After Wisdom: Sapiential Traditions and Ancient Scholarship in Comparative Perspective 9789004529014, 9004529012

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After Wisdom

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Philological Encounters Monographs Series Editor Islam Dayeh (Freie Universität Berlin) Editorial Board Manan Ahmed (Columbia University) – Michael Allan (University of Oregon) – Whitney Cox (University of Chicago) – Adrien Delmas (Centre Jacques Berque, Rabat) – John-Paul Ghobrial (University of Oxford) – Konrad Hirschler (Universität Hamburg) – Ananya Jahanara Kabir (King's College London) – Shamil Jeppie (University of Cape Town) – Rajeev Kinra (Northwestern University) – Ahmad Khan (American University in Cairo) – Joachim Kurtz (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg) – Sumit Mandal (University of Nottingham Malaysia) – Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn (cnrs Paris) – Ronit Ricci (Hebrew University) – Umar Ryad (ku Leuven – University of Leuven) – Dana Sajdi (Boston College) – Fabrizio Speziale (ehess paris) – Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University)

Advisory Board Muzaffar Alam (University of Chicago) – Zvi Ben-Dor Benite (New York University) – Daniel Boyarin (University of California, Berkeley) – Sebastian Conrad (Freie Universität Berlin) – Carlo Ginzburg (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) – Anthony T. Grafton (Princeton University) – Beatrice Gründler (Freie Universität Berlin) – Suzanne L. Marchand (Louisana State University) – Glenn Most (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa) – Angelika Neuwirth (Freie Universität Berlin) – Maurice Olender (ehess Paris) – Francesca Orsini (School of Oriental and African Studies, London) – Sheldon Pollock (Columbia University) – Dhruv Raina ( Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi) – Yasir Suleiman (University of Cambridge)

volume 4 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/penc

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After Wisdom Sapiential Traditions and Ancient Scholarship in Comparative Perspective

Edited by

Glenn W. Most Michael Puett

leiden | boston

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Most, Glenn W., editor. | Puett, Michael, 1964- editor. Title: After wisdom : sapiential traditions and ancient scholarship in comparative perspective / edited by Glenn W. Most, Michael Puett. Other titles: Philological encounters monographs ; v. 4. Description: Boston : Brill, 2023. | Series: Philological encounters monographs, 2451-9200 ; 4 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022052584 (print) | lccn 2022052585 (ebook) | isbn 9789004529007 (hardback) | isbn 9789004529014 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Wisdom literature–Criticism, interpretation, etc. | Greek literature–History and criticism. | Chinese literature–History and criticism. Classification: lcc pn56.w54 a38 2023 (print) | lcc pn56.w54 (ebook) | ddc 880.9–dc23/eng/20221108 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022052584 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022052585

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. issn 2451-9200 isbn 978-90-04-52900-7 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-52901-4 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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Contents Introduction 1 Glenn W. Most and Michael Puett

part 1 Comparing Greek and Chinese Wisdom Literatures 1 Aided-by-Ink’s Son and Mistery’s Great-Grandson: Wisdom and Oracular Literature in Classical China and Ancient Greece 15 Tomás Bartoletti 2 Wisdom Literature, Orality, and Textual Histories: Another Look at Heraclitus and the Laozi 54 Luke Parker 3 Representations of Infancy and Childhood in Laozi and Heraclitus Jingyi Jenny Zhao

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part 2 Chinese Wisdom Literature as Seen from Greece 4 Confucian Pollen: A Comparative Reading of the Xunzi Chapter “Great Digest” (da lüe 大略) 103 Thomas Crone 5 “The Master Says”: Speech and Silence in the Analects Andrew Hui

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6 Lady Mu of Xu’s Returning to Her Natal Home in “Zaichi” 載馳 (Gallop): A Comparative Perspective of the Early Scholarship of the Shijing 詩經 (Book of Odes) 147 Leihua Weng

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part 3 Greek Wisdom Literature as Seen from China 7 In the Wake of Wisdom: The Early Greek Prose Inquiries from a Comparative Perspective 171 Gaston J. Basile 8 Straight to the Divine: Claims of Self-Divinization in Plato and the Nei-yeh 221 Fabio Pagani 9 Textualizing Wonders: Ancient Greek Paradoxography in Comparative Perspective 251 Kenneth W. Yu Index of Personal Names, Authors, and Works General Subject Index 292

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Introduction Glenn W. Most and Michael Puett

The nine essays collected in this volume study the development and interrelations of two modes of thought that seem to have been characteristic of several ancient cultures, including those of Greece and China during the second half of the first millennium bce. Modern scholars, especially in the West, have often designated these two modes by the Greek words mythos and logos, applying the former to various kinds of non-rational mythic thought or wisdom, along with traditional forms of poetic discourse, and the latter to numerous innovative forms of rational critique, philosophy, historiography, or scholarship. Moreover, they have often looked to the surviving written documents of these cultures for the manifestation of some form of progress, sometimes one that they considered unbroken and linear, from mythos as an earlier phase to logos as a later one.1 The degree of presence or absence manifested by such progress has gone on to play an important role in the way certain modern cultures have understood their identity and in the claims that have been made for the importance, privilege, or even supremacy of one culture compared to another. The question of a progression from mythos to logos in ancient Greece has been much discussed in recent years.2 As the scope and validity that have been claimed for these two categories are widespread, or at least not merely local, it has seemed to us that they are best studied comparatively in order to test how robust they really are and to what degree they can contribute to a fair and balanced assessment of different cultures both in their individuality and in their plurality. As far as we know, the present volume is the first one to have ever studied this question on the basis of a comparison between ancient Greece and ancient China. The title of this volume, After Wisdom, is intended to be understood in three different ways, each indicating a fundamental aspect of the questions that are raised here and of the ways in which answers are sought. First, the preposition “after” can be taken in a temporal sense: the essays ask what happens in the time period after the great age of wisdom has passed.

1 One celebrated text may stand as an example for this whole approach: Wilhelm Nestle, Vom Mythos zum Logos: Die Selbstentfaltung des griechischen Denkens von Homer bis auf die Sophistik (Stuttgart: A. Kröner, 1975). 2 See, for example, Richard Buxton, ed., From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), including Glenn W. Most, “From Logos to Mythos,” 25–47.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004529014_002

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Of course, some forms of wisdom have never vanished and can easily still be found in our own world. However, it seems fair to say that in numerous cultures there once was a first period of time in which wisdom was the only game in town (or at least the only one that came to be attested, because it alone was documented in written records that were transmitted and survived to later times). After this period, a second one occurred in which the traditional wisdom was not suppressed or forgotten in any simple sense but thenceforth had to compete with other forms of thought that, sometimes respectfully, sometimes vigorously, contested its primacy. The temporal focus of these essays is not restricted to the early texts alone that could be characterized as mythos or wisdom literature, but rather enlarges the field of inquiry to focus especially on later works of scholarship such as philosophy, history, or commentary. These texts deal as logos in one way or another with those earlier works, thus interpreting them and making them available, in different, often oppositional terms, for later users. Second, the preposition “after” can be taken in a directional sense: the essays ask in what ways these later scholars seek after the earlier texts that they study, edit, and criticize. For these forms of logos, the ancient instances of mythos are the texts they work upon, i.e., what they ultimately direct their attention and their scholarly activity towards. They revere them as sources of meaning and legitimation for institutions and as ways of thought and behavior that are valid now and for all times. They bring them from a past in which they might have risked being forgotten into a present in which they are deemed to serve a useful, perhaps indispensable function. However, to revere is not the same thing as to adulate unquestioningly: it is precisely in critique, disparagement, and indeed sometimes even condemnation, that the later scholars’ reverence for the earlier wisdom texts is often most authentically expressed. For even when the sages are attacked, they are still considered worth discussing, editing, commenting—that is, they are still worth being reflected upon. At the opposite extreme, episodes of books being burnt and of scholars being buried alive en masse are indeed reported—but these stories are extremely rare and probably apocryphal. And even these stories, by their very invention and circulation, attest to the importance of the mortal dangers that some people could associate with such books and scholars. Third, the emphasis in our title can also be put on “wisdom” rather than “after,” for one of the aims of this volume is to put into dialogue the concepts of mythos and of “wisdom literature” as they have been used in different kinds of historical scholarship over the past several generations. “Wisdom literature” is a problematic and controversial category—yet it also seems helpful, and perhaps even indispensable, for certain kinds of historical inquiry. All the essays in this

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volume, though to differing degrees and in different ways, ask what can be done with the concept of “wisdom literature” in present scholarship, to what extent it can still be deployed usefully in historical and comparative research into antiquity, after it has become problematized and can no longer be accepted at face value as self-explanatory. This category arose in a specific field, Biblical and ancient Near Eastern studies, at a particular time, in the first half of the twentieth century, and for evident ideological reasons. Given the explosive growth in scholarly knowledge about the ancient Near Eastern cultures (including ancient Egypt) after the first modern excavations in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and given the gradual decipherment of the ancient languages of that region, the traditional presumption of a Jewish monopoly on certain kinds of literary genres that had long been familiar with the Hebrew Bible came increasingly to be questioned.3 Comparatism among different cultures served the ends of deprovincialism and of detheologization: if ancient Jews wrote literary forms that were closely similar to those written by ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, and Babylonians, this could not be explained on the premise that Jahweh had spoken uniquely to the Jews in these highly specific ways. Instead, it must have been because various cultures that coexisted and engaged in lively interchange with one another throughout the ancient Near East shared many cultural forms. From this first step, a number of scholars went on to generalize the concept of “wisdom literature” a second time by applying it to other ancient cultures—ancient Greece, which was influenced culturally to some degree by these cultures in early periods and then again in later times; ancient China, which seems to have had absolutely no contact with the regions of the ancient Near East until fairly late (perhaps the Han Dynasty, perhaps even later); and others. However, as it broadened, the concept became more and more diluted, to the point that sometimes, critical scholars sharply attacked it, as they considered it nebulous. And yet it seems that we cannot easily do without this concept: it does appear to point to something real, and if used cautiously, it may turn out to be not only helpful, but even invaluable. In making this argument, the authors are building upon a general trend in re-thinking the category of “wisdom literature”. Some of the most significant work in the second half of the twentieth century was done by anthropologists and folklorists who explored wisdom literature in practice. Much of this 3 For a helpful overview of the development of the category, see Will Kynes, An Obituary for “Wisdom Literature”: The Birth, Death, and Intertextual Reintegration of a Biblical Corpus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

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work focused upon proverbs, in particular on the ways in which they were used in context. One of the earliest and most influential of these studies was undertaken by Oja Arewa and Alan Dundes, who focused on proverbs among the Yoruba.4 Arewa and Dundes illustrated the ways in which proverbs were utilized—noting, for example, how they would be quoted and interpreted in court settings, much as legal precedents would be used elsewhere. Such usage required careful training not only on the part of the practitioners, but also on the part of the analyst to see the complexities of how proverbs were being employed. Peter Seitel extended the arguments of Arewa and Dundes in his own studies on the uses of proverbs among the Haya of Tanzania. Seitel developed a highly influential model to explore the manner in which proverbs are used in context. The genre of “wisdom literature,” according to Seitel, should not be thought of as a list of proverbs but rather in terms of the ways in which proverbs are employed pragmatically.5 Similarly, Charles Briggs argued that the study of proverbs should not focus on proverbs themselves, but rather on the linguistic context of their use.6 The approaches of Seitel and Briggs have since been developed by a large number of scholars.7 This work in the field of anthropology has in turn provided new inspiration to the study of wisdom literature in the ancient world as well. André Lardinois has built upon the work of Seitel, Briggs, and several other anthropologists to explore the ways in which wisdom expressions—proverbs and moral quotations—are used in context. One of Lardinois’ most influential works is a study on the use of wisdom expressions in the Iliad.8 Calum Alasdair Maciver, in his study of the Posthomerica by Quintus of Smyrna, has continued Lardinois’ arguments by showing later re-workings of these wisdom expressions from the Iliad.9

4 Oja Arewa and Alan Dundes, “Proverbs and the Ethnography of Speaking Folklore,” American Anthropologist 66, no. 6 (1964): 70–85. 5 Peter Seitel, “Proverbs: A Social Use of Metaphor,” Genre 2 (1969): 143–161, See also Peter Seitel, The Powers of Genre: Interpreting Haya Oral Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 6 Charles I. Briggs, “The Pragmatics of Proverb Performance in New Mexican Spanish,” American Anthropologist 87 (1985): 793–810. 7 For a full bibliography, see Wolfgang Mieder, International Proverb Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography, Supplement 3 (New York: Peter Lang, 1993). 8 André Lardinois, “Modem Paroemiology and the Use of Gnomai in Homer’s Iliad,” Classical Philology 92, no. 3 (1997): 213–234. 9 Calum Alasdair Maciver, Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica: Engaging Homer in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

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In a similar fashion, Carole Fontaine has built upon this anthropological literature to re-think the performance of proverbs in the Hebrew Bible.10 This approach, Fontaine has argued, opens up a number of questions concerning who is able to use proverbs and in which circumstances such uses can be powerful. These explorations have allowed Fontaine to investigate the social world of wisdom in the Hebrew Bible.11 The present volume stems from similar concerns. To begin with, the essays in this volume are very much concerned with how authors utilized, interpreted, and re-worked earlier wisdom expressions. However, they are also explicitly comparative: they ask how these modes of re-working and re-interpreting earlier wisdom expressions can themselves be productively compared with one another across cultures. In a sense, the essays are building upon some of the most exciting developments in the second half of the twentieth century concerning the re-thinking of wisdom literature, while also returning to the comparative concerns of an earlier body of scholarship. As such, the volume will hopefully help to bring an explicitly comparative dimension to the recent rethinking of the category of “wisdom literature.” By focusing on Greece and China as objects of comparison, the authors in this volume are also building upon a growing body of scholarship that has found these two cultures particularly helpful for comparison.12 The reasons for this are evident: situated on either end of Eurasia, the parallels between the intellectual and cultural histories of the two cultures are striking. Comparable genres appear, often within roughly a century from each other. This is not, of

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Carole Fontaine, “Proverb Performance in the Hebrew Bible,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 10, no. 32 (1985): 87–103. Carole Fontaine, Smooth Words: Women, Proverbs and Performance in Biblical Wisdom (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002). A brief, and certainly non-comprehensive, list of books written in just the past twenty-five years on comparisons between early China and early Greece includes: Steven Shankman and Stephen Durrant, The Siren and the Sage: Knowledge and Wisdom in Ancient Greece and China (London: Cassell, 2000); Steven Shankman and Stephen W. Durrant, eds., Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking Through Comparisons (Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 2002); Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin, The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Yiqun Zhou, Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Alexander Beecroft, Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Literary Circulation (Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Lisa Raphals, Divination and Prediction in Early China and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Fritz-Heiner Mutschler, ed., The Homeric Epics and the Chinese Book of Songs: Foundational Texts Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018).

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course, to imply that they are identical. On the contrary, genres appear in each culture as variations of those that appear in the other—hence the power of the comparisons between the two. Excellent work has been done along these lines comparing, for example, philosophical and literary materials in Greece and China.13 The authors of this volume have found these two cultures particularly fruitful to compare for precisely these reasons. In both areas, one finds the development of a set of concerns that engage with interpreting and commenting upon an earlier body of proverbs, anecdotes, and stories—to return to the terminology with which this introduction began, one finds the development of the application of various forms of logos to an earlier body of mythos. The authors of the essays collected here have found it very rewarding to compare with one another some of the ways in which figures across the two cultures interpreted their earlier wisdom literature. The essays in this volume thus bring another body of materials to the growing comparative studies of ancient Greece and China. We have organized these essays in three closely related but methodologically distinct groups, each of which uses comparative methods with somewhat different approaches and purposes. This organization is admittedly somewhat artificial, and in fact the studies have much in common with one another in ways to which no conceivable arrangement could possibly do justice. This is due to the fact that the contributions gathered here originated in a workshop in which all the authors participated. After the workshop, the authors continued to develop their contributions over several years of intense and friendly group discussions. Nonetheless, as editors, we have decided that it would be helpful to divide them into three groups. The first three essays aim above all to consider to what degree it makes sense to apply the concept of “wisdom literature” to different cultures: that is, the authors’ practice of cultural comparatism is also intended to serve the aim of investigating the validity of specific scholarly categories. Tomás Bartoletti reflects upon the extent to which the scholarly category of “wisdom literature” has been thought of almost exclusively in terms of written texts. To question this limited understanding, Bartoletti provides a comparative exploration of wisdom traditions in ancient Greece and China that are oracular

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For the philosophical material, see for example, Jean-Paul Reding, Comparative Essays in Early Greek and Early Chinese Rational Thinking (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). For the literary material, see C.H. Wang, From Ritual to Allegory: Seven Essays in Early Chinese Poetry (Hongkong: Chinese University Press, 1988); Mutschler, The Homeric Epics and the Chinese Book of Songs.

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in origin. He re-thinks the category of “wisdom literature” in its oral dimensions from this comparative perspective. A related concern underlies Luke Parker’s essay. Parker argues that we need to re-orient the understanding of wisdom literature to focus on textual histories and textual transmission. Here again, a comparative approach proves crucial to Parker’s argument. Parker’s analysis focuses upon a comparison of the textual histories of Heraclitus and the Laozi, demonstrating the degree to which a limited conception of wisdom literature that ignores these philological traditions dramatically restricts our understandings of how the texts, as we know them, came to be defined. Jingyi Jenny Zhao also turns her comparative focus to Heraclitus and the Laozi, but from the opposite direction. Zhao explores how and why the two texts utilize childhood imagery to reject earlier authoritative traditions and establish their own claims. The representations of childhood and infancy in the two works, Zhao argues, allow the texts to claim autonomy from the textual norms of the day and to argue for a different form of wisdom. These essays focus on the extent to which fundamental interpretative concepts are applicable to texts from both the ancient Chinese and the ancient Greek traditions. We might say that they are comparative in a reflective, critical spirit of hermeneutic engagement with the specificities of different and largely unrelated cultures. The next three essays use categories from early Greek culture in order to illuminate phenomena in early Chinese culture: here comparatism serves the purpose of clarifying some aspects of Chinese texts for which Greek texts may provide, up to a certain point, helpful interpretive instruments. Their approach to comparatism might be considered pragmatic and experimental, in the sense that the essays explore the degree of applicability of concepts derived from one culture in order to understand the products of the other. Thomas Crone focuses on the “Great Digest” chapter of the Xunzi. This chapter has received relatively little scholarly attention. Unlike the more obviously philosophical chapters of the Xunzi, the “Great Digest” consists of more than a hundred sayings and precepts. Through a comparison of collections of anecdotes and sayings from Greece, Crone explores how and why the text might have been written down. Crone thus demonstrates in practice how comparative work deriving inspiration from one culture can shed light on a phenomenon in a different culture that might seem otherwise difficult to interpret. Andrew Hui turns to the aphorisms in the Analects of Confucius and to the enormous commentarial tradition that developed around them. Hui shows the degree to which the Confucian tradition was defined through these interpreta-

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tions of early, pithy aphorisms. Hui further explores why both collections— aphorisms and commentarial traditions—are so important in the development of traditions on wisdom throughout the world. A similar concern with early authorship and later commentary underlies Leihua Weng’s study. Weng considers the early poem “Zaichi” 載馳 (Gallop) and examines its reception by investigating a selection of leading interpretations and commentaries on it from the seventh century bce to the mid-seventh century ce. She suggests that, in early scholarship on “Zaichi,” a hermeneutic development occurred: from a “weaker” text belonging to oral culture to a “stronger” text well embedded and supported by textual source materials. Weng concludes with a comparison of this hermeneutic development in early scholarship on “Zaichi” and on Homer. The final three studies reverse the perspective of the second group of essays, using categories from early Chinese culture in order to illuminate phenomena in early Greek culture: this time comparatism is deployed to clarify aspects of Greek texts for which, to a certain degree, Chinese texts may turn out to be helpful interpretive instruments. Gastón Basile explores the ways in which early Greek prose writers engaged with and re-worked earlier wisdom literature. Basile is particularly concerned with the modes of interpretation and commentarial strategies used to interpret earlier sagely advice and wise sayings. To strengthen his argument, throughout his study, Basile draws comparisons with Near-Eastern and Chinese materials. Fabio Pagani engages with how later texts re-interpret earlier wisdom literature in Greece and China as well. Pagani explores the theme of self-divinization from a comparative perspective, focusing in particular on a comparison of Plato with the relatively contemporaneous Chinese text Nei-yeh. In both texts Pagani discovers a response to earlier traditions that saw wisdom as something exclusively held by the gods, which would only occasionally be given out as advice to humans. In contrast, these self-divinization texts claim to describe practices that allow humans to obtain such wisdom directly. Similarly, Kenneth Yu turns to the ways in which later thinkers re-worked earlier wisdom literature. Yu focuses in particular on how and why Greek paradoxographers worked on, classified, and systematized earlier myth traditions. Yu goes on to draw a comparison with the roughly contemporaneous Chinese text Shan hai jing, which was equally directed to systematizing earlier myths and stories. The central insight of this book is that no one culture can possibly be understood well unless it is compared with others. There are many forms of comparatism in the world today, and the individual essays in this volume may be taken as a set of sophisticated exercises in some of the most interesting ones.

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Their variety is balanced by a congenial convergence which lends an added value to this volume as a whole. For it is the profound conviction of all the authors and of both the editors of the present volume that comparatism is not just one scholarly method among others but is instead the only viable method of cultural and historical scholarship. Cultural studies, if carried out properly, are always multi-cultural. As it happens, every one of the young authors whose essays are published in this volume embodies multi-culturalism in his or her own life. None of them live and teach their native culture in the country in which they were born: all have moved in space and time and have acquired a high degree of intercultural expertise—indeed in this regard they are like many other young scholars throughout the world who, sometimes by choice, sometimes by painful necessity, are building vast and vital international networks of scholarship and friendship that, we hope, will last long into the future and will provide bridges of intercultural tolerance and understanding in a world which seems to suffer increasingly from provincialism, nationalism, and xenophobia. The nine young authors in this volume were born in six countries (Argentina, China, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States); they have six nationalities (American, Argentine, British, Chinese, German, Italian); they were trained in nine countries (Argentina, Belgium, China, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States); they teach in seven (Argentina, Canada, Germany, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States). They worked together with the editors of this volume at the Kosmos Summer University at the Humboldt University of Berlin in the summer of 2015 in a compact course on “Wisdom Literature in East and West.” Back then we were excited by the lively and respectful dialogue in which we all became engaged, and we conceived the plan of publishing a joint volume as a continuation, documentation, and record of the intense conversations in those summer days. In the intervening years, close friendships have developed among all the members of this group, and the resulting essays are evidence for continuing scholarly and personal exchanges. In that sense, this book is not a collection of separate essays, but it manifests diverse aspects of a single joint project, “workings of one mind, the features / Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,” to borrow Wordsworth’s sublime phrase from The Prelude. We thank the Humboldt University for its prescience in organizing and financing the summer program that brought us together. Furthermore, we hope that this volume, too, will be an auspicious prelude for the future cultural studies of these nine young scholars and of many others like them throughout the world.

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Bibliography Arewa, Oja, and Alan Dundes. “Proverbs and the Ethnography of Speaking Folklore.” American Anthropologist 66, no. 6 (1964): 70–85. Beecroft, Alexander. Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Literary Circulation. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Briggs, Charles I. “The Pragmatics of Proverb Performance in New Mexican Spanish.” American Anthropologist 87 (1985): 793–810. Buxton, Richard, ed. From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Fontaine, Carole. “Proverb Performance in the Hebrew Bible.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 10, no. 32 (1985): 87–103. Fontaine, Carole. Smooth Words: Women, Proverbs and Performance in Biblical Wisdom. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002. Kynes, Will. An Obituary for “Wisdom Literature”: The Birth, Death, and Intertextual Reintegration of a Biblical Corpus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Lambert, W.G., Babylonian Wisdom Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960. Lardinois, André. “Modem Paroemiology and the Use of Gnomai in Homer’s Iliad.” Classical Philology 92, no. 3 (1997): 213–234. Lloyd, Geoffrey and Nathan Sivin. The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Maciver, Calum Alasdair. Quintus Smyrnaeus’ Posthomerica: Engaging Homer in Late Antiquity. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Mieder, Wolfgang. International Proverb Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography, Supplement 3 (New York: Peter Lang, 1993). Most, Glenn W. “From Logos to Mythos.” In From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought, edited by Richard Buxton, 25–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Mutschler, Fritz-Heiner, ed. The Homeric Epics and the Chinese Book of Songs: Foundational Texts Compared. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018. Mutschler, Fritz-Heiner, ed., The Homeric Epics and the Chinese Book of Songs: Foundational Texts Compared. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018. Nestle, Wilhelm. Vom Mythos zum Logos: Die Selbstentfaltung des griechischen Denkens von Homer bis auf die Sophistik. Stuttgart: A. Kröner, 1975 [1942]. Raphals, Lisa. Divination and Prediction in Early China and Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Reding, Jean-Paul. Comparative Essays in Early Greek and Early Chinese Rational Thinking. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Seitel, Peter. “Proverbs: A social use of metaphor.” Genre 2 (1969): 143–161. Reprinted in Wolfgang, Mieder, and Alan Dundes, eds. The Wisdom of Many: Essays on the Proverb, 122–139. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. - 978-90-04-52901-4 Downloaded from Brill.com02/24/2023 08:49:05PM via Western University

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Seitel, Peter. The Powers of Genre: Interpreting Haya Oral Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Shankman, Steven and Stephen Durrant. The Siren and the Sage: Knowledge and Wisdom in Ancient Greece and China. London: Cassell, 2000. Shankman, Steven, and Stephen W. Durrant, eds. Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking Through Comparisons. Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 2002. Wang, C.H. From Ritual to Allegory: Seven Essays in Early Chinese Poetry. Hongkong: Chinese University Press, 1988. West, Martin. The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1997. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850). London: Penguin Books, 1995. Zhou, Yiqun. Festivals, Feasts, and Gender Relations in Ancient China and Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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part 1 Comparing Greek and Chinese Wisdom Literatures

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chapter 1

Aided-by-Ink’s Son and Mistery’s Great-Grandson: Wisdom and Oracular Literature in Classical China and Ancient Greece Tomás Bartoletti

It is nothing new to say that the mere use of the term “wisdom literature” for the study of a certain corpus of texts is problematic. This category partly emerged in the process of cataloguing several heterogeneous Old Testament texts which proved difficult to categorize under the same one genre. So it was that a number of writings, the purpose of which was to give life advice and foster a wise understanding of reality, were grouped under “wisdom literature”.1 Due to its firmly theological-ecclesiastical nature, the first migration of the term from the fields of Theology, Hebraic, and Biblical Studies to Ancient Near Eastern Studies did not exactly pass without criticism.2 However, the background to this migration was the historical-geographic proximity and the subsequent possibility of comparing and ordering a certain corpus of Babylonian origin with its Old Testament counterparts. This first migration also brought with it the beginnings of an epistemological tension regarding the genres among Biblical form

1 See Oliver Rankin, Israel’s Wisdom Literature: Its Bearing on Theology and the History of Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1936); Harmut Gese, Lehre und Wirklichkeit in der alten Weisheit (Tübingen: Mohr, 1958); John F. Priest, “Where Is Wisdom to Be Placed?” Journal of Bible and Religion 31, no. 4 (1963): 275–282; John L. McKenzie, “Reflections on Wisdom,” Journal of Biblical Literature 86, no. 1 (1967): 1–9; James Crenshaw, Old Testament Wisdom (Atlanta: John Nox, 1981); Roland E. Murphy, The Forms of Old Testament Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981); James Kugel, “Wisdom and the Anthological Temper,” Prooftexts 17, no. 1 (1997): 9–32; William Brown, Character in Crisis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996); Matthew Goff, The Worldly and Heavenly Wisdom of 4QInstruction (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Matthew Goff, Discerning Wisdom (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Leo Perdue, “The rhetoric of wisdom and postcolonial hermeneutics,” Scriptura 81 (2002): 437–452; Leo Perdue, Wisdom Literature: A Theological History (London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007); Richard Clifford, Wisdom Literature in Mesopotamia and Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007); Stuart Weeks, An Introduction to the Study of Wisdom Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); Matthew Goff, “Qumran Wisdom Literature and the Problem of Genre,” Dead Sea Discoveries 17, no. 3 (2010): 286–306. 2 An emblematic work, for instance, was Wilfred Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960).

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criticism, Near East, and literary studies.3 In another not-so-distant field, Classical Studies developed its own construction of literature and wisdom, especially defining genres such as theogonies and cosmogonies. By establishing a radical and arbitrary polarity, it could be said that while the concept of “wisdom literature” arises as a product of theological-ecclesiastical inquiries—and of the field of Near Eastern Studies in recent decades—, the field of Classical Studies is the product of modern disciplines that have re-signified this particular tradition between antiquarian interest and philological-positivist methods.4 Today, this modern reconstruction provides a broad corpus that allows us to apply and form a potential “Greek wisdom literature.” Martin West and Walter Burkert have already drawn similar connections between the Near East traditions and Ancient Greece.5 One question that is always raised by the translation of concepts among different fields and hermeneutic practices is whether the application of the category of “wisdom 3 Wilfred Lambert, “Some New Babylonian Wisdom Literature,” in Wisdom in Ancient Israel, eds. John Day et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 30–42; Murphy, Wisdom Literature; Daniel Harrington, Wisdom Texts from Qumram (London: Routledge, 1996). Jack Sanders, “Wisdom, Theodicy, Death and the Evolution of Intellectual Traditions,” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 36, no. 3 (2005): 263–277. Goff, The Worldly and Heavenly Wisdom and Discerning Wisdom; Paul-Alain Beaulieu, “The Social and Intellectual Setting of Babylonian Wisdom Literature,” in Wisdom Literature in Mesopotamia and Israel, ed. Richard Clifford (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 3– 20; John Kampen, Wisdom Literature. Eerdmans Commentaries on the Dead Sea Scrolls (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 2011); Karel van der Toorn, “Why Wisdom Became a Secret: On Wisdom as a Written Genre,” in Wisdom Literature in Mesopotamia and Israel, ed. Richard Clifford (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 21–32. 4 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics (Cambridge [MA]: Princeton University Press, 1990); Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1991); Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, foreword by Riccardo Di Donanto (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Francois Hartog, Anciens, modernes, sauvages (Paris: Galaade Éditions, 2005); Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Constanze Güthenke, Placing Modern Greece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Stephen Rebenich, “Wilhelm von Humboldt—oder: Die Entstehung des Bürgetums aus dem Geiste der Antike,” in Applied Classics. Comparisons, Constructus, Controversies, ed. Angelos Chaniotis (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2009), 97–118; Alexandra Lianeri, The Western Time of Ancient History: Historiographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Peter Miller and Francois Louis, eds., Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2012). 5 Martin West, The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Walter Burkert, Die orientalisierende Epoche in der griechischen Religion und Literatur (Heidelberg: Winter, 1984).

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literature” to the corpus of Greek texts might not be taken as a theologization (Biblicization?) of epic poems such as Hesiod’s, of the so-called fragments of pre-Socratic philosophy, or of popular proverbs such as Aesop’s. The reverse process might also occur: the idea of “wisdom literature” is de-theologized as different fields of studies adopt and reconceptualize it according to their corpora and, indeed, their ideas of wisdom. If the idea of “wisdom literature” is a pivotal concept that would make it possible to compare, translate, and explicitly equate corpora of different origins and between dissimilar disciplinary traditions,6 one immediate difficulty that theologians and Near Eastern scholars have already formulated is that the Hebrew hokmâ is not equivalent to the Babylonian nēmequ, enqu, mūdû, etpšēsu, hassu.7 One could inquire whether these represent what in Greek would be Sophia,8 or even if they encompass the idea of wisdom or Weisheit as it is conceived of today. The same question arises if we project it onto early China, as Lisa Raphals extensively proved.9 Following Marcel Detienne and Jean-Paul Vernant’s seminal study Les ruses de l’intelligence: la métis des Grecs (Paris, 1974), Raphals examined the equivalent to Greek métis in different Chinese traditions. The terms zhi and zhe, among other closed conceptions, cover a wide

6 In contemporary anthropology, a good translation and, consequently, a ‘good’ comparison are, according to Viveiros de Castro (2004a, 2004b, 5), those that allow the ‘alien’ concept to ‘deform’ and ‘subvert’ ‘the translator’s conceptual toolbox.’ Hence, the intentio of the original language may be expressed in the new one. An explicit betrayal in translation is merely a ‘controlled equivocation.’ With the concept of ‘controlled equivocation’, Viveiros de Castro translates the theory of translation from Amerindian perspectivism, which takes in ‘controlled equivocation’ as a form of communication between different ‘perspectival positions’. The idea of ‘controlled equivocation’ allows us to ‘take seriously’ and exchange notions of wisdom(s) and literature(s) from diverse traditions as theoretical perspectives themselves and not only as mere corpus for analysis. See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectival Anthropology and the Method of Controlled Equivocation”. Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 1, no. 1 (2004): 5; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies,” Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (2004): 463–484. See also William F. Hanks and Carlo Severi, “Translating worlds: The epistemological space of translation,”hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 2 (2014): 1–16; Tal Asad, “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Anthropology,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds. James Clifford and George Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 141–164. 7 Lambert, Babylonian Wisdom Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 1–3; Murphy, Wisdom Literature, 3–4; Kampen, Wisdom Literature, 1–6. 8 Burkhard Gladigow, Sophia und Kosmos: Untersuchungen zur Frühgeschichte von sophós und sophíe (Hildesheim: Olms, 1965). 9 Lisa Raphals, Knowing Words: Wisdom and Cunning in the Classical Traditions of China and Greece (New York: Cornell University Press, 1992).

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range of ideas on wisdom associated with intelligence, morality, and practical knowledge which are similar to those pertaining to the Greek tradition such as phrónesis, epistéme, areté, etc. In all cases, diverse definitions of “wisdom” were rooted in specific contexts and depended on the contesting meanings that different traditions were trying to institutionalize. When applying the concept of “wisdom literature” to the Greek or Chinese texts, it is necessary to take cognizance of these concerns. For the Greek case, the first task in this translation is to identify the genres within the existing corpus that could be considered part of “wisdom literature,” thus establishing what it is meant by “wisdom” and by “literature.” This decision should be made in part by mirroring the traditions of the Old Testament and of the Near East and in part by considering the Greek material. The Greek and Chinese traditions, for instance, not only include cosmogonies and proverbs, among other things, but also a series of texts—dramaturgical and historiographical, and a considerable number of commentaries. These texts provide additional information on the socio-historical dimension of this wisdom. In fact, a certain idea of “wisdom literature” could be identified from the attitudes toward knowledge and from the social practices that can be reconstructed from these texts. In speaking of wisdom literature with regard to the Greek and Chinese corpora, it is also possible to investigate the “praxis” of wisdom literature. Several decades ago, the theologian John L. McKenzie critically remarked that wisdom “is viewed too narrowly” when it is studied as “wisdom literature” and that one cannot learn by this study what the “living tradition of wisdom” was.10 This study precisely aims to show “the living tradition” of “wisdom literature” along with its practical dimension and the human attempt to produce artefacts (single oracular inscriptions, collections of oracles, books, commentaries), labelled as “oracular,” which reflect ‘divinely-constructed’ advice in certain ritualized contexts. Frequently, critics are interested in understanding the ‘text,’ the inherent wisdom enigmatically hidden in the words, while the praxis of institutionalization of this wisdom through technical and material means is omitted or considered to possess only minor significance. Leo Perdue has recently suggested that this shift in focus in the study of wisdom literature can be understood from the opposition between the idealist perspective, which has traditionally prevailed, and that of philosophical realism, which reconstructs social roles and locations from the literature and the material culture of the cultures of a given region. From this second perspective, the wisdom tradition cannot be understood “apart from the larger social history of the cultures in

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John L. McKenzie, “Reflections on Wisdom,” 2.

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which it took root and flourished.” According to Perdue, this also entails considering the understandings and changing roles of sages within a variety of social locations over the centuries within each culture.11 By taking into account this praxeological turn in the study of wisdom literature,12 this essay focuses on the material and on the local construction of a type of wisdom tradition whose origin is tied to divine authority. This type of wisdom tradition thus shares the same starting point with the textual type that the genre of “wisdom literature” represents in the Old Testament. This “wisdom literature” is of oracular origin and, given the foundational role that this institution used to have in ancient societies, its study may prove revealing in understanding how a certain wisdom tradition takes root and blooms in given periods, through different practices and technologies, and ends up constituting the core of what we recognize as the heritage of “one” culture today. Two examples can clarify this affirmation. Although different in origin, when compared, these examples make it possible to justify the idea of the material institutionalization of a wisdom tradition. The cases in point are the Yijing or Book of Changes, considered a paradigmatic corpus of a non-western wisdom literature, and the Greek oracular tradition of which we lack an established corpus.13 However, its socio-technical dimension can be recovered from other sources, which show the dynamics of its practice in the construction of legitimized meanings within a community. Rather than finding pure differences and similarities, the comparative approach seeks the complementarity of two cases. Focusing on the same question of literacy and on the construction of “wisdom literature” in Ancient Greece and Classical China, each case sheds light on the other, while contributing to broaden the understanding of each context. As mentioned above, both textual corpora are primarily recognized as products of a wisdom which is institutionalized as oracular or divinatory and which at a given moment— and, to a great extent, thanks to reification by writing technology—became autonomous from that field of knowledge and was adopted as a wisdom heritage for moral and political counsel. In this way, oracular literature as “divine” message, is not considered on the basis of a revealed “truth” nor measured

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Perdue, Wisdom Literature, 1–15. On recent discussions on the praxiological approach, see Frederike Elias, Albrecht Franz et al., eds., Praxeologie. Beiträge zur interdisziplinären Reichweite praxistheoretischer Ansätze in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014); Sven Reichardt, “Praxeologische Geschichtswissenschaft. Eine Diskussionsanregung,” Sozial. Geschichte 22, no. 3 (2007): 43–65. Except for the much latter Chaldean Oracles.

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through “divine inspiration,” but rather through the social construction of meanings, which are based on the cultural memory of the community as well as on the technical, institutional, and material means at the community’s disposal to establish symbolic and sapiential discourses. Here, the aim of the praxeological analysis is to equally understand the social-human character of oracular-divine technology and the technological-cognitive character of divination as a social practice. Lastly, the analysis includes comic, ironic, and relativist perspectives on wisdom and literacy from the Greek and the Chinese traditions (i.e., Aristophanic and Daoist). These perspectives are crucial to reflect on non-monolithical associations between wisdom and literature and to reveal the already existent tensions in the construction of “wisdom” since ancient times.

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Contesting Yijing: On Books and Unliterary Wisdom

If we leave aside a theological-idealist perspective, so that the label of “wisdom literature” is, in effect, more a way of cataloguing a series of texts than an intrinsic value in them, then the perspective of this work is oriented at the historicity or at the construction of these texts as “wisdom monuments” in terms of their material institutionalization by written, collectable, and archival means. The Yijing or Book of Changes could be indeed a useful example and a starting point in the framework of this alternative perspective on wisdom literature. Thus, an intercultural kind of inquiry takes on greater relevance, as formulated by Puett, on the application of indigenous or non-western perspectives to “overcome the potential biases in our current theoretical understandings.”14 In this regard, the Yijing could be labelled as “wisdom literature” because of its sapiential value since time immemorial, but also because of the reception, translation, and reappropriation of this “classic” in the West as “wisdom literature”. This appropriation, however, is not a recent phenomenon, but it rather goes back, as we shall see below, to a particular moment in the Chinese tradition in which early followers of Confucius autonomized the oracular-divinatory meanings of the Yijing to read their meanings with other purposes. That is, the Yijing as wisdom literature, and no longer as a divination manual, is something that early

14

See Michael Puett, “Ritualization as Domestication. Ritual Theory from Classical China,” in Grammars and Morphologies of Ritual Practices in Asia, eds. Axel Michaels, Anand Mishra, Lucia Dolce (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), 365. Michael Puett, “Innovation as Ritualization: The Fractured Cosmology of Early China,” Cardozo Law Review 28, no. 1 (2006): 23–36.

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Confucians formulated, and which explains the mutability of the written and the interpretable. In other words, it explains the mutability of texts as objects that contain writings and whose appropriation is tied to specific socio-cultural phenomena. The text is only recognizable because of the history of its transmission. The Yijing is, perhaps, one of the clearest cases of this supposition not only because of western appropriation and multiple translations, but also because of the renewed epigraphic reconstruction and the findings of recent decades. Thus, the comparative approach here diverges from other works that focus on the divinatory practice itself, such as Raphals’Divination and Prediction in Early China and Ancient Greece, and it is oriented towards understanding the codification and the uses of knowledge reified in books and recognized as wisdom literature. As recently as 1973, the discovery of the Mawangdui manuscript in the Han tomb in Changsha, Hunan, brought to light the oldest copy of the Yijing (168 bce) along with a considerable number of commentaries as well as other texts, which are considered classics.15 This discovery, which was only made public twenty years later in an incomplete and informal manner,16 poses several challenges to our understanding of wisdom literature. On the one hand, the oldest version of the Yijing, a manuscript that experts say has not entirely been made public, turned out to be an existing, but only partially accessible, version. However, this does not change its monumental significance. On the contrary, it reinforces its material value as an object. On the other hand, its discovery created the possibility of a new version (based on a more ancient, and therefore more “faithful” source, from a positivist perspective) that unbalances what has been instituted this far. Nor does this change the heritage value of the Yijing. It rather opens to new meanings and to new orderings of these meanings and it strengthens the incessant push for a definitive form of this literary monument. In terms of genre and form, little can be said about the reason why the Yijing should be considered wisdom literature, and even more revealing are the historical contexts that established this set of texts as “the text” representative of wisdom literature, be this context Confucius’s China or our own digitalized era. Two recent investigations, Richard Smith’s The I Ching: A Biog-

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Although it must be mentioned that fragments of an older manuscript of the Zhouyi (the hexagram and line statements of the Yijing, apparently no commentary) dated to about 300 bce were excavated and now exhibited in the Shanghai Museum. See Edward Shaughnessy, Unearthing the Changes: Recently Discovered Manuscripts of the Yi Jing (I Ching) and Related Texts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 189–280. Edward Shaughnessy, “A First Reading of the Mawangdui Yijing Manuscript,” Early China 19 (1994): 47–73.

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raphy and Edward Shaughnessy’s Unearthing the Changes: Recently Discovered Manuscripts of the Yi Jing (I Ching) and Related Texts reconstruct, precisely, this perspective of the institutionalization, appropriation, and recontextualization of the Yijing throughout its history.17 It is this constant textual reconstruction and deconstruction that makes it possible to study the Yijing not only as a mirror of the mind, because of the knowledge it offers, but also as a mirror of history according to Ts’ao Yu-ts’un in his I Hsueh Shih Ching.18 The Mawangdui find also presented us with another aspect relevant to our question about the formation of the Yijing as wisdom literature, one that is related to the moment in which the original oracular knowledge shifts and meanings are made autonomous for the purposes of advice or teaching. This finding brought such novelties as the Xici commentaries which also include other texts such as Yi zhi yi (“The Properties of the Changes”) and Yao (“The Essentials”). These commentaries treat the Yijing as a book of wisdom and less as a divinatory manual.19 This treatment relies on the systematization of divinatory judgments (gua) and explanations ( yao) around hexagrams in written form, which is what makes the Yijing a text, i.e., a book (shu).20 As Shaughnessy illustrates, the divergent uses of the Yijing as a book are attached to ideas of fixism and mutability in the core of linguistics turns occurring in the Chinese intellectual debates in the third century bce. According to the Daoist perspective of the Zhuangzi, books are but “a fossilized vestige of an earlier intellectual moment.”21 The Yao commentary reveals, for instance, the teachings of an elderly Confucius to his disciple Zi Gong. These “Confucian” teachings are evidence of a first step of written institutionalization of the Yijing and they fully carry the awareness of the role of literacy in the fixing of certain meanings.22 Moreover, they 17

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Richard Smith, The I Ching: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Edward Shaughnessy, Unearthing the Changes: Recently Discovered Manuscripts of the Yi Jing (I Ching) and Related Texts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). Tat Wei, An Exposition of the I-ching, or Book of Changes (Taipei: Institute of Cultural Studies, 1970), 372. Richard Rutt, The Book of Changes (Zhouyi): A Bronze Age Document (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1996), 35. Chung-ying Cheng, “Inquiring into the Primary Model: The Yi Jing and the Structure of the Chinse Hermeneutical Tradition,” in Interpretation and Intellectual Change, ed. Ching-I Tu (New York: Routledge, 2005), 326. Edward Shaughnessy, “The Writing of the Xici Zhuan and the Making of the Yijing,” in Measuring Historical Heat. Event, Performance and Impact in China and the West. Symposium in Honour of Rudolf Wagner, eds. aa. vv. (Heidelberg, 2001), 209–212. On the Confucian attribution of the Xici, see Ruiping Fan, Reconstructionist Confucianism: Rethinking Morality after the West (Berlin: Springer, 2010), 147–165.

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bring insights on how Yijing, becoming a wisdom book, changes the authority among experts as well. The Yao revolve explicitly around a use of the Yijing which is different from the divinatory one practiced by scribes and magicians. This shift in the oracular sphere to a consultative or sapiential practice is, I suggest, possible because of the material fixism of the written object. Once the oracular knowledge is no longer intrinsically embodied by an expert and is transferred to another materiality, such as writing, that transference creates new appropriations and contextualizations:23 Zi Gong said: “Does the Master also believe in milfoil divination?” The Master said: “I am right in seventy out of one hundred prognostications. Even the prognostications of Liang Shan of Zhou must also follow the majority and no more.” The Master said: “As for the Changes, I return to its prayers and divinations, but I view its virtue and propriety. Intuiting the commendations to reach the number, and understanding the number to reach virtue, is to have humaneness (?) and to put it into motion properly. If the commendations do not lead to the number, then one acts as a magician; if the number does not lead to virtue, then one acts as a scribe. The divinations of scribes and magicians tend toward it and yet are not quite there; delight in it and yet are not correct. Perhaps it will be because of the Changes that later generations will doubt me. I seek its virtue and nothing more. I am on the same road as the scribes and magicians but end up differently. How could it be that the conduct of the gentleman’s virtue is to seek blessings; that is why he sacrifices but little. How could it be that the righteousness of his humaneness is to seek auspiciousness; that is why he divines but rarely. When priests and magicians divine, what will the end be!”.24 Yijing, cols. 16–18

In earlier columns, Confucius warns about the use of what is said and written, and it is his dissatisfaction that motivates certain uses of books. However, literacy is fundamental for the transmission and conservation of this knowledge. Paradoxically, written transmission saves the old wisdom at risk from potential misinterpretation. Different communities of experts compete to establish the authoritative meanings of these texts.

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Shaughnessy, “A First Reading of the Mawangdui Yijing Manuscript,” 68–70. Translation by Edward Shaughnessy. See Shaughnessy, “A First Reading of the Mawangdui Yijing Manuscript,” 70.

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If you examine the essentials, this does not pervert its virtue. To the Book of Documents there are many hindrances, but the Zhouyi has not yet been lost. Moreover, there are ancient lost sayings in it. I am not content just with its use.25 Yijing, col. 12–14

The “Confucian” discontent reveals the tension between uses of wisdom texts among different communities of experts. The Daoist tradition provides relevant testimonies of the criticism towards understanding wisdom as based on literature, but they do it from another angle. Both Laozi and Zhuangzi were contemporary of the formation of the early Confucian tradition and what they sharply addressed was the crucial association between wisdom and literacy. As I explain below, the Daoist tradition emphasized the “unliterary essence” of wisdom and it thus tackled the graphocentrist core of the institutionalization of wisdom literature, i.e., the Yijing.26 This idea can be framed in Raphals’ conclusions on Daoist wisdom as “metaknowlegde” and “extralinguistic” intelligence.27 In an attack against linguistic conventions, Daoism sets a separation between language and wisdom because language, names, and propositional knowledge are based on conventions and thus condition the perception of reality. Following this Daoist precept, books, inscriptions, and ritualized speech as fixed language clearly take an opposite direction with respect to—what they consider—wisdom. A passage in the Zhuangzi strikingly shows the opposition between Confucian and Daoist perspectives on the subject. The staged Confucius reflects precisely upon a premeditated institutionalization of the classics as footprints of the sapiential heritage. The construction of a classic prevents the loss of the old sayings. The institutionalization secures, at the same time, its preservation, although, as Laozi warns, it does not guarantee their wisdom. Shaughnessy attributes this opposition to the incommensurability of thought and speech and to the mutable essence of life where written texts appear as “fixed” and thus “dead”.28

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27 28

Translated by Shaughnessy, “A First Reading of the Mawangdui Yijing Manuscript,” 70. See Talbot Taylor, Theorizing Language: Analysis, Normativity, Rhetoric, History (Amsterdam: Pergamon. 1997), 52; Roy Harris, Rethinking Writing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Roy Harris, Rationality and the Literate Mind (New York: Routledge, 2009). Cf. William Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1989). Lisa Raphals, Knowing Words, 50–70. Edward Shaughnessy, “The Writing of the Xici Zhuan and the Making of the Yijing,” 212.

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Confucius said to Lao Dan: “I have put in order the six classics, the Poetry, Documents, Ritual, Music, Changes, and Spring and Autumn, considering myself that I have done so for a long time and that I know well their reasons? Having sought out seventy-two lords, I have discoursed on the way of the former kings and the footprints of (dukes of) Zhou and Shao, but it has gone so far that not a single lord has accepted what I have had to say. Is the difficulty in persuading people because of the difficulty in understanding the Way?” Laozi said: “Fortunately for you you have not met with a lord who puts in order the age. The six classics are the old footprints of the former kings; how could they be what made the footprints? What you are now speaking about is nothing more than footprints. Footprints are what are produced by shoes; how could they be the shoes?”29 Zhuangzi, 5.26a–b

This image on the footprint recovers some post-modern criticism on graphocentrism in the Western tradition. In the Zhuangzi, 5.18s, there is a fairly wellknown passage that alludes to a wisdom that omits its linguistic transmission: “the one who knows does not speak, and the one who speaks does not know.”30 To understand the Dao, language is an insufficient medium. This same passage begins, however, with a reflection on writing. “People” confuse language, whether written in colors or forms, whether spoken with sounds or words, with wisdom. As Shaughnessy points out, this passage from the Zhuangzi concludes with an ironic twist. The graph zhi (“record,” “inscribe”) at the end of the quote paradoxically refers to the inscription of the same sentence “he who knows does not speak and he who speaks does not know:”31 The way that is valued by the world is writing. Writing is nothing more than language (or: writing does not surpass language). Language has something of value. What is valued in language is ideas. Ideas have that which they follow. That which ideas follow cannot be transmitted through speech. And yet because the world values speech it transmits writings. Although the world values them, they are not worth being valued. What is considered as valuable about them is not their value. Therefore, what you can see when you look at something is shape and color; what you can hear when you listen to something is words and sound. What a pity that 29 30 31

See Shaughnessy, “The Writing of the Xici Zhuan and the Making of the Yijing,” 209. Xiaogan Liu, “Zhuangzi’s Philosophy: A Three Dimensional Reconstruction,” in Dao Companion to Daoist Philosophy, ed. Xiogan Liu (Berlin: Springer, 2015), 211–218. Edward Shaughnessy, “The Writing of the Xici Zhuan and the Making of the Yijing,” 220.

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people of the world take shape and color, words and sounds to be sufficient to get the characteristics of that (i.e., the Dao or Way). Since shape and color, words and sounds are certainly insufficient to get the characteristics of that, then the one who knows does not speak, and the one who speaks does not know, yet does the world record this!32 Zhuangzi, 5.18a

Between the attempt at institutionalization of certain wisdom literatures and the negation of wisdom transmitted through oral and written language lies their difference in purpose. That is, what type of wisdom is established behind the conservation of texts understood as classics? What origin do these wisdoms have—as in the case of the oracular foundation of the Yijing and its subsequent autonomization? What place in tradition does hold a wisdom that cannot be passed on through oral language and ritual practices? By default, a wisdom literature without writing would inevitably modify our idea of wisdom. An anecdote recorded in the first comments on Laozi reflects ironically on the falseness of the association between wisdom and literature: Wang Shou was walking along carrying books, and saw Xu Feng on the road to Zhou. Feng said: “Service is doing, and doing is born from timeliness; one who knows timeliness is without any constant service. Books are words, and words are born from knowing; one who knows does not store books. Now why do you alone walk along carrying them?” With this Wang Shou accordingly burned his books and danced on them. Therefore, the knowing don’t use word-talk to teach, and the wise don’t store books.33 Han Feizi, 7.4a

This anecdote is evidence of the transference and appropriation of wisdom between the human body and mind and its transcription mediated materially and technologically in books and institutionalized frameworks. It shows the problematic character represented by the (human or non-human) material support for knowing as part of wisdom itself in an early period of Chinese literacy. Along these lines, a parable from Zhuangzi also reveals much about the practical transmission and understanding of the Dao, a task that was the greatest aspiration in the context of this tradition. As Denecke explains, the form 32 33

Translated by Shaughnessy, “The Writing of the Xici Zhuan and the Making of the Yijing,” 210. Translated by Shaughnessy, “The Writing of the Xici Zhuan and the Making of the Yijing,” 211.

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of storytelling in Zhuangzi proposes “fictional solutions to philosophical problems.” The anecdotes or parables presented in “The Great Master” are not just illustrations of one ultimate truth—and in this regard it is opposed to other contemporary sapiential traditions such as the Confucian or even the Laozi tradition—but rather they “incarnate” in themselves messages that “transcend logical paradox” “in fantastically creative ways.” Therefore, Denecke defines this type of transmission that eludes an affirmative style of sapience as the “art of negation”.34 The anecdote that appears in “The Great Master” can be read in this tone, but it also supports a reflection on the material transmission of wisdom, which appears to have been a fairly contemporary problem in Ancient China. “The Great Master” episode which I am referring to begins with praise for the youthful appearance of the old man Nü-yü, who in response to Nan-po Tzu-k’uei’s question about the secret to his youthful looks says that he learned the Dao. Nan-po Tzu-k’uei then asks again if it is possible to learn the Dao and receives a negative response. Yü tells him about a certain state in which one gradually understands the different levels of the Dao the apogee of which is maintaining tranquillity in chaos. Nan-po Tzu-k’uei asks again where he learned this and Nü-yü’s answer gives an interesting gradation in the transmission and development of wisdom going from the written word as an autonomous object to the ritual context and the individual and embodied revelation of origins: “Where did you learn this?” asked Nan-po Tzu-k’uei. “I learned it from the son of Aided-by-Ink,” Nü-yü said. “The son of Aided-by-Ink learned it from the grandson of Repeated Recitation, the grandson of Repeated Recitation learned it from Clear Understanding, Clear Understanding learned it from Whispering, Whispering learned it from Earnest Practice, Earnest Practice learned it from Joyful Singing, Joyful Singing learned it from Participation in Mistery (hsüanming),35 Participation in Mistery learned it from Penetration of Vacuity, and Penetration of Vacuity learned it from Doubtful Beginning.”36 Zhuangzi

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Wiebke Denecke, The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi. (Cambridge [MA]: Princeton University Press, 2010), 277. Originally, hsüanming translated as “Noumenon”. For an explanation, see Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Cambridge [MA]: Princeton University Press, 1963), 788. For the translation, see Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, 196.

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This gradation can be interpreted as a postulation that is diachronic and synchronic at once. That is, either one can extract an evolutionary description of human sapience in the Dao and the material and technological media that transmitted it over time based on the equation son-grandson-great-grandson, etc.,37 or what Nü-yü’s answer suggests is a sapiential method or warning about understanding the Dao, especially considering the new bibliophile optimism of the period and other traditions that made its literature the means of knowledge. In relation to the anecdote recorded in the first comments of Laozi mentioned above, this passage also appears to attack the automatic relationship between “wisdom” and “literature” from an idealist and graphocentric perspective. According to this episode in Zhuangzi, writing is the ultimate expression of a sapiential process the origin of which goes back in the first instance to different social and individual practices, going from recitation to self-cultivation and participation in mystery.38 These first sources of wisdom value oral communication but, above all, rituals and introspection, which are forms of understanding without language (both written and oral). The somewhat parodic neologisms of this family tree do not deny the value of literacy itself, which is given its due place among other forms of transmission. But Zhuangzi especially places literacy as a child, as an infant, and to a certain degree, mirroring the stages described in Nü-yü’s first answer, it subordinates it to the other sapiential instances. This episode of Zhuangzi appears to warn, then, that literacy may be a first approach to understanding the Dao, but it may also be a mirage for finding wisdom if one does not go beyond the book object and even the words themselves. This perspective on the means of attaining the Dao, or the upper level of wisdom, are consistent with the cosmological claim that supports the Zhuangzi. The basis of the Zhuangzi is a “gnosis involving a breaking of boundaries and yet, at the same time, an acceptance of the patterns of Heaven” and its aim is a “call for humanity to become uncaged”.39 Books as material things can be traps for wisdom and, consequently, the last degree for understanding the Dao is found in the introspection that frees wisdom from dependence on books. This warning resonates as a response to sapiential traditions concerned with canonizing literature and institutionalizing meanings such as “wisdom.” The

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Chung Wu, The wisdom of Zhuang Zi on Daoism (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 100. Xiaogan Liu, “Zhuangzi’s Philosophy,” 207–218; Lee Yearley, “Zhuangzi’s Understanding of Skillfulness and the Ultimate Spiritual State,” in Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi, eds. Paul Kjellberg and Philip J. Ivanhoe (Albany [NY]: suny Press, 1996), 152–182. Michael Puett, To Become a God. Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China (Cambridge [MA]: Princeton University Press, 2002), 132–133.

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institutionalization of the Classics is part of this problem, and as these Daoist reflections show, it goes back to the first moments of the spread of literacy. The Yijing may be one of the first paradigmatic cases of both its institutionalization and the constant dynamic of de- and re-constructing its meanings. Therefore, a more skeptical view of this institutionalization as “wisdom literature” is nonetheless a relevant contemporary testimony as a contrast to understand that, to a great extent, what is considered wisdom is wisdom because it is literature, and that the concept surrounding “wisdom literature” is a method for producing, precisely, that type of “wisdom”. The Yijing as an object is a depository of ancestral knowledge of oracular origin but the meanings of its wisdom transcend the objective reality of the book and the oracular institution. However, the book, its material institutionalization, and the successive traditions that commented on it are the arena in which its meanings and interpretations are created in specific socio-cultural contexts. There is a mutable and dynamic relationship between the sapiential heritage represented by certain moral and cultural values and institutionalizations in different historical contexts. The meanings of the Yijing were not always the same nor do they contain innate meanings, as an idealist perspective would think of it. This same reflection on the mutability and materiality of what is thus considered wisdom is something that can also be recognized in the Greek oracular tradition of the classical period, even with a greater descriptive degree of the written institutionalization process. There is no doubt that the reflection on literacy in Ancient Greece is not entirely new. However, certain precepts of a graphocentric or scriptist point of view prevailed, justifying themselves in an idealist perspective.40 Precisely, a praxeological perspective, based on the interaction between the material and the mediality and the ideas or knowledge that they carry, would make it possible to understand the degree of construction of a certain wisdom as “wisdom literature”. The case of the Yijing as institutionalized “literature,” and as part of the heritage of a culture, serves as

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“Rosalind Thomas speaks of a ‘rationalist view of writing’ in connexion with ancient Greece (Thomas R. 1992: 74). But what it has to do with rationalism is not clear, since what she counts as ‘rationalist’ uses of writing seem to cover every kind of case except those which are ‘symbolic or non-documentary’. Even more confusingly, she describes these latter uses (e.g. writing on curse tablets) as ‘non-literate’. These are not happy choices of terminology. They are nevertheless worth mentioning here because they highlight the still-prevalent tendency among Western scholars to assume without question that the mastery of writing is eo ipso a manifestation of reasoning, and literacy itself a proof of possessing a rational mind. We are dealing here with survivals of the 19th-century belief in the mental inferiority of preliterate people.” See Harris, Rationality and the Literate Mind, 14.

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a complement to analyze a type of knowledge recognized as such, the textual transmission of which is however wanting. The Greek oracular tradition lacks a recognized canonical text (with the exception of the much later Chaldean Oracles) and there only remain testimonies of its practice. However, instead of denying the possibility of studying Greek oracles as wisdom literature, this justifies the analysis of the praxis of a certain wisdom literature or the “living tradition” of oracular wisdom.

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Oracular Wisdom and Its Written Institutionalization in Classical Athens

One of the oldest testimonies regarding the activity of Greek oracular wisdom can be found in Herodotus’s Histories. This testimony portrays somewhat completely certain elements from which it is possible to reconstruct part of the oracular institution. Recent studies also consider that the style and inclusion of oracular tradition not only were portrayed in Herodotus’ history, but indeed constituted the very storytelling art by means of which Herodotus built his authority.41 Indeed, aside from doubts about the veracity of the oracles narrated in Histories as fabrications ex eventu, what shows their (quasi) historiographical use is the acceptance and belief in the fifth century bce of the roles of the oracles for the functioning of the Greek cities and for the community’s storytelling. In this respect, the ambiguous and polysemous character of the oracular institution is precisely one of the elements that Herodotus was concerned with constructing in his Histories. Because of this, what recent critics have considered is not the degree of historicity or authenticity in the oracles cited by Herodotus, but their representation of the cultural values of oracular episodes in Classical Athens.42 The story of the oracular consultation by King Croesus of Lydia is paradigmatic of this perspective in the study of Herodotus’s work. This story is found at the beginning of his Histories, setting a stylistic pattern for the telling of orac41

42

Thomas Harrison, Divinity and History The Religion of Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Julia Kindt, “Delphic Oracle Stories and the Beginning of Historiography: Herodotus’ Croesus Logos,” Classical Philology 101, no. 1 (2006): 34–51. Elton Barker. “Paging the Oracle: Interpretation, Identity and Performance in Herodotus’ History,” Greece & Rome 53, no. 1 (2006): 2; Liza Maurizio, “Delphic Oracles as Oral Performance: Authenticity and Historical Evidence,” Classical Antiquity 16, no. 2 (1997): 308– 334; Alexander Hollmann, The Master of Signs: Signs and the Interpretation of Signs in Herodotus’ Histories (Washington, DC: Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2011).

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ular episodes and for the genre that Herodotus himself was creating:43 there is a reason given for his consultation, the ritual processes of his embassy are carried out, the oracular response is produced, it is interpreted in different ways, a decision is taken, offerings are made, the results of that decision are seen and, where necessary, the oracle is interpreted again. Given that Croesus puts the wisdom of the oracles to the test, this account confronts the king, the ruler, with divine wisdom, showing the limits of human power. As part of this pattern, Herodotus also presents different interpretations of the oracle and shows how these influenced successive decisions and events. He thus establishes, for political-didactic ends, a scheme for the reader in which account, event, and interpretation are interrelated, thus suggesting a reflective attitude towards signs and history. This is due, in part, to the very authority of the oracles in Ancient Greece, since this is core evidence for the demonstration and exemplification of historical narration, both for its written inscription and for the collective oral memory that remembered the oracular responses in crucial situations. Considering, then, that Croesus’ oracular consultation is essential to Herodotus’ Histories, in terms of style, narration, and motifs, the attitude and explanation of the oral and the written in this episode may also prove paradigmatic. In analyzing the scene of the first consultation of the Pythia, certain elements that describe the oracular practice “between” the oral and the written can be identified. These elements can also be associated with later representations: ἐντειλάμενος δὲ τοῖσι Λυδοῖσι τάδε ἀπέπεμπε ἐς τὴν διάπειραν τῶν χρηστηρίων, ἀπ᾽ ἧςἂν ἡμέρης ὁρμηθέωσι ἐκ Σαρδίων, ἀπὸ ταύτης ἡμερολογέοντας τὸν λοιπὸν χρόνον ἑκατοστῇ ἡμέρῃ χρᾶσθαι τοῖσι χρηστηρίοισι, ἐπειρωτῶντας ὅ τι ποιέων τυγχάνοι ὁ Λυδῶνβασιλεὺς Κροῖσος ὁ Ἀλυάττεω: ἅσσα δ᾽ ἂν ἕκαστα τῶν χρηστηρίων θεσπίσῃ, συγγραψαμένους ἀναφέρειν παρ᾽ ἑωυτόν. ὅ τι μέν νυν τὰ λοιπὰ τῶν χρηστηρίων ἐθέσπισε, οὐ λέγεται πρὸς οὐδαμῶν: ἐν δὲ Δελφοῖσι ὡς ἐσῆλθον τάχιστα ἐς τὸ μέγαρον οἱ Λυδοὶ χρησόμενοι τῷ θεῷ καὶ ἐπειρώτων τὸ ἐντεταλμένον, ἡ Πυθίη ἐν ἑξαμέτρῳ τόνῳ λέγει τάδε. “οἶδα δ᾽ ἐγὼ ψάμμου τ᾽ ἀριθμὸν καὶ μέτρα θαλάσσης, καὶ κωφοῦ συνίημι, καὶ οὐ φωνεῦντος ἀκούω. ὀδμή μ᾽ ἐς φρένας ἦλθε κραταιρίνοιο χελώνης ἑψομένης ἐν χαλκῷ ἅμ᾽ ἀρνείοισι κρέεσσιν, ᾗ χαλκὸς μὲν ὑπέστρωται, χαλκὸν δ᾽ ἐπιέσται.” ταῦτα οἱ Λυδοὶ

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Roland Crahay, Hérodote (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1956); Hans Klees, Die Eigenart des griechischen Glaubens an Orakel und Seher (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1963); Jutta Kirchberg, Die Funktion der Orakel im Werke Herodots (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965); Todd Compton, “The Herodotean Mantic Session at Delphi,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, Neue Folge 137, no. 3–4 (1994): 217–223.

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θεσπισάσης τῆς Πυθίης συγγραψάμενοι οἴχοντο ἀπιόντες ἐς τὰς Σάρδις. ὡς δὲ καὶ ὧλλοι οἱ περιπεμφθέντες παρῆσαν φέροντες τοὺς χρησμούς, ἐνθαῦτα ὁ Κροῖσος ἕκαστα ἀναπτύσσων ἐπώρα τῶν συγγραμμάτων, τῶν μὲν δὴ οὐδὲν προσίετό μιν: ὁ δὲ ὡς τὸ ἐκ Δελφῶν ἤκουσε, αὐτίκα προσεύχετό τε καὶ προσεδέξατο, νομίσας μοῦνον εἶναι μαντήιον τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖσι, ὅτι οἱ ἐξευρήκεε τὰ αὐτὸς ἐποίησε. ἐπείτε γὰρ δὴ διέπεμψε παρὰ τὰ χρηστήρια τοὺς θεοπρόπους, φυλάξας τὴν κυρίηντῶν ἡμερέων ἐμηχανᾶτο τοιάδε: ἐπινοήσας τὰ ἦν ἀμήχανον ἐξευρεῖν τε καὶ ἐπιφράσασθαι, χελώνην καὶ ἄρνα κατακόψας ὁμοῦ ἧψε αὐτὸς ἐν λέβητι χαλκέῳ, χάλκεον ἐπίθημα ἐπιθείς. τὰ μὲν δὴ ἐκ Δελφῶν οὕτω τῷ, Κροίσῳ ἐχρήσθη: κατὰ δὲ τὴν Ἀμφιάρεω τοῦ μαντηίου ὑπόκρισιν, οὐκ ἔχω εἰπεῖν ὅ τι τοῖσι Λυδοῖσι ἔχρησε ποιήσασι περὶ τὸ ἱρὸν τὰ νομιζόμενα (οὐ γὰρ ὦν οὐδὲ τοῦτο λέγεται, ἄλλο γε ἢ ὅτι καὶ τοῦτο ἐνόμισε μαντήιον ἀψευδὲςἐκτῆσθαι.) Histories i. 47.1–49.1

And when he sent to make trial of these shrines he gave the Lydians this charge: they were to keep count of the time from the day of their leaving Sardis, and on the hundredth day inquire of the oracles what Croesus, king of Lydia, son of Alyattes, was then doing; then they were to write down whatever were the oracular answers and bring them back to him. Now none relate what answer was given by the rest of the oracles. But at Delphi, no sooner had the Lydians entered the hall to inquire of the god and asked the question with which they were charged, than the Pythian priestess uttered the following hexameter verses: Grains of sand I reckon and measure the spaces of ocean, Hear when dumb men speak, and mark the speech of the silent. What is it now that I smell? ’tis a tortoise mightily armoured Sodden in vessel of bronze, with a lamb’s flesh mingled together: Bronze thereunder is laid and a mantle of bronze is upon it. Having written down this inspired utterance of the Pythian priestess, the Lydians went away back to Sardis. When the others as well who had been sent to diverse places came bringing their oracles, Croesus then unfolded and surveyed all the writings. Some of them in no wise satisfied him. But when he heard the Delphian message, he acknowledged it with worship and welcome, considering that Delphi was the only true place of divination, because it had discovered what he himself had done. For after sending his envoys to the oracles, he bethought him of a device which no conjecture could discover, and carried it out on the appointed day: namely, he cut up a tortoise and a lamb, and then himself boiled them in a caldron of bronze covered with a lid of the same. Such then was the answer from Delphi delivered to Croesus. As to the reply which the Lydi-

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ans received from the oracle of Amphiaraus when they had followed the due custom of the temple, I cannot say what it was, for nothing is recorded of it, saving that Croesus held that from this oracle too he had obtained a true answer.44 This passage from The Histories recounts Croesus’ procedure for consulting oracles. Beside the singularity of putting to test different oracular centers, the means through which communication between Croesus and the Pythia occurred are also described to provide a background for the episode. Unlike later scenes on the same subject, the means of communication are described with an emphasis on the procedure for recording it. Therefore, as the first consultation is oracular, this detail in the description may be considered of a paradigmatic nature. On the one hand, the question asked by the embassy is oral, as is the Pythia’s answer, which is given in hexameters. On the other hand, on numerous occasions there is a reference to the written nature of the oracular answers. Firstly, Croesus makes his order explicit to note down the answers. Secondly, the Pythia’s answer is transcribed. Thirdly, when the embassy returns, Croesus unrolls the pieces of papyrus where the oracles are written. Although there are registers of oracular answers in the sixth century bce, this representation of the oracular consultation must not be interpreted in a linear fashion. The description of the written recording of the oracles may not have belonged to the oracular practices of the sixth century bce and could form part of the imagery about writing that Herodotus projected from the fifth century bce. The specification of the recitation “in hexameters” shows more of an ad hoc aesthetic-generic comment used by Herodotus than a historiographical need. This “learned” consciousness of the language makes it possible to suppose an attitude inclined towards reflection on the quality of what is written, in keeping with Herodotus’s interests and his self-presentation as a “writer.” Despite these methodological concerns, this episode portrays at least the way in which the use of writing could be collectively represented in the oracular practice of the fifth century bce. To draw a line between the sixth and fourth centuries bce that makes tangible a certain continuity in the usual procedures of oracular practice, one can mention an inscription in a block of limestone found near Olynthus and dating from 357/6bce.45 This inscription, bearing witness to the alliance between 44

45

Translation, with changes, by Alfred Denis Godley, ed. and trans., Herodotus (London: William Heinemann: 1920), with changes, 1:52–55. For an interpretation of this passage, see Kindt, “Delphic Oracle Stories and the Beginning of Historiography: Herodotus’ Croesus Logos.” Classical Philology 101, no. 1 (2006). Hatzopoulos, Mac. Inst. ii 2.

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Philip ii of Macedonia and the Chalcidians, includes a Delphic oracle and the ritual procedures performed for their communication and conservation such as their offerings and the temples involved in them. Specifically, the inscription orders the recording of the oaths (l. 7, ὅρκια) and of the oracle in steles (l. 7, τὰ] δ̣ὲ γράμμ[α]τα̣ τάδε γράψαι κη [στή]λην) and the distribution and preservation of copies in the temples of Artemis in Olynthus, of Olympian Zeus in Diurno and in Delphil. 10–11, (Φίλιππον δ᾽ ἐ]ν Δίοι ἐς [τὸ] ἱερὸν το̣ῦ Διὸς τ[οῦ] Ὀ̣λυμπίου, καὶ ἐς Δελφοὺς μα- [ντείης τε καὶ στήλης ἀντíγρα]φα θεῖναι.). These inscriptions can only be used actively during a period of three months (τῶν δὲ γραμμάτ[ω]ν τῶνδ᾽ ἐξεῖν κοινῶι λόγωι χρό-[νωι πρíων μηνῶν (?)διορθοῦσθαι ὅ]τι ἂν δοκῆι Φιλίπ̣ πωι καὶ ̣ [Χαλ]κιδεῦσι.), then they remain as “monuments” of this consultation. Unlike the answer that Croesus received, the oracle of Philip ii and the Macedonians was not in hexameters, nor did it have figurative images. Nonetheless, what both testimonies reveal is the role of written institutionalization in the oracular practices of Ancient Greece. The transcription of the oracular answer formed part of its practice at least from the fifth century bce and most likely from the sixth century bce. Likewise, the possibility of writing allowed the oracular word to be moved in relatively reliable way between the temple and the polis, or, as I shall analyze below, in an itinerant manner. In the case of an inscription, the material on which it was recorded also constituted a monument to the agreement between Philip ii and the Macedonians, which makes it an archive and heritage of the community. On the conservation and archive of the oracles, Herodotus also reveals another aspect of their representation with his account of Onomacritus (vii. 6), chresmologue and “editor” of oracles. Just as the Croesus episode offers one of the first testimonies of the Pythia, being the emblem of oracular authority, in the Histories oracular wisdom also appears through another character type: Onomacritus. This testimony features the oldest presentation of a chresmologue: an expert in oracular knowledge who does not necessarily belong to a temple, but who wanders through the cities or accompanies large houses where he works as an advisor legitimized by his authority in sacred matters. This type of professional diviner provides his services independently of an institution.46 Although chresmologue and mán46

Robert Garland, “Religious Authority in Archaic and Classical Athens,” The Annual of the British School at Athens 79 (1984): 75–123; Robert Parker, Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Michael Flower, The Seer in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). John Dillery, “Chresmologues and Manteis: Independent Diviners and the Problem of Authority,” in Mantikê, eds. Sarah Johnston and Peter Struck (Leiden: Brill. 2015), 167–231; Kai Trampedach and Beate Dignas, Practitioners of the Divine. Greek Priests and Religious Officials from Homer to Heliodorus (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2008).

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tis are not always mutually exclusive terms, they engage in the mantic-oracular enterprise differently. The former is identified with oracular knowledge, knowledge tied specifically to reproducing and interpreting ainígmata, while the second is concerned with the interpretation of birds and sacrificial entrails. The seers, as experts that share a line of work similar to that of the chresmologue, are also presented as “independent professionals” both by Plato and Isocrates.47 Although posterior to the Onomacritus passage in Herodotus, these testimonies indicate the work independent of the temple that can be done by mantic-oracular experts. Likewise, the literal translation of the Greek term chresmologos does not fully express the expertise of this subject. The problem is not so much due to its etymology, but rather to the value given to its suffix. While the meaning of -logos as “reader”, “reciter,” or “connoisseur” of oracles is the one generally accepted, it does not do justice to his undeniable influence in Ancient Greece if he is treated as a mere oral reproducer of texts or as the equivalent of an aoidós in religious matters. On the contrary, the meaning of what he preached should also be emphasized; that is, the chresmologue’s capacity to use the ancestral knowledge of the oracular traditions according to the context in which they were used. Indeed, as I illustrate below, his capacity for (re)writing this tradition should be considered. Another anachronistic term, but one that sums up the different knowledges of his practice, could also be that of “expert” in oracles. The episode of Onomacritus told by Herodotus (vii.6) shows, precisely, these characteristics and the value of written institutionalization in the oracular practices of Ancient Greece: τοῦτο μὲν ἀπὸ τῆς Θεσσαλίης παρὰ τῶν Ἀλευαδέων ἀπιγμένοι ἄγγελοι ἐπεκαλέοντο βασιλέα πᾶσαν προθυμίην παρεχόμενοι ἐπὶ τὴν Ἑλλάδα: οἱ δὲ Ἀλευάδαι οὗτοι ἦσαν Θεσσαλίης βασιλέες. τοῦτο δὲ Πεισιστρατιδέων οἱ ἀναβεβηκότες ἐς Σοῦσα, τῶν τε αὐτῶν λόγων ἐχόμενοι τῶν καὶ οἱ Ἀλευάδαι, καὶ δή τι πρὸς τούτοισι ἔτι πλέον προσωρέγοντό οἱ: ταῦτα ἔλεγε οἷα νεωτέρων ἔργων ἐπιθυμητὴς ἐὼν καὶ θέλων αὐτὸς τῆς Ἑλλάδος ὕπαρχος εἶναι. χρόνῳ δὲ κατεργάσατό τε καὶ ἀνέπεισε ὥστεποιέειν ταῦτα Ξέρξην: συνέλαβε γὰρ καὶ ἄλλα οἱ σύμμαχα γενόμενα ἐς τὸπείθεσθαι Ξέρξην. ἔχοντες Ὀνομάκριτον ἄνδρα Ἀθηναῖον, χρησμολόγον τε καὶ διαθέτην χρησμῶν τῶν Μουσαίου, ἀναβεβήκεσαν, τὴν ἔχθρην προκαταλυσάμενοι. ἐξηλάσθη γὰρ ὑπὸ Ἱππάρχου τοῦ Πεισιστράτου ὁ Ὀνομάκριτος ἐξ Ἀθηνέων, ἐπ᾽ αὐτοφώρῳ ἁλοὺς ὑπὸ Λάσου τοῦ Ἑρμιονέος ἐμποιέων ἐς τὰ Μουσαίου χρησμόν, ὡς αἱ ἐπὶ Λήμνῳ ἐπικείμεναι νῆσοι ἀφανιζοίατο κατὰ47

In the Republic ii 364b, it is said that begging priests and seers (ἀγύρται δὲ καὶ μάντεις) knock on the doors of rich families (ἐπὶ πλουσίων θύρας), persuading them to remedy their own shortcomings and those of their ancestors.

