it. If we assume that ‘providential’ activity will minimally involve the providential agent in being a cause of good to some beneficiary, then the explanation might lie precisely in the metaphysical framework provided by Aristotle for the transmission of benefit from the first principle. It is presumably safe to assume that the ‘providence’ which flows from the first unmoved mover to the heavenly bodies is simply a matter of the orderly movement that the first mover imparts to them. Thanks to him, the first sphere of the heavens rotates and carries the ‘fixed stars’ in their regular cycle; and this is a movement in which all the other heavenly bodies (carried on spheres driven by this first sphere) subsequently partake. We can say, then, that the first unmoved mover is the single, teleological cause of this movement for all the heavenly bodies, and that they are, to just this extent, beneficiaries of his providence.12 Below the heavens, however, things get more complicated. It is true that the first unmoved mover is also the ultimate explanation for the existence of movement below the moon; but he is not responsible for the particular movements that there are. For example, the sublunary realm as a whole is stationary, and does not share in the westward motion of the heavens at conversely, accepts the idea that the cosmos is a unified, ensouled organism (5, 396b28–9; at 396a32ff. the cosmos is likened to a city in a way which invites comparison with Atticus fr. 8 as quoted below in the text). For reasons which will become clear, this seems to me no coincidence. 11 Moraux 1984: 571 resorts to suggesting that the claim is a product of confusion in the doxographical tradition. As Sharples notes, however (2002: 30), the view that providence stops at the moon is so well established that even someone as uncomfortable with it as Alexander does not question for a moment that Aristotle had been committed to it. 12 The movements of the heavenly bodies require, of course, more complexity than this: additional spheres add – and transmit – their own movements too. See Arist. Cael. 2.12 and Metaph. Λ.8, with Lloyd 2000: esp. 256–66. The essential point, however, is that the first unmoved mover is not simply the cause of movement to the heavenly bodies, but is a non-accidental cause of the very movement they have.

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all; and nothing in that realm moves according to a pattern laid down by the first unmoved mover either. (No species of animal, for example, exhibits regular westward-drifting behaviour; or, if any such species exists, they do not exhibit this behaviour because of the first unmoved mover.) Instead, what happens below the moon is explained by the combined influence (not even of any sphere or spheres but) of the heavenly bodies. As these pass closer and move further away in their various combinations, they bring (or remove) warmth in patterns which account for the cycles of nature, the changing seasons and the quality of different airs, waters and places. (The clearest example of this process, noted on several occasions by Aristotle, is the cycle of seasonal regeneration and decay as the sun draws closer to the earth or moves further away from it.)13 Ultimately, because of this, the celestial bodies are held to be responsible for the natures of the creatures and plants born in different places at different times. Aristotelians are far from alone in appealing to this sort of mechanism to explain sublunary activity. Indeed, as a description of the efficient causes involved, it amounts to something like a scientific consensus, one which was shared by Platonists too. But Platonists made a further claim about this system which Aristotelians were not in a position to make. Platonists claimed that the celestial system is to be conceived as a unified entity with a single formal cause. Platonists in fact talk of the whole cosmos as a unified living organism, which is a copy in matter of the realm of the forms as a whole (itself referred to in this context as the unique and all-encompassing ‘intelligible animal’),14 and governed by its own soul, the ‘world soul’. Atticus himself believes that the existence of this unifying principle can be established by something like an argument from design (Atticus fr. 8 des Places): For if there is not a single animate power ‘pervading all’ and ‘binding everything and keeping it together’, the universe could not be arranged in a reasonable See esp. Arist. GC 2.10, Mete. 1.2–3, 9; Metaph. Λ.6. A more detailed account of this kind of theory is to be found in Ptol. Tetr., esp. 1.2; see Pérez Jiménez 2012 for traces in Plutarch (cf. also perhaps Apuleius, Florida 10). 14 Cf. Attic. fr. 34 des Places, referring to Pl. Ti. 30c-31a; cf. 39e. 13

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A fortiori, the heavens have a unified structure; and in fact the Platonist view is that the ‘mind’ of the world soul is embodied in the orderly rotation of the heavens, which thereby play a special role in preserving order throughout the cosmos. Aristotle and his followers, by contrast, deny that there is any cause for the overall structure of the heavens. This goes with the denial of transcendent forms: there is, for Aristotle, no ‘intelligible animal’, no paradigmatic model for the cosmos as a whole, and no world soul.15 Rather, order as it were ‘trickles down’ from the first unmoved mover. I have noted that the first unmoved mover explains the westward motion common to the heavenly bodies; but it does not explain why there are as many such bodies as there are – or the number of the spheres; it does not explain the particular additional motions associated with individual spheres, or the combined effect that all these spheres moving together might have (via the movements they impart to the heavenly bodies) on anything below them. The first unmoved mover does not explain this – and nor does anything else. And it is because nothing, that is, no single or unified cause, is responsible for the overall structure of the heavens that nothing (no single or unified cause) is responsible for what happens beneath the heavens. But this means that nothing (no Plutarch, for example, notes Strato’s denial that ‘the cosmos was alive’ as a case of Peripatetic disagreement with the most important views of Plato (Against Colotes 1115b). (Aristotle’s assertion that there is ‘only one ouranos’ at Metaph. Λ.8, 1074a38 is not, of course, a claim for the unity of the heavens, but for the uniqueness of the cosmos.) Compare in this light Ps.-Justin, Dialogue 6, where (in a survey of differences between Plato and Aristotle) we are told that Plato has forms where Aristotle has gods. The roots of this obscure claim might lie precisely in the idea that Plato’s cosmos is constructed according to an eternal paradigmatic system – where Aristotle’s is the incidental result of the activity of a republic of divine individuals (the stars and planets). 15

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single or unified cause) is responsible for there being, for example, rivers and trees and human beings; let  alone for the complexity of behaviours that these things exhibit. One way of thinking about this is to consider how different life on earth might have been if there had been just one more star or planet in the heavens, or one more sphere affecting the movements of the stars and planets. There must certainly have been different individuals in this case, or at the very least individuals who were different in some respect to those who now exist; and it is quite likely that there would have been completely different species. But there is literally no reason at all, and certainly no reason that lies with the first unmoved mover, why there is not one more sphere or planet than there happens to be. It is worth noting that the claim does not have to be that we derive no benefit from the celestial gods, or the first unmoved mover. An Aristotelian might well argue that, given the orderly movement of the heavens, order was always going to ensue down here as well. It may not, in this case (and despite Atticus’ assertions to the contrary), be a matter of chance that there is sublunary order; but more than this, one could, in consequence, think of the particular benefits that we happen to derive from this order as some reason for us to be grateful to god. One of the more spirited attempts made within the Peripatetic tradition to qualify the claim that providence stops at the moon says in fact that we are benefited by the heavens – albeit accidentally (κατὰ συμβεβηκός) (Aetius 330.8–15 Diels; tr. Sharples): Aristotle [says that the world] is neither ensouled throughout nor endowed with sense perception nor rational nor intellectual nor governed by providence. For the heavenly things share in all of these, since spheres which are ensouled and alive surround [the world]; but the things in the region of the earth [share in] none of them, and have a share in good order accidentally, not in a primary way.

And Atticus himself seems to be aware of this line of argument: it must be the idea he refers to in 3.59–60, ‘that we receive some benefit from the gods although they remain in their heaven’. But not even the Aristotelian thinks that benefit received thus accidentally is going to count as providence. 326

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The transitivity of providence Our evidence for the difference between Platonists and Aristotelians in their views of providence is fully explained, then, by referring it to differences in their respective metaphysics, specifically their aetiological theories. It is because the first god of the Platonists is the cause of order for the cosmos as a whole, something in turn made possible by the posit of forms which are available to this god as a model for the unified complexity of the cosmos as a whole, that they are able to claim that god’s providence extends to ‘everything, including men’ (fr. 3.22–4). The causal complexity required to explain the sublunary cosmos in the Aristotelian system, by contrast, is achieved by an accumulation of causes which are individually creatures of divine providence, but in aggregation a product of chance. But Platonists go a step further than this. One might still be concerned that, while the demiurge is responsible for the cosmos as a whole, it is hard to see how he can be responsible for the welfare of individuals – except incidentally, insofar as the species is well conceived, for example;16 but, as we have seen, incidental benefit is not the same thing as providence. This is where the world soul becomes important. I noted above that Platonists believe that cosmic order importantly involves the heavens as a mechanism designed to transmit benefit to every individual generated within the cosmos. As such (and as I have already indicated), the heavens are the principal organ for the work that the world soul does in preserving the harmony of the world, and specifically in governing the generation of individuals within it. In other words, sublunary individuals are not in fact the immediate objects of the creator’s providence – and could not be so, given the metaphysical constraints on the demiurge. But they are the immediate and non-incidental objects of the providential care of the By ‘individual’ I  mean here specifically the transient individuals of natural, sublunary species. The heavenly bodies, which are ensouled individuals, but everlasting and crucial structural features of the cosmos, may perhaps be helpfully viewed as sui generis individuals for which the demiurge is the immediate cause. 16

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world soul, and that in turn is part of the providential dispensation of the world for which the demiurge is responsible. This is where things start to get interesting for the question of the relationship between humans and god. For something else that we can infer from Atticus’ debate with the Aristotelians is that it is common ground between them that providence can be transitive. What I mean by this is that, under the right circumstances, providential benefit can be received from its source through intermediaries – the ‘right circumstances’ being that those intermediaries are themselves immediate beneficiaries of providence from the same source, and are acting as such.17 We can presumably see this principle at work in the Aristotelian system in the assumption that every heavenly body is the beneficiary of the providential activity of the first unmoved mover. The first unmoved mover, after all, is only the immediate cause of the movement of the first heavenly sphere; all other spheres benefit from its activity only insofar as they are moved in turn by this first sphere. It seems that we are being invited to think that the first sphere is passing on or enacting the providence of god himself:  that the first unmoved mover is somehow understood to be immanent in its own activity as a transmitter of order. Applying the principle to the Platonist system ought to allow us to say that, when the world soul is acting providentially towards us (human individuals), then equally the demiurge is acting providentially towards us; that the providence of the demiurge is immanent in the activity of the world soul. And there is evidence that Atticus assumes just this, at the very beginning of the quotation in fr. 3. Atticus here is looking for texts that prove Plato’s view that we are beneficiaries of divine providence, and he finds two. One is a famous passage from the Timaeus which will be instantly familiar as a description of the demiurge. But before this, he cites a rather less well-known

In other words:  if a shows providential care for b and b shows providential care for c, then a shows providential care for c. (By the definition of providence I have reconstructed for Platonism, a shows ‘providential care’ for b just when a is non-accidentally a cause of good to b, in virtue of being good itself.) 17

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passage from the Laws, which a moment’s thought will show must be a reference to the world soul (3.16–24 des Places):18 Plato sees all things in relation to god and as derived from god, for he says that god ‘holds the beginning and middle and end of all things, and accomplishes his purpose directly as he revolves’ [Lg. 715e–716a]. And again he says that ‘he is good, and there is in the good no envy about anything, and he made everything outside himself as good as possible … bringing it to order from disorder’ [Ti. 29e–30a]; he cares for everything, including men, and has taken the trouble to brings as much order as possible to everything.

One does not need to be aware of the context of the Laws quotation to see that it has the world soul in mind (although the world soul is as a matter of fact the highest god considered by the Laws). The reference to this god ‘revolving’ (περιπορευόμενον) puts the matter beyond doubt:  as we have seen, the world soul governs through the revolutions of the heavens. (The demiurge does not move at all, or have the parts to do so.) So it is a striking fact about this passage that Atticus encourages us to have both the world soul and the demiurge in mind, but does not allow us to differentiate at all between the providential benefit we receive from one god or the other. And this makes sense if we are to think that it is in fact (via the principle of transitivity) the very same providential activity. The providential activity of the demiurge is immanent in the work of the world soul. If this is right, of course, then it should already start to become clear why the question of how ‘metaphysical’ or remote the demiurge is understood to be from an ontological perspective is irrelevant to the question from a religious perspective of how ‘personal’ or reciprocal a relationship might be possible with him. Our relationship with the demiurge can be just as personal as our relationship with the world soul. Opsomer 2005 argues for a general tendency among Middle Platonists to give the world soul itself demiurgic responsibility, and one might have wondered whether this is what is reflected in the present passage: in other words, whether Atticus in fact only has the world soul, qua demiurgic, in mind. But it happens that Atticus is the one person for whom we can be sure this is not the case. The question with Atticus is not whether he gives the world soul demiurgic functions, but whether he posits a (non-rotating!) divine soul which is prior to the world soul and associated with the demiurge (cf. Opsomer 2005: 74–6). 18

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That might still sound a little remote and abstract  – although already the world soul, insofar as it encompasses the heavens as the locus for its thinking and providential care for us, thereby encompasses traditional objects of Greek piety, the heavenly bodies and the gods associated with them. But in any case, the principle of transitivity allows the agency of divine providence to come even closer to us than that. Indeed, our most direct testimony to the principle applies it to the activity of daimones, identified by a number of Platonist sources as the immediate objects of particular religious cults.19 The following passage is a quotation from another second-century Platonist, Celsus. Celsus is here defending the worship of daimones from the Christian position that to worship subordinate daimones denies the supreme claims of God on our service. But ‘why should we not worship daimones?’ responds Celsus (quoted at Origen Cels. 7.68, tr. after Chadwick): Are not all things indeed administered according to god’s will, and is not all providence derived from him? And whatever there may be in the universe, whether the work of god or of angels, or of other daimones or heroes, do not all these things keep a law given by the greatest god? And has there not been appointed over each particular thing a being who has been thought worthy to be allotted power? Would not a man, therefore, who worships god rightly worship the being who has obtained authority from him?

