Critical Theory and the Classical World 2018008445, 9781138586970, 9780429504297

Citation preview

Critical Theory and the Classical World

This book radically re-examines Europe’s imaginaries of its origin in the ­ancient Greek world. Extracting central concepts of critical theory in its widest sense – beyond the Frankfurt School – like the human, force, spirit and domination, it allies them to characters, mythologies and motifs in ancient thought. Just as the stories of Achilles, Helen and Odysseus have become central to our modes of self-understanding, so we can also examine the roots and routes of the concepts of social theory out of the ancient earth and its myths. An important book for scholars and students of critical theory, social theory, aesthetic theory and the history of the human sciences, it alerts us to the catastrophe that we are facing in the 21st century  – a ­catastrophe of domination and ecological collapse that has its origins in the ancient world and the ways in which it began to define a certain sense of humanness. Considering the artistic production of the ancient world in relation to the thought of Adorno, Critical Theory and the Classical World argues that it is only by understanding the persistence of the haunted motifs of the past into the present that we can begin to re-forge our critical theory of society and re-found our social formations on a new basis. Martyn Hudson is a Lecturer in Art and Design History at Northumbria University, UK, teaching on the Creative and Cultural Management Masters programme. He is the author of The Slave Ship, Memory and the ­Origin of Modernity, Species and Machines and Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory. Cover image: Courtesy of Emily Hesse

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory Series Editor Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Texas A&M University, USA

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that re-discovers the relevance of social theory for contemporary times, demonstrating the enduring importance of theory for modern social issues. The series covers social theory in a broad sense, inviting contributions on both ‘classical’ and modern theory, thus encompassing sociology, without being confined to a single discipline. As such, work from across the social sciences is welcome, provided that volumes address the social context of particular issues, subjects, or figures and offer new understandings of social reality and the contribution of a theorist or school to our understanding of it. The series considers significant new appraisals of established thinkers or schools, comparative works or contributions that discuss a particular social issue or phenomenon in relation to the work of specific theorists or theoretical approaches. Contributions are welcome that assess broad strands of thought within certain schools or across the work of a number of thinkers, but always with an eye toward contributing to contemporary understandings of social issues and contexts. Titles in this series Lost in Perfection Impacts of Optimisation on Culture and Psyche Edited by Vera King, Benigna Gerisch and Hartmut Rosa Emotions, Everyday Life and Sociology Edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen Critical Theory and the Classical World Martyn Hudson For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ sociology/series/ASHSER1383

Critical Theory and the Classical World

Martyn Hudson

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Martyn Hudson The right of Martyn Hudson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Names: Hudson, Martyn, author. Title: Critical theory and the classical world / Martyn Hudson. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. | Series: Classical and contemporary social theory | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018008445 | ISBN 9781138586970 (hbk) | ISBN 9780429504297 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Critical theory. | Civilization, Classical. | Europe—Civilization—Classical influences. Classification: LCC HM480.H83 2018 | DDC 938—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008445 ISBN: 978-1-138-58697-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-50429-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction: Critical theory and the classical world 1 1 Out of the ancient earth 9 2 Marx, Epicurus and the classical world 28 3 Mnemosyne: Art, memory, objects 43 4 Human: Troy 58 5 Force: Achilles 78 6 Enlightenment: Odysseus 97 7 Cosmos: The classical gods 116 8 Spirit: The classical statue 139 9 Domination: The Atreides 162 References Index