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τῆς θαλάσσης. διὸ ἐξήλασέ μιν ὁ Ἵππαρχος, πρότερον χρεώμενος τὰ μάλιστα. τότε δὲσυναναβὰς ὅκως ἀπίκοιτο ἐς ὄψιν τὴν βασιλέος, λεγόντων τῶν Πεισιστρατιδέων περὶ αὐτοῦ σεμνοὺς λόγους, κατέλεγε τῶν χρησμῶν: εἰμέν τι ἐνέοι σφάλμα φέρον τῷ βαρβάρῳ, τῶν μὲν ἔλεγε οὐδέν, ὁ δὲ τὰ εὐτυχέστατα ἐκλεγόμενος ἔλεγε τόν τε Ἑλλήσποντον ὡς ζευχθῆναι χρεὸνεἴη ὑπ᾽ ἀνδρὸς Πέρσεω, τήν τε ἔλασιν ἐξηγεόμενος. οὗτός τε δὴ χρησμῳδέων προσεφέρετο καὶ οἵ τε Πεισιστρατίδαι καὶ οἱ Ἀλευάδαι γνώμας ἀποδεικνύμενοι. Histories vii. 6–7

This he said, because he desired adventures, and would himself be viceroy of Hellas. And at the last he so wrought upon and over-persuaded Xerxes that the king was moved to do as he said; for there were other things too that allied themselves to aid in winning Xerxes’ consent. Firstly, there came messengers out of Thessaly from the Aleuadae (who were princes of Thessaly) with all earnestness inviting the king into Hellas; and secondly, those of the house of Pisistratus who had come up to Susa did likewise, using the same pleas as the Aleuadae, and offering Xerxes besides even more than they. With these came Onomacritus, an Athenian oraclemonger and arranger of the oracles of Musaeus; with him they had come, being now reconciled to him after their quarrel: for Onomacritus had been banished from Athens by Pisistratus’ son Hipparchus, having been caught by Lasus of Hermione in the act of interpolating in the oracles of Musaeus an oracle showing that the islands of Lemnos should disappear into the sea. For this cause, Hipparchus banished him, though before that they had been close friends. Now he came to Susa with Pisistratus’ kin; and whensoever he came into the king’s presence they would use high language concerning him and he would recite from his oracles; all that portended disaster to the Persian he left unspoken, but chose out and recited such prophecies as were most favourable, telling of the Hellespont, how it must be bridged by a man of Persia, and how the host should march. So Xerxes was beset by Onomacritus with his oracles, and by the Pisistratidae and Aleuadae with their counsels.48 This short story about Onomacritus allows us to extract a number of aspects that made up the image of an expert in oracular wisdom. Firstly, the relationship with an important family, the Peisistratids, is evident, a relationship which in turn is dependent upon his reliability.49 Secondly, the type of knowledge 48 49

Translation, with changes, by Alfred Denis Godley, ed. and trans., Herodotus (London: William Heinemann: 1920), 3:304–307. On the propagandistic use of oracles by Pisistratids, see Alan Shapiro, “Oracle-Mongers in

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that Onomacritus practices holds a degree of legitimacy, but it also reveals a veil of suspicion about its possible manipulation and suitable uses. Thirdly, his practice is described as that of an “expert” (χρησμόλογος) and “editor” or “arranger” (διαθέτης) of the oracles of the legendary mántis Musaeus. In this way, Herodotus ascribes Onomacritus’ authority to the mythical seer, while at the same time describing a process of monumentalization of that tradition through writing.50 Instead of monumentalization, this could also be thought of as a “hoarding” of oracular knowledge, an aspect described in Aristophanes’ comedy Knights (1000–1001). Likewise, this transcription reinforces the authority of Onomacritus by making him an oral “and” written expert on the oracular tradition of Musaeus in a context in which literacy begins to have a symbolic value. Fourthly, Onomacritus’s expertise is questioned on two occasions, which explains the relationship of cooperation and exclusion between the knowledge of the rulers and of the priests and the possible punishments for fraudulent displays of expertise. These warnings about bad practices not only make up prototypical aspects that can be traced in subsequent testimonies,51 but they also reflect the collective perspective of the construction of authority and expertise, a perspective that Herodotus himself reproduces in recounting the life of Onomacritus. For example, the topic of the islands in oracular practice is tied to the colonization and military expedition on which the seers and chresmologues were consulted.52 Such is the case of the verses inserted-created (ἐμποιέω) by Onomacritus about the islands of Lemnos disappearing into the sea (αἱ ἐπὶ Λήμνῳ ἐπικείμεναι νῆσοι ἀφανιζοίατο κατὰ τῆς θαλάσσης). In Knights (1033–1034),

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Peisistratid Athens,” Kernos 3 (1990): 335–345; Martin Nilsson, Cults, Myths, Oracles, and Politics in Ancient Greece (New York: Paul Forlag Astroms, 1972). Rosalind Thomas, Oral tradition and written record in classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1989), 74–127. Soph. Ant. 1033–1061; Soph. ot 380–403; Eur. Bacchae vv. 255–257. Cf. Elton Barker. “Paging the Oracle,” Leslie Kurke, “Counterfeit Oracles and Legal Tender: The Politics of Oracular Consultation in Herodotus,” The Classical World 102, no. 4 (2009): 417–438. Mario Lombardo, “Delfi e la colonizzazione in occidente,” in Ethne, identità e tradizioni: la terza Grecia e l’Occidente, eds. Luisa Breglia et al. (Pisa: ets, 2001), 139–159. Irad Malkin, Religion and Colonisation in Ancient Greece (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 1–113; Irad Malkin, “Delphoi and the Founding of Social Order in Archaic Greece,” Metis 4 (1989): 129–153; Irad Malkin, “La fondation d’une colonie Apollienne: Delphes et l’Hymne Homérique à Apollon,” Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique, Suppl. 36: Delphes: Cent ans après la Grande fouille (2000): 69–77; Carol Dougherty, “When Rain Falls from the Clear Blue Sky: Riddles and Colonization Oracles,” Classical Antiquity 11, no. 1 (1992): 28–44; Carol Dougherty, The Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Archaic Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1–82; Arthur Stanley Pease, “Notes on the Delphic Oracle and Greek Colonization,” Classical Philology 12 (1917), 1–20.

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one of the oracles read by the Sausage Seller before Paphlagonian and Demos also warns that the sacred oracle-biting dog might devour some islands in the night, coming and going to and from the kitchen.53 Whether this is a coincidence or not between Herodotus and Aristophanes, one of the aspects of oracular authority that aroused suspicion in the community and its collective memory alludes to their influence, precisely, for “making islands disappear” or “devouring” them. Other aspects of the dynamics of oracular knowledge can also be extracted from Herodotus’ account of the Onomacritus episode. These would be reflected in the role of seers and chresmologues in the Greek cities and, particularly, in their good and fraudulent uses. These uses were tied to Onomacritus’ expert knowledge, which consisted in (re)producing and interpreting ainígmata and, even in the period of written institutionalization, in compiling and hoarding the tradition to which they belonged. The last of the fraudulent uses described by Herodotus is, perhaps, the most popular one. It is associated with “oraculizing” and prophesying what the client, in this case the Peisistratids, wants or needs to hear. Thus, the chresmologue played down the negatives and shared the favourable oracles. Herodotus’ perspective contrasts with that of his clients, as it is they who praise the chresmologue’s authority, a symbolic capital that enhances the power, fame and, consequently, the subsistence of the seers. While Herodotus reveals the chresmologue’s fraud, the Peisistratids praise the fitting use of his authority. This event contrasts with that fraudulent one that, on the contrary, is punished by Onomacritus’ exile. On this occasion, the chresmologue is caught creating-inserting (ἐμποιέω) an oracle into the tradition of Musaeus. This fraudulent use of oracular knowledge raises two issues: the monopolization of oracular knowledge and the reliability of the socio-technical means that conserve and reproduce it.54 In this respect, another episode of Herodotus’ Histories (v. 90) reveals the value of written oracle collections to rulers; indeed, it alludes to the collections commissioned by the Peisistratids themselves:

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‘He will go frequently to thy kitchen, and dog-fashion, without thy being aware, will by night lick the plates and the islands clean’; ἐσφοιτῶν τ᾽ ἐς τοὐπτάνιον λήσει σε κυνηδὸν / νύκτωρ τὰς λοπάδας καὶ τὰς νήσους διαλείχων. Veit Rosenberger, Griechische Orakel. Eine Kulturgeschichte (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001), 168. On the sacralization of writing in Ancient Greece, see also, Albert Henrichs, “‘Hieroi Logoi’ and ‘Hierai Bibloi’: The (Un)Written Margins of the Sacred in Ancient Greece,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 101 (2003): 207–266; and Roland Baumgarten, Heiliges Wort und Heilige Schrift bei den Griechen: Hieroi Logoi und verwandte Erscheinungen (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1998).

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ἔτι τε πρὸς τούτοισι ἐνῆγον σφέας οἱ χρησμοὶ λέγοντες πολλά τε καὶ ἀνάρσια ἔσεσθαι αὐτοῖσι ἐξ Ἀθηναίων, τῶν πρότερον μὲν ἦσαν ἀδαέες, τότε δὲ Κλεομένεος κομίσαντος ἐς Σπάρτην ἐξέμαθον. ἐκτήσατο δὲ ὁ Κλεομένης ἐκ τῆς Ἀθηναίων ἀκροπόλιος τοὺς χρησμούς, τοὺς ἔκτηντο μὲνπρότερον οἱ Πεισιστρατίδαι, ἐξελαυνόμενοι δὲ ἔλιπον ἐν τῷ ἱρῷ, καταλειφθέντας δὲ ὁ Κλεομένης ἀνέλαβε. Histories v. 90

Furthermore, they were moved by the oracles which foretold that many deeds of enmity would be done against them by the Athenians; of which oracles they had till now no knowledge; but now Cleomenes had brought them to Sparta, and the Lacedaemonians learnt their content. Cleomenes possessed himself of the oracles from the Athenian acropolis; the Pisistratids had possessed them till then, but when they were driven out, they left them in the temple, and being left behind they were regained by Cleomenes.55 Herodotus does not explicitly name Onomacritus and Musaeus, but he does refer to the oracles—in plural, χρησμούς—that were kept in the Acropolis— specifying the place where they were kept, ἐν τῷ ἱρῷ—and that they belonged to the Peisistratids. This proves their materialization as a written text and permits the appropriation and transfer of oracular wisdom between generations, like Polemaenetus, who left his books on mantiké (βίβλους τὰς περὶ τῆς μαντικῆς) to his friend Thrasyllus, who continued with the divination practice as a traveller to many cities (λαβὼν δὲ Θράσυλλος ταύτας ἀφορμὰς ἐχρῆτο τῇ τέχνῃ: πλάνης δὲ γενόμενος καὶ διαιτηθεὶς ἐν πολλαῖς πόλεσιν, Egineticus 19.5–6). Such is the case of Cleomenes, who finally reappropriates the archive of oracles from the Peisistratids. In this way, they can use this wisdom and, consequently, legitimize their decisions. In this passage, Herodotus reflects on the possibility of their subsequent use and recontextualization when he says that the Athenians had at first ignored the oracles and understood them only later, when Cleomenes took them to Sparta. Unlike the oracles pronounced in the temples as the result of specific consultations, the oracles’ written collections in the Acropolis may be timeless consultations. This difference is tied to the type of oracular knowledge that the temples and chresmologue professed. However, this distinction is not completely normative: while the oracles produced in the temples seem to have a decisive nature,—according to the epigraphic documents—other oracles existed as well and formed a corpus of gnomic literature. This gnomic

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Translation, with changes, by Godley, ed. and transl., Herodotus, 100–101.

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literature, characterized by its enigmatic formulation, was typical of the chresmologues, which makes it possible to tie it to the examples of Athenian oratory and Aristophanic comedy.56 As for the fact that Onomacritus poetically inserts (ἐμποιέω) some verses in the oracles of Musaeus, scholars have suggested different interpretations,57 given that this chresmologue is an expert in both oral and written media. The “editor-arranger” (διαθέτης), an addition inserted by Herodotus, leads us to suppose that his ad hoc intervention was written; more precisely, that it occurred during the act of edition-transcription.58 However, the fact that the informant about this interpolation was Lasus of Hermione, whose expertise was poetic and musical recitation, could suggest an oral instance, known as a Rätselkampf.59 This competition of ainígmata is of oral origin; it had roots in Ancient Greece since time immemorial, and it also formed part of the world of seers and poets. That is, Herodotus could be alluding to a combat of riddles in which the battlefield was oral. One argument in favor of this hypothesis is that Onomacritus was caught “at the exact moment” (ἐπ᾽ αὐτοφώρῳ ἁλοὺς) in which he was committing the fraud. This situation is feasible before the collective recognition of the authenticity of the oracles, a recognition that is based on the legitimacy granted by the collective oral, rather than written, memory. These interpretations, however, prove overly exclusive if the break between the oral and the written is still conceived along the lines of the rationalist and

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See Konstantin Horna and Kurt von Fritz, “Gnome, Gnomendichtung, Gnomologien,” in Paulys Realenzyklopädie, Suppl. 6 (1935): 74–90; André Lardinois, “Modern Paroemiology and the Use of Gnomai in Homer’s Iliad,” Classical Philology 92, no. 3 (1997): 213–234; Nikolaos Lazaridis, Wisdom in Loose Form: The Language of Egyptian and Greek Proverbs in Collections of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods (Leiden: Brill, 2007). G. Aurelio Privitera, Laso di Ermione (Roma: Ed. Dell’Ateneo, 1965), 48; Gregory Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 1990), 170–173; John Dillery, “Chresmologues and Manteis,” 188–192; Alexander Hollmann, The Master of Signs, 215–217. Cf. Alexander Gavrilov, “Techniques of Reading in Classical Antiquity,” The Classical Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1997): 56–73. Hugh Bowden, “Oracles for Sale,” in Herodotus and his World: Essays from a Conference in Memory of George Forrest, ed. Peter Derow and Robert Parker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 261. Melampodia (ff 270–279 Merkelbach-West). Cf. Konrad Ohlert, Rätsel und Rätselspiele der alten Griechen (Berlin: Mayer & Müller, 1912), 28–29; Ingrid Loffler, Die Melampodie. Versuch einer Rekonstruktion des Inhalts (Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1963), 48–49. On Lasus de Hermione, see Guerrino Brussich, Laso di Ermione Testimonianze e Frammenti. Testo, traduzione e commento (Pisa: ets, 2000); Albio Cassio, “Laso e Damone “sofisti” e “novatori”,” Parole del Passato 26 (1971): 275–280; G. Aurelio Privitera, Laso di Ermione (Roma: Ed. dell’Ateneo, 1965).

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deterministic technological perspective of the “Great Divide.”60 The comedies of Aristophanes are witnesses to the fact that non-mythical Rätselkämpfe contained oral and written elements that complemented rather than opposed each other. In this case, Onamacritus’s poetic insertion in the oracles of Musaeus may have occurred both in the inscription of the edition or in the reading of what was written, and directly in the orality of the performance of the Rätselkampf itself. Underlying all these variations is the art, the téchne, of being an expert in (re)producing (poiein) ‘new’ verses within the verses of tradition. The questioning of Onomacritus’ expertise arises not only because of the fraud, but especially because of the identity of the person who denounces him: Lasus of Hermione, the famous poet. These reflections could have plausibly formed part of Herodotus’ own attitudes towards writing, which he projected into the oracular practice. Moreover, the fact that oracular practice was considered a fitting field for such projections shows its plausibility as well. Aside from these objections, in Onomacritus’ fraud, discovered by Lasus of Hermione, Herodotus appears to confront a triangulation between orality-literacy, poiein-tradition, and lyrical and oracular expertise, a core that reflects the poet-seer axis of ancestral times in Greek culture.61 Another testimony of the classical period provides us with more elements to understand oracular practice in Ancient Greece. Aristophanes’ comedy Knights presents a comic-oracular duel between Paphlagonian and the Sausage-seller, which is similar to the one between Onomacritus and Lasus. In this duel, they recite written oracles. Indeed, the motif that opens this oracular Rätselkampf is the appearance of the Sausage-seller with a “load” of oracles.62 Aristophanes thus takes up the general idea of the plot that starts when Nicias and Demosthenes find the oracles that Paphlagonian has been keeping from the others. While Nicias steals the “sacred oracle” from him (116, τὸν ἱερὸν χρησμὸν), Demosthenes praises him, saying that he is “the wisest of them all” (118, ὦ

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John Halverson, “Goody and the Implosion of the Literacy Thesis,” Man 27, no. 2 (1992): 301–317. Emevwo Biakolo, “On the Theoretical Foundations of Orality and Literacy,” Research in African Literatures 30 (1999): 42–65; Michael Cole and Jennifer Cole, “Rethinking the Goody’s Myth,” in Myth, Technology, Literacy and the Evolution of Society: Implications of the Work of Jack Goody, eds., David Olson and Michael Cole (New York: Routledge, 2006), 305–324. Peter Struck, “Divination and Literary Criticism?” in Mantikê, ed. Sarah Johnston and Peter Struck (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 147–166. Recently, Kenneth Yu has revealed strong similarities between this scene and the Rätselkampf portraited in Melampodia. Kenneth Yu, “The Divination Contest of Calchas and Mopsus and Aristophanes’ Knights,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 57 (2017): 910– 934.

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σοφώτατε). This reveals that in the oracular field, wisdom is not limited merely to reciting and interpreting the allegorical-associative language but also to the oracular practice in a wider sense, including its material aspect and its technical means: Νικίας ὡς μεγάλ᾽ ὁ Παφλαγὼν πέρδεται καὶ ῥέγκεται· ὥστ᾽ ἔλαθον αὐτὸν τὸν ἱερὸν χρησμὸν λαβών, ὅνπερ μάλιστ᾽ ἐφύλαττεν. Δημοσθένης ὦ σοφώτατε. φέρ᾽ αὐτὸν, ἵν᾽ ἀναγνῶ· σὺ δ᾽ ἔγχεον πιεῖν ἀνύσας τι. φέρ᾽ ἴδω, τί ἄρ᾽ ἔνεστιν αὐτόθι; ὦ λόγια. δός μοι δὸς τὸ ποτήριον ταχύ. Eq. 115–120

nicias [returning with a scroll]: How loudly Paphlagon is farting and snoring! Because of that he didn’t notice me taking his sacred oracle, the one he guarded most jealously. demosthenes: You cunning man! Let’s have it, so I can read it; and you hurry up and pour me something to drink. [Opening the roll.] Let me see, what’s in here?—Ye oracles! Give me, give me the cup, quick!63 The oracular Rätselkampf between Paphlagonian and the Sausage-seller begins, precisely, with the appearance on stage of the oracles. Before the performance of their recital takes place, each one challenges the other to see who has the most oracles, thus establishing a relationship of hierarchy based on number, authority, and power. Beside the comic mise en scène that the material appearance of the oracles entails, their presence shows the abovementioned conflict about ownership and control of the oracles circulation as attested in the abovementioned episodes of Onamacritus, the Peisistratids and Croesus, and even in the inscription of Olynthus.64 This oracle, which Paphlagonian

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Translation, with changes, by Alan H. Sommerstein, ed. and trans., The Comedies of Aristophanes, vol. 2: Knights (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1981), 20–21. In Dinarchus’ oratory there is a clear example of the degree of preservation of the written circulation of oracular sayings. In Against Demosthenes, this orator alludes to the role of the Council in the protection of this written wisdom. Specifically, it refers to “secret” chests [τὰς ἀπορρήτους διαθήκας] containing information about the salvation of the city

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had hidden and overprotected and which was discovered by Nicias and Demosthenes, also contained information on the succession of power in Athens: the oracle announces that the Sausage-seller shall be the saviour of the polis (149, σωτὴρ τῇ πόλει). The materiality of the oracle in the new context of written institutionalization was a constituent element of the oracular message and conditioned its oracular practice; that is, it was not a mere support or transport, as an idealistic perspective would understand it. Aristophanes and Herodotus give evidence of the social perceptions about the textualization of oracular wisdom during the fifth century bce. While Paphlagonian comes with a chest full of oracles (1000, κιβωτός πλέα), Sausageseller claims to have a floor and two apartment houses full of them (1001, ὑπερῶιον καὶ ξυνοικία δύο). Just as at the start of this comedy, when Demosthenes and Nicias discover the written oracle that Paphlagonian had hidden, the exaggeration of the ownership and number of oracles reveals that the oracular practice is not legitimized exclusively by the authority that the writing represents or by whoever pronounces the divine messages, but also by whoever collects, edits, stores, and controls access to them and their diffusion: Κλέων ἰδοὺ θέασαι, κοὐχ ἅπαντας ἐκφέρω. Ἀλλαντοπώλης οἴμ᾽ ὡς χεσείω, κοὐχ ἅπαντας ἐκφέρω. Δῆμος ταυτὶ τί ἔστι; Κλέων λόγια. Δῆμος πάντ᾽; Κλέων ἐθαύμασας; καὶ νὴ Δί᾽ ἔτι γέ μοὔστι κιβωτὸς πλέα. Ἀλλαντοπώλης ἐμοὶ δ᾽ ὑπερῷον καὶ ξυνοικία δύο.

(ὡς σὺ φῄς, ἐπιβουλευθέν, ὃ φυλάττει τὰς ἀπορρήτους διαθήκας, ἐν αἷς τὰ τῆς πόλεως σωτήρια κεῖται). Although it is not completely explicit whether this refers to chests of “oracles,” the mention of the city’s salvation makes it possible to establish associations with the episodes of Herodotus and, in particular, with the Sausage-seller’s oracle in Knights vv. 201–219.

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Δῆμος φέρ᾽ ἴδω, τίνος γάρ εἰσιν οἱ χρησμοί ποτε; Κλέων οὑμοὶ μέν εἰσι Βάκιδος. Δῆμος οἱ δὲ σοὶ τίνος; Ἀλλαντοπώλης Γλάνιδος, ἀδελφοῦ τοῦ Βάκιδος γεραιτέρου. Δῆμος εἰσὶν δὲ περὶ τοῦ; Κλέων περὶ Ἀθηνῶν, περὶ Πύλου, περὶ σοῦ, περὶ ἐμοῦ, περὶ ἁπάντων πραγμάτων. Δῆμος οἱ σοὶ δὲ περὶ τοῦ; Ἀλλαντοπώλης περὶ Ἀθηνῶν, περὶ φακῆς, περὶ Λακεδαιμονίων, περὶ σκόμβρων νέων, περὶ τῶν μετρούντων τἄλφιτ᾽ ἐν ἀγορᾷ κακῶς, περὶ σοῦ, περὶ ἐμοῦ, περὶ ἁπάντων πραγμάτων. Δῆμος ἄγε νυν ὅπως αὐτοὺς ἀναγνώσεσθέ μοι, καὶ τὸν περὶ ἐμοῦ ’κεῖνον ᾧπερ ἥδομαι, ὡς ἐν νεφέλαισιν αἰετὸς γενήσομαι. Eq. 996–1013

paphlagon [returning laden with scrolls]: See, look! And I haven’t brought them all out. sausage-seller [returning laden with even more scrolls]: God, I need a crap! And I haven’t brought them all out. demos: What are these? paphlagon: Oracles. demos: All this lot? paphlagon: Surprised? Why, I’ve still got a chest full of them. sausage-seller: And I’ve got a whole first floor and two apartment houses full of them. demos: Tell me, who do these oracles come from? paphlagon: Mine are from Bacis. demos: [to Sausage-seller]: And yours, from whom? sausage-seller: From Glanis, the elder brother of Bacis.

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demos [to Paphlagon]: And what are they about? paphlagon: About Athens, about Pylos, about you, about me, about everything. demos [to Sausage-seller]: And yours, what are they about? sausage-seller: About Athens, about lentil soup, about the Spartans, about fresh mackerel, about traders who cheat in measuring out groats in the Agora, about you, about me. He can go and suck himself! demos: Now come, please will you both read them to me, and especially that one about myself that delights me so much, that I shall become an eagle ’midst the clouds.65 Both at the start of the comedy and in the oracular Rätselkampf, the material presence of the written oracles is the condition that makes their subsequent recitation possible. The ritual moment of the oracle reading begins with a papyrus or tablet recognized as an “oracle.” This phenomenon can also be seen in the “chresmologue intruder” scene in Aristophanes’ Birds. Here Aristophanes scoffs at authentications of the origin of oracles. While the chresmologue intruder claims his authority from Bakis (961, ἔστι Βάκιδος χρησμὸς), Pisthetaerus claims to have “transcribed” the oracle from Apollo himself (982, ἐγὼ παρὰ τἀπόλλωνος ἐξεγραψάμην:). In the same way as Glanis was Bakis’s elder brother in Knights, and therefore wiser, the fact that he received the oracle directly from Apollo—as god of the mantic art and, consequently, the highest authority in this regard—puts Pisthetaerus in a higher position than the chresmologue. Pisthetaerus also alludes to written expertise, emphasizing his “transcription.” This detail once again shows that in the public perception, mantic expertise and oracular wisdom were mediated by written institutionalization. Another argument that supports this hypothesis is the repeated reference to the materiality of the oracles. In the chresmologue intruder scene, there is a reiterated emphasis on showing the book on which the oracles are transcribed. Faced with Pisthetaerus’ suspicion over their authenticity, the chresmologue intruder responds three times: “Take the book” (974, 977, 981, λαβὲ τὸ βιβλίον). Then, when Pisthetaerus reads his oracle, he also says to the chresmologue on two occasions: “Take the book” (986, 989). In this way, the certification of what is said and interpreted in the context of the reading and recitation of the oracle is closely tied to the expertise of reading and writing and to the materiality of what is written. Thus, it is likewise understandable that the orac65

Translation, with changes, by Sommerstein, ed. and tr., The Comedies of Aristophanes, Knights, 102–103.

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ular Rätselkampf of Knights formally begins when Demos opens the contest by asking for the oracles to be read to him. Aristophanes’ mockery warns against the potential monopolization of oracular knowledge in the era of written institutionalization and suggests the suspicion that circulated socially in Ancient Greece.

3

Conclusion

To translate a label such as “wisdom literature” from one context into other fields of knowledge can entail two paths. We can either opt to transfer the same categories, at the risk of forcing ethnocentric perspectives, or we can readapt them, producing new questions that, in turn, make it possible to reformulate historical-epistemological bases rooted in Western scholarship and extend the very boundaries of wisdom literature. The aim of this comparative question about the institutionalization of oracular wisdom in Classical China and Ancient Greece tends towards the second direction in order to understand the social development, material practices, and subsequent epistemic configurations involved in the construction of a certain wisdom and of a certain literature as “wisdom literature”. This approach seeks to avoid the pitfalls of an idealist approach. However, the choice of oracular wisdom as a field for the study of wisdom literature cannot elude the religious and sacred dimension from which this type of corpora may originate. On the contrary, part of the goal of this study is to understand the correlation between the social-human character of oracular-divine knowledge and the technological-cognitive character of divination as a social institution. Here one might also add the subsequent modern reconstruction and the foundation of universities, carried out by Classical and Near Eastern Studies, Sinology and all studies concerned with editing sources, canonizing meanings, and administering interpretations. Consequently, a praxeological approach that focuses on the orality-writing dynamic and the material and ritual institutionalization of a certain type of knowledge as “wisdom literature,” in a given socio-political context, is productive inasmuch as it questions evolutionist-linear models based on the primacy of literacy and the subsequent modern epistemic configuration. In particular, the parodic-satirical examples of the comment from Laozi analyzed above and of the episode of Zhuangzi as well as the oracle scene in Aristophanes’ Knights show that even in those times the idea of wisdom literature as a primary source of wisdom was questioned. It appears that a certain degree of skepticism about the purity of literacy regarding wisdom literature has been considered as a fairly wise move since very ancient times.

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chapter 2

Wisdom Literature, Orality, and Textual Histories: Another Look at Heraclitus and the Laozi Luke Parker

This essay, like the one by Jenny Zhao in this volume, responds to striking parallels between Heraclitus of Ephesus and the Laozi (also known as the Dao De Jing), parallels that many have taken as an invitation to comparison. Both figures work against the grain of philosophical traditions that see them as foundational, a paradox largely driven by the ambiguity and contradiction inherent in their obscure expressive form. Both texts seem to prefer enigmatic aphorism to a linear exposition of arguments and concepts, and this form is deeply entwined with reflections on the relationship between reality and discourse that purports to reveal reality. We might think of them as sets of texts, then, but in both cases expression as well as organization must be viewed, as I argue here, in light of their remarkably different textual traditions. The texts commonly presented as the opening to each, however, demonstrate the reason for their modern coupling: τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ’ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον …. heraclitus dk B1/lm D1

Although this account is always people are uncomprehending, both before they hear and once they hear the first time … 道可道, 非常道。名可名, 非常名。 無名天地之始; 有名萬物之母。 Laozi i

Tao called Tao is not Tao. Names can name no lasting name. Nameless: the origin of heaven and earth. Naming: the mother of myriad things.1 1 I hasten to point out that I have no knowledge of the Chinese language. I have relied on translation and the advice of more expert participants in this project.

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Both texts use repetition and wordplay striking to the ear, but also contain deep ambiguities in meaning and syntax. My translation of Heraclitus aims to preserve the syntactic ambiguity of ἀεὶ, “always,” which may be taken with either the phrase preceding or following.2 For the Laozi, I have chosen an English version that emphasizes the repetition of the word dao, commonly translated “way” but offering an extraordinarily rich semantic range that includes connotations of speech or discourse. Such ambiguities, whether heard or read, challenge the ease with which we normally make sense of language. In this way, both texts seem formulated to surprise and puzzle their audience, and in each we find strategies for conveying ideas that swim against the cultural mainstream, as Jenny Zhao shows to be the case in their treatment of children and childhood.3 Both texts may be said to use language in novel ways and, setting aside rhetorical strategy, to reflect on how language relates to reality. Moreover, both of these texts deploy their ambiguities to register a kind of metaphysical significance. In Heraclitus, the “always” suggests itself as a link, but an opaque one, between the “being” associated with the logos (“account”), and the “becoming” of humans. The Laozi opens with a paradoxical formulation that, using different terms in similar patterns of repetition and negation, tells us that the true dao cannot be spoken and that the true name cannot be named. The term logos operates in Heraclitus’ text with a gravity and variety similar to the term dao in the Laozi: in both texts these terms are often taken to designate a supreme object of knowledge, which is, however, difficult to capture with any single name.4 These terms share an ambiguity in referring both to an object of discourse and to discourse itself. This fact heightens the significance of expressive form, and both texts push language to the breaking point, perhaps to provoke insights that their authors believe are concealed or unavailable in everyday discourse.5 2 Aristotle cites this text as a negative example of clarity and ease in writing and reading, Rhet. 3.5 1407b11–18. Modern scholars have sometimes debated whether the term ought to be construed with one or the other phrase, e.g., Leonardo Tarán, “The first fragment of Heraclitus,” Illinois Classical Studies, vol. 11, no. 1/2, (1986): 1–15. On the whole, an appreciation for the significance of the ambiguity itself has eclipsed any particular construal. 3 See Jingyi Jenny Zhao, “Representations of Infancy and Childhood in Laozi and Heraclitus,” in this volume. 4 These terms have even come, in some cases, to stand metonymically for the respective traditions in which each text plays a foundational role. For example, Zhang Longxi titles his 1992 comparative study of literary hermeneutics, focused largely on ancient Greece and China The Tao and the Logos. See Zhang Longxi, The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (Durham [NC]: Duke University Press, 1992). 5 It has become common to read logos in Heraclitus as part of a broad analogy between the intelligibility of reality and that of language itself. For example, Charles Kahn states: “By

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In considering Heraclitus and the Laozi together, the absence of any historical connection liberates the comparative endeavor from the tendency to focus on genetic relationships. Accordingly, there are many studies that turn away from historical relationships to compare the conceptual apparatus of the Laozi, and Daoism more generally, with that of Heraclitus. Quite apart from any question of direct influence, however, there is still much to be gained from reflecting upon the histories and the traditions of these texts alongside one another. With that in mind, I will argue that comparing the genesis and subsequent textual history of the Laozi and Heraclitus’ texts is valuable in two ways. First, understandings of both have lately been shaped by conceptions of orality and oral culture that, as I suggest, are themselves grounded in a broad comparison of cultures. Second, comparing textual histories allows us to see how the accidents of history and the work of different philological traditions have shaped these texts over time, prompting questions about and within each tradition that may not arise otherwise. I do not mean to overstate the fruits that may be borne by this approach here; I intend to highlight the vastly different histories behind each set of texts and the valuable questions that such inquiry may raise for future studies. By the “history” or “tradition” of each text, I mean the historical transmission of the text, along with its respective cultural and commentarial traditions. Once we attend to this in the case of Heraclitus and the Laozi, noteworthy asymmetries immediately emerge. An immense and largely unbroken textual tradition surrounds the Laozi, while in the case of Heraclitus we can only glean remnants of his writing from quotations by later authors. This significant difference has often discouraged efforts to study these two texts together, but it raises important questions concerning patterns and particularities in the ways these texts are approached by scholars past and present. For example, the comparison here illuminates a persistent fascination with the origin of texts, whether it lies in ancient and legendary accounts of an author’s life or in modern scholarly attempts to discover when, why, and how these texts came into being. Major problems arise, however, in accessing the origin of both texts. There is, most pointedly, the glaring absence of evidence contemporary with their emergence, and the complex mediation of transmission and commentary can obscure as much as they reveal. As I discuss in detail below, modern scholars often lean on conceptions of orality and oral culture to explain textual origins. its rational structure and its public function in bringing men into a community, language becomes a symbol for the unifying structure of the world which wisdom apprehends.” See Charles Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 131. The Laozi explicitly thematizes names and language as a central concern from its opening.

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From a comparative point of view, however, they deploy observations from extremely diverse cultures to suggest that there is some broadly shared set of facts and conditions at work in any culture deemed ‘oral.’ I do not mean to deny that there is value in the study of (and with) orality. That said, it becomes problematic when scholars rely on such assumptions in imagining the emergence of texts at the beginning of a literary tradition. I say “imagining” because these assumptions often obscure the real and unavoidable absence of substantial evidence. The brief examination I undertake here cannot, of course, do full justice to either tradition or to the issues I wish to raise. I think, however, that this exercise may help in expanding the scope of comparison in modern engagement with these texts. Instead of considering them as fixed writings with apparent conceptual and expressive overlap, or as artifacts of an oral culture that sets wisdom sayings in textual form, we may appreciate their evolution as texts that always and still invite commentary and exegesis, even as their cultural fortunes and indeed their actual form has shifted through time. By considering these texts longitudinally, as it were, I hope to expand the perspectives from which we might consider them, individually or in comparison. The concept of “wisdom literature” explored in this volume is useful for such a project because it helps us appreciate that texts like those under consideration here are, qua texts, products of history, commentary, philology, and cultural value (to name just a few factors) over millennia. The term “wisdom literature” originates in the search for phylogenetic patterns of direct influence in Near Eastern and Mediterranean cultures, and this already alerts us to the ways in which these texts are shaped by tradition and by the authority invested in them. Removing the centrality of direct genetic relations simply opens the field to new questions and discoveries. Comparison always raises issues around the categories deployed in it, but these can be productive even when, and perhaps precisely when, they are problematic. As I hope to show here, wisdom literature may—in contrast to unarticulated assumptions of universality in some uses of “orality” and “oral culture”—shine a light on the particularities of individual textual histories and cultural traditions as much as on any patterns shared among them.

1

“Orality” as a Comparative, Transcultural Concept

The discovery of an oral background to early Greek literature has proven to be one of the most dramatic developments in its modern study. Even before the publication of Friedrich August Wolf’s landmark Prolegomena ad Homerum in

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1795, European philologists had begun to suspect that the Homeric epics must have been composed before the reestablishment of literacy in Greece.6 In the last century, in their works, Milman Parry and Albert Lord seemed to confirm that hypothesis, and also went on to make “orality” an object of study itself by comparing Homeric epic with the performance-in-composition of modern oral poets in the Balkans.7 Using the notion of “orality” elaborated on this basis, scholars began to undertake radical reevaluations of Greek poetry and culture from its beginnings through the classical period. The broader realization that Greek culture made a slow transition from orality to literacy throughout the period that produced its “classical” literature spawned a scholarly literature of its own, dedicated to understanding the impact of such conditions on culture and thought.8 The tectonic shift towards orality has continued to shape the study of Greek literature, but it has also exerted significant influence on the study of other ancient textual traditions. A recent study by Edward Shaughnessy points out that the work of Parry and Lord still shapes the Western Sinologists’ approach to the earliest collection of Chinese poetry, the Shijing or Classic of Poetry, sometimes with explicit parallels to Homeric poetry.9 Shaughnessy claims that 6 Friedrich August Wolf et al., eds., Prolegomena to Homer, 1795 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). For a discussion of Wolf’s forerunners, see Anthony Grafton, “Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981), 101–129. 7 The Singer of Tales was published by Albert Bates Lord in 1960 after the untimely death of Milman Parry. For the most recent edition, see Albert B. Lord and David F. Elmer, eds., The Singer of Tales, Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, no. 4 (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 2019). 8 Walter Ong provides a theoretical overview of orality and literacy independent of its application in any particular tradition or field. See Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982). For an example of a wholesale rethinking of the development of Greek philosophy based on the role orality is thought to have played in it, see Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1963). 9 Shaughnessy cites a few examples of scholars’ assumption that the Shijing is significantly oral-formulaic by nature. See Edward L. Shaugnessy, “The Origin and Development of Western Sinologists’ Theories of the Oral-Formulaic Nature of the Classic of Poetry,” Bulletin of the Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology 3 (2016): 135–137. Christoph Harbsmeier offers the case of the Iliad as entirely similar to the development of the Shijing text: “The Iliad was still recited, and for the first time written down in ‘Homeric Greek,’ long after anything like ‘Homeric Greek,’ if indeed it ever was a current spoken language, had become a matter of the past. Similarly, one must assume that the Book of Songs of the Chinese was written down at a time when its language already sounded archaic or was at least obsolescent. The crucial point that the Homeric poems and the Book of Songs have in common is that both, though written in sometimes formulaic, somewhat artificial language, were evidently based on oral poetry which was only incidentally—almost literally post festum—written down and almost certainly first performed by illiterate people. Bards could be blind even after the invention of writing because

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the formation and transmission of the Shijing was textual from a very early stage, arguing that the sweeping changes wrought by the study of oral poetry in the Greek tradition still warp scholarly lenses on the Chinese one, at least in the West. He sums up his quotations of several scholars’ claims for the oralformulaic nature of the Shijing as follows: In light of these statements, one might assume that there exists firm evidence demonstrating that the Poetry was composed and transmitted orally. One would be quite wrong in this assumption. In fact, most of the arguments in favor of the oral nature of the Poetry derive—whether explicitly or implicitly—from studies of the Homeric epics, the New Testament, Malagasy hain-teny, Yugoslavian ballads, Old English poetry, etc.10 Shaughnessy’s last sentence points to the essentially comparative background underpinning most studies that look to unpack the significance of oral culture for the emergence and development of texts in a literary tradition. As he points out, much of the material for such studies is derived from a wide diversity of cultures and is often relied upon precisely where there is little real evidence concerning the texts and culture actually being studied. There is an astonishing variety of sources for the concept of “orality” and its practices. Parry and Lord observed a modern tradition in oral poetry that, though proximate to early Greek culture in a geographic sense, operated at a remove of nearly three millennia from the Homeric one. Yet, at least in the eyes of modern scholars, the latter has come to be modeled upon it. A recent study of the Iliad examining characters’ use of gnomai (“wisdom sayings”) draws on the analysis of such sayings in modern American society as well as historically indigenous cultures in Africa, North America, and the South Pacific.11 It would

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they did not need to read.” See Christoph Harbsmeier, Science and Civilisation in China, ed. Joseph Needham, vol. 7, part 1: Language and Logic (Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 41–42. Shaughnessy, “The Origin and Development,” 137. Alexander Beecroft also surveys, less polemically, the influence of orality on the modern study of ancient Chinese texts with a view to Greek comparanda. See Alexander Beecroft, Authorship and Cultural Identity in early Greece and China (Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 47–60. André Lardinois, “Modern Paroemiology and the use of Gnomai in Homer’s Iliad,” Classical Philology 92 (1997). The modern paroemiology that forms the basis of his study is drawn from modern American and Nigerian cultures, as well as that of the Maori in New Zealand. Lardinois goes on to parallel, at considerable length, what he sees in the use of gnomai in the Iliad with Keith Basso’s work on the Western Apache in North America. See

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seem that historical study or contemporary observation of any one of these cultures, or several of them, is deemed sufficient to shed light on conditions and practices of oral culture that may be applied to any given culture in which literacy is thought to be marginal or non-existent. In this way, such broadly comparative study of human societies across culture, time, and space sometimes presumes to illuminate trans-cultural conditions of orality. Such views of orality have exerted significant influence on a number of scholarly interpretations of both Heraclitus and the Laozi. In the case of the latter, the absence of any certain authorship or account of textual origin has led many scholars to lean on orality and assume an oral “reservoir” of aphorisms that eventually takes shape as a written compilation.12 In the case of Heraclitus, orality is deployed to answer what Kevin Robb has defined “the oldest and most haunting of Heraclitean questions: What manner of prose is this?” Philosophers from Aristotle down to the present have worried that Heraclitus’ fondness for opposition and paradox runs him afoul of the law of noncontradiction—perhaps the fundamental philosophical dictum in the Western tradition—so that one of the foundational figures in Greek philosophy is, qua philosopher, sometimes dismissed or ignored on the grounds of unintelligibility.13 Robb claims to explain Heraclitus’ form by noting similar prose patterns in certain Ugaritic, Hebrew, and Egyptian texts.14 All of these texts, he argues, were generated through what Miriam Lichtheim calls the “orational” style, a form of poeticized speech that is not versified but draws heavily on rhythm, repetition, and parallelism to maximize its impact on a society reliant on oral memory rather than text.15 Robb, in a move similar to the original program around wis-

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Keith H. Basso, “‘Wise Words’ of the Western Apache: Metaphor and Semantic Theory,” in Meaning in Anthropology, ed. Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), 93–121. Most notably, and discussed at greater length below, in Michael LaFargue, The Tao of the Tao Te Ching: Translation and Commentary (Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1992). Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1982), 44 ff. Kevin Robb, “Preliterate Ages and the Linguistic Art of Heraclitus,” in Language and Thought in Early Greek Philosophy, ed. Kevin Robb (La Salle [IL]: Hegeler Institute, 1983), 173. Robb’s point of departure is a work by Eric Havelock in the same volume that takes all of early Greek philosophy to be rooted in oral culture and straining after the kind of conceptual vocabulary that emerges in the more literate works of later philosophers. Robb, “Preliterate Ages,” esp. 174ff., 198–200. Robb defines his preference for “orational” against the imprecision he identifies in both the well-worn characterization of Heraclitus’ as “oracular” and the recent tendency to attribute elements of his style to the general influence of oral culture.

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dom literature, proposes that this “orational” style be transferred into the study of Greek culture ex Oriente, and thus be understood to inform the texts of Heraclitus. In this case, it would seem, orality works both as a cultural universal and as the grounds for a specific hypothesis about the origins of the expressive form we find in Heraclitus. Shaughnessy ends his argument against the appeal to orality in explaining the genesis of the Shijing with this sentence: I would urge that, in the future, studies of the nature of the Classic of Poetry be based primarily on ancient China’s own written traditions, and only secondarily—if at all—on comparisons with oral literature found elsewhere in the world.16 Here I propose an approach that Shaughnessy’s essay does not consider: what might we see by comparing the histories of texts from different traditions?

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Wisdom Literature, Comparison, and Textual Histories

I see one alternative approach in the comparative consideration of the traditions of wisdom texts. The study of oral culture and its influence on early texts in various traditions has been extremely valuable, and certainly vital for the study of the ancient Greek literary tradition. Still, as Shaughnessy’s essay warns, such study can shade into a vague universality that imposes itself on the study of early texts in any tradition, especially since hard evidence on the emergence of those texts themselves is so often hard to come by. One might rightly worry, as it is debated throughout this volume, whether the concept of “wisdom literature” implicitly assumes a similar kind of universality. I hope, however, that, despite the concept, we will be able to consider the emergence and transmission of texts that prove foundational for wisdom traditions without any corresponding assumption that what wisdom literature is and does must be similar across traditions. Indeed, I hope that the focus of this volume on specific textual practices of wisdom traditions can orient us towards the particularities of text production, transmission, and interpretation within traditions.

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Edward Shaughnessy, “The Origin and Development,” Bulletin of the Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology, 3 (2016), 147.

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Such comparative work takes place in a rapidly expanding and highly contested field. My hope is that, within the framework of “wisdom literature,” the way we think about the long histories of wisdom texts moves in the direction of what Wiebke Denecke has called “deep comparison,” a dialectical examination of literary texts and cultures that assumes no formal typology.17 If I linger on what such comparison is not rather than what it is, this is because Denecke has argued persuasively that maintaining openness about the terms, categories, and even methods of comparison should be central to current and future practices of comparison. As a matter of fact, the use of wisdom literature here aligns with Denecke’s positive argument for ‘catachresis’ as “the master trope of deep comparison.”18 Wresting the term from its traditional sense of misused words and botched metaphors, Denecke argues that the conscious application of terms from one literary and critical tradition to others may open a theoretical space where a robust conceptual apparatus cannot yet take root. Here, wisdom literature is shifted away from a supposed cultural interaction at a specific moment in the ancient Mediterranean. Instead, the term offers a provisional framework to reflect on the differing histories of cultures and textual traditions that have begun interacting for the first time. As all of these cultures and traditions become more global—the popularity of the Laozi is a prime example of this—we should then consider broader perspectives on how they have been shaped down to the present. My hope is that the reflection on the textual traditions of Heraclitus and the Laozi can do some of the work that we expect from deep comparison: to re-evaluate the most canonical texts and commonplace assumptions of a tradition or discipline through the counterpoint of others. Moreover, I am encouraged by the suggestion of Erich Auerbach, Maire Jaanus, and Edward Said that comparative approaches to the study of literature articulate a specific starting point or Ansatzpunkt. This, in the words of Jonathan Culler (to whom I owe the reference), represents “a specific point of departure, conceived not as an external position of mastery but as a “handle”

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Wiebke Denecke, Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 295–300. Denecke, Classical World Literatures, 300. I should specifiy that Denecke prefers a larger comparison between literary cultures rather than individual texts. That project, however, would be impossible in the space of this essay and, more broadly, for a scholar without training in Chinese language and literature as I am. However, I hope that this essay represents a positive effort to engage with other traditions and their scholarship on important, trans-disciplinary questions.

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or partial vantage point that enables the critic to bring together a variety of cultural objects.”19 In this essay, the conjunction of Heraclitus and the Laozi is motivated by the apparent similarities that have led many scholars to link them as well as by the way in which “wisdom literature” and “orality” are relevant to both texts. By considering the historical conditions of each text, we can better appreciate their status as objects of modern study. In turning away from the supposed oral origins of these texts, and in order to consider their tradition as texts, we can see that matters of textual origin evoke a persistent fascination in both ancient and modern modes of reading. In trying to comprehend these texts as products of very particular histories, I wish to open up a different perspective on what lies behind these millennia-old classics of wisdom.

3

Comparing the Textual Histories of Heraclitus and the Laozi

The present analysis considers four axes of comparison between the texts of Heraclitus and the Laozi: transmission, commentary, authorship, and modern situation. The first is obviously necessary for the others, and I have already pointed out the stark contrast here: the modern Laozi is created out of several manuscripts, many with an antiquity hardly dreamt of in Greco-Roman classics, whereas the texts of Heraclitus had to be gleaned from the quotations by other authors, most of whom wrote centuries later. This aspect is not acknowledged often in the comparative analyses of the two texts. However, it is hard to overstate the impact on their current form and study, especially when one considers that the texts of Heraclitus survive simply because they were incorporated into the projects of later authors whose aims usually differed from recording or interpreting Heraclitus. The second axis of comparison is, in a way, an extension of the first one: as befits a classic wisdom text, both texts come with extensive commentary traditions, which exerted significant influence on their interpretation, transmission, and cultural standing at any given point in time. Once more, however, there are dramatic differences in the material evidence: hundreds of Laozi commentaries have been preserved, but almost nothing from the many ancient commentaries on Heraclitus. This is all the more lamentable in the case of Her19

Eric Auerbach, Maire Said, and Edward Said, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” Centennial Review 13, no. 1 (1969), cited in Jonathan Culler, “Comparative Literature, at Last,” in Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Saussy, 237–248 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 244; 248, fn.

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aclitus because other authors’ discussions are our main source for his texts. Returning to the first axis of comparison, textual transmission in the case of Heraclitus is embedded within an interpretative tradition of which we see only scattered fragments. Textual transmission and interpretative tradition are certainly intertwined in the case of the Laozi, as they probably are for most texts, but here both have major and independent bodies of evidence. The third axis revolves around authorship and the biographical tradition that grows up around both sets of texts. Here the contrast we have seen in textual transmission runs in the other direction: it is fairly certain that Heraclitus lived in Ephesus and composed a text around the beginning of the fifth century bce, whereas the authorship of the Laozi is matter more of legend than of history. In both cases, however, ancient readers were eager to imagine far more of each author’s persona and biography than historical evidence would allow. In the respective biographical traditions, we find significant convergence: the ancient traditions of both tend to construct authorial biography in large part from readings of the texts themselves. Finally, and in light of the first three points, I wish to consider the modern situation of each text in terms of its status as both a cultural object and a subject for scholarly study. 3.1 Textual Traditions of Heraclitus and the Laozi For all of the congruities that have often made these two texts compelling comparanda, their modern situation could not be more different. Despite the enviable robustness of the textual tradition for the Laozi, its origins remain murky. The archaeological discovery of ancient manuscripts—the stuff of dreams, I must say, for a student of early Greek philosophy—has provided new pieces to the puzzle but has hardly resolved it.20 On the other hand, the historicity of Heraclitus’ lost composition is evident first of all from the Derveni Papyrus, the oldest manuscript in the Greek tradition. The papyrus itself may be a slightly later copy of a commentary on an Orphic theogony dated to the late fifth century bce. It provides direct evidence of Heraclitus’ writings and their influence within just a few generations after his, mentioning Heraclitus by name, referring to a handful of still extant texts, and offering some interpretative comments.21

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See, for example, William Boltz, “Textual Criticism and the Ma Wang Tui Lao-tzu,”Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 44 (1984). See also Boltz, “The Fourth-Century b.c. Guodiann Manuscripts from Chuu and the Composition of the Laotzyy,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 119, no. 4 (1999). Discussed in detail in André Laks and Glenn Most, eds., Studies on the Derveni Papyrus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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The widespread influence and popularity of Heraclitus’ composition in antiquity, however, has not secured its transmission to the present. Over the past two centuries, modern philology has tried to compensate for this loss by collecting, from other extant texts, quotations that may be directly attributed to Heraclitus. While earlier scholars had certainly been interested in Heraclitus, the notion of “authentic text”—one that may be described as originating with Heraclitus rather than deriving from another writer who simply mentions, paraphrases, or summarizes what he wrote—is largely a modern development. Scholars continue to debate the authenticity of individual quotations as well as differing strategies for presenting them; these have ranged from alphabetical arrangement by source author—a counsel of despair at achieving any legitimate arrangement of the texts whatsoever—to attempts at an actual reconstruction.22 From the standpoint of the texts themselves, then, things could not be more different: the lost writings of Heraclitus have come to us in pieces, though possibly whole in themselves, and often with a haze of uncertainty that is difficult to dispel once and for all. The Laozi may be read now much as it has been for centuries, though the arrangement of the text has certainly varied, but its genesis is shrouded in greater uncertainty than is the case with Heraclitus. There is an interesting inversion of difficulties here. Heraclitus is a well-known and influential author without a text; modern scholarship has sought to remedy this with the collection, curation, and philological critique of apparent quotations from what he wrote. The Laozi is even better known and more influential but lacks any certain author or origin story. In both cases, the traditions themselves and modern scholars have done their best to fill these gaps; we will briefly turn to the matter of authorship. In the case of Heraclitus—this goes for other early Greek philosophers as well— it is worth noting just how extraordinary the modern project of authentication and collection is. We also might wonder, in spite of the impossibility of comparison here, whether this highly literary and philological project bears any resemblance to the process of collection, arrangement, and textual evolution that produced the Laozi. In both cases, what might help us is considering the 22

The oft-criticized alphabetical arrangement by source author was employed in Diels’ authoritative edition. See Herman Diels and Walter Kranz, eds., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: Weidmann, 2004). Other editors have typically preferred to group texts by theme or subject matter, but the influential abovementioned edition and commentary by Charles Kahn is unapologetic in its speculative attempts to recover the architecture of the whole. Serge Mouraviev has gone even further in claiming to have attained a virtually complete reconstruction with his Heraclitea. See Serge Mouraviev, Heraclitea, 4 vols. (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 1999–2013).

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extent to which modern textual criticism might be continuous in certain goals and practices with the processes that have shaped both texts over their long histories. In the case of Heraclitus, we should keep in mind the long and complex history in the background, especially now that we have the opportunity, thanks to a unique and intense scholarly effort, to encounter his very own words in a textual space of their own. The unique process of recovering Heraclitus’ texts also underlines an interesting contrast with the Laozi in the way that the texts appear to have been handled over time. Ancient testimony relates that Heraclitus largely omitted the connective particles that clarify the relationship between individual statements, especially in extended prose treatises.23 No one expects, on this basis, a wholesale absence of these particles from any of Heraclitus’ authentic texts. However, in some cases, editors have debated whether these particles have been added by a source author, either to serve their own exposition or to connect two statements that may have been separate in Heraclitus’ text but are linked in a later writer’s interpretation. In the case of the Laozi, however, the ancient manuscripts discovered at Guodian and Mawangdui have been noted for their greater syntactic clarity with respect to the received text, largely through a more liberal use of grammatical particles. It would seem that those particles were edited out of the received text that accompanies the later Wang Bi and Heshang Gong commentaries.24 Other aspects of the text also evolved over time as scribes and scholars came to expect, or prefer, a terser and more cryptic text, not to mention these and other changes that were influenced by their own particular interpretations. I hesitate to make any general claims about what drove this process, especially since this extensive textual tradition allows modern scholars to study it in far greater detail than I am able to do here.25 While the Laozi may have evolved to 23

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This statement comes from Demetrius’ On Style, where Heraclitus represents a negative example for the principle that clarity depends on connective particles. Cf. Eloc. 191–192, in André Laks and Glenn W. Most, eds., Early Greek Philosophy, vol. 3 (Cambridge [MA]: Loeb Classical Library, 2016), 209. Some modern commentators, such as Tarán, argue that Heraclitus wrote a conventional prose treatise, though this view is not very popular at present. Ancient readers such as Demetrius and Aristotle may have read his text with the expectation of prose exposition, but this is not evidence for the actual form of Heraclitus’ writing. Rudolf Wagner, A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing: Wang Bi’s commentary on the Laozi with critical text and translation (Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 2003). Xiagon Liu offers a detailed examination of two principles he identifies in the evolution of the received text: “linguistic assimilation” tends to repeat and reinforce, sometimes to the point of unintelligibility, artistic or rhetorical patterns found in the text; “conceptual focusing” puts greater textual emphasis key conceptual terms like dao or wuwei, often in

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emphasize obscure or artistic forms of expression, it has been argued that the texts of Heraclitus tend to lose, in paraphrase or imperfect recollection, what commentators have called their “linguistic density” or “concentrated expressiveness.”26 Moreover, in the case of Heraclitus, the cryptic nature of his texts has posed major problems of interpretation within the modern history of philosophy. 3.2 Commentary Traditions In response to this contrast in transmission between Heraclitus and the Laozi, one might emphasize the extent to which that of the Laozi is visible to us, while Heraclitus’ remains opaque at best. The commentarial tradition on each text only emphasizes this point. We can chart the interpretative tradition of the Laozi, and even see some of its practitioners, who were well aware of their predecessors, adopt an historicist understanding of the text: Du Daojian (1237– 1318) observes that the coming of the Dao to the world looks different to every age. The commentary tradition around the Laozi, then, may often be seen to be in conversation with itself, giving modern scholars access not only to historical interpretations of that text but also to the way in which commentary traditions handle wisdom texts over time. Such material is a treasure trove for the kind of comparative philology that the category of “wisdom literature” may enable, even if Heraclitus, in this regard, may not be the most appropriate comparandum. In the case of Heraclitus, we are aware of an extensive commentarial tradition but catch only glimpses of it. Theophrastus’ Aristotelian doxography and early Stoic readings of Heraclitus were influential among ancient interpretations, and modern scholarship has sought to liberate itself from their approaches.27 Modern editors and commentators have been keen to identify

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tandem with interpretation. See Xiagon Liu, “From Bamboo Slips to Received Versions: Common Features in the Transformation of the Laozi,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 63, no. 2 (2003): 337–382. In discussing the several versions of Heraclitus’ famous dictum on rivers—the most famous of which, “you cannot step in to the same river twice,” seems not to come from Heraclitus himself—Daniel Graham, offers this as a kind of principle in distinguishing the genuine article from imperfect citation or paraphrase: “In a paraphrase of his meaning, his sayings will lose significance, as by a law of entropy: they are so well put together, that any change will damage them.” Cf. Daniel Graham, Explaining the Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 129–130. Stoic readings that emphasize a cycle of cosmic conflagration and regeneration from fire have continued to influence modern readings of Heraclitus. For example, see Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 290–296. At a more general level, modern reading, much

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and account for the way in which these schools of thought have shaped the interpretation of Heraclitus’ thought over millennia.28 Only fragments of Stoic doxography survive, however, and nothing of the extensive commentaries by major figures such as Cleanthes. This means that we look at doxography without the detailed textual exegesis that supported it, a situation that may prompt modern scholars to engage more with the postulates of doxography rather than its methods. Indeed, whether or not Heraclitus actually put forth the cycle of cosmic conflagration and regeneration attributed to him by the Stoics has been a central issue in modern study, one in which even the rejection of the idea may be attributed to Stoic influence, however negative.29 More generally, most modern interpretations have followed ancient doxography in making cosmology central to Heraclitus’ thought, and this despite the fact that only a small minority of the extant texts deal with the subject directly. Although modern studies have aimed to liberate themselves from what little remains of ancient interpretations, they have in this fundamental sense largely followed suit. Moreover, our best sources for quotations from Heraclitus’ book are much later authors, in particular, the early church fathers Clement of Alexandria and Hippolytus of Rome. These authors embed Heraclitus’ texts in much later theological and philosophical debates, not to say polemics, that Heraclitus himself could have never imagined. Except for the case of these later authors, we see little of the methods and almost nothing of the wider plurality of interpretations that must have circulated and competed throughout antiquity. In contrast to the situation of the Laozi, this can make it more difficult to appreciate the historical nature of our own readings, especially when the modern collection and

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like the ancient doxography, tends to focus on cosmology and suppress other subjects, even when explicit statements on the cosmology make up a small minority of the extant texts. See, for example, Anthony Long, “Heraclitus and the Stoics,” Stoic Studies (Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 147– 152 and 291–296. Charles Kahn claims that this cosmic cycle is not a crucial issue for Heraclitus’ thought, but nevertheless discusses it in detail. In arguing for the restoration of cosmogony to Heraclitus, he states that, “… the recent denial of cosmogony for Heraclitus will turn out to be a temporary over-reaction, an exaggerated by-product of our emancipation from the authority of Stoic and doxographical interpretations.” See Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 135. The term “emancipation” suggests how high the stakes of doxographical influence have seemed to modern commentators, and one might also note a tinge of modern chauvinism in the suggestion of wholesale liberation from ancient and blinkered authorities.

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construction of Heraclitus’ texts must, by the very nature of the project, disregard the source context to a greater or lesser extent.30 3.3 Authorship and Biographical Tradition The reason for recovering Heraclitus’ texts, however much we must content ourselves with the limitations of the project, is that we know that he wrote something that had a tremendous impact on Greco-Roman literary culture and beyond. We are dealing with an author of a philosophical classic for whom we would like to have a text, or as much of one as we can lay hands on. Readers in antiquity, on the other hand, were at least as eager for a robust account of his life or were tempted to infer one from what they read. Indeed, their dour and misanthropic characterizations of Heraclitus have persisted into the present.31 Most of the biographical tradition is lost to us, but a significant piece from the third century ce survives: Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, itself largely compiled from other sources that we do not possess. Thence comes the bulk of our information on Heraclitus’ biography in antiquity. Though the span of his life and his city seem to have been established facts, the tradition and anecdotes about Heraclitus often seem to stem from his writings rather than from independently reported facts about his life. For example, his statements relating to children, discussed by Jenny Zhao, may have spawned a story about Heraclitus abdicating a hereditary kingship and preferring dice games with children to politics with the adult Ephesians. This anecdote seems to draw on two statements: one says that the Ephesians ought to hang themselves and leave the city to boys, the other states with memorable alliteration that aiôn, a span of time often standing for a human life, is a child playing dice (the precise game in question is unclear).32 The anecdotes surrounding Heraclitus’ death are unique in the antipathy they show towards the philosopher. The end of philosophers’ lives tended to attract interest, even beyond the Solonian apothegm—memorably dramatized

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Catherine Osborne offers a major study of early Greek philosophical texts as they emerge from the writings of Hippolytus of Rome and argues for a correction of this tendency to read the texts with little regard for their source context. Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy: Hippolytus of Rome and the Presocratics (London: Duckworth Books, 1987). Nietzsche offers rare resistance to this characterization in a lecture on Heraclitus: “Heraclitus only describes the world at hand, in acceptance, in a contemplative well-being known to all the enlightened; only those unsatisfied by his description of human nature will find him dark, grave, gloomy, or pessimistic.” See Friedrich Nietzsche, The pre-Platonic philosophers, trans. Greg Whitlock (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 74. Diels-Kranz (dk) B121/Laks-Most (lm) D14; dk B52/lm D76.

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by Herodotus—that no life may be called happy until it has ended well.33 Philosophers in particular were expected to meet the end of life well insofar as their thought often claimed to offer, in one way or another, release from the fear of death.34 Heraclitus’ death, however, is reported to have been ignoble and marked by a conspicuous failure: after withdrawing from society altogether and living off of wild plants, he is said to have come down with dropsy (edema), an extraordinary retention of fluid in bodily tissues. Rejecting the treatment of doctors, he sought to draw off the moisture with heat and covered himself with cow dung. He died either forthwith or as a result of being torn apart by dogs who could not recognize him. Obviously, Heraclitus fails to cure himself and his rejection of medical treatment may be taken from dk B58/lm D57, a text that appears to stress the pains doctors visit on their patients in the name of health. The way he died, however, seems drawn from his own ideas. First, his claim that corpses ought to be thrown out more quickly than dung (dk B96/lm D119), a grave offense to Greek custom, may inform the report about his own immersion in dung before death. Second, Heraclitus’ disease of dropsy controverts his own emphasis on a ‘dry’ condition of soul as “wisest and best” (dk B118/lm D103), so that his death would seem to mark his own failure to achieve this condition. All this in addition to the extraordinarily grotesque death Diogenes’ depicts for him. Laozi, sometimes called Lao Dan, is the traditional author of the eponymous Laozi, and his biography often makes him an exemplar of the Daoist sage. Influenced by religious practices and cosmological myths that grew up around the Laozi, he even comes to be portrayed as a god.35 Naturally, the role that this Laozi (or Lao Dan) plays in Daoist schools and religious traditions is tremen-

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Herodotus 1.32.7. Ava Chitwood specifically treats death in Diogenes Laertius’ biography of archaic Greek philosophers. See Ava Chitwood, Death by Philosophy: The Biographical Tradition in the Death of the Archaic Greek Philosophers Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Democritus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). Arnaldo Momigliano and Tomas Hägg have offered general treatments of ancient biography. See Arnaldo Momigliano, The Development of Biography in Antiquity, (Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 1963) and Tomas Hägg, The Art of Biography in Antiquity (Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Discussions include the following: Alan Chan, “The Daodejing and Its Tradition,” in Daoism Handbook, ed. Livia Kohn (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2000); Livia Kohn, “The Lao-tzu Myth,” in Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, ed. Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue, (Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1998a); Livia Kohn, God of the Dao: Lord Lao in History and Myth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1998b); Michael Puett, “Forming Spirits for the Way: The Cosmology of the Xiang’er Commentary,” Journal of Chinese Religions, 32 (2004): 1–27.

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dous. The earliest attempt at an historical biography of Lao Dan appears in the Shiji of Sima Qian (ca. 145–86b.c.e.), but scholars are sharply divided on its value and authenticity. Western Sinologists often deny its authenticity, while Chinese scholars tend to dismiss this opinion and follow the biography, at least in arguing that the Laozi appears to have been composed by a Shi 史 (“scribe, astrologer, annalist”).36 It is, of course, largely among the former that the idea of an oral background to the text has been put forward and gained traction. Thus, though the textual tradition is robust, the authorship of the Laozi remains contested. Debates rage on over whether its traditional author may be identified as an historical person, and what sort of genesis the text may have had. The archaeological finds at Guodian and Mawangdui have shown that, at a minimum, parts of the text were fixed from the mid-third century bce. Yet the dates of composition proposed for the text have ranged over the preceding three centuries, with no view winning consensus.37 As a result, some scholars argue that the text is best taken to have emerged through a centuries-long process of compilation. Since it is difficult to unravel such a process, it has been common to fall back on conceptions of orality: many commentators imagine a collective reservoir of sayings or aphorisms that may go back to either a single ‘master’ or a school.38 In either case, it is thought that the corpus evolved over three centuries (650–350 bce) throughout which various dates of composition have been proposed.39 Scholars who engage with the issue, even when arguing for 36 37

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The commentary of Ch’en Ku-ying assumes an historical “Lao Tzu” as author; much of the scholarship arguing for this position, notably that of Wang Bo, remains untranslated. William Baxter, “The Probable Date of the Tao-te-ching,” in Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, ed. Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue (Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1998), 249; Liu, “From Bamboo Slips to Received Versions,” 2003. Michael LaFargue argues for a Laozi that is intentionally, and literarily, composed out of a reservoir of sayings in use in a particular school. See LaFargue, Tao Te Ching, 301–333. W.T. Chan claims that the collection of sayings eventually written down as the Laozi may originate in the teachings of Lao Dan and come to be written d own later in composite form. See W.T. Chan, The Way of Lao Tzu, (Upper Saddle River, [NJ]: Prentice Hall, 1963), 74. The influential translation of D.C. Lau takes the view that the text is an “anthology” of wise sayings. See Laozi, Tao Te Ching, D.C. Lau, trans. (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1963), 14. Wagner, however, opposes this view on the grounds that the received text exhibits an intricate and consistent rhetorical structure. See Rudolf Wagner, A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing, 2003. See, for example, Victor Mair, Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 120. Mair may rely a bit too readily on oral composition as an explanation for the emergence of the text (calling it “fairly straightforward”). Nonetheless, he points out that we might imagine the composition of the Laozi as largely continuous with editorial and commentarial practices that we can examine in textual form.

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the influence of orality, admit that evidence for such a process exists only “at a very general level.”40 It might be fair to say that prevailing understandings of orality—based on the kind of comparative generalizations that I have already discussed—exercise a significant influence on the conceptualization of this process.41 It is telling that, even when the traditional account of authorial composition is abandoned, an origin story is nevertheless thought necessary for anchoring our engagement with the extant text.

4

Conclusion

In arguing that the long history of these two texts should inform their study, comparatively or individually, it would be a mistake to ignore their place in the present. Both of them occupy an interesting position in contemporary culture: aside from the Bible, the Laozi is the most translated text in the world, and its ongoing connection to Heraclitus betokens the interest of some scholars in developing a kind of global wisdom literature, especially since the Laozi is already being read in this way. Though Heraclitus’ popularity is not as broad, he has emerged as a touchstone of sorts, especially in modern poetry ranging from Gerard Manly Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and Charles Olson, just to cite a few examples in English poetry.42 This influence may, at least in part, be attributed to the wider availability of Heraclitus’ texts, thanks to modern collection, editing, and publication. I have argued that, by considering the long tradition of these wisdom texts together, we may see how some of the particularities of that tradition inform not just the texts themselves but also modern approaches to them. Despite the significant asymmetries that occur in comparing a continuous textual tradition with one only recently revived, we notice a broad pattern of ongoing but shapeshifting interest in textual origins, one that deserves further interrogation. Just as the term “wisdom literature” was coined in the service of phylogenetic relationships in the literature of the eastern Mediterranean, my use of it here shows that attention to the genesis of the text spans ancient and modern readers of both Heraclitus and the Laozi. We also detect possible contiguities in the

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Mair, Tao Te Ching, 120. Quote from LaFargue, Tao Te Ching, 303. I have in mind Hopkins’ poem, “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Reseurrection,” the two texts of Heraclitus that serve as the opening epigraph to Eliot’s “Four Quartets” (dk B2/lm D2 and dk B60/lm D51), and the references to Heraclitus and quotations of his texts throughout Olson’s landmark poem, “The Kingfishers.”

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editorial practices that shape these writings as sets of texts and that offer persistent questions about their actual or possible arrangements and the meaning to be found there. These questions are, of course, frequently debated within the study of each tradition. These debates might benefit, however, from looking across traditions to observe whether and how similar questions are being asked elsewhere as well as how we deal with the blank spaces and gray areas of spotty evidence. It is an opportune moment for this kind of work, especially when it comes to texts like those of Heraclitus and the Laozi, for both of these texts probably have long and fascinating traditions ahead of them, just as they have behind them.

Acknowledgements I thank the other authors and participants for their guidance, and the AugustBoeckh-Antikezentrum for initially bringing us together in a seminar that was part of its kosmos 2015 Summer University program, “Globalizing Classics”. I thank Thomas Crone in particular for his very helpful comments on the scholars’ stances regarding the authenticity of Lao Dan’s biography in the Shiji of Sima Qian.

Bibliography Basso, Keith H. “‘Wise Words’ of the Western Apache: Metaphor and Semantic Theory.” In Meaning in Anthropology, edited by Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby, 93–121 Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976. Barnes, Jonathan. The Presocratic Philosophers. New York: Routledge, 1982. Baxter, William. “The Probable Date of the Tao-te-ching.” In Lao-tzu and the Tao-teching, ed. Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue, 231–253. Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1998. Beecroft, Alexander. Authorship and Cultural Identity in early Greece and China: Patterns of Literary Circulation. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Boltz, William G. “Textual Criticism and the Ma Wang Tui Lao-tzu.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 44 (1984): 185–224. Boltz, William G. “Lao tzu Tao te ching.” In Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, edited by Michael Loewe, 269–292. Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and The Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993. Boltz, William G. “The Fourth-Century b.c. Guodiann Manuscripts from Chuu and the Composition of the Laotzyy.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 119, no. 4 (1999): 590–608. - 978-90-04-52901-4 Downloaded from Brill.com02/24/2023 08:49:05PM via Western University

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Denecke, Wiebke. Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Diels, Hermann and Walter Kranz, eds. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, vol. 2, 3 vols. Berlin: Weidmann, 2004 [1903]. Chan, Alan K.L. “The Daodejing and Its Tradition.” In Daoism Handbook, edited by Livia Kohn, 1–29. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2000. Chan, Wing-Tsit. The Way of Lao Tzu. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963. Chitwood, Ava. Death by Philosophy: The Biographical Tradition in the Death of the Archaic Greek Philosophers Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Democritus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Culler, Jonathan. “Comparative Literature, at Last.” In Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization, edited Haun Saussy, 237–248. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Grafton, Anthony. “Prolegomena to Friedrich August Wolf.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 44 (1981): 101–129. Graham, Daniel. Explaining the Cosmos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Hägg, Tomas. The Art of Biography in Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Harbsmeier, Christoph. Science and Civilisation in China, edited by Joseph Needham, vol. 7, part1: Language and Logic, 7 vols. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Havelock, Eric A. Preface to Plato. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1963. Havelock, Eric A. “The Linguistic Task of the Presocratics” in K. Robb, ed. Language and Thought in Early Greek Philosophy, 7–82. La Salle [IL]: Hegeler Institute, 1983. Johnstone, Mark. “On ‘Logos’ in Heraclitus” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 47 (2014): 1–28. Kahn, Charles. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: A New Arrangement and Translation of the Fragments with Literary and Philosophical Commentary. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Kohn, Livia. “The Lao-tzu Myth.” In Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, edited by Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue, 41–62. Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1998a. Kohn, Livia. God of the Dao: Lord Lao in History and Myth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 1998b. Kohn, Livia, ed. Daoism Handbook. Boston: Brill Publishers, 2000. LaFargue, Michael. The Tao of the Tao Te Ching: Translation and Commentary. Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1992. Laks, André, and Glenn W. Most, ed. Studies on the Derveni Papyrus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Laks, André, and Glenn W. Most, eds. Early Greek Philosophy, 9 vols. Cambridge [MA]: Loeb Classical Library, 2016. - 978-90-04-52901-4 Downloaded from Brill.com02/24/2023 08:49:05PM via Western University

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Laozi. Tao Te Ching, trans. D.C. Lau. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1963. Lardinois, André. “Modern Paroemiology and the use of Gnomai in Homer’s Iliad.” Classical Philology 92, no. 3 (1997): 213–234. Chenyang, Li, and Franklin Perkins, eds. Chinese Metaphysics and its Problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Liu, Xiaogan. “From Bamboo Slips to Received Versions: Common Features in the Transformation of the Laozi.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 63, no. 2 (2003): 337–382. Long, Anthony. “Heraclitus and the Stoics.” Stoic Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Longxi, Zhang. The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West. Durham [NC]: Duke University Press, 1992. Lord, Albert B., and David F. Elmer, eds. The Singer of Tales, Publications of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, no. 4. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 2019. Third edition. Mair, Victor. Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way. New York: Bantam Books, 1990. Marcovich, Miroslav. Heraclitus: Greek text with a short commentary. Mérida: Los Andes University Press, 1967. Momigliano, Arnaldo. The Development of Biography in Antiquity. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 1963. Mouraviev, Serge. Heraclitea, 4 vols. Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 1999–2013. Nietzsche, Freidrich. The pre-Platonic philosophers, translated by Greg Whitlock. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Methuen, 1982. Osborne, Catherine. Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy: Hippolytus of Rome and the Presocratics. London: Duckworth Books, 1987. Puett, Michael. “Forming Spirits for the Way: The Cosmology of the Xiang’er Commentary.” Journal of Chinese Religions 32 (2004): 1–27. Robb, Kevin., ed. Language and Thought in Early Greek Philosophy. La Salle [IL]: Hegeler Institute, 1983. Robb, Kevin. “Preliterate Ages and the Linguistic Art of Heraclitus.” In Language and Thought in Early Greek Philosophy, edited by Kevin Robb, 153–207. La Salle [IL]: Hegeler Institute, 1983. Shaughnessy, Edward L. “The Origin and Development of Western Sinologists’ Theories of the Oral-Formulaic Nature of the Classic of Poetry.” Bulletin of the Jao Tsung-I Academy of Sinology 3 (2016): 133–149. Tarán, Leonardo. “The First Fragment of Heraclitus.” Illinois Classical Studies, vol. 11, no. 1/2, (1986): 1–15. Wagner, Rudolf. A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing: Wang Bi’s commentary on the Laozi

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with critical text and translation. Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 2003. Wolf, Friedrich August, Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E.G. Zetzel eds. Prolegomena to Homer, 1795. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Yu, Jiyuan. “Logos and dao: conceptions of reality in Heraclitus and Laozi.” In Chinese Metaphysics and its Problems, edited by Chenyang Li and Franklin Perkins, 85–104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

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chapter 3

Representations of Infancy and Childhood in Laozi and Heraclitus Jingyi Jenny Zhao

1

Introduction

Children in general do not feature prominently in ancient philosophy; some would say that ancient philosophers were barely concerned with children.1 While it may be conceded that these philosophers very rarely wrote about children for their own sake, in both the Chinese and the Greek traditions we do find instances where children are represented in order to serve certain philosophical and protreptic purposes. This study takes the Laozi (otherwise known as the Daodejing) and the fragments of Heraclitus to explore their representations of infants and children. Children in these texts serve as paradigms for a range of important questions, including how the texts transmit wisdom and knowledge, launch polemics against competing forms of discourse, and establish their own authority as supreme. Through textual analysis, I investigate how, by way of representing infants and children in various non-conventional ways, these texts challenge pre-existing norms and establish themselves as works of special status. Apparent similarities between Heraclitus and the Laozi have not remained unnoticed. In fact, the ideas of logos in Heraclitus and dao in the Laozi have attracted particular attention.2 Wheelwright claims that “in their clarity of thought, their sharpness of imagery, and their economy of ontological assumptions, the sayings of Heraclitus are more akin to the Tao Teh Ching than to the religious-philosophical documents of India and Iran,” though he adds that 1 Alison Gopnik, for example, comments upon the almost invisibility of children in the history of philosophy, despite the fact that thinking about children can help us answer many profound questions about human nature. See Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby (Bodley Head: London, 2009), 236. 2 On logos and dao in Laozi and Heraclitus, see for example Jiyuan Yu, “Logos and Dao: Conceptions of Reality in Heraclitus and Laozi,” in Chinese Metaphysics and its Problems, ed. Chenyang Li and Franklin Perkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 85–104; Elena Butti, “A Comparison between Heraclitus’ Logos and Lao-tzu’s Tao,” Journal of EastWest Thought 6, no. 4 (2016): 41–54.