‘This’, concludes Origen, ‘is how Celsus thinks one man can “serve many masters”.’ But his sarcasm denies Celsus’ point, which is that, since daimones are the ministers of the demiurge, it is his providence that they enact. (For precision, we could add that the daimones in fact have their commission via the celestial gods, or the world soul whose thinking they collectively enact;20 but, since the world soul is in turn exercising the providence of the demiurge, it is nonetheless still the Cf. Plu. Abandoned Oracles 416c–417a, 435a; Apuleius, On Socrates’ God 13–14, 148–50. Bernard 1994:  364–7 observes that the case for daimon-intermediaries is made by Apuleius in his emphasis on the impassibility of the celestial gods  – as compared with the passibility which daimones share with human beings. The observation holds for Plutarch too. 20 Cf. Apuleius, On Plato 1.12, 205–6 as quoted below; also On the God of Socrates 6, 132–4, where the daimones are likewise ministers of the celestial gods. 19

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providence of the demiurge that the daimones are exercising, as Celsus says.) It is not only compatible with the recognition of God’s supremacy and providence that we should worship the daimones, it is entailed by it. In worshipping the daimones we are worshipping the demiurge.21 The same thought can be found elsewhere in our evidence for second-century Platonism. Indeed, so important is the principle of transitivity for establishing our relationship with god that a terminology was invented for it. A  number of Platonist texts talk, namely, about ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ providence:  ‘primary’ providence belonging to the demiurge, and secondary providence to the world soul (or to the heavenly bodies in which it maintains cosmic order). So, for example, Apuleius (On Plato 1.12, 205–6): The first providence is that of the supreme and most exalted of all gods, who not only set in order the celestial gods, whom he dispersed through all the parts of the cosmos to preserve and adorn it, but who also made it the case that by nature those mortals who surpassed other terrestrial creatures in wisdom would achieve unending days, and who established laws for the arrangement and preservation of everything else (laws which are constantly required) and passed them to the keeping of other gods. Taking up this providence, the gods of secondary providence kept it so assiduously that everything, even what the heavens show to mortals, holds fast to the immutable station ordained by the Father. He reckoned daimones (which we [sc. Romans] can call Genii and Lares) to be ministers of the gods, and guardians of men and their intercessors in case they should want anything from the gods.

This language has often been noted and described as a Platonist ‘doctrine’, but little attempt has been made to explain what it is a doctrine about.22 I suggest that it expresses the important idea that providence can be passed down the line from the demiurge to the world soul. In saying that the world soul is ‘secondary providence’, Platonists do not mean that the See also Finamore 2006: esp. 37–9, with Apuleius, Socrates’ God 132–4. Could this be an explanation for the fact that Apuleius can (claim to) use a carving of Mercury as an icon in his worship of Plato’s ineffable first god (Apology 61–4)? 22 For discussion and references, see Boys-Stones 2007: esp. 436 with n.25 (my own suggestion there, at 445–7, was that the language was essentially rhetorical, and intended to herald a higher form of providence to that acknowledged by the Stoics). Cf. also now Drews 2009: 596 (which has the merit of seeing that ‘secondary providence’ plays a role of mediation). 21

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world soul exercises its own providence, which is secondary; the point is rather that the world soul secondarily exercises the very same providence, namely the providence of the demiurge. As to daimones (whose immediate divine superior, as I noted, is the world soul, not the demiurge) – two of our texts in fact talk about a ‘tertiary providence’, which applies precisely to their work – presumably, just when they are understood faithfully to enact the providential work passed on to them from the celestial gods, or the world soul at large.23 (The reason why some of our sources make a point of saying that there are two providences, while some that there are three, will also be explained on this account: it is that only some Platonists, including those who talk about three exercises of providence, believed that there were daimones who were reliably good and, to that extent, part of the permanent mechanism for the transmission of providence. Others were not so sure. Apuleius, for example, believed that daimones could be beneficent, but were no more certain to be so than human souls, which for him occupy, in fact, the same ontological class.24 So he can talk about daimones doing god’s service, but does not tend to assume that, as a genus, they will always be exercising his providence.) Philosophy as religion What this discussion has shown is that Platonism systematically vindicates religious observance: it recognises the traditional gods and approves their worship (with only one significant correction, perhaps, to traditional sensibility, which is that all divinities, at least all whose worship is approved, are beneficent, and none is malign). Indeed, it does more than this:  it assimilates all such deities into an inflection of monotheism:  a theory of deity according to which the properly divine aspect of all divine beings, their ability to be causes of good, is the immanent activity of one god, namely the first principle. As Celsus suggests, the See Ps.-Plu. On Fate 568e; Nemesius, On the Nature of Man 43, 126.15–21 Morani. 24 Apuleius, On the God of Socrates 13, 147–8 (but see all of 13–16). Plutarch thinks that daimones and souls are merely different states of the same entity: Abandoned Oracles 431b. 23

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worship of any god is worship of the supreme deity; conversely, that we encounter this supreme principle in his subordinates. Not that they stand proxy for him, but that he is immanent in them. And the remarkable thing is that it is metaphysics that does this. The question of whether the Platonist god is ‘metaphysical’ or ‘religious’ is misplaced. Even the question of whether a ‘metaphysical’ description of this god can be squared with ‘religious’ language sincerely used of him is misconceived. On the one hand, there is nothing remotely anthropomorphic about the first principle; but, on the other hand, that that is no bar to our having a personal and reciprocated relationship with him. (E.  R. Dodds, discussing the negative theology that results from Platonist metaphysical interpretations of the Parmenides, quotes the remark of Dean Inge that ‘one cannot worship the alpha private’.25 It turns out, in fact, that one cannot really worship anything else.) But all of this is only in the end to say in effect that Platonism has an analysis of causality which is supportive of conventional religious practice, or gives it philosophical justification. I  started out with a slightly different question:  how can the philosophy itself be the religion? I have presented evidence that the world soul, and daimones too (at least those daimones who were good in nature), were agents of divine providence: that is, that they were non-accidental causes of benefit in virtue of the providential benefit that they received in their turn. But given the way in which this mechanism works, there seems to be no principled reason why we ourselves, we human beings, could not become agents of providence as well – namely when we become virtuous. Virtue is standardly defined for Platonists as ‘likeness (or assimilation) to god’:  ὁμοίωσις θεῷ. The formula is sometimes taken to be a simple exhortation to a particular kind of activity which is, or is like, an activity engaged in by god: for example, the contemplation of forms. But the focus of surviving discussions of the virtues is much less on what you should do, and much more on how you should be. The Dodds 1928: 141; see Inge 1918: 2.115. Similarly Dillon 1986: 217, of Plutarch: ‘One does not dance, I think, in honor of the Good, or of the One.’ 25

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idea – obviously inspired by the account of justice in Republic 4 – is that we ought to acquire the right state of soul, and the right kind of actions will follow.26 I take it that ‘coming to be like god’ really involves acquiring a state in virtue of which one is a cause of good order and benefit just as god is.27 But if we think that this state of being is our telos, the fulfilment and enjoyment of a capacity which is the larger part of god’s providential gift to us,28 then – if the principle of transitivity holds – the virtuous human being would turn out to be an agent of providence and even, as such, a manifestation of god. This might sound like an overblown and unlikely claim, but some Platonists of the period express just this as the purpose for the descent of souls to human lives in the first place. There were followers of Taurus, we are told, who thought that the gods sent souls to earth so that, through them, they might become manifest there themselves:29 26 See e.g. Alcin. Didaskalikos 29.1, 182.15–19 (and similarly Apuleius, On Plato 2.5, 223): ‘Virtue is a divine thing: it is the perfect and very best state of soul [διάθεσις ψυχῆς], which makes a man graceful, harmonious and constant in what he says and does, by himself and with respect to others.’ 27 Alcin. Didaskalikos 28.3, 181.42–4 specifies that the assimilation is to ‘the celestial god’, not the ‘hyper-celestial god’. If, as I suppose, he means by this that we should aim to be like the world soul as opposed to the demiurge, the point might be motivated by a concern to head off a mistaken view of the ideal life as one which involves transcending immediate concern for particulars. In fact, Alcinous thinks, the good that the virtuous person does, in virtue of being good, needs to be directed immediately towards other individuals within the cosmos, just as is the good that the world soul does. (We, after all, do not have the intermediaries for this work that the hyper-celestial demiurge has.) It is true that this reading involves a particular view of Alcinous’ divine hierarchy, a topic which is a matter of some controversy: but note that my principal argument about the implications of human assimilation to the divine is not affected in any case. If I am right that every god in a given Platonist system exercises the very same providence, then the result is the same whichever god one is conceived as coming to be like. 28 Cf. Plu. On Isis and Osiris 550e; Maximus, Oration 38. Neither talks about ‘providence’ in so many words, but both say that virtue is the greatest of the gifts we receive from the gods. 29 The whole testimonium is a quotation from Iamblichus, On the Soul at Stob. Eclogue 1, 378-25-379.6 Wachsmuth = Taurus fr. 34T Gioè. Previous commentators have baulked at the literal meaning of the claim: Festugière, for example, paraphrases: ‘pour donner en spectacle la vie divine’ (1953: 219, n.6). Gioè 2002: 375 repeats Dillon’s comparison with the Christian thought that God made us ‘for his own honour and glory’ (1980: 359) (neither gives a reference for this thought, but cf. e.g. Lactantius, Divine Institutes 7.6). But there is no suggestion in what Iamblichus says that the gods are seeking any form of benefit for themselves.

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Providence and religion in Middle Platonism For this is the will of the gods: to manifest themselves as gods through the souls; for they are on display through the pure and unstained life of souls (ταύτην γὰρ εἶναι τὴν βούλησιν τῶν θεῶν, θεοὺς ἐκφαίνεσθαι διὰ τῶν ψυχῶν· προέρχονται γὰρ εἰς τοὐμφανὲς οἱ θεοὶ καὶ ἐπιδείκνυνται διὰ τῶν ψυχῶν καθαρᾶς καὶ ἀχράντου ζωῆς).

And this thought should not strike us as surprising, from the moment we saw that daimones may be agents of providence: as I noted above, daimones are generally understood by Platonists either to be numerically identical with human souls, or at least to occupy the same ontological class as human souls. If they, when they are good, can be agents of providence, there seems to be no good reason why humans, in the cases (however rare) when they too are good, might not be also be agents of ­providence.30 It is worth noting too that when Celsus justifies the worship of daimones on the ground that they are ministers of the creator, he mentions heroes in the same breath. But if a hero differs from a daimon it is precisely by being (or having been) an extraordinary human being, that is, extraordinarily virtuous – that is, ultimately successful in philosophy. Plato, indeed, is described as a heros by Apuleius.31 A perfectly virtuous human being, then, is a minister of the gods, and of the first god; their ‘assimilation to god’ is such as to make their activity god’s activity, their lives manifestations of god’s life, and in this, of course, to find their own perfection. But since virtue can only be acquired through philosophy, and is identified with the perfect practice of philosophy, to do philosophy coincides exactly with what it is to be (in this very strong sense) a minister of god and to find one’s perfection Cf. Bonazzi 2012 on the ‘daimonic’ character of the philosopher. (Atticus actually refers to Plato’s ‘daimonic nature’ in fr. 3.26–7 des Places.) Plutarch thinks that the perfect(ible) part of a human being, the intellect, is a ‘daimon’, and that we are more ‘daimonic’ the more virtuous we are (On Socrates’ Daimon 591de); similarly Apuleius, Socrates’ God 150–2, and esp. 157, where Socrates’ wisdom and virtue is such that he appropriately worships his own intellect (animus). 31 On Plato 2.8, 229. The successive transformation of humans into heroes and daimones is mooted by Plutarch at Abandoned Oracles 415b; cf. Life of Romulus 28. A third-century inscription commemorating a (Platonist?) descendent of Plutarch called Aristobulus praises him for possessing ‘every virtue’, and describes him both as a ‘perfect philosopher’ and as a ‘hero’ (IG VII 3425 = Syll.3 844B). Back in the first or second century, the anonymous commentator on the Theaetetus is happy to take Socrates’ remarks at 151c–d rather literally as evidence that Socrates’ good will made him ‘like god’ (coll. 58–9). 30

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through assimilation to god. So whether one thinks of religion in terms of divine service, or (in ‘eschatological’ terms) as a matter of pursuing one’s own ‘salvation’, it turns out that philosophy, and especially metaphysics, really is the pre-eminent manifestation of religion.32 Appendix Translation of Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 15.5.1–14 (798B–801A) = Atticus, fr. 3 des Places (numbers in brackets refer to lines in des Places’ edition): (3) Again, Moses and the Hebrew prophets, and indeed Plato, who is in agreement with them in these matters, have set out their views on (5) universal providence with great clarity. But Aristotle brings the realm of the divine to a halt at the moon, and keeps the remaining parts of the cosmos fenced off from god’s care. In this view he is also refuted by the aforementioned author [sc. Atticus], who goes through the arguments as follows: Of all the things that help one to achieve (10) happiness, the greatest and most important is faith in providence. This above all keeps human life on the right track, so long as we don’t intend to be unsure ‘whether by justice the race of earthborn men may scale the lofty wall, (15) or by perverse deceit’ [Pindar fr. 213.1–3 Snell]. Plato sees all things in relation to god and as derived from god, for he says that god ‘holds the beginning and middle and end of all things, and accomplishes his purpose directly as he revolves’ [Lg. 715E–716A]. And again he says that ‘he is good, and there is in the good no (20) envy about anything, and he made everything outside himself as good as possible bringing it to order from disorder’ [Ti. 29E–30A]; he cares for everything, including men, and has taken the trouble to brings as much order as possible to everything. (25) And a little further on: So Plato. But that man who casts off this daimonic character, excises the soul’s hope of the hereafter, and removes all reverence for superior beings right now – what has he (30) in common with Plato? How could he exhort anyone to what Plato has in mind, or give credence to his words? It is obvious that his collaboration tends in precisely the opposite direction, that his aid is for those who wish to commit injustice. For if someone were to (35) despise the gods and think them irrelevant to him on the grounds 32 I gratefully acknowledge the benefit I  have enjoyed from discussing these ideas with audiences in Cambridge, Toronto and (with special thanks to Radcliffe G. Edmonds) Bryn Mawr; and from membership of the IAS at Princeton for Spring term 2013 where the final draft was written.