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they are doubtless more similar to the latter in their prophetic tone.3 Hall and Ames suggest that “China is characteristically Heraclitian” on the basis that Heraclitus, unlike other Western thinkers, does not incline towards rest and permanence but favors process or becoming, as it happens in the Chinese tradition, in particular Daoism.4 It should be stated forthwith that the present study is not concerned with generalizing about the Greek and Chinese conceptions of infancy and childhood. After all, the portrayal of infants and children in Laozi and Heraclitus cannot be said to be representative of dominant views in their traditions, or even in their own times; if anything, these texts are rather exceptional in that respect.5 The focus of this study rather lies in the exploration of a number of striking similarities and differences between Laozi and Heraclitus, on the basis of which a series of interesting comparative questions can be raised. The comparison is not restricted to an investigation of what is said in these texts but includes a reflection on how certain ideas are projected to the audience. By exploring the literary form and style, this study attempts to go beyond detecting superficial similarities and differences between these texts in order to identify what is particularly distinctive about each while taking stock of their historical and literary contexts.6 Before progressing further, it is worth mentioning that both the Laozi and Heraclitus are subjects of fervent debate with regard to their textual history. 3 Philip Wheelwright, Heraclitus (Princeton [NJ]: Princeton University Press, 1959), 16. 4 David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Anticipating China (Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1995), 33, 40. This association made between Heraclitus and the Chinese tradition is, however, contingent upon interpreting Heraclitus as denying basic stability. Yet the ideas of flux and permanence in Heraclitus’ thought are subject to debate. I am in general agreement with G.S. Kirk in believing that “Heraclitus did not deny stability to the natural world; on the contrary, his main purpose seems to be to assert such a stability, which according to him underlies all change, and most notably change between opposites.” See G.S. Kirk, Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments. A Critical Study, with Introduction, Text and Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 370. For other works that compare Laozi and Heraclitus, see Kenneth Dorter, Can Different Cultures Think the Same Thoughts? A Comparative Study in Metaphysics and Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 91–127. See also Luke Parker’s chapter in this volume, which approaches comparison from the perspective of orality and textual history. 5 Anne Behnke Kinney, for example, points out that the views of child development in the Daodejing forms a striking contrast to the “Confucian references to the incompleteness of the infant and young child.” See Anne Behnke Kinney, Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China (Stanford [CA]: Stanford University Press, 2004), 28. 6 Cf. Glenn. W. Most, “The Poetics of Early Greek Philosophy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, ed. A.A. Long (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 335. Speaking of the early Greek thinkers, Most remarks: “no account of their philosophy

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Furthermore, the aphoristic nature of these sayings has posed challenges to their interpretation; as a result both bodies of texts have come to be viewed as ‘cryptic’ or ‘obscure.’ Nevertheless, we might say that even the apparently unhelpful claim that both bodies of texts are ‘mystical’ or ‘obscure’ can be taken into a more constructive direction, if we consider the implications of this remark on our understanding of the nature of these texts and on what they purport to transmit. The authorship of the Laozi is disputed—in spite of recent discoveries of the Mawangdui silk and Guodian bamboo manuscripts, the composition of the text remains a puzzle that can perhaps only be speculated about until further archaeological discoveries are made.7 Similarly, the nature of Heraclitus’ book has been an object of contention—was it composed of a collection of independent passages, mostly in aphoristic style, and were these passages intended to stand in any particular order? Scholars have debated over its form of composition as well as over the kinds of arguments that are found in the existing fragments.8 Given the lack of evidence for the original form of Heraclitus’ book, I read the fragments as a collection of independent passages, while remaining sensitive to the question of original composition. While philological considerations are important, the primary concerns of the present study are philosophical so that, by examining images relating to infants and children and by discussing their role in underpinning the rhetorical aims of the texts, I treat certain philosophical aspects of the texts that have been previously neglected.

that considers only the structure of their arguments, and not also the form in which they chose to communicate those arguments to their public, can be considered fully satisfactory.” 7 For a thorough review of the problem, see Edward L. Shaughnessy, “The Guodian Manuscripts and Their Place in Twentieth-century Historiography on the ‘Laozi’,”Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 65, no. 2 (2005): 417–457. On the editions of the Laozi, see also William. G. Boltz, “Lao tzu Tao te ching 老子道德經,” in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe (Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and The Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1993), 269–292. In this study, I use Chen Guying, 陳鼓應, Laozi zhuyi ji pingjie 老子註譯及評介, 2nd ed. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2009), which is based on the Wang Bi commentary with reference to the Mawangdui and Guodian editions. 8 See for example Jonathan Barnes, “Aphorism and Argument,” in Language and Thought in Early Greek Philosophy, ed. Kevin Robb (La Salle [IL]: Open Court, 1983), 91–109; Herbert Granger, “Argumentation and Heraclitus’ Book,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2004): 1–17.

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Part i—Laozi

Laozi’s frequent use of imagery has been commented upon,9 though there is currently no major work that focuses upon notions of infancy in the text and their implications in order to understand the wider themes. The cluster of terms under focus in this study are yinger 嬰兒 and chizi 赤子, both of which are expressions for infants.10 Generally speaking, while infants and children do not feature prominently in philosophical discussions in pre-Qin Chinese texts, infants are frequently employed in the Laozi to illustrate how one should live and rule (more on the political associations of the text below).11 For example, in one instance, chizi is introduced as a metaphor to describe the person who embodies the most abundant de (virtuous capacity/efficacy):

9

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11

Cf. for example Li Ling, 李零, Ren wang di chu zou 人往低處走, 5th reprint. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2015), 9–12; Hans-Georg Moeller, Daodejing (Laozi): A Complete Translation and Commentary (Chicago: Open Court, 2007), 68; Sarah Allan, The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue (Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1997): 136–143. For a detailed discussion of the etymology of these terms, see Wang Zijin, 王子今, Qin Han ertong de shijie 秦漢兒童的世界 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2018), 82–103. Rudolf G. Wagner raises the question whether chizi and yinger are two expressions with the same metaphoric value. He identifies a weak link between these expressions; for example, both are associated with the idea of 柔, ‘softness.’ See Rudolf G. Wagner, The Craft of a Chinese Commentator: Wang Bi on the Laozi (Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 2000), 284–285. I have not identified any obvious differences in the connotations of these two terms. Therefore, I am inclined to treat them as holding more or less the same metaphoric value. Unlike Wagner, who believes that the Laozi does not spell out a “unified metaphoric meaning” of the baby, Wang Bi, the commentator, does, seeing the baby as being “without desires” (wuyü 無欲) and “without knowledge” (wuzhi 無知). What precisely constitutes a so-called ‘unified metaphoric meaning’ is admittedly something that is harder to pin down than Wagner appears to acknowledge. As will become evident in the analysis to follow, a reading of the relevant passages in the Laozi reveals the various positive connotations associated with the infant. Thus, the metaphoric value of the infant is to a large degree consistent across the text. Children are featured in normative discourses such as the Neize chapter of the Book of Rites, which dictates what children should be accustomed to do at a certain age. Another notable text that mentions infants is the Mencius, which introduces the notion of chizi zhi xin 赤子之心, ‘the heart of the infant’, something that the great person ought to retain (iv B). The Laozi is not unique in using the image of the infant as a paradigm for the cultivated person. However, as I shall illustrate, what it has to say is in certain respects so. The literature on infants and children in early China is relatively scarce. For a work on the Han period, see Kinney, Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China, 2004. See also Wang, Qin Han ertong de shijie, 2018, which features a rich collection of primary sources. Neither, however, contains any extended discussion on the Laozi.

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含德之厚，比於赤子。蜂蠆虺蛇不螫， 攫鳥猛獸不搏。骨弱筋柔而握 固。未知牝牡之合而朘12作，精之至也。終日號而不嗄，和之至也。

(Laozi 55)13 The one who embodies the most abundant de is like an infant. Poisonous insects and reptiles will not sting it, predatory birds and brute beasts will not attack it. Its bones are weak, its tendons supple, yet it has a firm grasp. It does not yet know the union of the male and the female, yet its virile member will stir, which shows its consummation of jing (essence). All day long it howls, yet its throat does not get hoarse, which shows its consummation of he (harmony).14 Here we find the infant presented as invulnerable in the face of dangers, appearing to be at peace with wild animals so much so that they do not harm it. How might we explain this phenomenon? Moeller claims that “the infant or the embryo has not yet begun to ‘live its life’ and therefore it does not yet have ‘spots of death.’”15 Since there are no references to embryos in the text, I understand this passage to refer to infants only. By saying that the infant has not yet begun to ‘live its life,’ in his remark, Moeller seems to assume that infants do not represent a fully realized human life form. Yet the marker for starting one’s life is not a topic of concern in the Laozi—if we were to look for references to ideas of ‘completion’ or ‘consummation’ which we normally associate with adults, they are in fact to be found with reference to the infant (e.g., the repetition of zhi 至 in the passage cited).16 Moeller further says that the infant “is still an instinctive being that has preserved its ‘animal nature.’ ”17 I partly agree with this claim—that the infant is here somehow aligned with wild animals to the extent that it does not excite their interest as an object of threat or prey; this

12 13 14

15 16 17

Quan 全 instead of zui 朘 on the Wang Bi version. I give chapter numbers for the passages cited. However, I sometimes only cite parts of the chapter that are most relevant to the discussion. My translation of the Laozi is modified from D.C. Lau, Lao Tzu—Tao Te Ching: Translated with an Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963). The translation of Heraclitus is based on Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Moeller, Daodejing (Laozi), 128. As mentioned above, such references to ideas of completion in regard to the infant form a direct contrast to Confucian notions of the incompleteness of children. Moeller, Daodejing (Laozi), 128.

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turns out to be expedient for its survival.18 However, to speak in the vocabulary of ‘animal nature’ (understood in opposition to ‘human nature’) goes in some ways against the rhetoric of the Laozi. As a matter of fact, the text makes no explicit contrast between these two ideas, and it does not propose definitions about what makes a human being. In this way, it can be set in direct contrast to the early texts that largely fall within the so-called Confucian tradition, such as the Book of Rites, Mencius and the Xunzi, which often spell out what makes humans distinctive from wild animals (and often morally superior to them) in order to illustrate the claim that one should live in accordance with certain social norms. Despite its seemingly weak physique, the infant is said to be consummate in essence ( jing 精) and harmony (he 和). It is particularly interesting that he, which is often associated with concord, agreement, and musical harmony, should be identified here with the crying of infants. The text turns the reader’s expectations around and encourages him or her to reconceptualize fixed categories or rigid oppositions such as ‘strength’ and ‘weakness.’ In this way, the passage echoes other parts of the Laozi in which suppleness and apparent weakness are prized over sheer force. Indeed, within what appears weak there is extraordinary strength, as the frequently occurring image of water signifies. The infant of the Laozi does not require external interference to flourish or develop into a more complete being, rather it already encompasses a set of desirable qualities typical of the Daoist sage. What the text does not convey is a negative judgement of the infant’s capacities with reference to a superior being, nor does the Laozi assess the infant from an adult point of view. The infant exists as a being that needs no particular point of reference in terms of the direction towards which it should develop. Noteworthy is also the fact that the Laozi is not concerned with infants or children per se: it is no manual for child development, nor does it present a case for adult humans to behave like infants or to revert to childishness. The text is rather using infancy as a topos to provide insights and wisdom to the adult reader. Chapter 28 presents another instance in which the state of infancy is associated with de, virtuosity: 知其雄，守其雌，為天下谿。為天下谿，常德不離，復歸於嬰兒。

(Laozi 28)

18

One might think of Romulus and Remus as a classic example.

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The one who knows masculinity yet still stands by femininity acts as the stream for all under heaven. Being the stream for all under heaven, constant de does not depart, and one returns to the state of an infant. As is widely known, in the Laozi the imagery of water is frequently used with positive connotations.19 Allan goes so far as to call this “the root metaphor” of Laozi’s philosophical system.20 We are presented with a paradox: there is nothing weaker or softer than water, yet in water there is exemplary strength. In the passage above, the state of infancy is associated with the stream for all under heaven and with constant de. Allan remarks that Soft and weak, which are attributes of water, are also the attributes of young living things, both plant and animal; so water and young life may be correlated as soft and weak as opposed to stones and dead things; and both water and young living things are ultimately stronger than their opposites.21 In assimilating the infant to the stream, the passage above illustrates Allan’s point well. Furthermore, the idea of the masculine and the feminine being subsumed into one recalls the infant as it is described in chapter 55. He does not know of the union of the male and the female, yet he displays strong virility. In another passage, introduced by a rhythmic series of rhetorical questions, we find the infant serving as an exemplar for the reader to follow: 載營魄抱一，能無離乎？專氣致柔，能如嬰兒乎？滌除玄覽，能無 疵乎？愛民治國，能無知乎？天門開闔，能為雌乎？明白四達，能 無知乎？(生之畜之。生而不有，為而不恃，長而不宰，是謂玄德。)

(Laozi 10) When the ying-soul and po-soul are lodged into one, can one remain undivided? Giving complete attention to qi (vital breath/energy) to reach suppleness, can one arrive at the state of an infant? Polishing the enigmatic mirror,22 can one be without blemish? Can one love the people and govern the state without knowing anything? When the gates of heaven open

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For example, the idea that ‘water constitutes the highest good,’ (shangshan ruoshui 上善 若水) in chapter 8. Allan, The Way of Water, 148. Allan, The Way of Water, 141. The mirror being a standard metaphor for the mind in the Chinese tradition.

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and shut is one capable of keeping to the role of the female? When one’s discernment penetrates the four quarters is one capable of not knowing anything? (It gives them life and rears them. It gives them life yet claims no possession; it benefits them yet exacts no gratitude; it is the steward yet exercises no authority. Such is called the mysterious de.)23 In rendering the framing of these questions, both Lau and Moeller choose to introduce the second person though the original text consists of neither first person nor second person pronouns. In the absence of any pronouns or form of address, let alone any explicit addressee, one gets the sense that the reader is prompted to undertake self-examination to see if s/he can reach those states. The state of the infant again serves as a paradigm for envisioning the ultimate state of attainment. The political implications become clear in the second half of the chapter in which the text speaks of loving the people and giving order to the state. The imagined reader, then, could be a person who is currently in a position of power, or aspires to assume power.24 So far, in the passages shown above, the infant is construed as a model for the reader to follow in order to reach a supreme level of cultivation. In chapter 20, a different perspective is presented: infancy-related ideas are projected through the authorial voice, which identifies itself with the state of an infant: 衆人熙熙，如享太牢，如春登臺。我獨泊兮，其未兆，如嬰兒之未 孩；儽儽兮，若無所歸。衆人皆有餘，而我獨若遺。我愚人之心也 哉！沌沌兮！俗人昭昭，我獨昏昏。俗人察察，我獨悶悶。澹兮其若 海，飂兮若無止。衆人皆有以，而我獨頑且鄙。我獨異於人，而貴食 母。 (Laozi 20)

The multitude are joyous, as if they are enjoying a great sacrificial feast, as if they have made ascent to a tower in the spring. I alone do nothing, express nothing, just like an infant that has not yet laughed, listless, as if there were nowhere to which to return. The multitude all have more than enough, I alone seem to be in want. My mind is that of a fool—I am in a state of chaos. Ordinary people look bright, I alone am dull. Ordinary people look alert, I alone am muddled. Calm like the sea; like a high wind

23 24

In the Mawangdui B version of the text, the bracketed final line is included, a repetition of the final line in chapter 51, where de is mentioned. Allan conjectures that the Laozi was “written for the ruler of a small state, or even for the individual, who in a time of political chaos wished primarily to survive.” However, there seems to be no direct evidence to support this. See Allan, The Way of Water, 136.

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that never ceases. The multitude all have a purpose, I alone am foolish and uncouth. I alone am different from others and value being fed by the Mother. Unlike the previous passages cited, this passage features a first-person voice, which is set in direct contrast to the masses (zhongren 衆人) and to the ordinary people (suren 俗人). What seems to emerge is a claim for uniqueness—the authorial voice alone is still, not manifesting emotion, and almost without a sense of purpose. It even appears “foolish,” not having even acquired the ability to laugh, one of the first steps in a child’s development. As a matter of fact, the text explicitly asserts that the mind of the first-person voice is that of a fool. But judgments about who is really foolish, muddled, or uncouth are always made from some perspective. The ‘I’ seems uncouth from the perspective of the multitude only. Although it may seem that there is nowhere to return, the final line of the chapter spells out the ‘abode’ of the first-person voice: “I alone am different from others and value being fed by the Mother.” Thus, rather than happily feeding on a sacrificial feast like the masses, the ‘I’ in the text is fed directly by the Mother who symbolizes the Dao.25 As Li Ling comments, unlike the Analects which features 156 individual persons in total, the Laozi contains none; if one must look for persons, one can at best find three very abstract figures—‘I,’ or the ‘imagined ruler,’ ‘the sage,’ representing the ideal ruler, and the people/masses.26 In the Laozi we are confronted with a conspicuous lack of masters and texts and with a lack of acknowledgement of the literary traditions that provide the backdrop to this text. The Laozi’s non-acknowledgement of other competing forms of discourse elevates the text to a special status and grants it immediate and sole authority: it generates the impression that no competitor is worth mentioning. Thus, instead of following conventions, this text creates traditions. In this respect, its style of communication contrasts directly with that of other texts in the tradition, such as the Zhuangzi and the Xunzi in which targets are named and mocked.27 It is not explicitly mentioned whom the first-person voice represents and whom the text is addressing. Two main interpretations can be articulated here.

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See chapters 1, 25, and 52 where the image of the mother is employed for Dao, the originator of all things. Li, Ren wang di chu zou, 8. Paul Goldin notes that the pointed lack of allusions to named persons and places in the Laozi is particularly noticeable in the context of classical Chinese literature, which abounds in them. See Paul R. Goldin, The Art of Chinese Philosophy: Eight Classical Texts and How to Read Them (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020), 126.

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The first takes it to represent the imagined reader who is in a supreme state of cultivation comparable to the state of an infant. Concurring with the majority of the commentators in believing the text to have strong political overtones, we might also say that through figurative language the text encourages the reader, who is probably a person in a position of power and who is aspiring to be a sage, to distinguish himself from the common people by attaining a certain set of attributes normally associated with infants. The imagery of infancy well encapsulates one of the prominent recurring ideas in the Laozi—that of wuwei, which literally means ‘no-doing’ and ‘non-action’, and which has been translated as ‘effortless action’ or more loosely ‘spontaneity.’28 In chapter 43, the authorial voice is again present in the form of wu 吾, ‘I,’ and it claims to recognize the benefits of wuwei. Paradoxically, by not acting, one arrives at a state whereby nothing is left undone (無為而無不為).29 The second interpretation recognizes the first-person voice to represent the author of the text, who claims his distinction from the masses (and hence from other competing discourses) on the basis that he alone has access to the Dao. Through constructing parallel phrases that juxtapose the dispositions and the actions of the multitude and the first-person voice, in which the former is ascribed sets of apparently positive attributes and the latter apparently negative ones, the text builds certain anticipations of superiority and inferiority. Yet the final phrase reverses all expectations and the authorial voice’s shortcomings suddenly turn into its strong point: while everybody else seems in a position of advantage, having enough to spare, looking bright and intelligent and possessing a sense of purpose, that appearance is in fact deceptive and merely a manifestation of ignorance and inadequacy.30 This passage, then, is built upon sets of paradoxes and illustrates the deceptive nature of appearances, pointing out that what matters most is the source of one’s state of being. In acknowledging the unique source of his being, i.e., the Mother Dao, and in rejecting others’, the author, through the first-person voice, builds credibility for himself and for the ideas that are disseminated through the text. 28

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For an examination of this idea in the Chinese tradition, see Edward Slingerland, Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). This phrase can be found in chapters 37 and 48. I diverge, therefore, from Xiaogan Liu’s view that takes this passage at face value: “Clearly, this is pointing in the direction of a society in which those above and below equally embrace purity and simplicity, and the common people enjoy a peaceful existence.” See Xiaogan Liu, “An Inquiry into the Core Value of Laozi’s Philosophy,” in Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi, ed. Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Philip J. Ivanhoe (Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1999), 229.

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Through the example reported above, the reader learns not to take exterior manifestations for reality, but to look beyond what is merely superficial so as to uncover where true knowledge lies. We might even say that an outward manifestation of aporia can be an indication of the possession of true knowledge, suggesting a level that is far more elevated than the one of those who profess to know or to have a purpose but in reality do not. In highlighting the qualities of the sage that lie behind an infant-like façade, the text challenges conventional ideas about where authority lies, recalling other parts of the Daodejing that caution against the deceptive nature of appearances: 信言不美，美言不信。善者不辯，辯者不善。知者不博，博者不知。 聖人不積，既以為人己愈有，既以與人己愈多。天之道，利而不害； 聖人之道，為而不爭。 (Laozi 81)

Sincere words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not sincere. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good. He who knows has no wide learning; he who has wide learning does not know. The sage does not hoard. Having bestowed all he has on others, he has yet more; having given all he has to others, he is richer still. The way of heaven benefits and does not harm; the way of the sage is doing without contending. This passage is similar to chapter 20 in projecting an image of the exemplary person who, although cultivated, is satisfied with appearing a lesser being than somebody who is merely superficial in his achievements, undermining conventional views of what ‘sincerity’ or ‘credibility’ is.31 We are reminded of the infant who appears clueless and stupid in the eyes of the adult, yet he represents an untainted state that does not ever pretend to be more than what it already is. Such paradoxes of the Laozi, evident throughout the text, encourage the reader to reassess his/her preconceptions and to view opposites in a renewed light. Goldin interprets the text as making the strong statements that “the truth is the opposite of what you have been conditioned to accept. Rethink your assumptions.”32

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The ascription of “wide learning” to the one who does not know echoes “much learning” (πολυμαθίη) in Heraclitus B 40, which is said not to teach understanding. In the last two Laozi passages cited, true knowledge is associated with the one who appears to be stupid or who has no wide learning, the speaker’s special status highlighted vis-à-vis others. Likewise, in Heraclitus having ‘much learning’ does not prevent Hesiod and Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus from being criticized. Goldin, The Art of Chinese Philosophy, 116.

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Part ii—Heraclitus

Schofield is right to credit Heraclitus as “the earliest Greek thinker we know to have exploited the idea of childhood for philosophical purposes.”33 Among the early Greek philosophers, Heraclitus was probably the one that featured the greatest number of sayings that involve children. As we shall see, unlike the Laozi, which centers upon the praiseworthy qualities of infants, Heraclitus speaks of pais and anēbos, children or boys who are already past the infant stage. This discrepancy should not prove to be an obstacle to comparison—for ultimately the object of comparison lies in identifying the ways in which nonadult members of society are represented in these texts and set in contrast to the tendencies and expectations of adults or the educated elite. Citing the well-known saying B 79, in which it is said that “a man is found foolish by a god as a child by a man” or, as Fränkel himself translates it, “man is stamped as infantile by divinity, just as the child is by man” (ἀνὴρ νήπιος ἤκουσε πρὸς δαίμονος ὅκωσπερ παῖς πρὸς ἀνδρός), Fränkel identifies a characteristic thought pattern in Heraclitus whereby the degree of imperfection decreases in equal measure in the transitions from A to B and from B to C (A/B = B/C). He claims that “it was a truism for Heraclitus and his public that a child is a weak, foolish, and despicable being.”34 Clearly our own ideas of what children symbolize will be different, and it will be important not to impose our conceptions of children and childhood on these ancient texts. Yet I should like to argue, in agreement with Schofield, that the picture in Heraclitus is actually far more complicated than Fränkel allows. As a matter of fact, in the extant fragments children are represented in a wide variety of instances that are open to interpretation, and descriptions of them are not restricted to their ‘defects’ as incomplete humans. Furthermore, similarly to the Laozi in which the authorial voice’s state of infancy serves to highlight the deficiencies of other people, in Heraclitus children are often used as a discursive strategy in criticizing others. In the following well-known fragment, we encounter an example of Heraclitus employing a riddle to expose the faults of Homer and ordinary humans:

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Malcolm Schofield, “Infancy and Childhood in Ancient Greek Philosophy,” Presidential Lecture, Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 11 June 2011, 3. A digital copy of the lecture can be found at http://www.hellenicsociety.org.uk/wp‑content/uploads/2012/09/​ INFANCY‑AND‑CHILDHOOD‑final.pdf. Hermann Fränkel, “A Thought Pattern in Heraclitus,” in The Pre-Socratics: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alexander P.D. Mourelatos (Princeton [NJ]: Princeton University Press, 1993), 214–215.

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B 56. ἐξηπάτηνται, φησίν, οἱ ἄνθρωποι πρὸς τὴν γνῶσιν τῶν φανερῶν παραπλησίως Ὁμήρωι, ὃς ἐγένετο τῶν Ἑλλήνων σοφώτερος πάντων. ἐκεῖνόν τε γὰρ παῖδες φθεῖρας κατακτείνοντες ἐξηπάτησαν εἰπόντες·ὅσα εἴδομεν καὶ ἐλάβομεν, ταῦτα ἀπολείπομεν, ὅσα δὲ οὔτε εἴδομεν οὔτ᾽ ἐλάβομεν, ταῦτα φέρομεν. Humans are deceived in the recognition of what is obvious, like Homer who was wisest of all the Greeks. For he was deceived by boys killing lice, who said, ‘What we see and catch we leave behind; what we neither see nor catch, we carry away.’ The attack on Homer here seems all the more scathing in that despite being generally recognized as the ‘wisest of all the Greeks’ (sophōteros), he is easily deceived by a children’s riddle. The ascription of ekzēpatēntai and ekzēpatēsan to both (ordinary) humans and to Homer reinforces what binds them together: humans are deceived in the recognition of what is obvious, and even the wisest of the Greeks proves no exception. The passage thus lowers the status of Homer to that of an ordinary person in his epistemological capacity and challenges our beliefs about who holds the authority of wisdom—while Homer was commonly assumed to be the wisest, Heraclitus shows that he, just like the rest of the human race, has a tendency not to recognize what is obvious. The answer to a riddle is admittedly not something that is usually ‘obvious,’ yet the riddle described above is composed by children and is therefore expected to be easy to solve, especially for a man who has a reputation for wisdom. Of course, one important factor needs to be considered when interpreting this fragment: Homer was blind, therefore he could not see what the children were doing. While this helps to explain why he is deceived in the recognition of what is obvious, it nevertheless serves to expose the limitations of Homer’s source of knowledge. There are other examples in Heraclitus in which the imagery of children is employed to expose the foolishness of certain groups of people, for example: B 117. ανὴρ ὁκόταν μεθυσθῇ, ἄγεται ὑπὸ παιδὸς ἀνήβου σφαλλόμενος, οὐκ ἐπαΐων ὅκη βαίνει, ὑγρὴν τὴν ψυχὴν ἔχων. A man when drunk, stumbling, is led by a beardless boy, not perceiving where he is going, having his soul moist. This passage is often read metaphorically, i.e., a drunk man is denigrated to the status of a beardless boy, resembling him in behavior. Yet rather than high-

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lighting the incapacities of the beardless boy, we can read the passage as critical toward the drunken man who is allowing himself to fall into a muddled state. If we read the passage literally, the boy is guiding the man, and this can be viewed as a case in which, as Schofield says, “the child can actually be more sensible, more alert, more in control than a man in that condition.”35 It is usually young children who ‘stumble’ when walking and who, in the eyes of adults, do not know where they are going. Yet to have the boy lead the man, who is expected to be more sensible, clearly underscores the foolishness of the drunkard and highlights the dangers of having one’s soul moist. As we can see from the B 56 example, unlike the Laozi, which rejects other forms of wisdom (specifically by not mentioning any people or texts), Heraclitus undertakes a radically different approach, by naming those that he attacks and representing rival authorities in an exceedingly unflattering light. His rejection of Homer and Hesiod, archetypes of traditional authorities of wisdom and poetic art, is most pronounced, and is found also in the following fragments: B 42. τόν τε Ὅμηρον ἔφασκεν ἄξιον ἐκ τῶν ἀγώνων ἐκβάλλεσθαι καὶ ῥαπίζεσθαι καὶ Ἀρχίλοχον ὁμοίως. Homer deserves to be expelled from the competition and beaten with a staff—and Archilochus too! B 57. διδάσκαλος δὲ πλείστων Ἡσίοδος· τοῦτον ἐπίστανται πλεῖστα εἰδέναι, ὅστις ἡμέρην καὶ εὐφρόνην οὐκ ἐγίνωσκεν· ἔστι γὰρ ἕν. The teacher of most is Hesiod. It is him they know as knowing most, who did not recognize day and night: they are one. Heraclitus’ rejection of the poets is not only reflected in his direct criticisms but also in the style of his sayings, which markedly departs from that of his predecessors, whose forms of discourse are considered inadequate for the expression of Heraclitus’ ideas. For example, Kahn affirms that: whereas the archaic language and traditional formulae of the Homeric hexameter help to create a fictive world, and the powerful rhythms and unusual vocabulary of lyric poetry contribute to an expressive reshaping

35

Schofield, “Infancy and Childhood,” 3.

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or ritual celebration of experience, prose represents language in its most natural state, as a vehicle for information and command.36 Kahn further notes that the “more relaxed and natural form of discourse tends to make for less opacity,” though specifies that “prose too has its opacities.”37 To speak of language in its most ‘natural’ form or state is problematic; however, what can be said is that in Heraclitus we encounter a distinctive way of writing that fuses the features of prose with other characteristics that lend themselves to opacity and are reminiscent of oracular wisdom.38 Certainly, the oracular and ‘obscure’ nature of Heraclitus’ sayings has been much commented upon. For instance, Hölscher identifies three features in Heraclitus that recall the oracular: the riddle, the paradox, and the simile, all of which are widely employed in the fragments.39 This way of writing produces two effects. First, it reflects the nature of reality presented in Heraclitus’ account, thus prompting the reader to work harder at reaching an understanding of it. Second, as Parke and Wormell argue, Heraclitus (along with Parmenides and Empedocles) borrows the ‘most elevated language’ of the oracular style to impress upon his audience that he has received a ‘revelation’, thereby appealing to divine authorities for his words.40 If we understand the latter to be a motivation for Heraclitus’ use of oracular language, then he is in fact not so different from the poets in his appeal to the divine, notwithstanding the difference in medium through which such an appeal is made. A contrasting view to Parke and Wormell’s is held by Granger, who argues that: Knowledge has an empirical basis, and does not depend upon the extrahuman or the divine. The poets are special targets of Heraclitus’ scorn, 36

37 38

39

40

Charles H. Kahn, “Philosophy and the Written Word: Some Thoughts on Heraclitus and the Early Greek Uses of Prose,” in Language and Thought in Early Greek Philosophy, ed. Kevin Robb (La Salle [IL]: Open Court, 1983), 119. Kahn, “Philosophy and the Written Word,” 121. That is not to say, however, that Heraclitus is unique in making use of the oracular style of writing. As Granger notes “possibly, Heraclitus was under the influence of the gnomic style of the Seven Sages” and “shows a certain affection for one of the Seven, Bias of Priene, whom he praises (fr. 39) and paraphrases (fr. 104).” See, Granger, “Argumentation and Heraclitus’ Book,” 8. It has to be conceded, however, that what we know about the style of the Seven Sages themselves is minimal. As a matter of fact, all we know is how they were represented. Uvo Hölscher, “Paradox, Simile, and Gnomic Utterance in Heraclitus,” in The Pre-Socratics: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Alexander P.D. Mourelatos (Princeton [NJ]: Princeton University Press, [1974] 1993), 229–238. H.W. Parke and D.E.W. Wormell, The Delphic Oracle, vol. 2 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956), xxxiv.

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because their inspiration amounts to an exceptional claim for themselves, of possessing a special dispensation and the immediate apprehension of the truth without difficulty.41 On the basis of this interpretation, Heraclitus distinguishes himself from the poets precisely by not appealing to the divine for knowledge. Nonetheless, this interpretation is problematic and rather downplays the multiple references to the divine in Heraclitus in terms of wisdom and knowledge. In B 107, for example, eyes and ears are described as poor witnesses for humans if their souls do not understand language, which can reasonably mean the logos. The connection of knowledge and wisdom with the divine is indicated elsewhere, for example in B 32, where the wise (to sophon) is associated with the name of Zeus, and in B 41, 78, and 102, which explicitly underline the stark contrasts between the human and the divine. We have seen that the Laozi justifies its special status by appealing to Mother Dao as the ultimate source from which its wisdom and even its being derive (it is after all said to feed on her). What, then, is the ultimate source to which Heraclitus appeals to lay claim on authority? The answer would seemingly be “logos,” as listening to it is reportedly wise (B 50). It is useful to cite the fragment which is standardly taken to represent the opening lines of Heraclitus’ book: B 1. τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον· γινομένων γὰρ πάντων κατὰ τὸν λόγον τόνδε ἀπείροισιν ἐοίκασι πειρώμενοι καὶ ἐπέων καὶ ἔργων τοιούτων ὁκοίων ἐγὼ διηγεῦμαι κατὰ φύσιν διαιρέων ἕκαστον καὶ φράζων ὅκως ἔχει· τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους ἀνθρώπους λανθάνει ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ποιοῦσιν ὅκωσπερ ὁκόσα εὕδοντες ἐπιλανθάνονται. Although this logos holds always42 humans fail to comprehend, both before hearing it and once they have heard. Although all things come to pass in accordance with this logos, humans are like the untried when they try such words and works as I set forth, distinguishing each according to

41 42

Herbert Granger, “Death’s Other Kingdom: Heraclitus on the Life of the Foolish and the Wise,” Classical Philology 95, no. 3 (2000): 263. Aei—“always,” can agree with either logos or point to the fact that humans always fail to understand it, or both, as recognized by Aristotle (Rhet. 1407b13). James Warren is right to state that “we should certainly not try to pin down a single meaning of logos here or try to determine precisely what ‘always’ qualifies.” See James Warren, Presocratics (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007), 61.

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its nature and telling how it is. But other people are oblivious of what they do awake, just as they are forgetful of what they do asleep. In this fragment we encounter the first-person voice, which lays claim on truth (“distinguishing each according to its nature and telling how it is”) and criticizes humans for not comprehending it. Indeed, in a similar fashion to the Laozi, Heraclitus scorns the opinions of the many. Most people (hoi polloi) live as though their thinking were a private possession. This is understood to be all the more inexcusable because the logos is shared (B 2). It is this failure to understand logos that prevents humans from grasping what is obvious. By stating that the logos is shared, Heraclitus denies any claim to sole access. Nonetheless, a clear contrast is set out between the privileged few who succeed in accessing it (including Heraclitus) and the many who go astray despite having the opportunity to grasp it (in B 1 humans are said to fail to comprehend, both before and after they have heard it).43 Logos has transcendental status, as it is said to hold forever—this interpretation stems from connecting ‘always’ with ‘logos’ in reading B 1. While all things come to pass in accordance with it, humans resemble the untried when they approach Heraclitus’ words and works. From the structure of this sentence, we can see that a close association is made between the logos and Heraclitus’ account. Given that there is no explicit mention of what the logos consists in, there have been debates as to what it refers to, and whether it is synonymous with the account that Heraclitus produces in his book. It appears that the logos and Heraclitus’ account are not one and the same thing, the clearest indication being B 50 that reads: “it is wise, listening not to me but to the logos, to agree that all things are one.”44 Nonetheless, the didactic tone of the passage cannot be clearer, as we see Heraclitus assuming the voice of the teacher, instructing the reader on the perils of following the ordinary humans who are unaffected by the logos. Returning to the topos of children, B 52 is perhaps the most enigmatic fragment of all the Heraclitean sayings that feature children, and one that has ignited much discussion and debate: B 52. αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεσσεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη. Lifetime is a child at play, moving pieces in a game (pesseuōn). Kingship belongs to the child. 43 44

See also B 17. See Warren’s discussion of these opening lines in Warren, Presocratics, 60–64. On the idea of logos in Heraclitus, see Roman Dilcher, Studies in Heraclitus (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1995), 27–52.

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As rightly noted by commentators, the way in which we understand the message of this fragment very much depends upon the interpretation we give to several key words: aiōn, pais (paizein), pesseuōn, and basilēiē, all of which permit alternative readings.45 Much of the interpretation hinges upon how the game of pesseia is played. Both skill and chance are involved in the game, which in a way resembles modern backgammon.46 Unlike astragaloi, a children’s game, pesseia is played by adults, often older men, which has significant implications for our understanding of what this passage means. In interpreting it, some commentators concentrate on the idea of chance, in which case the image of a child playing the game would highlight the unpredictability and capriciousness of life. Moreover, the fact that aiōn is described as a child suggests that humans will never surpass the state of childhood to reach a higher state of knowledge.47 On the other hand, if one focuses on pesseia, which requires careful planning and strategic movements in order to win (i.e., to possess ‘kingship’), then the line would suggest that a lifetime consists of activities that are orderly and measured. This would be in keeping with other Heraclitean fragments that emphasis cosmic order.48 Regardless of which interpretation one follows, the representation of a lifetime as a child playing pesseia will undoubtedly have made a strong impact on Heraclitus’ audience. Going by the first reading, it would have rung an alarm bell to alert the reader to abandon previous opinions and ways of obtaining knowledge, and instead to follow the ways set out in Heraclitus’ book in order to escape childish ignorance. Going by the second reading, it would have likewise made a novel statement: Heraclitus is deliberately choosing not to represent children as incomplete or inferior, as the ancient reader might have expected, but is now utilizing the image of a child to convey ideas of order and regularity. 45 46 47

48

For a treatment of each term, see Sandra Šćepanović, “Heraclitus’ Fragment B 52 dk Reexamined,” Rhizomata 3, no. 1 (2015): 26–46. Cf. Malcolm Schofield, “Childhood and Play,” Gray Lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge, 2015. Glenn Most sees this fragment as Heraclitus’ warning to his readers that if they do not study his philosophy, they will effectively remain a child until the day they die. Cf. Glenn W. Most, “Heraclitus Fragment B 52 dk (on of 242),” in Tracing Orpheus: Studies of Orphic Fragments, ed. de Jáuregui, Miguel Herrero, Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal, Eugenio R. Luján Martínez et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 105–109. According to Šćepanović’s recent interpretation, Heraclitus “applies essential order and regularity to the apparently disordered course of human life” by “placing the child into the regulated context of a board game.” “Moreover, by eventually ascribing royal power to the child, Heraclitus […] suggests that there is purpose and plan to the way the child acts and accordingly rules the course of human life.” Cf. Šćepanović, “Heraclitus’ Fragment,” 43.

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Either interpretation would imply the deconstruction of pre-existing conventions and norms. We might say that for Heraclitus, the opposite characteristics of wisdom and childishness are simultaneously manifest in children, and that is above all further evidence of the great Heraclitean theme of the unity of opposites.

4

Conclusion

From the passages examined in the Laozi and Heraclitus, what can be ascertained forthwith is that neither body of texts is concerned with infancy or childhood per se. They display no interest in investigating children’s behavior for the sake of human development, and hence their objectives are fundamentally different from those of neuroscientists and developmental psychologists of today. Both Laozi and Heraclitus employ representations of children to instruct and guide, thus shedding light on the path that the adult reader should take. In the Laozi, we find infants and the state of infancy represented in an unreservedly positive light. Infants are embodiments of qualities such as de (virtuosity),49 jing (essence) and he (harmony), which are the prized attributes of the sage, hence they serve as models for cultivation. In Heraclitus we encounter a far more multifaceted picture in which children are represented in ways that are often open to interpretation, as reflected in the richly varied scholarly responses to the fragments. In some instances children are portrayed as beings inferior to adults, while in others they have qualities that can surpass those of certain groups of adults. There are also other fragments, such as B 52, in which children are employed in metaphors that still perplex commentators. What can be identified as common to both Laozi and Heraclitus is the usage of child-related imagery in the rejection of certain groups of people: in the Laozi this is most apparent where the authorial voice compares itself to an infant and contrasts itself with the multitude, and in Heraclitus the idea comes to the fore in the children’s deception of Homer, and in the case of the drunken man led by a boy. In both bodies of texts, we see a rejection of pre-existing forms of discourse, albeit in contrasting ways: the Laozi creates an image of itself as the sole source of wisdom by not mentioning other competing forms of discourse, while Heraclitus does so by naming and shaming those that are 49

On de in the Laozi, see Philip J. Ivanhoe, “The Concept of de (“Virtue”) in the Laozi,” in Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi, ed. Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Philip. J. Ivanhoe (Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1999), 239–257.

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objects of his criticism and by explaining why those people must be rejected, both through the content and style of his writing. No doubt their differing tactics in the matter of named targets represent different styles of communication, though that is not to imply that Chinese writers in general do not mention names—the Zhuangzi and the Xunzi, for example, certainly do. Nonetheless, we can conclude that both Laozi and Heraclitus are offering radical challenges to what passes as received wisdom, and both distance themselves from their own alternative message: listen to the logos, not to Heraclitus; follow the Dao. It would appear that Most’s description of the early Greek philosophers as those who are “carving out for themselves a discursive space that would be autonomous and privileged over other forms of social communication” could equally be applied to the Chinese Laozi.50 Finally, we are faced with an intriguing question: What might explain the fact that Laozi and Heraclitus appear exceptionally interested in utilizing images of infants and children in their discourses, when compared with their predecessors and contemporaries? To answer it, we might have to indicate what characteristics infants and (young) children represent in many cultures: they do not articulate their thoughts, they are innocent (i.e., not guilty of deliberate malicious acts), and do not have responsibility. Children are good to think with and valorizing them (in contrast to adults) can challenge all of those features. When children are traditionally viewed as incomplete and defective, it is a bold move to overturn those kinds of expectations and complicate the picture by saying that the infant represents sagely qualities (Laozi) or that children can deceive Homer, the wisest of the Greeks (Heraclitus). It is no doubt particularly striking that both Heraclitus and Laozi overturn our expectations about what ‘ruling’ requires—there is a political message, for sure, even though it poses a challenge, for there are several possible readings of ‘the kingdom is the child’s’ and Laozi’s governing without knowing/by virtue of ‘spontaneity.’ One major common feature that Laozi and Heraclitus share in their rhetorical agenda is the rejection of pre-existing forms of wisdom, which helps to explain why infants and children are invoked to challenge norms. Furthermore, for both, the unity of opposites is a recurrent theme, and both make interesting uses of paradoxes to urge their readers to reconsider what they think they know and to reconceptualize their worldview according to the wisdom transmitted through these texts.

50

Most, “Poetics,” 334.

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to Geoffrey Lloyd, Malcolm Schofield, and Luke Parker for comments on an earlier draft, as well as to members of the Berlin “wisdom literature” group, in particular the editors of this volume, for their suggestions.

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Granger, Herbert. “Argumentation and Heraclitus’ Book.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2004): 1–17. Hall, David L., and Roger T. Ames. Anticipating China: Thinking through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture. Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1995. Hölscher, Uvo. “Paradox, Simile, and Gnomic Utterance in Heraclitus.” In The PreSocratics: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Alexander P.D. Mourelatos, 229– 238. Princeton [NJ]: Princeton University Press, 1993 [1974]. Hussey, Edward. “Heraclitus.” In The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, edited by A.A. Long, 88–112. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Ivanhoe, Philip J. “The Concept of de (“Virtue”) in the Laozi.” In Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi, edited by Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Philip. J. Ivanhoe, 239–257. Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1999. Kahn, Charles H. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Kahn, Charles H. “Philosophy and the Written Word: Some Thoughts on Heraclitus and the Early Greek Uses of Prose.” In Language and Thought in Early Greek Philosophy, edited by Kevin Robb, 110–124. La Salle [IL]: Open Court, 1983. Kinney, Anne Behnke. Representations of Childhood and Youth in Early China. Stanford [CA]: Stanford University Press, 2004. Kirk, G.S. Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments. A Critical Study, with Introduction, Text and Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954. Lau, D.C. Lao Tzu—Tao Te Ching: Translated with an Introduction. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963. Mencius. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1984. Li, Ling 李零. Ren wang di chu zou 人往低處走. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2015 [2008]. Liu, Xiaogan. “An Inquiry into the Core Value of Laozi’s Philosophy.” In Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi, edited by Mark Csikszentmihalyi and Philip J. Ivanhoe, 211–237. Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1999. Long, Alexander. “Wisdom in Heraclitus.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 33, no. 1 (2007): 1–17. Moeller, Hans-Georg. The Philosophy of the Daodejing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Moeller, Hans-Georg. Daodejing (Laozi): A Complete Translation and Commentary. Chicago: Open Court, 2007. Most, Glenn. W. “The Poetics of Early Greek Philosophy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy, edited by A.A. Long, 332–362. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Most, Glenn. W. “Heraclitus Fragment B 52 dk (on of 242).” In Tracing Orpheus: Studies of Orphic Fragments, edited by de Jáuregui, Miguel Herrero, Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal, Eugenio R. Luján Martínez et al, 105–109. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. - 978-90-04-52901-4 Downloaded from Brill.com02/24/2023 08:49:05PM via Western University

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Parke, H.W., and D.E.W. Wormell. The Delphic Oracle, 2 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1956. Šćepanović, Sandra. “Heraclitus’ Fragment B 52 dk Re-examined.” Rhizomata 3, no. 1 (2015): 26–46. Schiesaro, Alessandro, Phillip Mitsis, and Jenny Strauss Clay, eds. Mega nepios: Il destinario nell’epos didascalico. Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici, 31. Pisa: Giardini, 1993. Schofield, Malcolm. “Infancy and Childhood in Ancient Greek Philosophy.” Presidential Lecture, Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, 11 June 2011. http://www​ .hellenicsociety.org.uk/wp‑content/uploads/2012/09/INFANCY‑AND‑CHILDHOO D‑final.pdf. Accessed May 1, 2017. Schofield, Malcolm. “Childhood and play.” Gray Lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge, 2015. Shaughnessy, Edward L. “The Guodian Manuscripts and their Place in Twentiethcentury Historiography on the ‘Laozi’.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 65, no. 2 (2005): 417–457. Sider, David, and Dirk Obbink, eds. Doctrine and Doxography: Studies on Heraclitus and Pythagoras. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. Slingerland, Edward. Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Wagner, Rudolf G. The Craft of a Chinese Commentator: Wang Bi on the Laozi. Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 2000. Wang, Zijin. 王子今, Qin Han ertong de shijie 秦漢兒童的世界. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2018. Warren, James. Presocratics. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007. Wheelwright, Philip. Heraclitus. Princeton [NJ]: Princeton University Press, 1959. Yu, Jiyuan. “Logos and Dao: Conceptions of Reality in Heraclitus and Laozi.” In Chinese Metaphysics and its Problems, edited by Chenyang Li and Frank Perkins, 85–104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

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part 2 Chinese Wisdom Literature as Seen from Greece

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chapter 4

Confucian Pollen: A Comparative Reading of the Xunzi Chapter “Great Digest” (da lüe 大略) Thomas Crone

“Great Digest” (da lüe 大略) is the title of a chapter of the received Xunzi 荀 子 corpus, a collection of writings associated with and named after an influential Confucian philosopher, whose concrete life dates are unknown, but who is generally assumed to have lived in the early third century bce. The Xunzi corpus was compiled by the Han scholar Liu Xiang 劉向 (ca. 77–6bce), who, while cataloguing the imperial library, reportedly obtained 322 different texts associated with the philosopher Xunzi. After removing 290 “duplicates” ( fuchong 復 重), Liu Xiang ended up with the 32 chapters that are extant today. In comparison to the philosophical treatises and written dialogues that represent the core of the Xunzi corpus, the Great Digest has led a rather shadowy existence. It is a collection of over one hundred brief and self-contained textual units, which have somehow randomly been cobbled together with only weak signs of order and authorial intention.1 These sections generally convey Confucian teachings and mostly consist of sayings, precepts, and sometimes even short anecdotes. In a few cases, thematic interrelatedness makes it difficult to determine if a passage should be treated as one or two units.2 Some sections also exhibit signs of textual corruption, which suggests that they

1 John Knoblock has pointed out that the chapter can be thematically separated into three different sections, as the first third (sections 1–47) mainly describes different rules of propriety or “ritual” (li 禮), while the second (sections 48–73) concentrates on illuminating principles of good government, and the third (sections 74–115) focuses on the moral ideal of the “noble man.” John Knoblock, Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works, 6 vols. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988–1994), 3:205. Obvious exceptions to this rule and the general interrelatedness of these three topics warn us against reading this arrangement as a clear cut and all-pervading order of the text. Sections 17, 18, and 21, for instance focus on the topic of government or the noble man. Section 57 and 94, on the other hand, which clearly deal with issues of ritual, have been placed into later segments of the text. Some sections even appear to not be related to any of the three topics at all, as, for example, sections 49 and 92, which represent commentaries on canonical scriptures such as the Changes and the Odes. 2 See, for example, sections 69 and 70, which are discussed later. They are listed as two separate entities by Knoblock and Hutton but are treated as one by Yang Liang.

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may have originally included more than what is extant today.3 Therefore, the total number of sections differs slightly on the basis of each reader’s personal view. Thus, John Knoblock, who first translated the text into modern English, states that the chapter contains 115 sections,4 while a more recent study by Yu Zhihui 俞 志 慧 counts 121.5 For reasons of convenience, in this study, I continue to rely upon Knoblock’s numbering when referring to single sections and adjust them according to Yu Zhihui’s or my own personal judgment if necessary. Apart from the title, which broadly suggests that it served a synoptic purpose,6 there is no comment or note that sheds light on the origin and purpose of the text. The traditional hermeneutical approach established by Yang Liang 楊倞 (a Tang Dynasty scholar who wrote the earliest commentary to the Xunzi text), has been to read it as a collection of important teachings of the philosopher Xunzi, written down by his students in order to provide future generations with some introductory examples of his thought.7 According to an alternative view, which was influential during the first half of the 20th century, the Great Digest does not represent a work of Xunzi’s immediate disciples but probably of later Han Dynasty Confucians.8 John Knoblock speculated that apart from containing teachings of Xunzi collected by his students and later followers, some parts of the text might have circulated within an intellectual tradition around Zigong 子弓.9 Moreover, Yu Zhihui has recently proposed that the Great Digest might have been Xunzi’s personal reading notes written during different moments of his life, whose content was then incorporated into his main writings.10 However, from the examination of the evidence that these hypotheses rely upon, it becomes obvious that none of them can withstand scrutiny. Yang 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10

The most obvious example is probably section 29, which apparently merely consists of an enumeration of different political titles without any statement attached to it. Knoblock, Xunzi, 3:205. Yu Zhihui 俞志慧, “‘Xunzi: Da lüe’ wei Xunzi dushu biji shuo 《荀子·大略》為荀子讀 書筆記說,” Wenxue yichan 文學遺產 1 (2012): 142. As Yu Zhihui has pointed out, used as a verb, lüe 略 could also mean “to extract, to obtain, to take away”. Yu Zhihui, “‘Xunzi: Da lüe’ wei Xunzi dushu biji shuo,” 142. Wang Xianqian 王先謙, Shen Xiaohuan 沈啸寰, and Wang Xingxian 王星賢, Xunzi jijie 荀子集解 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1988), 485. Liang Qichao 梁啟超, “Xunzi shu zhi zhuzuo ji qi bianci 荀子書之著作及其編次,” in Gushibian 古史辨, 7 vols., ed. Luo Genze 羅根澤 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982), 4:115; Zhang Xitang 張西堂, “Xunzi gepian zhenwei zhi jiading 荀子各篇真偽之 假定,” in Luo Genze, Gushibian, 6:150. Knoblock, Xunzi, 3:205. Yu Zhihui, “‘Xunzi: Da lüe’ wei Xunzi dushu biji shuo,” 141.

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Liang’s proposal that the Great Digest contains records of Xunzi’s teachings is challenged by the simple fact that some of them are clearly attributed to other Confucians, such as Zengzi 曾子, Mengzi 孟 子, or, of course, Confucius himself.11 Moreover, compared with the core chapters of the Xunzi, the Great Digest exhibits ideological dissent over the treatment of certain disciples and early followers of Confucius. While the core chapters are well known for their repeated criticism and derogatory comments against Mengzi and Zixia 子夏, sections 59 and 97 of the Great Digest portray both people in a generally reverent and adoring light. This paradox eventually also challenges Yu Zhihui’s conclusion, as it is based on the premise that the Great Digest and the core chapters are the work of the same individual.12 Even more problematic for these attributions is the fact that the chapter contains no positive evidence that convincingly ties the Great Digest to a particular historical person or tradition. This also applies to Knobloch’s attempt to further relate the chapter to the person of Zigong, as well as the claim that the text must have originated during the Han Dynasty.13 However, as shown in the sections below, the very nature of the chapter questions any attempt to “date” its textual material. Even if we could determine the historical moment or time frame in which the Great Digest assumed the shape that is extant today, the possibility that it most likely drew upon a broad range of older sources would diminish the significance of this achievement. Instead of establishing another, in all likelihood similarly doubtful, theory of when and by whom the Great Digest was written, I attempt to address the questions of how and why. My interest derives from the trivial but important

11 12

13

Compare sections 58, 59, 60, 67, 82, 83, 91, 97, and 106. Of course, Yu Zhihui’s reading of the text is also challenged by the lack of certainty that the core chapters were single-handedly authored by Xunzi himself, and instead “passed through numerous” hands before ending up in the shape extant today. See Mark E. Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1999), 55. See also Martin Kern, “Style and Poetic Diction in the Xunzi,” in Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Xunzi, ed. Eric L. Hutton (Dordrech: Springer, 2016), 1–33. Noteworthy is that the latter appears to be mainly based upon the shaky premise that the mixed and “confused” (za 雜) structure of the chapter itself indicates that it must have been the work of later generations which failed to retain the purity and excellence of Xunzi’s original teachings. Liang Qichao expressed this view most explicitly, which was generally adopted by Zhang Xitang as well. Zhang Xitang’s stance seems to have been at least partially influenced by Hu Shi’s 胡適 derogatory comments on the Great Digest. Hu Shi claimed that the chapter (and the five other collections of sayings attached to it) consisted entirely of “incoherent ramblings” (dong la xi che 東拉西扯). See Liang Qichao, “Xunzi shu zhi zhuzuo ji qi bianci,” 115; Zhang Xitang, “Xunzi gepian zhenwei zhi jiading,” 148.

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observation that the Great Digest is only one among many other collections of “wisdom in loose form” in the ancient Chinese corpus.14 Particularly close to the Great Digest are the “Tan gong” 檀弓 Chapter of the Liji 禮記, the “Yu cong” 語叢 manuscripts from Guodian 郭店, and the Laozi 老子, which, such as the Great Digest, stand out for their considerable amount of anonymous material. However, the Great Digest also bears obvious literary and dogmatic similarities with texts such as the Confucian Analects and the “Dizi wen” 弟子問 and “Junzi wei li” 君子為禮 manuscripts of the Shanghai Museum manuscript collection.15 Similarly, this refers to other Xunzi chapters such as the “You zuo” 宥 坐, “Zi dao” 子道, “Fa xing” 法行, “Ai gong” 哀公, and “Yao wen” 堯問, which Liu Xiang seems to have purposely placed together with the Great Digest at the end of the Xunzi.16 Thus, the Great Digest was not an innovative composition but a text that was part of a rather extensive literary tradition—a “genre” so to speak—the earliest traces of which date back to the fourth century bce and probably even beyond. By saying this, I do not presuppose that this type of literature possessed an official label, nor that it was subjected to rigid literary conventions. However, I do assume, that studying the compilation of one text can help us in understanding the formative process of others. Looked at from this perspective, the seemingly unremarkable Great Digest promises some rare and interesting insights. The text seems to have originated as a collection of excerpts, similarly to what has been claimed of the aforementioned conspecifics such as the “Tan gong” chapter, some of the “Yu cong” manuscripts, or even the Analects.17 However, not only does the evidence of the Great Digest tend to be much more conclusive, but it also refers to the crucial question of how such excerpts were made. After examining the nature of the Great Digest in the first part of this article, I will turn to a similar genre of wisdom literature of ancient Greece, the so-called 14 15 16

17

Nikolaos Lazaridis, Wisdom in Loose Form: The Language of Egyptian and Greek Proverbs in Collections of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2007). Note that both manuscripts may have belonged to the same text. Yao Zhenzong 姚 振 宗 and Deng Junjie 鄧 駿 捷, Qilüe bielu yiwen Qilüe yiwen 七 略 別錄佚文七略佚文 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2008), 42–43. Interestingly, although not relevant to this topic, the “Xing E” 性惡 and “Junzi” 君子 chapters were apparently placed among these texts as well. Compare Michimasa Yoshimoto 吉本道雅, “Dan Kyū kō 檀弓考,” Kodai bunka 古代 文 化 44, no. 2 (1992): 38–46; Christoph Harbsmeier, “A Reading of the Guōdiàn 郭 店 Manuscript Yǔcóng 語叢 1 as a Masterpiece of Early Chinese Analytic Philosophy and Conceptual Analysis,” Studies in Logic 4, no. 3 (2011): 3–56; Michael Hunter, Confucius Beyond the Analects (Leiden: Brill, 2017); Thomas Crone, “Confucius Repeats Himself: On the Nature and Sources of the Lunyu 論語 (Selected Teachings),” T’oung Pao 108, nos. 3–4: 289–318.

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gnomological tradition, and explore the literary and socio-cultural proximity between the two genres. Drawing upon the results of this comparison, I will suggest that the idiosyncratic features of the Great Digest eventually turn it into an interesting read. While we often tend to follow the traditional belief that sayings and anecdotes as found in the Great Digest represent the prototype of early Chinese philosophical writing, it seems at least equally advisable to consider them as a common byproduct of learning traditions that simultaneously coexisted with much more elaborate and complex types of textual compositions. Thus, when looked at from the remnants of ancient Greek wisdom literature, the Great Digest turns out to be anything but an unremarkable and unappealing text. It rather becomes a silent witness of scholarly practices that surrounded and sustained the rise of Confucianism in early China and may to some extent even force us to reconsider our hermeneutical approach to its textual origins.

1

Content and Nature of the Text

The Great Digest contains a significantly high number of parallel passages that feature in other sources written and compiled at the time of the late Warring States and the early Han Dynasty. If we follow Yu Zhihui’s count, more than a half of all sections contain parallels.18 Considering the historical “irrelevance” of the Great Digest of which we have no evidence that it ever gained an influential or even a “canonical” ( jing 經) status, the most plausible explanation to this phenomenon is that much of the chapter’s material was transferred into the text from external sources. While my discussion below will show that we should not underestimate the role of orality or, put more precisely, aurality in this process, these parallels also indicate that, to some extent, the compilation of the text must have relied upon written documents. As the Great Digest does not provide us with the names of its sources, we can only speculate on their nature based upon the texts available today.19 However, given that we often hardly know anything about the precise status and format of these writings at the time when the Great Digest was supposedly compiled, this step represents a risky undertaking. For example, the Liji 禮記 (“Book of

18 19

Yu Zhihui, “‘Xunzi: Da lüe’ wei Xunzi dushu biji shuo,” 142. Note that sections 4, 11, and 38 cite other literary works, such as, for example, a lost text named Records of the Rites of Formal Visits (pin li zhi 聘禮志), the Changes, and the Odes. All of the quoted passages, however, only constitute one fraction of the particular section.

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Rites”) remarkably features eight parallels with the Great Digest.20 However, since this textual overlap is spread among several chapters of the Liji, and since we cannot be sure whether they had been transmitted together until the Han Dynasty, it is far from certain that the Great Digest borrowed from these sources. The same also applies to parallels between the Great Digest and the Analects of Confucius, which involve, depending on the way they are counted, three to six different passages.21 Moreover, since these cases mostly consist of short phrases and sentences, rather than entire sections, they do not even support the notion that only certain parts of the Analects had been directly available to the author(s) of the Great Digest. Nevertheless, there are also parallels which suggest that there might have been a direct relationship between the chapter and another piece of writing extant today. This concerns parallels between the Great Digest and two collections of sayings ascribed to the Confucian disciple Zengzi. These collections were found in the Da Dai Liji 大戴禮記, which includes ten sections.22 What is striking about these passages in the Great Digest is that not only they often occur in direct succession to each other, but their parallels in the Da Dai Liji are almost always verbatim. Take, for example, sections number 86, 87, and 88: they appear several times in different parts of the “Zengzi li shi” 曾子立事, in which they are collectively attributed to Confucius’ disciple Zengzi 曾子: 君子疑則不言。未問則不立。道遠日益矣。

If the noble man is in doubt, he does not speak. If he has not inquired [into the matter], he does not establish [conclusions]. If the way is distant, make progress day by day.23 Great Digest, section 86

君子疑則不言。未問則不言。兩問則不行其難者。

20

21

22

23

See sections 14, 27, 28, 33, 34, 35, 36, and 57, which possess parallels with wordings found in the Liji chapters “Sang da ji” 喪大記, “Jiao te sheng” 郊特牲, “Ji yi” 祭義, “Shao yi” 少 儀, “Li yun” 禮運, and “Wang zhi” 王制. In my opinion, this particularly concerns sections 11, 77, and 104, whose wordings resemble sayings found in Analects 17/11, 9/28, and 13/25. For further potential cases, compare Michael Hunter, “Analects deselected” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012), 375, 376, 382. Elements of the sections 17, 18, 86, 87, 88, 90, 102 reappear within the “Zengzi li shi” 曾子 立事 chapter of the Da Dai Liji. Sections 16, 25, 90 possess parallels with the “Zengzi zhi yan” 曾子制言. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 509.

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If the noble man is in doubt, he does not speak. If he has not inquired [into a matter], he does not speak. If he inquires twice, he does not put the difficult matter first.24 “Zengzi li shi”

多知而無親，博學而無方，好多而無定者，君子不與。

Those who know much but are relentless, those who have learned extensively but are without direction, those who want many things but are restless, the noble man does not associate with.25 Great Digest, section 87

多知而無親，博學而無方，好多而無定者，君子弗與也。

Those who know much but are relentless, those who have learned extensively but are without direction, those who want many things but are restless, the noble man does not associate with.26 “Zengzi li shi”

少不諷，壯不論議；雖可，未成也。

To not recite when young, to not debate and contend when being a young adult; although it is permissible, you will not have reached maturity yet.27 Great Digest, section 88

其少不諷誦，其壯不論議，其老不教誨，亦可謂無業之人矣。

He who does not recite and chant when young, he who does not debate and contend when being a young adult, he who does not teach and instruct when old, he can also be called a man without accomplishments.28 “Zengzi li shi”

24 25 26 27 28

Wang Pinzhen 王聘珍 and Wang Wenjin 王文錦, Da Dai Liji jiegu 大戴禮記解詁 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983), 71. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 509. Wang and Wang, Da Dai Liji jiegu, 74. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 509. Wang and Wang, Da Dai Liji jiegu, 75.

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Noteworthy is that these parallels mainly differ in their endings. The third sentence of section 86 actually appears in the “Zengzi li shi” as well but has been placed into a different context.29 Due to its thematic differences, it could therefore also be interpreted as a separate paragraph. In addition, in section 86, the verb “to establish” (li 立) appears to have originated out of a wrongly copied graph of the verb “to speak” ( yan 言) during the transmission of the text.30 The verb “to chant” (song 誦) in section 88 may have been lost as well.31 Apart from these changes, alternations between both versions mostly consist of certain grammatical particles or the following of different orthographic conventions. Thus, the parallel of section 87 contains an additional final ye 也, and that of section 88 an initial qi 其. Moreover, the negative particle bu 不 in section 87 has been written with the graph of the homophone term fu 弗. Changes as these can also be found in regard to many other parallels between the Great Digest and the Zengzi chapters of the Da Dai Liji: the graph 予 of the word yu (“to give”) in the Great Digest changes to 與 in the Da Dai Liji,32 that of you (“as, like”) from 由 to 猶,33 and qiang (“strong”) alternates between 彊 and 強.34 In addition, section 17 develops an additional yi 亦,35 section 18 looses a zhi 之 and gains a ye 也,36 and section 90 commences with an additional gu 故 in the Da Dai Liji.37 Considering that all of these variances are typical phenomena witnessed during the written transmission and copying of a text, along with the already noted circumstance that the Da Dai Liji parallels form clusters in the Great Digest, we could plausibly speculate that parts of one text were visually copied into the other and then occasionally altered or expanded. Since the parallels in the Great Digest were often placed next to each other, while in the Zengzi texts they are widely scattered, it is reasonable to assume that they might have migrated from the latter, or another underlying text, to the Great Digest.38 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Wang and Wang, Da Dai Liji jiegu, 74. Wang Niansun has already pointed this out in his commentary on this passage. See Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 509. Once again, this has already been suggested by Wang Niansun, who also notes that this omission must have happened somewhere before the Tang Dynasty, as Yang Liang’s copy apparently already lacked the word song. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 490; Wang and Wang, Da Dai Liji jiegu, 78. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 490; Wang and Wang, Da Dai Liji jiegu, 78. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 490; Wang and Wang, Da Dai Liji jiegu, 78. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 490; Wang and Wang, Da Dai Liji jiegu, 78. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 490; Wang and Wang, Da Dai Liji jiegu, 78. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 509; Wang and Wang, Da Dai Liji jiegu, 92. The Chu manuscript “Nei li” 内禮 from the Shanghai Museum collection shows that parts

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Another interesting lead are parallels between the Great Digest and main chapters of the Xunzi, as both were apparently transmitted together as early as the first century bce. However, since we do not know the precise content of the “duplicates” that Liu Xiang notes to have removed during his compilation of the Xunzi, it might again be advisable to refrain from assuming a direct connection between the writings he left to us. However, the unusually high amount of textual overlap seems to suggest that the Great Digest and the main chapters of the Xunzi are more intimately related to each other. Apart from those passages that appear to loosely paraphrase ideas and teachings found in the core text,39 there are at least eighteen sections of the Great Digest that possess more or less identical counterparts in the main chapters.40 While these parallels seem to have been arbitrarily distributed throughout different parts of the Great Digest, at least two of them strongly suggest that what is found in the Great Digest has been derived from something similar to what we find today in some of the main chapters contained in the Xunzi: 主道知人，臣道知事。故舜之治天下，不以事詔而萬物成。農精於 田，而不可以為田師。工賈亦然。

The way of the sovereign is to recognize men [of talent], the way of the minister is to recognize [one’s] duties. Thus, when Shun ruled all under Heaven, he did not complete the myriad things by following a decree. A farmer is excellent at field work, but should not become the minister of agriculture. So it is with carpenters and merchants.41 Great Digest, section 69/70

農精於田，而不可以為田師。賈精於市，而不可以為市師。工精於 器，而不可以為器師。有人也，不能此三技，而可使治三官。曰：“精 於道者也。精於物者也。精於物者以物物，精於道者兼物物。” 故君

39

40

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of the Zengzi texts must have circulated widely around the year 300 bce. It remains highly speculative as to which kind of texts the authors of the Great Digest were exposed to. See, for example, section 13, which explicitly argues that “ritual” (li) was created for the self-improvement of ordinary people and not the sages, who could simply follow their “desires” ( yu 欲). This passage appears to closely correspond to the depiction of “ritual” within the “Li lun” 禮論, where it is said to have been created by ancient kings and sages in order to regulate and cultivate the “desires” ( yu) of mankind. In particular, this concerns sections 1, 5, 12, 20, 31, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 55, 64, 69, 70, 98, 108, 112, 113, and 114. As sections 69 and 70 could be counted as one, this makes a minimum of 18 sections. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 504.

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A farmer is excellent at field work but should not become the minister of agriculture. A merchant is excellent at trade, but should not become the minister of trade. A carpenter is excellent at his craft, but should not become the minister of crafts. There are men, who do not possess these three skills, but can be appointed to govern the three offices [of agriculture, trade and crafts]. It is said: “There are those who are excellent at [practicing] the Way, there are those who are excellent at things. Those who are excellent at things deal with things. Those who are excellent at [practicing] the Way deal with all things.” Thus, the noble man embraces the Way and assists in the examination of things. If he embraces the way, he is righteous. If he assists in the examination of things, he is observant. If he uses righteous intentions to come to observant conclusions, then the myriad things are [properly] managed. In the past when Shun ruled all under Heaven, he did not complete the myriad things by following a decree.42 “Jie bi” 解蔽

Here one section of the Great Digest possesses two parallels (in italics) that are found at the beginning and the end of the same paragraph in the “Jie bi” chapter of the received Xunzi.43 While both of the cited passages represent selfcontained and fully comprehensible textual units, it is interesting to note that the passage of the Great Digest ends with “So it is with carpenters and merchants,” a sentence which seems to have been derived from the second and third sentence of the “Jie bi” passage. The opposite scenario does not seem plausible since it would not explain why the authors of the Great Digest decided to end the passage in this rather peculiar way. Neither does “So it is with carpenters and merchants” make the sentences mentioned above more comprehensible, nor does it improve the aesthetic value of the entire passage. Another very compelling case is found in the shape of the following section, which is almost verbatim to a passage found in the “Zhongni” 仲尼 chapter of the Xunzi text: 文王誅四，武王誅二，周公卒業，至成康，則案無誅已。

42 43

Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 399–400; emphasis added. Knoblock and Hutton both split this passage into two sections based upon their separateness in the Xunzi text. However, as their topics are clearly interrelated, I think it is best to treat them as one.

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King Wen launched four punitive campaigns, King Wu launched two punitive campaigns, the Duke of Zhou completed [their] legacy [and] when it came to Cheng and Kang, [they] relied upon not launching punitive campaigns.44 Great Digest, section 64

文王誅四，武王誅二，周公卒業，至於成王，則安以無誅矣。

King Wen launched four punitive campaigns, King Wu launched two punitive campaigns, the Duke of Zhou completed [their] legacy [and] when it came to King Cheng, peace was achieved without launching punitive campaigns.45 “Zhongni” 仲尼

Interestingly, in the Great Digest, three quadrisyllabic clauses are followed by the trisyllabic clause zhi Cheng Kang 至 成 康 (“when it came to Cheng and Kang”). The version of the Zhongni chapter is more elegant: it contains the quadrisyllabic zhi yu Cheng wang 至於成王 (“when it came to King Cheng”), which also follows the model of the previous clauses by containing the name and title of only one monarch. At the same time the endings of both passages remain conspicuously close to each other when it comes to their pronunciation. The verb “to rely upon” (an 案, *ʔân) is now and was then homophone to “to achieve peace, to appease” (an 安, *ʔân). Moreover, even the coordinative phrase *deŋ *khâŋ, “Cheng and Kang” (cheng kang 成康), must have sounded much like *deŋ *waŋ, “King Cheng” (cheng wang 成王), to a speaker of old Chinese, particularly when the final velar nasal of *deŋ, “Cheng,” merged with the initial velar consonants of *waŋ, “King,” and *khâŋ, “Kang”.46 Apart from the neglectable particles yu 於 and yi 以,47 both passages become practically indistinguishable in sound. Since the graphs 王 and 康 are too different for a copyist

44 45 46

47

Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 503. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 108–109. My reconstructions have been obtained from Axel Schuessler, Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese: A Companion to Grammata Serica Recensa (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009). The more recent reconstruction by Baxter and Sagart even increases the homophony of this phrase, as it reconstructs “king” as *ɢʷaŋ and “Kang” as *k-r̥ˤaŋ. William H. Baxter and Laurent Sagart, Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). As Wang Niansun has pointed out, the omission of both particles may have been the work of later copyists. See Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 109.

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to have confused them, it is more plausible to assume that these alternations might have resulted from a mistake, i.e., someone misheard or wrongly recalled a version of the “Zhongni” passage, which is the one we find today in the Great Digest. Another indicator of such an aural or “memory based” transmission of a text is the interchange of synonymous phrases and wordings.48 As a matter of fact, when examining the remaining parallels between the Great Digest and the Xunzi core chapters, we find them in a significant number of cases. Thus, what is “skin” (pi 皮) in one version is “leather” (wei 韋) in the other,49 “dark turban and fabric cap” (xuan yuan yi mian 玄裷衣冕) turns into a “dark crown” (xuan guan 玄冠),50 “men and women” (nan nü 男女) becomes “husband and wife” ( fu fu 夫婦),51 “troops” (shi 師) changes to “army” ( jun 軍),52 and what is “beautiful” (mei 美) is said to be “good” (shan 善) instead.53 In some rare instances, even entire phrases and clauses are affected by this phenomenon. The same seem to have been occurred in the following statement of the Great Digest, which constitutes the opening line of section 12: 水行者表深，使人無陷。治民者表亂，使人無失。禮者，其表也。

Those traveling on water delineate deep places, so that others do not drown. Those who rule the people delineate disorder, so that others do not become neglectful. It is ritual that is their delineation.54 Great Digest, section 12

While the Great Digest continues to discuss the implications of ritual on carrying out government in a way that is unattested in the main Xunzi chapters, this first part appears in a slightly different but nonetheless clearly related manner in the “Tian Lun” 天論:

48

49 50 51 52 53 54

For Greek counterexamples, see, for example, Hendrik Selle’s dissertation on the Theognidea, in which he notes similar discrepancies among doublets found in the received corpus of gnomic elegy ascribed to Theognis Megara and thereby concludes that they indicate an oral transmission of the relevant verses. Hendrik Selle, Theognis und die Theognidea (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 199–203. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 178, 486. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 178, 486. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 182, 494. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 369, 490. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 251, 518. Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 488.

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水行者表深，表不明則陷。治民者表道，表不明則亂。禮者，表也。

Those traveling on water delineate deep places; if their delineations are unclear, [others] will drown. Those ruling the people delineate the right way; if their delineations are unclear, there will be disorder. It is ritual that is the delineation.55 “Tian lun” 天論

While the lexical discrepancies between both passages are quite substantial, their wording and content are too similar to claim that one of them merely paraphrases the other. Was it then possible that they might have been the result of intended alternation in order to clarify or even change the meaning of this passage? This appears very unlikely. Both passages are equally comprehensible and use the same similes to come to an identical conclusion. Moreover, the differences between them are far too extensive to argue that they might have originated while a later scribe was copying one of both texts. Instead, these differences suggest that at one point at least one of both passages might have been altered unintentionally after having been recited from memory. Variances as these provide us with an interesting insight into the circumstances under which the Great Digest may have been composed. Not only do the “imperfect” sections 64 and 69/70 analyzed above reinforce the assumption that the chapter consists of textual elements borrowed from external sources, but together with the last discussed parallels, they indicate that, to some extent, these excerpted passages may have been transferred into the text based upon recitation. While the sources that the chapter drew upon remain largely unknown to us, these aural features of the Great Digest remind us of its seemingly improvised and disordered nature. Moreover, they call our attention to the obvious didactic purpose of the text by linking it to the practice of rote learning. While this alone may strike as a rather trivial finding, I believe that it will become more meaningful when relating the chapter to other contemporaneous collections of similar nature, which will be the focus of the following section.

55

Wang, Shen, and Wang, Xunzi jijie, 318–319.

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The Great Digest in Comparison with the Greek Gnomological Tradition

Under the influence of the sophist and philosophical schools, ancient Greek literature witnessed a rising interest for the collection of sayings and anecdotes of famous sages, poets, and philosophers during the fourth century bce.56 This so-called gnomological tradition continued to flourish at the time of the Hellenistic Period due to the rise of pragmatically and morally minded philosophy with a strong focus on the charismatic founders of philosophical schools, who served as role models for personal self-cultivation. During the era of the Roman Empire, Judaic and Christian traditions joined in this process.57 Although most of the respective collections have only reached us in fragments—“an immeasurable expanse of ruins” as Konstantin Horna has described it—,58 many sayings are believed to have eventually ended up in anthologies of much later provenance. Among these anthologies are the Florilegium by Stobaios, the Gnomologium Vaticanum, the Wiener Apophthegmensammlung,59 but also Arabic collections.60 The remains of the gnomological tradition show that the ancient Greeks had developed fixed, schematic conventions about how to record their material. Thus, the simplest way to record a saying was to present it as it was, perhaps listed under the name of its author or, if there was no apparent author, without any attribution at all:

56

57

58 59

60

Konstantin Horna and Kurt von Fritz, “Gnome, Gnomendichtung, Gnomologien,” in Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Supplemente, 15 vols., ed. Georg Wissowa (Stuttgart: Alfred Druckenmüller, 1903–1978), 6:76–82; John Barns, “A New Gnomologium: With Some Remarks on Gnomic Anthologies (i),” The Classical Quarterly 3 (1950): 126–137; John Barns, “A New Gnomologium: With Some Remarks on Gnomic Anthologies (ii),” The Classical Quarterly, New Series 1 (1951): 1–19; Denis M. Searby, Aristotle in the Greek Gnomological Tradition (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1998), 28–41; Oliver Overwien, Die Sprüche des Kynikers Diogenes in der griechischen und arabischen Überlieferung (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005), 440–446. The most comprehensive overview on the use of chreiai in Judaic and Christian traditions that I have come across is by Catherine Heszer, “Die Verwendung der hellenistischen Gattung Chrie im frühen Christentum und Judentum,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 27, no. 4 (1996): 371–439. Horna and Fritz, “Gnome, Gnomendichtung, Gnomologien,” 82. Karl-Heinz Stanzel, “Dicta Platonica: Die unter Platons Namen überlieferten Aussprüche” (PhD diss., Julius-Maximilians-Universität zu Würzburg, 1987), 20–29; Searby, Aristotle in the Greek Gnomological Tradition, 43–70. Gotthard Strohmaier, Von Demokrit bis Dante: Die Bewahrung antiken Erbes in der arabischen Kultur (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1996), 44–56.

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τοῦ πλείονος βίου, φαυλοτέρου δὲ, τὸν ἐλάσσονα ἀμείνονα ὄντα παντὶ παντῶς προαἱρετέον. To the longer but worse life, the shorter but better is to be preferred for everyone in every case.61 This gnome is listed under Plato’s name in Stobaios’ Florilegium and seem to have been taken from Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. Alternatively, an attributed saying could also start with the opening formula that a particular person had “said” (ἔφη) such as the following: Πλάτων ἔφη “ού καλὸν πεπαι δευμένον έν άπαιδεύτοις διαλέγεσθαι ὤσπερ ούδὲ νήφοντα έν μεθύουσιν.” Plato said: “It is inappropriate for a man of culture to talk among those uneducated as much as it is for a sober man among drunkards.”62 As Stanzel has noted, this saying may in fact stem from Theognis.63 A slightly more elaborate way to present a saying was to turn it into a response to a certain question or situation: Ἐρωτηθεὶς “πῶς ἂν τοῖς φίλοις προσφεροίμεθα;” ἔφη “ὡς ἂν εὐξαίμεθα αὐτοὐς ήμῖν προσφέρεσθαι.” Asked how we should behave towards our friends, he (Aristotle) said: “As we would wish them to behave towards us.”64 Noteworthy is that Aristotle’s saying strikes as a variant of the golden rule and could well have originated as a proverb.65 A fourth and last source of material was small anecdotes that only consisted of non-verbal actions:

61 62 63 64 65

Otto Hense, ed., Ioannis Stobaei anthologii libri duo posteriores, 3 vols. (Berlin: Weidemann, 1894–1912), 3:1107. Leo Sternbach, ed., Gnomologium Vaticanum e codice Vaticano Graeco 743, (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1963), 159. Stanzel, “Dicta Platonica,” 170–171. Tiziano Dorandi, ed., Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 356. Searby, Aristotle in the Greek Gnomological Tradition, 187–188.

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Διογένης ὁ Κυνικὸς φιλόσοφος ἰδὼν ὀψοφάγον παῖδα τὸν παιδαγωγὸν τῇ βακτηρίᾳ ἔπαισε. Diogenes the Cynic philosopher, on seeing a gluttonous boy, beat his tutor with a stick.66 Modern scholars have adopted the practice of ancient authors to divide these four types into gnome (“judgement, opinion, maxim”) and chreia (lit. “useful [things]”), the latter being alternatively also referred to as apophthegma or apopththegm (“saying, dictum”). While the ancient Greeks themselves did not always apply the terminology in the same manner (see Aelius Theon’s account below), gnome is usually taken to denote the first two types of records, while chreia and apophthegma are used for the last two, thus drawing the line between anecdotal and non-anecdotal material. Historically speaking, the eponymous gnome appears to have thrived during the Archaic and Classical Period, while chreia and apophthegma rose to prominence during the Hellenistic age. Those familiar with the genre of Chinese collections as sketched out in the introduction of this study will have no problems to find compatible specimens for these four examples—and researchers have in fact come up with very similar categories.67 These similarities become less surprising once we consider that the four examples cited above comprise essential ways to convey wisdom. Wisdom is conveyed either through verbal or non-verbal actions, such as a general assertion or as a solution to a particular problem, which are attributed to a source of authority, or as an anonymous, self-evident statement. However, it is remarkable that authors from both sides have resorted to a similar set of simple literary forms that were, at least to some extent, shaped by human intent. Authors did not submit to these conventions purely by chance, but they rather considered them to be the common and approved way to present their material. In Chinese texts these considerations are certainly tangible but regrettably never elaborated upon. In the case of ancient Greek texts, however, we are fortunate that such thoughts were not only written but also handed down. Examples of these texts are the opening passages of the chapter “On the Chreia” (Περὶ

66 67

Ronald F. Hock, Edward N. O’Neil, The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric, 3 vols. (Atlanta: The Society of Biblical Literature, 1986–2012), 1:88. Cf. Wiebke Deneke, The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 2010), 94; Hunter, Confucius Beyond the Analects, 53–54.

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Χρείασ), contained in a rhetorical textbook attributed to Aelius Theon (1st century ce). A passage from the chapter outlines the essential differences between chreia, gnome, and apomnemoneuma (“reminiscence, recollection, memoir”): Χρεία ἐστι σύντομος ἀπόφασις ἢ πρᾶξις μετ᾽ εὐστοχίας ἀναφερομένη εἴς τι ὡρισμένον πρόσωπον ἢ ἀναλογοῦν προσώπῳ. Παράκειται δὲ αὐτῇ γνώμη καὶ ἀπομνημόνευμα, πᾶσα γὰρ γνώμη σύντομος εἰς πρόσωπον ἀναφερομένη χρείαν ποιεῖ. καὶ τὸ ἀπομνημόνευμα δὲ πρᾶξίς ἐστιν ἢ λόγος βιωφελής. διαφέρει δὲ ἡ μὲν γνώμη τῆς χρείας τέτρασι τοῖσδε, τῷ τὴν μὲν χρείαν πάντως ἀναφέρεσθαι εἰς πρόσωπον, τὴν δὲ γνώμην οὐ πάντως, καὶ τῷ ποτὲ μὲν τὸ καθόλου, ποτὲ δὲ τὸ ἐπὶ μέρους ἀποφαίνεσθαι τὴν χρείαν, τὴν δὲ γνώμην καθόλου μόνον· ἔτι δὲ τῷ χαριεντίζεσθαι τὴν χρείαν ἐνίοτε μηδὲν ἔχουσαν βιωφελές, τὴν δὲ γνώμην ἀεὶ περὶ τῶν ἐν τῷ βίῳ χρησίμων εἶναι· τέταρτον ὅτι ἡ μὲν χρεία πρᾶξις ἢ λόγος ὑπάρχει, ἡ δὲ γνώμη λόγος ἐστὶ μόνον. τὸ δὲ ἀπομνημόνευμα δυσὶ τοῖσδε κεχώρισται τῆς χρείας· ἡ μὲν γὰρ σύντομος, τὸ δὲ ἀπομνημόνευμα ἕσθ ὅτε ἐπεκτείνεται, καὶ ἡ μὲν ἀναφέρεται εἴς τινα πρόσωπα, τὸ δὲ ἀπομνημόνευμα καὶ καθ ἑαυτὸ μνημονεύεται. εἴρηται δὲ χρεία κατ ἐξοχήν, ὅτι μᾶλλον τῶν ἄλλων πρὸς πολλὰ χρειώδης ἐστὶ τῷ βίῳ, καθάπερ καὶ Ὅμηρον πολλῶν ὄντων ποιητῶν κατ ἐξοχὴν τοῦτον μόνον καλεῖν εἰώθαμεν ποιητήν. A chreia is a brief saying or action making a point, attributed to some specified person or something corresponding to a person, and gnome and apomnemoneuma are connected with it. Every brief gnome attributed to a person creates a chreia. A apomnemoneuma is an action or a saying useful for life. The gnome, however, differs from the chreia in four ways: the chreia is always attributed to a person, the gnome not always; the chreia sometimes states a universal, sometimes a particular, the gnome only a universal; furthermore, sometimes the chreia is witty and not useful for life, but the gnome is always about something useful in life; fourth, the chreia is an action or a saying, the gnome is only a saying. The apomnemoneuma is distinguished from the chreia in two ways: the chreia is brief, the apomnemoneuma is sometimes extended, and the chreia is attributed to a particular person, while the apomnemoneuma is also remembered for its own sake. A chreia is given that name par excellence, because more than the others it is useful for many situations in life, just as we have grown accustomed to call Homer “the Poet” because of his excellence, although there are many poets.68 68

Hock, O’Neil, The Cheia in Ancient Rhetoric, 1:82. Translation (with minor modifications): George A. Kennedy, Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), 15.

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Interestingly, what Theon seems to have had in mind when referring to gnome are sayings that correspond to the first example cited above, where the attribution is not part of the saying. On the basis of this obsevration, examples two to four belong to the category of chreia. Apomnemoneuma seems to refer to a more elaborate type of biographical account and scholars have commonly connected it to Xenophon’s work of the same name (Memorabilia). For a student of Chinese collections such as the Great Digest it is interesting to notice that Theon sees an intimate connection between unattributed and attributed sayings, as ancient Chinese authors appear to silently agree with him by listing both types side by side without any sign of differentiation. His statement that every gnome turns into a chreia once it has been attributed raises the question of whether Chinese authors as well saw in their anonymous snippets of wisdom potential material that could or even should be enhanced with attributions or otherwise be brought into context. Theon’s description of the chreia, his use of words such as prosōpon (“person, character, role”) or anaferō (“to attribute, to ascribe, to bring to”), suggest that he was well aware of the doubtfulness of these attributions.69 Historically speaking, the general didactic purpose of gnomai and chreiai caused a high degree of “modularity” when it came to individual “building blocks” such as attribution, historical setting, etc. The pursuit of intellectual and rhetorical efficacy appears to have generally outweighed the significance of what we would consider historical accuracy.70 Researchers of ancient Chinese anecdotes and sayings wrestle with very similar issues. In general, it has been argued that the concept of “modularity” could be applicable to the entire early Chinese corpus.71 Therefore, scholars on both sides have come to the conclusion that the authenticity of an attributed saying represents an interesting but, in most questions, unsolvable if not doubtful issue, as attributions regularly appear to have been dropped or changed in the process of transmitting and remodeling a saying.72 Be it due to willful modification or unintended error, on the basis of their changing provenance, some sayings have been labelled as “travelling saying,” 69 70 71

72

Cf. Hock, O’Neil, The Cheia in Ancient Rhetoric, 1:109–110. See, in particular, Overwien, Die Sprüche des Kynikers Diogenes, 391–401, fn. 5. For the introduction of the concept of “building blocks” into the academic discourse on early Chinese manuscript production in general, see William G. Boltz, “The Composite Nature of Early Chinese Texts,” in Text and Ritual in Early China, ed. Martin Kern (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 50–78. See, for instance, Michael Hunter’s thoughts on the “Kongzi problem” in comparison to Socrates: Hunter, Confucius Beyond the Analects, 14–16. For the Greek side, see Stanzel, “Dicta Platonica,” 29–33; Searby, Aristotle in the Greek Gnomological Tradition, 23–27; Oliver Overwien, “Denis Michael searby, Aristotle in the Greek Gnomological Tradtion

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“Wandersprüche,” or “Wanderapophthegmen,” thus suggesting that the attribution of single statements could easily travel from one individual and one context to another.73 Neatly related to this is Theon’s second intriguing observation. He suggests that while gnomai are necessarily concerned with useful matters of life, chreiai “make a point” (εὐστοχία) and can be “witty” (χαριεντίζομαι). What he refers to here is the tendency of chreiai to portray their protagonists as ingenious thinkers and rhetors that are quick at repartee and who always have a clever or even a humorous answer ready. The root of the word charientizomai chosen here indicates that he believes this representation to showcase the charismatic personality of the teacher.74 Profound wisdom was not enough. In order to be appealing and convincing, the teacher had to be able to prove his cleverness in a humorous and memorable way. As Christoph Harbsmeier has demonstrated, compilers of Confucian collections such as the Analects were certainly familiar with this idea.75 This leads us to the last engaging aspect of Theon’s account, i.e., his reanalytical conception of the chreia as the archetype of “useful” (χρειώδης) sayings. Initially, Theon seems to contradict himself, as he has only admitted a few lines earlier that some chreiai are not “useful for life” (βιωφελής). However, the solution to this paradox is found towards the end of the chapter, where he introduces the reader to different chreia-based progymnasmata, “preparatory exercises,” which range from grammatical inflection to instructions on how to expand, refute, or elaborate chreiai. Here it becomes evident that Theon has above all the rhetorical potential of the chreia in mind when he speaks of its versatility. As a rhetor, its didactic value is of secondary concern. It was in philosophical school teachings that these ethical aspects of the chreia found their application.76

73

74 75 76

(Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 19), Uppsala 1998, 314 S.,” Göttinger Forum für Altertumswissenschaften 2 (1999): 1149. Rens Krijgsman, “Traveling sayings as carriers of philosophical debate: From the intertextuality of the *Yucong 語叢 to the dynamics of cultural memory and authorship in Early China,” Asiatische Studien 68, no. 1 (2014): 83–115; Stanzel, “Dicta Platonica,” 30; Overwien, Die Sprüche des Kynikers Diogenes, 392. See also Overwien, “Denis Michael searby,” 1149–1150. Christoph Harbsmeier, “Confucius Ridens: Humor in the Analects,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 50, no. 1 (1990): 131–161. Barns, “A New Gnomologium (ii),” 8; Searby, Aristotle in the Greek Gnomological Tradition, 35; Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China, 56; Overwien, Die Sprüche des Kynikers Diogenes, 444–445. By stating this, I fully acknowledge that the potential applications of these texts were not necessarily constrained to school education alone but could also include self-cultivation or even simply entertainment of individuals unaffiliated with any school.

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What consequently renders the comparison between these two literary traditions so fascinating is that both appear to have been an integral element of philosophical and rhetorical education that flourished almost simultaneously in two entirely separate locations on this planet. Created to illustrate and convey fundamental aspects of ethical teachings, collections from both sides appear to have generally served as learning material that allowed easy and direct access for a potential student, who could use them for her or his intellectual advancement. After having been studied and memorized, perhaps even under the guidance of a tutor, the language and the content of these sayings would turn into an important resource. It would be useful when facing the challenge of delivering an eloquent and persuasive speech in front of a public audience or a monarch or in the attempt to establish one’s own ideas and systems of thought.77 Given this shared Sitz im Leben, it is certainly significant that classical scholars have generally read the rise of the gnome and chreia into a literary context.78 In fact, the abovementioned schematic approach to these sayings has been singled out as a silent witness to a literary background.79 While no one doubts that sayings could and did originate from oral traditions or as pure inventions, their flourishing has been commonly seen as linked to an increasingly literate culture that did not prohibit but encouraged the appropriation of the written achievements of others. Thus, it was regarded as laudable to compile large collections of passages taken from the writings of poets, philosophers, or politicians in order to use them for one’s own purposes. These practices gave rise to stylistic conventions whose traces remain visible in the material transmitted to this day. Relying upon a simile widely used by ancient Greek authors themselves, John Barns has compared this approach to the behavior of an industrious bee, flying meticulously from flower to flower to collect as much pollen as possible.80 Traces in preserved works and anecdotes suggest that excerpting had soon become an indispensable part of literary culture. Already Xenophon has Socrates say that he and his friends take pleasure in “selecting” (ἐκλέγω) and collecting passages from the writings of the wise men of old.81 The resulting 77

78 79 80 81

For futher analogies between the Chinese and Greek traditions in relation to the rhetorical elaboration and manipulation, see Thomas Crone, “The Master Elaborates: The Liji 禮記 Chapters ‘Ziyi’ 緇衣, ‘Biaoji’ 表記, and ‘Fangji’ 坊記 Read from the Perspective of Greco-Roman Progymnasmata,” (unpublished manuscript, July 31, 2021), typescript. Horna and Fritz, “Gnome, Gnomendichtung, Gnomologien,” 135; Searby, Aristotle in the Greek Gnomological Tradition, 31. Overwien, Die Sprüche des Kynikers Diogenes, 173. Barns, “A New Gnomologium (i),” 135. Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.6.14.

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collections could reach considerable dimensions. Thus, Pliny the Younger (61– 113/115) relates in a letter to his friend that his uncle, Pliny the Elder (23/24– 79), left him 160 notebooks “written also on the back and in the tiniest script” (opisthographos quidem et minutissimis scriptos).82 Plutarch’s (46–? ce) comprehensive anthologies, which by far exceed the scale of the Great Digest and other Chinese collections, suggest that since his youth, Pliny the Elder must have been a passionate collector and compiler of small literary items. We should not necessarily assume that he wrote all of his notes by himself. Pliny the Elder had servants who not only read to him but even supported him in taking notes. Thus, as much as reading was practiced in groups, passages were excerpted by being dictated, paraphrased, or recited from memory.

3

Conclusion

This study has attempted to show that by treating the Great Digest as a representative of a genre of texts and comparing it with remnants of the Greek gnomological tradition, we can obtain insights that go beyond the understandably interesting but to some extend unsolvable issues of authorship and of precise compilation dates. The comparison encourages us to see the Great Digest as a product of an ancient learning tradition, which not only enhances our understanding of the text itself, but also promises to shed new light on its broader literary background. As a result, this essay poses an alternative to the commonly held view that collections of sayings such as the Great Digest are representative of the origins of early Chinese philosophical writing, which then slowly developed into larger and more complex types of literature.83 It also raises doubts on the closely related assumption that the origins of this genre can be traced back to a preliterate philosophical discourse surrounding Confucius and his early followers.84 This is obviously not to say that such collections may not have possessed an oral background at all. In fact, the aural features of the Great Digest raise the question as to whether a strict separation between oral and literary sources is

82 83

84

Plin. Ep. 3.5.17. Lewis, Writing and Authority in Early China, 56–57., 83. This approach is also followed by Wiebke Deneke, who claims that texts such as the Analects served as the “great model” for later philosophical writings. Deneke, The Dynamics of Masters Literature, 90. For the probably most explicit articulation of this viewpoint, see Wojciech J. Simson, Die Geschichte der Aussprüche des Konfuzius (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 31–39.

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at all helpful when it comes to understanding the creation of such texts. As both modes of transmission apparently remained interrelated, what seems to have been brought into the text by memory may have originated from another written document and vice versa. However, this also implies that we cannot automatically assume that only oral discourse and collections of sayings and anecdotes constituted the earliest type of sources writers possessed, and that everything else was somehow derived from them. Instead, the very existence of this kind of “pollen” perhaps indicates that there might have been much more complex literary “blossoms” around from which it had been originally obtained. At the same time, after having been collected, studied and internalized, such sayings could obviously also become the source of new compositions that went well beyond the scope of originally shattered tiny textual fragments. This shows that the recording and gathering of sayings may in many cases simply have been a common byproduct of written and oral philosophical discussions in general, and right from the beginning went hand in hand with the composition of much more complex and elaborate pieces of literature. The Greek gnomological tradition in general, and the Great Digest in particular, therefore suggest that we should remain open to the possibility that extensive philosophical treatises and essays, as found in the main chapters of the Xunzi, may have played an important role during the composition of Confucian gnomai and chreiai as much as entirely orally transmitted teachings. Finally, it also throws a thought-provoking light on the extent to which sociopolitical and intellectual change has had an influence on such seemingly remote things as text composition. By this I do not mean the obvious and irrefutable fact that in both ancient cultures the flourishing of person-focused sayings and anecdotes was deeply connected to the rise of a morally minded philosophy and charismatic spiritual leaders. What I refer to is that both phenomena occurred simultaneously with the emergence of monarchical, authoritarian and centralist regimes. Here parallels arise, the possible significance of which goes far beyond what this essay seeks to establish. What influence do macroeconomic and socio-political factors have on human writing habits? How much is the style and scope of texts determined by the social order? These are difficult questions to discuss, but as the comparison in this study shows, they might be worth a try.

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Bibliography Barns, John. “A New Gnomologium: With Some Remarks on Gnomic Anthologies (i).” The Classical Quarterly 3 (1950): 126–137. Barns, John. “A New Gnomologium: With Some Remarks on Gnomic Anthologies (ii).” The Classical Quarterly, New Series 1 (1951): 1–19. Baxter, William H., and Sagart, Laurent. Old Chinese: A New Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Boltz, William G. “The Composite Nature of Early Chinese Texts.” In Text and Ritual in Early China, edited by Martin Kern, 50–78. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. Cook, Scott. “Confucius in Excavated Warring States Manuscripts.” In A Concise Companion to Confucius, edited by Paul R. Goldin, 35–51. Hoboken: Wiley, 2017. Crone, Thomas. “Confucius Repeats Himself: On the Nature and Sources of the Lunyu 論語 (Selected Teachings).” T’oung Pao 108, nos. 3–4: 289–318. Crone, Thomas. “The Master Elaborates: The Liji 禮記 Chapters ‘Ziyi’ 緇衣, ‘Biaoji’ 表 記, and ‘Fangji’ 坊記 Read from the Perspective of Greco-Roman Progymnasmata.” (Unpublished manuscript, July 31, 2021), typescript. Denecke, Wiebke. The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 2010. Dorandi, Tiziano, ed., Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Harbsmeier, Christoph. “Confucius Ridens: Humor in the Analects.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 50, no. 1 (1990): 131–161. Harbsmeier, Christoph. “A Reading of the Guōdiàn 郭店 Manuscript Yǔcóng 語叢 1 as a Masterpiece of Early Chinese Analytic Philosophy and Conceptual Analysis.” Studies in Logic 4, no. 3 (2011): 3–56. Hense, Otto, ed. Ioannis Stobaei anthologii libri duo posteriores. Vol. 3, 3 vols. Berlin: Weidemann, 1894–1912. Heszer, Catherine. “Die Verwendung der hellenistischen Gattung Chrie im frühen Christentum und Judentum.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 27, no. 4 (1996): 371– 439. Hock, Ronald, and F. Edward N. O’Neil. The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric. Vol. 1, 3 vols. Atlanta: The Society of Biblical Literature, 1986–2012. Horna, Konstantin, and Kurt von Fritz. “Gnome, Gnomendichtung, Gnomologien.” In Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Supplemente, edited by Georg Wissowa. Vol. 6, 15 vols., 74–90. Stuttgart: Alfred Druckenmüller, 1903– 1978. Hunter, Michael. “Analects deselected.” PhD diss., Princeton University, 2012. Hunter, Michael. Confucius Beyond the Analects. Leiden: Brill, 2017.

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Hutton, Eric L. Xunzi 荀子: The Complete Text. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Kern, Martin. “Style and Poetic Diction in the Xunzi.” In Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Xunzi, edited by Eric L. Hutton, 1–33. Dordrecht: Springer, 2016. Kim Tae Hyun, and Mark Csikszentmihalyi. “History and Formation of the Analects.” In Dao Companion to the Analects, edited by Amy Olberding, 21–36. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014. Knoblock, John. Xunzi: A Translation and Study of the Complete Works. Vol. 3, 6 vols. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Krijgsman, Rens. “Traveling sayings as carriers of philosophical debate: From the intertextuality of the *Yucong 語叢 to the dynamics of cultural memory and authorship in Early China.” Asiatische Studien 68, no. 1 (2014): 83–115. Lazaridis, Nikolaos. Wisdom in Loose Form: The Language of Egyptian and Greek Proverbs in Collections of the Hellenistic and Roman Periods. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2007. Lewis, Mark E. Writing and Authority in Early China. Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1999. Makeham, John. “The Formation of Lunyu as a Book.” Monumenta Serica 1 (1996): 1– 24. Overwien, Oliver. “Denis Michael searby, Aristotle in the Greek Gnomological Tradtion (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 19), Uppsala 1998, 314 S.” Göttinger Forum für Altertumswissenschaften 2 (1999): 1147–155. Overwien, Oliver. “Das Gnomologium, das Gnomologium Vaticanum und die Tradition.” Göttinger Forum für Altertumswissenschaften 4 (2001): 99–131. Overwien, Oliver. Die Sprüche des Kynikers Diogenes in der griechischen und arabischen Überlieferung. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005. Qichao, Liang 梁啟超. “Xunzi shu zhi zhuzuo ji qi bianci 荀子書之著作及其編次.” In Gushibian 古史辨, edited by Luo Genze 羅根澤, Vol. 4, 7 vols., 110–115. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982. Schuessler, Axel. Minimal Old Chinese and Later Han Chinese: A Companion to Grammata Serica Recensa. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. Searby, Denis M. Aristotle in the Greek Gnomological Tradition. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1998. Selle, Hendrik. Theognis und die Theognidea. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. Simson, Wojciech J. Die Geschichte der Aussprüche des Konfuzius. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. Stanzel, Karl-Heinz. “Dicta Platonica: Die unter Platons Namen überlieferten Aussprüche.” PhD diss., Julius-Maximilians-Universität zu Würzburg, 1987. Sternbach, Leo, ed. Gnomologium Vaticanum e codice Vaticano Graeco 743. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1963.

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Strohmaier, Gotthard. Von Demokrit bis Dante: Die Bewahrung antiken Erbes in der arabischen Kultur. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1996. Wang Pinzhen 王聘珍, and Wenjin Wang 王文錦. Da Dai Liji jiegu 大戴禮記解詁. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1983. Wang, Xianqian 王先謙, Xiaohuan Shen 沈啸寰, and Xingxian Wang 王星賢. Xunzi jijie 荀子集解. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1988. Xitang, Zhang 張西堂. “Xunzi gepian zhenwei zhi jiading 荀子各篇真偽之假定.” In Gushibian 古史辨, edited by Luo Genze 羅根澤. Vol. 6, 7 vols., 148–150. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1982. Yoshimoto, Michimasa 吉本道雅, “Dan Kyū kō 檀弓考.” Kodai bunka 古代文化 44, no. 2 (1992): 38–46. Zhenzong, Yao 姚振宗, and Junjie Deng 鄧駿捷. Qilüe bielu yiwen Qilüe yiwen 七略別 錄佚文七略佚文. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2008. Zhihui, Yu 俞志慧. “‘Xunzi: Da lüe’ wei Xunzi dushu biji shuo 《荀子·大略》為荀子讀 書筆記說.” Wenxue yichan 文學遺產 1 (2012): 141–145.

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chapter 5

“The Master Says”: Speech and Silence in the Analects Andrew Hui

Elias Canetti once said that in the Analects, what Confucius does not say is as important as what he does say.1 For instance, the Master never spoke about “miracles, violence, disorder, spirits” (7.20); nor the supernatural, “you do not understand life—how could you be able to serve ghosts and spirits?” (11.12). He was taciturn: “the good person is sparing of speech” (12.3); “reticence is close to Goodness” (13.27). “Words should convey their point, and leave it at that” (15.41); “remaining silent and yet comprehending, learning and yet never becoming tired … they are tasks that present me with no difficulty” (7.2). What you do is more important than what you say: “People in ancient times were not eager to speak, because they would be ashamed if their actions did not measure up to their words” (4.22); “The gentleman wishes to be slow to speak, but quick to act” (4.24). He was even a stickler for when to speak: “He would not instruct while eating, nor of the collection continue to converse once he had retired to bed” (10.10). The very last saying warns: “One who does not understand words lacks the means to understand others” (20.3).2 From a Sinological point of view, it might seem odd, even a bit perverse, to begin our discussion of a revered text of the Chinese tradition with Canetti, but his intuitions hit upon a central matrix in the Analects: words and silence. Now, we turn to a slightly firmer historical ground: The Analects is composed of discussions in which Confucius responded to his disciples and his contemporaries, and to his disciples’ words when speaking of one another and of speech they heard directly from the Master. At that time, each of the disciples had his own personal records. After the Master died, his

1 Elias Canetti, “Confucius in His Conversations,” in The Conscience of Words, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 171–179, in particular 171. 2 There are many sound translations of the Analects. I have benefitted the most from the recent translations by Edward G. Slingerland and Annping Chin, as they include many of the traditional commentaries. See Edward G. Slingerland, Analects: With Selection from Traditional Commentaries (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003); Annping Chin, The Analects (New York: Penguin Books, 2014).

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disciples gathered them all together to discuss and then compiled them (輯而 論篹). Thus, they were called his “selected speeches” (論語).3 These words are from the History of the Han (hanshu, 漢書) by Ban Gu (班 固, 32–92 ce). Already in this early anecdote there is a suggestion that the practice of Confucian exegesis is both hermeneutic (“discuss,” lun, 論) and textualcritical (“compiled,” ji, 輯). It would be perhaps too hyperbolic to claim that these two words encapsulate the entire history of debates in Chinese intellectual thought. However, Ban Gu’s anecdote certainly gives us an incipient sense of the myriad of schools and doctrines that were to contend for authority in the centuries to come. Actually, the composition of the Analects is more complicated than Ban Gu’s idealized etiology would seem to suggest.4 Like many of the collected aphorisms we will discuss, there is simply no original, no Ur-text. Scholars now acknowledge that compositional fluidity marked the earliest stages of Lunyu. Early Chinese texts circulated in short, bite-sized units that were eventually merged into larger collections. They could be reconfigured in endless ways according to the wishes of an editor.5 Five centuries after Confucius’ life (551– 479 bce), Ban Gu himself wrote some and, therefore, there is a fair amount of mythologizing. Recent scholarly work on archaeologically excavated manuscripts has shed much light on the production of texts in early China. A huge cache of bamboo strips, recovered in 1993 from a fourth-century bce Warring States Guodian tomb in the Hubei Province, demonstrates the fluid and variable formation of the textual corpora. The collection contains the earliest version of the Daodejing, ordered differently from the received version: there is a gnomic “thicket of sayings,” yucong, 語叢, and some of Confucius’ sayings appear in the section “Black Robes” (Ziyi, 緇衣).6 While Confucius is not explicitly named, his identity is confirmed because the same quotations survive in other testimonia,

3 §30 Ban Gu 1717. 4 In the Balanced Discussions, Wang Chong gives a different account, stating that the original Analects had more than a hundred chapters. See Tae Hyun Kim and Mark Csikszentmihalyi, “History and Formation of the Analects,” in Dao Companion to the Analects, ed. Amy Olberding (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014) 21–36. 5 For a fine account on the topic, see Maurizio Scarpari, Il confucianesimo: i fondamenti e i testi (Turin: Einaudi, 2010), 31–37. 6 See Scott Cook’s important The Bamboo Texts of Guodian A Study and Complete Translation (Ithaca [NY]: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2012). Dirk Meyer argues that the pervasive use of bamboo and ink during the second half of the first millennium bce enabled an efflorescence of philosophical activity. See Dirk Meyer, Philosophy on Bamboo: Text and Production of Meaning in Early China (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

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namely the Book of Ritual (Li ji, 禮記) and in the Shanghai Museum excavated manuscripts. By the end of the Western Han, the words of Confucius existed in many other versions besides the Lunyu, and all these abundant anthologies attest to his charisma.7 We simply do not know to what extent did editors and copyists change the order of the Analect books (pian, 篇) in their transmission. At a certain point (the dating of the collection is fraught with controversy), the Analects became the supreme source.8 The absence of a definite plan, combined with the protagonist’s enigmatic reticence, in part explains the long exegetical tradition of the text, for much labor was exerted to find some sort of coherence behind its haphazard appearance. The dynamics of the commentarial tradition thus established the very architectonics of Chinese classical thought, enduring for more than two millennia. In short, the teachings of Confucius “the Uncrowned King” (suwang, 素 王) began as oral production, were transcribed by his disciples into inchoate “fragments,” and, after generations and generations of commentaries, were codified into an immense institutional canon, thereby constituting the official “system” of Confucianism (ru, 儒).9 As such, insofar as the commentarial tradition seeks to give coherence to Confucius’ scattered sayings, the dichotomy between teacher and follower cannot be maintained—they exist on a continuum.10 My hypothesis is that, at least in the Analects, the amount of scholarly commentary produced is inversely proportional to the succinctness of the original sayings. In other words, the pithier the teacher, the more voluminous the tradition.11 The premodern reader would have never read any “clean” text of the

7

8 9

10 11

Michael Hunter’s exhaustive study distinguishes the Kongzi of the Lunyu and the other “Kongzis” depicted in the other multitudinous texts. See Michael Hunter, Confucius Beyond the Analects (Leiden: Brill, 2017). For a list of all the extant sources, which run to the dozens, see pages 39–45. Another helpful source is Paul Goldin, ed. Concise Companion to Confucius (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017). See Hunter and Kern, Confucius and the Analects Revisited: New Perspectives on Composition, Dating, and Authorship (Leiden: Brill, 2018). For a magisterial study of the commentarial tradition from the Han to the Qing dynasties, see John Makeham, Transmitters and Creators (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003). For a stimulating cross-cultural approach, see John Henderson, Scripture, Canon, and Commentary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). On the formation of the Confucian canon, see Michael Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). This inverse ratio is also true for the Spring and Autumn Annals, which Mencius attributes to Confucius. As a 241-year chronicle of the minor state of Lu, it lists, season-by-season, important births, deaths, accessions, sacrifices, harvests, wars, peace treaties, the earthly,

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Lunyu. Printed editions invariably included a raft of paratextual apparatus and propaedeutic aids (see fig. 1). As we will see, sometimes the exegesis served to explain the historical meaning of the text; sometimes it served to explain its timeless philosophical import. When we read the Confucian canon in light of the category of “wisdom literature,” we can point out several common phenomena. One, the master (always a male). He is an eccentric figure, who powerfully critiques the conventions of society. Zoroaster, the Buddha, Jesus—they do not write. The Master speaks and the disciples transcribe. Confucius is an interesting case because while the aversion to writing does certainly seem to be cultivated in the Analects, from the late Western Han the Master’s name began to be attached to the Five Classics. These texts record the daily lives, love songs, sacrificial hymns, ritual conducts, divinatory practices, and annalistic chronicles of early China.12 In this case, he compiles and assembles the fragments of the past rather than creates ex nihilo. Thus, we have the construction of Confucius as the philosopher in the Analects (one of the Four Books) and as the philologist in the Five Classics. Two, according to Max Weber, a wisdom tradition develops from a charismatic teacher to a group of selected disciples and finally to a sprawling bureaucracy with rigid hierarchies.13 In wisdom literature, the equivalence between authorship and authenticity is often a false one, since so many founding fathers disavowed writing. The main force of authority rests in the hands of the tradents, a term used in Biblical scholarship for those responsible for the preservation and dissemination of the tradition. One might say that the mystique of the master is largely a construction of these epigones. Tradition attests that the Buddhist canon—known as the Tripiṭaka—was compiled during a series of councils after the Buddha’s death. As scriptures were transmitted, often by rival sects, from India to China in the early second century ce and Tibet in the seventh century ce, monastic communities were confronted with a plethora

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13

and celestial phenomena of the realm. While cumulatively massive, each unit of text seems as short, dry, and factual as a telephone book. This enormous rationale had to be conjured in order to find a deeper meaning in it. The Commentary of Zuo (左傳) and the Commentary of Gong Yang (公羊) exemplify such an undertaking. These are the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu, 春秋), Book of Poetry (Shijing, 詩經), Book of Documents (Shangshu, 尚書), Records of Rituals (Liji, 禮儀), and the Classic of Changes (Yijing, 易經). On the organization of bureaucracy, the sociology of charismatic authority, and an analysis of the Chinese literati, see Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 196–244, 245–252, 416–444.

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of commentaries and scholarly apparatuses.14 Like the early Christian church councils, Confucian scholars held major meetings to address differences in textual interpretation and to establish the authorized canon at the Stone Canal Pavilion in 51 bce and at the White Tiger Hall in 79ce. Under the auspices of state sponsorship, the official “Confucian” system endeavored to make the once stateless “Confucius” and his wandering fragments into an ideological whole. Three, much of this institutionalization is conservative and preservative— exegesis labors to maintain orthodoxy.15 In the longue durée, tradition is attacked by successive waves of heresies but finds its vitality and relevance precisely by combating them. The Han Feizi—a Warring States text that establishes the Legalist tradition—already records that after Confucius’ and Mozi’s deaths, their schools split respectively into eight and three sects (§ 50). A welter of texts about Jesus circulated in the decades and centuries after his death. Successive church councils ultimately reduced these to the canon of the New Testament. Thus, all other competing materials became apocryphal. In the development of the Theravāda canon, Steven Collins surmises that there were four stages of recension for the purposes of “self-definition and self-legitimation by the Mahāvihārin monks.” These stages include the written transcription of the Buddha’s oral sayings and their attendant commentaries, the production of a fixed set of writings, the standardization of authorized commentaries, and the establishment of the genre of vaṃsa, genealogies, and annals that determined the authenticity of transmission.16 Four, the ordering of topics in a received text is non-sequential (such as the Lunyu, the Pali “Numbered Discourses of the Buddha,” The Gospel of Thomas). Certainly, there are common themes in a work, but they are only loosely connected, lacking a clear architectonic structure. This miscellaneous heterogeneity, we can assume, is deliberate. It allows a great amount of hermeneutic freedom and provides scholars with a task to carry out—we will never be out of work. Fifth, the enunciative moment of an aphorism begins with very little indication of time or place, utterly out of context, as if the reader were hearing the pure voice of the teacher, uncontaminated by the strictures of circumstance.

14 15 16

For a brief, reliable history, see Kogen Mizuno, Buddhist Sutras: Origin, Development, Transmission (Tokyo: Kosei, 1982). See Henderson, The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heresy: Neo-Confucian, Islamic, Jewish, and Early Christian Patterns (Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1998). Collins, Steven. “On the Very Idea of the Pāli Canon,” Journal of the Pali Text Society 15 (1990): 89–126.

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The majority of the fragments in the Analects begins with the famous “Master says” (zi yue 子曰, the Chinese verb has no temporal marker). In the Gospel of Thomas, every logion similarly begins with the simple present tense formula “Jesus says.” Pali and Sanskrit Buddhists texts invariably begin with “Thus have I heard.”17 Finally, aphorisms in wisdom literature are usually simple, wellwrought sentences, often in rhythmic parallels, thus making memorization and recitation easy. In sum, without aphorisms, there would be no wisdom literature. From across Eurasia, the sayings of the sages exist in the short form, they are preserved and shaped, and at times, mutilated by their “tradents.” Aphorisms live in interesting places—though usually received as singular enunciations, they find strength and survive in the social collective of anthologies. As such, in understanding wisdom literature, both philological and philosophical approaches are needed. Moreover, the minimal syntax of an aphorism gives it a maximal semantic force. The best aphorisms admit infinite interpretations, i.e., hermeneutic inexhaustibility. In other words, while an aphorism is circumscribed by the minimal requirements of language, its interpretation demands a maximal engagement. Deciphering the gnomic remarks of the early Greek thinkers, Jesus, or Confucius marks the birth of hermeneutics.

1

Distrust of Words

When we set aside the polyphony of exegetic voices by energetic commentators and turn our attention to the text itself (which would not exist except through their preservation), it is clear that the Master distrusted words. Already in the third fragment of Book 1, Confucius said: “A clever tongue and fine appearance are rarely signs of Goodness” (1.3). This is repeated verbatim in 17.17 and the theme of glibness of speech is something like a leitmotif (5.5, 11.25, 12.3, 15.11, 16.4). For Confucius, there must be a correspondence between the inner intention and the outer expression—language is but a cunning mask and not at all a transparent mirror that reflects the true nature of an individual. In fact, the Analects could be considered an anti-rhetoric manual. Confucius’ precise use of words led to his conciseness. For this reason, he taught through the genre of the short remark:

17

See John Brough, “Thus Have I Heard,”Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 13, no. 2 (1950): 416–426.

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The Master said, “I will not open the door for a mind that is not already striving to understand, nor will I provide words to a tongue that is not already struggling to speak [ fa 發]. If I hold up one corner of a problem, and the student cannot come back to me with the other three, I will not attempt to instruct him again.” 7.8

This passage confutes the myth of “Asian learning” as only rigid, uncreative rote memorization, which was a stereotype perpetuated by twentieth and twenty-first century critiques of traditionalist education. This is a pedagogy that requires the student to actively participate in the co-production of knowledge. Like the Socratic method, Confucian learning at its origins is maieutic and dialectical, and not a top-down model of codified knowledge. The Qing commentator Liu Fenglu remarks that “all the sage’s words consist of raising one corner so as to wait for people to come back with the other three corners. Hence his written words are pithy, but their meaning is without limit.”18 Another Qing commentator, Liu Baonan, says that “fa 發 refers to the meaning that Confucius had not yet spoken about (wei yan zhi yi 未言之義).”19 The Master promoted what we would today call meta-cognitive skills: “if you learn without thinking about what you have learned, you will be lost. If you think without learning, however, you will fall into danger” (2.15). Now, literally speaking, showing the other three points on a coordinate is a simple mathematical equation; indeed, the rivals of the Confucian school would say that it was too simple. The Nominalist would say that the Confucians did not have adequate terminology to engage in rational debates. The Legalist would critique the Confucians as lacking in theories of statecraft sophisticated enough to administer a sprawling empire. The Daoist would say that the Confucians fall short of having a fully articulated vision of the intimate relationship between the individual and the cosmos. The Mohist school would develop models of systematic argument, standards of proof, and methodologies of philosophical debate. Even the Mencius, a text compiled by the followers of “Master Meng,” a staunch follower of Confucius, would exhibit a more developed system of expository prose with complex arguments and dialogues than the Analects.20

18 19 20

Makeham, Transmitters and Creators, 332. Makeham, Transmitters and Creators, 332. The works by A.C. Graham provide rigorous philosophical analysis to these schools. See, for example, A.C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao (La Salle [IL]: Open Court, 1989).

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Alternately, defenders of Confucius’ way of teaching would stress the Master’s indirection as a sign of hidden depths. In the fifth-century ce, Liu Xie in the extraordinary poetic treatise Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍) emphasized the “subtle” or “hidden” speech (weiyan 微 言) of the Master.21 The pedagogy of the opaque, I would argue, authorizes, invites, enables, and gives license to the commentarial tradition, a mode of practice that would simply not exist if everything were transparent. The Master’s ambivalence to and indirection of language are what make exegesis possible.

2

The Silent Heavens

As Wiebke Denecke aptly notes, “the charismatic master is what he does.”22 This preference for the ethos rather than the logoi is captured by the analogy of the silence of celestial motion: The Master said, “I do not wish to speak anymore.” Zigong said, “If you do not speak, what will there be for us little ones to transmit [shu 述]?” The Master said, “Does Heaven speak? The four seasons are put in motion by it, and the myriad creatures receive their life from it. Does Heaven speak?” 17.9

There are many ways to read this passage. The first way is intertextuality, and the precedent is 2.1: “One who rules through the power of Virtue is analogue to the Pole Star: it simply remains in its place and receives the homage of the myriad lesser stars.” In both quotations there is a sense of hierarchy, with the “little stars” and Zigong’s “little ones.” The second way is biographical; this is a man clearly exhausted and frustrated by his lack of advancement. Does Confucius want to be one of those recluses, so sick of civil corruption, that they abandon society once and for all, as many anecdotes in Books 17 and 18 recount? This reading would be persuasive if there were no response by him to Zigong. A better reading would be provided by the third way, which is analogical: the silence of heavenly motion is deployed as a pedagogical paradigm. The pivotal word is Zigong’s “transmit” (shu 述). This word is the same as the “transmit” in the allimportant 7.1: “I transmit rather than innovate” 述而不作. It is not the words 21 22

See the lunshuo chapter, 論說. Wiebke Denecke, The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010).

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of the Master that “transmit,” but his wordless actions. Moreover, Confucius is saying that the heavens actually do speak—only that its language is silent and pervasive, present in the sheer immanence of the myriad creatures. Confucian thought is as expansive as the ways of heaven, manifesting its power by animating the changes of the seasons and nourishing all things (baiwu 百物) through its vital principle (sheng 生).

3

How to Read

The Confucius presented in the Analects thus embodies a curious paradox: he distrusts speech yet loves to learn. The way of self-cultivation is relentlessly driven by repetition and reflection: “learning is like a chase in which, as you fail to catch up, you fear to lose what you have already gained” (8.17): “the more I contemplate it, the higher it is; the deeper I dig into it” (9.11). So how do you learn? Through an interlinked series of lapidary aphorisms, Zhu Xi (1130–1200) in his treatise “How to Read” constructs an entire theory of interpretation: In reading a book we must read and reread it, appreciating each and every paragraph, each and every sentence, each and every word. Furthermore, we must consult the various annotations, commentaries, and explanations so that our understanding is complete. In this way moral principle and our own minds will be in perfect accord.23 4.4

At the heart of Zhu Xi’s program is the concept of “comprehending the principle in things” (gewu 格物), the means by which an individual can connect with her pure nature. Reading is the first step. And since “the substance of the Way is infinite,” the activity of learning is interminable. For Zhu Xi reading is a spiritual and an ethical practice. As was the case with the humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli, he yearns to speak with the worthy ancients: “it’s best to take up the books of the sages and read them so that you understand their ideas. It’s like speaking with them face to face” (4.6) Reading becomes the supplement, the proxy to conversing with the dead. The key for Zhu Xi is endless practice: “whether we are walking or at a standstill, sitting 23

See Chu Hsi, “On Reading (Part 1),” in Learning to Be a Sage: Selections from the Conversations of Master Chu, Arranged Topically, trans. with commentary by Daniel K. Gardner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 129.

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or lying down, if our minds are always on these texts, we will naturally come to understand them” (4.41). You must “pass them before your eyes, roll them around and around in your mouth, and turn them over and over in your mind” (4.7). Just as in the European Renaissance, the age of print in China brought about a sense of information overload.24 Zhu Xi expressed exasperation at the overabundance of books: “There are a great many books in the world. If you just read them as you have, when will you finish them?” (4.19). What he means is that it is foolhardy to read the classics on one’s own—one must have a wise guide. He urges the student to read not for quantity but for quality: “Read little but become intimately familiar with what you read; experience the text over and over again” (4.20). He believes in the hermeneutics of intuition: “be sure to ponder what you read. Then you’ll see the meaning leap right out from the text” (4.48). Finally, one must turn text into action: “the books you read, the principle you probe, should be embodied in your person” (5.2). For Zhu Xi, there is a paradoxical purpose to all this striving: the end of reading is the end of books. “Book learning is secondary,” necessary only because we have lost our original nature. But since book learning contains the “many manifestations of moral principle,” we should study books. Once we comprehend them, we might as well discard them, for what we learn is but what has been hidden within us, “from the very beginning, nothing has been added to us from the outside.” “When we read the Six Classics, it should be just as if there were no Six Classics. We are simply seeking the moral principles in ourselves—this principle is easy to understand” (5.41). As Nietzsche would later say, “What good is a book that does not even carry us beyond all books?” (Gay Science § 248)

4

The Silence of Textual Meditation Master said, “I once knew a time when scribes would leave the text blank (que, 闕), and those who owned horses would lend them to others. Nowadays, there is no one like this.” 15.26

The implied meaning is easy to decipher, i.e., Confucius’ times lack the modesty and generosity of earlier times. Ban Gu explains: 24

See Ann M. Blair’s account of the early modern European world in Too Much To Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

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According to the mode of working in ancient times, scribes wrote down exactly what was in the documents, and when they were not familiar with a word, they would leave a blank or they would ask senior scholars. But in periods of moral decline, right and wrong could no longer be verified, and so people relied on their own speculations Chin, 260

Huang Kan 皇侃 (488–545 ce) writes “Confucius here laments the fast-paced disorder of his age … in his later years, it was the case that a scribe who did not know a word would arbitrarily make something up rather than leave the space blank.” (Slingerland, 185) All our interest in lacunae, ellipses, and silence is obliquely condensed into this one saying. Confucius was indeed prescient in choosing the example of the scribe, for this will become the philological principle of understanding in the ages to come. The less Confucius says, the more the commentators have to add (and embellish). For Huang Kan, all patterns of the world (li, 理) are contained in the Analects—every jot and character must have some deeper meaning. Under the paradigm of “dark learning,” (xuanxue, 玄學), he elaborated on concepts such as weimiao 微妙 (subtle wonder), xuantong 玄通 (mysterious comprehension), wu 無 (emptiness), you 有 (there is), and xu 虚 (vacuity) of the Master.25 This Xuanxue was a neo-Daoist movement that resulted in many erstwhile “Confucian” texts being reinterpreted in a way more friendly to the teachings of Laozi and Zhuangzi.26 Kongzi would probably have been horrified. Nevertheless, xuanxue is an important episode in Chinese intellectual history of exegetes doing with the text as they pleased. While the early scribes, fondly recalled by Confucius, left bamboo strips empty, later commentators after the Master clearly did the opposite. The text did not remain blank for long. The fragments of the Master from Lu thus became the inexhaustible engine of Chinese thought. As the Confucian tradition coalesced and fragments turned to collections, the millennia of commentarial tradition became a culture industry. I point out two exemplary cases, which are around six hundred years apart. We have already encountered Zhu Xi. He is the prime exponent of the philosophical tendency of the Neo-Confucian movement, or Daoxue (道學).27 For

25 26 27

Henderson and Ng, “The Commentarial Tradition,” in Dao Companion to the Analects, ed. Amy Olberding (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014) 48. See Part ii of Makeham’s Transmitters and Creators, “Commentary as Philosophy: Huang Kan’s Lunyu yishu,” 79–170. See, among others, Peter K. Bol, Neo-Confucianism in History (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008).

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Zhu Xi, through diligent self-cultivation and textual study, a regular person can learn to become a sage: there is layer upon layer [of meanings] in the words of the sages. In your reading of them, penetrate deeply. If you simply read what appears on the surface, you will misunderstand. Steep yourself in the words; only then will you grasp their meaning Learning To Be A Sage, 4.9

Second, Qing scholars react to such subjective feelings by ushering in a more rational methodology that emphasizes the exacting analysis of ancient artifacts and texts. Aided by an expanding network of bibliophiles, printers, and booksellers, they stress “evidential research” (kaozheng 考證) through a mastery of grammar, lexicography, textual criticism, and paleography. The goal is no longer moral perfection, but empirical knowledge. Wang Ming-sheng 王鳴 盛 (1722–1798 ce) criticizes the Neo-Confucians when he writes: The Classics are employed to understand the Tao. But those who seek the Tao should not cling vacuously to ‘meanings and principles’ ( yili, 義理) in order to find it. If only they will correct primary and derived characters, discern their pronunciation, read the explanations and glosses, and master the commentaries and notes, the ‘meanings and principles’ will appear on their own, and the Tao within them. Similarly, for Dai Zhen (戴震 1724–1777 ce): The Classics provide the route to the Tao. What illuminates the Tao is their words. How words are formed can be grasped only through [a knowledge of] philology and paleography. From the study of primary and derived characters we can master the language. Through the language we can penetrate the mind and will of the ancient sages and worthies.28 This shift is what Benjamin Elman calls “from philosophy to philology,” hence the title of his groundbreaking book. The hermeneutic mode of self-cultivation versus the more scientific rigors of textual analysis forms a recurring dialectic throughout the tradition. In other 28

Both in Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge [MA]: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984), 28–29.

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words, there is always a friction between a universal, all-embracing philosophy of understanding and the local, philological glosses of difficult passages.29 The former treats received texts as unified, coherent doctrine propounded by an authoritative Master. The latter rejects such totality and points to internal inconsistencies due to textual corruption. This agon will never resolve. And this irresolution is imbricated with three related phenomena that we have explored so far: 1) the quandary of whether the Master’s thought is occasional or systematic; 2) the asymmetry between the Master’s succinctness and the commentaries’ voluminosity; 3) the rise of different contending schools of thought as a result of interpretative differences. Finite words, infinite meaning.

5

Ten Out of One

Hegel, when he encountered Confucius, was decidedly unimpressed. He was only a “moral educator” and not a true “philosopher:” “For in his case we do not find theory that occupies itself with thought as such,” the German philosopher explains in his 1822 Berlin lectures on world history. Since his purpose was to establish that the spirit of philosophy could only arise from Greece, China by definition had no part to play in his commanding narrative. He excluded Confucius from his canon precisely because he was too aphoristic. He had merely good, competent morality, “nothing more.” Hegel summarily declared: He is not to be compared to Plato, Aristotle, or Socrates. He was about the same as Solon, if we understand by this that he was the lawgiver to his people. His teachings are the foundation for moral instruction, especially that of princes.30 The German philosopher was probably disappointed because the sayings in the Lunyu, at first glance, do seem pretty banal. Admittedly, precepts such as “set your heart sincerely upon Goodness” (4.4) or “Do not disobey” (2.5) appear to be platitudes—their meaning too transparent, too commonplace for seri-

29

30

This is true for commentaries on the Book of Songs as well: they moved from specific, grammatical explanations of individual Odes to general aesthetic treatises such as the Wenfu and Wenxindiaolong. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Volume i: Manuscripts of the Introduction and the Lectures of 1822–1823, ed. and trans. Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011), 1:241.

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ous philosophical study. As in much else, Hegel was both right and wrong. He was right that Confucius was no Plato or Aristotle, for he did not engage in long discursive arguments contained in heavy tomes such as the Republic or the Metaphysics. But he was Socratic with his students, as we have seen. His teachings did become the foundation for moral instruction, but that happened because of his followers rather than his own power. Above all, Hegel was wrong about the banality of the sayings. Because of the subtlety (weiyan) of the Master’s words, their transparency is that of clear, limpid waters that run so deep that one cannot see the bottom: Yan Hui, the Master’s favorite disciple, had Hegel’s opposite reaction: The more I look up at it the higher it [the Confucian Way] seems; the more I delve into it, the harder it becomes. Catching a glimpse of it before me, I then find it suddenly at my back. The Master is skilled at gradually leading me on, step by step. He broadens me with culture and restrains me with the rites, so that even if I wanted to give up I could not. Having exhausted all of my strength, it seems as if there is still something left, looming up ahead of me. Though I desire to follow it, there seems to be no way through. 9.11

Yan Hui here experiences a moment of intellectual seizure at the immensity of it all. How do you not disobey? How do you set your heart upon Goodness? Easy to say, hard to do. Yet his aporetic moment is unlike that of Socrates’ Meno, for whereas the Greek interlocutor cannot get beyond his doubts, Yan Hui’s realization inspires him to go beyond his limits. This is the same Yan Hui in 5.9: “The Master said to Zigong, ‘who is better, you or Yan Hui?’ Zigong answered, ‘How dare I even think of comparing myself to Hui? Hui learns one thing and thereby understands ten. I learn one thing and thereby understand two.’” Yan Hui’s exponential intellect has become proverbial, and even he has a hard time following the Way.31

31

The Ming iconoclast Li Zhi 李贄 (1527–1602) would write: “After Yan Hui passed away, Confucius’s subtle words were cut short, sagely learning died out, and [genuine] Confucianism was no longer transmitted.” See Zhi Li, A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden), trans. Rebecca Handler-Spitz, Pauline Lee, and Haun Saussy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 17; translation modified.

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The River Flows

The sense of the immensity of it all is also captured in this saying: “Standing on the bank of a river, the master said, ‘Look at how it flows [shi 逝] on like this, never stopping day or night.’” (9.17) Commentary on this passage begins with Mencius: He was asked once, ‘Confucius more than once expressed his admiration for water, saying, ‘Water, Water,’ But what good did Confucius see in water?’ … ‘Water from a source rushes forward, never ceasing day and night, filling all the cracks and hollows as it advances, before it drains into the sea. Everything with a source is like that, and this is the good Confucius saw in water’ Chin, 139

The Jin-dynasty Sun Chuo (320–377) gives a more melancholic biographical reading: “The river flows on without stopping, like the years ceaselessly passing away; the time is already late, and yet the Way has still not been put into practice. This is the cause of Confucius’s lament” (Slingerland, 92). Zhu Xi takes the side of Mencius and reads it as an allegory of the Way: “Confucius used this to bring home the message that all those who wished to learn should be vigilant constantly, not letting their effort slacken even for an instant” (Chin, 139). My point is that there are infinite ways of reading a finite saying, especially one that contains an ever-flowing aqueous image.32 The accumulation of commentaries in the tradition contributes to a cascading effect that becomes as vertiginous as inundating waters. Exegesis flows, never stopping, day or night. It has irrigated the fields of Chinese culture century after century, bringing sometimes gentle nourishment, sometimes overwhelming deluge. The image of the river was among Heraclitus’ favorites as well. A Heraclitean interpretation of Analects 9.17 would read the image as capturing the world’s perpetual flux. Here is “the Obscure One” as reported by Plato: “Heraclitus says somewhere that ‘everything gives way and nothing stands fast,’ and, likening the things that are to the flowing (rhoē) of a river, he says that ‘you cannot step into the same river twice.’” (Cratylus 402a)

32

Sarah Allen explores how water was the paradigm for conceptualizing cosmic principles in early China. See Sarah Allen, The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue (Albany [NY]: State University of New York Press, 1997), 29–62. For her gloss of Analects 9.17, see pages 35–36.

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Both Confucius and Heraclitus, when confronted with the river, experience a moment of epiphany, i.e., from a European perspective, the “Ultimate Sage” seems to have an experience of the sublime. As the Chinese Master ponders the river’s ceaseless flow, one imagines him to be full of awe at the inexhaustible phenomena of it all. Nature is immense, human life finite. For Longinus, this ecstatic experience/ emotion/ concept/ aesthetics/ rhetorical style is captured in the Greek term hupsos, the sublime.33 Marcus Aurelius writes in his Meditations: “Time is a river, the ceaseless flow of all created things. One thing no sooner comes into sight than it is hurried past, and another is borne along, only to be swept away in its turn” (4.43). For Kant, the sublime is found in the “formless object as limitlessness,” arousing a “feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital powers.”34 It is that which “even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind that surpasses every measure of the senses.”35 Confucianism share with the sublime the following: they both generate exhilarating exegesis. In my reading, the recognition of the infinite cosmos is what Confucius encountered at the riverbank. It is a powerful paradox of literary form that the aphorism’s concision can capture the inexhaustible. The Chinese commentators explain the unrelenting energy of the water as an allegory of human striving. Struggling to comprehend the Master’s sayings is one such example of this striving, a finite tangent to the infinite circle of the Confucian Way.

7

The Infinite Aphorism

Philosophies come and go, theologies rise and fall, but the aphorism abides. As the essays in our edited volume After Wisdom demonstrate, in the ancient cultures of China and the Mediterranean the aphorism functioned as the basic unit in the propagation and circulation of ideas. The sayings of Confucius competed with those of the Daoist sect and later with the Buddhists’. Besides Heraclitus, there were many other wise men vying for authority. The early Christians’ project of collecting the sayings of their spiritual master partakes in a larger tradition in which sects as disparate as the Stoics, Epicureans, Essenes, and Manicheans meditated ceaselessly upon the apophthegmata of their teachers. Pierre Hadot has devoted his entire career to exploring ancient philosophies of 33 34 35

See the magisterial work by James Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, 5:244–245. Kant, Critique of Judgement, 5:250.

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life and their affinities with Christian spirituality.36 An admirer of Hadot was none other than Foucault, who toward the end of his life significantly reflected on the care of the self. He wrote: In this period there was a culture of what could be called personal writing: taking notes on the reading, conversations, and reflections that one hears or engages in oneself; keeping kinds of notes on important subjects (what the Greeks call ‘hupomnemata’), which must be reread from time to time so as to re-actualize their contents. “Self-Writing,” 210

To be sure, the cultivation of the self is the ultimate purpose of the Master’s aphorisms. Foucault suggested that the individual reader eventually compose her own aphorisms after reflecting on those of others. But what we have discovered so far is that there are some important preconditions before that can happen: 1) Because of the instability of the textual materials, it is impossible to decipher the aphorist’s philosophy or theology without philology. Thus, the question of how the collected fragments become authoritative (or not) is a burning one. 2) The ideological agenda of a community are always imbricated with the aphorisms’ transmission. 3) The disconnected nature of the collected sayings turns out to be an advantage as well as a liability: it affords greater hermeneutic fluidity and contention. 4) From the multiplicity of clashing voices, the singular voice of the Teacher, as constructed by the Tradition (both with a capital T) eventually emerges. The Teacher becomes the Tradition, or the Tradition becomes the Teacher, though the anti-Tradition always lurks in the shadows. The self is indeed formed and transformed by the aphorism, but we first have to determine whose aphorisms they are and whether or not we really want to read them.

Bibliography Allen, Sarah. The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997. Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.

36

See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

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Bol, Peter K. Neo-Confucianism in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008. Brough, John. “Thus Have I Heard.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 13, no. 2 (1950): 416–426. Canetti, Elias. “Confucius in His Conversations.” In The Conscience of Words, 171–179. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Seabury Press, 1979. Confucius. Analects: With Selection from Traditional Commentaries. Translated by Edward G. Slingerland. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003. Confucius. The Analects. Translated by Annping Chin. New York: Penguin Books, 2014. Chu His. Learning to Be a Sage: Selections from the Conversations of Master Chu, Arranged Topically. Translated with a Commentary by Daniel K. Gardner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Collins, Steven. “On the Very Idea of the Pāli Canon.” Journal of the Pali Text Society 15 (1990): 89–126. Cook, Scott Bradley. The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study & Complete Translation. Ithaca [NY]: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2012. Denecke, Wiebke. The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010. Elman, Benjamin A. From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in Late Imerpial China. Cambridge [MA]: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984. Goldin, Paul, ed. A Concise Companion to Confucius. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2017. Graham, A.C. Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. La Salle [IL]: Open Court, 1989. Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Edited with an introduction by Arnold I. Davidson and translated by Michael Chase. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Volume i: Manuscripts of the Introduction and the Lectures of 1822–1823. Edited and translated by Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011. Henderson, John B. The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heresy: Neo-Confucian, Islamic, Jewish, and Early Christian Patterns. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998. Henderson, John B. Scripture, Canon, and Commentary: A Comparison of Confucian and Western Exegesis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Henderson, John B. and On-Cho Ng. “The Commentarial Tradition.” In Dao Companion to the Analects, edited by Amy Olberding, 37–53. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014. Hunter, Michael. Confucius Beyond the Analects. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Hunter, Micheal, and Martin Kern, eds. Confucius and the Analects Revisited: New Perspectives on Composition, Dating, and Authorship. Leiden: Brill, 2018.

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Li, Zhi. A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings. Translated by Rebecca Handler-Spitz, Pauline Lee, and Haun Saussy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Makeham, John. Transmitters and Creators: Chinese Commentators and Commentaries on the Analects. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003. Makeham, John. “The Formation of Lunyu as a Book.” Monumenta Serica 44 (1996): 1– 24. Meyer, Dirk. Philosophy on Bamboo: Text and Production of Meaning in Early China. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Mizuno, Kogen. Buddhist Sutras: Origin, Development, Transmission. Tokyo: Kosei, 1982. Nylan, Michael. The Five “Confucian” Classics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Porter, James I. The Sublime in Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Scarpari, Maurizio. Il confucianesimo: i fondamenti e i testi. Turin: Einaudi, 2010. Weber, Max. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. Weingarten, Oliver. “Recent Monographs on Confucius and Early Confucianism.” T’oung Pao 97, no. 1–3 (2011): 160–201.

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chapter 6

Lady Mu of Xu’s Returning to Her Natal Home in “Zaichi” 載馳 (Gallop): A Comparative Perspective of the Early Scholarship of the Shijing 詩經 (Book of Odes) Leihua Weng

Returning to one’s ancestral home is a seminal theme in the Shijing 詩 經 (Book of Songs). Poems in this oldest, extant collection of Chinese poetry often address life and mortality, as in “Mayfly” (Poem 150), which ends with a melancholic reflection on the last journey awaiting the speaker. In the Shijing, the act of returning is often informed by social and cultural membership in the living, actual world. Many of the poems in the Shijing express a yearning to return, in the manner of Odysseus’ home-bound journey in Homer’s Odyssey, from the battlefield to one’s own home at the end of an arduous peregrination. The Shijing presents multifaceted tropes of return, social and cultural alienation, as well as possible reunions or resolutions. For example, the motif of a lonely wife awaiting the homecoming of her enlisted husband (“Tall PearTree,” Poem 169), or a young woman enjoining her lover to heed social norms and leave off his devious courtship (“I beg you, Zhong Zi,” Poem 76). As Michael Hunter observes, the Shijing presents “idealized images of fully integrated communities on the one hand, and alienated personas who yearn to gui 歸 (return) to those communities on the other.”1 This study discusses the scholarly interpretations of one particular instance of ‘returning,’ that of Lady Mu of Xu 許穆夫人to her natal home in the poem “Zaichi” 載馳 (Gallop) (Poem 54) in the Shijing. It examines a selection of leading interpretations and commentaries, dating from the seventh century bce, when the poem “Zaichi” was composed and circulated, to the mid-seventh century ce, when preceding commentaries were compiled into a single authoritative volume in Maoshi Zhengyi 毛 詩 正 義, under the leadership of Kong Yingda 孔 穎 達, a scholar of the Tang. The present discussion encompasses

1 Michael Hunter, “To Leave or Not to Leave: The Chu Ci 楚辭 (Verses of Chu) as Response to the Shi Jing (Classic of Odes),” Early China 42 (2019): 113.

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the Zuozhuan 左傳 (Zuo Tradition) of the fifth century bce as well as commentaries by Han scholars in the Mao Commentary 毛注,2 and a biographical essay on Lady Mu’s “Zaichi” by the Han scholar Liu Xiang 劉向. The analysis also includes the poem interpretation by Kong Yingda 孔穎達 of the Tang within the tradition established by his predecessors. This study discusses two central issues, perennially arising in relation to the poem “Zaichi” throughout the millennia of interpretative scholarship. The first question addresses authorship in early culture: how did early scholars make use of secondary textual resources to identify Lady Mu as both the author and the poetic speaker of “Zaichi”? The second question pertains to hermeneutic approaches to the poem: how did these scholars interpret Lady Mu’s dilemma in returning to her natal domain in “Zaichi”? Conjointly, the authorship and the hermeneutical questions explore and illuminate the oral-textual transition in early China. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that early scholarship of “Zaichi” coalesced around precisely these two crucial questions, namely, the limitations on knowledge and the availability of source materials in this period. As shown by the variety of critical responses during the millennial span of literary analysis, the study sheds light on the hermeneutic movement that revolved around the poem: from being considered a fluid, oral poetic piece, it turned into a strong textual entity in its own right, with a stable meaning and an identifiable origin, solidly embedded in a textual culture. This study ends with a brief comparison between this hermeneutic movement in the early scholarship of “Zaichi” and that of Homer. It observes that while a similar pattern is identifiable in the two traditions, some unique feature of the oral-textual transition remains in the early scholarly reception of the Shijing, as in the case of “Zaichi.”

1

The Authorship of Lady Mu in the Shijing

“Zaichi” is a poem of profound excruciating emotional turmoil. The female poetic speaker expresses the pain of not being able to return to the Domain of Wei because of the interference of the people of Xu. The poem opens with the speaker’s account of her journey and her swift, relentless riding towards her natal home:

2 For the sake of convenience and clarity, the Mao or the Mao Commentary mentioned in this study refers to the commentaries made by the Mao of the late Qin and the early Former Han, and by Zheng Xuan of the Later Han.

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I ride home I gallop To lay my plaint before the lord of Wei, I gallop my horses on and on Till I come to Cao.3 载驰载驱，归唁卫侯。驱马悠悠，言至于漕。4

Her journey is interrupted before she reaches her destination: A great Minister, post-haste! How sad my heart. …… He no longer delights in me; I cannot go back across the river. 大夫跋涉，我心则忧。 既不我嘉，不能旋反。

The poetic speaker is filled with sorrow and fury: That the people of Xu should prevent it Is childish, nay, mad. 许人尤之，众穉且狂。

Notwithstanding the intensity of her sorrow and anger, traces of self-justification are present in the speaker’s lament, which takes on a subtly apologetic tone. The speaker defends herself, insisting that her return is justified. She argues that moral judgement should be passed on her intent rather than on her actions, and that her attempt to undertake the headlong journey should be exempt from blame: And now, seeing how ill you use me, Surely my plan is not far-fetched! …… 3 “Zaichi,” in The Book of Songs, trans. Arthur Waley, ed. with additional trans. Joseph R. Allen (New York: Grove, 1996), 44–45. 4 All the lines of “Zaichi” in Chinese are from Maoshi Zhengyi 毛诗正义, vol. 1, ed. Li Xueqin 李学勤 (Beijing: Beijing da xue chu ban she, 1999), 210–214.

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And now, seeing how ill you use me, Surely my plan is not rash! …… A woman of good intent Has always the right to go. …… Empty-handed in a great land, To whom could I go, on whom rely? Oh, you great officers and gentlemen, It is not I who am at fault; All your many plans Are not equal to the journey I want to take.5 视而不臧，我思不远。…… 视而不臧，我思不閟。…… 女子善怀，亦各有行。…… 控于大邦，谁因谁极。 大夫君子，无我又尤。 百而所思，不如我所之。

The Zuozhuan, the earliest known external source of “Zaichi,” focuses on the poetic narrator and on the circumstances of composition. The Zuozhuan connects the poetic speaker to Lady Mu of Xu, a former princess of Wei married to the Lord of the Xu Domain. Chapter “Lord Min 2” of the Zuozhuan provides a historical account of Lady Mu, as well as of her family lineage, in a flashback narrative temporally situated after the siege of the capital of Wei by the Di people: Earlier, Lord Hui had still been young at the time of his accession. The Qi leaders had urged Zhaobo to consort with Xuan Jiang, Lord Hui’s mother. He refused, but they forced him. She gave birth to Qizi, Lord Dai, Lord Wen, the wife of Lord Huan of Song, and the wife of Lord Mu of Xu … When Wei was defeated, Duke Huan of Song went to meet the Wei refugees at the Yellow River. They forded the river by night, the refugees numbering seven hundred and thirty men and women. Adding the people of Gong and Teng, they numbered five thousand.

5 “Zaichi,” stanza 2–5, with some revisions in translation.

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They established Lord Dai as ruler, and he lodged in Cao. Lady Mu recited [ fu 賦] the ode “I Gallop” [Zaichi]. The Prince of Qi had Gongzi Wukui lead three hundred chariots and three thousand armored soldiers to garrison Cao.6 初，惠公之即位也少，齊人使昭伯烝於宣姜，不可，強之。生齊子、 戴公、文公、宋桓夫人、許穆夫人。…… 及敗，宋桓公逆諸河，宵濟。 衛之遺民男女七百有三十人，益之以共、滕之民為五千人。 立戴公以廬于曹。許穆夫人賦〈載馳〉。齊侯使公子無虧帥車三百 乘、甲士三千人以戍曹。7

The informative and succinct historical account in the Zuozhuan connects the destruction of Wei to Lady Mu and the “Zaichi” poem. Lady Mu, a princess of Wei, was married to Lord Mu of Xu. After her marriage, her cousin, Lord Yi Gong of Wei, was killed by the Di people. With generous help and support from Song, the refugees of Wei managed to re-establish the Domain of Wei in a new settlement in Cao. Lady Mu recited, or composed ( fu 賦), the poem “Zaichi”.8 The rich details in the Zuozhuan echo the plot lines of the poem, thus allowing readers to place Lady Mu’s participation in the poem, situated in its historical context. In this manner, the full picture revolving around “Zaichi” and its historical account in the Zuozhuan permits a fruitful speculation on the probable causes of the strong emotions expressed in the poem. As recalled, Lady Mu’s cousin, the former ruler of Wei, was killed, and the Domain of Wei was eliminated. However, unlike her brother-in-law (by that time, the Duke Huan of Song), who offered essential assistance to the exodus from Wei, Lady Mu’s husband, the ruler of Xu, withheld his support. On the contrary, aided by the people of Xu, he dispatched high officers to stop Lady Mu from journeying back to her natal domain. She wished to join her brother in commemorating their slain family member and mourning the destruction of her ancestral domain. Thus, the speaker’s overwhelming sorrow and fury is palpable, contextualized and comprehended through the historical details found in the Zuozhuan.

6 “Lord Min 2 (660 bce),” in The Zuo Tradition/Zuozhuan: Commentary on the “Spring and Autumn Annals,” trans. Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, and David Schaberg (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 241. The term “composed” in the translation is revised to “recited”. Emphasis in italics added. 7 “Lord Min 2,” 2.5b, 240. Emphasis added. 8 The word fu 赋 has its literal meaning in the action of reciting.

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As highlighted above, the word fu 賦 is used in the Zuozhuan to indicate Lady Mu’s participation in the poem. The statement runs: “Lady Mu composed/recited ( fu 賦) the ode ‘Zaichi’” (許穆夫人賦〈載馳〉). The meaning of the word fu in this poetic context is two-fold. A possible sense is “to recite,” for example, a literary piece in performative circulation. Another meaning is “to compose”, and it reflects the author’s original production of the literary work. Yet the verb fu is used ambiguously in the Zuozhuan, without clarification of its specific meaning in this context. Consequently, readers are left uncertain as to what fu actually means: does it refer to the composition of “Zaichi” or to the performative reproduction of the poem and its circulation? In other words, according to this statement, did Lady Mu author “Zaichi,” or did she recite a poem not of her own authorship, but one she found particularly resonant in her situation?9 In point of fact, the ambiguous usage in the Zuozhuan reflects particular features connected to the production of the poem and to its circulation in its historical time. In the seventh century bce, poetic works were customarily recited, performed, and circulated on diverse social occasions. Thus, the reciter might have been the sole single author of the poem, one of its recipients, or one of the collective authors of a poem in continual development and accretion. Therefore, in the seventh century bce, it was extremely difficult if not impossible, and certainly not necessary, to identify the sole author or a group of collective authors of a particular poem.10 In short, the word fu is used in the Zuozhuan strictly in line with the poetic conventions governing the oral culture of the pre-Qin China. These conventions did not distinguish the initial composition of a poem from its gradual development and continuous accretion through production, reproduction and circulation. Though the word choice was conventionally reasonable in the Zuozhuan, centuries later, fu became an overhanging textual issue that later scholars were obliged to deal with and resolve in due course when the growing textual culture was gradually replacing the oral. The juxtaposition shown below effects a comparison between the explanation of fu in the Mao Commentary (ca. thirdsecond century bce), during a transitional stage of orality-textuality, and the explanation by Kong Yingda of the Tang in the 7th century when textual culture had grown more fully and had become dominant. 9

10

For a similar discussion, see Alexander Beecroft, Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Literary Circulation (Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 226. For a fuller discussion on pre-Qin authorship, see Martin Kern, “Shi Jing Songs as Performance Texts: A Case Study of ‘Chu Ci’ (Thorny Caltrop),”Early China 25 (2000): 49–111. See also Beecroft, Authorship and Cultural Identity.

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1) The explanation in the Mao Commentary reads as follows: This ode was created by Lady Mu. She mourned that her ancestral domain had been overturned, and she felt distress that they had not been able to rescue it. … She mourned the loss of Wei, and she was sorrowful that she could not rescue Wei because of the weak power of the Domain of Xu [the domain of her husband]. She thought of returning home to condole with her brother, but duty would not allow this, and that is why she recited ( fu 赋) this ode.11 《载驰》，许穆夫人作也。闵其宗国颠覆，自伤不能救也。… 许穆夫 人闵卫之伤，伤许之小，力不能救，思归唁其兄，又义不得，故赋是 诗也。12

2) Kong’s explanation recites: The Zhengyi 正义 says, “This poem of ‘Zaichi’ was composed by Lady Xu of Mu. … She therefore wanted to return to her natal domain in person to condole with her brother. However, according to the ritual, when the parents of high-ranking ladies passed away, they [the ladies] could only send officials to condole with their brothers [on their behalf]. Duty prevented these ladies from returning themselves. For this reason, the people of Xu condemned Lady Mu for her attempt to personally return. She therefore recited ( fu 赋) the poem of “Zaichi” to express her intent. The Dingben 定 本and the Jizhu 集注 both say “You yi bu de 又义不得”. The word you又 is an alternative word of “you有 (to have; there was).” They say “Lady Mu of Xu composed zuo作 it.” They also say “She therefore recited fu 赋 this poem.” The word zuo 作 has the same meaning with fu 赋. It was referred as fu 赋 when the poet composed (zuo 作) a poem [in the Shijing] to extensively state the intent. Therefore, to compose (zuo 作) a poem is referred as to recite ( fu 赋) a poem. This was the reason that the Zuozhuan says that “Lady Xu of Mu recited ( fu 赋) ‘Zaichi.’ ” 《正义》曰：此《载驰》诗者，许穆夫人所作也。… 故且欲归国而唁 其兄。但在礼，诸侯夫人父母终，唯得使大夫问于兄弟，有义不得 归，是以许人尤之，故赋是《载驰》之诗而见己志也。定本、《集注》 11 12

Maoshi Zhengyi, 210–211; emphasis added. The translation is based on the translation in Durrant, Li, and Schaberg, ed., The Zuo Tradition, 240, fn. 33; emphasis added.