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Providence and religion in Middle Platonism that, while alive he lives far away from them, and when dead no longer exists, then, as a human being possessed of human urges, he would readily want to indulge his desires. It is not impossible to be confident that one can commit injustice without being found out – if it is only necessary to avoid detection by humans. (40) In fact it is not always necessary that you should seek to evade notice, if you can wield power over the people who have seen you. So the way is open for injustice where people despair of providence. In his great benevolence, Aristotle holds out to us pleasure as something good, and offers us release from fear of the gods – (45) and then thinks he can provide a mechanism to prevent injustice. He acts like a doctor who neglects to give any help while the patient is still living, but when he has died tries to come up with mechanisms for saving the dead. The Peripatetic is like this. For the pursuit of pleasure itself does nothing (50) to encourage injustice like a refusal to believe in divine concern. ‘What then?’ someone might say. ‘Do you put Aristotle and Epicurus in the same case?’ Absolutely – on this matter, anyway. What difference is there as far as we are concerned whether you locate the divine outside the cosmos (55) and allow us no contact with it, or whether you imprison the gods within the cosmos but keep them away from what happens on earth? Both alike think the gods have no concern for men, and provide the unjust with the same freedom from fear of the gods. (60) As to the idea that we receive some benefit from them although they remain in their heaven: in the first place, that is something we share with irrational creatures and inanimate objects; but then even Epicurus thinks that men get some benefit from the gods. At any rate, they say that the superior emanations that come from them are responsible for great goods in those who partake in them. (65) But it is not right to count either of them on the side of the argument for providence. On Epicurus’ account, the effect of providence disappears, even though the gods devote a lot of care (so he says) to the preservation of their own goods. Likewise (70) for Aristotle, providence will disappear even if the heavenly bodies are arranged in some sort of rank and order. We are looking for a providence that is distinguished by its concern for us – and that is not available for anyone who denies that daimones and heroes and souls in general are able to survive. (75) In my judgement, however, Epicurus seems to have come up with a position that is more modest as well. It is as if he despaired of the gods’ ability to abstain from caring for men if they found themselves in the same place: so he settled them as it were in a foreign country, and established their home outside the cosmos, and then blamed (80) their lack of concern for man on their removal, their separation from everything. But this extraordinary sleuth of nature, this unerring judge of matters divine, placed human affairs under the very sight of the gods and let them go unheeded and uncared for, (85) organised by ‘nature’ rather than god’s reason. So Aristotle can’t reasonably escape that criticism which some people level against Epicurus,

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George Boys-Stones namely that it was not through his own conviction but out of fear of men that he allocated the gods space in the universe – as if allocating them a seat in a theatre. (90) The evidence they adduce for his real conviction is the fact that he denies them any activity exercised towards us, which is the only thing that would make the existence of the gods grounds for a proper faith. But Aristotle does the same thing. Since he sets the gods apart, and hands faith over to sight alone – (95) a weak faculty for making judgements over so long a distance – it will perhaps seem to be only through shame that he says there are gods there. For since he does not allow that there is anything outside the cosmos, and does not bring the gods into contact with things on earth, he had either to admit that he was a complete atheist or else maintain the reputation of apparently allowing the existence of the gods (100) by exiling them somewhere like that. To excuse the aloofness of the greater beings on the grounds of their distance from society at least presents atheism gracefully.

This is what Atticus had to say against Aristotle’s rejection of the theory of providence.

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CHA PTER 1 5

NA R R AT IVE S OF C ONT INU IT Y A ND DI SCONT INUI T Y PE T E R VA N NUF F E L E N

A reader picking up a work of the Christian bishop Eusebius of Caesarea will quickly acquire the impression that he has entered a different world of thought from the one represented by the authors quoted in the previous chapters in this volume. Traditional Greek deities are reduced to demons or human inventions, and the Bible has become the prime proof-text for the nature of the only deity left standing, the Christian God. Nevertheless, Eusebius himself constructs a grand narrative of continuity centred around the notion of tradition. According to the argument of the demonstratio evangelica, Christianity is fundamentally a return to the primeval form of life already practised by the Hebrew patriarchs, from which Judaism represents a deviation.1 Similarly, the praeparatio evangelica can be read as a reconstruction of the origins and development of the various idolatrous traditions, within which the Hellenic one is particularly highlighted.2 In doing so, Eusebius is transposing a view on the development of mankind that originated in post-Hellenistic philosophy.3 Whilst emphasising the differences with Hellenism, he also accepts that Platonic philosophers were on the right track, even if they failed to attain the full truth. Such arguments can be traced in many patristic texts, such as Augustine’s City of God (book 8) and the Therapy of Greek Maladies by Theodoret. As illustrated by Simon Goldhill’s chapter in this volume, nineteenth-century Ulrich 1999; Morlet 2009. 2 Johnson 2006. 3 Boys-Stones 2001; Van Nuffelen 2011a, 2011b. 1

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013)/ ERC Grant Agreement n. 313153 and from the Flemish Research Fund.

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scholarship tended to agree with Theodoret and Augustine, and constructed an unbroken chain from the classical world to Victorian England. Christianity was the continuation of classical ideals. In the twentieth century, however, the pendulum swung back to an emphasis on difference, often articulated around the thesis that Greek and Roman religions were practice-based in contrast to the belief-based religious system that is Christianity.4 On such a view, Theodoret’s attempt to integrate Plato can only be a specious appropriation of an alien heritage.5 The question of continuity and discontinuity does not intrude in the same way into discussions of late ancient Neoplatonism, which seems to be, in a quite obvious manner, part of the classical tradition. Yet even a cursory reading of Proclus’ Platonic Theology reveals a different theological universe from the one presupposed by, say, Plutarch, even if the incorporation of traditional deities and the references to the classical canon generate a greater sense of continuity. Indeed, a volume such as this one can be very well understood as the distant descendant of the construction of Hellenism as a continuous tradition that took place in the Roman Empire:6 its title, Greek Theologies, may seem obvious to a classicist, accustomed to assuming the continuity of Hellenism. Yet much also separates Hesiod from the philosopher Atticus, let alone Iamblichus, who arguably each represent very different phases in the development of Greek theology. As we shall see, scholarship has grown aware of the massive appropriation and reinterpretation of earlier traditions performed by Neoplatonists, which is so much harder to grasp as it is swamped by claims of continuity and return to pristine traditions. As cultural practices, the Christian and Neoplatonist discourse are very much akin in constructing narratives of continuity that allow them to integrate the aspects of earlier traditions that they wish to. Yet our modern assessment See e.g. Scheid 2005; Parker 2011; North and Price 2011. For further illustration, see Van Nuffelen 2010: 21–7. 5 Siniossoglou 2008. See, for a different view, Papadoyannakis 2012. 6 Kaldellis 2007; Johnson 2012. 4

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tends to go in two different directions: towards difference for Christianity, continuity for Neoplatonism. This example highlights two, closely intertwined issues. The first is the rhetorical construction of narratives of continuity by ancient religious and philosophical groups. The adjective ‘rhetorical’ points to the obvious fact that such a rhetoric does not necessarily represent historical continuities (even if it can), but also to the fact that we are dealing with the affirmation or creation of a particular identity. Even if one rejects Christianity’s claim to offer authoritative interpretations of Plato, it is a significant social and cultural fact that Christians wished to do so. The second is the way in which modern scholarship constructs its own narratives of continuity (or difference), possibly influenced by the ancient rhetoric of appropriation and rejection. In this chapter I  shall argue that both narratives are influenced by, indeed, often driven by, theological presuppositions. To paraphrase Julia Kindt’s chapter, there is not only a story of theology, but also a theology in the story. Modern narratives of difference I wish to approach the modern perspective via a detour:  the first volume of lectures given by the French philosopher Cornélius Castoriadis at the Collège de France, entitled Ce qui fait la Grèce: d’Homère à Héraclite (What made Greece: From Homer to Heraclitus). Early in the book, he states his main thesis: C’est qu’il y a opposition entre la tradition monothéiste en tant que tradition d’hétéronomie et la tradition grecque proprement dite, ou démocratique, en tant que tradition d’autonomie.7 (‘There is an opposition between the monotheistic tradition as a tradition of heteronomy and the Greek tradition properly speaking, that is, the democratic tradition, as a tradition of autonomy.’)

The statement is obviously asymmetrical. Greece, a geographical entity, is opposed to a theological category, monotheism. In addition, whereas one side of the opposition is identified 7 Castioridis 2004: 35. For similar statements, see Marquard 1981; Goldhill 2008.

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with a political tradition (democracy), the political nature of the other is left unspecified – although one can imagine what it is supposed to be. The asymmetry of the opposition is to be explained by the implicit reduction that happens in the definition of both poles. On the one hand, the Greek tradition is reduced to what constitutes, according to Castoriadis, its true essence, democracy. A classicist is bound to recognise here the traditional identification of Athens (and only part of the Athenian tradition) as expressing the Greek spirit in its purest form.8 Such a perspective traditionally implies the belief in a degeneration after the Classical period, something that can indeed be found in Castoriadis.9 On the other hand, the monotheism he refers to is obviously Christianity. But what kind of Christianity is he thinking of ? Castoriadis seems to presuppose that Christianity also possesses some form of an essence, just as the Greek tradition does. One element that he singles out is the absence of revelation in Greece.10 Revelation is indeed traditionally seen as a marker of Christianity, which, for Castoriadis, seems obviously heteronomous. Yet the focus on revelation as a marker of distinction between the Greek tradition and Christianity may not be as useful or absolute as it seems at first sight. It is only with the rise of modern science that revelation, understood as a non-rational form of knowledge and as opposed to a proof-based evidentialism, acquires its particular edge as a defining aspect of Christianity, reflected in a quickly growing body of literature since the seventeenth century.11 Such a contrast is far less obvious in a time when Muses inspired poetry, a doctor like Galen was cured in a dream and oracles were consulted for theological issues,12 or, to cite Neoplatonist examples, the Chaldean oracles became a source of divine wisdom and the philosopher Porphyry produced a work entitled 8 For a sketch of the origins of this idea, see Vlassopoulos 2009. 9 Castoriadis 2004: 143. 10 Also a starting point for Parker 2011: ch. 1. 11 Scholtz 1984; Herms 1995. For doubts about the usefulness of the concept of revelation even when applied to the Bible, see Downing 1964; Barr 1966. 12 Busine 2005.

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Philosophy from Oracles. Indeed, the emphasis on revelation indicates that Castoriadis has projected the contrast between, on the one hand, the acquisition of scientific knowledge by the independent working of the human mind and, on the other, the acceptance of a view on the basis of authority onto the contrast between Greece and Christianity. Ultimately the notions of autonomy and heteronomy can only acquire their importance in Castoriadis’ philosophy on the condition that one accepts the opposition between an idealised essence of Greece as a prefiguration of modernity and a Christianity that is assimilated to an anti-modernism. That Christianity and Greece both had a long history, in which they evolved considerably, does not seem to matter much. In other words, Castoriadis’ narrative of discontinuity hinges on some specific views on the history of Western society, articulated around what are in origin theological categories. Monotheism and revelation are, however, not absolute terms but themselves products of a particular historical attempt to construct difference: in the case of the first, between advanced religions and more primitive, polytheistic forms; for the second, between religion and science as different modes of knowledge. If the idealisation of Classical Greece that permeates Castoriadis’ work is quite obvious to a classicist, similar issues arise concerning our own approaches. The past decade has seen a resurgence of the argument that forms of monotheism can be detected in classical antiquity, in particular from the first centuries CE onwards. This proposition has understandably encountered criticism, as the idea of ‘pagan monotheism’ cuts through some of the traditional polarities with which ancient religions have been analysed, in particular monotheism/ polytheism and ritual/belief.13 Here I wish to take a closer look at a recent discussion by John North of pagan monotheism and its implications for the study of the transition of the classical world to a Christian one. Athanassiadi and Frede 1999; Gasparro 2010; Mitchell and Van Nuffelen 2010a; Mitchell and Van Nuffelen 2010b. These works also provide a guide to responses to the idea of pagan monotheism. For reflections on the latest discussions, see Van Nuffelen 2012. 13

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At the start of the chapter, he notes that pagan monotheism might provide an explanation for the conversion of the empire to Christianity: if it is true that there is solid evidence to suggest that pagans were progressively becoming monotheistic, abandoning the cultic and sacerdotal specificities of their own tradition and forgetting the complex identities of the powers recorded in their books, then evidently the transition to Christianity for individuals would have become more straightforward.14

Whilst North is alluding to the assumption that the adoption of monotheism could be a preliminary stage for the conversion to Christianity (as older scholarship often held), his precise articulation of the idea is not without its problems. He identifies the change in theological position (from polytheism to monotheism) with the abandonment of the traditional cult acts of Graeco-Roman religion. In fact, all late ancient pagan authors who have been labelled monotheistic explicitly defend traditional cult, rites and statues as proofs of the reality and efficacy of their deities, who are, in turn, manifestations of a single deity.15 If pagan monotheism exists, it is a reinterpretation of traditional cult, not its rejection. Indeed, late ancient Neoplatonists combined a metaphysics that was quite different from what earlier philosophers held with a concern to practice the traditional rites properly and traditionally. They situated themselves consciously in a long and glorious Hellenic tradition.16 There is sufficient evidence that monotheism itself was not sufficient to make the transition to Christianity painless:  in order to convert, a pagan monotheist still had to accept that traditional cultic practice was void (i.e. sacrifices to Apollo were meaningless) and that traditional texts of authority (Homer, Plato, etc.) were inferior to the Bible. In other words, even in later antiquity, religion was not reduced to theological beliefs, but embedded in wider assumptions about tradition 14 North 2011: 482. 15 E.g. Maximus of Madaura, in Augustine, Ep. 16. See also Saturninus of Thugga, PL 3.1107. The theology of Macrobius as expressed in the Saturnalia (see below) would be another example. 16 Dillon 2007.