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weng 皆云“又义不得”，则为 “有” 字者非也。上云 “许穆夫人作” ，又云 “故赋 是诗” ，作、赋一也。以作《诗》所以铺陈其志，故作《诗》名曰赋。 《左传》曰：“许穆夫人赋《载驰》”，是也。13

Both commentaries rely upon the historical account in the Zuozhuan as intertextual evidence and state that Lady Mu was both the author and the poetic speaker of “Zaichi.” Moreover, both commentaries attempt to mediate the discrepancy between the meanings of “to compose” and “to recite” in the semantic usage of fu by arguing that fu as it figures in the Zuozhuan actually means “to compose,” thus reporting Lady Mu’s authorship as fact. Notwithstanding these similarities, there are differences between these two interpretative attempts. First, whereas the Mao Commentary was confined, in its use of external textual sources, to the Zuozhuan, Kong’s explanation cites not only a recognized authoritative edition of the Shijing, the Dingben, but also a collection of commentaries, the Jizhu. It indicates that by the time Kong came to analyze “Zaichi,” a substantial amount of textual work had flowed into compiling, editing, and interpreting the extant text of the Shijing. By resorting to these readily accessible textual scholarly materials, Kong went further than the scholars in the Mao. He produced extended disquisitions on the connections between the poetic composition and circulation of “Zaichi,” and on the probable initial composition of the poem by an individual author in the seventh century bce. Second, the Mao and Kong mediate the discrepancy between zuo 作 (the composition) and fu 赋 (the vocal performance) in different ways. The Mao Commentary starts by identifying Lady Mu as the author of “Zaichi”: “This ode was composed (zuo 作) by Lady Mu,” and then swiftly concludes that “[…] that is why she recited ( fu 赋) this ode.” That little effort on the connection between zuo and fu in the Mao is explained by the reasonable historical assumption that contemporary readers of the Mao, who were relatively familiar with overlaps between poetic composition and performative circulation in the late stages of oral culture, did not require additional explanation from the commentator to appreciate the interconnections between zuo (creating a poem) and fu (performing a poem). By contrast, centuries later, Kong devoted far more attention than the Mao to explaining why fu is used in the Zuozhuan and how it is connected to the tradition of the Shijing. Kong went back to the early Shijing vocal poetic production. He reminded his readers of the poetic tradition of the Shijing and explained the emotional intensity of the poem with its opening in the form of vocal performance:

13

Maoshi zhengyi, 211.

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The word zuo 作 has the same meaning of fu 赋. It was referred to as fu when the poet composed (zuo 作) a poem [in the Shijing] to extensively state the intent. Therefore, to compose (zuo 作) a poem is referred to as to recite ( fu 赋) a poem. Kong thus concluded that Lady Mu was the author of “Zaichi.” “This was the reason that the Zuozhuan says that Lady Xu of Mu fu ‘Zaichi.’ ” Kong’s extended explanation of the overlapping of the words zuo and fu in the Shijing tradition may suggest his commitment to imparting the lost oral tradition of the performative poetic creation in the Shijing to the readers of the poem. His efforts in this direction implicitly reveal that his readers may have been rather distanced from the situational, performative, and vocal activities involved in the production and transmission of early poetry in China during the Spring and Autumn period. In brief, Kong attended to the overlapped meaning of fu and zuo in the bygone performative poetic tradition in a much more minute way than the Mao did. Besides substantiating why fu in the Zuozhuan should be taken as evidence of Lady Mu’s authorship of the poem, Kong may well have intended to prove to his readers that the “Zaichi” in the Zuozhuan was exactly the same literary work as the “Zaichi” that had been passed down via the Shijing collection. The Zuozhuan mentions twice that “Zaichi” was recited on diplomatic occasions, i.e., in “Lord Wen 13” and in “Lord Xiang 19”. On both occasions, only “the fourth stanza” was recited.14 In the sequence recorded in the Shijing, while the fourth stanza focuses on the female voice of the poetic speaker who seeks for approval (“A woman of good intent/Has always the right to go”), the fifth stanza contains lines that directly address high officers and defend her own position: Empty-handed in a great land, To whom could I go, on whom rely? Oh, you great officers and gentlemen, It is not I who am at fault; All your many plans Are not equal to the journey I want to take. Considering the diction in both sequences in the Shijing, it is the lines in the fifth stanza that are more appropriate in style, with respect to those in the fourth, for the two diplomatic occasions recorded in the Zuozhuan. Hence, it

14

“Lord Wen 13,” and “Lord Xiang 19,” in The Zuo Tradition/Zuozhuan 535, 1071.

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becomes a task for later scholars to investigate on the length of the “Zaichi,” which was partially recited on these two diplomatic events recorded in the Zuozhuan and collected in the Shijing. Are these lines addressing “you great officers and gentlemen” in the fourth stanza or in the fifth stanza? Or rather, does the “Zaichi” mentioned in the Zuozhuan have four stanzas in total, or five stanzas instead, as collected in the Shijing? On the doubts about the length of the “Zaichi” in the Zuozhuan and in the Shijing, Kong comments: There are indeed five stanzas in this poem. In the Zuozhuan, it mentions Shu Sunbao and Zheng Zijia recited ( fu 赋) only the fourth stanza of “Zaichi.” The number of fourth likely indicates that the poem is longer than four stanzas. It is used to illustrate that this poem has five stanzas. 此实五章, 故《左传》叔孙豹、郑子家赋《载驰》之四章，四犹未卒, 明其五也。15

Kong was at pains to explain the possible inconsistency between the text of “Zaichi” collected in the Shijing and the length of the poem in the chapter of “Lord Wen 13” in the Zuozhuan. It seems that, in the Tang period, Kong and his readers encountered, and had to reckon with, the distinction between poetic composition, on the one hand, and performative reproduction and circulation, on the other. Did the disparate texts collect different poems, identically titled “Zaichi” by coincidence? Or were there actually different versions of the same poem, one in five stanzas and another in four? How should the reader construe the structural difference in number of stanzas in the poem in the Shijing, and in the Zuozhuan, respectively? Interestingly, Kong denied both that the identical title “Zaichi” subsumed different poems and that the texts captured multiple shorter versions of a single poem. In his view, the fact that the fourth stanza of “Zaichi” was recorded in the Zuozhuan should not be taken as an indicator of a shorter version of this poem. While not providing many details, Kong did address the differences between poetic composition and circulation in the Spring and Autumn period and explained the possible structural difference between the “Zaichi” in the Shijing and in the Zuozhuan in terms of how it was vocally performed during its circulation. Furthermore, when the “Zaichi” collected in the Shijing was challenged by the historical recordings in the Zuozhuan, Kong reaffirmed its authoritativeness.

15

Maoshi zhengyi, 211.

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Compared with his predecessors, in his cognition of the distinction between poetic creation and performative circulation, Kong showed a more sophisticated understanding of the differences between the bygone oral poetic tradition and the textual culture prevalent at the time, including the interpretative puzzles thus engendered. He seems to have been acutely aware that intertextual material may be used either to affirm or challenge the accepted reading of a text, particularly on the score of its original composition. The contrast between the brief excursus on zuo and fu in the Mao Commentary and the ample explanation produced by Kong shows an emergent and steadily developing textual scholarly tradition of the Shijing. In Kong’s commentaries, the text of “Zaichi” was already fully taken as a fixed, stable text, the initial composition of which was spatiotemporally specific and unique. It was thus distinct from a product gradually growing through collective reproductions and circulation. The original situation of the initial composition of poems was considered recoverable with the help of the increasingly abundant external textual sources. In the time elapsed from the Mao Commentary of the pre-Han era to Kong of the Tang period, an increasingly rich textual culture developed; scholars became increasingly adept at reconstructing the original compositions of the Shijing, discerning the differences between composition and reproduction. While the Mao Commentary could only glancingly cite the Zuozhuan, Kong was able to bring to bear not only the Zuozhuan, but also an authoritative version of the Shijing (the Dingben) as well as a collection of previous commentaries (the Jizhu). Within this greatly enriched textual culture, Kong was apt to address potential queries arising from a more astute general readership as to the reconstructed scene of composition of “Zaichi,” and on the differences between the poem in composition and its variations in circulation.

2

Later Interpretations of Lady Mu’s Dilemma in Returning to Her Natal Domain

Blended with the voicing of frustration, anger, and other intense emotions in “Zaichi,” there is a tone of self-defense and self-justification. The poetic speaker argues that her plan is reasonable, and in fact superior to, any available alternative: “Surely my plan is not far-fetched!” and “Surely my plan is not rash!” and “All your many plans/ Are not equal to what I propose.” She objects to external censure, by insisting that she is entitled to return to her natal home because her intent is morally good: “A women of good intent/ Has always the right to go.” An astute reader might wonder what sorts of opposition to her planned journey to her ancestral domain the poetic speaker is envisaging, and on what grounds her

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husband and the people of Xu could legitimately prevent her from returning. What is precisely Lady Mu’s dilemma in returning to her natal domain? The social norms prevalent in the Spring and Autumn period frequently discouraged the return of wives to their natal homes, in the form of outright censure, criticism, or disparagement. When recorded, these occurrences were intended to caution against social disintegration and cultural corruption. In the Spring and Autumn Annals it is mentioned that Lady Jiang’s return to her natal domain of Qi incurred her a severe reprimand, in the form of a censorious reiteration of the expected norms governing female marital conduct: “Once married, women shall not go beyond the restrictions upon them. Once they transgress, they go astray [in their deeds].”16 It was not until several centuries later that these highly stringent social codes took on a degree of leniency. The Liji, a work on rituals composed during the Warring States period, specifies the dining etiquette to be observed by married women on returning to their natal home. The written instructions are highly specific to the occasion. For instance, they prohibit the sharing of the family meal with male siblings, or the use of the same food vessels.17 Nevertheless, while evincing a certain level of toleration of natal returns, the Liji continues to endorse the normative stricture that women, once married, should no longer be received as family members in their natal parents’ homes. The sanction of married women returning to their natal homes in early China might have originated in the rather jaundiced distrust of a woman enjoying the double identity and privileges of wife and daughter. From the eighth century to the fifth century bce, marriage was a foremost diplomatic instrument, employed by ruling families to counteract and balance inter-domain military and political powers and alliances. In their dual guises as wives and daughters, married women were often suspected of harboring divided loyalties, split between the conjugal and natal families.18 A woman’s position in the social scale exacerbated the sense of mistrust attending her actions; women of

16 17

18

“婦人既嫁不逾竟。逾竟，非正也。” See Li Xueqin 李学勤, ed., Chunqiu guliangzhuan zhushu 春秋谷梁传注疏 (Beijing: Beijing da xue chu ban she, 1999), 64. “姑、姊、妹、女子，子已嫁而反，兄弟弗同席而坐，弗與同器而食。” See Li Xueqin 李学勤, ed., Liji zhengyizhengyi 礼记正义 (Beijing: Beijing da xue chu ban she, 1999), 51. An instance of divided loyalty may be found in “Lord Huan 15” of the Zuozhuan. When Yong Ji learned that her husband was plotting to kill her father, she consulted her mother, asking: “Whom should one hold dearer, a father or a husband?” Her mother replied: “Any man can be a husband, but one has only a single father. How can they be compared?” Obeying her mother’s advice, Yong Ji alerted her father, who in turn killed her husband.

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high status who maintained close connections with their natal families were frequently perceived as liable to unsettle the political order in their husbands’ domains.19 Han and Tang scholars, in their commentaries on Lady Mu’s “Zaichi,” showed a gradually growing understanding of the social restrictions and oppositions against the return of wives to their natal homes. The Mao Commentary seems to notice the dilemma implicitly confronting the poetic speaker: “… she thought of returning home to condole with her old brother, but duty would not allow this …” (思 归 唁 其 兄 ，又 义 不 得). The Mao Commentary does not explain what kind of “duty” this may be, nor why there was a conflict between Lady Mu’s “duty” and her intention to return. Actually, other parts of the commentary show a certain degree of oblivion of these social restrictions. Discussing the final line of another poem in the Shijing, “Getan” 葛覃 (The Cloth-Plant Spreads) (Poem 2), the Mao Commentary observes that “As her parents are alive, she [the Consort] returns to make her parents feel at peace [guining 歸寧]” (父母在，则有时归宁耳).20 The attribution of motives for the word “guining” (歸寧) in the Mao Commentary seems to suggest that the Consort returns to her parental abode in order to “make her parents feel at peace”— betraying an apparent lack of appreciation of the social injunction censuring the return of highly-ranking ladies to their natal home, a sanction that was in conformity with the prevalent norms of the Spring and Autumn period. It thus seems reasonable to suppose that the omission or the overlooking of societal norms in the Mao Commentary reflects the lapse of several centuries, the gradual alleviation of these cultural stringencies over the course of time, and the collective oblivion of the bygone social strictures at the time of the Mao Commentary. Centuries after the Mao, Liu Xiang of the Former Han of the first century bce displayed a similar unfamiliarity with the social and cultural restrictions against Lady Mu’s returning to her ancestral domain. Liu, in his Exemplary Women, provided a biographical account of Lady Mu, which mentions Lady Mu’s frustrated return to her natal domain and her composition of the poem “Zaichi”: “At the time of the defeat, the wife of Duke Mu of Xu set out with

19

20

See “Lord Huan 15,” The Zuo Tradition, 125. Yong Ji’s betrayal of her husband’s interests out of deference toward her parents reaffirmed the entrenched mistrust of wives’ motives in this historical epoch. On high-ranking wives as “potential destabilizing factors,” see Wai-yee Li, The Readability of the Past in early Chinese Historiography (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 2007), 151. Maoshi zhengyi, 33.

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great haste to condole with him. But because she was frustrated in her efforts, she wrote the following ode …”21 Liu’s account did not contain any explanation on why her journey was aborted, nothing on the social restrictions that Lady Mu experienced in her return to her natal home. It was not until the writings of Kong of the Tang that the dilemma of Lady Mu at the heart of “Zaichi” received a fuller and more empathetic reading. Kong acknowledged that in Lady Mu’s returning journey there was a dilemma of “duty” founded on social customs: However, according to the ritual, when the parents of high-ranking ladies passed away, they [the ladies] could send only high-ranking officials to condole with their brothers [on their behalf]. There was a duty preventing these ladies from returning themselves. For this reason, the people of Xu condemned Lady Mu for her attempt to personally return …. 但在礼，诸侯夫人父母终，唯得使大夫问于兄弟，有义不得归，是以 许人尤之 ….22

While essentially rehearsing the interpretation in the Mao Commentary, Kong nevertheless made an important change. He substituted the word “有” (“you,” meaning there was) to replace the word “又” (“you,” meaning but) in the Mao Commentary. An explanatory note draws attention to the significance of the change as follows: Both the Edition [the Dingben] and the Collection of Commentaries [the Jizhu] say “there was [ you 又] a duty preventing the returning.” The word “you” 又 is an alternative form of “you 有” [there was]. 定本、《集注》皆云“又义不得” ，则为“有” 字者非也。23

Kong’s interpretation of the word you 又 (but) in the Mao Commentary, as in the case of you 有 (there was), is at first sight rather puzzling. In describing Lady Mu’s predicament in the Mao Commentary, it made perfect semantic sense to interpret the word as ‘but’, to elicit the contrast between active intention and counterposing duty: 21 22 23

Liu Xiang, Exemplary Women of Early China: the Lienü zhuan of Liu Xiang, trans. and ed. Anne Behnke Kinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 48. Maoshi zhengyi, 213; emphasis added. Maoshi zhengyi, 211.

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She thought of returning home to condole with her brother, but ( you 又) duty would not allow this, and that is why she recited ( fu 赋) this ode. 思归唁其兄，又义不得，故赋是诗也.24

As Kong acknowledged, other commentaries in the Jizhu followed the Mao’s interpretation, remaining truthful to the original, contrastive meaning of you 又. Then, for what reason did Kong decide to interpret you 又 as an existential, alternative form of you 有 (there existed)? One explanation is that Kong wanted to emphasize the existence of social restrictions upon women’s returning as in the case of Lady Mu’s homecoming, which might not have been readily accessible to the readers of his time. Therefore, he resorted to an indirect existential reading instead of the contrastive. Immediately after rendering these lines via the existential you 又, Kong goes on to explain the nature of the duty incumbent upon Lady Mu, and how her emotional reactions under the duress of this duty guided the structural development of the poem. Kong appeals to Lady Mu’s responses to this counteracting “duty” in examining the poem’s structure and the sequential arrangement of its stanzas.25 By acknowledging Lady Mu’s ethical quandary in full, Kong rhetorically shifts from dispassionately commenting to identifying with Lady Mu to the point of assuming her voice. He openly questioned the rationality of fulfilling such a “duty” in circumstances of extreme perils and crisis: The people of Xu guard the ritual and use it to blame me. … They only want to guard one single duty. They do not understand that the defeat and the destruction of my ancestral domain and its people are sufficient reasons to excuse me from this duty. Why do they use social norms to stop me [from returning to Wei]? 许人守礼尤我 … 唯守一概之义，不知我宗国今人败灭，不与常同，何 为以常礼止我也？26

Unlike his predecessors, in his commentaries Kong displayed a deep empathy for Lady Mu’s ethical situation that neither the Mao, nor Zheng or Liu had 24 25 26

Maoshi zhengyi, 211. Maoshi zhengyi, 211. Maoshi zhengyi, 213.

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evinced (or perhaps would have understood) in their writings. Key background information regarding norms and customs prevalent in the Spring and Autumn period was thus imparted to the contemporary readership, leading to a comprehensive revision of long-standing interpretations of the emotional world in “Zaichi.” Thus, we come to appreciate that the hermeneutics of apprehending Lady Mu’s social and historical context significantly evolves, from the Mao’s sketchy acknowledgement of Lady Mu’s “duty,” through Liu’s overlooking the social strictures against the return of wives to their natal domains, and finally to Kong’s ethically and psychologically fuller grasp of Lady Mu’s dilemma. However, there is an interesting aspect in the historiographic trajectory from the Mao to Liu and then to Kong: both the Mao Commentary and Kong displayed a degree of awareness of the social restrictions at play in the context of the poem, while Liu, unlike his predecessor or his successor, passed them over in silence in his biographical essay on Lady Mu. Did Liu intentionally avoid mentioning the ritual and ethical restrictions upon Lady Mu’s choice in action? Such an explanation is plausible but not entirely convincing. Liu composed his essays on Lady Mu and other historically important female figures and collected them in his Exemplary Women with the specific purpose of providing positive moral examples of how court ladies should conduct themselves. Lady Mu’s returning to her natal home in “Zaichi,” which was socially and politically controversial, and her deed that violated the social customs of her time, would have presented a disconcerting problem to Liu’s specific writing agenda. Even if Liu deliberately omitted the information of the social circumstances of Lady Mu’s returning, his contemporaries, who had the same knowledge as Liu did, would have questioned Liu’s manipulation of Lady Mu’s rebellious spirit for his orthodox teaching on how women should behave in accordance with social conventions. Therefore, a more plausible explanation would be that Liu, who lived in the first century bce, simply did not have access to the knowledge of the social restrictions on a married woman’s return to her natal home in the seventh century bce. The absence of the social restrictions on Lady Mu’s returning in Liu’s Exemplary Women was more likely an innocent ignorance rather than a tactic of silence. The absence of the specific knowledge on the Pre-Qin social customs in Liu’s Exemplary Women could equally be explained by the disruption of textual transmission caused by the book-burning during the Qin in 213bce and by the large-scale persecution of Confucian scholars in 212 bce. “By the ending years of the Qin, the Shi [the Shijing, the Book of Odes] and the Shu [the Shangshu, the Book of Documents] were burned, and Confucian scholars were buried. The six Confucian arts were henceforth discontinued” (及至秦之季世，焚詩

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書，阬術士, 六藝從此缺焉).27 The impact of these acts of cultural and human

eradication upon the transmission of knowledge and development of textual culture was pervasive and profound. It was not until sometime between 156– 88 bce of the Former Han that the Zuozhuan, an important source book on the Pre-Qin history and customs, was rediscovered by accident. After its rediscovery, the Zuozhuan was circulating among small groups only, before it was institutionally recognized between 5–57ce, when an official position was set up for the study of this book.28 Considering the disrupted transmission of the Shijing and the Zuozhuan, and of other important pre-Qin texts during the Qin in 213 and 212 bce, it was likely that Liu Xiang composed and compiled his essays on Lady Mu at a time when the newly excavated pre-Qin texts of the Zuozhuan and other works were inaccessible to scholarship.29 The knowledge of the social context of the poetic scene in “Zaichi” could only be inferred from the texts of the Zuozhuan, the Liji, and other important historical writings of the pre-Qin that evidenced censure of conduct. In this respect, Kong was in a better position than Liu and other earlier scholars, as he was able to access the catalogue of writings emerging from rigorous and state-supported initiatives to rediscover, compile, edit, and comment on the pre-Qin texts including the Zuozhuan, in addition to the Mao Commentary. Consequently, Kong was able to historicize the context of the initial composition of “Zaichi,” providing richer details and with a higher degree of accuracy. In addition, with the benefit of the body of textual scholarship accomplished by earlier scholars, Kong was able to do full justice to the agonizing and unique dilemma of Lady Mu in her unsuccessful journey to her natal home, with a more comprehensive and profound understanding of the content and context of “Zaichi.”

27

28 29

For the recordings of book-burnings and the persecution of scholars, see the following related chapters in the Shijing 史記. “臣請史官非秦記皆燒之。非博士官所職，天 下敢有藏詩、書、百家語者，悉詣守、尉雜燒之” (史記·秦始皇本紀). “於是使 御史悉案問諸生，諸生傳相告引，乃自除犯禁者四百六十餘人，皆阬之咸陽， 使天下知之，以懲後” (史記·秦始皇本紀). See Han Zhaoqi 韓兆琦, ed., Xin yi Shiji 新譯史記 (Taibei: San min shu ju, 2008), 1:317, 319. “及至秦之季世，焚詩書，阬術 士, 六藝從此缺焉” (史記·儒林列傳). See Han Zhaoqi, Xin yi Shiji, 8:4756. Ma Yinqin 马银琴, “An Interpretation of Guining and the Evolution of Guining Institution,” Journal of Tsinghua University 35 (2020): 72–83. Liu Xiang likely started to collect accounts of noteworthy women that would later contribute to his Exemplary Women in 26 bce, when he was appointed to collect ancient texts for collation and incorporation into the imperial library. See Liu Xiang, Examplary Women, Anne Behnke Kinney ed. and trans., xvi–xvii. Liu Xiang died in 6 bc, likely before the Zuozhuan become institutionally recognized sometime between 5–57ce.

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From the late Warring State to the Tang period, the historicizing approach became an abiding feature of textual scholarship. Scholars of the time investigated not just the authorship question “by whom was the text composed?” but also deeper exegetical aspects such as “what was the context in which it was composed?” and “what are the differences between composition and reproduction, and how should they be represented by literary analysis?” The focus on context and authorship quite evidently evinced the development of a substantive written textual culture. In the oral culture in which the Shijing was originally produced and circulated, interest in the study of poems was chiefly limited to the determination of a suitable recital on social, political, or diplomatic occasions. It was not until more textual materials were available that more investigation was carried out concerning the intended meaning of the text, the historical context of its initial composition, or the constitutive distinctions between initial creation and performative reproduction. Han scholars and Tang scholars who belonged to a textual culture, confronted similar challenges in reconstructing the historical context of the initial composition of “Zaichi.” Historical conditions change and evolve out of recognition over time, presenting a universal obstacle to the historicizing interpretation and inexorably confronting latter-day readers and commentators who attempt to reconstruct the original composition of extant texts. Notwithstanding the universality of these issues, the difficulty Han and Tang scholars had with “Zaichi” was unique. The acute disruption in the transmission of textual knowledge caused by the book-burning and the persecution of scholars in 213 and 212 bce had a profound impact upon the transition from oral to textual culture during the Qin, and for generations thereafter. Han and Tang scholars made significant progress in reconnecting themselves to the interrupted textual culture through excavating, compiling, editing, and commentating extant texts. Their scholarly works, often funded or supported by governments (as in the case of Liu and Kong who either worked for the imperial library or held positions in the imperial academy), were essential to the continuation of the textual culture after the Qin and to the completion of the transition from oral to textual culture in early China. Their works on “Zaichi” were part of the imperial large-scale efforts to reconnect and to continuously develop a textual culture.

3

A Comparative Conclusion: “Zaichi” and Homeric Epics

The Shijing and Homer’s Odyssey share the focal theme of returning, with poetic speakers either expressing longing for home or embarking upon a long homeward journey. Moreover, the Shijing and the Odyssey went through a simi-

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lar process of canonization. Both works displayed a movement from a “weaker” text (performative, fluid, and deeply rooted in oral culture) to a “stronger” text (stable, fixed in meaning, and embedded in a textual culture). Certain common features of the evolution from “weaker” to “stronger” textual bodies characterized both the early transmission and reception of the Shijing and the oral-textual transition in early Homeric scholarship. Yet important differences remained. In the movement from a “weaker” text to a “stronger” text, there was a disruption of the circulation and transmission of pre-Qin texts in 213 and 212 bce in China, which required generations of efforts by scholars of Han and Tang on the rediscovered extant texts. Those efforts were largely funded and supported by governments which were increasingly relying upon a textual tradition for bureaucratic and ideological purposes. However, such a disruption in the textual transmission was absent in the early Homeric reception. Neither was there any large scale official or institutional project to remediate any disruption of the “weaker”-to-“stronger” transition. The difference also lied in the displayed interest in authorship investigation in the ancient world. The Shijing is a large body of texts discussing a myriad of topics, whose authorship has traditionally been attributed to Confucius. The role of Confucius in the formation of the Shijing bestowed upon the Shijing a considerable degree of textual unity as well as cultural, political, and moral authority. However, the seminal cultural position of Confucius did not prevent early scholars from inquiring into the authorship of various poems in this collection. The Mao Commentary, Liu, Kong, and many other scholars of Han and Tang evinced an abiding interest in discussing the authorship of individual poems, and in determining the best methods for uncovering presumed authorial identities and intentions. Over time, scholarly interest in the poem’s authorship and in the intention or emotions entailed in authorship continuously increased. This interest was relatively diluted in the Mao Commentary, at the incipience of textual culture, but became considerably ardent in Kong, whose scholarship was informed by the developing textual tradition, especially after extant writings were compiled, edited, and commented through certain official and institutional efforts. It was not the case in the Homeric tradition to hold continuous and increased interest in authorship. In contrast to the scholarly tradition coalescing around the Shijing, corresponding inquiries into the authorship of the Homeric epics seemed rare and disparate. A degree of biographical interest in Homer’s identity appeared around 530–520 bce,30 but little attention was 30

Barbara Graziosi, “Homeric Scholarship in its Formative Stages,” in The Homeric Epics and

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given to the authorship of Homeric epics in the Ancient Greek world after an important semi-institutional archaic Athenian “recension” of the Homeric epics in the sixth century bce. According to some sources, the tyrant Pisistratus or one of his sons gave the decree in the mid-sixth century bce that “Homer only” had to be recited and “in the correct order” at the Panathenaea in Athens. The “recension” of Homeric epics did not give rise to an increased interest in the identity of Homer as the author of these epics.31 In addition, there was a hermeneutical tendency of excluding the poet from the epics in the Homeric tradition. The Alexandrian scholar Aristarchus held the position that the correct interpretation should be based upon nothing “outside of the things said by the poet” (ἔξω τῶν φραζομένων ὑπὸ τοῦ ποιητοῦ, Schol. D ad Il. 5.385), a position that used the distinction between the poet and his characters to resolve some contradictions within the text itself.32 In sum, the multi-generational and accretive commentaries of “Zaichi,” offering several interpretations of Lady Mu’s return to her natal domain, exemplify the process by which a “weaker” text becomes “stronger” in early Chinese culture. Certain, though not all, historical characteristics parallel the evolution of the early Homeric scholarship. However, noteworthy aspects remain unique to the Chinese literary context.

Bibliography Beecroft, Alexander. Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Literary Circulation. Cambridge [UK]: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Durrant, Stephen, and Wai-yee Li, and David Schaberg, trans. The Zuo Tradition/ Zuozhuan. Introduced by Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, and David Schaberg. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. Graziosi, Barbara. “Homeric Scholarship in its Formative Stages.” In The Homeric Epics and the Chinese Book of Songs, edited by Fritz-Heiner Mutschler, 87–116. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018. Han, Zhaoqi 韩兆琦, trans. Xin yi Sshiji 新译史记. Vols. 1 and 8. Taipei: San min shu ju, 2008.

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the Chinese Book of Songs, ed. Fritz-Heiner Mutschler (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), 88. See Graziosi, “Homeric Scholarship,” 89. See also Glenn Most, “Homeric Scholarship in its Formative Stages,” in The Homeric Epics and the Chinese Book of Songs, 175. Graziosi, “Homeric Scholarship,” 108.

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Hunter, Michael. “To Leave or Not to Leave: The Chu Ci 楚辭 (Verses of Chu) as Response to the Shi Jing (Classic of Odes).” Early China 42 (2019): 111–146. Kern, Martin. “Shi Jing Songs as Performance Texts: A Case Study of ‘Chu Ci’ (Thorny Caltrop).” Early China 25 (2000): 49–111. Li, Xueqin 李学勤, ed. Chunqiu guliangzhuan zhushu春秋谷梁传注疏. Beijing: Beijing da xue chu ban she, 1999. Li, Xueqin 李学勤, ed. Liji zhengyi zhengyi 礼记正义. Beijing: Beijing da xue chu ban she, 1999. Li, Xueqin 李学勤, ed. Maoshi zhengyi zhengyi毛诗正义. Vol. 1. Beijing: Beijing da xue chu ban she, 1999. Liu, Xiang 刘 向 Exemplary Women of Early China. Translated and edited by Anne Behnke Kinney. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Ma, Yinqin 马银琴. “An Interpretation of Guining and the Evolution of Guining Institution.” Journal of Tsinghua University 35 (2020): 72–83. Most, Glenn. “Homeric Scholarship in its Formative Stages.” In The Homeric Epics and the Chinese Book of Songs, edited by Fritz-Heiner Mutschler, 163–184. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018. The Book of Songs. Translated by Arthur Waley, edited with additional translations by Joseph R. Allen. New York: Grove Press, 1996.

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part 3 Greek Wisdom Literature as Seen from China

∵

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chapter 7

In the Wake of Wisdom: The Early Greek Prose Inquiries from a Comparative Perspective Gaston J. Basile

1

Wisdom and Myth

“Wisdom literature” is an elusive category. Almost every study of the ancient Near-Eastern cultures claiming to draw on the notion of “wisdom literature” feels compelled to account for the choice of such a fuzzy heuristic category. As a literary genre, wisdom literature has been used, since the publication of Lambert’s Babylonian Wisdom Literature in 1960, to bring together a composite body of texts from Egyptian, Assyrian, Sumerian, Babylonian, and Greek culture by their formal or doctrinal resemblance to the Hebrew wisdom books, such as Proverbs, Job, and Qohelet.1 Recent discussions have insisted on the category of “wisdom literature” associated with biblical studies as fundamentally loaded and biased, which has called into question the usefulness of the term. In practice, studies have tended to empirically define the category of “wisdom” by the selection of texts from one or various ancient cultures (often from a comparative perspective) that feature wise figures offering advice on leading a successful life or providing an understanding of the cosmological or theological underpinnings of the world. My contention is that the notion of “wisdom literature” becomes unproductive in so far as it is taken as a rigidly codified genre of literature modeled upon the Hebrew tradition. The codification and circulation of wisdom, however, can be regarded as the hallmark of ancient cultures, which often adopted comparable formats and similar textual outputs, especially among the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean. In my interpreta-

1 For a discussion of the concept of “wisdom” and on “wisdom literature” as a genre, see Joram Cohen, Wisdom from the Late Bronze Age (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013) 7–13. According to many scholars, the concept has now become so broad that its usefulness has been called into question. See Andrew George, “The Epic of Gilgamesh: Thoughts on Genre and Meaning,” in Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria. Proceedings of the Conference Held at the Mandelbaum House, the University of Sydney, 21–23 July 2004, eds. Joseph Azize and Noel Weeks (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 37–66. See also and Richard Clifford, Wisdom Literature in Mesopotamia and Israel (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), xi–xiii.

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tion, however, “wisdom literature” is not a genre-specific category but rather signals a composite body of communal, oral lore (dealing with theodicy, the Gods/human relations along with morality and codes of conduct within a culture) which becomes partially entwined and encoded into different discourse genres. Though not straightforwardly associated with wisdom literature, myths are paramount in codifying and transmitting ancient lore about the gods, the exemplary deeds of legendary heroes, the creation of the world, and the origins of human culture and mores. These “socially powerful traditional tales”2 serve as fundamental carriers of wisdom in ancient cultures in a very broad sense. As recently noted, myths comprise theoretical wisdom, a form of knowledge that can be readily associated with the Aristotelian definition of sophia, as well as practical wisdom, more in line with the Greek idea of phronesis, a type of wisdom relevant to practical action and involving ethical or moral codes of conduct.3 Hence, mythological knowledge consolidated by rituals can be said to perform multiple functions in ancient cultures. Firstly, by way of theodicy and cosmogonic accounts, myths explain the main principles of a people’s basic existence and legitimate the status quo which provides for stability in a community. Secondly, mythical accounts streamline a reliable contact between a community and its environment, modeling the interaction between men, the gods and the natural world. They also provide fundamental etiological knowledge that enables a community to trace the origin of their ethnos, cult practices, or social institutions. Finally, myths offer a supple code of conduct and moral charter for humans by featuring exemplary deeds of the gods, demigods, and heroes as well as their manifold reproachable actions that need to be averted.4 This latter instrumental and normative function of myth is forcefully stressed by Malinowski:

2 Richard Buxton, The Complete World of Greek Mythology (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 18. 3 See Esther Endinow, “Telling Stories: Exploring the Relationship between Myths and Ecological Wisdom,” Landscape and Urban Planning 155 (2016): 47–52. Claude Calame also stresses the pragmatic function of myth (“efficacité pratique”) as a distinguishing mark. See Claude Calame, Myth and History in Ancient Greece. The Symbolic Creation of a Colony (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 29–30. 4 William Doty indicates that mythologies “convey the political and moral values of a culture and provide systems of interpreting individual experience within a universal perspective, which may include the intervention of suprahuman entities as well as aspects of the natural and cultural orders.” See William Doty, “Mythophiles’ Duscrasia: A Comprehensive Defintion of Myth,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48, no. 4 (1980): 531–562.

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Myth fulfils in primitive culture an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances, and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man. Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilizations; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or an artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom.5 In early Greece, mythoi were pervasive, though by no means static, singular, or coherent in their formulation. The standard themes and motifs of the Greek myths and legends were regularly associated with the oral compositions of Homer and Hesiod, which—if not actually composed with the aid of writing in the form they are preserved today—belong to a tradition of oral lore. As such, irrespective of the modern categorization of “wisdom literature” in the wake of biblical exegesis, Homer’s epic poetry and Hesiod’s didactic poetry were the embodiment of Greek communal lore, and therefore, the touchstone of traditional wisdom that was perceived as a common Hellenic legacy from the archaic period onward. Herodotus’ testimony at ii 53 possibly summarizes the orthodox view in the fifth century: (…) and these (Hesiod and Homer) are they who taught the Greeks of the descent of the gods (οἱ ποιήσαντες θεογονίην),6 and gave to all their several names (τὰς ἐπωνυμίας), and honours (τιμάς), and arts (τέχνας), and declared their outward forms (εἴδεα αὐτῶν). But these poets who are said to be older than Hesiod and Homer were, to my thinking, of later birth. Indeed, as Herodotus’ citation shows, other non-canonical, oral versions of myths were in circulation from an early age (such as the traditions associated with the mythical bards and poets Linus, Orpheus and Musaeus),7 possibly as a response to identity-formation processes, ritual practices and local needs of the various archaic poleis. Nevertheless, Homer and Hesiod, whose poetic authority rested on the Muses, were perceived as the quintessence of traditional wis5 Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion, and Other Essays (Garden City [N.Y.]: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954), 101. 6 Literally, it should be rendered as “those who made into poetry the genealogy of the gods”. The term θεογονίη, in the sense of origin or genealogy of the gods, is first recorded here in Herodotus’ Histories. 7 Cf. Apol. ii 63; Ar. Ran. 1032–1033; Pl. Resp. 364. It was sometimes claimed that Homer descended from the mythical singers Orpheus (Pherecydes, FGrHist 3 F 167; Hellanicus, FGrHist 4 F5; etc.) or Musaeus (Gorgias, 82 B25 dk).

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dom (sophia), which was ultimately regulated by its correlation with the divine order and omniscience. Etymologically, the Greek word mythos—which is not to be confused with the use of the term myth in modern parlance, or the object of study of mythography as a later discipline—has been linked to the verb μύω (“close the eyes or mouth”) and has been interpreted as a sort of sacred, mysteric, or authoritative utterance.8 As shown by Richard Martin, the word mythos regularly evokes a command in the Homeric poems.9 Hence, mythical accounts evoke an instructional form of utterance with an emblematic or paradigmatic illocutionary force. Consolidated by situated performance and connected to ritual, mythoi have a performative potential: they are not only reservoirs of encyclopedic knowledge about the gods, the world, and the ancestors (as a theoretical form of wisdom), but also possess an instructional, directive force aimed at guiding human conduct (as practical wisdom). Mythoi—as authoritative tales (logoi was the conventional, unmarked term for the Greeks) endowed with exemplary theoretical and practical wisdom—acquire specific meanings in view of the discourse genres where they become embedded (lyric, drama, narrative writing, etc.) and, like proverbs, sayings, and gnomai more generally, perform specific social functions in their contexts of production and reception. Mythoi have a high pragmatic and functional malleability. In archaic Greece, mythoi—though chiefly associated with the monumental poems of Homer and Hesiod, and their authoritative, inspired wisdom—were variously circulated by word of mouth by wandering rhapsodes and singers, and adapted to local cultic practices, local mysteric traditions, and genealogical lineages. Myths not only adopted multiple, overlapping and often contradictory versions, but also became encoded and repurposed into different discourse genres (lyric poetry, drama, narrative prose logoi, etc.), which allegedly shaped and transformed the tales in accordance with the rules of composition and the changing contexts of production and reception. What is idiosyncratic about the Greek approach to mythoi is the early realization of the multiplicity of myths, their incongruities, and the dubious facts transmitted by the various accounts. The awareness of this bewildering duplicity and diversity is well in evidence in the sixth century and early classical period as shown, for example, by sophoi such as Xenophanes of Colophon, who cast doubt not only on the anthropomorphism of the Greek gods but also on their dissolute demeanor, by renowned sages such as Solon, who denounced the ἀθεμίστια ἔργα transmitted by both poets, or Plato’s wide-ranging moral condemnation in the Repub8 Richard Martin, “The Myth before the Myth Began,” in Writing down the Myths, ed. Joseph Nagy Falaky (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 47. 9 Martin, “The myth,” 45–66.

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lic.10 That myths contain elements of untruth and relativity, which makes them liable to conflicting interpretations, is itself an assertion of the oral poetic tradition that gave rise to these foundational accounts. It would suffice to mention here Hesiod’s own words in the Theogony (27–28), who declares that the Muses speak lies (ψεύδεα) like the truth, as well as the truth (ἀληθέα), an adage that, in turn, reverberates in a verse of Theognis’ elegies: “if you made lies (ψεύδεα) like true words (ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα)” (v.713).11 Even Pindar, reworking mythoi into his odes to commemorate athletic victories (epinikia), makes the bold claim that “mythoi (μῦθοι) adorned with cunning lies (ψεύδεσι), deceive” and that the many wonders reported by men (θαύματα πολλά) lie beyond the truthful account (ὑπὲρ τὸν ἀλαθῆ λόγον) (Pind. Ol. 1.28–29). However, the engagement with myths, their factual content or fabulous fabrication, along with the various motifs and wisdom elements contained therein, was also the subject matter of a prose-writing tradition (now almost irremediably lost) that emerged in the sixth century and flourished throughout the classical period.

2

The Early Greek Prose-Inquiries: Repurposing Myths and Traditional Lore

With the exception of Herodotus’ grand narrative (which tends to be placed in a category of its own by virtue of its subject matter and methodological achievements),12 our knowledge of the early Greek prose writing tradition is largely fragmentary and hypothetical. In fact, our understanding of the socalled logographers—the first writers to use continuous ‘prose’ (logos) instead

10

11

12

Cf. Xenophanes (B11, 12), Solon πολλὰ ψεύδονται ἀοιδοί “poets tell many lies” (fr. 25 g.p.) and Plato Republic, 331e, 362a–b, 363a–367a and passim Books ii, iii, x (on Homer and moral education). On the mythographic discourse in the archaic and classical period, see Andrew Ford, “Mythographic Discourse among the Non-Mythographers: Pindar, Plato and Callimachus,” in Host or Parasite? Mythographers and their Contemporaries in the Classical and Hellenistic Periods, eds. Allen J. Romano and John Marincola (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 5–28. On Plato’s echo of this statement in the Theogony in his criticism of mythoi at the end of Republic 2 (376–383), see Elizabeth Belfiore, “Lies Unlike the Truth: Plato on Hesiod Theogony 27,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 115 (1985): 47–57. Herodotus’ ‘splendid isolationism’ within the early Greek prose writing tradition has been the standard view in the second half of the twentieth century. This scholarly approach, which tended to separate Herodotus from his contemporaries and early prose writing tradition, was grounded on Jacoby’s evolutionary model of explanation of Herodotus’ career. See Nino Luraghi, The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 6.

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of verse (epos)—mainly rests on the references which later Greek authors make to these early writers (archaioi sungrapheis).13 Although very little remains, the early Greek prose writing tradition seems to have been extremely prolific (only to judge by the record of authors and the titles of their works) and heterogeneous. It included works like Hecataeus’ Genealogies, dealing with mythology, as well as his two books describing the Earth (Perambulation), ethnographical works such as Charon of Lampsacus’ two books on Persian history (Persica), the town chronicles attributed to writers such as Hellanicus of Lesbos or, finally, Herodotus’ work on the Greco-Persian conflict. The logographers were compilers of mythical, genealogical, ethnographic, historical, and geographical material arising from their first-hand examination of oral and written traditions, or from their personal cogitation.14 The early Greek prose writers engaged closely and creatively with the mythoi and the ancient wisdom poetized by Hesiod and Homer, thus broaching new ways of dealing with the gods, myths, cosmogonies, and traditional moral values. Even Herodotus, who is often placed in a category of its own, as drawing the line between the spatium mythicum and the spatium historicum, is still concerned with myths, legends, and traditional expressions of wisdom such 13

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On the use of the word logographos, see Thuc. 1.2.21; Hellanic. T23; F25b; also Pal. 1. 11–16; 26. On the ancient historians, see also Str. 8.3.9 (Hecat. T 10 = F 25); Str. 1.2.8, 1.2.35 (Hellanic. T 19); Plut. De Is. et Os. 20, Polyb. vii, 7,1. The term logographos in antiquity—though scarcely used—was loaded with pejorative overtones (Aesch. In Ctes. 173, De Fals. Leg. 180; Dem. xix. 246, 250; Pl. Phd. 257C) and was employed as a term of abuse by rhetoricians and by Thucydides in his disparagement of his predecessors (Thuc.1.21). The general derogatory sense attached to the word was that of lack of accuracy, lack of concern for the truth claims of the narration or a flair for the fabulous. For a general discussion on Herodotus and his prose predecessors, see Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science and the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). On Herodotus text as ‘exceptional’ in the context of early Greek prose, which defies generic categories and establishes intertextual relations with (often blending) multiple discourse types, see Egbert Bakker, “The Syntax of historie: How Herodotus Writes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, eds. Carolyn Dewald and John Marincola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 92–102. See also Rosalind Thomas, “The Intellectual Milieu of Herodotus,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, eds. Carolyn Dewald and John Marincola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 76–91. For the overlapping and fluid genre distinctions in these early prose writers, see John Marincola, “Genre, Convention and Innovation in Greco-Roman Historiography,” in The Limits of Historiography. Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts, ed. Christina Kraus (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 281–324. See also Robert Fowler, “Early Historie and Literacy,” in The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus, ed. Nino Luraghi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 95–115. On Herodotus’ awareness of and engagement with historical sources as a distinctive feature of his approach, see Robert Fowler, “Herodotos and his Contemporaries,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 116 (1996): 76–80.

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as dreams, oracles, portents, and wisdom figures.15 Undeniably, Herodotus’ engagement with the mythical tradition is a lot more tenuous and circuitous than his prose predecessors’. However, certain epistemological attitudes and hermeneutical strategies towards the mythical past initiated by the sixthcentury prose Ionian writers were taken on, consolidated, and honed by Herodotus in the framing of his large-scale account of the Greco-Persian conflict. In this sense, we can affirm that Herodotus both crowns and culminates the Ionian prose writing tradition. In particular, the Histories show a manifest intention to steer clear of the gods and metaphysical explanations—as Herodotus declares in his own person (e.g., 2.3.2; 2.65.2)—but the evidence in his work indicates that these transformations were not to be fully brought to fruition until the next generation. Indeed, while the straightforward interaction between gods and humans is altogether ruled out in the Histories, religious allusions are pervasive in the narrative and a divine explanation of historical phenomena is not dismissed as a form of causal agency in history.16 Whatever Herodotus’ particular stance, which will be examined later, his prosewriting predecessors were actively engaged with mythoi and traditional lore. The remaining fragments of their work reveal sound attempts at rendering into prose, adapting, expanding, or recreating the Greek mythical past and developing incipient commentarial strategies.17

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This vexed question has been recently revisited in a collection of essays exploring the interface between myth and history in Herodotus. See Emily Baragwanath and Mathieu de Bakker, Myth, Truth and Narrative in Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). A change in scholarly approach has started to come to terms with the mythical content of Herodotus’ Histories in its own right, rather than seeing it as a remnant of an archaic mentality, which detracted from historical rigor of the text. For a recent re-evaluation of the mythos/logos polarity, see Robert Fowler, “Mythos and Logos,” The Journal of Hellenistic Studies 131 (2011): 45–66. On the applicability of the term mythos in the contemporary sense to Greek literature in general, see for example, Claude Calame, Mythe et histoire dans l’Antiquité grecque (Lausanne: Editions Payot, 1996). The commonplace term for any kind of tale in Herodotus is logos, while the term mythos is only used twice (in the restricted sense of unaccountable story). As to the long-debated question of whether Herodotus identifies a spatium mythicum as separate from a spatium historicum, equally plausible arguments have been proposed on either side. For a reassessment of the implication of the gods in the narrative and the role of religion in Herodotus’ historiography, see Robert Fowler, “Gods in Early Greek Historiography,” in The Gods of Ancient Greece. Identities and Transformations, eds. Jan Bremmer and Andrew Erskine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 318–320. ‘Prosification’ is as a standard procedure in cultural development over time. Mise en prose is a fully-fledged, complex, literary transformation that involves a new expressive medium altogether. As the case of medieval renderings of verse into prose shows, the prosator excises, condenses or expands segments of the poems, but also produces omissions or

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As to how these texts related to institutionalized expressions of wisdom in early Greece, most notably the Homeric, Hesiodic and poetic traditions, the scanty evidence available points to a critical, polemical, and rationalizing stance.18 The locus classicus of such rationalizing attitude towards tradition is Hecataeus’ programmatic statement in the proem of his Genealogies (Hecat. F1) transmitted by Ps.-Demetrius (Eloc. 12): Ἑκαταῖος Μιλήσιος ὧδε μυθεῖται· τάδε γράφω, ὥς μοι δοκεῖ ἀληθέα εἶναι οἱ γὰρ Ἑλλήνων λόγοι πολλοί τε καὶ γελοῖοι, ὡς ἐμοὶ φαίνονται, εἰσίν. Hecataeus of Miletus speaks thus: I write these words as they seem to me to be true; for the stories of the Greeks, as they seem to me, are many and ludicrous.19 Hecataeus’ opening statement provides a number of clues to characterize the prose-writing tradition as a whole: (1) the record of the first name in a thematic position at the beginning of the passage, which—as will be later the case with Herodotus and Thucydides—grants authority to the ensuing statements; (2) the insistence on writing (γράφω) as a distinct medium of expression; (3) the relativity of subjective opinion (δοκεῖ / φαίνονται) in mythical matters—which is a sign of multiple and overlapping oral traditions—coupled with a parallel concern for truth (ἀληθέα); (4) the multiplicity and preposterousness (πολλοί τε καὶ γελοῖοι) of Greek tales, which calls for some sort of selection, critique or rational expurgation; (5) the identification of a whole corpus of oral or written texts labelled as ‘Greek’ (Ἑλλήνων), which is a very early and uncommon explicit reference to some degree of pan-Hellenic consciousness. It could be argued that some of the ancient logographoi preserved traditions—whether gathered by word of mouth (akousmata) or via consultation

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additions. On the exegetical and critical use of tradition by early prose writers, see Lucio Bertelli, “Hecataeus. From Genealogy to Historiography,” in The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus, ed. Nino Luraghi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 69. See, for example, Hecat. F 15 and the genealogy of the Deucalionids. See also, his correction of Hesiod in F26. On Hecataeus’ ‘rationalism,’ see Bertelli, “Hecataeus,” 84–89, and Robert Fowler, Early Greek Mythography. Volume 2: Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), xv–xvi. Translations, unless otherwise stated, are my own. These programmatic opening lines have received considerable scholarly attention. See, for example, Aldo Corcella, “Ecateo di Mileto così dice,” Quaderni di Storia 43 (1996): 295–301, and Fowler, “Early historie,” 101– 103. Hecataeus’ critique of the Greek logoi, which are many (polloi) and absurd (geloioi), probably entailed making corrections, amendments or offering conjectures of his own or by drawing on local traditions.

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of written records (both sacred and profane)—that bound the grand heroic and genealogical accounts (as recorded by Homer and Hesiod) to the local aristocracies. In a way, these writings may have preserved non-standard, more local, or personal reinterpretations of myths and legends that were used to legitimize the rights of certain families or social groups. They may also have preserved alternative traditions, possibly derived from ancient epics and myths ascribed to mythical bards such as Musaeus and Orpheus, or texts that followed the tradition of the Hesiodic Catalogue.20 Moreover, there is evidence in some of these fragments to suggest a clear effort to link the mythical past to the recent past or present through the elaboration of complex (and often diverging) genealogies, thus bridging the timeless past of the gods and heroes to the historical present.21 Hellanicus is a good example of a writer who, by shortening, selecting, and creating synchronies, conflated the mass of mythological and genealogical material, thereby reducing the whole to just four ‘lineages’ in the Deukalioneia, Phoronis, Asopis, and Atlantis. Moreover, in his work Priestesses of Hera (of which only a few fragments and testimonies survive), Hellanicus appears to have used a chronological method to narrate events by reference to priestesses rather than the old reckoning by generations.22 Otherwise stated, these early prose writers offered a context-sensitive and increasingly rationalized re-elaboration of myths and genealogies, which was more in line with the verisimilitude criteria of ordinary experience and enhanced the pragmatic value of these accounts. Furthermore, 20 21

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On the importance of the Hesiodic Catalogue in the works of the first prose genealogists, see Bertelli, “Hecataeus”, 67–94. See, for instance, Her. 2.143 (= Hecat. T 5;6;7) reporting Hecataeus’ alleged conversation with the Egyptian priests at Thebes. See also Hellanicus’ Priestesses of Hera attempts at chronology as an alternative to the old reckoning by generations. The use of prose to render poetic genealogies cannot be regarded as a simple and unproblematic change of medium, as sometimes believed. The choice of prose rather than verse enables a critical attitude to the genealogical material. As to whether there are traces of any chronological criteria in the organization of these genealogies, see Bertelli, “Hecataeus,” 90–95, and Fowler, “Early historie,” 103–105. For the transition from relative chronology to absolute chronography, see Alden Mosshammer, The Chronicle of Eusebius and Greek Chronographic Tradition (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979). For a discussion of the organization of time in the Histories and whether Herodotus elaborated a systematic chronology, see Justus Cobet, “The Organization of Time in the Histories,” in Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, eds. Egbert J. Bakker et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 387–412. See Lionel Pearson, The Early Ionian Historians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), 152–235; Dino Ambaglio, L’opera storiografica di Ellanico di Lesbo (Pisa: Giardini editori e stampatori, 1980), 40–41. See also Astrid Möller, “The Beginnings of Chronography: Hellanicus’ Hiereiai,” in The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus, ed. Nino Luraghi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 241–262.

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not only did they repurpose mythical accounts, but they also developed heuristic procedures and commentarial strategies to critically scrutinize the tales of the past. 2.1 The Early Critique of Myth: Etymology and Commentarial Strategies One of the most salient features of the early mythographers and genealogists is the recourse to etymology in the appraisal of myths. This procedure is wellattested in the Greek prose-writing tradition from Hecataeus to Herodotus.23 Arguably, the logographers repurposed a standard poetic device used by early Greek poetry, turning it into a hermeneutic instrument to critically revisit the mythical past. This use of etymology offers fresh ground to draw hitherto unexplored connections with the Babylonian commentary tradition, one which has only recently been examined in greater detail.24 Ancient etymology was a heuristic tool that sought to explain why a word or name is what it is or is connected to something existing in the real world. It involved tracing the link between the phonological level (which is well-known) and the semantic or referential level (which is more obscure).25 The early poetic and epic works provide examples of wordplay or use of etymology (ἔτυμος λόγος: true 23

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The genealogy of the Deucalionids (Athenai 2.35= Hec. F 15), the real nature of Cerberus the “dog of Hades” of Cape Taenarum (Paus. 3.25.4 = Hec. F27), Hec. F 19 (Aegyptus’ sons), Hec. F 22 (Mykenai is derived from Perseus’ scabbard μύκης); Hellanicus of Lesbos, F. 111 (vitulus/Vitulia), F 28 (rationalization of Iliad 21.242), F 175 (etymology of Osiris). Similar procedures are used by Herodotus in his Egyptian logos to discuss mythological and/or ethnographical and historical material. Hdt. ii. 28, 30, 44–46 (Heracles); 52, 56–57 (the foundation legend of the oracle of Dodona). Herodotus also deploys more sophisticated modes of explanation including reasoning by induction and deduction. See Eckart Frahm, Babylonian and Assyrian Text Commentaries. Origins of Interpretation (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2011), and Uri Gabbay, The Exegetical Terminology of Akkadian Commentaries (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Cross-cultural connections in early scholarly practices have been recently drawn between the Akkadian commentaries and the early Hebrew exegesis. Etymology was a standard hermeneutic technique in Mesopotamian commentaries. Lemmata were thus artificially etymologized by parsing them into smaller units and explaining them individually, a procedure which would, in turn, shed light on the general meaning of the words as used in a certain text. Scholars have likened this procedure to the technique known as notarikon in later rabbinic exegesis. On the various ways in which ‘names’ often generate myths, see John Peradotto, Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 107–108. On ancient, especially Greek, etymology, see the comprehensive discussion by Ineke Sluiter, “Ancient Etymology. A Tool for Thinking,” in Brill’s Companion to Ancient Greek Scholarship, eds. Franco Montanari et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 896–922. See also the recent comparative approach by Glenn Most, “Allegoresis and Etymology,” in Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices, eds. Antony Grafton and Glenn Most (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 52–74.

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word) in the explanation of names. For example, Homer (Od. 19.406–408) suggests that the name Odysseus is linked with the expression ὄδυσσομαι (“to be wroth against”) and Hesiod etymologizes the names of the Cyclops (Theog. 140–144) and of Pegasus and Chrysaor (Theog. 280–284). In Homer and Hesiod, the word ἐπώνυμος (the ‘significant name’) is regularly used in these cases of etymology and is generally accompanied by a brief explanation (οὕνεκα).26 While the mythographers probably drew on this early poetic device linking specific names with their attending circumstances by way of etymology (a phonetic bridging between the explanans and the explanandum), the strategy as used by the logographers, Hecataeus for example, has become more sophisticated. Below, we consider one example. When reporting the genealogy of Oeneus, Hecataeus produces an etymological explanation of a different kind.27 The passage is one of the four surviving fragments dealing with the descendants of Deucalion, which was presumably narrated in the first book of the Hecataeus’ Genealogiae: Ὀρεσθεὺς ὁ Δευκαλίωνος ἦλθεν εἰς Αἰτωλίαν ἐπὶ βασιλείᾳ, καὶ κύων αὐτοῦ στέλεχος ἔτεκε, καὶ ὅς ἐκέλευσεν αὐτὸ κατορχθῆναι, καὶ ἐξ αὐτοῦ ἔφυ ἄμπελος πολυστάφυλος. διὸ καὶ τὸν αὑτοῦ παῖδα Φύτιον ἐκάλεσε. τούτου δ᾽ Οἰνεὺς ἐγένετο, κληθεὶς ἀπὸ τῶν ἀμπέλων (οἱ γὰρ παλαιοί, φησιν, Ἕλληνες οἴνας ἐκάλουν τὰς ἀμπέλους). Οἰνέως δ᾽ ἐγένετο Αἰτώλος. hecat. F. 15 = athenai. ii 35 ab

Orestheus, son of Deukalion, came to Aetolia for a kingdom and his dog gave birth to a log, and he ordered it to be buried, and from it grew a vine with many grapes. Thus, he also named his own son Phytios. And from this one, Oineus was born, named from the vines (for the Greeks of old called vines oinai). And from Oineus was born Aitolos. Several aspects of this fragment are worth mentioning. For a start, Hecateaus seems to be innovating or drawing on a different oral tradition. Second, causeeffect relationships are more explicitly underscored here through causal conjunctions (διό, γάρ). Etymology works at multiple levels: Phytios’ name (‘he who causes to grow’) is explained both through the narrative context, because of the connection with a buried staff that miraculously grew into a vine, and 26

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Cf. Od. 7.54 (Ἀρήτη δ᾽ ὄνομ᾽ ἐστὶν ἐπώνυμον), Od. 19.409. (τῷ δ᾽ Ὀδυσεὺς ὄνομ᾽ ἔστω ἐπώνυμον), Il. 9.562 (Ἀλκυόνην καλέεσκον ἐπώνυμον, οὕνεκ᾽) cf. h.Ap. 373, Hes. Theog. 144 (Κύκλωπες δ᾽ ὄνομ᾽ ἦσαν ἐπώνυμοι, οὕνεκα) Theog. 282 (τῷ μὲν ἐπώνυμον ἦεν [Χρυσάωρ], ὅτ᾽). Cf. Hes. Op. 572 and [Sc.] 292; see also Hom. Il. 14. 114. Cf. Hes. Cat. Fr. 2–7 and 234.

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also from the etymological root-stem connection with the verb φύω (in the passage, ἐξ αὐτοῦ ἔφυ) and, possibly, also with a cognate noun φυτόν (plant) not explicitly mentioned.28 At this point, etymological analysis is taken a step further in Hecataeus’ next move. The designation of Phythios’ son, Oineus, is fleshed out in more complex etymological terms. Not only is he thematically connected to the original vine with many grapes (ἄμπελος πολυστάφυλος) in the narrative, but the origin of his name is also explained through diachronic reference to previous linguistic evidence in absentia (in a philological guise, as it were), rather than through an immediate phonological resemblance, as it was customary in early poetry. Thus, Οἰνεύς is connected to the old form for “vine” (οἴνη), allegedly used by the ancient Greeks (παλαιοὶ Ἕλληνες).29 Here, Hecataeus produces a complex metalinguistic gloss: he historicizes language in an unprecedented way, showing awareness of linguistic change over time. Moreover, he incorporates himself and his predecessors into a national speech community (the Ἕλληνες), in what constitutes a very early record of the use of this term to denote the Hellenic unity.30 This passage reveals a more analytical dimension of etymology which transcends the immanent nameobject relation featured in the early poetic and epic traditions. Here, it is used both to create an alternative genealogy and explicate its semantic derivations. Hecataeus thus narrates and explicates the genealogical links between the descendants of Deucalion (Orestheus, “Mountainous”, Phytios “Plant Man”, and 28 29 30

Interestingly, Hesiod (Op. 571–572) in two successive verses connects the words φυτά (plants) and οἰνέων (vineyards). This observation is at least partially confirmed by the use of the word οἴνη by Hesiod (Op. 572). Surprisingly, these early occurrences of the term Ἕλληνες in Hecataeus to designate the Greeks as a national unit have been, to the best of my knowledge, largely ignored. The word also figures in the genitive case in Hecataeus’ proem (see above). In fact, Hecataeus—and possibly the early Greek prose-writers—could be seen as the missing link in the dissemination of this ethnical term, which becomes commonplace in the fifth century (presumably, after the Persian wars). In archaic poetry, the usual term is Πανέλληνες rather than Ἕλληνες (cf. Hes. Op. 526–528; fr. 130 Merkelbach-West; Archil. fr 54 Diehl.). Indeed, the earlier record of the term Hellenes in the wider meaning (to indicate a collective national identity) appears in writing for the first time—according to Pausanias’ citation (10.7.6)— in an inscription by Echembrotus, dedicated to Heracles for his victory in the Amphictyonic Games (584bce). According to Thucydides (1.132), after the Greco-Persian Wars, an inscription was written in Delphi celebrating the victory over the Persians and calling Pausanias the leading general of the ‘Hellenes’. See Jonathan Hall, Hellenicity. Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 125–154. Reference to language as a common ethnical linkage between the Greeks of the past and the present by Hecataeus is highly significant and predates the celebrated definition of ‘hellenicity’ (to hellenikon) by Herodotus at 8. 144.

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Oineus “Wine Man”) in order to construct an alternative lineage that may shore up the people’s legitimacy in South Aetolia and introduce the genial culture of the vine. As such, this account may be interpreted as an etiological myth, which Hecataeus spawned from local sources and which probably served the interest of the local communities, especially in tracing Aitolos’ pedigree as a lineagefounder.31 One other commentarial technique extensively used by the early prose writers to explicate or rework the mythical past was the anchoring of myths to the ‘realia’—whether topographical sites, cult heroes, cult practices, rites, customs, etc.—or the historicization of myths. This strategy will be taken up and refined by Herodotus in his ethnographical commentaries.32 Possibly the earliest example of what would later become the standard procedure of fifteenthcentury prose writing is provided by Pherecydes of Syros—presumably the first to have used literary prose instead of verse and one who is counted among the legendary ‘wise’ men by Diogenes Laertius.33 There is consensus among scholars that Pherecydes belonged to a school of thinkers—together with the physiologoi and the Orphics—who, abandoning the Muses and choosing prose as a new medium, strove to purge the Hesiodic theogony of its irrational and indecorous elements.34 Pherecydes is reputed to have authored a cosmogony which, unlike Hesiod’s standard account featuring Chaos as the initial state of the Universe, was based on three eternal divine principles, Zas (Zeus), Chthonie (Earth) and Chronos (Time). Scholars have noted that, unlike Pherecydes, neither Hesiod nor Homer present a god as a demiurge or the world as an artifact made by a god.35 The act of creation itself is described mytho-poetically by Pherecydes: Zas makes a cloth on which he decorates earth and sea; he then presents it as a wedding gift to Chthonie and wraps it around her. In doing so, Chthonie becomes Gê, land, the substance that covers the surface of the earth.

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Cf. Fowler, Early Greek Mythography, 135–136. Cf. Pherecydes of Athens F 146, Hec. F 26 (Geryon) 27, F138 (virgin sacrifice to Lemnian goddess), F 305 (shrine of Leto in Boutoi), Hdt. 2. 91 (festival in honour of Perseus at Chemmis), 2. 156 (etiology of the floating island of Chemmis), 2. 171 (the Thesmophoria). Cf. Hermann Schibli, Pherekydes of Syros (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), notably fragments 1, 2, 9, 10, 11, 12, for testimonia attributing the first prose narrative to Pherecydes. Diogenes Laertius (i.1) includes him among the sages of Ancient Greece. On eastern influences on Pherecydes and other early Greek intellectuals, see Martin West, Early Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 174–175. See Herbert Granger, “The Theologian Pherecydes of Syros and the Early Days of Natural Philosophy,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 103 (2007): 135–163. Schibli, Pherekydes, 54–55.

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The marriage scene is preserved in two fragmentary columns (Schibli 68). On the third wedding day, Zas presents the embroidered robe to his wife (Col. i). The following lines read: (Coll ii) βουλόμενος] γὰρ σεο τοὺς γάμου[ς] εἶναι, τούτωι σε τιμ[έω]. σὺ δέ μοι χαῖρε καὶ σύ[νι]σθι. ταῦτά φασιν ἀν[α] καλυπτήρια πρῶτον γενέσθαι, ἐκ τούτου δ[ὲ] ὁ νόμος ἐγένε[το] καὶ θεοῖσι καὶ ἀνθρ[ώπ]οισιν. ἡ δὲ μι[ν ἀμείβεται δεξαμ[ένη εὑ τὸ φᾶ[ρος … (Col. ii) ‘… Wishing marriage with you I honour you with this (robe). Welcome me, and form a union with me.’ It is said that this was the first anakalupteria. From this event, the custom (of the anakalupteria) originated among gods and men. And she accepted the robe and answered him … Both the religious and the etiological meanings of this passage have been fully explored. The ἱερὸς γαμός of Zas (the demiurge god) and Chthonie (the primal earth-mother) replicates the traditional nuptials between Zeus and Hera. Moreover, Pherecydes’ text lays down the heavenly prototype of the rite of human marriage. Specifically, in this fragment allusion is made to a number of human rites: the bridegroom’s salutation, the ceremonial unveiling of the bride at the end of the marriage banquet (ἀνακαλυπτήρια), the three-day duration of a marriage ceremony, and the giving of gifts.36 Thus, Pherecydes’ fragment sets the tone for later Greek prose-writers, i.e., an explicit connection is established between the gods and the human world, which is presented in the form of an embedded custom (νόμος). Pherecydes’ example shows a standard procedure in the early Greek prose writing and its engagement with the mythical accounts and the traditional lore: alternative accounts were produced (both in poetry and prose) and Homeric and Hesiodic narratives cleansed or criticized. Furthermore, a new “voice” emerged in relation to traditional accounts. After Zas’ direct address to his wife, there is a sudden break in the narrative voice. It is a new third-person voice (φασιν) that introduces the metanarrative gloss connecting the divine domain and the concomitant human rite. This gloss entails the writer’s explicit com-

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On the etiological significance of this fragment, see the detailed discussion in Schibli, Pherekydes, 61–69. On the anakalupteria, see Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise (Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2003), 27–30.

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mentary on his ongoing text. The reference to the unveiling of the wife as a human rite (ἀνακαλυπτήρια) does not follow the development of the main narrative sequence, but is rather a commentarial insertion, a critical reflection on the unfolding narrative aimed at explaining the allegorical and etiological meaning of the cosmic marriage. After this brief gloss, the original narrator’s voice resurfaces and takes up the story (“And she accepted the robe …”). This new voice in the text introduces a distancing from the mythical content, but also connects it to the writer’s context, highlighting the relevance to current interpretations. A new kind of discourse flourishes in the mid-sixth century that not only narrates (and produces alternative accounts about the gods and traditional wisdom), but also comments and explains the narrative. 2.2 Refashioning Mythical Patterns, Motifs and Traditional Wisdom Not only did the early Greek prose writers rework the mythical tradition into prose, often adopting a critical or polemical stance and developing commentarial strategies, but they also refashioned mythical patterns, motifs and partially reworked the moral content of the wisdom tradition. Herodotus’Histories provides examples of the ways in which historical personalities and events are rendered in the account via narrative templates closely associated with mythical tales and the wisdom tradition.37 As a matter of fact, the wisdom tradition not only conveys timeless nuggets of truth and self-contained advice to lead a successful life, but also recognizable discourse formats whereby this authoritative content is transmitted. The so-called Croesus’ logos is possibly the best example to explore the ways in which certain mythical structural patterns, motifs, and traditional wisdom maxims are reworked into the Histories. In portraying Croesus and his fictional encounter with Solon (i 30–33), Herodotus reworks narrative templates and moral content deriving from the earlier poetic tradition. He draws on the structural pattern offered by the wise advisors in Homer (generally performed by elderly men who advise younger characters and whose advice is often neglected),38 and by the wise advisors in tragedy (both the tragic warner, who generally cautions a ruler against the perils of hybris, and the practical adviser, who recommends a specific course

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Cf. Katharina Wesselmann, Mythische Erzählstrukturen in Herdotos Historien (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011). Examples in Iliad abound. E.g. Chryses (1.17–21); Nestor (1.274–284); Peleus (9.252.59); Phoenix (9.502–514); Priam (22.38–76). Examples can also be found in in Sophocles’ tragedies (e.g. Tiresias in Oedipus Tyrannus and Antigone).

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of action).39 These instructional scenes display formal features that can be traced consistently not only in the Hesiodic didactic tradition (Works and Days, the Precepts of Chiron), epinicean poetry (e.g. Chiron as adviser in Pindar’s Nemean 3 and Pythian 3), and drama (especially, Sophocles), but also more broadly in the Near-Eastern wisdom literature tradition.40 Herodotus retains certain paradigmatic traits of these advice scenes such as the asymmetry between the giver and receiver in terms of age and wisdom, the adviser’s benevolence, and the receiver’s heedless neglect of the counsel,41 which will forebode calamity. However, he also reworks the familiar folktale wise-adviser template in various ways. At the most obvious level, he uses the instructional matrix to showcase an imaginary encounter between two historical personages, rather than the legendary figures largely featured by epic, tragedy, or the exempla of epinician poetry. What is more, Herodotus’ encounter is set in the recent past (rather than in illo tempore) and involves a Greek sage and a nonGreek monarch. As far as the figure of Croesus is concerned, Herodotus reworks a pre-existing poetic tradition that associated Croesus’ wisdom with material wealth, virtue, generosity, and piety toward the gods. Though non-Greek in origin, Croesus fig-

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This classification is made by Richmond Lattimore, “The Wise Adviser in Herodotus,” Classical Philology 34 (1939): 24–35. The classification is based on Bischoff’s distinction between Warner and Berater. See Heinrich Bischoff, Der Warner bei Herodot (Marburg: Noske, 1932). In characterizing these warners in the Iliad, Gerald Heverly concludes that “warners are always male, elderly or significantly older than the recipient, wise, actively benevolent, and sympathetic. Second, they are for the most part paternal and prophetic. Owing to this consistently recurring handful of traits, warners are a distinct character type. Furthermore, they may possess more than one traditional authority role that grounds their advice and traits besides strong benevolence that contribute to their appeal.” See Gerald Heverly, “Neglected Warnings in the Iliad: A Study in Characterization” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2013), 107. On the extensive parallels between Hesiod’s Works and Days and the didactic literature of the Near East and Egypt, see Peter Walcot, “Hesiod and the didactic literature of the Near East,” Revue des Études Grecques 75, no. 354–355 (1962): 13–36. See also Martin West, The East Face of Helicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 76–78. Particularly relevant to our case is the genre of “instructions” that proliferated in Egyptian and Sumerian literature. The genre of “instructions” usually featured an authoritative figure (a vizier of king) providing moral guidance to his son(s), students or a promising young bureaucrat. See William Kelly Simpson, ed., The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, and Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 6. See also Richard Parkinson, Poetry and Culture in Middle Kingdom Egypt: A Dark Side to Perfection, (London: Continuum, 2002), 236–238. Cf. Hdt. i. 33 where Croesus’ disregard for Solon’s views is suggested by the adjective ἀμαθέα (“ignorant, stupid”).

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ured prominently among the wise men of antiquity, and was renowned both for his wealth and pious deeds to the Gods, most notably, Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphos.42 Pindar (Pyth. 1.90–94) extols Croesus’ legendary excellence (φιλόφρων ἀρετά), which makes him the object of praise of storytellers (like Herodotus) and singers alike (like Pindar himself). He is a prime example of prosperity (τὸ δὲ παθεῖν εὖ) and everlasting fame (εὖ δ᾽ ἀκούειν) (Pyth. 1.98). A similar approach is discernible in Bacchylides’ Ode iii 23–62, which provides the most extensive poetic treatment of Croesus’ legendary piety toward the gods. Irrespective of the debates regarding sources that may have inspired Bacchylides’ and Herodotus’ different versions,43 the early classical poetic and pictorial tradition unmistakably stresses Croesus’ royal status, dignity and piety, which become the safe-conduct to his own salvation (as Croesus is miraculously rescued from the burning pyre and carried away to the Hyperboreans).44 Through the fictional encounter with a prototypical Greek sage, Herodotus reconfigures the legendary status and archaic moral underpinning of Croesus’ story. The foremost transformation is allegedly Croesus’ orientalizing cast, which is couched by Herodotus in the post-Persian War dichotomous rhetoric differentiating between the Greeks and the Oriental kings. Moreover, this Othering of Croesus through his encounter with Solon largely reconfigures the archaic aristocratic conception of olbos associated primarily with material wealth and prosperity.45 In Herodotus’ version, it is Croesus’ hybris—routinely associated in the Histories with Oriental monarchs—that is emphasized. Furthermore, by providing a full biography of Croesus in the context of the GreekPersian struggle, Herodotus goes beyond the archaic motif of the king’s leg-

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On Croesus as a historical figure and his literary representation, see recently Robert Wallace, “Redating Croesus: Herodotean Chronologies, and the Dates of the Earliest Coinages,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 136 (2016): 168–181. For the differences between Bacchylides’ and Herodotus’ versions, see Richard Jebb, Bacchylides. The Poems and Fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905), 195– 197. See also Herwig Maehler, Bacchylides. A Selection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 80–83. Bacchylides draws on the story of Croesus as an exemplum of human piety as the best guarantee of prosperity (ὄλβος), which is intended to highlight Hieron’s relation with Delphi. At iii 21–22, Bacchylides introduces Croesus’ exemplum through a gnome that guides the interpretation of the whole passage: honoring the god provides the greatest prosperity (θεόν, θεόν τις ἀγλαϊζέτω, ὁ γὰρ ἄριστος ὄλβων). At iii 60–63 Bacchylides restates the reason behind Croesus’ miraculous salvation: his piety (εὐσέβεια) and his generous gifts to Apollo. Gregory Cranes argues that Herodotus’ version of Croesus’ demise is a reaction against a poetic tradition that equated Croesus with olbos (material wealth and general prosperity). See Gregory Crane, “The Prosperity of Tyrants: Bacchylides, Herodotus, and the Contest for Legitimacy,” Arethusa 29, no. 1 (1996): 60–61.

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endary prosperity and piety evoked by his miraculous rescue. More generally, Herodotus’ peculiar emplotment of Croesus’ biography in the macro-narrative reconfigures the wisdom tradition on various levels. Croesus’ famous encounter with Solon has often been interpreted as the philosophical and moral framework for the Histories as a whole.46 The scene displays a number of features regularly associated with the didactic tradition not only in the Greek setting but also more broadly in the Near-Eastern literature: the recreation of an asymmetrical instructional scene (usually, the adviser and the advisee); the use of gnomes and other wisdom expressions (similes, exempla or paradigmatic tales); and the recourse to a wise figure to authorize a particular saying or moral instruction. However, Herodotus’ reworking of these traditional elements in his Croesus’ logos fails to provide, in my view, a moral template that could be consistently projected to the whole narrative.47 Though the moral dimension of Croesus’ downfall is prefigured through the famous encounter with Solon (i. 30–33)—incidentally, a renowned ‘sage’ at the time of the Histories48—the complex and overlapping reasons for Croesus’ conduct and for his personal and political demise rule out an exclusively moral interpretation couched in traditional wisdom terms. The straightforward ὄλβος-κόρος-ὕβρις-ἀδικία-τίσις sequence49 becomes harder to discern in Herodotus’ multilayered account of Croesus’ biography. The narrative provides various accounts for Croesus’ actions: on the human level, for one thing, the Lydians’ plans to attack Cyrus are explained in personal and political terms (vengeance for his brother-in-law, Astyages, and fear for Persia’s power, 1.46.1;

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See among others Lattimore, Wise Adviser, 30–31, and Thomas Harrison, Divinity and History. The Religion of Herodotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 38–44. While Herodotus’ text frequently expresses judgments in terms of traditional Greek moral principles, such as divine punishment for excesses or injustice, overconfidence in one’s prosperity and the transiency of human happiness, the extent to which the historian endorses such beliefs or—more importantly—makes them a moral framework that regulates the unfolding of events or dictates the moral lesson to be drawn from the narrative is still far from settled. See Nick Fisher, “Popular Morality in Herodotus,” in Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, eds. Egbert Bakker et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 199–224. For a comparison of the views expressed by the Herodotean Solon with those of the historical figure, see Paula Sage, “Solon, Croesus and the Theme of the Ideal Life” (PhD. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1985), 47–56. See also, Harmut Erbse, Studien zum Verständnis Herodots (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1992), 12–13, and Harrison, Divinity, 36–38. Some of the motifs found in Solon’s poetry are the uncertainty of life and the unpredictability of human deeds (e.g. Solon, ieg F13.63–70), the uselessness of wealth in the face of old age, disease and, ultimately, death (F 24.1–10), and the notion of seventy years as man’s natural span (F 27). For examples of this traditional pattern in Greek literature, see Robert Schmiel, “The Olbos Koros Hybris Ate Sequence,” Traditio 45 (1989–1990): 343–346.

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1.71.1; 1.73.1) but, for another, metaphysical reasons are also adduced directly or indirectly. Divine jealousy (φθόνος) is Solon’s foreboding at i. 32.1; fate (μοῖρα) is the reason given by the priestess at Delphi, as Croesus was expiating the crimes of his ancestor of the fifth generation (i. 91.1); divinities in general are otherwise often invoked (i. 34.1; 91.3). Moreover, the nexus between the religious and human domains is provided by Croesus’ misunderstanding of the oracles from Delphi (i. 54.1, 75.2). Finally, the development of Croesus is far from consistent: although he eventually becomes ‘wise’ through suffering and takes on the role of wise adviser towards Cyrus and Cambyses (i. 207.1), he still continues to err in his judgment.50 In the Histories, the regulating forces of dike have ceased to steer the course of human affairs.51 If the traditional principles of justice and moderation are often preached by the actors of the Histories (and can be read as tragic warning against personal and political excesses), the contact with the cultural Other and the political breadth of the narrative have undermined undisputed moral convictions and criteria for leading successful lives. More importantly, the movement of history can no longer be safely predicted. The multi-causality of human actions in the narrative—ranging from occasional mediated divine intrusion, vengeance, human greed to fate and chance—has tampered with the clear-cut moral bearings advocated by the wisdom tradition.52 Ultimately, the Histories

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On the inability to learn permanently through suffering and on the transiency of human wisdom in the Histories, see Hans-Peter Stahl, “Learning through Suffering? Croessus’ Conversations in the History of Herodotus,” Yale Classical Studies 24 (1975): 1–36. See also and Donald Lateiner, The Historical Method of Herodotus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 221–222. In Hesiod, Dike embodies the Goddess (Op. 256, 220), the idea of punishment δίκην λαμβάνειν/ δίκην διδόναι (Op. 712) as well as the principle that defines the race of heroes (Op. 158), which stands in opposition to ὕβρις and βίη. This centrality of Dike proclaimed by the Hesiodic tradition was later adopted as a Leitmotif during the seventh and sixth centuries by archaic poetry. (See Pindar Nem. v 14, ix 15, Pyth. iv 140, Nem. x 54, ix 44, Pyth. v 44, viii 22). This is clearly evinced by the obvious intertextual relations between Hesiod and Solon (especially, Solon 4 ‘Eunomia’). On the relationship between Hesiod and Solon with regard to Dike, see Bernd Manuwald, “Zu Solons Gedankenwelt,” Rheinisches Museum 132 (1989):1–25. See also, Joseph Almeida, Justice as an Aspect of the Polis Idea in Solon’s Political Poems (Leiden: Brill, 2003), and Elizabeth Irwin, Solon and Early Greek Poetry: The Politics of Exhortation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 155–198. As for the role played by fate in the narrative, some commentators state that all important events in the Histories are supernaturally predetermined, for example, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 62, and Mabel Lang, Herodotean Narrative and Discourse (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1984), 64. Others claim that fate plays a minor and inconsistent role, e.g., John Gould, Herodotus (London: St Martin’s Press, 1989), 70–78, and Lateiner, Historical Method, 67. A third group

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can be said to expound the bewildering moral lesson of history. Unlike the archaic wisdom tradition, which instructed the individual to lead a successful life within a closed community, self-contained moral advice is no longer an assured guidance for action and success in an increasingly complex, interstate scenario where humans tend to overstep the boundaries of their own personal and political territories. Thus, no true moral guidance is successful a priori by virtue of its inherent, didactic contents; moral understanding is only obtained—so appears to be the lesson of history—a posteriori (post eventum). Croesus’ case also illustrates the relative and questionable truth of a number of gnomes customarily associated with the Greek wisdom tradition, which scholars have also tended to associate with Herodotus’ moral interpretation of history. As a matter of fact, gnomes are a standard component of the Greek didactic tradition, including Homer, Hesiod, and lyric and epinician poetry.53 Moreover, they lie at the core of wisdom literature beyond the Greek world, as they prominently feature in early Hebrew, Egyptian, Akkadian, Sumerian, and Babylonian didactic texts.54 The use of gnomes in Herodotus’ Histories

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finds that Herodotus attributes causality to both divine fate and to human choice. See, for example, Henry Immerwahr, “Historical Action in Herodotus,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 85 (1954): 32–35; Jutta Kirchberg, Die Funktion der Orakel im Werke Herodotos (Göttingen: Vandenhceck & Ruprecht, 1965), 119, and Nannó Marinatos, “Wahl und Schicksal bei Herodot,” Saeculum 33 (1982): 259. Modern paroimiological research defines proverbs as brief and pithy statements, cast in poetic or rhythmical form, which express general wisdom or practical advice. Some of the features of proverbs often highlighted by researchers are their oral genesis, their highly contextual meaning, and their pragmatic value, which is determined by the authority of the speaker of the utterance and the situation. On the importance of context in determining the meaning of wisdom sayings, see Joseph Russo, “The Poetics of the Ancient Greek Proverb,” Journal of Folklore Research 20 (1983): 121–130; André Lardinois, “Wisdom in Context: The Use of Gnomic Statements in Archaic Greek Poetry” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1995), 273, and, “Modem Paroemiology and the Use of Gnomai in Homer’s Iliad,” Classical Philology 92, no. 3 (1997): 214. Peter Seitel distinguishes first, second, and third person sayings depending on their external reference. See Peter Seitel, “Saying Haya Sayings: Two Categories of Proverb Use,” in The Social Use of Metaphors: Essays on the Anthropology of Rhetoric, eds. David Sapir and Christopher Crocker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 75–99. For Hesiod’s Works and Days and the didactic literature of the Near East and Egypt, see Walcot, Hesiod and Didactic Literature, 13–36. In a recent study, Lilah Canevaro has explored the didactic potential of Works and Days as detachable units that can be applied to various instructional settings. See Lilah Canevaro, Hesiod’s Works and Days: How to Teach Self-Sufficiency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). As extensively discussed in the last decades, proverbs are a well-established feature in Near-Eastern materials. In the Hebrew tradition, Proverbs is a corpus made up of instruction poems and proverb collections featuring a famous wise man typical of the Near Eastern preceptive literature

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has received several treatments which highlight the influence of traditional folk wisdom.55 Scholars have discussed the structural function of these wisdom expressions—notably, whether they merely stand as a colorful presentation of familiar traditional beliefs, or serve larger explanatory or didactic purposes for the understanding of individual sections or for grasping the general moral meaning behind the narrative. In my view, the use of gnomes in Herodotus is heavily dependent on their pragmatic value in their specific contexts and it is therefore unwarranted to claim that they serve consistent explanatory or didactic purposes in the macro-narrative. The Histories as a novel genre imposes a number of constraints on the intelligibility of gnomes. This is determined by the multivocality of the text (the juxtaposition of several speakers, viewpoints, moral beliefs, and cultural mindsets), by the interplay of oratio recta and obliqua, alongside the elusiveness of the narrative voice (which eschews clear moral pronouncements) and, finally, by the presence of contradictory statements in the text itself.56 Rather, what is particularly noteworthy in the

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and Egyptian “books of wise instruction,” especially the Egyptian Instruction of Amenem-Opet and the Babylonian Counsels of Wisdom. As frequently noted, because of their brevity and rhythmical features, proverbs stand at the core of education of many cultures. See Bendt Alster and Takayoshi Oshima, “A Sumerian Proverb Tablet in Geneva. With Some Thoughts on Sumerian Proverb Collections,” Orientalia 75, no. 1 (2006): 31–72. In the Near-Eastern cultural setting, not only were proverbs collected, memorized, and variously compiled throughout the centuries as repositories of traditional wisdom, but they were also part of the scribal curriculum and their text commentary practices (as shown by the book of Proverbs used in Talmud tractates to explicate passages of the Bible, or the use of proverbs to comment on medical texts and omens in the Babylonian commentary tradition). On the close stylistic, formal or subject-matter connections between the precepts in Hesiod’s Works and Days and Hebrew, Babylonian, and Egyptian didactic literature, see West, The East Face, 324–328. On Herodotus’ moralizing use of Greek and Eastern folk-tale motifs, see Oswyn Murray, “Herodotus and Oral History,” in Achaemenid Studies, vol. ii: The Greek Sources, eds. Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Amelie Kuhrt (Leiden, 1987), 93–115, and Alan Griffiths, “Euenios the Negligent Nightwatchman (Herodotus 9.92–96),” in From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought, ed. Richard Buxton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 169–182. Scholars have identified between seventy-four and eight-six gnomai in Herodotus’ narrative. See Lang, Herodotean Narrative, 58–67; Gould, Herodotus, 63–85. See also, Susan Shapiro, “Proverbial Wisdom in Herodotus,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 130 (2000): 89–118. Examples of contradictory proverbs in the Histories abound. A case in point is the recurrent use of gnomes expressing the transiency of human prosperity and others expressing the need for careful planning, or those advising an action coupled with those recommending restraint. On the presence of contradictory moral statements in Herodotus, see Shapiro, “Proverbial Wisdom”, 89–118. Shapiro examines contradictory proverbs in the Histories, which are connected with verbal dueling in paraemiological research, in an attempt to show their significant role in historical explanation.

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use of proverbs and maxims in Herodotus is their rhetorical function. Most of the traditional wisdom gnomes in the Histories are used by political advisors in the context of persuasive speeches in the Oriental courts. Thus, rather than personalized instructions on individual codes of conduct, Greek wisdom gnomes become rhetorical instruments of persuasion in war or military deliberations in foreign (barbarian) settings. This further complicates the coherent reception of these maxims. Moreover, it highlights their instrumental function rather than their propositional truth. The use of traditional gnomes in the context of military advice also calls into question the intention of the maxim and its truth value as well as its actual consequences once a course of action has been adopted. Croesus’ case exemplifies the rhetorical and pragmatic use of wisdom sayings as well as their problematic truth claims. Having finally learned Solon’s wise teachings, Croesus becomes Cyrus’ advisor (i. 155–156, i. 207) and later on plays this role at Cambyses’ court (iii. 14, 36). At i. 207, contrary to the prevailing view, Croesus advises Cyrus to cross the Araxes and fight the Massagetae in their own territory. It is at the beginning of this speech that he reiterates, in traditional wisdom terms, the lesson derived from his past misfortune and his meeting with Solon: men become wise through suffering (Hdt. i. 207.1 τὰ δὲ μοι παθήματα ἐόντα ἀχάριτα μαθήματα γέγονε) and human fortunes are on a wheel (ὡς κύκλος τῶν ἀνθρωπηίων ἐστὶ πρηγμάτων). The idea of human learning through suffering is well-attested in the Greek wisdom tradition, ranging from Homer and Hesiod to epinician poetry and tragedy.57 But now, the dictum has become a mere rhetorical topos, an instrument used by Croesus to legitimate his advisory faculty and to draw Cyrus’ attention by warning him about decisions that may bring about his downfall. The substance of Croesus’ advice, however, rests on arguments based on military strategy. Ironically, it is precisely this piece of practical advice that results in Cyrus’ defeat and death (i. 214). This episode raises important questions regarding the status of wisdom in a largescale scenario of interstate war as featured in the Histories. Was Croesus wise? Were his intentions good but the outcome bad? What is the relation between ethos and praxis, between moral virtue and practical advice?58 Wisdom gnomai

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Though the wording differs, the underlying concept remains unaltered in the early Greek literature. See Hom. Il. 17.32 and 20.198 (πρίν τι κακὸν παθέειν. ῥεχθὲν δέ τε νήπιος ἔγνω); Hes. Op. 218 (παθών δέ τε νήπιος ἔγνω) Pind. Isthm. 1.40b (Ὁ πονήσαις δὲ νόῳ καὶ προμάθειαν φέρει) Aesch. Ag. 177 (πάθει μάθος), Ag. 250–251 (Δίκα δὲ τοῖς μὲν παθοῦσι μαθεῖν ἐπιρρέπει); Solón, fr. 1D, 33–35. For various solutions to this dilemma, see Harrison, Divinity, 43, Lateiner, Historical Method, 221, and Gould, Herodotus, 78.

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in the Histories’ changing, complex, cross-cultural setting have become pithy rhetorical devices aimed at persuading the interlocutor of a certain course of action;59 they have ceased to be self-contained nuggets of virtue for leading a successful life. In other words, Croesus’ case shows that it is the situational and instrumental function of maxims that takes precedence in the Histories over the timeless moral truth they contain. Thus, while Herodotus draws on motifs from the wisdom tradition—which are typical of the archaic mentality in which his historical events are set—, the context of composition of his work (the fifth century) is discernible in this changing and complex presentation of the status of wisdom advisers. 2.3 Writing the Beginnings: Herodotus and the Shiji The proem of Herodotus’ Histories is the locus classicus for the historian’s attitude toward the preceding mythical accounts and his general methodological approach to the writing of the Greek past. As discussed earlier, Herodotus was working within a century-old prose writing tradition that had systematically engaged with, criticized, and repurposed the mythical legacy and traditional lore. Though Herodotus’ approach partially overlaps with that of the earlier logographoi and possibly with the inquiries of many of his contemporaries, the communis opinio is that his focus on the antecedents of the Greco-Persian conflict is accomplished through a self-imposed temporal restriction which precluded any personal accountability for the times stretching beyond the archaic period. While scholars concur that mythical motifs and ritual patterns are embedded and functional in Herodotus’ logoi,60 it is generally accepted, as Herodotus declares in the first person, that he is unable to make categorical claims about events that took place in the distant past (ἐν τῷ μακρῷ χρόνῳ: 5.9) and that he is on firmer ground when he focuses on “the so-called human race” (τῆς δὲ ἀνθρωπηίης λεγομένης γενεῆς: 3.122). The much-discussed opening

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Various other sections in the narrative display contradictory gnomes used by interlocutors in the context of a discussion or argument: (1) Gyges and Candaules (1.8–13); (2) The Constitutional Debate (3.80–83); (3) Xerxes, Mardonius, and Artabanus (7.8–10); (4) The Conversation at Abydos (7.47–51); (5) Themistocles and Adeimantus at Salamis (8.59); and (6) Candaules and Xerxes (1.8.2 and 7.39.1). Despite Herodotus’ attempts at rationalizing mythical stories and legends, such as the Trojan War (2.120), and his deliberate focus on human rather than divine affairs in the account of the human past, scholars have insistently shown the way in which mythical traditions, contents and narrative permeate Herodotus’ logoi. For a comprehensive study of Herodotus’ engagement with myth, see Deborah Boedeker, “Epic Heritage and Mythical Patterns in Herodotus,” in Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, eds. Egbert Bakker et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 97–116. See also, Wesselmann, Mythische, 1–35.

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section of the Histories (1.1–5), in which he recounts the so-called “rape stories” (that include the tit-for-tat abductions of Io, Europa, Medea, and Helen), is commonly interpreted as Herodotus’ programmatic illustration of his general approach toward the Greek past. In it he both radicalizes and ridicules his predecessors’ attempts at rationalization of mythical figures, and confirms the incommensurability of the distant past.61 The writing of history requires establishing a terminus a quo, namely the starting point of the narrative as well as the hermeneutical stance in relation to earlier, and often more authoritative and entrenched tales about the human past circulated by singers and poets. What is Herodotus’ general attitude to myth in the opening of the Histories? What does this tell us about his historiographic approach? The opening section is perhaps the most intensely discussed sequence of Herodotus’ whole work. Therefore, we will only limit ourselves to a few general observations. As a whole, the opening section (1.1–5) is punctuated by the first-person point of view in a ring-composition structure, which starts with the conventional proem’s incipit bearing the historian’s identity and aim of his work (1.1). It is then followed by the inclusion of the various foreign accounts re-elaborating Greek myths (1.2–4) and culminates with the programmatic coda at 1.5. Scholars have drawn attention to the carefully structured framing of this opening sequence, referring to it as a form of ring-composition or “pedimental composition”62 and, more specifically, as a false-start recusatio,63 or as an ingenious “prose priamel”.64 The tripartite structure of Herodotus’ proem outlined above is framed by his self-identification in the opening lines, which builds upon a well-attested tradition in archaic prose literature: “Here is the display of the inquiry by Herodotus’ of Halicarnassus” (Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε). The incipit asserts that his work purports to record the great and wonderful achievements of the Greeks and barbarians to save them from time and obliv-

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For recent treatments of the proem see Marek Wecowski, “The Hedgehog and the Fox: Form and Meaning in the Prologue of Herodotus,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 124 (2004): 143–164; Elena Pallantza, Der Troische Krieg in der nachhomerischen Literatur bis zum 5 Jh.v Chr. (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005), 131–142. For an abundant bibliography and up-to-date state of the art see also, Timothy Rood, “Herodotus’ Proem: Space, Time and the Origins of International Relations,” Ariadne 16 (2010): 43–74. See John Myres, Herodotus. Father of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 81–88. See also Wecowski, Form and Meaning, 148. See Hayden Pelliccia, “Sappho 16, Gorgias’ Helen, and the Preface to Herodotus’ Histories,” Yale Classical Studies 29 (1992): 64. See also Wecowski, Form and Meaning, 149–151. See Charles Chiasson, “Herodotus’ Prologue and the Greek Poetic Tradition,” Histos 6 (2012) 137.

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ion (where scholars have noted epic and Homeric reminiscences) and, more specifically, to indicate the reason (αἰτίη) for their mutual hostilities. After the incipit, Herodotus offers an account reportedly told by “learned Persians” (Περσέων … οἱ λόγιοι) (1.1–4), and also by the Phoenicians (1.5), which focuses on the successive abductions of four women as the mythical origin of the conflict between Asia and Europe. The sequence is recounted as a reciprocal abductionretaliation process (ἴσα πρὸς ἴσα) in which compensation for the wrongdoing is never obtained from the other party. First, the Phoenician’s abduction of Io is avenged by the Greek’s abduction of Europa. The third abduction, Medea’s, makes the Greeks the offenders once again. Finally, Paris’ kidnap of Helen is supposed to be the Asian’s retaliation. According to the Persian’s account, the Trojan War is the root of their enmity with the Greeks, since they launched a full-scale military invasion of Asia. The account lays the grounds for the proverbial enmity between the Greeks and the Persians and the geopolitical division between Asia and Europe (1.4.4) upon which the subsequent logoi will draw. According to the Persians, it was the unwarranted capture of Troy the starting point for the feud between the Greeks and Persians. (1.5.1). At 1.5.2 the Phoenicians’ account is introduced as the tertium comparationis—which casts the myth of Io in the form of a romance and further euhemerizes the tale. In what follows, I wish to briefly discuss Herodotus’ hermeneutic operations in relation to the mythical tales that he recounts at the outset of his grand narrative. Taken as a whole, it can be argued that Herodotus purposely distances himself from the mythical legacy by presenting the traditional Greek accounts as (untrustworthy?) tales of Others.65 This estrangement from the mythical, which will be confirmed in his first-person recusatio at 1.5, adopts a clear parodic tone.66 Parody is a complex intertextual phenomenon, which ultimately provokes a humorous, critical, or polemical effect in the audience. But the object of Herodotus’ parody is multilayered: in his matter-of-fact reworking

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On this see Carolyn Dewald, “I Didn’t Give my own Genealogy: Herodotus and the Authorial Persona,” in Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, eds. Egbert Bakker et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 270–271; and, “The Figured Stage: Focalizaing the Initial Narratives of Herodotus and Thucydides,” in Contextualizing Classics. Essays in Honor of John J. Peradotto, eds. T.M. Falkner et al. (Lanham [MD]: Littlefield, 1999), 228–233. Dewald argues that what chiefly makes these initial accounts unreliable is not their extreme antiquity or their dubious status as rationalized myths but that they are overly “partial and partisan”. On the parodic flavor of this passage, see Wecowski, Form and Meaning, 151; Robert Drews, The Greeks Accounts of Eastern History (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1973), 89; Stewart Flory, The Archaic Smile of Herodotus (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 24–25; Lateiner, Historical Method, 40–43, and Thomas, Herodotus in Context, 268 and 274.

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of Greek traditional myths, he disparages the poets and singers of old as well as the prose-rendering of such myths by the early and contemporary logographoi (if not wholly, at least in so far as they are unlikely to have any significance in the outbreak of the latest conflict between the Greeks and Persians). Yet he strategically refrains from using the first-person; he introduces them as anonymous versions transmitted by the peoples involved in the conflict, however vaguely defined. The playfulness is obscured by Herodotus’ serious tone in presenting them as oral sources referring to the long-term antecedents of the strife. However, Herodotus’ humor is incontestable. In the first place, he seems to be parodying the straightforward and simplistic cause-effect explanations of the early verse and prose genealogies which were limited to sequential, annalistic framing of events in a narrative usually connected by the expression “and after that …” (μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα) or reduced to polar oppositions (as successive reciprocity mechanisms).67 More ostensibly, he produces a reductio ad absurdum of the rationalization procedures used by the earlier logographoi and several of his contemporaries.68 Scholars have insistently noted the absence of the fabulous and romantic elements in the legends retold by Herodotus through the Persian logioi as mouthpieces.69 Though Herodotus himself will incur in such rationalizations—especially in Book ii and iv—the pedestrian over-rationalization of mythical accounts here can be interpreted as a foil to the kind of methodology that he will adopt in his examination of the short term causes of the Persian Wars (which will be explicitly endorsed at 1.5). More importantly, Herodotus is distancing himself from both the local prose historians and the post-Homeric epic poets, who often presented a continuous history of a city from the mythical times down to the present. Acusilaus of Argos, for example, appears to have included in his Genealogies in three books the entire history of the world (from its creation down to the aftermath of the Trojan war, with a focus on the history of Argos).70 Eumelus of Corinth’s epic poem, the Korinthiaka, covered a range of mythical material from the foundation of

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On this pseudo-epic causality, see Wecowski, Form and Meaning, 51–53. Cf. Stephanie West, Demythologisation in Herodotus. (Torun: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2002), 8–11. Flory, The Archaic Smile, 25, writes that Herodotus here “parodies not just myth but rationalism itself.” See Wecowski, Form and Meaning, 151, and Rood, Herodotus’ Proem, 48. Herodotus deliberately and blatantly glosses over the mythical details of the tales. For example, he alludes to the winning of the Golden Fleece in Medea’s story in a cursory and matter-of-fact manner: “having done the other business for which they came” (διαπρηξαμένους καὶ τἄλλα τῶν εἵνεκεν ἀπίκατο). See Fowler, Early Greek Mythography, 626–628.

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the city to (possibly) the time of the Bacchiads.71 Furthermore, Hellanicus of Lesbos, in his Atthis, a work mentioned by Thucydides (1.97.2), presented a continuous history of Athens from Ogygus and the flood up to the last year of the Peloponnesian war.72 The concluding section (1.5) is crucial in interpreting the significance of the previous material: it signals the authorial approach to the partisan and the petty mythical versions attributed to the Persians, Phoenicians, and Greeks as unequivocally parodic, and it also offers a glimpse of Herodotus’ historiographic method and the texture of his logos about the human past.73 Herodotus writes: ταῦτα μέν νυν Πέρσαι τε καὶ Φοίνικες λέγουσι: ἐγὼ δὲ περὶ μὲν τούτων οὐκ ἔρχομαι ἐρέων ὡς οὕτω ἢ ἄλλως κως ταῦτα ἐγένετο, τὸν δὲ οἶδα αὐτὸς πρῶτον ὑπάρξαντα ἀδίκων ἔργων ἐς τοὺς Ἕλληνας, τοῦτον σημήνας προβήσομαι ἐς τὸ πρόσω τοῦ λόγου, ὁμοίως σμικρὰ καὶ μεγάλα ἄστεα ἀνθρώπων ἐπεξιών.τὰ γὰρ τὸ πάλαι μεγάλα ἦν, τὰ πολλὰ σμικρὰ αὐτῶν γέγονε: τὰ δὲ ἐπ᾽ ἐμεῦ ἦν μεγάλα, πρότερον ἦν σμικρά. τὴν ἀνθρωπηίην ὤν ἐπιστάμενος εὐδαιμονίην οὐδαμὰ ἐν τὠυτῷ μένουσαν, ἐπιμνήσομαι ἀμφοτέρων ὁμοίως. These are the stories told by the Persians and the Phoenicians. For my part, I will not say that they happened this way or the other, but I will point to the man who I myself know first began to commit wrongs against the Greeks and thus go forward further with my story, giving an account of small and great cities of men alike. For those which in old times were great have now become small, and those that were great in my time used to be small before. Knowing therefore that human prosperity never remains steadfast, I will mention both alike. In this key section, Herodotus is both proclaiming his approach to the mythical past and tacitly laying down a few methodological principles of his historie as well as their inherent limitations. Methodologically speaking, the passage anticipates his historiographical approach in the remainder of his work. It

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See West, Demythologisation in Herodotus 124–125, and Christos Tsagalis, Early Greek Epic Fragments i. Antiquarian and Genealogical Epic (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007) 89. See Pearson, Early Ionian Historians, 210, and David Asheri, “Commentary on Book i,” in A Commentary on Herodotus Books i–iv, eds. Oswyn Murray et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 30. For a detailed analysis of this section, see A.E. Wardman, “Herodotus on the Cause of the Greco-Persian Wars,” American Journal of Philology 82 (1961): 133–150.

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shows that (a) the core of Herodotus’ work rests on oral reports (logoi) rather than the examination of documentary evidence; (b) the historian summons those accounts into his own logos and examines them critically (often refraining from categorical pronouncements about their truth value, as is the case here). Herodotus’ historie chiefly stands for oral enquiry. However, Herodotus rarely quotes his sources. When he does, it serves to lend authority to his account or to raise doubts about the informants’ reliability. His main goal is the preservation of oral traditions and the deeds of men (τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων), rather than their truth-claims. The conclusion he seems to favor in this opening passage is that the partisan versions of Greek myths as long-term causes of the conflict are unfounded—they are based on hearsay and mystification. Moreover, since oral traditions transmit conflicting and possibly biased versions of the past, it is the historian’s task to critically appraise them. Finally, Herodotus makes a silent pronouncement about the accountability and reliability of the traditional mythical lore: oral traditions become increasingly untenable the farther one stretches back in time.74 In other words, traditional accounts stretching back to the ‘mythical’ past are unaccountable (not least in the rationalized, euhemerized form in which they were cast by his predecessors).75 Herodotus’ programmatic first-person intervention (ἐγὼ δὲ) reinforces his authorial stance by attributing to the Asians the responsibility for the conflict in recent times (which also provides the temporal frame for the GrecoPersian war). More specifically, the first aggressor, Croesus, the protagonist of the ensuing narrative, is introduced via an emphatic use of an epistemic verb in the first person (τὸν δὲ οἶδα αὐτὸς): the recent instigator of the conflict is thus squarely identified (σημήνας) in terms of the historian’s personal knowledge.76 The passage closes with a wisdom saying on the unsteadiness of human prosperity, which Herodotus adopts as justification for including great and small cities in his logoi. The extent to which Herodotus’ reference to the instability of human affairs and eudamonie is actually providing a moral underpinning to the whole work couched in traditional wisdom terms or is rather a rhetorical topos is unclear.77 In my view, the Croesus’ logos chiefly provides the terminus a quo 74 75 76 77

See Rood, Herodotus Proem, 53. Also S. West, Demythologisation, 8–15, Wecowski, Form and Meaning, 149–154; David Asheri, “Commentary on Book i”, 73–74. Herodotus appears to adopt a tripartite division of time according to the “degree of verifiability.” See Asheri, “Commentary on Book 1,” 33. For a discussion of this passage as the climax of a poetic priamel, see Chiasson, “Herodotus’ Prologue,” 130–137. I would not go as far as Weckowski in positing Herodotus’ quasi-religious stance—which underscores the fundamental unity of the world and human experience—as the backbone of Herodotus’ larger inquiry into the human condition. The evidence in his work

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of the narrative, rather than a consistent moral template of the Histories as a whole (which the very unfolding of Croesus’ story, as discussed before, appears to invalidate to a large extent). In what follows, I wish to turn to the way in which the mythical legacy is handled by Sima Qian in the opening section of his Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), a monumental history of ancient China composed during the Han dynasty.78 Sima Qian’s treatment of the so-called Five Emperors, the legendary five rulers in the first Basic Annals (běnjì 本紀), offers a foil to Herodotus’ engagement with the mythical past as well as a glimpse of his programmatic approach to history writing. Sima Qian opens his history of China (The Five Emperors, Basic Annals) with the Yellow Emperor (黃帝, Huángdì), the legendary originator of the centralized state and Chinese civilization, and the ancestor of the two legendary rulers Yao and Shun. The Yellow Emperor—whose rule is located in the period pre-

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forecloses unilateral interpretations of the moral framework of his composite logoi. See Weckowski, Form and Meaning, 158–159. On the complex and elusive form of wisdom in Herodotus, see John Marincola, “Herodotus and the Poetry of the Past,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, eds. Carolyn Dewald and John Marincola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 18–20. On the practical side of Herodotean wisdom, see Carolyn Dewald, “Practical Knowledge and the Historian’s Role in Herodotus and Thucydides,” in The Greek Historians: Literature and History, ed. Michael Jameson (Stanford: Anma Libri, 1985), 53–55. The project of writing a universal history of China was begun by Sima Qian’s father, Sima Tan (司馬談), who had access to the imperial library in his capacity as official dynastic court scribe and astrologer (taishi 太史). His son, Sima Qian (司馬遷), carried out his father’s dying wish, both as a tribute to his father’s memory and possibly also as a revenge for the cruel punishment inflicted on him by of the Han royal family. On the authorship of the Shiji, see William Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records. Volume 1. The Basic Annals of Pre-Han China by Ssu-ma Ch’ien (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), vii–xii. The office of the historian-scribe (shi) involved not only recording and ritually presenting historical events but also divination, omen interpretation, and astrology. On this see Joachim Gentz, Das Gongyang zhuan. Auslegung und Kanonisierung der Frühlings- und Herbstannalen (Chunqiu) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001), 8–9. See also Martin Kern, “Poetry and Religion: The Representation of ‘Truth’ in Early Chinese Historiography,” in Historical Truth, Historical Criticism and Ideology. Chinese Historiography and Historical Culture from a New Comparative Perspective, eds. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer et al., (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 66–67. The historian was connected with affairs of divination and the keeping of records of the past, and was close to the ruler, acting often as adviser and moral counselor. See Burton Watson, Ssu-ma Ch’ien: Grand Historian of China (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1958), 73–74. On the role of the historian as official recordkeeper of the ruler, see Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, “Herrschaftslegitimation und das Ideal des unabhängigen Historikers im mittelalterlichen China,” Oriens Extremus 38 (1995): 91– 107.

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ceding the Xia dynasty, the times of “Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors” (三 皇五帝, sān huáng wǔdì)—is regarded as the ancestor of all Han Chinese people, and is reported to have invented Chinese characters and traditional Chinese medicine as well as astronomy, mathematics, calendar, etc. Throughout the Shiji, Sima Qian traces lines of descent from Huángdì to the founders of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties. In this opening section, Huángdì’s historicity is tacitly confirmed, by his prominent position in the narrative, as a sovereign sage from antiquity and as a legendary ruler whose descendants founded the Xia dynasty. Thus, Sima Qian structures the imperial history of China as a genealogical account with the Yellow Emperor as the founding father of the Chinese family.79 Sima Qian creates his own pantheon of legendary rulers, by passing over the so-called Three Sovereigns (The Heavenly Sovereign 天皇 or Fu Xi 伏羲, the Earthly Sovereign 地皇 or NüWa 女媧, and the Tai Sovereign 泰 皇 or Shennong 神農), and by placing The Yellow Emperor as the first of the Five Emperors, as the fountainhead of Chinese history and civilization. Huángdì was a figure that had played a minor role in the early tradition where he was generally portrayed as a warrior-god. Indeed, the first records of Huángdì date to the early Warring States era, but his cult is believed to have become prominent in the late Warring States and early Han period.80 This was undoubtedly an ideological move. It purported to buttress the divine ruling legitimacy of Liu Bang, the initiator of the Han dynasty (202–195bce), as the descendant of the mythical Yellow Emperor. From a structural point of view, the presence of Huángdì as the origo of Sima Qian’s universal history is fundamental in pro-

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Whereas the figure of Huángdì appeared sporadically in Warring State texts, it was the Shiji that first produced a coherent and systematic narrative of the Yellow Emperor’s genealogy and cultural achievements, thanks to Sima Qian’s piecemeal reconfiguration of the fragmentary and diffuse information in his sources. On the religious origins of the legendary Huángdì, see among others, K.C. Chang, Art, Myth, and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1983), 2; Mark Lewis, “The mythology of early China,” in Early Chinese Religion: Part One: Shang through Han (1250bc–220 ad), eds. John Lagerwey and Marc Malinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 565, and Sarah Allan, The Shape of the Turtle (Albany [NY]: suny Press, 1991), 64– 67. On the earlier mythical status of Huángdì, see Anne Birrell, Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 130–137. According to Mark Lewis, Sima Qian provides the “earliest surviving sequential narrative of the career of the Yellow Emperor.” See Mark Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China (Albany [NY]: suny Press, 1990), 174. Michael Nylan shows that the historian rejected the view of the Chinese past as presented in the Five Classics by including portraits of the early sage-kings only known from legend. See Michael Nylan, “Sima Qian: A true Historian?” Early China 23/24 (1998): 206.

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viding a chronological, imperial framework to the Shiji, thus making all the subsequent rulers genealogically linked to the great patriarch.81 As Nienhauser notes,82 the Shiji granted Huángdì the status of the first Chinese ruler; there is no genesis, no cosmological speculations. The Yellow Emperor’s ancestry is charted; his many children, his military expansions, and his wise teachings to the people are recorded in a matter-of-fact style (which, nevertheless, betrays conflicting sources and a mythical substratum deriving from the Emperor’s divine resonances). It should be noted that Sima Qian was building upon a deep-rooted tradition of historicization of mythical accounts, on the rationalization of fabulous and supernatural elements conducted by Confucian scholars as well as on the euhemerization of mythology.83 While he presents Huángdì as historical, some of his reservations about “high antiquity” are well in evidence in his work, especially regarding dating and the reliability of the sources. Drawing chiefly on the “Wu-ti te” chapter of the Da Dai li-chi 大戴禮記 (“Records of ritual matters by Dai the Elder”) and on the first three sections of the Shang shu 書經 (“Documents of Highest Antiquity”) to compose his genealogical section,84 Sima Qian opens his monumental history with the legendary Huángdi, the originator of the centralized state, the cosmic ruler, the patron of esoteric arts, and the founder of the Chinese lineage, whose reign should be understood as both historical (circa 2697–2597 bce?) and mythical (as lord of the underworld symbolically linked to the Xia).85

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Cf. Steven Shankman and Stephen Durrant, The Siren and the Sage. Knowledge and Wisdom in Ancient Greece and China (London: Cassell, 2000), 105–106. For other explanations of Sima Qian’s choice, see Watson, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, 109–111. For example, it has been claimed that Sima Qian and his father were Taoists and, therefore, honored the Yellow Emperor as the founder of their creed. See also Anthony Christie, Chinese Mythology (New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1985), 96–97. Edouard Chavannes argues that the Shiji begins with the Yellow Emperor due to the theory of the five elements—as yellow is the color of earth the first of the five elements. See Edouard Chavannes, Les Memoires historiques de Se-ma Ts’ien, 5 vols. (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1895–1905). Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, 18. Birrell stresses the polyfunctionality of myths in general. The case of the Yellow Emperor shows an amalgam of contradictory roles: as “warrior god, bringer of cultural benefits, avenging god, or, later in the mythological tradition, the supreme deity of the Taoist pantheon.” See Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 20–21. On the rationalization of the Yellow Emperor in particular in the sources consulted by Sima Qian, see Hanmo Zhang, Authorship and Text-Making in Early China (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 50–51. This is confirmed by his opening remarks in Ch. 13 “San-taishih-piao” (The Table of the Three Dynasties’ Genealogy). Cf. Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, xxvii–xxviii. On the mythical associations and transformations of Huángdì, see Allan, Shape of the Turtle, 65–69.

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In Sima Qian’s account, centrality is accorded to the Yellow Emperor’s military prowess, which enabled him to pacify and harmonize the feudal lords under his dominion. Prominence is also given to the way in which he managed to subdue the rebels Ch’ih-yu and Yen-ti, expanded his rule in all directions, and made the myriad states harmonious.86 Huángdì’s military feats are followed in Sima Qian’s narrative by his cultural-mythical legacy, which makes him the fountainhead of Chinese culture and civilization. However, Sima Qian’s approach in the Basic Annals is for the most part chronological and rational; it avoids the supernatural elements found in other accounts.87 Various fabulous and mythological features of Huángdì’s legend are glossed over, for example, the battle between the Yellow Emperor and his brother, the Flaming Emperor Yen-Ti, each ruling half of the world and fighting for total supremacy and embodying the dualism between water and fire (as narrated, for example, in the Annals of Master Lii and Huai-nan Tzu of the third and second centuries bce).88 I wish to turn now to a coda (1.46) appended at the end of this genealogical section on the Five Emperors, in which Sima Qian discusses his sources as well as a few methodological concerns. This provides a stimulating comparandum with Herodotus’ concluding remarks in his proem (i. 5–6). The passage is transcribed in full:89 [46] His Honor the Grand Scribe says, “Scholars often claim that the Five Emperors belonged to high antiquity. But Shang shu (The Documents of High Antiquity) only records Yao and [the rulers] thereafter. And when the scholars of the different schools talk about The Huang-ti, their words are not appropriate. Even civil officials or old masters would have trouble explaining [the history of this period]. What Confucius transmitted in his answer to Tsai Yu’s question in the ‘Wu-tite’ (Virtues of the Five Emperors) and the ‘Ti hsi hsing’ (Cognomens of the Successive Emperors) some Con-

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On this, see Michael Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China (Stanford [CA]: Stanford University Press, 2001), 182–185. For example, the battle between Huángdì and Chiyou in Sima Qian’s account is divested from fabulous elements found in other versions, which involved battles between gods and supernatural events. See Lihui Yang and Deming An, Handbook of Chinese Mythology (Santa Barbara: abc Clio, 2005), 38–39. Zhang, however, draws attention to a passage in the Shiji (28.1393–1394) in which the Yellow Emperor’s ascension to heaven as immortal is recounted. This is an indication of the underlying god-like associations of the sage-king and the intertwining images in different circles of learning. See Zhang, Authorship, 51. Cf. Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 131. The translated text is taken from Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, 17.

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fucian scholars do not transmit. I once traveled west to Mount K’ung-t’ung and passed Cho-Iu [Mountain] in the north; to the east I drifted along the coast, and to the south I floated over the Huai River and the Chiang. Wherever I went, all of the village elders would point out for me sites of The Huang-ti, Yao and Shun. The traditions were certainly very different from each other. In sum, [those accounts of the elders] which were not far from the ancient-text versions [of the classics], tend to be plausible. What I have read in the Ch’un ch’iu (Spring and Autumn Annals) and the Kuo yu (Conversations from the States) sheds light on the ‘Virtues of the Five Emperors’ and ‘The Cognomens of the Successive Emperors’ and makes [their meaning] apparent. Though they did not investigate the problem deeply, what they try to show is not all without basis. The Book of Documents missed some things and has certain deficiencies. What is missing there, then, from time to time, can be seen in other accounts. If one were not a person who is fond of pursuing and pondering deeply so as to conceive the ideas in his mind, one certainly would have a hard time to tell it [i.e., this history] to those who only have a superficial view and are illinformed. I edited [these other accounts] and selected those words which are the most appropriate. For these reasons I put this as the first chapter of the ‘basic annals.’” In this extract, Sima Qian is laying down his methodological caveats in dealing with ancient history. He tries to justify the textual basis of his account of the Five Emperors, noting the extent to which the sources exhibit lacunae and contradictions. The passage is fraught with difficulties, as many of Sima Qian’s references or presuppositions are elusive. However, his main purpose in this authorial digression seems to account for his decision to begin his universal history of China with Huángdì (a genealogy that is not supported by the canonical Shang shu).90 What is first remarkable in this authorial gloss is that it is introduced in the third person: “His Honor the Grand Scribe says”. This can be partly explained as a way to distinguish this section from the previous “voices” in the text, signaling the author’s space of enunciation. This third-person intervention seems modelled on the junzi yue (“The Gentleman remarks”), used in the Zuozhuan and other pre-Qin texts to pass moral judgement on the narrative and to display authority. By the same token, Sima Qian, by quoting his (or his father’s)

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For a recent examination of the Yellow Emperor in the Shiji, see Zhang, Authorship 38– 52.

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own words, is incorporating his prominent voice (and the Records as a whole) into the same inveterate scribal tradition that informed the accounts of China’s imperial past.91 It is a gesture toward the monumentalization of his own writing, the culmination of a scribal tradition (which he inherited by line descent from his father) in the Shiji.92 The ensuing commentary can be divided into three parts, which mark the historian’s hermeneutic procedures. First, he presents the mystification of the sources about the primeval Huángdì and his dynastic line. He explains that (1) unidentified scholars (xue zhe 學者, lit. “those who learn”) argue that the first emperors belong to “high antiquity,” but (2) the canonical Documents of High Antiquity opens with the Yaodian, the Annals of Yao. Moreover, (3) the philosophical schools of the Warring State period are unclear about the Huángdì, and (4) there is even discrepancy between what Confucius transmits about the Five emperors and the reports of other Confucian scholars. The medley seems unsolvable. Immediately after, he resorts to the first person to report on the oral traditions gathered during his travels, which, despite their diversity, appear to confirm the historicity of the Five Emperors across China. However, he points out that the validity of these oral traditions is to be weighed against the “ancient texts,” which is now generally taken to mean the Confucian six arts.93 After that, he reviews his written documents, showing how information that is missing in one text may be supplemented by other texts. Finally, he makes his method-

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On the junzi yue patterns, see David Schaberg, “Playing at Critique: Indirect Remonstrance and the Formation of Shi Identity,” in Text and Ritual in Early China, ed. Martin Kern (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 194–225. On their relation with the Shiji, see Kai Vogelsang, “Some Notions of Historical Judgment in China and the West,” in Historical Truth, Historical Criticism and Ideology. Chinese Historiography and Historical Culture from a New Comparative Perspective, eds. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 144–145. On the underlying religious motivations for the writing of the Shiji, see Nylan, Sima Qian, 211–212. Nylan stresses Sima Qian’s filial obligations in honouring his father’s dying wish to “continue our ancestors” by compiling the tales they had collected together. Thus, he strove to attain immortality and secure the tradition of holding the shi position. He also mentions that, by restoring to life remarkable men and women from the Central States, he hoped that these potent spirits among the dead would confer benefits on Sima Qian and his family as long as the Shiji continued to be read. Sima Qian means texts written in pre-Qin script, maybe those that are reported to have been collected by Kong Anguo, a teacher of Sima Qian whom he references elsewhere in the Shiji (in connection to guwen). According to Han legends, these texts stem from the ruins of Confucius’ old residence in Qufu, the old capital of the State of Lu. The restorers of the Imperial palace reportedly found old versions of classical texts written in the old orthography used before the reforms of the Clerical script.

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ological pronouncement: “I edited [these other accounts] and selected those words which are the most appropriate. For these reasons I put this as the first chapter of the basic annals.” A few remarks on Sima Qian’s programmatic opening of the Basic annals, his methodological approach and intellectual stance are in order. As pithily stated in his concluding comment, Sima Qian’s self-description as a historian is as a judicious and erudite “editor” (lun ci 論次, lit. to assess the sequence, to rearrange) or “compiler” (ze 擇, to select, to choose, to pick) of written documents.94 While he acknowledges the oral traditions about the ancient emperors that he obtained in his travels, the role played by autopsia in drafting this section of the basic annals seems fairly limited.95 The oral lore appears to confirm the historicity of the legendary emperors, but only in so far as the information derived from the manifold accounts corroborate the authoritative texts (which Sima Qian seemingly locates in the Confucian six arts). Authority ultimately lies in the textual tradition. However, his statement reveals that such knowledge is not uniformly or monolithically encoded in one authoritative text but is dispersed in a variety of sources, which the scribe is expected to integrate into a coherent account. The historian should deploy, above all else, meta-textual expertise. His rationale is that the canonical Documents of High Antiquity is incomplete and, therefore, should be supplemented by alternative sources such as the “Virtues of the Five Emperors” and the “Cognomens of the Successive Emperors.” These sources should be read in conjunction with the Ch’un ch’iu (“Spring and Autumn Annals”) and the Kuo yu (“Conversations from the States”). This method, which is reminiscent of the examinatio and collatio of sources used in textual criticism, is consistent with the notion of pen-chi, usually translated as “basic annals,” which Sima Qian defines as the act of “recording the base events” and “putting them in order” but also, playing on the polysemy of chi (“thread”), as the act of offering guidelines for ideal government.96 94

95 96

On this see, Stephen Durrant, “Truth Claims in Shiji,” in Historical Truth, Historical Criticism and Ideology. Chinese Historiography and Historical Culture from a New Comparative Perspective, eds. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 104. Durrant cites Sima Qian’s assertion that, following Confucius, he was a “transmitter not a creator”. In relation to the idea of authorship in early China more generally, see the recent discussion in Zhang, Authorship, 10–34. Authorship in ancient China is best regarded as a multifarious, multilayered, and collective process involving multiple social actors and stretching over centuries. Durrant, “Truth Claims,” 101, observes that the recourse to personal observations increases as the narrative draws closer to Sima Qian’s own time. On this, see Nienhauser, The Grand Scribe’s Records, xxi. Li Wai-Yee remarks that Sima Qian is the first Chinese historian to undertake a critical examination of sources, often distanc-

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A key word—twice repeated in this passage—is, in my view, central for a correct interpretation of Sima Qian’s methodological approach. The historian closes the text with the assertion that he has selected “those words which are the most appropriate”. Much depends on the translation of this term ya zhe 雅 者 “that what is ya” (which echoes the earlier mention of yă xùn 雅馴 in the passage). The meaning here is obscured by the English translation(s).97 Both yǎ (雅: proper; correct; refined; elegant) and xùn can be rendered as “elegant” or “refined” and may refer to the “appropriate version” as well as the “elegant language” of texts such as the Shangshu and Shijing, written in an old, archaic dialect. Indeed, these texts and their language were considered to represent the essence of Chinese civilization ( ya is cognate to xia 夏, the name of the first Chinese dynasty and for China and Chinese in general). As recently noted,98 the principle guiding Sima Qian’s writing cannot be overly associated with a search for truth (at least in the sense of a correspondence between the historical writing and the events in the past, as posited by historical realism). The fact that he has chosen what ya is in his account of the first emperors, has more obvious moral-didactic, even aesthetic, resonances (which may be conceivably extended to his broader historiographical project). The fundamental reliability of his account on high antiquity lies in his close inspection and elegant disposition of the most prestigious and refined texts (古文) which, as most scholars claim today, should be equated with the six arts (the six Classics and their commentarial tradition).99 The openings of the Shiji and Herodotus’ Histories offer a fertile ground for exploring the historians’ approaches to the traditional cultural material dating back to high antiquity, the mythical legacy, and their authorial first-person statements regarding their respective methodologies. I do not wish to engage here in a thorough comparative analysis—which would require a more sustained collaboration with sinologists—but rather to reflect on the opening of Herodotus’ grand narrative by cross-examining the approach adopted by Sima Qian in a different cultural milieu.

97 98

99

ing himself from the Confucian exegetical and other rhetorical traditions. See Li Wai-Yee, “The Idea of Authority in the Shi chi (Records of the Historian),”Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54, no. 2 (1994): 369–370. Zhang, however, translates the words as “elegant.” See Zhang, Authorship, 48. Cf. Martin Kern, “Poetry and Religion,” in Historical Truth, Historical Criticism and Ideology. Chinese Historiography and Historical Culture from a New Comparative Perspective, eds. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2005) 53–54, and Vogelsang, “Some Notions of Historical Judgment,” 155–156. Cf. Kern, “Poetry and Religion,” 71; Durrant, “Truth Claims,” 94; Volgensang, “Notions of Historical Judgment”, 156–157.

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Both texts, in so far as they are conscientiously inaugurating a new mode of discourse, need to grapple with the oral lore, canonized texts or canonical authors as well as the previous attempts at recording, appraising, or reworking the human past in other discursive genres. The structure of Sima Qian’s “Basic Annals” purposefully integrates the mythical legacy into an account that legitimates imperial rule by instituting the Yellow Emperor as the legendary patron of China.100 As noted above, the fabulous elements of the legends included by Sima Qian in this opening section are sparse, possibly due to the euhemerization process well underway since Confucius, which had indubitably shaped the sources Sima Qiam accessed. This is further complicated by the fact that Ancient China’s mythological system was largely lost, was never given in a coherent or systematic framework (if compared, for example, to Hesiod and Homer’s canonical poems), and was early historicized by nameless historians of Western Zhou and early Qin periods.101 Sima Qian’s approach to history writing in his “Basic Annals” is chronological and genealogical. However, this should not mislead us into thinking that it is a straightforward or unsophisticated process. Organizing a genealogy is an ideological process, much like determining a starting point for the narration of recent history (as is the case with Herodotus).102 In other words, despite Sima Qian’s self-presentation as a transmitter rather than a creator,103 his treatment of China’s mythical past is unmistakably programmatic and ideological.104 If we revisit Herodotus’ pro100

101

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103 104

On the differences between the Chinese and Greek attitude to myth in early historiography, see the useful observations in Geoffrey Lloyd, “Mythology from a Chinese Perspective,” in From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought, ed. Richard Buxton (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001), 158–165. Yang and An summarize the most salient features of the Chinese myths: they are scattered and fragmented, they are historicized, and they have been rewritten as literature and philosophy. See Yang and An, Handbook of Chinese Mythology, 12–14. See also Birrell, Chinese Myhtology, 17–20. Anne Birrell states that Chinese myths existed as “an amorphous, untidy congeries of archaic expression.” See Anne Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 18. The difficulty in interpreting Greek myths lies in the fact that mythic narratives were used by authors of different philosophical and literary traditions to illustrate specific points of view, which may have eventually transformed or distorted the original meaning. Yuan Ko states that, unlike the Greek and Roman mythological systems, which was early systematized and poetized by gifted rhapsodes like Hesiod and Homer, the Chinese myths remain in a more “pristine condition” and, therefore, are a reliable evidence of a primitive, multifarious oral tradition. See Yuan Ko, “Foreword,” in Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), xi–xii. Shiji 130. 1338. Sima Qian is citing Confucius’ own words in the Analects. On Sima Qian’s moral and emotional reaction to the events he narrates, as well as his subjective approach to the largest portions of his text (which concern his own era), see

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logue, we note a similar concern with the pre-existing mythical traditions but a profoundly different solution. Herodotus’ initial charade of the rape-stories involving mythical figures is altogether unbecoming (I would dare say satirical). As discussed above, the legends of the past are pushed to the margins of the Histories on account of their multiplicity, incongruity, and unaccountability. Though in other sections of his work Herodotus offers a chronological framework to his narrative (which relies on parallel genealogical lines connecting the mythical times with the historical present, thus following in the footsteps of the genealogists and mythographers),105 the terminus a quo of his account of the Persian wars that he provides in his proem rests with Croesus the Lydian, about whom his “personal knowledge” is sufficiently sound. What strikes us as particularly remarkable in Herodotus’ opening chapters when set off against Sima Qian’s engagement with high antiquity is the former’s dismissive, parodic tone. His mutual-abduction sham is not only a proof of Herodotus’ background as a traditional story-teller (a wandering lopopoios) who caters for his audience, but vividly evokes the words of Hecataeus who denounced the “many and ludicrous” tales of the Greeks. Herodotus is writing both within and against this early prose-writing tradition. At any rate, this playfully debasing, lighthearted attitude to the mythical past, the awareness of the multiplicity and absurdity of the Greek tales, is idiosyncratic. In Greece, this playful intellectual distancing from the mythical paved the way for rationalization, multiple, competing genealogies and accounts, the rejection of predecessors’ attempts in a typically agonistic stance as well as the search for truth in various forms of personal enquiries (historiai).106 As far as the methodological approach to the record of the past (especially the proto-history of the mythical times) and the authorial self-inscription in the narrative, several salient features are worthy of mention from a comparative perspective. Compared to Sima Qian’s methodological coda, Herodotus’ discussion of method and management of sources seems particularly rudimentary. Whereas Sima Qian explicitly cites and discusses the sources he consulted to compile the opening chapter of the Basic Annals, Herodotus passes over his

105 106

Shankman and Durrant, The Siren and the Sage, 116–136. For a general discussion of the personal agenda and ideological overtones in Sima Qian’s history, see Stephen Durrant, The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian (Albany [NY]: suny, 1995); Grant Hardy, Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian’s Conquest of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). See also Yuri Pines, “Biases and Their Sources: Qin History in the ‘Shiji’,” Oriens Extremus 45 (2005): 10–34. Cf. Asheri, “Commentary on Book i,” 31–36. On the Greek tendency to criticize and take issue with predecessors, as opposed to the Chinese approach, see Lloyd, “Mythology from a Chinese Perspective,” 163.

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informants in silence (if any of these true informants actually existed) and dismisses the myth-based accounts by proudly stating his self-knowledge about Croesus’ aggression (“the first I know”) though without going to any lengths to account for such knowledge. This will hold true for the remainder of the narrative: Herodotus rarely mentions his sources (and when he does include conflicting versions, they are for the most part introduced anonymously), previous accounts are rejected as false or useless, and forerunners are criticized or simply ignored altogether. Conversely, Sima Qian’s source analysis is systematic and rich, not only in his meta-reflection on the historiographic procedure but also in his discussion of the methods used by the authors he drew upon for his universal history.107 Whereas Sima Qian sees writing about high antiquity primarily as a painstaking form of textual criticism, Herodotus’ inquiry rests on autopsia and consultation of oral (rather than written sources), which explains his reluctance to claim accountability for the remote past. The ethos of the historian, as evinced by a comparative analysis of the opening of both texts, is noticeably different as well. The Shiji opens with 黃 帝 (Huangdi) as the zero-point of the narrative, the fixed point of reference that structures the universal history of China, within which the Shiji itself (and Sima Qian’s lineage) should be subsumed.108 Herodotus imprints his thumbprint at the outset (Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος); authorship is foregrounded; the histor’s personal enquiry is the zero-point of the narrative. Not only the very first words but the overall arrangement of the opening chapters of each narrative is indicative of a different authorial self-presentation as well as of a different historian ethos. As noted above, Herodotus’ false-start recusatio framing, which teasingly distances his narrative from mythical accounts, foregrounds the authorial persona and his personal knowledge as the guarantor of the subsequent account

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Sources are explicitly cited and examined, e.g., the introduction to his “Chronological Table of the Three Dynasties” (sc 13/3), in which he discusses Confucius’ disparate methodology in the Spring and Autumn Annals and the Book of Documents. See Watson, Ssu-ma Ch’ien, 86. The primacy of the Yellow Emperor in the Shiji is restated in Sima Qian’s post-face: “The narration begins with the Yellow Emperor” (Shiji 130.3300) and “I have narrated and examined the period starting from the Yellow Emperor and ending in the era of Taichu, including one hundred and thirty pian chapters.” (Shiji 130. 3332). However, at 130. 1339, he states that the Records begin with Emperor Yao. On this, Zhang discusses a number of textual interpolations or incongruent observations regarding the starting point of the narrative. As far as the postface is concerned, Zhang examined the various stages and voices in the transmission of the Shiji and claims that it was not written by Sima Qian or his father Sima Tan, but by a later author who tried to form and maintain the Shiji as a cohesive whole. See Zhang, Authorship, 268–269.

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reliability. Sima Qian’s intervention, on the other hand, takes the form of a highly technical, authorial gloss appended to the self-standing major narrative of the Five Emperors (as form of commentary on his own text). This divergent arrangement warrants no claim in relation to the degree of objectivity, intervention, or fabrication of either Herodotus or Sima Qian. It only speaks of the ethos of the historian as ‘constructed’ by the texts themselves. This initial presentation, however, entails a paradox (especially when the rest of the narrative is brought into account). In the case of Herodotus, though explicit first-person intrusions in the narrative are relatively sparse (the I-voice appears more prominently in the ethnographic sections of the earlier logoi), the firstperson command of the narrative is paramount in the Histories, filling in blanks “and helping readers understand what is going on and how to think about it.”109 Though unobtrusive, Herodotus’ authorial voice provides the overarching interpretive frame of the multiple logoi assembled in his narrative and the set of relationships they establish with one another. In this narratological sense, the Histories are unequivocally a mirror image of Herodotus’ task as inquirer and recorder. Yet, despite his proud self-promotion in the sphragis, his logoi virtually tell us nothing about Herodotus the man, his political leanings, his insider’s attachments to the events under consideration. The opposite appears to be the case with the Shiji (or the interpretive tradition associated with text). Compared to Herodotus’ logoi, the unity of the Records is severely compromised by the use of multiple discourse genres within the overall design and by the “mutual illumination” as well as by the many inconsistencies that emerge therein. Moreover, Sima Qian’s explicit first-person interventions in the text are fairly restricted (e.g., in the introductions to the “Tables” or as brief appended commentaries at the end of individual chapters) and largely confined to separate textual blocks (unlike Herodotus’ tendency to subsume his voice in the third-person narration more uniformly throughout). However, as the work progresses towards Sima Qian’s own era (which takes up the greater portion of his work), his emotional and moral involvement becomes particularly noticeable.110 This autobiographical reading of the text has been consolidated by interpretations that focus primarily on Chapter 130, the “Taishigong zixu” 太史 公自敘 (Grand Historian’s Self-Narration), and the “Bao Ren An shu” 報任安書

109 110

Dewald, “Herodotus and the Authorial Persona,” 284. Cf. Shankman and Durrant, The Siren and the Sage, 116–136. Wai-Yee insists on the importance of empathy in the Shiji for historical understanding, and Sima Qian’s personal involvement in the events of his own time. See Wai-Yee, “Ideas of Authority,” 366–367, and 377–378.

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(Letter in Response to Ren An).111 In this autobiographical sense, as the trustee of a family shi tradition, as a filial son, as the humiliated minister after the Li Ling affair who seeks to obtain revenge, as a moral judge of the conducts of men of his time, the Records of the Grand Historian offers a far more empathic and subjective image of the historian than Herodotus’ detached, impersonal voice stitching the multiple logoi into a consistent account.

3

Conclusion

This study has attempted to show the engagement of early Greek prose texts with the mythical legacy and wisdom tradition associated with Homer, Hesiod, and the archaic poets and sages. Naturally, the process should not be read in terms of progress or realization of a telos (such as the transition from poetry to prose, orality to script culture or mythos to logos) but as the emergence of new discursive genres and cognitive schemata—possibly facilitated by certain technical and intellectual developments—that fostered a reworking of tradition and the use of alternative expressive means. These novel discursive practices and cognitive modes did not supersede the legacy of the poets and sages of old but coexisted with the institutionalized expressions of wisdom and engaged in a rich, though often critical, dialogue with it. They opened up new research areas and tailored the traditional tales and wisdom motifs to new audiences, times, and purposes. As this study has tried to show, these early Greek prose inquiries reveal a complex reworking of the mythical legacy and the earlier wisdom traditions ranging from specific exegetical procedures, the development of commentarial strategies, to broader discursive and cultural transformations. The sixth and fifth-century bce intellectuals in Ionia and mainland Greece who started recording their inquiries in prose cannot be neatly classed under the modern rubrics that distinguish disciplinary fields such as mythography, geography, history, literature, and philosophy. The post-Hesiodic scenario featured a wide array of actors embracing various and often overlapping forms of knowledge, thereby both enlivening and reshaping the status of the traditional sage. In doing so, they can be said to have given birth to new genres and text types—often hybrid—which would only be systematized or formalized at a later point. What seem to bring together these texts as a whole are certain methodological considerations and discursive features. Whatever their final

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On the role played by biography in the overall design of the Shiji, see Wai-Yee, “Ideas of Authority,” 377–379.

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outcome, these early prose texts appear to have included increasingly complex hermeneutic procedures, validation methods, and explanatory strategies in their accounts. Many of these procedures are well represented by Herodotus’ discursive technique, even if there are traces of such commentarial strategies in the earlier fragments. Finally, the results of their inquiries were rendered in a new discursive form, i.e., prose—which has been generally described by later authors as plain, unadorned and imitative of the spoken language used by the people. Within the fragmentary landscape of the early Greek prose inquiries, Herodotus’ Histories stands as the only full testimony of a script tradition that engaged systematically and critically with oral lore, mythical accounts, and traditional wisdom. Whereas Herodotus’ approach to myth is fairly narrow and ambivalent in his work, the opening section provides a programmatic authorial statement of the limited accountability and reliability of such accounts in the record of the recent human past. A comparative analysis of the Shiji’s engagement with the mythical past in the first sections of Sima Qian’s full-scale history of China has brought into sharper relief the Greeks’ idiosyncratic approach: their critical (and often strikingly jocular) attitude to the oral lore and mythical accounts, the agonistic and polemical stance vis-a-vis their predecessors, and the centrality of the inquirer’s perspective, authority, and self-knowledge in framing the events as opposed to a systematic examination of previous written authorities.

Acknowledgments I warmly thank Thomas Crone for drawing my attention to the passage of the Shiji about Sima Qian’s treatment of the so-called Five Emperors and for his many helpful comments as well as for his help with the original Chinese passage related to the word ya, for which I warmly thank Leihua Weng as well.

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Fowler, Robert. “Herodotos and his Contemporaries.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 116 (1996): 62–87. Fowler, Robert. Early Greek Mythography, vol. i: Text and Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Fowler, Robert. “Early Historie and Literacy”. In The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus, edited by Nino Luraghi, 95–115. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Fowler, Robert. “Herodotus and his Prose Predecessors”. In The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, edited by Carolyn Dewald and John Marincola, 29–45 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Fowler, Robert. “Gods in Early Greek Historiography”. In The Gods of Ancient Greece. Identities and Transformations, edited by Jan Bremmer and Andrew Erskine, 318– 334. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Fowler, Robert. “Mythos and Logos.” The Journal of Hellenistic Studies 131 (2011): 45–66. Fowler, Robert. Early Greek Mythography. Volume 2: Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Frahm, Eckart. Babylonian and Assyrian Text Commentaries. Origins of Interpretation. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2011. Gabbay, Uri. The Exegetical Terminology of Akkadian Commentaries. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Gentz, Joachim. Das Gongyang zhuan. Auslegung und Kanonisierung der Frühlings- und Herbstannalen (Chunqiu). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001. George, Andrew. “The Epic of Gilgamesh: Thoughts on Genre and Meaning.” In Gilgamesh and the World of Assyria. Proceedings of the Conference Held at the Mandelbaum House, the University of Sydney, 21–23 July 2004, edited by Joseph Azize and Noel Weeks, 37–66. Leuven: Peeters, 2007. Gould, John. Herodotus. London: St Martin’s Press, 1989. Granger, Herbert. “The Theologian Pherecydes of Syros and the Early Days of Natural Philosophy.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 103 (2007): 135–163. Griffiths, Alan. “Euenios the Negligent Nightwatchman (Herodotus 9.92–96).” In From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought, edited by Richard Buxton, 169–182. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Hall, Jonathan. Hellenicity. Between Ethnicity and Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Hardy, Grant. Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian’s Conquest of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Harrison, Thomas. Divinity and History. The Religion of Herodotus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Heverly, Gerald. Neglected Warnings in the Iliad: A Study in Characterization. PhD. diss., University of Pittsburgh (unpublished), 2013. http://d‑scholarship.pitt.edu/18450/ Immerwahr, Henry R. “Historical Action in Herodotus.” Transactions of the American Philological Association 85 (1954):16–45.

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Irwin, Elizabeth. Solon and Early Greek Poetry: The Politics of Exhortation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Jebb, Richard. Bacchylides. The Poems and Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905. Kern, Martin. “Poetry and Religion: The Representation of ‘Truth’ in Early Chinese Historiography.” In Historical Truth, Historical Criticism and Ideology. Chinese Historiography and Historical Culture from a New Comparative Perspective, edited by Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, Achim Mittag and Jörn Rüsen, 53–78. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Kirchberg, Jutta. Die Funktion der Orakel im Werke Herodotos. Hypomnemata ii. Göttingen: Vandenhceck & Ruprecht, 1965. Kurke, Leslie. Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Ko, Yuan. “Foreword.” In Chinese Mythology: An Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Lang, Mabel. Herodotean Narrative and Discourse. Martin Classical Lectures, 28. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1984. Lardinois André. “Wisdom in Context: The Use of Gnomic Statements in Archaic Greek Poetry.” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1995. Lardinois, André. “Modern Paroemiology and the Use of Gnomai in Homer’s Iliad.” Classical Philology 92, no. 3 (1997): 213–234. Lateiner, Donald. The Historical Method of Herodotus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. Lattimore, Richmond. “The Wise Adviser in Herodotus.” Classical Philology 34 (1939): 24–35. Lewis, Mark Edward. Sanctioned Violence in Early China. Albany [NY]: suny Press, 1990. Lewis, Mark Edward. “The mythology of early China.” In Early Chinese Religion: Part One: Shang through Han (1250bc–220 ad), edited by John Lagerwey and Marc Malinowski, 543–594. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Lilja, Saara. On the Style of the Earliest Greek Prose. Helsinki: Societas scientiarum Fennica, 1968. Llewellyn-Jones, Lloyd. Aphrodite’s Tortoise. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, 2003. Lloyd, Alan. “Commentary. Book ii”. In A commentary on Herodotus Books i–iv, edited by Oswyn Murray and Alfonso Moreno, 219–378. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Lloyd, Geoffrey Ernest Richard. The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practice of Ancient Greek Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Lloyd, Geoffrey Ernest Richard. “Mythology from a Chinese Perspective.” In From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought, edited by Richard Buxton, 145–168. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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Lloyd-Jones, Hugh. The Justice of Zeus. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971. Luraghi, Nino. The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Maehler, Herwig. Bacchylides. A Selection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Magic, Science, and Religion, and Other Essays. Garden City, [NY]: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954. Manuwald, Bernd. “Zu Solons Gedankenwelt.” Rheinisches Museum 132 (1989):1–25. Marinatos, Nannó. “Wahl und Schicksal bei Herodot.” Saeculum 33 (1982): 258–264. Marincola, John. “Genre, Convention and Innovation in Greco-Roman Historiography.” In The Limits of Historiography. Genre and Narrative in Ancient Historical Texts, edited by Christina Kraus, 281–324. Leiden, Boston and Cologne: Brill, 1999. Marincola, John. “Herodotus and the Poetry of the Past.” In The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, edited by Carolyn Dewald and John Marincola, 13–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Martin, Richard. “The Myth before the Myth Began.” In Writing down the Myths, edited by Joseph Falaky Nagy, 45–66. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Möller, Astrid. “The Beginnings of Chronography: Hellanicus’ Hiereiai.” In The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus, edited by Nino Luraghi, 241–262. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Mosshammer, Alden. The Chronicle of Eusebius and Greek Chronographic Tradition. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979. Most, Glenn W. “Allegoresis and Etymology.” In Canonical Texts and Scholarly Practices, edited by Antony Grafton and Glenn W. Most, 52–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Murray, Oswyn. “Herodotus and Oral History.” In Achaemenid Studies, vol. ii: The Greek Sources, edited by Heleen Sancisi-Weerdenburg and Amelie Kuhrt, 93–115, Leiden, 1987. Murray, Oswyn. “Herodotus and Oral History.” In The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus, edited by Nino Luraghi, 16–44. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Myres, John. Herodotus. Father of History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953. Nienhauser, William H. Jr. The Grand Scribe’s Records. Volume 1. The Basic Annals of PreHan China by Ssu-ma Ch’ien. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Nylan, Michael. “Sima Qian: A true Historian?”Early China 23/24 (1998–1999): 203–246. Pallantza, Elena. Der Troische Krieg in der nachhomerischen Literatur bis zum 5 Jh.v Chr. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2005. Parkinson, Richard. Poetry and Culture in Middle Kingdom Egypt: A Dark Side to Perfection, London: Continuum, 2002. Pearson, Lionel. The Early Ionian Historians. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939.

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chapter 8

Straight to the Divine: Claims of Self-Divinization in Plato and the Nei-yeh Fabio Pagani

1

Introduction

In the last two decades, comparative studies of Greece and China have expanded both steadily and rapidly. After the pioneering work by Geoffrey Lloyd (specifically centered on ancient science),1 a great deal of scholarship has explored the relationships between Greek and Chinese thought. Michael Puett has investigated the connections of sacrificial practices and self-divinization in Ancient China, paying special attention to how theoretical models created for Ancient Greece have been appropriated by Chinese scholars.2 Aristotelian thought, and especially Aristotelian ethics, has been thoroughly compared with Confucian texts.3 However, within this nouvelle vague of comparative Greek-Chinese studies,4 less attention has been given to Plato, and more generally to the transitional process by which philosophy slowly emerged as a distinctive (and self-aware) pursuit on its own. As classical philologists have learned, in Greece this process entailed a dynamic and evolving dialogue with other forms of wisdom—a dialogue not yet resolved when the corpus of texts that modern scholars usually label as 1 See Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd, Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Science and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). 2 See Michael Puett, To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice and Self- Divinization in Early China (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 2002). 3 On Aristotle and China see especially: Robert Wardy, Aristotle in China: Language, Categories and Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); May Sim, Remastering Morals with Morals and Confucius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jiyuan Yu, The Ethics of Confucius and Aristotle: Mirrors of Virtue (London: Routledge, 2007); Haixia W. Lan, Aristotle and Confucius on Rhetoric and Truth: The Form and the Way (London: Routledge, 2017). On Lan’s work, see also the review by Matylda Amat Obryk in Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews 2017.11.62. 4 Needless to say, this vague extends well beyond the realm of scientific and philosophical texts. For example, see the recent Fritz-Heiner Mutschler, ed., The Homeric Epics and the Chinese Book of Songs: Foundational Texts Compared (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018).

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‘philosophical literature’ was written. The older, diachronic model of transition from mythos to logos has become less and less appealing, and a more complicated vision of the relationship(s) between each philosopher and other forms of knowledge has emerged.5 If we focus specifically on Plato, these relationships have been repeatedly and thoroughly investigated in recent years, in case studies focused on specific texts,6 but also in explorations of broader phenomena such as that of Greek religion.7 In this process, well-established categories have occasionally been challenged. In 2017, Anders Klostergaard Petersen argued that Plato’s thought is better defined by the word “religion” than by the word “philosophy.”8 By carefully distinguishing Plato’s religion (i.e., ancient religion as it was practiced in Plato’s days) vis-à-vis Platonic religion (i.e., his own intellectual construction), Klostergaard Petersen understands Plato as a central figure of Axial Age religion. Seen from this perspective, the development of Platonism is but one of many changes taking place within the religious systems of different Axial Age cultures, from Greece to Israel to India to China. I am not prepared to give up the label of ‘philosophy’ for Plato yet, the idea of understanding his thought in terms of religion seems both promising and worthy of further development, especially from a comparative point of view. Building on previous scholarship both in comparative Greek-Chinese studies and in classical philology, this study argues that Plato’s thought can be compared with the Nei-yeh, a chapter within the broader collection of texts known as Guanzi,9 in terms of how both handle wisdom literature at a time when it had become more and more problematic. In doing so, this study does not merely assume that a philosopher of ancient Greece can be fruitfully compared with a text from ancient China. More broadly, it argues that both Plato and the Nei5 See Glenn W. Most, “From logos to mythos,” in From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought, ed. Richard Buxton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25–48. 6 For example, on Plato and Hesiod, see George R. Boys-Stones and Johannes H. Haubold, eds., Plato and Hesiod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), especially the “Introduction.” 7 See Michael L. Morgan, “Plato and Greek Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 227–247. 8 Anders Klostergaard Petersen, “Plato’s Philosophy—Why Not Just Platonic Religion?”, in Ancient Philosophy & Religion, Religio-Philosophical Discourses in the Mediterranean World: From Plato, through Jesus, to Late Antiquity, eds. Anders Klostergaard Petersen and George van Kooten (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 9–36. 9 On the Guanzi, a collection of texts traditionally attributed to the prime minister Guan Zhong (seventh century bce), as a whole, see Walter Allyn Rickett, trans., Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early China, 2 vols. (Princeton [NJ]: Princeton University Press, 1985), 1:3–47. Especially important is the section on the textual history of the collection: 14–24.

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yeh should be understood as engaging in a dialogue with something roughly similar: wisdom literature. This of course presupposes the category of “wisdom literature” as well as its transferability beyond the Middle Eastern context for which it was created. Thus, before sketching what this study intends to achieve, I will lay out its underlying theoretical and practical assumptions. I will not tackle the whole issue of whether or not “wisdom literature” is a theoretically legitimate category—that would far exceed my own expertise in this field.10 Many scholars (including some in this volume) have already voiced their discomfort with the category, and articulated the reasons for their more or less nuanced skepticism.11 While sharing some of these concerns, I do accept the concept of “wisdom literature” in so far as it works as an (admittedly loose) epistemological category that establishes a common ground for different world cultures, and therefore makes it possible to compare them fruitfully. It is the results of such a thought-experiment that will convince (or not convince, as the case may be) the reader of the usefulness of such a category. For the specific sake of this study, the main features linking wisdom texts of ancient Greece and China is that they both presuppose a system of religious beliefs, and in both cases divine ‘wisdom’ is revealed to human beings through certain mediators in a kind of top-down model. The necessity for a philosopher such as Plato to deal with wisdom literature becomes evident if we bear in mind that ancient philosophy conceived (and defined) itself not on the basis of the set of ideas that certain philosophers tried to propagate, but by and large as a way of life. As Pierre Hadot convincingly argued in many of his works, ancient Greek philosophy is about the choice of a certain lifestyle.12 One only needs to be reminded of Diogenes the Cynic, or of Socrates’ death in Plato’s Phaedo, to understand that what defined one as a philosopher was his/her manner of living and, indeed, dying. In its attempt to indicate a way to live, philosophy inevitably offers answers to some of the very same questions addressed by wisdom literature. Of course, when handling such different historical phenomena, caution as well as a certain degree of skepticism are mandatory. The contexts within which ‘wisdom’ was practiced were substantially different at the Athenian Academy 10 11 12

For some useful remarks on the origin of the category of “wisdom literature,” see the “Introduction” in this volume: 3–5. See Tomás Bartoletti “Aided-by-Ink’s son and Mistery’s great-grandson: Wisdom and Oracular Literature in Classical China and Ancient Greece,” in this volume: 17–20. See, for example, Pierre Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris: Institut d’Études augustiniennes, 1993), 15–29, especially 15–16. See also Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life. Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, ed. with an introduction by Arnold I. Davidson, transl. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 264–277.

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and in Ancient China, as far as we can tell (modern understanding of these contexts remains fairly limited). More to the point, we cannot assume that when using concepts such as “wisdom” or “god” a Greek and a Chinese sage would attribute the same meaning to these words. Nevertheless, precisely teasing out these differences, as well as underlying similarities, is the task of comparative studies. In expanding Puett’s analysis of the relationship between shamanism and philosophy in Greece and China to Plato and the Nei-yeh, this study does essentially two things. On the one hand, it argues that, at a time during the fifth and fourth century bce when wisdom literature became more and more problematic, (1) claims of self-divinization intended to reverse the relation between gods and human beings traditionally presupposed in wisdom literature itself. Challenging the top-down model assumed by wisdom literature, both Plato and the Nei-yeh advocated a bottom-up relationship between human beings and gods, one in which human beings are no longer passive, but become active, to the point of effectively becoming gods themselves. This was by no means the only solution available to those who were engaging with the legacy of wisdom literature (from oracles to aphorisms to didactic poetry) and, more broadly, with the questions those texts sought to answer. As this volume shows, several other possibilities for dealing with ancient wisdom were also available. Within the exegetical tradition, outdated social norms could be historicized, and therefore considered with a degree of distance.13 But those who refused to part company with the old wisdom literature could find ways of carving new senses out of old words. In this vein, creating traditions of exegesis that either filled the gaps of what wisdom texts did not say,14 or employed allegoresis as a way to adjust old texts to more contemporary agendas were certainly viable options. Since the message supposedly coming from the gods was no longer useful in the old format, in both cases additional layers of interpretation were introduced. But as Bartoletti has shown, one could also exercise a healthy degree of outright skepticism towards ancient wisdom literature and towards those who were responsible for mediating the relationship between gods and human

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See for example the Kong commentary’s discussion of Lady Mu’s duty not to return to her native family in Leihua Weng, “Lady Mu of Xu’s Returning to her Natal Home in “Zaichi” 載馳 (Gallop): A Comparative Perspective of the Early Scholarship of the Shijing 詩經 (Book of Odes),” in the present volume: 153–157. In the case of Confucius, this possibility is explored by Andrew Hui, “ ‘The Master Says’: Speech and Silence in the Analects,” in the present volume: 130–133.

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beings, especially when the technology of writing was being (ab-)used to create forgeries.15 As a consequence, another possibility was to move in exactly the opposite direction: removing the number of interpretative layers between gods and human beings, instead of increasing them. By bypassing any mediation, human beings (and not only kings) could make themselves independent of sacrificial specialists. If this was the case, then platonic philosophy was not born from the rejection of ancient religion—rather, it came about as a way to reinforce ancient religion and access the purest form of divinity. While the Neiyeh and Plato would normally be classified under different literary genres, what I suggest here is that they both develop the same logical path of thought: dealing with the legacy of wisdom literature by reversing the top-down model and creating a bottom-up one instead. On the other hand (2), since sinologists would have no difficulties in labeling the Nei-yeh as a religious text, then one could logically argue that Plato could be seen as an (unorthodox) religious thinker as well. As a consequence, comparative analysis ends up strengthening Klostergaard Petersen’s thesis: Plato can be seen as a religious writer because this is how he probably thought of himself. From our contemporary point of view, there is of course no need (at least as I see it) to discard the label of “philosopher”. However, one should bear in mind that Plato’s philosophy needs to be interpreted as something that develops within Greek religion, and not outside of it.