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and authority. Conversion meant to exchange one community of interpretation for another one, each with its own set of assumptions, texts and readings of the past.17 A change in theological interpretation of traditional religion did not suffice to cause conversion. Indeed, monotheism was not perceived as a change by those ‘pagans’ who professed it. Pagan monotheism thus appears as an internal evolution of Graeco-Roman religion. It is precisely at this point that John North disagrees. For him, pagan monotheism is the outcome of major changes during the second century, under the influence of groups that stood outside that tradition: The conception of the history of pagan-ism for which I should argue is that the crucial factor is not some internal change or transformation, still less an evolution according to some pre-determined process, but rather the necessary effects of confrontation and co-existence with the new types of religious groups, Jewish, Christian, and others, with which pagans in all the cities of the Empire had to deal from the first century onwards.18

Monotheism is thus an alien import into Graeco-Roman religion. North suspects the idea of an internal evolution of being teleological as it could imply the idea of a praeparatio evangelica. Instead, he highlights social competition as the engine of religious change. As does Castoriadis, North relies on the implicit acceptance of strong polarity between Graeco-Roman religion and Christianity, seen as an instance of the opposition between polytheism and monotheism as two mutually exclusive religious systems. Within monotheism, theological beliefs are supposed to determine action, whereas within Graeco-Roman polytheism practices are primordial. Hence North’s idea that monotheism, even if not Christian, necessarily entails the abandonment of Graeco-Roman cult practices:  the acceptance of monotheism by a polytheist implies a change towards a different religious system within which cult practice is prescribed by its theology. In addition, both systems are opposites to such a degree that the generation of monotheism within See McCarthy 2009 for the close link between belief and community. 18 North 2011: 492. 17

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polytheism is akin to Baron von Münchhausen dragging himself out of the marsh by his own hair: monotheism must therefore be the product of external influences, that is, competition and confrontation with groups that were already monotheistic. The high walls that North erects between polytheism and monotheism are, in fact, hard to reconcile with the close interaction between various religious groups that characterises later antiquity and which he has admirably charted.19 They come, however, very close to views of early Christian authors, such as Orosius, for whom the monotheism he witnesses among his pagan contemporaries is due to the influence of Christianity.20 This coincidence of views is, ultimately, not very surprising: like North, many Christian apologists tended to believe in the fundamental incompatibility between their own monotheism and the Graeco-Roman polytheist tradition. Ultimately, such views reflect theological presuppositions. As much as Castoriadis is dependent on a certain understanding of revelation, North’s construction of the nature of a monotheistic religious system is framed by a particular understanding of how a monotheistic worshipper related to his beliefs, namely the subordination of actions to understanding. If this idea seems to fit well with the view (found among Christians and classical philosophers alike) that one’s walk of life should reflect one’s philosophy, it ignores the flipside of that coin: that actions can also shape one’s mind.21 The unilateral emphasis on the priority of theology in Christianity seems to reflect the modern presupposition that reason should guide our actions and the idea that Christianity is a first step in the long process of rationalisation in Western society.22 I have discussed Castoriadis and North to demonstrate the deep roots in intellectual history of the narratives of discontinuity that currently dominate scholarship on ancient religion. North 1992. 20 Orosius, Historiae adversus paganos 6.1.3. 21 For this dual aspect of ancient philosophy, see Hadot 1995 and Sherman 2005 for reflections from a modern perspective. For a view of early medieval Christianity as a practice, see Asad 1993. 22 For a discussion of the Weberian concept of rationalisation, see now Rüpke 2012, who uses the concept to explain religious changes in the late Republic. 19

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The emphasis on the difference with Christianity has had salutary effects, rendering the eye more attuned to the particular nature of Graeco-Roman religion. At the same time, the now topical disclaimer that we should not rely on Christianising assumptions when studying ancient religion has led to a significant blind spot, namely the failure to recognise the degree to which such scholarship remains indebted to existing theological schemes. As I have argued, if scholars of ancient religion have acquired a better and more nuanced understanding of ancient religion, they tend to work with a view of Christianity that is essentially modern in nature. Yet the transition we witness is one from Graeco-Roman religion to ancient Christianity, not its modern apparition. The concepts with which scholars work are ultimately of a theological nature: particular conceptions of polytheism, monotheism, revelation and belief determine the construction of the narratives of difference I  have surveyed. Therefore, we should retheologise our discourse, not with the intention to claim that all was belief and theology, but rather to see that our categories are and will remain indebted to a theological tradition. Theological narratives in late antiquity It is not just modern scholars whose narratives rely on theological presuppositions. In this section I  shall argue that late ancient theologies rely on narrative constructions of the past and that these cannot be disjoined. I shall start with a brief discussion of the theological chapters of Macrobius’ Saturnalia.23 In the second quarter of the fifth century, Macrobius composed two works: the Saturnalia is a seven-book account of a symposium with a dramatic date of 17–19 December 384,24 whereas the commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio sets out a Neoplatonic world view. The Saturnalia has recently been characterised as an encyclopaedia, an educational work for Macrobius’ son The discussion on Macrobius uses some material also found in Van Nuffelen forthcoming. 24 For an overview, see Kaster 2011: xxiv. Cameron 2011: 234–7 argues for 382; Döpp 1978: 629 suggests 383. 23

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Eustachius:25 it discusses a wide range of antiquarian and literary issues, including ancient wit (2.2–7), the chicken and the egg (7.16.1–14) and Vergil and Homer (5.2–16). In the context of this chapter, the theological chapters, which, through the use of etymology and allegory, identify all traditional deities with the sun as the highest deity (1.17–23), are of most interest. As long as the view that Macrobius was merely a late antique compiler of earlier lore held sway, these chapters tended to be ascribed to a single source.26 Now scholars accept that he must have produced his own synthesis of earlier material,27 in which Porphyry must have played an important role.28 The emphasis on the didactic nature of Macrobius’ Saturnalia has led scholars to downplay their philosophical nature and to consider them as a mere collection of material. This view has been stated most vigorously by Alan Cameron, who reacted against scholars for whom the antiquarian focus of the work is an illustration of the cultural pagan resistance that was supposed to flourish in fourth- and fifth-century Rome.29 Cameron rightly argues that classicism and antiquarianism are not in themselves enough to identify someone as a pagan, for they reflect cultural attitudes that were widely shared in the late Roman elite.30 Yet the new image of Macrobius as a mere philologist with limited interests is hardly satisfactory. In the introduction to his recent Loeb edition, Robert Kaster, following Cameron, puts forward the following image of Macrobius and the role of the theological passages of the first book: The crucial point is that the manner of proceeding is not theological at all – not concerned with establishing basic principles of divinity and exploring the systematic relationship of these principles with one another – but is more nearly, and more simply, philological, concerned with accumulating data to support a series of definitions that have the general form ‘God X is the sun because …’31 Goldlust 2010; Kaster 2011: xii; Gerth 2013. 26 Mastandrea 1979:  169–79 contends, for example, that Macrobius is largely dependent on Cornelius Labeo. 27 Syska 1993: 105–12, 215–16; Goldlust 2010. 28 Flamant 1977: 656–68. 29 E.g. de Labriolle 1948; Flamant 1977: 674; Frateantonio 2008; Ratti 2010, 2012. 30 Cameron 2011. 31 Kaster 2011: xxi. See also Liebeschuetz 1999: 196–7: ‘an academic lecture’. 25

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It may be useful to pause a moment here to reflect on the contrast between philology and theology established by Kaster. Were it not written by a philologist, the statement could be read as reducing philology to an ancillary discipline, providing the proofs for someone else’s thoughts. Given the obvious parallels of Macrobius’ theological focus on the sun with Neoplatonist authors such as Porphyry, Iamblichus and Julian, there is room for the prima facie contention that Macrobius’ interests tie in with some wider intellectual currents – even if one decides to leave the issue of direct influence aside.32 Macrobius refers to the Symposium of Plato in the preface of the Saturnalia,33 and is the author of the highly philosophical (and theological in Kaster’s terms) Commentary on the Dream of Scipio. All of this should warn against reducing him to a mere philologist. The definition of theology, in turn, seems hardly suited for antiquity either:  theologia refers to any discourse about the gods and Kaster’s definition would also disqualify Cornutus’ Introduction to Greek Theology and Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride (both works by authors with some philosophical street credibility) and reduce theology to metaphysics.34 Kaster thus seems to have used a very strong and modern notion of theology as a systematic discipline dealing with metaphysical notions but not with the nature, looks and rites of traditional deities. This may seem all the more plausible given that late antiquity abounds with treatises that seemingly conform with that definition:  many early Christian theological treatises obviously seem to do so, but many Neoplatonic works, such as the Elements of Theology by Proclus, do too. Yet such a definition ignores a fundamental characteristic of late ancient metaphysical discourse:  it never disconnects entirely from tradition, that is, stories and myths transmitted through poets, established cult practices and images and the

Kaster ignores Syska 1993, who argues that there is a clear philosophical, protreptic aim in the theological chapters. For parallels, see e.g. Mart. Cap. 2.18.5; Jul. Helios. 33 Macr. Sat. 1.1.3. 34 See the chapter by Csapo in this volume, who argues for a broader definition of theology to be applied to the Classical period. 32

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texts of authoritative philosophers. In his fundamental analysis, G. Boys-Stones has shown that in the late Hellenistic period philosophers develop a narrative according to which earliest man (in all cultures) possessed full knowledge of the world and translated this knowledge into expressions of human culture, including religion.35 Religion is thus a symbol system that can be decoded by later philosophers, who try to recover the original wisdom. Great philosophers like Plato basically do not do anything more than rediscover that original wisdom. Such a theory helps to justify the large-scale philosophical interpretations that philosophers such as Plutarch propose of Greek and foreign cults and is the origin of the extensive talk about ‘wise ancients’ in later ancient philosophy.36 Boys-Stones has argued that this view underlies post-Hellenistic philosophy, which for him includes Neoplatonism as well. Such a view knows many modulations, depending on which individual or people is identified as ‘ancient’, what culture or what form of tradition is considered to be authoritative and to what degree truth is considered to be corrupt through transmission.37 In such a framework of thought, philology is also theology: the collection of tradition is necessary to gather the knowledge of truth dispersed through culture, and subsequently interpretation, in particular etymology and allegory, is needed to retrieve original meaning. There can be little doubt that Macrobius adhered to some form of this view, as the following quotation from the introduction to the theological ­chapters shows: Then Vettius said: Careful, my good Avienus: do not suppose that when the flock of poets tell stories of the gods, they are not often borrowing germs of wisdom from the sacred shrine of philosophy. It’s not empty superstition but divine reason that prompts them to relate almost all the gods – at least those beneath the heaven – to the sun. If ‘the sun is guide and governor of all other stars in heaven’ as the ancients judged, if it alone presides over the planets, and if the movements of the very stars have power to determine (as some think) or foretell (as Plotinus is known to have held) the sequence of human events, Boys-Stones 2001. 36 Broze, Busine and Inowlocki 2006. 37 Van Nuffelen 2011a. 35

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Narratives of continuity and discontinuity then we must acknowledge the sun – which governs those bodies that govern our affairs – as the source of all that goes on around us. And just as Maro, in saying of Juno alone, ‘with what aspect of her divinity harmed’ shows that the different actions of a single god must be understood as different manifestations of her divinity, so the diverse special powers of the sun gave the gods their names: hence the foremost philosophers have revealed that ‘the all is one’. So they have called ‘Apollo’ the special power of the sun that presides over prophecy and healing, while the one that is the source of speech gained the name Mercury:  since speech makes our hidden thoughts plain, Hermes got his name, appropriately from ‘interpreting’. It is the special power of the sun that … the fruit of the trees … and also his creative force that presides over the fruits of the fields. Hence too there came to be the names of the other gods, which relate to the sun in a fixed and secret system: let us ask the ancient authorities about them, one by one, lest so great a mystery be afforded no more than mere assertion.38

This can only be understood as a theological statement, even in the sense Kaster uses the term. The sun is the highest, visible deity, to which all gods known by tradition relate as manifestations or powers. As a passage from the commentary on the Dream of Scipio makes clear, the sun reflects, in some way, the highest principle (the Good), which is beyond the material world and beyond our intellectual capacities to grasp or to describe.39 According to Macrobius, prime witnesses to this theological knowledge are the poets. They do not fabulate, but are guided by ‘divine reason’ (ratio divina) and draw on the Macr. Sat. 1.17.2–6: Tum Vettius: Cave aestimes, mi Aviene, poetarum gregem, cum de dis fabulantur, non ab adytis plerumque philosophiae semina mutuari. Nam quod omnes paene deos, dumtaxat qui sub caelo sunt, ad solem referunt, non vana superstitio sed ratio divina commendat. 3 Si enim sol, ut veteribus placuit, dux et moderator est luminum reliquorum, et solus stellis errantibus praestat, ipsarum vero stellarum cursus ordinem rerum humanarum, ut quibusdam videtur, pro potestate disponunt, ut Plotino constat placuisse, significant: necesse est ut solem, qui moderatur nostra moderantes, omnium quae circa nos geruntur fateamur auctorem. 4 Et sicut Maro, cum de una Iunone diceret:  Quo numine laeso, ostendit unius dei effectus varios pro variis censendos esse numinibus, ita diversae virtutes solis nomina dis dederunt: unde ἓν τὸ πᾶν sapientum principes prodiderunt. 5 Virtutem igitur solis quae divinationi curationique praeest Apollinem vocaverunt: quae sermonis auctor est Mercurii nomen accepit. Nam quia sermo interpretatur cogitationes latentes, Ἑρμῆς ἀπὸ τοῦ ἑρμηνεύειν propria appellatione vocitatus est. 6 Virtus solis est quae fructibus … effectus eiusdem est qui frugibus praeest. Et hinc natae sunt appellationes deorum [sicut] ceterorum qui ad solem certa et arcana ratione referuntur:  et, ne tanto secreto nuda praestetur adsertio, auctoritates veterum de singulis consulamus. Transl. Kaster 2011: 207–11. 39 Macr. Somn. 1.2.14–16. 38

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‘shrines of philosophy’ (ab adytis philosophiae). Macrobius here seems to hint at two possible sources of knowledge for the poets: divine inspiration and philosophy. As Neoplatonist philosophers often assumed that philosophers, especially of old, had experienced divine inspiration to discover fundamental truths, this is, in the end, not a fundamental distinction.40 Elsewhere, Macrobius also accepts that metaphysical knowledge is hidden in religious ceremonies, even if that knowledge may have been imperfect: Before the study of philosophy regarding the inquiry into nature grew to sufficient vigour, those who were, among the different peoples, the creators of religious ceremonies, denied that hell was something else than the bodies themselves, in which the souls were enclosed and suffered an emprisonment that was disgusting because of the darkness and horrible because of the dirt and blood.41

For Macrobius, philosophy clearly marks a step forward in comparison with intuitive understandings of the world. I have argued elsewhere that this may mark the difference between a Middle Platonist and a Neoplatonist understanding of the relationship between tradition and philosophy: Middle Platonists tended to see tradition as a source of knowledge fundamentally equal to philosophy, whereas Neoplatonists emphasised the logical and temporal priority of philosophy.42 Whatever the merits of that distinction, it will be clear by now that, within such an understanding, the reductio ad philologiam of Macrobius cannot work: when one understands the whole of traditional culture as containing seeds of knowledge about the divine world, the disciplines that help to understand that culture are not merely autotelic enterprises. Rather, they help to understand, ultimately, the divine. The modern definition of theology that Kaster uses presupposes a divorce between metaphysics and culture:  theology uses reason, maybe Cf. Dillon 2012b: 46. 41 Macr. Somn. 1.10.9: antequam studium philosophiae circa naturae inquisitionem ad tantum uigoris adolesceret, qui per diuersas gentes auctores constituendis sacris caerimoniarum fuerunt, aliud esse inferos negauerunt quam ipsa corpora, quibus inclusae animae carcerem foedum tenebris horridum sordibus et cruore patiuntur; cf. 1.11.1: dicendum est quid his postea veri sollicitior inquisitor philosophiae cultus adiecerit. 42 Van Nuffelen 2011a: 231–41; Van Nuffelen forthcoming. 40