2

The Power of the Spirits and the ‘Child of the Enlightenment’

In Chapter 2 of his To Become a God (‘Gaining the Power of Spirits. The Emergence of Self-Divinization Claims in the Fourth Century bc’), Michael Puett criticizes the idea that fourth-century bce claims of self-divinization arose as the ultimate consequence of the origins of Chinese philosophy from an earlier form of shamanism. Instead of a diachronic model,16 Puett argues for a synchronic one, in which claims of self-divinization ought to be understood as responding to the “practices of the ritual specialists”—and thus revealing the existence of “competing cosmologies.”17 In addition to putting forward his

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Bartoletti, “Aided-by-Ink’s son,” in the present volume: 34–41. Within this model, sinologists have introduced further sophistication. Graham believes that Chinese philosophy re-works shamanism, while Chang and Ching describe the relationship between Chinese philosophy and shamanism in terms of ‘organic development’. On all this, see Puett, To Become a God, 81–83. Puett, To Become a God, 117.

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own original interpretation of Chinese claims of self-divinization, Puett deconstructs shamanistic theories for the origin of Chinese philosophy, arguing not only that the evidence for shamanism during the Chinese Bronze Age is inconclusive,18 but also that the idea of shamanism “grows out of a misleading comparison between Greece and China.”19 According to Puett, Chinese scholars’ arguments are “closely paralleled” by the model constructed by Eric R. Dodds (1893–1979) to explain the birth of the Self in Greek philosophical thought.20 In Chapter 5 of his celebrated The Greeks and the Irrational, Dodds, building on Burnet’s (1863–1928) lecture “The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul,”21 maintains that in the fifth century bce the word psyche defined the “emotional self,” and was therefore in opposition to the “rational self” of nous, rather than to sôma (‘body’).22 According to Dodds, the revolution that took place in the fifth century was the re-definition of psyche as the place, in itself both eternal and divine, in which both the emotional and the rational self are located. This kind of psyche was then set in opposition to sôma, which being purely material was destined to perish. As a consequence, death could be represented, as Plato does in the Phaedo, as the liberation of the divine soul from the material prison of the body. Secondly, looking for the origin of such a conceptual shift in the definition of the soul, Dodds built on Karl Meuli’s (1891–1968) work on Thracian shamanism,23 and argued for a “tentative line of spiritual descent.”24 This hypothetical line would start in Scythia, then move to Asiatic Greece, continue (perhaps with Cretan influences) with Pythagoras in the West, and finally end with Empedocles in Sicily. Crucially, Dodds does

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Puett, To Become a God, 76–79. Puett, To Become a God, 81. Regius Professor at Oxford (1936–1960), Eric Dodds worked especially on Neoplatonism and ancient tragedy. His The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) has proven to be one of the most influential books in the field of classics during the 20th century. A scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, Burnet’s edition of Plato in 5 vols., (Oxford University Press), first published in 1902, remains the standard reference work for most (though not all) of the Platonic corpus. Eric R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 138–139. As a Classical philologist and ethnographer, Meuli in his Scythica (1935) investigated the text of Herodotus as a source for ancient shamanism. On shamanism in Siberia and Central Asia, see Roberte Hamayon, La chasse à l’âme: esquisse d’une théorie du chamanisme sibérien (Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie, 1990); and Charles Stépanoff, Le chamanisme de Sibérie et d’Asie centrale (Paris: Gallimard, 2011). See also Charles Stépanoff, Chamanisme, rituel et cognition chez les Touvas (Sibérie du Sud) (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2014). Dodds, The Greeks, 146.

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not claim to be able to prove the existence of such a line, but simply claims that it “seems reasonable to conclude that the opening of the Black Sea […] enriched with some remarkable new traits the traditional Greek picture of the Man of God, the theios anêr (‘divine man’).”25 The reason for his focus on Scythia is that he takes it for granted that the divine nature of the soul could only be understood, as Erwin Rohde (1845–1898) had suggested,26 as a “drop of alien blood” in Greece. This overall uncertainty notwithstanding, the ultimate consequence of Dodds’ model is to set Empedocles against Plato, seeing the former as a “very old type of personality, the shaman,” while the latter, at the opposite end of the spectrum, is defined as a “child of the Enlightenment.”27 Against this background, Puett does not merely argue that Dodds’ explanatory model does not map onto the Chinese evidence, and therefore should not be appropriated by Chinese scholars, but more radically, he argues that Dodds’ model does not work for Greece either. This calls for the attention of scholars of ancient Greece. In order to deconstruct Dodds’ shamanistic hypothesis, Puett discusses Empedocles extensively.28 Specifically, Puett (1) highlights Empedocles’ contempt for sacrifice; (2) stresses the relationship between Love and Thought in Empedocles’ physics; and (3) interprets fragments such as D10 lm (B115 dk) as implying that Empedocles saw himself as a fallen daimon, therefore opposing claims by Pindar, for example, that human beings should not “try to become Zeus,” because only mortal thoughts befit mortal men.29 While developing his argument, Puett mentions Plato as well, though only briefly. Quoting Timaeus 90a, he argues that, like Empedocles, Plato understands self-divinization as a way to train a group that will ultimately be in charge of leading a state.

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What Does Self-Divinization Mean in Plato?

The study of self-divinization is particularly complex because it ultimately requires one to clarify who or what is divine for Plato, in order to grasp what

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Dodds, The Greeks, 142. A German classical philologist, his book Psyche (2 vols., 1890–1894) investigates the cult of souls in ancient Greece. Dodds, The Greeks, 208. Puett, To Become a God, 88–93. Pind. Isth. v, 11–16. When it comes to Plato, to the passage quoted by Puett one could also add Plato, Phaed. 69d and Leg. 885b (both quoted extensively in the following pages).

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he meant by self-divinization. Hence, a brief discussion of Plato’s theology cannot be avoided, even though this topic has now accumulated two centuries of modern scholarly analysis. The key problem is how to reconcile Plato’s theology and his theory of ideas, i.e., to work out the exact relationship between the Demiurge, who creates the universe in the Timaeus, and the Idea of the Good (presented in the Republic as the highest of all Ideas). A first possibility is to imagine that the Demiurge coincides with the Idea of the Good, which yields a perfectly rational theology centered on the Idea of the Good being the first creator of the Universe. A second possibility is to deny this identification and to claim that the Demiurge is something other than the Idea of the Good. In the last decade, this latter position has tended to prevail, but such interpretations then raise the problem of understanding exactly who/what the Demiurge is and what is its relationship with the Idea(s). Against this background, Plato’s claims of self-divinization have long been discussed by Classicists. Following the now classic works by Culbert Gerow Rutenber (1909–2003) and Dietrich Roloff (1934–),30 much recent work has been devoted to the concept of self-divinization in both Early Greek philosophy (by Patrick Miller),31 as well as in Plato specifically (by Salvatore Lavecchia).32 None of these studies, however, has considered Platonic self-divinization from a comparative point of view. Rutenber built his discussion on the assumption that the Demiurge is not to be identified with the Idea of the Good but is instead to be understood as a soul. When it comes to forms, he argues that “the forms eternally actualize, to use an Aristotelian expression, the nature of God”—in other words, gods participate in (at least some of) the forms.33 As a consequence, because human

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Culbert G. Rutenber, The Doctrine of the Imitation of God in Plato (Philadelphia: Vermont Printing Co., 1946). Rutenber tackles this issue from a theoretical point of view and analyses the consequence of this practice within Platonic thought from ontological, political, and ethical points of view. Dietrich Roloff, Gottähnlichkeit, Vergöttlichung und Erhöhung zu seligem Leben. Untersuchungen zur Herkunft der platonischen Angleichung an Gott (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970). A classical philologist by training, Roloff is more concerned with the historic originality of Platonic self-divinization within the previous tradition and concludes that Plato is largely innovative. Patrick L. Miller, Becoming God: Pure Reason in Early Greek Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2011). Lavecchia frames self-divinization within the context of the Tübingen interpretation of Plato’s ungeschriebene Lehre and traces its origin back to mystery cults and especially to Pythagoreanism. See Salvatore Lavecchia, Una via che conduce al divino: la “homoiosis theo” nella filosofia di Platone (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2006), especially 287–291. This, however, forces Rutenber to ask whether primacy goes to the forms or to the soul; he concludes that ‘It is conjectural whether this is Plato’s final solution to the problem of

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beings consist of body and soul, self-divinization should effectively be understood as a way to become similar to those forms that are participated by the gods. In contrast, Lavecchia argues that the Demiurge is nothing but the Idea of the Good. Needless to say, this translates into a different interpretation of what self-divinization ultimately means. Indeed, self-divinization ought then to be understood as an actualization of the human dynamis, a process that allows human beings to transcend their own apparent limits.34 In sum, understanding what self-divinization means for Plato lends itself to (at least) two different interpretations: the fundamentally immanent invitation to improve oneself, as argued by Lavecchia, or the more idealistic imitation of souls/forms that exist elsewhere, as in Rutenber’s view. Building on this scholarly foundation, in the next two sections of this study, I first take up the work done by Classicists on self-divinization in Plato and expand Puett’s discussion of Plato to map more precisely how self-divinization operates within Platonic philosophy. Then, I compare those claims with the Nei-yeh. By drawing on the category of “wisdom literature” as an epistemological tool, I examine how both Plato and the Nei-yeh appropriate the same questions asked by wisdom literature itself but provide different answers (even though from a modern perspective neither Plato nor the Nei-yeh fit in the “wisdom literature” category). More specifically, I argue that both Plato and the Nei-yeh radically subvert the relationship between human beings and gods, thus providing an alternative not only to oracles, but to any form of mediation between gods and human beings. My broader argument, then, is not aimed at disproving Dodds’ admittedly tentative theory, but it rather reinforces, from a comparative perspective, the work done by scholars, such as Klostergaard Petersen, who suggest that Plato should be seen in a new (religious) light—one that makes him look less distant from Empedocles as well as more in continuity with the sages to whom he so often refers.35

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ultimate reality, but it is probable that, to the very end, he gave primacy to the forms’. Cf. Rutenber, The Doctrine, 108. Lavecchia, Una via, 255–261. Fore references to the sages, see for example here below in par. 4 the quotations from Gorg.507e–508a and Tim.29e–30a.

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Becoming like a God

As Bartoletti has shown, oracular texts are among the most obvious sources that can be included in the category of wisdom literature. Their close ties to religion make it relatively easy to see their similarity to the Middle Eastern material for which the category of “wisdom literature” was created in the first place. Whether oracles come from Delphi (as with Croesus) or are some reworking of Musaeus (as with Onomacritus), they always presuppose a message from the gods to the human beings through a series of (oral and/or written) mediations. Such messaging assumes a top-down model, in which wisdom is communicated through some intermediation. Yet in addition to oracular texts, there are larger and more complex literary compositions that also presuppose this same hierarchical structure. In Theogony 1–115 (a hymn to the Muses), Hesiod articulates the complex relationship between the Muses, himself, and his poetry. The Muses taught him how to sing while he was pasturing lambs on Mount Helicon (Hes., Theog. 22– 23). As he puts it, the Muses are responsible for having inspired in him his songs (Theog. 31–34: “they breathed a divine voice into me, so that I might glorify what will be and what was before”). Therefore, his entire narrative—from the origins of the cosmos and the genealogies of the gods until the final triumph of Zeus’ justice in the current world order—ultimately comes from the Muses. Crucially, the Muses do not merely represent the condition that makes it possible for the poet to sing (i.e., his memory). They also are Zeus’ daughters, hence, divine in nature. Regardless of whether or not what the Muses say is true (Theog. 27–28), what Hesiod is about to sing is validated by them. This presupposes a top-down model that involves at least three different levels: the divine level (the Muses and their father Zeus), the first human level of mediation (the poet, but also the kings, see Theog. 81–115), and the second human level of the audience (in this case, anyone listening to Hesiod).36 This top-down model does not only apply to oracles and to Hesiod’s Hymn to the Muses: these texts provide a productive background against which we can project Plato’s claims of self-divinization. Through a meticulous analysis of multiple Platonic passages, Lavecchia argues that “the process of becoming like a god is the center and the very substance of Platonic philosophy” (“La omoio-

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Even though its association with wisdom literature may be debatable, a comparable scene of initiation by a goddess is found in the famous fragment Parmenides D4 lm (B1 dk).

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sis theo costituisce il centro e la sostanza della filosofia platonica”).37 Without committing to whether self-divinization can be considered the only centro of Plato’s philosophy, I do nevertheless consider self-divinization as crucial in Plato’s thought. In order to understand the role this concept plays in Platonic philosophy, I will consider some of its most representative occurrences.38 The classical passage is Tht. 176a–b,39 in which self-divinization is presented as a way to escape from the perishable world and is directly connected with exercising virtue: Therefore, we ought to try to escape from earth to the dwelling of the gods as quickly as we can; and to escape is to become like God, so far as this is possible; and to become like God is to become righteous and holy and wise. Interestingly, this passage immediately clarifies that self-divinization does not only mean to become holy (as one might have expected), but also to become wise. Therefore, it plainly overlaps with the aims of wisdom literature. The strong bond between virtue and self-divinization is further articulated in the Gorgias. After arguing the well-known point that anyone who desires to be happy should practice temperance, Socrates continues by saying that both individuals and communities should concentrate all their efforts on pursuing justice,40 instead of letting personal desires force one into the life of a robber: For neither to any of his fellowmen can such a one be dear, nor to God; since he cannot commune with any, and where there is no communion, there can be no friendship. And wise men tell us, Callicles, that heaven and earth and gods and men are held together by communion and friendship, by orderliness, temperance, and justice; and that is the reason, my

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See Lavecchia, Una via, 1. On Plato’s religious attitude and the allegations of atheism against Socrates, see Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods. Atheism in the Ancient World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), 130–131. All translations of Plato are taken from the Loeb series. For more specific information, see the “Sources” section in the Bibliography. On this passage see David Sedley, “The Ideal of Godlikeness,” in Plato 2. Ethics, Politics, Religion and the Soul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 309–328. On the relationship between individuals and communities see especially the passage on the large vs. small letters in Pl., Resp. ii.368d, and then again Resp. iv.441c. The passages imply that the same values hold for the individual and for the community.

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friend, why they call the whole of this world by the name of order, not of disorder or dissoluteness.41 grg. 507e4–508a4

The robber cannot share anything with anyone, and lack of communion soon translates into lack of philia (affection, friendship). However, this destroys the world order that binds gods and men by communion and friendship. Once again, it should be noticed that this world order has been revealed to us, says Socrates, by “wise men” (oi sophoi), a probable reference to the Pythagoreans. In Republic Bk. vi, while discussing the relationship between philosophy and the government of a state, the very same issue is tackled from the point of view of a community, rather than an individual’s. After having stated that “The philosopher who allies himself with the divine and orderly becomes divine and orderly, as far as is possible for a human being” (500d1–2), Socrates points out that any philosopher who could reach such a privileged state would desire nothing more than to spread it to everybody else. In order to explain how this could happen, Socrates introduces the metaphor of the writing tablet. At first philosophers would need to wipe it clean, i.e., expurgate people’s souls. Then, they would redraw it, i.e., give them new characteristics that would make them dear to the gods.42 Philosophers are, therefore, in charge of making other people just as dear to the gods as they are themselves. The political agenda that lies behind these claims becomes clearer in the Laws. In Book iv, while discussing the foundation of a new colony, the Athenian stranger argues that under no circumstances should the new colony be governed by ordinary men. Instead, the city should, ideally, be governed by the gods, just as it had been during the golden age of Cronos (Lg. iv, 713b). Should the gods in the end not materialize, those human beings who can claim to be ‘god-like’ should at that point take up the torch of leading the state. Needless to say, this raises the question of clearly defining the features of those human beings, a task that Plato discharges by lengthily discussing his definition of virtue as composed by wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage. But what is more interesting here is that the discussion of virtue is presented as a means for human beings to become similar to the gods:

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Koinônia (‘association’) is crucial not only in the relationship between human beings and gods, but also within the community. See Lg. v.739e and xii.942a, but also Resp. v. See Pl., Resp. vi. 501c1–3: “Then I think they would rub out and redraw some parts until they had made human characteristics as much and as far as possible dear to the gods.”

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What conduct, then, is dear to God and in his steps? One kind of conduct, expressed in one ancient phrase, namely, that “like is dear to like” when it is moderate, whereas immoderate things are dear neither to one another nor to things moderate. In our eyes God will be “the measure of all things” in the highest degree—a degree much higher than is any “man” they talk of. He, then, that is to become dear to such a one must become, so far as he possibly can, of a like character; and, according to the present argument, he amongst us that is temperate is dear to God, since he is like him, while he that is not temperate is unlike and at enmity,—as is also he who is unjust, and so likewise with the rest, by parity of reasoning. Lg. iv. 716c–d4

These passages make it clear that, both in the case of individual human beings (Gorgias) and in that of communities (Republic, Laws) there is a direct connection between koinônia (‘association’) and philia (‘affection, friendship’), i.e., between sharing certain characteristics and being dear to the gods. The practice of virtue, especially temperance (mentioned both in the Republic and in the Laws), is crucial to bridge the gap between human beings and gods. Much more can be said about how to become like the gods, and what mistakes one ought to avoid. The role played by sacrifices is duly scrutinized in the Laws. As Burkert has pointed out, sacrifices were crucial in order to strengthen the sense of (human) community.43 But while listing the three fundamental mistakes in theological matters, the Athenian stranger criticizes sacrifices and prayers for being among the causes of people’s voluntary, impious deeds. Indeed, one of the three mistakes is precisely to believe that gods can be bribed by sacrifices or prayers.44 This should not be taken to mean that one should not sacrifice to the gods in any way at all. Rather, the Athenian stranger critiques as misleading the assumption that sacrifice itself will guarantee divine support. Ultimately, such an assumption leads people to rely on sacrifices to win the gods’ support, instead of trying to be dear to them by becoming similar to them. Sacrifice can

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On sacrifices see Walter Burkert, Greek Religion (Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1985), 55–66, especially 58. See Pl. Lg. x, 885b4–9: “It shall be as follows:—No one who believes, as the laws prescribe, in the existence of the gods has ever yet done an impious deed voluntarily, or uttered a lawless word: he that acts so is in one or other of these three conditions of mind—either he does not believe in what I have said; or, secondly, he believes that the gods exist, but have no care for men; or, thirdly, he believes that they are easy to win over when bribed by offerings and prayers.”

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be appropriately practiced by someone who is dear to the gods already, but sacrifice in itself will not make anyone dear to the gods: On this there follows, let us observe, this further rule,—and of all rules it is the noblest and truest,—that to engage in sacrifice and communion with the gods continually, by prayers and offerings and devotions of every kind, is a thing most noble and good and helpful towards the happy life, and superlatively fitting also, for the good man; but for the wicked, the very opposite. For the wicked man is unclean of soul, whereas the good man is clean; and from him that is defiled no good man, nor god, can ever rightly receive gifts. Lg. iv. 716d3–717a1

As a consequence, what matters is not sacrifice, but the means by which one can become a ‘good man’. From Plato’s point of view, being good means being able to have access to the form of the Good. (Whether this should be understood in a purely immanent sense, as Lavecchia suggests, or in an idealistic sense, as Rutenber puts it, remains of course an open problem.) On this note, in Resp. Bk. vii Plato sets out the ultimate criterion by which one may judge an educational program, namely, whether or not it makes it easier for us to see the form of the Good (Resp. 526e2). Such an educational program involves the study of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, harmonics, and dialectic, in addition to gymnastics and music. When introducing this broad program, Socrates describes it as a way to lead the guardians up towards the light, as some are said to make their way up from Hades to the gods (Resp. 521c2–3). Crucially, education in the Republic is compared with an experience of self-divinization. The connection between human knowledge and self-divinization is further articulated by Plato in the Timaeus. As Lavecchia points out, the entirety of Timaeus’ long speech aims at describing the whole of the Cosmos as being itself a visible Living Creature embracing the visible creatures, a perceptible God made in the image of the Intelligible, “most great and good and fair and perfect in its generation” (Ti. 92c6–9). The whole of the cosmos is then itself a visible god, who is nothing but an image of its creator, a god that is both invisible and intelligible. Such a god, who is otherwise known as the Demiurge of the Cosmos, created the entire universe and desired it to be as good as himself: Let us now state the Cause wherefore He that constructed it constructed Becoming and the All. He was good, and in him that is good no envy arises ever concerning anything; and being devoid of envy He desired that all

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should be, so far as possible, like unto Himself. This principle, then, we shall be wholly right in accepting from men of wisdom as being above all the supreme originating principle of Becoming and the Cosmos. For God desired that, so far as possible, all things should be good and nothing evil. Ti. 29e1–30a3

Much has been written on the identity of the Demiurge of the Cosmos. To mention but two of the interpretations that have been suggested, Lavecchia identifies him with the very idea of the Good, while Menn, for example, identifies him with nous.45 In both cases, however, what matters is that the cosmos, i.e., the physical world, is similar to him, because it has been constructed by him. In the same way, as Plato makes it clear in Ti. 41d, individual human souls have been produced by the Demiurge and are similar to him.46 Within this framework of similarity between human and divine, there is a specific kind of soul which can bridge the gap between human beings and God, in a way as to “raise us up from earth towards our kindred in the heaven.”47As Plato argues in the Republic 439d, this part is the ‘rational part’ of the soul (logistikon). As a consequence, any attempt made by human beings at understanding the nature of the world can be seen as an attempt to become similar to Demiurge himself and therefore know him, as much as this is possible for human beings. But phronesis (‘thought’) is not merely a way to know the cosmos created by the eternal Demiurge, which thereby allows human beings to access the divine. It is also a means by which human beings can make their relationship with the divine just as eternal as the divine itself. It is in this sense that the relationship between death and self-divinization plays a significant role in the Phaedo. After arguing that philosophy is ultimately about learning how one should die 45

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Stephen Menn, Plato on God as Nous (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995), 12–13. Menn argues, against Cherniss and Cornford, in favor of the transcendent interpretation of nous previously suggested by Hackforth. See Pl. Ti. 41d4–7: “For the rest, do ye weave together the mortal with the immortal, and thereby fashion and generate living creatures, and give them food that they may grow, and when they waste away receive them to yourself again.” On this passage see Alfred E. Taylor, A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (Oxford: the Clarendon Press, 1928), 255. See Pl. Ti. 90a2–b1: “And as regards the most lordly kind of our soul, we must conceive of it in this wise: we declare that God has given to each of us, as his daemon, that kind of soul which is housed in the top of our body and which raises us—seeing that we are not an earthly but a heavenly plant—up from earth towards our kindred in the heaven. And herein we speak most truly; for it is by suspending our head and root from that region whence the substance of our soul first came that the Divine Power keeps upright our whole body.”

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(Phd. 64a–65a), Socrates strongly criticizes the body as the reason why wars and other evils affect human life and prevent it from becoming truly philosophical (66d). Against this background, the body is described as a prison for the soul that prevents it from attaining knowledge. Death is presented as the liberation of the soul from the chains of the body (67d): My dear Simmias, I suspect this is not the right exchange with a view to goodness, to swap around pleasures for pleasures, pains for pains, fear for fear, more for less, exchanging them like coins; but the only true coinage for which you must exchange all these is wisdom. And everything bought and sold for this and in company with this really is courage, temperance, justice, and in short, true virtue along with wisdom, whether pleasures and fears and all other things of that kind are added or taken away. But if they are separated off from wisdom and swapped around with each other, virtue of this sort I suspect may be a kind of artistic facade and in actual fact slavish, and contains nothing sound nor even true. But the truth in reality, temperance and justice and courage, may be a kind of cleansing of all these sorts of qualities, and wisdom itself may be some kind of purification. And so those who set up the initiations for us seem to be not some unenlightened types, but have in fact long been saying in riddles that whoever arrives in Hades without initiation and enlightenment will wallow in the mud, while he who arrives cleansed and initiated will dwell among the gods. There are, I assure you, as those who are concerned with the rituals say, many who carry the fennel rod, but true initiates are few. In my opinion these initiates are none other than those who have practiced philosophy in the right way. Phd. 69a–d

It is precisely by dying that Socrates transcends the limits of the body, acquires pure knowledge, and is therefore finally allowed to dwell among the gods. In this sense, the process of acquiring knowledge is a form of purification that culminates in the separation of the soul from the body at the moment of death. Quite interestingly, Socrates adds that many people participate in rituals, but only very few are “true initiates”—it is the practice of incorporating philosophy into one’s own life that actually prepares one for death, not the mere ritual act of “carrying the fennel rod.” This selection of passages shows that self-divinization in Plato does not merely work as a way to select and train the elite who should lead the state. While this is certainly the most direct implication in terms of political theory, self-divinization is a more multifaceted concept. First, self-divinization is the

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way in which human beings can become immortal—it is because he is selfdivinized that Socrates can see his own death as a liberation in the Phaedo. Second, self-divinization describes the epistemological process through which the individual rational soul gets to know the Demiurge in the Timaeus. Third, self-divinization is the very aim of the whole theory of virtue contained in the dialogues—it is in order to become divine that he initiated the practice of the various aspects of virtue. Fourth, this self-divinizing practice of virtue is a form of wisdom. It should be clear by now that self-divinization is a very different way to acquire wisdom compared with the oracles or Hesiod’s hymn to the Muses. While in those cases wisdom is received from the gods through some layers of human mediation, here (some) human beings are supposedly able to reverse the whole process and go straight to the divine by becoming gods themselves. Since gods are for Plato perfectly good, it is not difficult to see why he would then cast his famous negative judgement about Hesiod in the Republic—in Plato’s eyes, Hesiod was responsible for having spread falsities about the gods that have no place in Kallipolis. (Needless to say, should one accept the principle that gods are not necessarily good, then Plato’s whole self-divinization program would raise huge moral issues.) This does not mean that for Plato every Hesiodic line ought to be rejected,48 but his false tales about the gods and, perhaps even more seriously, his Hymn to the Muses (detailing his poetic investiture and therefore projecting the divine authority of the Muses onto his own poem) never encountered Plato’s favor. On the issue of intermediary layers between the gods and human beings, one may also notice that these layers involve not only Hesiod or the Pythia. As in the case of Croesus and Onomacritus, the very act of writing down oracles adds a further layer of mediation. In the same way, the sheer act of writing down philosophical dialogues adds an additional level of mediation between the reader and the wisdom one is trying to achieve. Perhaps Plato’s notorious skepticism towards writing in the Phaedrus 275c–d can be also seen from this angle, i.e., writing adds a layer of mediation into a program of self-divinization that, by its sheer definition, should give one immediate access to the divine.

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On Plato’s complex relation with Hesiod, see Glenn W. Most, “Plato’s Hesiod: An acquired Taste?”, in Plato and Hesiod, ed. George R. Boys-Stones and Johannes H. Haubold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 52–67. If Hesiod did indeed become an “acquired taste” for Plato, this applies essentially to the Works and Days. Most argues: “It seems that, if the older Plato came to appreciate Hesiod more than he had as a young man, it was above all the Hesiod of the Works and Days who benefited from this development.” See Most, “Plato’s Hesiod,” 66.

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The Cult of the Ancestors in Ancient China

In Ancient China, theorizing the relationship between human beings and gods was just as productive as it was in Ancient Greece. During the Western Zhou (1045–771 bc), this relationship was mediated by the cult of the past, that took the shape of a veneration for the ancestors. In a nutshell, instead of accessing the gods directly, the sacrifice was directed towards the ancestors, that would in turn act as mediators with the gods. Its origins dating back to the burial practices from the fifth millennium onwards,49 the ritual of sacrificing to the ancestors was a well-established practice. During the Western Zhou roughly twenty generations of ancestors were believed to have lived between the time of gods and current human beings.50 The main source of information on this cult are of literary nature. In the Book of Odes, the group of sacrificial poems 266–269 Mao provides a good starting point to understand the cult. Dating to the early Western Zhou (ca. eleventh-tenth bce), these texts were likely to have been sung on the occasion of religious sacrifices:51 Oh, august is the pure temple, solemn and (concordant=) acting in unison are the illustrious assistants; stately are the many officers, they possess a fine virtue; they respond to and (proclaim=) extol those in Heaven, quickly they hurry about in the temple; the greatly illustrious, greatly honored ones never weary of (the homage of) men. Crucially, the song (poem 266 Mao) does not address “those in Heaven” directly, but rather the “assistants” for the sacrifice that are invoked to quickly gather in

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51

On the veneration for the ancestors, see Martin Kern, “Bronze Inscriptions, The Shijing and the Shangshu: the Evolution of the Ancestral Sacrifice during the Western Zhou,” in Early Chinese Religion, ed. John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 1:143–200. For discussions of the religious background to these ideas, see John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski, ed., Early Chinese Religion (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Fabrizio Pregadio discusses how many of these ideas and practices played out in the later Daoist traditions. See Fabrizio Pregadio, Great Clarity: Daoism and Alchemy in Early Medieval China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). All the translations are from Bernard Karlgren, transl., The Book of Odes: Chinese Text, Transcription and Translation. In Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 17 (1945) 87–88.

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the temple. It is the responsibility of these “assistants” to mediate the relationship between human beings and gods. Precisely for their mediation, they are greatly honored by human beings. The nature of the relationship between those who carry out the sacrifice and the ancestors is further clarified in 269 Mao: Brilliant and fine rulers and princes, you have given these blessings; you have given us favour without bounds, sons and grandsons will preserve it. There are no fiefs that are not in your land, it is only the king who (elevates them=) establishes them; we (think of=) remember these great deeds of yours, continuously we (find them august=) revere them. The ancestors are ancient “rulers and princes,” ancestors of the current rulers. The present kings are both in charge of preserving the memory of their great deeds and of administering religious sacrifice for the gods. As 268 Mao clarifies, it is only through Wen Wang, the ancestor of the family, that current rulers (i.e., Wen Wang’s descendants) can hope to obtain what they want: “Clear and continuously bright are the statutes of Wen Wang; he initiated the sacrifices, and by them it has come to an achievement: the good fortune of Zhou.” One could visualize the dynamic of sacrifice as follows, with the process of offering on the left and its intended consequences on the right: gods ancestors kings Visual representation of the dynamic of sacrifice

Ultimately, the whole point of sacrifice is to prompt a response from the gods that will benefit those who initiated the sacrifice in the first place, i.e., human beings. Since the initiators of sacrifices were ultimately human beings, it is now time to focus our attention on them rather than on the theological assumptions of the sacrifice.

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The Mawangdui Manuscripts and the Medical Context

Our understanding of Chinese speculation about human beings and their body has changed dramatically in recent years. Back in the Seventies, the discovery of the Mawangdui manuscripts substantially altered our understanding of the relationship between philosophy and medical literature in ancient China.52 Indeed, these book-rolls proved the existence of a body of macrobiotic hygiene literature disseminated by physicians, which provided the intellectual background for later engagement with the relationship between soul and body within human beings. The body of medical texts that has been brought to light in these manuscripts are not aiming at obtaining the favor of the gods or, even less, immortality. Rather, these texts transmit a body of techniques aiming at gaining longevity and general well-being. In doing so, however, they spell out very clearly their understanding of the biological nature of human beings. An example could help the reader, at this point. In msvi.a4, the Yellow Thearch and Rong Cheng debate what causes for life to remain in a certain body so that the person can live long, and vice versa what prevents this from happening. On this note, Rong Cheng explains:53 If your Lordship wishes to be long-lived, then comply with and examine the way of heaven and earth. The vapor of heaven is monthly exhausted and monthly replenished; thus it is able to live long. The vapor of earth during the year is cold and hot, and the precipitous and the gentle complement one another; thus the earth endures and does not deteriorate. Your lordship must examine the nature of heaven and earth and put it into practice with your body. To be even more clear, Rong Cheng continues his explanation by stating: The culminant essence of heaven and earth is born in the signless, grows in the formless, and is perfected in the bodiless. He who obtains it has a lengthy longevity, he who loses it dies young. Thus he who is skilled at cultivating vapor and concentrating essence accumulates the signless. As a consequence, he provides suggestions on how to accumulate within one’s body as much “vapor” as possible. “Vapor” (Qi) is, therefore, the biological key 52 53

See Donald Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature: the Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts (New York: Kegan Paul International, 1998), 148–192. Harper, Early Chinese, 512.

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to longevity and well-being. This text provides a useful background in order to make sense of the Nei-yeh.

7

The Nei-yeh Chapter of the Guanzi

Within the Guanzi, the Nei-yeh chapter is a crucial text for the history of meditation in Ancient China.54 While there is up to date no scholarly agreement about the authorship or the exact origin of Nei-yeh, there is little doubt that these texts had a lasting influence on the later history of Daoism.55 Moreover, there is also little doubt about the interest of the doctrines it contains. Indeed, by equating the essence of the spirits with the Qi (“vapor/vital energy”) discussed by medical texts such as those discovered in Mawangdui manuscripts,56 the Nei-yeh presupposes a very interesting understanding of the relationship between human beings and gods. Indeed, as Puett has explained, the Nei-yeh works with three key-concepts, i.e., Qi, Jing,57 and Shen.58 He argues that both Jing and Shen are concentrated and refined forms of Qi.59 It is well attested in Nei-yeh that all things are connected by a strong bond within a cosmological framework. The sky and the stars, especially, are connected with individual human souls (those of the sages): That vital essence of all things; It is this that brings them to life It generates the five grains below And becomes the constellated stars above. When flowing amid the heavens and the earth We call it ghostly and numinous

54 55

56

57 58 59

For the Nei-yeh, I refer to Harold D. Roth, ed. and trans., Original Tao: inward training (neiyeh) and the foundations of Chinese mysticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). For further discussions of the Nei-yeh, see Romain Graziani, Les Corps dans le taoïsme ancient (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011). See also Russell Kirkland, “Neiye 內業 Inner Cultivation,” in The Encyclopedia of Taoism, ed. Fabrizio Pregadio (London: Routledge, 2008), 771–773. Harper, Early Chinese, 119. The word Qi is translated as “vapor” by Harper and usually as “vital energy” by Roth (though he is not always consistent), while Puett prefers to leave it untranslated. Jing is usually translated by Roth as “vital essence,” while Puett and Harper prefer the translation “essence”. Shen is translated by Roth as “numinous,” while Puett and Harper prefer “spirit”. Puett, To Become a God, 109.

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When stored within the chests of human beings We call them sages.60 i

According to this text, the “vital essence” ( jing) is responsible not only for the life of individual human beings, but also of stars and grains. As Roth puts it, the jing “is spoken of with awe and can truly be understood as the concrete manifestation of the Way’s power to generate the living.”61 While the Way represents the general order of the universe,62 the jing is its actual creative energy. Though the jing may at times be called shen (‘numinous’) when in the heavens, nonetheless it is the very same principle that inhabits both the heavens and the bodies of sages, according to the Nei-yeh. Precisely this identity of content makes it possible, in theory, for every human being to connect with the divine. As a consequence, sacrifice is no longer a necessity, and (as Puett has argued) “inner working” emerges as an alternative way of accessing the divine.63 Furthermore, since the Jing is a refined form of Qi (“vapor/vital energy”), one should be able to store such Qi in oneself: “Therefore this vital energy cannot be halted by force, yet it can be secured by inner power (de).” (ii, 6–8) The capability of developing inner power (de) is what separates the sage from every other human being. Indeed, after acquiring de, wisdom and the ability to understand the complexity of the world will arise: “When inner power develops and wisdom emerges, The myriad things will, to the last one, be grasped.” (ii, 13–14) The process of understanding the world is represented as a process of achieving unification with it. Through introspection, the sage manages to contain in himself what is outside him.64 In contrast to Plato, however, there is an important caveat in terms of what human knowledge can and should achieve. In

60 61

62 63

64

See, Roth, ed., Original Tao, 46. See, Roth, ed., Original Tao, 42. In it Roth also discusses the relationship between the concept of jing and the Way. All references to the text of Nei-yeh and all the English translations are taken from Harold D. Roth’s edition. “The Way fills the entire world.” See Nei-yeh xiv.1–7. See Nei-yeh xix.4–5. Puett has extended his study of the relationship between metaphysics and ritual well beyond the Nei-yeh. On the Liyun, see Michael Puett, “Constructions of Reality: Metaphysics in the Ritual Traditions of Classical China,” in Chinese Metaphysics and its Problems, ed. Chenyang Li and Franklin Perkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 120–129, especially, 120–124. “By concentrating your vital breadth as if numinous. The myriad things will all be contained within you. Can you concentrate? Can you unite with them?” See Nei-yeh xix, 1–3.

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fact, a real risk for human beings is the excess of knowledge,65 which ends up destroying their vital essence. This is a logical consequence of the idea that the inner power (de) is the result of balance, in which all excess should be avoided.66 But what is the nature of the wisdom that the Nei-yeh advocates? As texts xvii and xx–xxiii show, wisdom consists of practical advice that one should follow in order to preserve the internal balance crucial to maintaining one’s own de. These principles of general moderation apply to daily activities such as, for example, eating and thinking: In eating, it is best not to fill up In thinking, it is best not to overdo Limit these to the appropriate degree And you will naturally reach it [vitality]67 xx.10–13

These principles also apply to breathing and emotion: Just let a balanced and aligned [breathing] fill your chest And it will swirl and blend within your mind, This confers longevity. When joy and anger are not limited, You should make a plan [to limit them] xxi.10–14

More generally, these principles can be applied to every part of the body: If people can be aligned and tranquil, their skin will be ample and smooth, Their ears and eyes will be acute and clear, Their muscles will be supple and their bones will be strong. xvi.1–4

As it is evident in these passages, despite their different origins from earth and sky, body and jing are not opposed to one another:

65

66 67

“When there is thought, there is knowledge, /But when there is knowledge, then you must stop./Whenever the forms of the mind have excessive knowledge, you lose your vitality.” See Nei-yeh viii, 10–13. “Chase away the excessive; abandon the trivial.” See Nei-yeh xvii, 5. On balanced food consumption, see also Nei-yeh, xxiii.1–7.

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As for the life of all human beings The heavens bring forth their vital essence, the earth brings forth their bodies These two combine to make a person xxi.1–4

Thus, wisdom consists in securing an overall sense of the balance that should be kept within the body, in order to make sure that both health and wisdom can flourish within the person. Achieving such a balance is the key to controlling everything else.68 In contrast, the lack of internal balance not only prevents wisdom,69 but in the end damages one’s health as well: “Without order, you will always be chaotic. If chaotic, you die.” (xiv.21–22) Within this framework, the sage is someone who manages to stay balanced and, as a consequence, to have an impact on what surrounds him: Those who can transform even a single thing, call them numinous Those who can alter even a single situation, call them “wise” But to transform without expending vital energy; to alter without expending wisdom: Only exemplary persons who hold fast to the One are able to do this. ix.1–4

The key feature in the sage is his stability: he “shifts with things but does not change place with them” (vii.7–9). His stability is the result of a stable mind. Of course, there is no detailed theory of the soul in the Nei-yeh as in Plato’s Republic (in which every function of the soul is governed by one specific part of the soul itself). What we find is merely an indication that the core of the human thought is non-linguistic—at the core of the mind, there is “an awareness that precedes words” (xix.14–15). If compared with the earlier sacrificial poems of the nineth to tenth centuries bce, the Nei-yeh reverses the relationship between human beings and gods. Instead of taking for granted a top-down relationship in which human beings are beneficiaries of the action of the gods, they can become gods themselves, in the sense that they can re-produce and preserve within themselves the divine nature of the jing.

68 69

See Nei-yeh x.1–9. See Nei-yeh xi.1–4.

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Conclusions

In terms of their ethical implications, Plato and the Nei-yeh could not be more different. While the Nei-yeh reads as a series of tips on how to preserve physical as well as mental health as a way to avoid death, in the Phaedo Plato describes Socrates’ death as the highest form of purification. While the Nei-yeh focuses on the training that an individual can undertake for himself/herself, Plato’s philosophy is oriented towards the creation of a (more or less ideal) community of like-minded people—ultimately implying in the Republic that the idea of justice can only materialize in the context of a just community. However, it is perhaps more interesting to identify the similarities between these two texts and to investigate their underlying tensions. First, both Plato and the Nei-yeh reject sacrifice as a way to establish a relationship between human beings and gods. Second, both Plato and the Nei-yeh present an alternative to sacrifice based upon a set of physical and metaphysical assumptions which can be fruitfully compared with one another. From a cosmological point of view, both texts take it for granted that there is an order in the world (kosmos), which is governed by forces referred to as the gods. Both texts take it for granted that this order can be understood if human beings become similar to the gods. In both cases, the reason why human beings can understand the order of the world is that there is something within them that is actually the same as what is in the skies and the stars. From an epistemological point of view, both texts assume that knowledge of something is only possible if there is some fundamental similarity. Third, in Plato’s Timaeus, the individual soul is conceived as a small part of the soul of the universe that was originally created through a mathematical process by the Demiurge. For the author of the Nei-yeh, the jing is a principle of life which is present both in the skies and in the sages. While Plato’s theory of the soul is very sophisticated (and at times problematic), and although there is no way it could be mapped onto the Chinese concepts of jing, the questions behind the concept of jing and behind the soul in Plato appear to be very similar. Indeed, as Aristotle makes clear in the first book of De anima, while collecting and criticizing the different views on the soul of early Greek philosophers, a soul is essentially two things, namely a principle of movement and a principle of perception.70 In other words, from the Aristotelian perspective, a soul is the answer to two questions: (1) ‘what allows both human and

70

Arist. deAn. 410b–411a.

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non-human beings to move, and therefore to be alive?’ and (2) ‘how does someone perceive (and therefore know) the world?’. Even though the opposition body/soul cannot per se be transferred to Chinese culture, these questions can be useful to conceptualize some of the characteristics of the jing, which is both a principle of life and what fills the chest of the sages. Why, then, does a similar set of assumptions end up yielding such different ethical implications? First, the definition of what counts as divine sets Plato and the Nei-yeh apart. In other words, the rational nature of Plato’s gods cannot be reconciled with the nature of Chinese religion. Plato’s gods are intrinsically good and would not be capable of evil actions. (It is precisely this, i.e., believing in the rational goodness of the gods,71 that leads Socrates in the Republic to censor and/or expel not only Hesiod, but also poets such as Homer and Aeschylus from the ideal city.)72 Plato’s strong drive towards mathematics prompts him to see numbers as the way to bridge the gap between individual souls and the Demiurge. Regardless of whether one decides to identify the Demiurge with nous or with the Idea of the Good itself, none of these principles appears to be similar to the Chinese counterpart in the Nei-yeh. Second, the mechanism of how self-divinization is supposed to operate is radically different. The Nei-yeh takes self-divinization to mean that one should reproduce within himself/herself the divine order of the world, by keeping all elements in a good balance. On the contrary, Plato assumes that becoming like the gods means imitating their own (rational) nature, and eventually even living ‘with them’ by getting rid as much as possible of non-rational elements within us. In the eyes of his contemporaries, Plato’s dialectics and theory of ideas were not enough to set him apart from all the other sophoi (‘sages’) who had been— and were still—teaching their own ways to ‘become divine’. Plato’s claims of self-divinization, as we have seen, take it for granted that a relationship with the divine can rely only on the Delphic principle that ‘the similar is by necessity dear to the similar’. Seen from this perspective, Plato looks less distant from Empedocles, whose doctrine explicitly contains the idea that different elements attract each other because of their similarity.73 From a modern point of view, one might object that comparing Plato to the Nei-yeh does not do justice to the father of Western philosophy. However, my

71 72 73

Pl. Resp. ii. 379b. Pl. Resp. ii. 380c–383c. Alain Martin and Oliver Primavesi define this as one of the “faits universellement admis” about Empedocles. See Alain Martin and Oliver Primavesi, L’Empédocle de Strasbourg (P.Strasb.gr.Inv.1665–1666). Introduction, édition and commentaire (Strasbourg: Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg: De Gruyter, 1999), 53–54.

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point is that comparative studies strengthen the conclusion that Plato’s celebrated rationalism grew up within his unorthodox religious thought; it is not the result of a long process that gradually substituted philosophy for religion. In fact, when Aristophanes was mocking Socrates in the Clouds, he presented him (paradoxically) as a sophist74—and there is every reason to believe that this is exactly how Socrates must have looked in the eyes of many of his contemporaries. In the same way, by comparing the Platonic dialogues with the Nei-yeh and finding how they both provided alternatives to their respective wisdom traditions, we are led to re-appreciate the often-neglected religious assumptions of Plato’s philosophy. Indeed, despite the dialectical core of his philosophy, to other Athenians he must have looked (and must have intended to look!) more like a (radical) religious thinker than the rationalist “child of the Enlightenment” that scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has so often presented to us. Ultimately, if there is any wisdom in interpreting Plato against the background of wisdom literature, then it is perhaps because this helps us to reverse our own received wisdom, and to look at familiar material through a different pair of eyes.

Acknowledgements For proofreading this study, I am indebted to the kindness of Prof. Byron Hamann (Ohio State University). For his precious help in handling the Chinese material, I am thankful to Prof. Michael Puett (Harvard University).

Bibliography Sources Bernhard Karlgren, trans., The Book of Odes: Chinese Text, Transcription and Translation. Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1950. Published originally in the Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 16 (1944) 171–256 and 17 (1945) 64–99. Laks, André and Glenn W. Most, eds. and trans. Early Greek Philosophy, vols. i–ix. Loeb Classical Library 524–532. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 2016. Rickett, Walter Allyn, trans. Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early China. 2 vols. Princeton [NJ]: Princeton University Press, 1985.

74

See for example Aristoph. Nub., 137–179 and 360.

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Roth, Harold D., ed. and trans. Original Tao: inward training (nei-yeh) and the foundations of Chinese mysticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Plato. Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Edited and translated by Christopher EmlynJones, William Preddy. Loeb Classical Library 36. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 2017. Plato. Laws, Volume i: Books 1–6; Volume ii: Books 7–12. Translated by R.G. Bury. Loeb Classical Library 187 and 192. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1926. Plato. Lysis. Symposium. Gorgias. Translated by W.R.M. Lamb. Loeb Classical Library 166. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1925. Plato. Republic, Volume i: Books 1–5; Volume ii: Books 6–10. Edited and translated by Christopher Emlyn-Jones, William Preddy. Loeb Classical Library 237 and 276. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 2013. Plato. Theaetetus. Sophist. Translated by Harold North Fowler. Loeb Classical Library 123. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1921.

Studies Boys-Stones, George R., and Johannes H. Haubold, eds. Plato and Hesiod, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, 1985. Dodds, Eric R. The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951. Graziani, Romain. Les Corps dans le taoïsme ancien. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2011. Hadot, Pierre. Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique. Paris: Institut d’Études augustiniennes, 1993. Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life. Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Edited with an introduction by Arnold I. Davidson. Translated by Michael Chase. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Hamayon, Roberte. La chasse à l’âme: esquisse d’une théorie du chamanisme sibérien, Nanterre: Société d’ethnologie, 1990. Harper, Donald. Early Chinese Medical Literature: the Mawangdui Medical Manuscripts. New York: Kegan Paul International, 1998. Kern, Martin. “Bronze Inscriptions, The Shijing and the Shangshu: the Evolution of the Ancestral Sacrifice during the Western Zhou.” In Early Chinese Religion, ed. John Lagerwey and Marc Kalinowski. Vol. 1, 2 vols., 143–200. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Klostergaard Petersen, Anders. “Plato’s Philosophy—Why Not Just Platonic Religion?” In Ancient Philosophy & Religion, Religio-Philosophical Discourses in the Mediterranean World: From Plato, through Jesus, to Late Antiquity, edited by Anders Klostergaard Petersen and George van Kooten, 9–36. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2017. Kirkland, Russell. “Neiye 內業 Inner Cultivation.” In The Encyclopedia of Taoism, ed. Fabrizio Pregadio, 771–773. London: Routledge, 2008.

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Lan, Haixia W. Aristotle and Confucius on Rhetoric and Truth: The Form and the Way. London: Routledge, 2017. Reviewed by Matylda Amat Obryk in Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews, 2017.11.62. Lavecchia, Salvatore. Una via che conduce al divino: la “homoiosis theo” nella filosofia di Platone. Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2006. Lagerwey, John, and Marc Kalinowski, eds. Early Chinese Religion. Vol. 1, 2 vols. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Lloyd, Geoffrey Ernest Richard. Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Science and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Martin, Alain, and Oliver Primavesi. L’Empédocle de Strasbourg (P.Strasb.gr.Inv.1665– 1666). Introduction, édition and commentaire. Strasbourg: Bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de Strasbourg: De Gruyter, 1999. Menn, Stephen. Plato on God as Nous. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995. Miller, Patrick L. Becoming God: Pure Reason in Early Greek Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2011. Morgan, Michael L. Plato and Greek Religion. In The Cambridge Companion to Plato, edited by Richard Kraut, 227–247. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Most, Glenn W. From logos to mythos. In From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought, edited by Richard Buxton, 25–48. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Most, Glenn W. Plato’s Hesiod: An acquired Taste? In Plato and Hesiod, edited by George R. Boys-Stones and Johannes H. Haubold, 52–67. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Mutschler, Fritz-Heiner, ed., The Homeric Epics and the Chinese Book of Songs: Foundational Texts Compared. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018. Pregadio, Fabrizio. Great Clarity: Daoism and Alchemy in Early Medieval China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pregadio, Fabrizio, ed. The Encyclopedia of Taoism. London: Routledge, 2008. Puett, Michael. To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice and Self- Divinization in Early China. Cambridge [MA]: Harvard University Press, Harvard University Asia Center, 2002. Puett, Michael. Constructions of Reality: Metaphysics in the Ritual Traditions of Classical China. In Chinese Metaphysics and its Problems, edited by Chenyang Li and Franklin Perkins, 120–129. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Roloff, Dietrich. Gottähnlichkeit, Vergöttlichung und Erhöhung zu seligem Leben. Untersuchungen zur Herkunft der platonischen Angleichung an Gott. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970. Rutenber, Culbert G. The Doctrine of the Imitation of God in Plato. Philadelphia: Vermont Printing Co., 1946.

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chapter 9

Textualizing Wonders: Ancient Greek Paradoxography in Comparative Perspective Kenneth W. Yu

The concentration of so much written material in the Library, which enabled Alexandrian scholars to make their vital contributions to the understanding of texts, distracted their minds from speculation and historical reflection, and turned them towards the collection and explanation of obscure events and phenomena.1

∵ 1

Introduction

Fraser’s provocative claims in the epigram exemplify his broader critique of the Alexandrian scholarly proclivity to collect enormous amounts of information with no apparent theoretical aim. In drawing a categorical distinction between the “distracting” activity of data-gathering and more systematic “historical reflection,” Fraser effectively dismisses ancient technical writings as devoid of intellectual thinking.2 Indeed, elsewhere in his magisterial study of Ptolemaic Alexandria, Fraser calls paradoxography—textual compendia of wonders and marvels—the “ascientific or antiscientific result of Aristotelian speculation.”3 This evaluation of paradoxography as decadent remains dominant in classical scholarship. A more recent critic, for instance, summarizes the common view 1 Peter Marshall Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 551. 2 Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 551, 771–774. Cf. Graham Zanker, Realism in Alexandrian Poetry: A Literature and its Audience (London: Sydney & Wolfeboro, 1987), 118; Romm calls paradoxography “pseudoscientific.” See James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 92 and 205. For a summary of the scholarly views: Klaus Geus and Colin King, “Paradoxography,” in Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World, eds. Paul Keyser and John Scarborough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 3–4. 3 Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, 770.

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of paradoxographical texts as “a symptom of decay, as a degeneration of the original, healthy spirit of curiosity and inquiry that was the hallmark of Ionian culture from Homer onwards to Herodotus.”4 This article examines ancient paradoxography, and the knowledge practices associated with the genre, with the aim to calling into question these pronouncements, which seem to misconstrue the logic of Hellenistic and Imperial Greek technical literature.5 I show how paradoxographers, in developing new perspectives and techniques for safeguarding and transmitting knowledge, transformed local wonders—natural anomalies, exotic customs, exceptional mythological lore, and descriptions of curious rituals that impinged on the limits of credibility—into scientific data that could subsequently be scrutinized, classified, transmitted, and variously refashioned in innumerable contexts.6 I trace a conceptual tension in a particular subset of paradoxa that bears on mythological or cultic phenomena: on the one hand, paradoxographers collect and classify myths and descriptions of cult to gain mastery over a sizable repository of local wonders; on the other hand, the descriptive language of the genre, as well as its conventions of reportage, often betray a pertinacious attraction on the part of paradoxographers to the marvels of local religious life. Along 4 Guido Schepens and Kris Delcroix, “Ancient Paradoxography: Origin, Evolution, Production and Reception,” in La letteratura di consume nel mondo greco-latino, eds. Oronzo Pecere and Antonio Stramaglia (Cassino: Università degli studi di Cassino, 1996), 378. 5 In addition to n. 2, useful surveys of paradoxography include Schepens and Delcroix, “Ancient Paradoxography”; Guido Schepens and Stefan Schorn, “Verkürzungen in und von Historiographie in klassicher und hellenistischer Zeit,” in Condensing Texts, Condensed Texts, eds. Marietta Horster and Christiane Reitz (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2010), 403–410; Maria Michela Sassi, “Mirabilia,” in Lo spazio letterario nella Grecia antica, i. La Produzione e la circolazione del testo, 2. L’Ellenismo, eds. Giuseppe Cambiano, Luciano Canfora, and Diego Lanza (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1993), 457–464; Lorraine Daston and Otta Wenskus, “Paradoxographoi,” in Der neue Pauly, vol. 9 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000). 6 Surviving titles point to interest in a range of marvels, although Pfeiffer rightly warns against extrapolating content from titles. See Rudolph Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 135. Some paradoxographers wrote in a more periegetic strain, e.g., Polemon of Ilium (fl. 177/6bce). See Mariachiara Angelucci, “Polemone di Ilio: Fra riconstruzione biographifa e interessi antiquari,” sco 49 (2003): 165–184. Philostephanus of Cyrene, Isogonus of Nicaea, and Agathosthenes treated primarily aquatic paradoxa; Archelaus and Philon of Heracleia (third century bce) animals and zoological curiosities; Bolus of Mende (third century bce) plants; and Ptolemaeus Chennus and Myrsilus (third c. bce) paradoxa of an ethnographic and historical nature, as evidenced by the latter’s ἱστορικὰ παράδοξα and a local history on marvels on Lesbos (τὰ Λεσβιακὰ). On Ptolemaeus Chennus, see Martin Hose, “Ptolemaios Chennos und das Problem der Schwindelliteratur,” in In Pursuit of Wissenschaft: Festschrift für William M. Calder iii zum 75. Geburtstag, eds. Stephan Heilen et al. (Zurich: Georg Olms Verlag Hildesheim, 2008), 177–196.

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the way, I show how Greek paradoxography leaves traces of the textualizing process by means of which religious lifeworlds were translated into paradoxographical discourse—that is, how paradoxography took shape as a new way of writing and conceptualizing the more sensational aspects of Greek religious life in the postclassical era.7 I analyze the textual strategies by which oral narratives, traditionally embedded in complex social and religious contexts, came to be retheorized as technical knowledge in compendia of wonders. Representative examples from the pseudo-Aristotelian On Marvelous Things Heard will be examined to draw out the generic conventions and operative logic of paradoxography and to demonstrate how local traditions—understood as a form of collective wisdom—were reconfigured in technical discourse.8 The stress that I lay on myth as traditional wisdom builds on Geoffrey Lloyd’s view that although Myth does not, in any case, normally attempt to give the kind of direct answers to questions that ordinary practical experience is used to and demands … [they] provide some imperfect means of responding, in various ways, to various manifestations of the apparently intractable or refractory in experience.9 More recently, Esther Eidinow explicitly has defined Greek mythological narratives as vehicles of wisdom: They are practical, they provoke action, and they shape our perception of the world … Even though they may often describe the activity of the gods and monsters, many myths are, fundamentally, concerned with the affairs of men, and intricately related to the practical aspects of the material world.10 7 8

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On religious aspects of paradoxography, especially in Phlegon, see Manuel García Teijeiro and Maria Teresa Molinos Tejada, “Paradoxographie et religion,” Kernos 7 (1994), 273–285. On theoretical issues related to marvels and knowledge, see Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991). Geoffrey Ernest Richard Lloyd, The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practices of Ancient Greek Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 5–6. Cf. Esther Eidinow, “Telling Stories: Exploring the relationship between myths and ecological wisdom,”Landscape and Urban Planning 155 (2016), 49. Richard Buxton, The Complete World of Greek Mythology (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 18. On Greek myth and wisdom: Barbara Kowalzig, Singing for the Gods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 25. In the Chinese context, see Rémi Mathieu, Étude sur la mythologie et l’ethnologie de la Chine ancienne (Paris: Institut des hautes etudes chinoises, 1983), xxxiii, li–lii.

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Admittedly, not all sources of Greek paradoxography derive from ancient popular mythological traditions, for example, those that engage Aristotelian natural and biological research. However, there are at least two points to be highlighted in this respect: first, paradoxographers found traditional myths to be a rich source to mine wonders. Second, in harnessing both popular mythological tradition and scientific texts, paradoxographers blurred the distinction between myth discourse and scientific discourse, subordinating both modalities to the broader category of the marvelous. While Gaston Basile’s article in this volume focuses on the re-elaboration or rejection of poetic wisdom traditions among early prose writers such as Hecataeus and the logographoi, I argue that Hellenistic and Imperial Greek paradoxographers, despite their Aristotelian aims and sensibilities, are at pains to recuperate a sense of wonder in their endeavors.11 Marvels (as Aristotle conceived of them) disrupt normative conceptions of the natural order, engender epistemic quandaries, and prompt philosophical speculation on their causes. Ancient paradoxographers take up the Aristotelian imperative to gather as many marvelous phenomena as possible, but they abandon the pursuit of their causes.12 Thus pseudo-Antigonus, in a well-known passage from ἱστοριῶν παραδόξων συναγωγὴ defines paradoxography in contradistinction to Aristotle’s concerted efforts to rationalize wonders: Aristotle exposes other similar things, showing the greatest scrupulousness in most of these cases, and by recognizing their explanation as a central and not secondary function. All the books on this subject amount to about 70; it happens that they are more concerned with the explanation than with the exposition of each fact. For our collection it suffices to mention in brief, among the things said by him before, what they have of the strange and exceptional (τὸ ξένον καὶ παράδοξον).13

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See Gaston J. Basile, “In the Wake of Wisdom,” in this volume. A key discussion is Albert Henrichs, “Demythologizing the Past, Mythicizing the Present,” in From Myth to Reason? ed. Richard Buxton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 223– 248. Αριστοτέλης … πάνυ πολλὴν ἐπιμέλειαν πεποιημένος ἐν τοῖς πλείστοις αὐτῶν καὶ οἶον ἔργῳ, οὐ παρέργῳ χρώμενος τῇ περὶ τούτων ἐξηγήσει. τὰ γοῦν πάντα σχεδὸν ἑβδομήκοντα περὶ αὐτῶν καταβέβληται βιβλία, καὶ πεπείραται ἐξηγητικώτερον ἤ ἱστορικώτερον ἐν ἑκάστοις ἀναστρέφεσθαι. πρὸς τὴν ἡμετέραν ἐκλογὴν ἐκποιεῖ ⟨τῶν⟩ προῃρημένων αὐτῷ τὸ ξένον καὶ παράδοξον ἔκ τε τούτων καὶ τῶν ἄλλων ἐπιδραμεῖν. See Alessandro Giannini, Paradoxographorum Graecorum reliquiae, (Milano: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1967), 60; emphasis added.

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Whereas Aristotle values wonders of the natural world for their capacity to galvanize philosophers into action, pseudo-Antigonus understands the chief task of paradoxography to be the recounting of the most sensational marvels. Contrary to the Aristotelians, then, paradoxographers eschew causal explanations, preferring to represent phenomena in terms of their extraordinariness and the sensations of wonder they elicit. Guido Schepens insightfully notes that: The items excerpted from his [sc. the paradoxographer] sources are not a mere copy of the original but constitute a new record … essentially a negative process by which the paradoxographer is undoing the work done by the scientist or the historian.14 What precisely paradoxographers intend to “undo,” by what means this is achieved, and for what purposes, are some of the questions that motivate my inquiry. It should be conceded that the fragmentary nature of extant paradoxography—much of it derived from later testimonia—hampers our ability to envisage the original and subsequent circumstances and audiences of these texts. As a way to mitigate these challenges, and to put into high relief the specific status of anomalies in ancient Greek paradoxography, I will marshal as comparative evidence the Chinese Shan hai jing (late fourth c. bce–second c. ce). Interrogating the similarities and disanalogies between different wonder traditions can help us delineate the salient aspects of Greek paradoxography and shed light on our modern interpretive blind spots. Other comparanda could surely be enlisted with equal profit, but my circumscribed comparison is animated by two premises: the notable stylistic parallels of Greek paradoxography and the ancient Chinese comparandum, as well as the contrastive political contexts in which these wonder traditions emerged and flourished.

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Schepens and Delcroix, “Ancient Paradoxography,” 394. Similarly, Callebat affirms “Le glissement était facile de la curiosité scientifique à la simple curiosité des mirabilia (The shift was easy from scientific curiosity to simple curiosity about mirabilia was easy).” See Louis Callebat, “Science et Irrationnel—Les mirabilia aquarum,” Euphrosyne 16 (1988), 158.

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The Contours of Greek Paradoxography

The proliferation of paradoxographical writing and its subsequent crystallization into a distinct genre in the postclassical period resulted partly from the establishment of centralized libraries in the Greek-speaking world as well as innovations in scribal technologies and textual transmission. These knowledge practices and scholarly spaces facilitated the acquisition and study of travel reports and scientific and historical texts that included descriptions of numerous natural and cultural oddities from across the Mediterranean and beyond. It should be recalled that the umbrella term “paradoxography” is a postclassical invention, coined by the poet and grammarian Tzetzes in the twelfth century, although its constitutive elements—a preoccupation with the fantastic and its relation to topography—have antecedents in preexisting poetic and historic genres, as the essay by Basile in this volume demonstrates.15 Yet, paradoxography developed into a separate branch of ancient technical literature in the early Hellenistic period with the production of textual collections that focused exclusively on marvels (in contrast to large-scale historical narratives that displayed clear but intermittent interest in marvels). The quest for wonders was also stimulated in part by the large-scale political expansion by which citystates became enmeshed in, and defined by, networks of empire.16 That is, the enlarging of sociopolitical frontiers arising from Alexander’s conquests multiplied the materials to be studied, especially of the non-Greek world, but it also seemed, paradoxically, to rekindle interest in local Greek curiosa and cus-

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On thaumata in Homer, see Maria Michela Sassi, “Mirabilia,” 451; and Lawrence Kim, Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). On thaumata in Herodotus, see Jessica Priestly, Herodotus and Hellenistic Culture: Literary Studies in the Reception of the Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 51–108; Christine Hunzinger, “La notion de θῶμα chez Hérodote,” Ktèma 20 (1995), 47–70; Rosaria Vignolo Munson, Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the Work of Herodotus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 232–265; Hannelore Barth, “Zur Bewertung und Auswahl des Stoffes durch Herodot (Die Begriffe θῶμα, θωμάζω, θωμάσιος, und θωμαστός),” Klio 50 (1968), 93–110; Romm, Edges of the Earth; and J. Redfield, “Herodotus the Tourist,” cp 80 (1985), 97–118. Schepens and Delcroix state: “The emergence, at the beginning of the Hellenistic period, of writings with the title Περὶ θαυμασίων is testimony to some ‘singularization’ of this feature [sc. interest in the marvelous] of Greek culture.” See Schepens and Delcroix, “Ancient Paradoxography,” 380. Sassi is of the same opinion: Maria Michela Sassi, “Mirabilia,” 457. On archaic and classical precursors to the genre, see Alessandro Giannini, “Studi sulla paradossografia greca. Da Omero a Callimaco: motivi e forme del meraviglioso,” Rendiconti dell’Istituto Lombardo 97 (1963), 247–266. John Ma, “Peer Polity Interaction in the Hellenistic Age,” Past & Present 180 (2003), 9–39.

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toms.17 Soldiers and scholars alike enjoyed royal patronage from such figures as Ptolemy i, who financed the collection of books at the Museum and Library at Alexandria.18 Agatharchides tells us, in fact, that Ptolemy ii had a fascination with exotic animals and desired to collect and examine the most extraordinary species (ἀθεωρήτους καὶ παραδόξους).19 Hellenistic and Imperial Greek paradoxography often frames wonders in indirect discourse, betraying the secondhand nature of the compiler’s relation to marvels.20 Collectors of wonders probably consulted informants and scholars who conducted on-site research or else read their works in archives at major intellectual centers such as Athens and Alexandria. In general, then, claims to autopsy in paradoxography might reasonably be treated as a rhetorical trope and need not imply first-hand observation of the marvels described. Paradoxographical texts may have functioned as teaching notes for Aristotle and his students or as resources that aided Hellenistic poets in the composi-

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See Georgia Irby, “Mapping the World: Greek Initiatives from Homer to Eratosthenes,” in Ancient Perspectives: Maps and Their Place in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome, ed. Richard J.A. Talbert (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 96–104; Emilio Gabba, “True History and False History in Classical Antiquity,” Journal of Roman Studies 71 (1981), 53; and D.W. Roller, Ancient Geography: The Discovery of the World in Classical Greece and Rome (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 105–120. Kathryn Stevens argues that early Hellenistic scholars—particularly Aristotle and Theophrastus—developed greater sensitivity to notions of space following Alexander’s imperial expansion. See Kathryn Stevens, “From Herodotus to a ‘Hellenistic’ World? The Eastern Geographies of Aristotle and Theophrastus,” in New Worlds from Old Texts: Revisiting Ancient Space and Place, eds. Elton Barker et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 144. Gabba, stresses this period’s increased interest in the cultural: “The widening of geographical and cultural horizons which followed the Asiatic conquests of Alexander produced a profound shift in cultural interest, not least because new levels of society were now involved in political and historical processes.” See “True History,” 52. Oswyn Murray concurs: “During and immediately after the periods of expansion there is a new awareness, a new flexibility of response, to the variety of human cultures.” See Oswyn Murray, “Herodotus and Hellenistic Culture,” Classical Quarterly 22, no. 2 (1972), 201. One ought to be chary of facile analogies of these texts to the collecting habits of Hellenistic rulers but note the ostentatious exhibiting of the sculptures of first-rate artists, textiles, spolia, and other extravagant furnishings in Hellenistic courts, for which see Herodas (e.g., Mimiamb 4) and Theocritus (e.g., Idyll 15). See also Ann Kuttner, “Hellenistic Court Collecting from Alexandros to the Attalids,” in Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World, eds. Maia Gahtan and Donatella Pegazzano (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 45–53; Schepens and Delcroix, “Ancient Paradoxography,” 404–407; and Jeremy Tanner, The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society and Artistic Rationalisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 221–229. F 80b = Diod. 3.36.3–4. Cf. Diod. 37.7; Athen. v.201a–b. Note recurrent verbs such as ἱστορεῖ, λέγεται, and μυθεύουσι.

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tion of erudite etiological poetry such as Callimachus’ Aetia.21 Leonid Zhmud argues, by contrast, that they constituted remnants of massive historical projects that were initiated but never completed at the end of Aristotle’s life.22 To be sure, paradoxography constitutes a heterogeneous genre whose contents were exploited for various poetic and scholarly purposes. However, the communis opinio that these texts are incomplete, unpolished, or subservient to the objectives of other genres obfuscates their particular logic and their contributions to the history of knowledge in Greek antiquity.

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On Marvelous Things Heard

On Marvelous Things Heard was transmitted in the corpus Aristotelicum and associated with the philosopher since Athenaeus.23 The text inventories over 170 natural, historical, mythological, meteorological, and ethnographic oddities from the Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds, including Babylonia, India, Cappadocia, Iapygia, Egypt, Byzantium, and Syria. Although On Marvelous Things Heard contains excerpts from genuine Aristotelian texts, it is more precisely a Peripatetic product that began as epitomes of passages from texts of Aristotle, Theophrastus, Timaeus and others, but was continuously augmented and reshaped by anonymous hands from the third century bce to the early third century ce.24 A handful of passages enumerates in remarkable detail 21

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On Hellenistic poetry and the Alexandrian Library, see Peter Bing, The Well-Read Muse: Present and Past in Callimachus and the Hellenistic Poets (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 37–48. Leonid Zhmud, The Origin of the History of Science in Classical Antiquity (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006), 125–126, 133–140. See also Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamental of the History of His Development (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), 334 ff. The text is not mentioned in the list of Aristotelian works by Diogenes Laertius. Its authenticity has been debated since Scaliger, who argued for its genuineness, while Estienne in his 1557 edition of Aristotle and Theophrastus held the opposite view (though he confirms genuine sections). Mommsen posited Solinus as the author, while Keller advanced Trophilos. Rose, by contrast, maintains that the collection circulated in antiquity as an anthology of notes belonging to Aristotle, Timaeus, and Theopompus whose title originally was “Collectio mirabilium Aristotelis et Timaei et Theopompi” but which in transmission was truncated to “Collectio mirabilium Aristotelis.” See Gabriella Vanotti, Aristotele. Racconti meravigliosi (Milano: Bompiani, 2007), 9–10. The first fifteen entries echo Ar. ha (e.g., viii 28 606b9–13) with their focus on snakes (e.g., 23, 24, 141, 142, 149, 151). Only six entries disclose their source: two in the biological section (37, 38), the rest in the ethnographic section (112, 132, 134, 130). On lack of citation in this collection, see Geus and King, “Paradoxography,” 6–7. There is a loose structure to the work: 1–77, 137–151, and 114–129 deal with natural phenomena; 78–136 (save 115–

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legendary events tied to the inscriptions, statues, and temples of the gods, reminiscent of certain descriptions of local Greek religion from the Periegesis of Pausanias.25 Other entries feature iron-eating mice on Cyprus, hedgehogs that could survive without food for lengthy periods of time, and sulfuric lakes that boil and overflow. Hellenistic and Imperial Greek paradoxographers did not yet differentiate between mirabilia and miracula—that is, extraordinary natural phenomena of the everyday world and anomalies perceived to be divinely inspired. The texts under consideration subject both types of phenomena to similar epistemic criteria and explanatory methods.26 With these preliminary observations in mind, I begin with entry 82: In Sicily in the neighborhood of the place called Enna there is said (λέγεται) to be a cave, around which is an abundance (πλῆθος) of flowers at every season (ἀνὰ πᾶσαν ὥραν) of the year, and particularly that an immense (ἀπέραντόν) space is covered with violets, which fill the neighboring area with sweet scent (εὐωδίας), so that hunters cannot track the hares, because the dogs are overcome (κρατουμένων) by the scent. Through this cave there is an invisible (ἀσυμφανής) underground (ὑπόνομος) passage, by which they say (φασι) Pluto carried off Core. In this place, they say (φασιν), wheat is found resembling neither the native sorts, which people use, nor other kinds that are imported, but possessed of a certain great peculiarity (ἰδιότητά τινα μεγάλην). And this they use to prove (σημειοῦνται) that the wheat-fruit appeared first among them; whence also they lay claim (ἀντιποιοῦνται) to Demeter, deeming that the goddess was born among them.27

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129) with historical-mythological material; and 152–178 with rivers and fountains, some of which are replicated in the pseudo-Plutarchan De fluviis. Anton Westermann claims that entries 33–151 belong to the earliest stratum. See Anton Westermann, Paradoxographi scriptores rerum mirabilium Graeci. (Braunschweig: n.p., 1839). Flashar posits that 152–178 are later additions. See Hellmut Flashar, Aristoteles. Mirabilia, vol. 18 (Berlin: AkademieVerlag Berlin, 1990). E.g., cloaks used in sacred festivals (96); sculpture of Athena (155); statue of a golden bull in the temple of Artemis (175). See Harold Remus, Pagan-Christian Conflict over Miracles in the Second Century (Cambridge [MA]: The Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, 1983) and George Williamson, “Mucianus and a Touch of the Miraculous: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Roman Asia Minor,” in Pilgrimage in Graeco-Roman and Early Christian Antiquity: Seeing the Gods, eds. Jaś Elsner and Ian Rutherford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 244–245. Cf. Diodoros 5, 3, 2 and Cic. Verr. 4, 48, 106–107. Scholars detect Timaeus (FGrH 566 F164) as the original source. Unless otherwise stated, the Greek text is taken from Alessandro Giannini, Paradoxographorum Graecorum reliquiae (Milano: Istituto Editoriale Italiano,

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This descriptive passage directs the reader’s attention to a curious cave distinguished by a profusion of flowers and the overwhelmingly sweet scent they emit. This is where Hades supposedly seized Persephone, a mythological event memorialized in local and panhellenic traditions.28 Interestingly, the paradoxographer prefers to highlight the miraculous flowers, geological details about the cave, and the peculiar local wheat linked to the myth of Persephone rather than the mythological narrative about her abduction, a clear instance of how paradoxographical discourse mobilizes but ultimately diverges from conventional discourses of myth. Still other marvels were associated with the site: not only did wheat first appear here, but a particular kind unlike any other (οὔκ ὁμοίους) whose marvelous properties (ἰδιότητά μεγάλην) the text does not disclose. The accumulation of marvels leads to the denouement, the birth of Demeter in Enna, but the emphatic ἀντιποιοῦνται introducing the claim intimates possible dissent as to its factuality.29 Similarly, the verb σημειοῦνται in the previous line picks up on this evidentiary language, which provides proof indicating possible contestation between rival paradoxographers and competing experts.30 In fact, the repeated speech verbs preceding each wonder convey a careful distancing from truth claims on the part of the compiler; he merely reports accounts and has no personal stake in adjudicating their veracity or cause. This passage inscribes multiple, overlapping thaumata onto a numinous site in Magna Graecia. It highlights eccentric phenomena that depart from the natural order or expected patterns of behavior, as for instance dogs that become debilitated by the fragrance of flowers. These flowers are no less marvelous, for they persist year-round against the natural cycle of the seasons. The description also encompasses other plants with remarkable properties as well as subterranean sites of divine activity. Finally, it includes phenomena of a wholly mythological sort, as in the evocation of narratives about Persephone, Demeter, and Pluto. This datum illustrates the formal characteristics of paradoxography: concision; ellipticism; an orientation toward the topographical; the elision of source material; and the intertwining of observable phenomena with those entirely

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1967). English translation by Jonathan Barnes, The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984) with modifications. The myth as it relates to Enna: Giuseppe Martorana, “Kore e il prato sempre fiorito di Enna,” Kokalos 28–29 (1982–1983): 113–122. On the eristic quality of paradoxography: Schepens and Delcroix, “Ancient Paradoxography,” 386–387. See the Thucydidean resonances of semeia at 1.20–22, with Simon Hornblower, Thucydides (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 100–107.

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invisible and existing only in myth or by word of mouth. The collection tends to adopt a synchronic view, complicating our ability to tease out the occasions, participants, narrators, and audiences of each marvel. It is unclear if individual entries in these lists of wonders responded to specific scholastic problems, but one can easily imagine how the passage above, for instance, might have addressed questions as to how Enna acquired sacred status. In a sense, paradoxography inverts the problemata mode, in that it does not depart from an explicit causal question (problema) followed by solutions (luseis). Instead, it prioritizes description, in keeping with the above-cited passage from pseudoAntigonus in which paradoxography is said to subordinate the analytic aims of Aristotelian methodology to the enchanting qualities of marvels. In addition to mythological wonders, On Marvelous Things Heard also takes a keen interest in local rituals. Entry 57, for example, records an oath ritual in Sicily, widely discussed in antiquity:31 There is a spring among the Palici in Sicily, about as large as the space ten couches would occupy; this throws up water to the height of six cubits, so that it is thought by those that see it (ὑπὸ τῶν ἰδόντων) that the whole place is inundated; and it falls back again to its original state. There is also a form of oath, which is regarded as very sacred there (αὐτόθι); for a man writes down the oath he takes on a small tablet and casts it into the water. If he swears truly, the tablet floats. If he swears falsely, they say that (φασι) the tablet grows heavy and disappears, and the man is burned. So the priest takes security from him that someone shall purify the temple. As in the previous example, this passage focuses on the natural marvels that mark a site of religious significance, in this case a spring and geyser whose dynamics and measurements are scrupulously described. The trope of autopsia is thematized here by the mention of τῶν ἰδόντων and the deictic αὐτόθι in the following line.32 The passage does not explain the etiology of the oath ritual but is more preoccupied with recounting the dramatic procedure by which a person’s truthfulness is put to a divine test.33 It is important to consider the

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See Serv. ad Aen. 9.581, Diod. Sic. 11.89.2, Macrob. Sat. 5.19.16–31, Strabo 6.2.9, Callius (FGrH 564 F1), and Polemon (FGrH 140 F83). See with Nicola Cusumano, Ordalia e soteria nella Sicilia antica. I Palici (Palermo: Istituto di Storia Antica, 1990), 27–96. Note the self-conscious use of semeion in entries 50 and 105. On the intertwined notions of water and justice embodied in figures like Nereus, see Mar-

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almost complete absence, here and elsewhere in the text, of any famous protagonist, divine or mortal. To a large degree, paradoxography differs from traditional mythopoetic discourse in the way it eschews stories about the exploits of the gods or heroes, emphasizing the astonishing natural elements and marvelous occurrences related to landmarks instead. We have observed elsewhere that paradoxographers often highlighted the wondrous characteristics and bewildering behaviors of animals. Entry 79, for instance, describes the astounding comportment of birds that dwell on the eponymous island of the hero Diomedes: They say (φασὶν) that in the island of Diomedeia in the Adriatic there is a remarkable (θαυμαστόν) and sacred (ἅγιον) shrine of Diomedes, and that large (μεγάλους) birds sit around this shrine in a circle, having large (μεγάλα) and hard beaks. They say, moreover, that if ever Greeks disembark on the spot they [i.e. the birds] keep quiet, but if any of the barbarians that dwell nearby land there, they rise, and wheeling round, attack their heads and kill them by wounding them with their bills. As the legend goes (μυθεύεται), these birds are descended from the companions of Diomedes, who were wrecked near the island, when Diomedes was treacherously murdered by Aeneas, the king of those parts at the time.34 The description begins with the marvelous (θαυμαστόν) shrine of Diomedes before turning to the unexpected size (μεγάλους, μεγάλα) and remarkable behavior of the birds assumed to descend from Diomedes’ comrades and now protectors of the shrine. Such myths elaborating the foundation of the shrine of Diomedes intensified the site’s prestige and perhaps promoted tourism among those eager to inspect such marvels for themselves. Of considerable importance is the politicized dimension of the account, namely that the birds attack not Greeks but barbarians. One wonders for what purpose this claim was included, among whom it circulated, and whether there was social tension between locals and non-locals in the communities that perpetuated this ver-

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cel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 56. Cf. Strabo 6.3.9; Timaeus (FGrH 566 F53); Lycus of Rhegium (FGrH 570 F3); Lycoph. Alex. 592–602; Ov. Met. 14, 509; and Ael. na 1,1. Some scholars, such as Giannini, substitute Dauno for Aeneas as there is no comparanda that Aeneas was ever in Diomedeia or its environs or that he killed Diomedes.

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sion of the story. It is helpful to compare this datum to a passage in Aelian’s Characteristics of Animals (1.1), which recapitulates the legend of Diomedeia but downplays the political aspects: There is a certain island called Diomedeia, home of many shearwaters. These, it is said, neither harm the barbarians nor go near them [emphasis added]. If, however, a stranger from Greece puts into port, the birds by some divine dispensation approach, extending their wings as though they were hands, to welcome and embrace the strangers. And if the Greeks stroke them, they do not fly away, but stay still and allow themselves to be touched; and if the men sit down, the birds fly on to their lap as though they had been invited to a meal. They are said to be the companions of Diomedes and to have taken part with him in the war against Ilium; though their original form was afterwards changed into that of birds, they nevertheless still preserve their Greek nature and their love of Greece. Aelian relates a somewhat different account than the pseudo-Aristotelian text. Unlike pseudo-Aristotle, who claims that the birds attack foreigners who approach, Aelian describes them as rather indifferent to them, minimizing their aggressiveness toward non-Greeks. Though he emphasizes the camaraderie that these birds share with Greeks in particular, he minimizes the difference in treatment of locals and foreigners. One supposes that both versions circulated in antiquity, evincing the polyvalence of paradoxography. It is not easy to decide whether both versions reworked the same “source” text, or if they excerpted distinct versions from separate sources. However this may be, one senses that paradoxography was not an inert genre but could shape local discourses and the religious perceptions of communities by highlighting significant and often polemical details about local wonders. This passage confounds mythic and historic time, deploying the method of historical derivation—either from myth or from remote history—to trace the etiology of practices and institutions that endured into the then-contemporary world. The compiler evidently takes for granted a temporal continuum between heroic and present time and exploits assumptions about the perennial nature of Greek religious and social institutions in order to sustain and trigger “memory regimes” (to borrow a phrase by Geoffrey Bowker).35 What is

35

Geoffrey C. Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences (Cambridge [MA]: mit Press, 2005), 9.

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paramount, however, is that paradoxographers agreed to disagree about the same marvels, thus tacitly legitimizing certain localities and their attendant phenomena as worthy of record and continued debate. As usual, the passage does not postulate causal clarifications to explain away the marvels of myth and ritual; the crux of paradoxography is not to explicate but to showcase the most marvelous Greek and foreign phenomena. The last entry that I wish to examine (101) in this compendium is instructive for its self-reflective commentary about the aims of the collection as a whole: In one of the seven islands called those of Aeolus, which is known as Lipara, runs a legend (μυθολογοῦσι) that there is a tomb, about which they tell (λέγουσι) many marvels (πολλὰ τερατώδη). Among other things they agree (συμφωνοῦσιν) that it is not safe to approach that place at night, for from it are distinctly heard the sound of drums and cymbals and laughter along with noise and the rattle of castanets. But they state that a still more prodigious event (τι τερατωδέστερον) occurred with regard to the cave; for a certain man once under the influence of wine fell asleep in it before dawn, and continued to be sought for by his servants for three days; and on the fourth he was found, and taken away for dead by the servants and put into his own tomb. After receiving all the usual rites he suddenly arose and recounted everything that had happened to him. This strikes us as more like a legend (μυθωδέστερον); but at the same time, one must not pass over it unmentioned when making a record of circumstances (ἀναγραφὴν) connected with that place (τὸν τόπον ἐκεῖνον).36 The emphatic comparative adjectives τερατωδέστερον and μυθωδέστερον, and the explicit reference to πολλὰ τερατώδη, evince a high degree of generic selfreflection apropos of the primary aim of paradoxography: not to dispel wonders or to submit truth claims but to engage perceptions of the incredible.37 The passage singles out two spectacular features of Lipara. First, the island appears to be the site of a mystery cult or night rituals. The verb introducing the prescription against trespassing (συμφωνοῦσιν) indicates that paradoxographers could endorse or reject the veracity of descriptions of marvels. Second,

36 37

In Aristoteles, Flashar, attributes this comment to Aristotle or Timaeus, who makes similar remarks (FGrH 566 F57). Gabba states: “Its [sc. paradoxographical literature] concern was not to distinguish the true from the false or to establish the cause, but to provide lively and highly-coloured pictures of milieus and situations, whose historicity was already accepted.” See Gabba, “True History”, 54.

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we are told about the even more incredible (τερατωδέστερον) story of an individual who lost consciousness in a cave on the island and woke up days later. Later in the text, the paradoxographer provides a rare programmatic statement about the importance of recording such stories, even if incredible at first sight. What is most striking is how the text expressly theorizes its epistemological stance in relation to wonders. That is, in contrast to local discourses that regard wonders as credible and sacred, the text calls itself an ἀναγραφὴν, a technical term that denotes a treatise, record, or inscription. In other words, the text distinguishes paradoxographical descriptions and wonders as locally meaningful realia. Whereas the latter are ephemera of ever-changing local discourses, and thus difficult to pin down, On Marvelous Things Heard—orthogonal to firsthand experience—aims to textualize and stabilize such traditions.

4

Anomalies and the Construction of Knowledge in Greek Paradoxography

Having examined representative examples of paradoxography, I will now address the logic of the genre through interlocking questions: How were descriptions of marvels generated in terms of research and text production? Are paradoxographers recipients of marvels or co-constructors of complex economies of wonder and enchantment? In what follows, I suggest that the knowledge practices constituting paradoxography actively transform marvels—understood in their original local contexts as real phenomena that inspire awe and reverence—into discursive objects construed by human perception and discernment. Paradoxography stems from learned and popular interest in anomalies— natural marvels and idiosyncratic customs tied to specific lieux de memoire, that is, landmarks vested with cultural significance.38 As much as we would like to uncover the networks of meaning and politics that gave rise to ancient Greek wonder compendia, the lack of clarity about their material and social contexts, patrons and producers, and audiences and their responses all defy

38

For a history and discussion of the term, see Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992). See also Christian Jacob, who suggests that geographically oriented texts, including paradoxography, reinforce a community’s self-understanding about its own cultural and religious priorities. Christian Jacob, “The Greek Traveler’s Areas of Knowledge: Myths and Other Discourses in Pausanias’ Description of Greece,” Yale French Studies (1980), 65–85, and Géographie et ethnographie en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Armand Colin, 1991), 141.

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efforts at ferreting them out. One ought therefore to proceed cautiously in drawing inferences about macro-sociopolitical contexts from the paradoxographical evidence. Certainly, the less we know about the authorship of a text, its circumstances of composition, and readership and reception—and the more technical and formulaic the genre—the more prudence we should exercise in this regard. I turn, therefore, to formal aspects of language and to practices of textuality involved in paradoxography to illuminate some of its governing principles. In my view, descriptions of wonder in paradoxography are mediated by context-specific rules of language and modes of description that complicate the reconstruction of the historical actualities that allegedly underlie these discourses. Simultaneously, these conventions shine considerable light on the discursive practices that were integral to ancient reflection on religious life. The texts under examination depict anomalies following specific generic conventions, a fact that evinces awareness on the part of paradoxographers that representations of wonder and their corresponding realia do not match perfectly. Paradoxographers, whose interests diverge from those of locals who believe their wonders to be true and unique, select particular Realien to decontextualize and to typologize as anomalies. They construct a general category of the wondrous based on selectively observed characteristics of otherwise singular phenomena, thus reducing their overall complexity. Paradoxography transforms thaumata into standard units of knowledge and, in doing so, strips them of the particularity they enjoyed in their original contexts. What is gained in the process, however, is the scholarly capacity to stabilize and to comprehend these phenomena across time and space. I quote the apposite words of Jack Goody: When an utterance is put in writing it can be inspected in much greater detail, in its parts as well as in its whole, backwards as well as forwards, out of context as well as in its setting; in other words, it can be subjected to a quite different type of scrutiny and critique than is possible with purely verbal communication. Speech is no longer tied to an ‘occasion’; it becomes timeless. Nor is it attached to a person; on paper, it becomes more abstract, more depersonalized.39 The potentials and pitfalls of the textual practices to which Goody alludes resonate with the ways in which Greek paradoxographers harnessed organiz39

Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 44.

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ing principles to order heterogeneous folkloric traditions that they deemed important to extract, preserve, and transmit. In a sense, then, we are witness to normative practices of selection and textuality that convert local wisdom traditions, previously ethereal and mutable, into stable and intransigent data to be exploited. These texts yield precious historical information, not only indicating what paradoxa ancients found remarkable, but also the theoretical mechanisms by which particular wonders were ordered into an abstract type—the construction of paradoxographical knowledge, as it were. If we dig a little deeper, we notice that the conceptual sense-making apparatus of ancient paradoxography may well reflect more widespread local discourses about marvels. That is, ancient concept-formation activities are not free-floating but ultimately derive from irreducibly rich pre-theoretical oral narratives embedded in actual social and religious life. This is to modify Roland Barthes’ view that metalanguage, in contrast to literary language, is “necessarily artificial.”40 According to my reading, On Marvelous Things Heard reveal varieties of meaningful “folk typifications” that reflect, but then reconfigure, everyday ways of talking about marvels.41 Stated differently, living local discourses about anomalies are preconditions for their subsequent elaborations in paradoxographical writing (through the mediation of historical and scientific texts).42 If the technical language of paradoxography partly arises from the common language of social life, then paradoxography captures and reproduces (while also reworking) the elements and priorities of local discourses about wonders. The scholarly act of cataloging wonders reconfigures their local meanings. And yet they preserve (and metabolize) traces of local discourses about ancient myth and cult.

40 41 42

Roland Barthes, “Literature and Metalanguage,” in Critical Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 97. John C. McKinney, “Typification, Typologies, and Sociological Theory,” Social Forces 48 (1969), 2. Gabba states that “The materials of which paradoxographies were composed derive for the most part from local histories. The principal aim of these was to note and record the peculiarities and characteristic features of particular places and individuals.” See Gabba, “True History,” 60. The effects of classification is expressed succinctly by P. Bourdieu: “To ask what objectification is means asking about the ethnologist’s very work, which, in the fashion of the first legislators, codifies, by the mere fact of recording, things which existed only in the incorporated state, in the form of dispositions, classificatory schemes whose products are indeed coherent, but only partly so … The objectivation brought about by codification introduces the possibility of a logical control of coherence, of a formalization.” Emphasis original. See Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990), 79.

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Paradoxography is therefore the result of a three-step operation by which local wonders are processed into discrete objects. First, certain oral narratives related to wonders, out of an enormous stock of inherited stories and lore, gained traction and popularity in local pre-theoretical contexts. Second, the most prevalent of these oral narratives about wonder were then textualized and used by historians, travelers, geographers, and scientists for various purposes. At a third stage, paradoxographers isolated these marvelous phenomena from scholarly texts for their own compendia of wonders. Thus, both local and expert communities played decisive roles in selecting the wonders that ultimately materialized in paradoxographical corpora. A scrutiny of the metalanguages used by ancient paradoxographers allows us to locate ancient ideologies about the reportage of anomalies and to interrogate the ethos and politics of modes of description and argumentation in ancient wonder collections. I have highlighted how the genre links anomaly and place, that is, the use of the anomalous to mark out sacred territory, whereby the proliferation of perplexing myths, uncanny rituals, and irregularities of the natural order confers legitimacy to cultural-political spaces in the here and now. The paradoxographers are by no means the only ancient writers who superimposed marvels on the physical environment, for they are prefigured in an etiological tradition stretching back to the archaic period that traversed several mythopoetic genres.43 But the shift in discourse from the oral-poetic to the textual-encyclopedic marks a critical moment in ancient perspectives toward time-honored myths and rituals. The ambivalent attitude of paradoxographers towards marvels is worth emphasizing. To put the matter in anthropological terms, the paradoxographer treads a tightrope across the emic and etic: the aim of these texts is not to mimic the startling affects of wonder—recall the force of ἀναγραφὴν (“record” or “inscription”) from pseudo-Aristotle that sets paradoxography against the sensational dimensions of marvels. Nonetheless, certain entries in the pseudoAristotelian compilation appeal repeatedly to marked vocabulary of astonishment and delight that reflexively point to its attunement to the enchantment of thaumata and refusal to reduce marvels to scientific or causal explanations.44 The compiler transforms transitory narratives into stable objects of technical discourse, but there is no attempt to generalize or theorize systematically about

43 44

See Kowalzig, Singing for the Gods, 24–32, with e.g., Herodotus 2.35 on the wonders of Egypt. The self-reflexive vocabulary associated with paradoxa and thaumata is particularly marked in this text.

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myth, ritual, or the nature of wonders from this mass of data. This vacillation between two poles constitutes a core feature of Greek paradoxography: on the one hand, the lofty undertaking to collect, classify, and domesticate anomalies, and on the other, the desire for anomalies to manifest something sacred and grander than reality.

5

Interlude: Shan hai jing

Given the considerable hurdles of uncovering the specific circumstances involved in the making of On Marvelous Things Heard, I now turn to the composition and compilation techniques of a Chinese compendium of marvels about whose context we are better informed. The Shan hai jing (山海經, The Classic of Mountains and Seas) is a catalogue of mythological, folkloric, zoological, and geographical knowledge. This text was stitched together by generations of scholars and scribes at roughly the same time period as the Greek comparandum, that is, between the late fourth century bce and the second century ce (late Chou and Han periods).45 It will soon become evident how the knowledge and textual practices of Greek paradoxography bear resemblance to aspects of the Shan hai jing, a document that conjoins, in the words of Mathieu, “le savoir technique” and “[les] croyances des campagnes et aux cultes des paysans.”46 A comparison of how narratives of local wonders commanded attention in different contexts, and how different scholarly communities transformed wisdom traditions into commodified forms of knowledge will prompt us to develop new research questions about the collecting habits and attitudes of Greek paradoxographers. The Shan hai jing comprises over 18 books of varied authorship, bringing together descriptions of marvelous geophysical and natural phenomena, local customs, bizarre animals and hybrid creatures, miraculous medicinal

45

46

Part of the content dates to the Warring States period (early fourth c. bce). See Anne Birrell, trans. The Classic of Mountain and Seas (New York: Penguin, 1999), xv–xvi. On the complexities of dating the text, see Richard E. Strassberg, ed. and trans. A Chinese Bestiary: Strange Creatures from the Guideways through Mountains and Seas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 3 and 29. Mathieu continues “C’est le temps du retour sur les oeuvres, les croyances, les représentations de l’antiquité. Le temps des compilations, des dictionnaires, des catalogues … c’est celui d’une mise en ordre, ou d’une mise au pas, des croyances qui ne changeront plus guère dans l’histoire de la Chine.” See Mathieu, Étude sur la mythologie, xcv and cxi.

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benefits of countless plants, and divine genealogies and foundation stories. In short, the collection systematizes collective wisdom and local knowledge traditions into a synthetic catalogue of cultural and geographic data.47 The Grand Historian Sima Qian referenced the Shan hai jing already in the first century bce, testifying to the popularity of the text and perhaps its importance among Chinese literati.48 The Han bibliographer Liu Xin (46 b.c.e.–23 c.e.), who penned a preface to the earliest attested version of the text, opines that Confucian scholars and courtiers held the text in high esteem.49 The Shan hai jing was widely read and consulted in diverse premodern scholarly and political circles; it was continuously commented upon, transcribed into poetry, and even inspired the production of charts and illustrations to accompany the text.50 Rémi Mathieu has drawn attention to the paratactic style of the Shan hai jing and to the way that the text is organized around discrete verbal images rather than continuous narrative accounts.51 In place of proffering a systematic treatise on a single ethnographic or geographic topic, the Shan hai jing, in the same fashion as the pseudo-Aristotelian On Marvelous Things Heard, adopts a technical expository mode that catalogues an array of culturally significant descriptions of local facts. The compilers of the Shan hai jing (like the Greek paradoxographers) adopt a scholarly perspective and do not purport to derive their knowledge from a divine or charismatic figure, nor do they claim that the text advances a set of eternal or divine precepts.52 It is worth underscoring that both ancient Greek

47

48 49

50 51 52

See Robert Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (Albany [NY]: suny Press, 1996), 36, especially 58–59. The text was traditionally ascribed to the mythical sage-king Yu but compiled in the Han dynasty. See Birrell, Classic of Mountain and Seas, xxxviii–xxxix; Riccardo Fracasso, “Shan hai ching” in Early Chinese Texts: A Bibliographical Guide, ed. Michael Loewe (Berkeley: The Society for the Study of Early China and The Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1993), 359, and Campany, Strange Writing, 133–137. The heterogeneous nature of this text has fueled controversy as to its function, for which see Fracasso, “Shan hai ching,” 358–359. Strassberg, A Chinese Bestiary, 13; and Campany, Strange Writing, 36–37. It was also consulted by erudites such as Dongfang Shuo (154–93 b.c.e.), a courtier of Emperor Wu, for which see Strassberg, A Chinese Bestiary, 13; and Campany, Strange Writing, 36–37. Strassberg discusses in detail the ancient reception of the Shan hai jing. See Strassberg, A Chinese Bestiary, 17–24. See Mathieu, Étude sur la mythologie, cv–cvi. Though the text, by virtue of its content, was associated with sages: Strassberg, A Chinese Bestiary, 14.

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and Chinese compendia of marvels flourished in comparable imperial regimes that valorized the undertaking of large encyclopedic projects. Anne Birrell has remarked that the Shan hai jing emerged in “an age of travel and exploration and appearing at the dawn of Chinese geographical science.” Notably, she elaborates, the text’s aim is to “amuse, delight, shock, horrify, and at times inform its readers.”53 I have argued along similar lines that Greek paradoxography collects wonders without attempting to strip them of their marvelous features. Thus, I suggest that compilers of Greek paradoxography and the producers of the Shan hai jing both capitalized on a peculiar technical discourse, straddling a budding scientific and bookish ethos and the desire to preserve the wondrous aesthetics of myth and wisdom traditions. Like the heterogeneous form of Greek paradoxography, the Shan hai jing sutures together mythological, ethnographic, and scientific knowledge. The affinities between the Shan hai jing and On Marvelous Things Heard shine through in the following passage about the mineralogical composition, local fauna, and animal life on Mount Seeksuch: Two hundred and fifty leagues further north is a mountain called Mount Seeksuch. Copper is plentiful on its summit, and there are quantities of jade on the lower slopes. This mountain has no plants or trees. The River Gloss rises here and flows west to empty into the River Allnavel. The River Gloss contains many glossy fish which look like eels with a scarlet back. They make a noise like a plane-tree [lute]. If you eat some, it will cure a tumor. There are numbers of hippopotamuses which look like a horse with marking on their forelegs and with an ox’s tail. They make a noise like a human shout.54 The passage hinges on a precise geographic location and calculates the distance between the site of interest and adjacent landmarks. The description of the region touches upon marvels of various sorts and scales, beginning with the massive topographical feature of Mount Seeksuch, which apparently rejects all vegetative life. Then it focuses on the river Gloss and the abundance of copper and jade found on site, and it finally ends with descriptions of two

53

54

A. Birrell, Chinese Mythology: An Introduction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 37. Further: “The primary intent of The Classic of Mountains and Seas was to gather together, and so preserve, a vast repertoire of mythic narratives about various parts of China in all their contradictory, enigmatic, and seemingly useless variety.” Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 38. Book 3, Ch. 1, Birrell, Classic of Mountain and Seas, 35.

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curious local animals, namely fish with curative properties and hippopotamuses that emit humanlike noises.55 This patchwork of distinct but interconnected phenomena coheres by virtue of their geography, thus resembling the logic of Greek paradoxography whereby multiple marvels cluster around circumscribed spaces. Further, as it occurs in Greek paradoxography, there is a conspicuous absence of human protagonists in favor of purely natural phenomena.56 We can draw out other parallels between On Marvelous Things Heard and the Shan hai jing, for example, their abiding interest in the sensational. The following excerpt is expressly concerned with the ethnographic: The Country of the One-Eyed People (Yimumin) lies to its east. Its people have only one eye that is set right in the middle of their face, and they live [lacuna]. One author says that they have hands and feet. Softsharp Country lies east of the Country of the One-Eyed People. Its people have only one hand and only one foot. Their knees turn backwards so that their foot sticks up in the air. One author states that this is Keepsharp Country (Liuli), and that the single foot of the people there turns backwards because it is broken.57 As Anne Birrell and others have demonstrated, the text adopts a culturally normative viewpoint in which distant peoples and their customs are evaluated according to value-laden criteria.58 Ethnographic descriptions in the Shan hai jing are rampant with moralizing pronouncements and represent the physical characteristics and cultural practices of others as utterly different, indeed bordering on the frightening, as the passage above suggests. One might be inclined to argue that the text exploits the imagined physiological features of different peoples (e.g., those with one eye or those who possess a single hand or foot) to stake out the boundaries between neighboring communi-

55

56 57

58

For mountains and rivers as organizing principles in Chinese geographic writings, see Kazutaka Unno, “The Geographical Thought of the Chinese People: with Special Reference to Ideas of Terrestrial Features,” Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko (The Oriental Library) 41 (1983): 83–97. Strassberg notes a similar absence of humans in descriptions of mountains in the shj. See Strassberg, A Chinese Bestiary, 38. Book Eight, Ch.1 = Birrell, Classic of Mountain and Seas, 121. Mathieu speculates that the description might refer to a community of exiles who had one foot cut off as punishment. See Mathieu, Étude sur la mythologie, 415. On the one-eyed people, see Strassberg, A Chinese Bestiary, 176, 223. Birrell, Classic of Mountain and Seas.

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ties. That is, the Shan hai jing articulates an imaginary cultural mapping oriented by the imputed physiological eccentricities of ethnic subgroups in the empire. What follows from this claim is the (surely by now obvious) observation that descriptions of ethnographic and cultural marvels in this text are neither straightforward nor neutral, but they acquire salience in relation to other phenomena as well as to the cultural and political interests of patrons, compilers, and readers. Finally, the passage references an unspecified author’s work, thereby disclosing important features of the modus operandi of the composers of the Shan hai jing, i.e., they obtain information by consulting scholarly sources either in addition to, or as a substitute for, actual observation. We have seen that, in the same fashion, Greek paradoxographers culled information from the reports and writings of historians, ethnographers, and philosophers. In both the Greek and Chinese analogues, then, the process of systematizing marvelous myths, cults, and customs was a predominantly textual enterprise. One detects, however, crucial disanalogies between our comparanda that render more transparent the conceptual contours of Greek paradoxography, about whose context and conditions of production and circulation we know relatively less. First, there are signal differences in the modes of transmission of these two texts. We read in the editors’ prefaces preceding Books 10 and 14 of the Shan hai jing that in 6 bce (“the first year of the Jianping era”) court officials, consisting of the Grand Master of Ceremonies, Associate Officers for the Supervision of the Collation and Amendment of Texts, Imperial Household Grandees, and others (including the Han dynasty court bibliographer Liu Xin Xiu), were tasked with verifying, amending, and correcting the text, which became an official version of the Shan hai jing.59 What we can glean from these prefaces is that the composition and transmission of the Shan hai jing was standardized early in its textual history, sponsored and facilitated by bureaucratic stakeholders, unlike the Greek analogue, which betrays scarce intimation of an authorizing body or of explicit political motivations.60 Second, the descriptions in the Shan hai jing are geographically contiguous, evincing a carefully mapped out trajectory (usually measured by leagues, li = 576 meters), and string together numerous sites whose spatial relations appear to have been precisely measured:

59 60

On these personages as well as for the argument that the second prescript is interpolated, see the useful note at Mathieu, Étude sur la mythologie, 446. Birrell uses the stronger term of “censorship.” See Birrell, Chinese Mythology, 37.

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The Emperor ordered Shu Hai61 to step from the eastern extremity [of the world] to the western extremity: five hundred thousand [ yi], ten tenthousands [xuan], nine thousand, eight hundred [519,800] steps. Shu Hai held counting rods in his right hand and his left hand pointed north of Qing Qiu. Some say Yu ordered Shu Hai. Some say five hundred thousand [yi], ten myriad [wan], nine thousand, eight hundred [519,800] steps.62 This passage, with its overt emphasis on instruments of measurement and the precise demarcation of travel routes, accentuates the way in which the Shan hai jing meticulously measures distances, even if these details of precision fulfill a rhetorical rather than a pragmatic function.63 More importantly, in framing these geographic continuities “from the eastern extremity to the western extremity,” the compilers of the Shan hai jing emphasize the totalizing scale of their enterprise, striving to catalogue the distinct local fauna, culture, and plant life endemic to each and every region of the known world. But more than a scholarly resource, the text is imbued with political implications. As Dorofeeva-Lichtmann points out, the Shan hai jing charts a “proper terrestrial organization” overlaid by a “spiritual landscape … instrumental in the act of rulership.”64 In other words, the text scrupulously assembles and mobilizes cul-

61 62 63

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“Shuhai was understood to be a minister of sage-king Yu.” See Mathieu, Étude sur la mythologie, 435. Shan hai jing 9.2–3, trans. Lisa Raphals, “A ‘Chinese Eratosthenes’ Reconsidered: Chinese and Greek Calculations and Categories,” eastm 19 (2002), 154. See Raphals, “A ‘Chinese Eratosthenes’ Reconsidered,” 174: “These metaphors … expressed a range of notions of moral and technological excellence, and were put to the service of a wide range of arguments. These analogies are so pervasive as to suggest that accurate measurement and precision functioned as root metaphors in early China.” According to Joseph Needham, the measuring instrument noted in the passage is the first reference to a geometric calculator. See Joseph Needham, ed. Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 570, For further discussion, see Mathieu, Étude sur la mythologie, 436. According to Vera Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, “The shj provides a detailed terrestrial description supplied with precise directions and distances between location, and, thus, gives an impression of topographical accuracy, nevertheless it refers to conceptual organization of space.” See Vera V. Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, “Conception of Terrestrial Organization in the Shan Hai Jing,” befeo 82 (1995), 58, 62. At page 88, she posits that this ideological conception of territory can be traced back to royal tours of Qin and Han emperors. See also V.V. Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, “Mapping a ‘Spiritual’ Landscape: Representation of terrestrial space in the Shanhaijing,” in Political Frontiers, Ethnic Boundaries and Human Geographies in Chinese History, eds. Nicola Di Cosmo and Don J. Wyatt (London: Routledge, 2003) 35–79. Raphals notes that the measurements in this text serve important economic functions. See Raphals, “A ‘Chinese Eratosthenes’ Reconsidered,” 153. Mathieu provides useful

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tural, geographic, and religious data for political aims, providing in effect a panoramic gaze over the far-reaching cultural horizons of the Chinese empire and the interior regions and inhabitants that comprise it. Notably, the Shan hai jing’s recurring concern for the careful elaboration and measurement of travel routes and circuits is entirely absent in Greek paradoxography, which leads the reader from one place to the next in no apparent hodological, cartographic, or conceptual order.65 Furthermore, the marked emphasis on cardinal orientation and the elaborate center-periphery dynamics that loom large in the Shan hai jing are patently absent in Greek paradoxography.66 Instead of a primarily cardinal mode of perceiving and organizing the world and its constitutive elements, the contents in On Marvelous Things Heard are mobilized in relatively haphazard manner, bereft of any broader context or narrative and focused rather on the singularity of individual marvels. The driving impetus of Greek paradoxography, in the final equation, revolves around local rather than global knowledge. Finally, I would like to consider the prescriptive dimension that appears occasionally in the Shan hai jing. The following passage about a ritual of sacrifice on Mount Blossom is particularly illuminating: The peaks in the Classic of the Mountains of the West, from Mount Moneycome to Mount Blueroanhorse, number nineteen mountains over a distance of 2,957 leagues. Mount Blossom is the sacrificial mound. The sacrificial rite is that of the Major Sacrifice (T’ai Lao). Mount Ewe[next] is the presiding deity. In sacrificing to them, the ritual is: use torches;

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context for the political aspirations of the text: “C’est avec l’éclosion des ambitions géopolitiques des Qin et des Han (-221 à notre ère) que va se développer le besoin d’une vision globale du pays, traduite par un développement de la géographie et de la cartographie.” See Mathieu, Étude sur la mythologie, ci. On the imbrication of spatial knowledge and empire in medieval Chinese thought, see Linda Rui Feng, “Merging into the map: sources of imagined cartographic efficacy in medieval China,” Word & Image 34 (2018), especially 324. One might compare the Shan hai jing to Greek periplous and periegetic texts; but even there, Pausanias’ arrangement of space, for instance, is governed more by religious priorities than straightforward geographic continuity. See Jaś Elsner, “Structuring ‘Greece.’ Pausanias’s Periegesis as a Literary Construct,” in Pausanias: Travel and Memory in Roman Greece, eds. Susan Alcock, John F. Cherry, and Jaś Elsner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3–20. Charles Delattre highlights the toponymic rather than hodological modus operandi of Imperial mythographic texts. See Charles Delattre, “Islands of Knowledge: Space and Names in Imperial Mythography,” in Myths on the Map: The Storied Landscapes of Ancient Greece, ed. Greta Hawes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 261–280. Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, “Conception of Terrestrial Organization,” 80 ff.

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observe a purification period of one hundred days; use one hundred animals of a single color for the sacrifice, then bury them; use one hundred lapis lazuli; for the wine ritual, serve it in one hundred jars; for the pendants use one hundred ritual oblong jades and one hundred ritual round jades.67 The text dispels any illusions of objective and pure description, and indeed prescribes ritual behavior in the imperative mode. That is, the passage does not purport merely to catalogue descriptions of local cult activity but pronounces ritual instructions of a very pragmatic sort, as if guiding the reader through a series of ritual action. It offers ritual directives including the selection of the sacrificial animal based on color, the mode of dispensing libations, as well as the cult implements to be employed.68 By contrast, the descriptions of cult and ritual in Greek paradoxography are of a second-order register, treating ritual action not from the perspective of a religious practitioner but of the scholar engaged in cool ethnographic observation. The foregoing discussion has revealed the general logic of two ambitious knowledge practices from different historical contexts. I have suggested that both texts aim to collect and organize enormous quantities of data over vast spatial and temporal spans, and both advance distinct culturally patterned spatial paradigms that draw on, but simultaneously reshape, local knowledge. In other words, both textual traditions under examination demonstrate their knowledge of the periphery and translate local, popular wisdom into forms of reified knowledge. Both, to varying degrees, combine archival research with the rhetoric of autopsia.69 But whereas the Shan hai jing conjoins wonders into a finely structured spatial itinerary within an expansive imperial framework, On Marvelous Things Heard assembles pixelated pieces of information about popular customs or features of geography that remain self-contained, fragmented from what precedes and follows. Consequently, each text engenders distinct reading experiences for their intended readers and configures the relationship between wonders and textuality in their own ways. Moreover, if the Shan hai jing circulated among powerful patrons and the ruling political elite, consolidating cultural, natural, and religious knowledge at the service of administrative ambi-

67 68 69

Book 2, Ch. 1 = Birrell, Classic of Mountain and Seas, 17. This ritual prescription recalls aspects of Greek leges sacrae. On color as an organizing principle in the Shan hai jing, see Strassberg, A Chinese Bestiary, 42. On ancient anecdotes about the importance of autopsia in the composition of the Shan hai jing, see Campany, Strange Writing, 137.

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tions, the same cannot be said for Greek paradoxography—at least not on the grounds of the surviving evidence, as it lacks any ostensible geographic coherence. Compounding these issues is our scanty knowledge of how the objectives of scholarly communities were tethered to the interest of Hellenistic and Imperial political institutions. To be sure, globalizing aspirations and an ethos of empire guide the logic of both On Marvelous Things Heard and the Shan Hai Jing, but these imperial pretentions are articulated in different and revealing ways. The comparison of this interlude has underscored, I hope, the contours of the Greek evidence while also yielding deeper insight into the specific knowledge cultures and generic and compilatory practices that buttressed Greek paradoxographical discourse. Situating Greek paradoxography alongside comparable wonder cultures from other historical contexts, rather than vis-à-vis Greek historical or scientific texts, repositions our scholarly perspectives: a transcultural approach to wonder traditions liberates Greek paradoxography from the enduring scholarly viewpoint that the genre is inferior and merely derivative of Greek scientific works.

6

Conclusions

This article has highlighted the intellectual priorities of paradoxography with the intention to complicate Fraser’s critique of the genre as a degenerate form of proper historical reflection. I have shown that paradoxography is a sophisticated technical genre that ensures its own continuation as a textual form. That is, the abbreviated expository mode of paradoxography and ease with which one could transmit, retrieve, excerpt, and modify its contents facilitated research on marvels for generations of scholars well beyond its original moments and circumstances of creation.70 Thus, in the manner of other postAristotelian technical genres such as problemata and Homeric scholia, paradoxography not only gives shape to a distinct field of knowledge related to the preternatural, but also transmits the tools and techniques for managing such knowledge. More importantly, I have argued that Greek paradoxographical compendia display a fascination for marvels on a superregional level while preserving a keen interest in local, recondite myths and customs of innumerable poleis. This corroborates the view of Christian Jacob, who has suggested that 70

Some of these issues are discussed in Liba Taub, “Archiving Scientific Ideas in GrecoRoman Antiquity,” in Science in the Archives: Pasts, Presents, Futures, ed. Lorraine Daston (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 113–135, and Schepens and Delcroix, “Ancient Paradoxography,” 402.

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the polis prevails as the dominant unit of orientation in the postclassical imaginaire, implying this to be a reaction against Macedonian and Roman imperial encroachments on traditional life.71 Thus, paradoxographers were actively grappling with intense political and religious transformations and negotiating the terms by which to articulate complicated and evolving sentiments toward religious and cultural phenomena of a very local sort. What ensued from this, at least in paradoxographical discourse, is the patent concurrence of Aristotelian and Homeric impulses—that is, the systematic collection of myriad epichoric myths and customs combined with a nostalgic treatment of marvels as emanating from an irretrievably lost past. I conclude with the preface to Palaephatus’ On Incredible Things (fourth century bce), which emblematizes the epistemologically complex attitude of Greek paradoxographers toward marvels: Poets and chroniclers have turned some of the things that have happened in the direction of the unbelievable and wonderful (ἀπιστότερον καὶ θαυμασιώτερον) in order to amaze (θαυμάζειν) men. But I know that things are not possible such as they are reported, but I have also understood that, if they had not happened [in some form], there would not have been reports.72 The essential point is unmistakable. Underlying Palaephatus’ expression of skepticism of the ancient reports of wonders is an awareness of the equivocal relation between realia and conventions of reportage. Although Palaephatus warns against the temptation of succumbing all too easily to the alluring effects of the marvelous and anomalous, he does not reject this class of objects as a whole. In fact, he stresses that a certain degree of veracity can be recovered

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According to Jacob, “La cité grecque a disparu, à l’époque d’Agatharcide, comme realité politique autonome et souveraine. Elle reste cependant le paradigme du discours anthropologique: les représentations symboliques et l’idéologie n’évoluent pas dans la même temporalité que les événements et les mutations sociales ou politiques. La conception que les Grecs se font de la civilisation et de la culture est en fait un miroir de la vie dans la cité classique. Il n’y a de civilisation que dans une polis, cette dernière n’impliquant pas seulement un habitat collectif urbain, mais aussi un définition générale de l’humanité par rapport au monde des bêtes ou au monde des dieux.” See Jacob, Géographie et ethnographie, 136. Translation quoted in Richard Hunter, “‘Palaephatus’, Strabo, and the Boundaries of Myth,” Classical Philology 111 (2016), 246. On Palaephatus, see Jacob Stern, “Rationalizing Myth: Methods and Motives in Palaephatus,” in From Myth to Reason, ed. R. Buxton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 215–222.

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from even the most phenomenal of accounts. In the eyes of postclassical paradoxographers, too, ancient mythological traditions—even those that border on the incredulous—abound in wisdom, and they consequently genuflect to this earlier poetic material in the teeth of their otherwise dispassionate scholarly ambitions.

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Index of Personal Names, Authors, and Works Acusilaus of Argos 196 Genealogies 196 Adeimantus 193n59 Aelian 263 Characteristics of Animals 263 Aelius Theon 118–122 Progymnasmata, ‘On the Chreia’ chapter and 118–119 Aeneas 262n34 Aeschylus 246 Aesop 17 Agatharchides 257 Agathosthenes 252n6 Aitolos 181, 183 Aleuadae 36 Alexander of Macedon 256, 257n17 Allan, Sarah 83 Ames, Roger 78 Annals of Master Lii and Huai-nan Tzu 202 Apollo 45 Archelaus 252n6 Archilochus 90 Arewa, Oja 4 Aristarchus 166 Aristophanes 20, 37–38, 40–41, 43, 45–46, 247 Birds 45 Clouds 247 Knights 37–38, 41–42, 42n64, 43–46 Aristotle 55n2, 60, 66n23, 92, 117, 140– 141, 172, 221, 228, 245–246, 251, 254– 255, 257, 257n17, 258, 258n23, 261, 278 De Anima 245 Metaphysics 141 Rhetoric 55n2, 92n42 Artabanus 193n59 Artemis 34 Astyages 188 Athenaeus 258 Auerbach, Erich 62 Bacchiads 197 Bacchylides 187 Odes 187 Bakis 44–45

Ban Gu 129, 137–138 History of the Han 129 Barns, John 122 Barthes, Roland 267 Bartoletti, Tomás 224, 230 Basso, Keith 59n11 Bible 71 scholarship of 131 see also New Testament Bible, Hebrew 3, 5, 190n54 Job 171 Proverbs 171 Qohelet 171 see also Old Testament Birrell, Anne 271–272 Bolus of Mende 252n6 Book of Odes see Shijing (Classic of Poetry) Book of Rites see Liji (Book of Rites) Book of Songs see Shijing (Classic of Poetry) Bowker, Geoffrey 263 Briggs, Charles 4 Buddha 131–132 commentary and 132 death of 131 Buddhist canon 131 ‘Numbered Discourses of the Buddha’ (Pali) 132 Pali texts 132 Sanskrit texts 132 Tripiṭaka 131 Burkert, Walter 16, 233 Burnet, John 226 ‘The Socratic Doctrine of the Soul’ 226 Callicles 231 Callimachus 258 Aetia 258 Cambyses 189, 192 Candaules 193n59 Canetti, Elias 128 Chaldean Oracles 30 Chaos 183 Cheng, King 113 Ch’ih-yu 202 Chiron 186

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index of personal names, authors, and works

Chiyou (Ch’ih-yu) 202, 202n87 Chronos (Time) 183 Chrysaor 181 Chthonie (Earth) 183–184 Ch’un ch’iu (Spring and Autumn Annals) 130n11, 131n12, 158, 203, 205, 209n107 Cleanthes 68 Clement of Alexandria 68 Cleomenes 39 Collins, Steven 132 Commentary of Gong Yang 130n11 Commentary of Zuo 130n11 Confucius 7–8, 20–25, 105, 128–138, 140–143, 165, 202, 204, 205n94, 207, 207n103, 224n14 Analects 7, 85, 106, 108, 121, 128–131, 133– 136, 138, 142, 207n103 death of 132 Five Classics 131, 131n12 Four Books 131 Socratic method and 141 Counsels of Wisdom 190n54 Croesus of Lydia 30–34, 42, 185–187, 187n42, 187n44, 189–190, 192–193, 198–199, 208– 209, 230, 237 logos of 185, 188, 198–199 piety of 186–187, 187n44, 188 Solon and 185, 187–188, 192 Cronos 232 Culler, Jonathan 62 Cyclops 181 Cyrus 188–189, 192 death of 192 Da Dai Liji (Da Dai li-chi) (‘Records of ritual matters by Dai the Elder’) 108, 110, 201 ‘Great Digest’ and 110 ‘Zengzi li shi’ chapter 108–110 Dai Zhen 139 Dao De Jing/Daodejing see Laozi Demeter 260 Demetrius 66n23 On Style 66n23 Demiurge of the Cosmos 184, 228–229, 234–235, 237, 245–246 Demos 38, 43–46 Demosthenes 41–43 Denecke, Wiebke 26–27, 62, 62n18, 135

Detienne, Marcel 17 Les ruses de l’intelligence: la métis des Grecs 17 see also Vernant, Jean-Paul Derveni Papyrus 64 Deucalion 181–182 Dinarchus 42n64 Against Demosthenes 42n64 Dingben (The Edition) 153–154, 157, 160 Diogenes Laertius 69–70, 70n34, 183, 258n23 Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers 69 Diogenes the Cynic 118, 223 Diomedes 262 Dizi wen manuscript 106 Dodds, Eric 226, 226n20, 227 The Greeks and the Irrational 226 Dongfang Shuo 270n49 Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, Vera 274 Du Daojian 67 Duke Huan 150–151 Duke Mu 159 Dundes, Alan 4 Echembrotus 182n30 Eidinow, Esther 253 Eliot, T.S. 72 Elman, Benjamin 139 Empedocles 91, 226–227, 229, 246 physics and 227 Eumelus of Corinth 196 Korinthiaka 196 Euripides 37n51 Bacchae 37n51 Europa 194–195 Fontaine, Carole 5 Foucault, Michel 144 Fränkel, Hermann 88 Fraser, Peter 251, 277 Glanis 44–45 Gnomologium Vaticanum 116 Goldin, Paul 87 Gongzi Wukui 151 Goody, Jack 266 Gospel of Thomas 132–133 Granet, Marcel 270

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index of personal names, authors, and works Granger, Herbert 91–92 Guanzi 222, 222n9, 241 ‘Neiye’ (‘Nei-yeh’) chapter 222–225, 229, 241–242, 242nn61–62, 243–247 Guan Zong 222n9 Guodian manuscripts 66, 79, 106 Gyges 193n59 Hades (individual) 260 Hadot, Pierre 143–144, 223 Hall, David 78 Han Feizi 26, 132 Harbsmeier, Christopher 121 Havelock, Eric 60n14 Hecataeus 87n31, 176, 178, 179n21, 180–183, 208, 254 Genealogies 176, 178, 181 Perambulation 176 Persica 176 Hegel, Georg W.F. 140–141 Helen 194–195 Hellanicus of Lesbos 176, 179, 197 Asopis (lineage) and 179 Atlantis (lineage) and 179 Atthis 197 Deukalioneia (lineage) and 179 Phoronis (lineage) and 179 Priestesses of Hera 179, 179n21 Hera 184 Heracles 180n23, 182n30 Heraclitus 7, 54–56, 60–65, 66n23, 67, 67n26, 68–69, 69n31, 72–73, 77–78, 78n4, 87n31, 88–89, 91–96, 142–143 biography and 69–70 commentary and 63 death of 69–70 Fragments 54, 69n32, 70, 72n42, 87n31, 88–95 oracles and 91 poets and 88–92 textual history of 63–67, 78–79 wisdom and 77, 89–92, 95–96 Herodas 257n18 Herodotus 30–33, 35–41, 42n64, 43, 70, 70n33, 175, 175n12, 176n14, 177–178, 180, 180n23, 183, 185–188, 190–199, 202, 207– 211, 252 autopsia and 209 commentary and 183

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historie and 197–198 Histories 30–36, 38–39, 173, 177, 177nn15–16, 185, 188–191, 191n56, 192– 194, 197, 199, 206, 208–210 methodological approach and 209–212 Hesiod 17, 87n31, 90, 173–176, 178–179, 181, 183–184, 190, 192, 207, 207n102, 211, 230, 237, 237n48, 246 Catalogue 179 Hymn to the Muses 230, 237 Melampodia (attrib.) 41n62 Precepts of Chiron 186 Theogony 175, 175n11, 181, 230 Works and Days 186 Hipparchus 36 Hippolytus of Rome 68, 69n30 Hölscher, Uvo 91 Homer 8, 58–59, 88–90, 95, 119, 148, 164– 166, 173–175, 175n10, 176, 178–179, 181, 183–185, 190, 195–196, 207, 207n102, 211, 246, 252, 278 authorship and 165–166 D Scholia 166 Iliad 4, 59, 59n Odyssey 147, 164, 181 Shijing and 164–166 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 72 Horna, Konstantin 116 Huang Kan 138 Huángdì see Yellow Emperor (Huángdì) Hunter, Michael 147 Hyperboreans 187 Instruction of Amenem-Opet 190n54 Io 194 Isocrates 35 Aegineticus 39 Isogonus of Nicaea 252n6 Jaanus, Maire 62 Jacob, Christian 277–278 Jesus 131–133 Jizhu (Collection of Commentaries) 153–154, 160–161 John Tzetzes 256 Junzi wei li manuscript 106 Kant, Immanuel 143 Critique of Judgement 143nn34–35

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index of personal names, authors, and works

Kahn, Charles 65n22, 68n29, 90–91 Klostergaard Petersen, Anders 222, 225, 229 Knoblock, John 103n1, 104–105 Kong Yingda 147–148, 152–154, 156–157, 160–165, 224n13 Kuo yu (Conversations from the States) 203, 205 Lady Jiang 158 Lady Mu of Xu 147–155, 158–163, 166, 224n13 Lambert, Wilfred G. 171 Babylonian Wisdom Literature 171 Lao Dan see Laozi 25 Laozi 24–25, 70–71, 71n38, 78, 95–96, 138 Laozi 7, 24–28, 46, 54–56, 60, 62–68, 71, 71nn38–39, 72–73, 77, 78n5, 79, 80n10, 81–85, 87–88, 90, 92–93, 95, 106, 138 absence of persons and 85, 85n27 ‘Black Robes’ chapter 129 commentary and 63, 67 earliest version of 129 Heshang Gong commentary 66 imagery and 80, 83, 86–87, 96 paradoxes and 87 textual history of 63–67, 71, 78 Wang Bi commentary 66, 79n7, 80, 81n12 wisdom and 77, 82, 90, 92, 95–96 Lardinois, André 4 Lasus of Hermione 36, 40–41 Lau, D.C. 84 Lavecchia, Salvatore 228–230, 234–235 Liang Shan of Zhou 23 Lichtheim, Miriam 60 Liji (Book of Rites) 80n11, 82, 106–108, 130, 158, 163 ‘Great Digest’ and 107–108 ‘Tan gong’ chapter 106 Li Ling 85, 211 Linus 173 Liu Bang 200 Liu Baonan 134 Liu Fenglu 134 Liu Xiang 103, 106, 111, 148, 159–160, 162–163, 163n29, 164–165 Exemplary Women 159, 162, 163n29

Liu Xie 135 Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (wenxin diaolong) 135, 140n29 Liu Xin 270, 273 Li Zhi 141 Lloyd, Geoffrey 221, 253 Longinus 143 Lord, Albert 58–59 Lord Dai 151 Lord Hui 150 Lord Mu of Xu 150–151 Lord Yi Gong of Wei 151 Lunyu 129–132, 140 composition of 129 Machiavelli 136 Maciver, Calum Alasdair 4 McKenzie, John L. 18 Malinowski, Bronislaw 172 Mao Commentary 148, 148n2, 152–154, 157, 159–163, 165, 238–239 Maoshi Zhengyi 147, 153–154, 159–161 Marcus Aurelius 143 Meditations 143 Mardonius 193n59 Martin, Richard 174 Mathieu, Rémi 269–270 Mawangdui manuscripts 21–22, 240–241 Medea 194–195 Mencius 142 Mencius 80n11, 82, 134 Meng, Master 134 Mengzi 105 Menn, Stephen 235 Meno 141 Meuli, Karl 226, 226n23 Miller, Patrick 228 Moeller, Hans-Georg 81, 84 Mommsen, Theodor 258n23 Mouraviev, Serge 65n22 Mozi 132 death of 132 Musaeus 36–41, 173, 179, 230 Myrsilus 252n6 ‘Nei li’ (Shanghai Museum) 110n38 ‘Neiye’ (‘Nei-yeh’) see Guanzi New Testament 59, 132 Nicias 41–43

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index of personal names, authors, and works Nienhauser, William H. 201 Nietzsche, Friedrich 137 Gay Science 137 Odysseus 181 Oeneus 181–183 Ogygus 197 Oineus see Oeneus Old Testament 15, 18–19 Babylonia and 15 Olsen, Charles 72 Onomacritus 34–42, 230, 237 Orestheus 182 Orpheus 173, 179 Osiris 180n23 Palaephatus 278 On Incredible Things 278 Paphlagonia 38, 41–45 Paris 195 Parke, Herbert 91 Parmenides 91, 230n36 Parry, Milman 58–59 Pausanias 259, 275n65 Periegesis 259 Pegasus 181 Peisistratids (Pisistratidae) 36, 38–39, 42 Perdue, Leo 18–19 Persephone 260 Petrarch 136 Pherecydes of Syros 183–184 Philip ii of Macedonia 33–34 Philon of Heracleia 252n6 Philostephanus of Cyrene 252n6 Phythios 181–182 Phytios see Phythios Pindar 175, 187, 227, 227n29 Nemean Odes 186 Olympian Odes 175 Pythian Odes 186 Pisistratus 36, 166 Pisthetaerus 45 Plato 8, 35, 117, 140–142, 174, 175n11, 221–227, 227n29, 228–235, 242, 245–247 Cratylus 142 gods and 237, 246 Good, idea of 228–229, 234–235, 246 Gorgias 231–233 Laws 232–233, 233n44, 244

289

Phaedo 223, 226, 235–237, 245 Phaedrus 237 Republic 35n47, 142, 174–175, 175nn10–11, 228, 231n40, 232, 232n42, 233–237, 244, 246 self-divinization and 228–231, 234–237, 246 Theaetetus 231 theology of 228 Timaeus 117, 227–228, 234–235, 235nn46–47, 237, 245 Pliny the Elder 123 Pliny the Younger 123 Plutarch 123 Pluto 259–260 Polemaenetus 39 Polemon of Ilium 252n6 Prince of Qi 151 progymnasmata 121 Ps.-Antigonus 254–255, 261 Ps.-Aristotle 253, 263, 268 On Marvelous Things Heard 253, 258, 258n23, 259–265, 267–272, 275–277 Ps.-Demetrius 178 De elocutione 178 Ps.-Plutarch 258n24 De fluviis 258n24 Ptolemaeus Chennus 252n6 Ptolemy i 257 Ptolemy ii 257 Puett, Michael 20, 221, 224–229, 241 To Become a God 225 Pythagoras 87n31, 226 Pythia, the 31–34, 237 Quintus of Smyrna 4 Posthomerica 4 Raphals, Lisa 17–18, 21, 24 Divination and Prediction in Early China and Ancient Greece 21 Remus 82n18 Robb, Kevin 60–61 Rohde, Erwin 227 Roloff, Dietrich 228 Romulus 82n18 Rong Cheng 240 Roth, Harold 242 Rutenber, Culbert 228, 229, 234

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index of personal names, authors, and works

Said, Edward 62 Sausage-Seller, the 38, 41–42, 42n64, 43 Schepens, Guido 255 Schofield, Malcolm 88, 90 Seitel, Peter 4 Shan hai jing (The Classic of Mountains and Seas) 8, 255, 269–276 authorship and 269–270, 270n47 geographical measurement and 274– 275 paratactic style of 270 Sima Qian and 270 standardization of 273 Shangshu (Book of Documents) 24, 162, 201–202, 203, 204–205, 206 see also Confucius Shaughnessy, Edward 22, 24–25, 58–59, 61 Unearthing the Changes: Recently Discovered Manuscripts of the Yi Jing (I Ching) and Related Texts 22 Shijing (Classic of Poetry) 58, 58n9, 59, 61, 140n29, 147–148, 154–157, 162–165, 206, 238 commentary and 140 ‘Getan’ (Poem 2) 159 ‘I beg you, Zhong Zi’ (Poem 76) 147 ‘Mayfly’ (Poem 150) 147 ‘Tall Pear-Tree’ (Poem 169) 147 yearning for home and 147 ‘Zaichi’ commentary and 159, 166 ‘Zaichi’ (Poem 54) 8, 147–164, 166 see also Homer Shu Hai 274 Shun 111–112, 199, 203 Shu Sunbao 156 Sima Qian 71, 199, 199n78, 200n79, 201–203, 204n93, 205, 205n94, 207, 207nn103– 104, 208–212, 270 Bao Ren An shu (Letter in Response to Ren An) 210–211 Basic Annals (běnjì) and 199, 202–203, 205, 207–208 methodology of 205–206, 207–209 Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) 71, 199–200, 200n79, 201, 203, 206, 209– 212 Taishigong zixu (Grand Historian’s SelfNarration) 210

Sima Tan 199n78 Simmias 236 Smith, Richard 21 The I Ching: A Biography 21–22 Socrates 122, 140, 223, 231–232, 234, 236– 237, 246–247 death of 223, 237 Solinus 258n23 Solon 69, 140, 174, 175n10, 185–189, 192 see also Croesus Sophocles 37n51, 186 Antigone 37n51 Oedipus Tyrannus 37n51 Spring and Autumn Annals see Ch’un ch’iu (Spring and Autumn Annals) Stanzel, Karl-Heinz 117 Stobaios 116–117 Florilegium 116–117 Sun Chuo 142 Talmud 190n54 Themistocles 193n59 Theocritus 257n18 Theognis 117, 175 Theophrastus 67, 257n17, 258 Theopompus 258n23 Theravāda canon 132 Thessaly 36 Thrasyllus 39 Thucydides 178, 197 Ti hsi hsing (Cognomens of the Successive Emperors) 202–203, 205 Timaeus 258, 258n23 Tsai Yu 202 Ts’ao Yu-ts’un 22 I Hsueh Shih Ching 22 Vernant, Jean-Paul 17 Les ruses de l’intelligence: la métis des Grecs 17 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 17n6 Wagner, Rudolf 80n10 Wang Ming-sheng 139 Weber, Max 131 Wen, King 113 Wen Wang 239 West, Martin 16 Wiener Apophthegmensammlung 116

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index of personal names, authors, and works Wolf, Friedrich August 57 Prolegomena ad Homerum 57 Wordsworth, William 9 The Prelude 9 Wormell, D.E.W. 91 Wu, Emperor 113, 270n49 Wu-tite (Virtues of the Five Emperors) 203, 205

201–

Xenophanes of Colophon 87n31, 174, 175n10 Xenophon 120, 122 Memorabilia 120, 122n81 Xerxes 36, 193n59 Xici 22 commentary and 22 see also Yao (‘The Essentials’) and Yi zhi yi (‘The Properties of the Changes’) Xuan Jiang 150 Xunzi 103–105, 105n13 Xunzi 7, 82, 85, 96, 103–105, 111–114, 124 ‘Ai gong’ chapter 106 ‘Fa xing’ chapter 106 ‘Great Digest’ chapter 103–115, 120, 123– 124 ‘Jie bi’ chapter 111–112 ‘Tian Lun’ chapter 114–115 Yang Liang commentary 104–105 ‘Yao wen’ chapter 106 ‘You zuo’ chapter 106 ‘Zhongni’ chapter 112–114 ‘Zi dao’ chapter 106 Yan Hui 141, 141n31 Yao (emperor) 199, 202–204, 209n108 Yao (‘The Essentials’) 22–23 commentary and 22 Yaodian (Annals of Yao) 204

291

Yellow Emperor (Huángdì) 199–200, 200n79, 201–202, 202n87, 203–204, 207, 209, 209n108 Yellow Thearch 240 Yen-ti 202 Yijing (Book of Changes) 19–26, 29 oldest copy of 21, 21n15 Yi zhi yi (‘The Properties of the Changes’) 22 Yong Ji 159n18 Yu cong manuscripts 106 Zaichi (poem) see Shijing (Classic of Poetry) Zas (Zeus) 183–184 see also Zeus Zengzi 105, 108, 110 Zeus 34, 92, 184, 227, 230 Zhaobo 150 Zhao, Jenny 55, 69 Zheng Zijia 156 Zhihui, Yu 104–105, 105n12, 107 Zhmud, Leonid 258 Zhou, Duke of 113 Zhuangzi 138 Zhuangzi 22, 24–28, 46, 85, 96 Zi Gong see Zigong Zigong 22–23, 104–105, 135, 141 Zixia 105 Zhu Xi 136–139, 142 ‘How to Read’ 136–137 Learning To Be A Sage 139 Zoroaster 131 Zuozhuan (Zuo Tradition) 148, 150–152, 154–157, 163, 163n29, 203 commentary and 148 Lord Huan 15 158n18 Lord Wen 13 155–156 Lord Xiang 19 155

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General Subject Index Abydos 193n59 Adriatic 262 Aetolia 181, 183 Africa 59 ainigmata see chresmologists Akkadian 180n24, 190 akousmata (word of mouth) 178 Alexandria 166, 251, 257 Library of 251, 257 Museum of 257 Allnavel R. 271 America 9, 59, 59n11 Amphictyonic Games (584 bce) 182n30 an (to achieve peace, to appease) 113 an (to rely upon) 113 anecdotes 6–7, 124 Chinese 26–28, 103, 107, 120, 129, 135, 276n69 Greek 69, 116, 118, 123 annals 132 Ansatzpunkt (term) 62 anthropomorphism 174 aoidos 35 Apache, Western 59n11 aphorisms 54, 60, 71, 79, 129, 132–133, 136, 143–144, 224 function of 143 syntax of 133 see also wisdom literature apomnemoneuma 119–120 defined 119 apophthegmata 118, 143 aporia 87 Arabic 116 Araxes R. 192 arete 18 Argentina 9 Argos 196 arithmetic 234 Asia 195, 198, 226n23 Assyria 171 astronomy 200, 234 Athens 30, 36, 39, 40, 43, 45, 166, 197, 232– 233, 247, 257 Academy of 223–224 Acropolis of 39 Panathenaea 166

authenticity 30, 40, 45, 65, 71, 120, 131–132 authorship 60, 63–65, 69, 71, 79, 123, 131, 148, 152–155, 164–166, 199n78, 205n94, 206, 209, 241, 266, 269 autopsia 205, 209, 261, 276 Axial Age 222 Babylonia, Babylonians 3, 15, 171, 190, 258 Babylonian language 17 nēmequ 17 enqu 17 mūdû 17 etpšēsu 17 hassu 17 Balkans 58 Ballads 59 Belgium 9 Berlin 9, 140 Black Sea 227 Blossom, Mt. 275 Blueroanhorse, Mt. 275 Buddhists 131, 133, 143 Byzantium 258 Canada 9 Cao 149, 151 Cape Taenarum 180n23 Cappadocia 258 causality 189, 189n52, 196n67, 198 Chalcidians 33 chi (thread) 205 childhood 55, 78, 88, 94–95 children 55, 69, 77–80, 80n11, 81n16, 82, 88– 90, 93–96, 201 China ancestors and 204n92, 238–239 Bronze Age 226 Changsha (Hunan) 21 Chou period 269 court officials and 273 Five Emperors 199–205, 210 Former Han 148n2, 159, 163 Han Chinese 200 Han Dynasty and 3, 21, 80n11, 103–105, 107–108, 129, 148, 159, 164–165, 199–200, 204n93, 269–270, 273, 274n64 Hubei Province 129

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general subject index Jin Dynasty and 142 Legalist tradition and 132, 134 medical texts and 240–241 meditation and 137, 241 mythological system, loss of 207, 207nn101–102 oral-textual transition and 148, 152, 157, 164–165 poetry and 58–59, 147, 155, 164 pre-Han 157 pre-Qin 80, 152, 162–163, 165, 203, 204n93 printing, development of 137 Qin Dynasty and 148n2, 162–164, 207, 274n64 Qing Dynasty and 130n9, 134, 139 Shang Dynasty 200 Spring and Autumn period 155–156, 158–159, 162 Tang Dynasty and 104, 110n31, 147–148, 152, 156–157, 159–160, 164–165 Three Sovereigns 200 Warring States era and 107, 129, 132, 158, 164, 200, 200n79, 204, 269n45 Western Han 130–131 Western Zhou 207, 238 women, position of 158–162 Xia Dynasty 200–201 Zhou dynasty 200 chizi (infant) 80, 80n10 chizi zhi (heart of the infant) 80n11 Cho-Iu, Mt. 203 chreiai 116n57, 118–122 Christian 116n57 Confucian 124 defined 118 Judaism 116n57 see also apophthegmata chresmologists 34–38, 40, 45 ainigmata and 35, 38, 40 chresmologos (term) 35 Christianity 116, 143–144 church councils and 132 chronicles 131, 176, 278 comedy 37, 40–41, 43, 45 commentaries 18, 21, 56–57, 63–64, 132, 136, 139–140, 142, 147, 154, 161, 210, 264 Babylonia and 180, 190n54 ‘conceptual focusing’ (Liu) 66n25

293 Confucianism 20, 24, 27, 103–104, 106– 108, 129–131, 134, 138, 143, 162, 201, 204, 270 commentary and 130 Confucian Way 143 Daoism and 24 learning and 134 Neo-Confucianism (Daoxue) 138–139 scholars of 132 sheng 136 six arts 204–206 Stone Canal Pavilion meeting (51 bce) 132 system of 132 White Tiger Hall meeting (79 ce) 132 Core 259 cosmogony 16, 18, 68n29, 172, 176, 183 cosmology 28, 67n27, 68, 70, 171, 201, 225, 241, 245 cosmos 134, 143, 230, 235 Cosmos, the 234–235 Crete 226 cults 172, 183, 200, 227n26, 238, 252, 264, 267, 276 culture, oral 8, 56–61, 152, 154, 164–165 dao (term) 55, 66n25, 77, 77n2 Daoism 20, 22, 24–27, 29, 56, 70, 78, 82, 134, 143, 238n50, 241–242 Neo-Daoism 138 see also Confucianism Dao, the 25–28, 67, 85, 85n25, 86, 96 Mother Dao 86, 92 de (inner power) 83, 242–243 death 70n34, 81, 130n11, 188n48, 226, 235– 236 ‘deep comparison’ (Denecke) 62 Delphi 32, 182n30, 187n44, 189, 230, 246 Delphic Oracle 32–33, 189, 230 demiurges 183–184 Diomedeia 262, 262n34, 63 Di, people of 150–151 dike 189, 189n51 Diurno 34 divination 20, 23, 32, 46, 199n78 see also mantike and mantis/eis Dodona 180n23 doxography 67, 67n27, 68, 68n29 commentary and 68

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294 dreams 177 dynamis, human 229 education 122, 122n76, 134, 175n10, 191, 234 Egypt, Egyptians 3, 60, 171, 179n21, 180n23, 186n40, 190n54, 258 Enlightenment, the 227, 247 Enna 259–260 Ephesus 54, 64, 69 Epicureans 143 epinikia (athletic victories) 175 episteme 18 epos (verse) 176 Essenes 143 ethics, Aristotelian 221 ethos 135, 192, 209–210, 268, 271, 277 etymology 35, 80n10, 180, 180nn23–25, 181– 182 eudamonie 198 Eurasia 5, 133 Europe 195 Ewe, Mt. 275 exegesis 57, 68, 129, 131–132, 135, 142–143, 173, 180n24, 224 notarikon and 180n24 folklore 267, 269 France 9 fu (recite/compose) 151–157, 161 fuchong (duplicates) 103 genealogy, genealogies 132, 173n6, 174, 176, 178n18, 179, 179n21, 180–182, 196, 200, 200n79, 201–203, 207–208, 230 geometry 234 Germany 9 Gloss R. 271 gnomai (wisdom sayings) 59, 59n11, 120– 121, 174, 191n55, 192 Confucian 124 see also gnomes gnomes 117–122, 129, 133, 187n44, 188, 190– 192, 193n59 defined 118 gnomological tradition (Greece) 107, 116, 123–124 see also gnomai (wisdom sayings) and gnomes Gong, people of 150

general subject index Greece (ancient) Archaic Period 70n34, 118, 166, 174, 175n10, 193, 268 Asiatic 226 Classical Period 29, 41, 58, 118, 174–175, 175n10 gods and 172–174, 176–179, 182–187, 228– 234, 236–237, 245–246, 253, 259, 262 Hellenistic Period 116, 118, 252, 254–257, 259 Imperial Period 252, 254, 257, 259 morality and 18, 172–174, 175n10, 176, 185, 187–188, 188n47, 189–191, 191n56, 192– 193, 198–199 oral-textual transition and 165 Persians, war with 36, 176–177, 182n30, 187, 193–198, 208 polis/eis and 30, 34, 38, 43, 173, 277–278, 278n71 see also literacy and paradoxography and wisdom literature gui (return) 147 Guodian 71, 129 gymnastics 234 Hades (location) 234, 236 hain-teny, Malagasy 59 harmonics 234 Haya (Tanzania) 4 he (harmony) 81–82, 95 Hebrew (language) 17, 60, 171, 190 hokmâ 17 Helicon, Mt. 230 hellenes 182, 182n30 hexagrams 22 hexameters 32–34, 90 historiai (personal enquiries) 208 historicity 20, 30, 64, 200, 204–205 hoi polloi 93 Huai R. 203 hupomnemata 144 hupsos (the sublime) 143 hybris 185, 187 Iapygia 258 India 77, 131, 222, 258 infants 28, 77–80, 80nn10–11, 81, 81n16, 82– 83, 86–88, 95–96 see also children

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general subject index intertextuality 135, 154, 157, 176n14, 189n51, 195 Ionia 177, 211, 252 Israel 222 Italy 9 Jahweh 3 jing (canonical) 107 jing (essence/vital essence) 81–82, 95, 241, 241n55, 242–246 see also qi (vapor/vital energy) jun (army) 114 junzi yue (The Gentleman remarks) 203, 204n91 Kallipolis 237 kaozheng (evidential research) 139 knowledge 18–19, 21–22, 24, 28–29, 36–38, 46, 55, 77, 87, 89, 92, 94, 134, 139, 162, 172, 175, 205, 208–209, 211, 222, 234, 236, 242–243, 245, 252–253, 256, 258, 265– 267, 269–270, 275–277 ancestral 29, 35 divine and 92 encyclopedic 174 ethnographic 271 etiological 172 geographical 269 limitations on 148 literacy and 23 mythological 172, 271 oracular 22–23, 34–39, 46 reified 276 scientific 271 self-knowledge 209, 212 technical 253 transmission of 30, 77, 163–164, 252 koinônia (association) 232n41, 233 K’ung-t’ung, Mt. 203 language 24–25, 33, 55, 55n5, 58n9, 86, 90– 92, 122, 133–136, 139, 182, 182n30, 206, 212, 252, 260, 266 allegorical-associative 42 literary 267 metalanguage 267–268 oral 26, 28 written 26, 28 lemmata 180n24 Lemnos 36–37

295 Lesbos 176, 252n6 lexicography 139 li (ritual) 111n39 li (to establish) 110 li (world) 138 ‘linguistic assimilation’ (Liu) 66n25 Lipara 264 literacy 19–20, 22–23, 28–29, 37, 46, 58, 60 ancient China and 26 ancient Greece and 29, 29n40, 58 orality and 41, 58, 211 wisdom and 20, 22, 24 see also knowledge Liuli (Keepsharp Country) 272 logos, logoi 1, 6, 35, 55, 55n5, 77, 77n2, 92– 93, 96, 135, 174, 180n23, 193, 193n60, 195, 197–198, 210–211 logographoi (logographers) and 175–176, 176n13, 178, 180, 193, 195, 254 see also mythos/oi lore 172–173, 177, 184, 193, 198, 205, 207, 212, 252, 268 lun ci (editor) 205 luseis (solutions) 261 Lydia 30–33, 188, 208 magicians 23 Magna Graecia 260 Mahāvihārin monks 132 mantike 39 mantis/eis 34–35, 35n, 36–39 Maori 59n11 Marvels 251–257, 260–265, 267–269, 271– 273, 275, 277–278 Massagetae 192 mei (beautiful) 114 memory 20, 31, 38, 40, 60, 114–115, 121n73, 123–124, 230, 239, 263 Mesopotamia 180n24 mirabilia 255n14, 259 miracula 259 Mohism 134 Muses 173, 175, 183, 230, 237 mythos/oi 1, 6, 173–177, 211 function of 174 transition to logos and 211, 221 see also wisdom myths, mythology 70, 172–176, 179–180, 194, 196, 198, 201, 201n83, 206, 207nn101– 102, 252–254, 262, 268, 273, 277–278

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296 narratives, oral 253, 267–268 New Zealand 59n11 Nigeria 59n11 nous 226, 235, 246 oath rituals 261 olbos 187 Olynthus 33–34, 42 oracles 18–19, 23, 29–34, 36, 38–46, 177, 224, 229–230, 237 authentication of 45 authority and 38 communication of 34 conservation of 34 knowledge and 22–23, 29, 34–35, 38–39, 46 traditions and 35–37 written 38, 237 see also knowledge and wisdom orality 41, 46, 56–63, 71–72, 107, 122, 164, 181, 198 see also China and literacy and writing Orphics 183 paleography 139 Palici 261 paradoxa 252, 252n6, 267, 268n44 paradoxography 251–252, 252nn4–5, 253– 256, 258–279 Aristotle and 254–255 problemata and 261 scientific texts and 254 see also marvels parallelism 60 parody 195 Peloponnesian War 197 Peripatetics 258 Persia, Persians 36, 188, 195–197 logioi of 195–196 see also Greece (ancient) perspectivism 17n6 philia (affection, friendship) 232–233 Phoenicians 195, 197 phronesis (wisdom/thought) 18, 172, 235 pi (skin) 114 poetry Chinese 58, 61, 147, 155, 270 didactic 173, 224 English 72

general subject index epinicean 186, 190, 192 etiological 258 Greek 40, 58, 90–92, 116, 120, 122, 173– 174, 175n10, 180, 182, 182n30, 184, 188n48, 189n51, 194, 196, 211, 230, 246, 257 lyric 90, 174, 190 Old English 59 oral 58–59 prose 211 poiein (to produce) 41 portents 177 Pre-Socratics 17 problema, problemata (causal question) 261, 277 see also paradoxography proverbs 4–6, 17–18, 117, 174, 190nn53–54, 191n56, 192 psyche 226 purification 236, 245, 276 Pylos 45 Pythagoreans 232 qi (vapor/vital energy) 240–241 qiang (strong) 110 Qing Qiu 274 Qi, people of 150, 158 Rätselkampf 40–41, 41n62, 42, 45–46 realia 183, 265–266, 278 Renaissance (Europe) 137 repetition 55, 60, 81, 84n23, 136 rituals 26, 28, 34, 158, 172, 225, 236, 238, 252, 261, 264, 268 Roman Empire 116 sacrifice 23, 130n11, 183n32, 221, 227, 233– 234, 238–239, 242, 245, 275–276 Salamis 193n59 Sardis 32 scholia 277 scribes 23, 66, 71, 115, 137–138, 199n78, 202– 203, 205, 269 see also shi (scribe/astrologer/annalist) see also zhi (record/inscribe) Scythia 226–227 Seeksuch, Mt. 271 self-divinization 221, 224–231, 234–246 shamanism 224–227

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general subject index shan (good) 114 Shanghai Museum 21n15, 106, 130 shen (numinous/spirit) 241, 241n56, 242 see also qi (vapor/vital energy) shi (scribe/astrologer/annalist) 71, 199n78 shi (troops) 114 shi, tradition of 211 shu (transmit) 135 Sicily 226, 259, 261 similes 115, 188 Singapore 9 Socratic method 134, 141 Softsharp Country 272 sôma (body) 226 song (to chant) 110 Song, people of 150–151 sophia (wisdom) 17, 172–174 sophists 116, 247 sophoi (wise men/sages) 174, 232, 246 soul 70, 83, 89–90, 226–228, 228n33, 229, 234–235, 235n47, 236–237, 240, 244– 246 death and (Plato) 236–237, 245 logistikon (rational part) 235 po-soul 83 ying-soul 83 see also psyche Sparta 39, 45 Stoicism 67, 67n27, 68, 143 storytelling 27, 30 Sumerians 3, 171, 186n40, 190 suren (ordinary people) 85 Susa 36 Switzerland 9 Syria 258 Tao, the 54, 139 techne 41 telos 211 temperance 231–233, 236 temples 34, 39, 259 Teng, people of 150 thaumata 256n15, 260, 266, 268, 268n44 theodicy 172 theogony, Hesiodic 183 theogony, Orphic 64 Thrace 226 Tibet 131 Tradition, The 144

Trojan War 193n60, 195–196 Troy 195 truth 19, 27, 87, 92–93, 175, 176n13, 178, 185, 190, 192–193, 198, 206, 208, 236, 260, 264 Ugarit 60 United Kingdom 9 United States 9 vaṃsa 132 virtue 23–24, 96, 135, 175, 186, 190, 192–193, 231–233, 236–238 Wanderapophthegmen 121 Wandersprüche 121 Wei 149–151, 153 destruction of 151 Domain of Wei 148, 151 wei (leather) 114 weimiao (subtle wonder) 138 weiyan (subtlety) 141 wisdom appropriation of 26 authority and 89–90, 118 balance and 244 bottom-up models and 225 canonization of 28 definitions of 17–18 divine and 92, 223, 237 folk wisdom 191 gods and 8 Greek terms and 18 mythos and 1–2 myths and 253 oracular 30–31, 34, 36, 39, 42–43, 45–46, 91, 230 orality and 28, 57, 63 top-down models and 225, 230 traditions and 19, 61, 185, 188–190, 192– 193, 198, 211–212, 253–254, 267, 269, 271 transmission of 27, 77, 96, 118 virtue and 237 wisdom literature 2–5, 8, 18–20, 22–26, 29, 46, 57, 61–63, 67, 72, 106–107, 131, 133, 171–173, 186, 222–225, 229–232, 247 academic disciplines and 15–17 aphorisms and 133 commentaries and 63, 67

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298 Hebrew tradition and 171, 173 oracles and 19, 29–31 universality and 61 see also gnomological tradition (Greece) wisdom monuments 20 writing 23, 25, 29n40, 33, 35, 37, 38n54, 41, 55n2, 58n9, 66n23, 91, 96, 107–108, 124, 131, 144, 162, 173–174, 183, 204, 206, 225, 232, 253, 256, 266–267 Chinese philosophical writing and 107, 123 Greek prose-writing 175, 175n12, 176–178, 180, 182n30, 184, 193, 208 history and 193–194, 199, 199n78, 204n92, 206–209 oracles and 33–34, 43, 45, 91, 237 orality and 46 wisdom and 19, 26, 28 wu (emptiness) 138 wuyü (without desires) 80n10 wuzhi (without knowledge) 80n10 xia 206 see also China xuantong (mysterious comprehension) 138

general subject index xuanxue (dark learning) 138 xue zhe (those who learn) 204 xùn (elegant) 206 Xu, people of 148–149, 153, 158, 160–161 Domain of Xu 153 xu (vacuity) 138 yǎ (proper; correct; refined; elegant) 206 yan (to speak) 110 Yahweh see Jahweh yili (meanings and principles) 139 Yimumin (One-Eyed People) 272 yinger (infant) 80, 80n10 Yoruba 4 you (as, like, but) 110, 160–161 yu (desires) 111n39 yu (to give) 110 ze (compiler) 205 zhi (record/inscribe) 25, 81 zhongren (masses) 85 zoology 252n6, 269 zuo (the composition) 153–155, 157 see also fu (recite/compose)

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