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helped by revelation, to grasp the highest metaphysical realities and their relationships, but cult practice, culture and tradition are not sources for that knowledge. Such an understanding is unable to deal with Macrobius for whom both levels are intricately intertwined. Macrobius’ theological chapters are known for their accumulation of antiquarian evidence:  he cites a high number of authors and heaps etymology on allegory. This rhetoric produces the impression of a fundamental cultural continuity:  the interpretations he proposes are part of tradition. Indeed, late ancient theologies, through their reference to ancient wise men, presuppose a narrative of continuity. Such a narrative could find support in a quick reading of the other chapters in this volume. Late ancient Neoplatonism may seem to articulate explicitly in theological terms what many of the chapters in this book detect implicitly in narratives and ritual practices. To cite a few examples: sacrifice is explicitly theorised and systematised, focusing on the order of sacrifice as related to the hierarchy of deities, on the necessity to relate the nature of offerings to that of the deity sacrificed to, and on the community that is established by gods and men.43 The ‘singular power’ of ­statues44 was recognised by ancient philosophers, who, as we have seen, developed ways of reading statues allegorically. If such allegories are a recurring feature in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy,45 a systematic treatise was dedicated to the topic by Porphyry, who, to that end, interpreted images as texts that could be read.46 The appropriation of oracles for philosophical argument was extensive in Neoplatonism:  the Chaldaean oracles acquire the status of a canonical text (fragments of a commentary by Proclus are extant), but also oracles from the Classical period were Compare the chapter by Osborne and Iamblichus, Reply to Prophyry (De mysteriis) 5.5–23 (Saffrey and Segonds 2013:  149.5–179.7). A  similar comparison could be made between Iamblichus and Scheid 2005. 44 The quotation is from the chapter by Graziosi in this volume. See also the chapter by Gaifman. 45 See e.g. Dio, Oration 12. 46 Porphyry, Peri agalmaton F351 Smith. 43

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collected and discussed by Porphyry.47 Nevertheless, differences are visible too: Iamblichus, for example, rejects the idea that sacrifice would feed the gods, as this would make them dependent on us.48 Porphyry notes that the gods themselves provide instructions, through oracles, for how they should be represented,49 rendering statues far less ambiguous than they were before. Together with the appropriation of oracles and the assignment of sacrificial practices to a primeval divine law,50 this points towards a more systematic justification of cult practice as divinely authored. One crucial aspect of change is underscored by George Boys-Stones in his chapter in this volume:  the development of the conception of a benevolent deity. The ambiguity that deities had in classical religion is abandoned in favour of a unilaterally positive conception. This introduces the necessity to rethink the relation between a perfect God and the imperfect world. In Neoplatonism, this necessity becomes even more acute, as Plotinus emphasised the transcendence of the divine:  in the formulation of Porphyry, only the lowest of the three hypostases was accessible for human rational thought.51 Later philosophical theologies thus are strongly committed both to a systematic metaphysical understanding of the cosmos, and to the incorporation of tradition. This leads, in turn, to both an active interest in tradition, as witnessed in Macrobius, and an active engagement with it: tradition is often reinterpreted to suit the new theological system. The ambiguities of earlier Greek understanding of the divine, admirably charted by Hendrik Versnel,52 are resolved in an increasingly complex metaphysical system. In a laconic assessment of Proclus’ integration of earlier strands of theological thought, John Dillon states:  ‘So that is the ideal Compare the chapter by Tor in this volume. 48 Iamblichus, Reply to Prophyry (De mysteriis) 5.10.12 (Saffrey and Segonds 2013: 158.8–161.12). 49 Porphyry, Philosophy from Oracles F 317–319 Smith. 50 Iamblichus, Reply to Prophyry (De mysteriis) 1.21 (Saffrey and Segonds 2013: 48.18–50.8). Compare the chapter by Osborne in this volume. 51 Cf. Macr. Somn. 1.2.14–16, a passage that relies on Porphyry. 52 Versnel 2011. 47

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lineup: reason commends a theory, wise men of old support it, and the gods themselves add their voice in confirmation.’53 One should add religious and cultural traditions, which are supposed to be in ultimate agreement with these three sources of knowledge. However much later Greek theologies may seem to anticipate our approach in finding theology in literary genres such as comedy, tragedy and epic, and in cultural and political practices such as assembly meetings and lawgiving, we should thus be aware that they represent reappropriations of tradition within a specific metaphysical framework. Evidence from this late period thus needs to be carefully sifted before it can be used for earlier religious life. Two examples will help to make this clear. As is well known, the traditional scholarly opposition of chthonic and Olympian deities was first articulated by Plato,54 but it were Neoplatonists who linked specific cult acts with each type of deity.55 The distinction is now being increasingly abandoned as it is difficult to map such a systematic distinction on ancient Greek cult practice.56 Recently, Sarah Iles Johnston has argued that the idea of ritualised animation of statues is a late Platonic invention, within the context of theurgy, and that this cannot be projected back on earlier Greek practice.57 Indeed, stories about Neoplatonists show that they presented themselves as authoritative interpreters who were the only ones to possess true knowledge about traditional cults.58 In his life of Proclus, Marinus narrates how Proclus had to flee Athens and sailed to Lydia: ‘So that he would not be uninitiated into the very ancient rites that are still preserved there, the divine produced this occasion for a voyage.’59 The locals engage in an exchange of knowledge: they demonstrate their rites to Proclus and in return they are taught the meaning of these rites, which Dillon 2012a: 104. He refers to Proclus, In Parm. 799.23–801.26. 54 Pl. Lg. 717A, 828C. 55 Porph. Peri agalmaton F315F = Eus. PE 4.9.3–7, De antro nypharum 6.19–20. 56 Schlesier 1991/1992, 1994; Scullion 1994. 57 Johnston 2008. 58 Marx-Wolf 2010. 59 Marinus, Vita Procli 15.12, ll. 23–5. 53

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they clearly had forgotten. Tradition is a preservation of knowledge but can decline into an unreflected practice, to which philosophy brings illumination and restores true meaning. Marinus shows how Proclus acquired knowledge about all cults and brought these all into agreement (19, 22). This agreement is, ultimately, based on philosophical knowledge: in one story, the gods reveal to Proclus the identity of the gods worshipped in Adrotta, by referring him to the works of the philosopher Iamblichus (32). This anecdote illustrates the fundamental shift in later antiquity concerning the authority of interpretation of particular rites, away from practitioners towards philosophers. As such, late ancient theology becomes explicitly elitist: the philosophers know the true meaning, whereas ‘popular theologies’ are constantly shown to be ignorant or corrupted.60 Neoplatonist theology is thus underpinned by a strong discourse of continuity: even when philosophers intervene in rites, it is to vouchsafe continuity with tradition and to avoid corruption. As I have argued, this narrative is an integral part of the theological outlook of Neoplatonism: philosophical truths are not only acquired by reasoning and reflection but are dispersed throughout tradition and culture. That tradition can help us to recover the lost union with the source of our souls. In this chapter, it was not my intention to pontificate on real or false continuities between Classical and late ancient Hellenism or between the ancient world and Christianity. Rather, I  have suggested that narratives of continuity and discontinuity, ancient and modern, often presuppose cer­ tain theological positions, be it about the origins of knowledge about the divine (e.g. revelation and ancient wisdom), about the interaction between beliefs and religious practices (do actions or beliefs have priority?), about the nature of God (monotheism or polytheism? How does God interact with our world?) or about the authority to talk about the divine (philosophers or practitioners). Whereas modern narratives would profit from being ‘re-theologised’, our understanding of late ancient theologies needs to take the historical narratives (or 60 For the elitist nature of Porphyry, see Johnson 2013: 178.

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what is presented as such) into account with which these theologies are bound up. This may not only help to understand them better, but it may also lead us to reconsider our own narratives of the religious evolution of the ancient world. Indeed, the provocative question Castoriadis forces us to ask is: how much continuity was there really between the different stages of Greek theology?

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401

INDE X

Abbott, Evelyn on Sophocles, 155, 158 abuse comic, distinguished from ritual abuse, 131, 134 in context of Dionysia, 128 ritual, 134, 135 Adonis, 20 Aeschines on Athenian Assembly, 282, 283, 284 on gods’ favour to Athens, 294 on proposal to consult oracle about Philip, 289–90, 291 Aeschylus and causal complexity, 174 and dangers of good fortune, 226–7 and divine envy, 221, 226–7 and divine origin of lawcourts, 184 theology of, 31 Agamemnon, and envy, 226 Agamemnon, on sacrifice of Iphigeneia, 164–7 Oresteia, 156, 159–60 Persae, and envy, 226–7 Aëtius as source for Poseidonios, 29 on accidental benefits from heavens, 326 agriculture central to sacrifice in Hesiod, 235 of no interest to gods, 53 Ajax and Cassandra, 258–60, 276, 280 Alcibiades recall of debated, 287–8 Alexander the Great modelling his victory celebrations on Dionysus, 143

Allen, Danielle on origins of law, 199 on Solon, 199 altars archaeology of, 239 Amasis and Polycrates, 215, 224 Ameiniades proposing consulting Delphi about Philip, 289–90 Ameipsias poet of Old Comedy, 135 putting Dionysus on stage, 136 showing Dionysus as competitor, 144 Anaxagoras, 303 alluded to in Plato Laws, 314 Anaxandrides comic poet, putting Dionysus on stage, 136 Anaximander, 302 new gods of, 303 Anaximenes new gods of, 303 animals, see also sacrifice prescription of which to sacrifice, 240 sacrifice of domesticated not wild, 245 Anthesteria festival of, 118, 121–2 celebrated by Ionians, 118 timing of, 145 anthropology and development of Dionysia, 126 use of by J. E. Harrison, 18 Antiphanes poet of Old Comedy, 135

403

Index Antiphon on homicide courts received from gods, 184 Apellas Ponticus parody of Cypselid epigram in, 70, 74 Aphrodite and Adonis, 20 in Empedocles, 303 in Euripides’ Hippolytus, 166, 175 Homer and Hesiod on, 36 in Iliad 21, 52 on Parthenon metope, 272–4, 275–6, 279 relates differently to gods and men, 48 Aphrodite Pandemus sanctuary of at Athens, 277 Apollo commanding murder of Clytemnestra, 166 and Croesus, 189–92 deciding Athenian decree, 283 dedication to by Mantiklos, 251–5 and Dionysus, 265–7, 269 distinctive iconography of, 262 in Euripides’ Electra, 167–8 golden cult statue at Delphi, 267 in Iliad 21, 52–4 ‘Kassel Apollo’, 264 on krater found in Tarentum, 5, 256–8, 262–9 language of, 89–116 as lawgiver, 182 Macrobius on, 351 metaphorical role of bow and arrows, 54 in Oresteia, 167 perhaps represented at Dreros, 252 Piraeus Apollo, 264 represented as god and statue, 256 responsible for Sparta’s laws, 180 sacrifice to on Cos, 242, 243, 244 and sacrifice of Iphigeneia, 166 temple of at Dreros, 201 Apuleius on daimones, 331, 332 describing Plato as hero, 335 Apulian red-figure krater showing Apollo, 5, 256–8, 262–9 Arcesilaus Delphic oracle for, 98

404

Archilochus on Gyges, 79 obscene songs of, 137 Ares in Iliad 21, 52 Aristomenes comic poet, putting Dionysus on stage, 136 showing Dionysus as competitor, 144 Aristophanes on Athenians and oracles, 288 centrality of chorus in, 140 and Cleon, 131 and comic phalloi, 132 Dionysian plays of, 135 Dionysus in, 136, 137, 144 and Eleusinian cult, 149 fusing Dionysus and Iakkhos, 149 golden age in, 147 on opening prayers of Assembly, 282 ritual mockery and orgiastic rites in, 135 and victory feast, 147 Acharnians, Dikaiopolis’ Rural Dionysia in, 125 Acharnians, phallophoria in, 127, 134 Birds, and Prometheus, 237 Birds, and sacrifices, 247 Frogs, play-loving chorus of, 151 Knights, on gods favour to Athens, 293 Peace, description of sacrifice in, 239 Wealth, and envy of gods, 205, 215, 231–2 Aristotle on Charondas, 186 coins term theologike, 303 critic of comedy, 131 denial of transcendent forms, 325 deriving comedy from ritual, 132 distinguishing theologians from natural philosophers, 302, 303–5 family, 59 on early comedy, 133 on envy, 215 on gods not needing city, 61 on mythical theology, 313 on obscenity being old-fashioned, 132 on providence, according to Atticus, 320–7

Index on seasonal cycle, 324 on theologoi, 304, 316 theology of, 22, 26, 305–7 unmoved mover in, 307, 320, 323–4, 325, 326, 328 on Xenophanes, 315 Metaphysics, on divine science, 303 Poetics on Homer’s gods, 50–1 Politics, on development of society, 57–9 Politics, on lawgivers, 196 Artemis in Euripides’ Hippolytus, 166, 175 in Iliad 21, 54–5 on krater from Tarentum, 264, 266 perhaps represented at Dreros, 252 and sacrifice of Iphigeneia, 164, 165, 166 in tragedy, 30 Asclepius Athenian decree about, 285–6 asebeia, see impiety Assembly Athenian, agenda of, 284 Athenian, autonomy of, 299 Athenian, explicit discussion of religious matters at, 284–7 Athenian, and gods, 281–300 Athenian, preliminary rituals in, 282–4 Athena, see also Palladion and Cassandra, 280 in Euripides’ Troades, 168 as goddess and statue on Getty krater, 258–60 as goddess or statue on plate by Paseas, 259–60 in Iliad 21, 52 more archaic as statue than as goddess, 261–2 presiding over court, 166, 184 sacrifice to on Cos, 242, 244 in Sophocles’ Ajax, 170–2 in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, 172 and Zaleucus, 184 Athena Polias statue of at Athens, 270, 278

Athenaeus collecting comic fragments on food and drink, 147 Athens Parthenon, see Parthenon and war in Euboea, 75, see also Assembly athletes victories of and envy, 224–6 Atrahasis, 48n38 Atticus, Platonist philosopher, 340 argument from design in, 324 on providence, 319–26, 336–8 Augustine City of God and Christian continuity, 339 authority absence of in Greek religion, 12, 207 Autokrates poet of Old Comedy, 135 Bacchylides on Croesus, 81–2, 83, 190, 192 Bachofen, J and familial structure of gods, 60 influence of, 36–7, 39 Bacis oracles of, 289 Bakola, Emmanuela on Kratinos, 134 beliefs as category of analysis, 20, 22 not always implied by theology, 4 not discussed by Burkert, 25 haphazard among Greeks, 12 underdetermined by practice, 3 Bendis introduction of cult of at Athens, 285 Berger, Ernst on Parthenon metopes, 275, 277 Berlin Painter scene of Helen and Menelaos, 273 Berthiaume, Guy and images of sacrifice, 239 Biles, Zachary and comic competition, 141 boar sacrifice of on Mykonos, 245

405

Index Boeckh, August and date of City Dionysia, 124 bones and sacrifice, 239 Bowie, Angus on ritual in Old Comedy, 136 Boys-Stones, George, 354 on late Hellenistic philosophers, 350 Burkert, Walter on animal sacrifice, 21, 233–5, 238 on Greek theology, 13, 24–5 and polis religion, 24–5 on popular theology, 32 Cairns, Douglas on gods reflecting human envy, 216 Calchas and sacrifice of Iphigeneia, 164, 165, 166 calendar of sacrifices, theology of, 3, 240–6 Callimachus, 55 Cambridge school of study of Greek religion, 15–19 Cambyses and Prexaspes, 97 Cameron, Alan on Macrobius, 348 Campbell, Lewis on Sophocles, 153–6, 161, 162 Carrey, Jacques drawing of Parthenon metopes by, 270 Cassandra and Ajax, 168, 258–60, 262, 272, 276, 280 Castoriadis, Cornelius on monotheism contrasting to Greeks, 341–3, 345, 346, 357 causality and polytheism, 163–7 Celsus on daimones, 331, 335 on worship, 332 Chaldaean oracles, 353 Charondas breaking his own law, 198 cult of, 193 education of, 186

406

on lawmaking, 197 as ‘middle man’, 196 Chilon and Solon, 197 chorus absent from Sicilian comedy, 132, 138 of Agamemnon, 165 comic, and phalloi, 133 comic, appealing to audience, 141 comic, size of, 141 costumed, 120–1 of Dionysus, 150 female at Lenaia, 123 in Old Comedy, 141 Christianity construction of narrative of continuity by, 340–1 contrast with Greek religion, 12, 22 and endless cycle of killing, 233 and ethics, 169 as model of monotheism, 342 and rituals as memorials, 237 and substitution for animal sacrifice, 234 theology of, 23, 250 Christus Patiens, 170 chthonic religion unsatisfactory nature of category, 10 opposed to Olympian, 355 Cleon and Aristophanes, 131 and oracles, 298 cock as icon of Dionysus, 142 cockfight agon of Clouds as, 142 shown on throne of priest of Dionysus, 142 comedy and competition, 141–5 constructing itself as ritual form, 134 curbed by legislation, 131 introduced to City Dionysia, 124 invented in Sicily, 132 linked to Apollo in Syracuse, 138 new gods in, 136

Index and politics, 130–2, 134 theology of, 2, 14, 117–52 competition as theme of Old Comedy, 141–5 Connor, W. R. and date of City Dionysia, 123 cook monologue of in fourth-century comedy, 147 Corinth and Cypselid dedications, 65–7 dedications by, 7 and Euboea, 75 komasts of, 133 Cornutus Introduction to Greek Theology, 349 Cos holocaust sacrifices on, 244, 247 sacred calendar from, 241–4 cosmic history in early epic, 55, 58 place of Gaia in, 40 costume of comedy, 133 creed absence of, 12 Croesus and Cyrus, 190, 191, 192 dedications by, 8, 78–85, 189 Delphic oracles for, 92, 95, 98, 110–11, 112, 190–1 on pyre, 79, 86–7 reversal of fortune of, 79–85 and Solon, 83, 189–92, 223–4, 227 wealth of, 78 cult statues, 261 of Apollo shown on krater from Tarentum, 267 identification of, 254 theology of, 2, 5–6 curse against Alcibiades, 288 at opening of Athenian Assembly, 283 Cypria conflict of gods in, 47–8 Cypselids chronology of, 65 dedication by at Delphi, 65, 66, 68 dedication by at Olympia, 7, 64–78

Cypselus chest of, 64, 65 as dedicator of kolossos, 68 Cyrene Demonax at, 196 oath of founders from, 70, 72 Cyrus and Croesus, 190, 191, 192 Darius, 91n9 death Greek attitudes to, 116 key theme of Iliad, 61 of no interest to gods, 53, 57 dedications by Croesus, 78–85 by Cypselids, 7, 64–78 by Mantiklos, 251–5 revealing collapse of past powers, 63–88 significance of, 67 theology of, 2 Delphi, see also Delphic oracle Croesus’ dedications at, 78–85, 189 Cypselid dedication at, 65, 66, 68 Dionysus at, 265–7, 268 fire at, 86–7 in Hesiod’s Theogony, 108 representation of on krater from Tarentum, 78, 265–6 statues of Apollo at, 268 Delphic oracle and Athens, 289–91 authority of, 291 and Croesus, see Croesus and Cypselids, 66 and Demonax, 196 and lawgivers, 185 and Lycurgus, 180, 188 and murder of Clytemnestra, 170 and Orestes, 167, 168 and wooden walls, 289 Demeter linked to Dionysus, 148–9 sacrifice to on Cos, 241, 242, 243, 244 sacrifice to on Mykonos, 245 as thesmophoros, 182

407

Index Demetrios comic poet, putting Dionysus on stage, 136 democracy Athenian, defended by Grote, 157 Demonax at Cyrene, 196 Demosthenes cautious in attributing actions to gods, 298 on gods acting to influence Athens’ actions, 294–6, 299 on gods making laws humanely, 188 hardly mentioning gods in assembly speeches, 291–3 on law, 178, 179–80, 182, 183–84, 187, 194 opposing consulting Delphi about Philip, 290–1 Derveni Papyrus, 210 Detienne, Marcel on myth, 20–1 Dickie, Matthew on envy of gods, 217 Didymus Chalcenterus and Cypselid kolossos, 69 Diels, Hermann on Aëtius, 29 Dike as daughter of Zeus, 56 as deity, 183 inspiring Epimenides, 184 personified in Parmenides, 185, 302 Dillon, John, 354 Diocles, lawmaker breaking his own law, 198 cult of, 193 Diocles, poet of Old Comedy, 135 Diodorus on Charondas, 186, 197, 198 Dionysia invention of City Dionysia, 123–4 markets at, 145, 148 occasion for announcing civic crowns, 143 theology of, 7, 117–52 timing of, 145–6 violating taboos, 127

408

Dionysius I of Syracuse wanting tragic victory, 143 Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Numa, 187 Dionysus as actor, 144 as arbiter of taste, 144–5 as competitor, 144 crowing like a cock, 142 at Delphi, 265–7, 268 and Demeter, 148–9 earliest images of, 119 and Eleusinian cult, 150 Eleuthereus, 118–22, 149 epithets of, 118 festivals of, 118, see also Dionysia as god of all musicians, 145 as god of plenty, 146–9, 150 as god of victory, 142, 150 as god who is experienced, 150–1 as god who licensed free speech, 137 and Iakkhos, 123, 148, 149 as judge, 144 kallinikos in Euripides’ Bakkhai, 143 on krater from Tarentum, 265–7, 269 as lover of luxury, 147 in the Marshes, 118 as model victor, 142–4 and Orphic cult, 150 as passive butt of mockery, 137 sacrifice to on Cos, 242, 243, 244 sacrifice to on Mykonos, 245 on stage in comedy, 136 dithyramb, 137, 139 divination and belief, 4 Dodds, E. R. on negative theology, 333 dogma absence of in Greek religion, xv, 12, 250 Dreros constitutional law from, 203–4 statues from, 251–5 Durand, Jean-Louis and images of sacrifice, 239 dynasties marking power by dedications, 64–5 overthrow of, 63, 71, 76–8

Index economics of sacrifice, 240 Ekphantides poet of Old Comedy, 135 Eleusinian mysteries, 118, 150 Iakkhos procession at, 123 Eleutherae, 125 embeddedness of Greek religion, 207–8, 212–15, 230 Empedocles alluded to in Plato Laws, 314 and the gods, 302 on ‘holy Mind’ as agent, 303 Enuma Elish, 48 envy definition of, 206–7 denied of gods by Aristotle, 307 of gods, 205–32 Epaminondas and oracle, 99 Ephesus dedications of Croesus at, 78 Ephippos poet of Old Comedy, 135, 140 epic theology of, see Homer Epicurus Atticus on, 321 Epimenides descent from Selene, 193 inspired by Justice and Truth, 184 and Solon, 194 epiphany of god, staged by statue, 264 epistemology impossibility of knowing plan of god, 154 Erechtheion at Athens, housing statue of Athena Polias, 278 Eros in Parmenides, 302 on Parthenon metope, 272–4, 279 ethics, see also Plato and polytheism, 169–73 Euboea war in, 75–7 Euboulos

comic poet, 135 putting Dionysus on stage, 136 Eumolpidae protesting at recall of Alcibiades, 287–8 Eupolis, poet of Old Comedy, 135 golden age in, 147 putting Dionysos on stage, 136, 137, 144 Euripides dei ex machina in, 156, 170 on Dionysus, 143, 151 prefiguring Christian revelation, 160 on sacrifice of Iphigeneia, 164 subversive theology of, 31 Bacchae and ethics, 170 Electra and theodicy, 168 Electra, deus ex machina in, 156 Hippolytus, 166 Hippolytus, advice of nurse in, 170 Ion, on gods establishing law, 184 Troades and theodicy, 168–9 Eusebius on ancient views on providence, 322 on Christianity as continuity, 339 as source for Atticus, 319, 336 evil first acts of, 41–3 Exekias representation of Dionysus by, 148 family in Aristotle, 59 Olympian gods as model for, 57 family, of Greek gods theology of, 35–61 feast and sacrifice, 244, 245, 247 fertility and phalloi, 126 and sacrifice of pregnant animals, 243 festivals regulations for, 240–5, see also sacred laws Ficino, Marsilio, 305 on ‘ancient theologians’, 301–2, 316 Fine, Gail on Form of the Good in Plato, 311

409

Index foreigners and sacrifice, 240, 245, 248 fortune shifts of, 62, 79 Fraenkel, Eduard on phthonos, 206 free speech in comedy and democracy, 130 Freeman, E. A. on Grote, 156 Freud, Sigmund and familial structure of gods, 60 influence of, 36, 37 functionalism in study of Greek religion, 21 Gaia Bachofen on, 36–7 in Theogony and Cypria, 40–8 Galen cured in a dream, 342 Garland, Robert on Bendis, 285 Ge sacrifice to on Mykonos, 245 gender and revenge, 228 and sacrifice, 242 Georgoudi, S. on Bachofen, 36 gifts in Aeschylus, 226–7 and envy, 217–23 facilitating social cohesion, 217 from gods, nature of, 228 to gods, theology of, 4 in Herodotus, 223–4, 227–8 in Homeric epic, 217–22 in Pindar, 224–6 Gilkes, Arthur on Sophocles’ Electra, 156 Girard, René on animal sacrifice, 233–5, 238 Gladstone, William Ewart on Homer and the Bible, 154 goat sacrifice of on Cos, 242, 243, 244 goddesses behaving differently from gods, 52, 55

410

Godelier, Maurice on Mauss on gifts, 223 gods, Greek absence of individuation of, 298 assumed to like order, 245 in Athenian Assembly, 281–300 authority of, 297 benevolence/malevolence of, 27 care of for city, 293–6 conflict of as entertainment, 49 conflict of in Iliad 21, 48–57 effect of power of, 223 envy of, 205–32 expenditure on not a matter of contention, 297 gendered behaviour of, 52, 55 good relations with necessary for lawfulness, 178 and their images, 4, 18, 176, 249–80 as images of desire, 16 invocation of in decrees and laws, 203, 283 and law, 176–204 as lawmakers, 181 like humans, 176, 248 little present in Demosthenes assembly speeches, 291–3 new gods in Old Comedy, 136 perfection of in Aristotle, 306–7 Plato and, 301–16 as political model in Hellenistic period, 60 preferences of signalled in sacrifice, 246 putative dislike of killing, 234 reduced to abstract principles, 301 reduced to teleological perfection, 301 relation of to world in Hesiod’s account of sacrifice, 235–6 representations of emphasising affinity with humans, 262 represented on metopes of Parthenon, 279, see also cult statues and sacrifice, 21, see also sacrifice sharing through sacrifice, 247 variety of marked in sacrifice, 246 golden age in Old Comedy, 147 Gordon, Richard on art and religion, 251

Index Graces sacrifice to on Cos, 242, 243, 244 Granovetter, Mark on embeddedness, 213 Gregory of Tours on biography, 174 Griffin, Jasper on Homer’s gods, 51 Grote, George, 160 developmental model of Greek history, 156–7 Gyges and Croesus, 83 wealth of, 79 Hadrian Delphi coin of, 267 Haigh, A. E. on Sophocles’ Electra, 156 Halliwell, Stephen on ritual and humour, 134 hare sacrifice of, 246 Harrison, Jane Ellen influence of, 33 and study of Greek religion, 15–19 Hector dilemma of in Iliad 6, 60 Hedreen, Guy on scenes of return of Hephaestus, 119 heifer sacrifice of, 242–3 Helen guilt for Trojan war debated in Troades, 169 instigating Trojan war, 59 and Menelaos at fall of Troy, 272–5 on Parthenon metope, 276–8, 279, 280 Henrichs, Albert, 1 on theology, 13 Hephaestus return of, 119–20, 139, 141, 148 Hera in Iliad 21, 54 sacrifice to on Cos, 241, 242 sanctuary of at Olympia, 66, 72 and Zeus and envy, 222

Heracles first images of, 119 ox sacrificed to on Cos, 242 in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, 170, 172–3 Heraclitus on divine law nourishing human law, 181 frequently refers to gods, 302 on ‘the God’, 303 on Homer, 9 on names, 103–4 on oracles, 10, 33 on prayer, 5 on sensory experience, 104–5 on theology of communication, 89–116 Hermes in Iliad 21, 54 Macrobius on, 351 relates differently to gods and to men, 48 Hermias on Cypselid kolossos, 65n10 Hermippos celebrating Dionysus as supplier of plenty, 148 putting Dionysus on stage, 136 Herodotus on Amasis, 215, 224 on Artabanus, 215 on Cleobis and Biton, 224 concealment in, 97 on Croesus, 78–9, 82–5, 87, 111, 189–92, 223–4 on Cypselids, 66, 67 on Delphi, 89 on Demonax at Cyrene, 196 on disunity of Greeks, 215 on divine envy, 221, 227–8 on envy, 223–4 on fall of Sardis, 86 on gifts, 223–4, 227–8 on Hermotimos, 227 on Homer and Hesiod and gods, 35 on Lycurgus, 185, 188 oracles in, 93, 110 on origins of Alcmaeonid wealth, 87 on Pheretime, 227, 228 on Polycrates, 224

411

Index Herodotus (cont.) on Solon, 189–92, 215, 223–4 stories of gods in, 14 on Themistocles, 215 as theologian, 2 on Xerxes, 227 Hesiod, 340 compared to Homer, 39–40, 55–6, 59–61 gods in, 1, 8, 9 gods of criticised by Plato, 308 gods of criticised by Xenophanes, 303 justice determined by sound-minded men, 187 and sacrifice, 235–7, 248 supposed mother goddess in, 36–7 theological authority of, 36 theology of, 16 on Zeus and Prometheus, 205 Catalogue of Women, 45 Theogony, absence of polis from, 56 Theogony, compared to Aristotle Politics, 57–8 Theogony, divine conflict in, 39 Theogony, position of Prometheus story in, 237 Theogony, Zeus in, 108 Works and Days, appearance of polis in, 56–7 Works and Days, on justice coming from Zeus, 182 Works and Days, position of Prometheus story in, 237 Hestia sacrifice to on Cos, 241 Hieron of Syracuse, 80, 81 Hinnells, J definition of theology, 12 Hippocratic corpus theology of, 210 Hölkeskamp, Karl-Joachim on civic sanctuaries, 204 holocaust sacrifices, 244, 247 Homer compared to Hesiod, 39–40, 55–6, 59–61 envy and status in, 228, 231 gift-exchange in, 217–22 gods of criticised by Plato, 308

412

gods of criticised by Xenophanes, 303 gods of frivolous, 37–8, 60–1 Macrobius on, 348 and stories of gods, 1, 8, 14 theological authority of, 36 theology of, 16 theology of criticised, 50 theology of family of gods in, 35–61 Iliad 21, conflict of the gods in, 39, 48–57 Iliad, gifts in, 218 Odyssey, description of sacrifice in, 238 Odyssey, and envy, 218–21 Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 46 Hooker, Richard definition of theology, 250 hosia discussion of in Athenian Assembly, 287–96 meaning of, 284–5 humanity placed between gods and beasts in Hesiod, 236 Hume, David, 209 on miracles, 162 hunting nature of, 246 hybris at festivals, 129 Iakkhos and Dionysus, 123, 148, 149 Iamblichus, 340 on dialectic, 115 and Proclus, 356 on sacrifice, 354 Ibykos on Helen, 272 Ikarion Dionysia at, 124, 126 Iles Johnston, Sarah on Platonist view of statues, 355 Immerwahr, Henry on divine envy in Herodotus, 215 impiety as legal charge, 210, 214 India Alexander the Great in, 143

Index Inge, Dean on alpha privative, 333 invocation of gods in decrees and laws, 203, 283 of gods in Demosthenes’ speeches, 292–3 Iphigeneia sacrifice of, 163–6 Isis as lawgiver, 183 Isthmian games exclusion of Eleans from, 67 ithyphalloi, 133, 137 choruses of, 139 procession of, 127 song of, 127 Jaeger, Werner, 23 Japan processions of phalloi in, 139 Jebb, Richard, 153, 162 Jesus problems of writing a life of, 173 representation of in nineteenth century, 173 justice, see also Dike, theodicy from Zeus, 182 Kallias poet of Old Comedy, 135 Karystios monument of on Delos, 142 Kaster, Robert and Macrobius, 348–9, 351, 352 Kearns, Emily, 10 on Homer’s gods, 51–2 Ker, J. on Solon, 198 Kerinthos, 74, 76 Kerykes protesting at recall of Alcibiades, 287–8 Kindt, Julia on material representation of the otherworldly, 176 kings gods envious of, 215 Kitto, H. D. F. on Sophocles, 161–3

kolossos of Cypselus at Olympia, 64–78 of wax, 70 komasts costume of, 133 linked to Hera, Artemis and Demeter, 137 korai dedication of on Athenian Acropolis, 242 Krates golden age in, 147 putting Dionysus on stage, 136 Kratinos associating Dionysus with mysteries, 149 and comic ridicule, 133 Dionysus in, 137 Dionysian personality of, 134–5, 136 and Eleusinian cult, 149 golden age in, 147 Kronos in Hesiod’s Theogony, 108 violence of, 57 Ktesikles behaviour at Dionysia, 129 Kurke, Leslie on Croesus and Solon, 191 language theology of in Heraclitus, 89–116 law and laws associated with good relations with gods, 178 display of in sanctuaries, 202 and gods, 176–204 ideal qualities of, 178 inscribed, 177 in Judaeo-Christian tradition, 179 qualities of projected onto lawgivers’ lives, 197 and religion, 281 required to deal with messiness of human affairs, 180 sacred, see sacred laws status of, 177 universality of, 178, 179 unwritten, 181

413

Index lawgivers, see also Delphic oracle education of, 186, 194 identity of, 176–8 learning by travelling, 195 as part of a tradition, 195 relations with gods, 8, 184–5 traditions about, 177 Leaf, Walter on theomachia, 51 legei translation of, 91–2 Lelantine plain, 74, 75 Lelantine War, 76 Lenaia festival of, 118, 123 Leto in Iliad 21, 54–5 perhaps represented at Dreros, 252 sacrifice to on Cos, 242, 244 libation representation of, 267, 268–9 liturgy of providing sacrificial animal, 241 logos in Heraclitus, 105–7 Longinus on Cypselid kolossos, 68 Lucian on Heraclitus, 100 Lycurgus, Athenian politician adds processions to Anthesteria, 122 Lycurgus, Spartan lawgiver absenting himself, 197, 198, 199 cult of, 193 and Delphic oracle, 186 descent from Herakles, 193 dying to protect his laws, 179 emulated by Numa, 187 Herodotus on, 192 as ‘middle man’, 196 and Spartan laws, 180 and Thaletas, 194 and universality of law, 194 Lydia Proclus interpreting cults in, 355 Lysias on Nicomachus and calendar, 245 Lysippos poet of Old Comedy, 135

414

Macrobius Dream of Scipio, 347, 349, 351 Saturnalia, and theology, 347–9, 350–3 magic not discussed by Burkert, 25 Magnes putting Dionysus on stage, 136 Mansfeld, Jaap on doxographic tradition, 305 Mantiklos dedication by, 251–5 Marcus Aurelius as ‘seeker after god’, 159 Marinus Life of Proclus, 355, 356 Marmor Parium and Dionysia, 123 mask comic, 133 required in procession at Dionysia, 130 Maurice, F. D., 158 sacking of, 154 Mauss, Marcel on gifts, 217, 223 meat from sacrifices, use of, 244 Menelaos and Helen at fall of Troy, 272–5 on Parthenon metope, 279 Metagenes golden age in, 147 Mikalson, Jon on Greek theology, 25–7 on Plato’s traditional beliefs, 312 on popular religion, 32, 209–10 Minos and Cretan laws, 180 divine assistance for, 187 divine descent of, 193 emulated by Numa, 187 and Zeus, 184, 185, 187 Mithridates and nickname ‘Dionysus’, 148 monarchy Aristotle on, 58 monotheism and ethics, 170

Index as model for understanding gods of tragedy, 154–5 pagan, 343–6 Montiglio, Sylvia on Plato’s Laws, 196 on wandering sages, 195 Monumentum Archilochium, 125 moon as limit of providence in Aristotle, 322–4, 326 Most, Glenn on theios aner, 188 mother goddess concept of, 36–7 Münchhausen, Baron von, 346 Murray, Gilbert on theology of Greek religion, 18–19 Musurillo, Herbert on Sophocles’ Electra, 161 Mykonos sacred calendar from, 244–5 Myson depiction of Croesus by, 79, 189 Mysteries, Eleusinian and Alcibiades, 288 events at a portent, 290 mythology developmental view of, 160 ethics of, 158 Grote on, 157 Plato and, 301 and structure of society, 20 study of, 19–21 and theology, 16–17, 19 Naiden, Fred on animal sacrifice, 234, 236 on theology, 238 Neoplatonism on chthonic versus Olympian religion, 355 claim to authoritative interpretation of cults, 355 classical nature of, 340–1 and divine inspiration of philosophers, 352 in Macrobius, 347

on theology implicit in religious practices, 353–4 on tradition and philosophy, 352 networks and cognition, 213 as model of embeddedness, 213 of narratives, 214 theory of, in understanding Greek religion, 208 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg on Roman historiography, 157 Nikophon golden age in, 147 Nineveh, 62, 63, 86 nomos as deity, 183 Nonnos Dionysus in, 143 North, John on pagan monotheism, 343–6 Numa emulating Greek lawgivers, 187 oath of founders of Cyrene, 70, 72 and kolossos, 71, 72 and law, 203 obeliaphoroi, 135, 140 Odysseus and gifts, 218–21 in Sophocles’ Ajax, 171–2 in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, 172–3 Olympia Cypselid dedication at, 64–78 dedications at, 7 Pheidias’ statue of Zeus at, 263 Olympian gods theology of, 16, 17, 18 Olympian religion opposed to chthonic, 355 unsatisactory nature of classification, 10 Olympus as home of gods, 56 oracles, see also Delphic oracle Athenians influenced by, 288 commanding phallic procession for Dionysus, 125 as expressions of gods’ will, 297

415

Index oracles (cont.) about fall of Sardis, 86 about fire at Delphi, 86 in Heraclitus, 89–116 limited political use of, 299 Neoplatonists on, 353 politics of citation of, 299 requiring mortal agency, 187 and revelation, 342 and Sicilian expedition, 289 oratory, Greek theology of, 14, 26, 27–8 Orestes, see also Delphic oracles and murder of Clytemnestra, 166 Origen on Celsus, 330 Orosius, 346 Orphics associating Dionysus and Iakkhos, 149 theology of, 16 Oskhophoria festival of, 118, 123 Ouranos compared to Zeus, 55 in Iliad 21, 49 in Theogony, 41–3, 44–5, 46 violence of, 57 ox sacrifice of on Cos, 241–2 Palladion representation of, 261, 272, 277–9 palm tree dedicated by Cypselids at Delphi, 70 Panathenaia at Athens, 124, 138, 278 Pandora, 237 panhellenism and dedications, 64, 67, 71, 77 Paris School, on Greek religion, 20 Parker, Robert on assembly and religion, 281 on Dionysus and Iakkhos, 149 on embeddedness of Greek religion, 207, 213 on Greek theology, 27–8

416

on Panathenaia, 124 on popular religion, 209–10 on theology, 13, 33 on theology of Greek tragedy, 14 Parmenides absence of theology in, 24 mythological imagery in, 302 Paros as colony of Athens, 138 introduction of Dionysus to, 138 Parry, Milman and oral composition of epic, 39 Parthenon at Athens, gods on metopes of, 270–9 sculpture of, gods in, 249 Pausanias on chest of Cypselus, 64 on Cypselid dedications, 65, 66 on Epaminondas and oracle, 99 on golden Apollo at Delphi, 267 on Minos, 187 on statue of Athena Polias, 278 stories of gods in, 14 Peirce, Sarah on sacrifice, 247 Peisander and Alcibiades, 288 Peisistratids and cultic innovation, 124 Peisistratos and City Dionysia, 123, 126 and Panathenaia, 124 Peitho cult of at Athens, 277 in scene of Menelaos and Helen, 273, 277 Penelope angry with minstrel, 219 and Odysseus, 218–19, 220 Periander dedications by, 65, 68 stories of, 67 Perlman, Paula on Dreros law, 203 perquisites of sacrifices, 241, 243 Persephone and Adonis, 20 in Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 46 sacrifice to on Mykonos, 245

Index Phalaris, 80 phalloi brought to Dionysia, 138 and comic costume, 132 comic, less prominent in fourth century, 132 object of laughter, 127 obscene and aggressive, 127 in processions, 119, 121, 124, 132, 150 of satyrs, 119 transgressive, 126 in worship of Dionysus, 124–8 phallos pole, 120, 138 Phanodemus, 122 Pheidias statue of Zeus of at Olympia, 68, 263 Pherekrates and Eleusinian cult, 149 golden age in, 147 Philip of Macedon Athens consulting oracle about, 289–90 and the gods, 294–6 Philippides comic poet, 131 prosecuted by Stratokles, 131 philosophers, ancient, see also Aristotle, Heraclitus, Neoplatonism, Plato, Xenophanes as theologians, 1, 22–3, 24 Philostratus on Homer’s battle of gods, 50 stories of gods in, 14 Phocylides on Nineveh, 62 Photius on Cypselid kolossos, 68, 69n26, 70, 72 Phrynichos poet of Old Comedy, 135 putting Dionysus on stage, 136 phthonos, see envy pigs sacrifice of on Cos, 242, 244 sacrifice of on Mykonos, 245 Pindar and Croesus, 80–1, 82, 84 and dangers of good fortune, 224–6, 229

and divine envy, 221 and Homeric religion, 157 theology of, 13, 14 Piraeus Apollo from, 264 rural Dionysia at, 123 pirates and Dionysus, 141, 148 Plato comic poet, putting Dionysus on stage, 136 Plato, philosopher on behaviour at Dionysia, 129 Christian interpretation of, 340, 341 on chthonic versus Olympian religion, 355 classed as ‘ancient theologian’ by Ficino, 301 critic of comedy, 131 critic of democracy, 157 on Cypselid kolossos, 68 divine descent of, 193 and divine envy, 229–30 on gods causing only good, 3 on Homer and Hesiod on gods, 35 on immortality of soul, 311 late antique views of, 350 metaethical reduction in, 310–11 metaphysical reduction in, 308–10 mythical theology in, 312–13 on place of theology in education, 312–13 on providence, according to Atticus, 320 on souls as source of motion for everything, 325 and theology, 22–6, 301–16 use of singular ὁ θεός by, 309 Cratylus, on difficulty of knowing gods, 315 Critias, on laws of Atlantis, 182 Crito, and kinship of Athenian laws and laws of Hades, 181 Laws, and lawgivers’ divine descent, 193 Laws, Athenian Stranger as mantis, 194 Laws, Athenian Stranger on legislating for ordinary men, 200

417

Index Plato, philosopher (cont.) Laws, education in, 312–13 Laws, honours for euthynoi in, 193 Laws, lawgiving to be sanctioned by Zeus, 184 Laws, on authorship of law, 176, 193–4 Laws, on laws of Crete and Sparta, 180 Laws, on natural philosophers, 313–15 Laws, on rectification of pictures, 316 Laws, on world soul, 329 Laws, on Zeus and Apollo as lawgivers, 182 Laws, pilgrimage to cave of Zeus in, 311 Laws, religion in, 25, 209 Meno, on knowing what we do not know, 315 Phaedo, and immortality, 311 Phaedrus, and generosity, 229 Phaedrus, on demythologising, 316 Protagoras, and phthonos, 229 Protagoras, and Prometheus, 236, 237 Protagoras, on Zeus giving shame and justice, 182 Republic, education in, 312–13 Republic, theologia in, 1 Republic, theology of, 308–11 Symposium, and generosity, 229 Timaeus, and generosity of gods, 230 Timaeus, Demiurge in, 310, 320 Timaeus, invocation of gods in, 311 Timaeus, on difficulty of knowing gods, 315 Timaeus, on providence, 328 Platonism and daimones, 330–2 god as form of good in, 318 and immortality of soul, 317 and likeness to god, 333–6 and personal relations with god, 317 and philosophy as initiation, 317 and providence, 318–36 and religion, 317–38 supportive of conventional religion, 318, 332–3 thought to anticipate Christianity, 339 use of religious language in, 318 and world soul, 324–5, 327–9

418

Platt, Verity on representation of Apollo, 256 on theology of Greek art, 251 Plotinus Macrobius on, 350 on transcendence of divine, 354 Plumptre, E. H. on Sophocles, 158–9 Plutarch on ancient wisdom, 350 on Anthesteria, 122 on Cypselid dedications, 65, 66 on Heraclitus on oracles, 94 on Lycurgus, 179, 194, 197 on philosophical enquiry being like initiation, 317 on Solon, 186, 189, 192, 194, 197 theological universe of, 340 On Isis and Osiris, 349 polis in early Greek epic, 56–7 as natural in Aristotle, 59 polis religion, 7, 21, 61, 281, 297 politics and comedy, 130–2, 134 in Old Comedy linked to ritual elements, 136 of oracles, 288, 299 Polycrates and Amasis, 224 Polygnotos krater by in Getty Museum, 258–60, 261–2 polytheism and animal sacrifice, 245 contrasted to monotheism, 163, 345–6 and lawmaking, 201 and tragedy, 153–75 Polyzelos putting Dionysus on stage, 136 Porphyry and Macrobius, 348 on Plotinus, 354 on representation of gods, 354 Peri Agalmaton, 353 Philosophy from Oracles, 342, 354 Poseidon in Empedocles, 303 in Euripides’ Troades, 168

Index giving laws to Atlantis, 183 in Iliad 21, 52–3 sacrifice to on Mykonos, 245 Poseidonios theology of, 28 pottery, Greek representation of gods on, 5, 14, 249–80 prayer in association with sacrifice, 241 and belief, 4 at opening of Athenian Assembly, 282–3, 299 theology of, 4 pregnant animal sacrifice of, 243, 244, 245 Presocratics metaphysical and metaethical reduction in, 307 Price, Simon R. F. on religion as practice, 22 priest, see also perquisites of Asclepius proposing decree, 285–6 providing sacrificial animals, 244 processions in Athenian festivals, 121–7, 132 Dionysiac, 150 in Old Comedy, 141 representation of, 119–21, 125 Proclus on Chaldaean oracles, 353 integrating earlier theological thought, 354 interpreting ancient cults, 355 learning from work of Iamblichus, 356 Elements of Theology, 349 Platonic Theology, 340 Prometheus and animal sacrifice, 235, 237–8, 247 in authors after Hesiod, 236–7 giving of fire celebrated, 238 providence as a dominant Victorian idea, 154 in late antiquity, 354 in Middle Platonism, 318–36 transitivity of for Platonists, 328–32

Ptolemy Philadelphus behaving like Zeus, 60 ram sacrifice of on Mykonos, 245 Ranulf, Svend on envy of Greeks and their gods, 216 reciprocity, see gifts religion explicit discussion of in Athenian Assembly, 284–7 Greek, embedded, 207–8, 212–15, 230 Greek, explanatory role of, 22 Greek, nature of, 207, 250 Greek, official, 210 Greek, popular, 27, 210 Greek, unity of, 10–11 opposed to superstition, 206 Renan, Ernest influence of, 39 on Homeric theology, 38 Life of Jesus, 173 revelation, 347 claimed peculiar to monotheism, 342–3 Rhea sacrifice to on Cos, 242, 244 Rhodes kolossos of, 68 Ricci hydria scene of sacrifice on, 239 ritual primary over myth for J. E. Harrison, 17 social function of, 17 and theology, 16, 19 rituals of expulsion, 234 Rohde, Erwin on theology of Greek religion, 18–19 Runia, David on doxographic tradition, 305 Rüpke, Jörg on Varro’s theology, 29 sacred laws as evidence for sacrificial theology, 239–46

419

Index Sacred Orgas decree on, 283 sacred texts, Greek absence of, 12, 36, 207 sacrifice animal, archaeological evidence for, 239 animal, assumed to be religiously central, 233 animal, choice of victim, 241–3 animal, culturally widespread, 233 animal, description of in Greek texts, 238–9 animal, epigraphic evidence for, 239–46 animal, explained by Hesiod, 235–7 animal, and hierarchy of gods, 242–3 animal, involves a group, 246 animal, as a particular kind of gift, 233, 246, 248 animal, theology of, 233–48 animal, treatment of after sacrifice, 243–4 animal, as understood by Burkert, 21, 233–5 animal, as understood by Girard, 233–5 animal, as understood by Vernant, 21, 235–8 animal, visual representation of, 121, 239 animal, wide variety of practices of, 233 at Dionysia, 146 of Iphigeneia, 163–6 at Lenaia, 123 Neoplatonists on, 353 at opening of Assembly, 282, 299 Salaminioi genos of, 240 sanctuaries display of laws in, 202 and monuments of failure, 63–88 Sardis fall of, 79, 86 satyr play in Dionysia, 140 phalloi of, 132

420

satyrs as choruses, 139 first appearance of, 119 on krater from Tarentum, 265, 266, 268, 269 phalloi of, 133 with phallos sticks, 139 processions of, 120–1 riding phalloi, 127 Scullion, Scott on Dionysus, 151 on Old Comedy, 117 seasons of no interest to gods, 53 Semos on phallophoroi, 127 song of ithyphalloi, 127 sex abstinence from demanded of hieropoios, 241 sexuality explored in Adonis myth, 21 Shear, Julia and Panathenaia, 124 sheep sacrifice of on Cos, 242, 243, 244 Sicily comedy from, 132, 138 Slatkin, Laura on Homer’s gods, 37 Socrates on Athenian laws, 181 and Delphic oracle, 115 Solmsen, F. on Plato Laws on gods, 314 Solon absenting himself, 198–9 and Apollo, 192 and Chilon, 197 and Croesus, 83, 189–92, 223–4, 227 and Epimenides, 184, 194 later laws ascribed to, 199 as ‘middle man’, 196 prays to Zeus for laws’ success, 186 restraint of, 72 Sommerstein, Alan on Kratinos’ ridicule, 133

Index Sophocles adding ethical dimension to Homeric religion, 157 Ajax, role of Athena in, 170–2 Electra, Campbell on, 154 Electra, on sacrifice of Iphigeneia, 163–4 Electra, Victorian scholars on, 155–6 Philoctetes, ethics in, 172–3 soul, see also Platonism immortality of, 18 Plato on immortality of, 311 Sourvinou-Inwood, Christiane on gods in tragedy, 30–1 on theology, 33 Sparta, see Lycurgus Speusippus on Plato, 193 statues immobility of, 265 of gods and their theology, 10, 33, 249–80 Neoplatonists on theology of, 353 relationship of to gods, 255 stories of gods, multiplicity of, 2, 7 of gods, power of, 1 role in social formation, 208, 214 theology of, 8–9, 12–19, 230 Strabo on Mekone, 237 Stratokles prosecutes Philippides, 131 Strattis putting Dionysus on stage, 136 Strauss Clay, J. on Homeric gods, 40 structuralism and implications of myth and ritual, 21 influence of, 21 and polytheism, 174 succession as answer to death, 59 explored in Hesiod’s Theogony, 41–8 Suda on Cypselid kolossos, 68, 69, 70, 72 superstition opposed to religion, 206

Supreme Disposer Campbell on, 160 and monotheism, 174 in Protestant theology, 154 and theodicy, 169 Symonds, J. A. on Sophocles, 157–8 Syracuse invention of comedy in, 138 Szegedy-Maszack, A. on lawgivers, 195 Tanner, Kathryn on popular theology, 211–12, 214 Tarentum krater from showing Apollo, 5, 256, 262–9 Taurus Platonist, 334 Teiresias, 91 Telekleides golden age in, 147 Telemachus and Antinous, 220 and Penelope, 219, 221 Thales, 302 Thebes Mantiklos’ dedication from, 251–5 threatened by Philip of Macedon, 290 Themistocles on Xerxes’ defeat in Herodotus, 227 Theocritus on Ptolemy Philadelphus, 60 theodicy and divine envy, 205, 206 in Hesiod, 182 in polytheism, 167–9 Protestant, 154, 155, 160 in Sophocles, 155 in Sophocles’ Electra, 156, 162 Theodoret Therapy of Greek Maladies, 339–40 Theognis and Cypselids, 69, 74–8 theologia sense of, 13 as understood by Burkert, 24 use of, 1, 22, 250

421

Index theologia civilis of Varro, 29 theologia tripertita, 24–31 theology of animal sacrifice, 233–48 of Athenian Assembly, 281–300 a by-product of social origins of religion, 17 Christian, 1, 346 of communication in Heraclitus, 89–116 concerned for boundary between men and gods, 180 continuity and discontinuity in, 9–10 contrasted with philology, 349 of dedications, 63–88 definition of, 20, 38, 206, 250 development of, 2 different senses of, 3–4 of Dionysia and Old Comedy, 7, 117–52 elitist, in late antiquity, 356 of Hesiod’s account of sacrifice, 235–6 history of study of Greek, 15–34 of images, 249–80 and lawmaking, 7 Mikalson on, 25–7 a misnomer for Greek religion, 12 mythical versus philosophical, 301–5 as parasitic on wider cultural discourse, 212 philosophical, abstractions of, 306 philosophical, and meta-ethical reduction in, 306–7 philosophical, secularisation of, 301 and Plato, 301–16 of polis, as civic duty, 24 politics of, 7–8 popular, 16, 205–32 popular, definition of, 211 popular, responsive to context, 211 practical role of, 5–6, 17, 211 of reversal of fortune, 63 and scholars’ conceptions, 347 scholars’ own, 9 and social groups, 1 of stories, 8–9, 12–19, 230 systematic, 4, 23 or theologies?, 1, 3, 4, 9

422

triple division of Greek, 32 unifying disparate beliefs and practices, 6 Theon of Smyrna on philosophy as initiation, 317 Theophrastus, 29 on Cypselid kolossos, 68 and doxographic tradition, 305 theoria of Solon, 198 Theoxenia, 247 Thespis, 123 Thorikos Dionysia at, 126 theatre at, 126 Thucydides on Athenians and oracles, 288 on recall of Alcibiades, 288 on temples of Dionysus, 118 Timocles comic poet, 131, 135 putting Dionysus on stage, 136 Tisamenus Delphic oracles for, 92 tragedy, Greek in Dionysia, 124, 140 Mikalson on theology of, 25–7 Parker on theology of, 27–8 and polytheism, 153–75 theology of, 14, 23, 30–1 transvestism at Oskhophoria, 123 tripod as symbol of Delphi, 266 Turner, Frank on Grote’s History, 157 tyrannicide theology of, 7 tyrants gods envious of, 215 Van Effenterre, Henri on invocation of gods in laws, 203 van Straten, Folker and images of sacrifice, 239 Van Wees, Hans on gifts, 217 Varro theology of, 29–30

Index Vernant, Jean-Pierre on animal sacrifice, 21, 235–8 on the divine body, 176 on myth, 20 Versnel, Hendrik on early Greek theology, 354 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre on myth, 20 violence and the sacred, 235, see also Girard Virgil Macrobius on, 351 Walcot, Peter on envy, 215 war gods no guides to, 60 Westcott, Bishop on Oresteia, 159–60 and theodicy, 167 women in Aristophanes parodying Assembly, 282 explained together with fire and sacrifice in Hesiod, 237 and sacrifice, 240, 245, 248 Xenophanes on difficulty of knowing gods, 315 on Hesiod, 35 on Homer, 9, 35, 50 on mind, 24 promoting the ‘one God’, 303 Xenophon on Dionysia, 140 on gods making men able to legislate, 188 on Lycurgus, 186 as a source for theology, 26 theology of, 27

Xerxes invasion of, 289 in Herodotus, 227 in Persae, 226 Zaleucus breaking his own law, 198 cult of, 193 education of, 186 inspired by Athena, 184 various roles of, 197 Zeus amused by conflict of gods, 39, 49 as bad example, 170 as chastiser, 226 compared to Ouranos, 55–6 demanding piety, 173 in Empedocles, 302 and family power, 57 and Hera and envy, 222 in Heraclitus, 103, 113 in Hesiod’s Theogony, 44–6, 108 Homeric formula describing, 39 in Iliad 21, 49, 55 as lawgiver, 180, 182 making Wealth blind, 205 and Minos, 184, 185, 187 as model for patriarchy, 59 not reciprocating gifts, 231 and Prometheus, 205, 235, 238 and sacrifice of Iphigeneia, 165, 166 sacrifice to on Cos, 242–3, 244 sacrifice to on Mykonos, 245 and Solon, 186 in Sophocles’ Philoctetes, 173 as source of justice, 182 statue of, at Olympia, 263 and Titans, 237 violence of, 57

423