179 197

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my friends and collaborators who have contributed to this work and conversation. These include Liv Carder, Ben Reche, P.A. Morbid, Gavin Parry, Neil Jenkings, David Petts, Gwilym Williams, ­Quentin Lewis, Isabel Lima, Tina Roberts, Sean Milburn, Sarah Tulloch, Benjamin Jeffries, Nick Stone, Rob Airey, Richard Skelton, Tim Shaw, Sean McCusker, Taryn Edmonds, Jessie Joe Jacobs, Eric Lee, Julie C ­ rawshaw, Frances Rowe, Menelaos Gkartzios, Karen Scott, Pete Cookson, James Bloodworth, Darren O’Neil, John Bowers, Emmanuel Tzwern, Yael ­Reicher, Ian Hughes, Grahame Whitfield, David Butler, Venda Pollock, Paul R ­ ichter, Ed Wainwright, Julia Heslop, Ian Hunter, Celia Larner, Michele Allen, Eric Cross, Harry Paterson, Alan Johnson, Sacha Ismail, Elinor Morgan, Mick Garratt, Mike Woolley, Rowena Sommerville, M ­ aggie O’Neill and Ruth Barker. No part of this work would be possible if it were not for my first teacher of classics, Phil Balmforth – a constant inspiration. Neil Jordan and Alice Salt of Routledge have been hugely supportive readers and developers of this project and others. I would like to note the ­support of the research group I belong to at Northumbria U ­ niversity – Visual and M ­ aterial ­Cultures – and specifically Ysanne Holt. I would also like to acknowledge the importance of the Shefton Museum of Greek Art and Archaeology and the Shefton library collection at the Great North ­Museum, Newcastle, where I conducted large parts of this study. Many of the ideas here were first rehearsed in conversation with and in partnership with the arts projects of Emily Hesse. I owe a great debt of thanks to her and her co-thinking.

Introduction Critical theory and the classical world

This book is about translation, reception and repetition. It is far less about the original. It is not about the ‘classics’ or the ‘classical moment’ and is certainly not a history of events 3000 years ago that a multitude of texts have described, transmuted and reworked. That multitude of texts is a production of 3000 years. Whatever moment or history it attempted to describe at the beginning has long disappeared. No ‘history’ can be written of the Trojan War, no ‘biography’ of Achilles. Of course traces of those moments can be found embedded in texts, embodied in statues, buried in the rock of Mycenae. This search for the ‘world of Odysseus’ is an uncovering of our obsessions and compulsions rather than a search for ‘ancestors’ or the very moment that Atreus dragged the sons of Thyestes into the sacred grove. Indeed the search for that grove of oak and ilex in the heart of the dead city will retrieve nothing. Yet neither is this entirely about reception and those intangible stories we receive from the ancient earth. The compulsion, over those millennia, to re-describe and repeat those moments is a forceful act of imagination. At the same time the themes that emerge from those archaic moments are themes which stay with us. We receive them because we are struggling with many of the same problems as well as very different ones. This is the concern of this book, but it is also something more specific: it is an attempt to use those stories, motifs, categories to think through our current human predicament and crises. I do not share the idea that these stories appeal to us because essentially our human nature is the same as that of Agamemnon, Achilles and Odysseus. Undoubtedly we are still obsessed with ancestry, love, violence and horror, and we can still weep as Iphigenia is sacrificed by her mad old father on the beach. But the predicaments of Agamemnon as he kills his daughter are not ours. The ‘classics’ can illuminate and inform our imaginaries, our politics, our ecologies, our human movements – but we have very different Troys to besiege. How then do the ‘classics’ illuminate, inform and entertain? In what ­m anner does the story of Odysseus, the wooden horse and the destruction of Troy appear to us as if they were indeed apparitions? In translation. Few people, outside of scholarly circles, would read the ‘original’ texts

2  Introduction in archaic Greek and Latin. Indeed the idea of these texts as original in any way is also problematic. They are often collages of different versions and different textual and oral variants as in Homer. Texts with more fixity, like Seneca, for example survive themselves only by accident. The missing and lost corpus of the classics far outweighs what has survived. Indeed whole civilisations and peoples either lost their stories or had never recorded them in the first place. The contingent, accidental nature of our inheritance can make us dizzy as we examine what has survived to us in multiple versions, translations and textual variants. Each translation is a document of its moment of translation as well as a document of the archaic. They are the product, like Pope’s translation of Homer, of the mores, social formations and linguistic subtleties of the moment of ­translation not of the time of Homer. As Alan Garner has said of Pope’s translations of Homer: I see little of that in Pope’s immaculate couplets. His Iliad is the Iliad Homer might have written if he had been an English eighteenth-­c entury gentleman of polite society. That is not quite the same as giving a generation its voice. The difference is important. Pope’s duty was to translate to polite society of the eighteenth-century the heart and mind of Homer; and that he did not do. Instead, the Greek poet was dressed as an Englishman. (1997:43) As Christopher Logue has argued, the respective translations of Pope, ­Murray and Chapman reflected their own literary powers and social locations. As he says of subsequent translators: ‘Lord Derby was high-Victorian and Rieu mid-Windsor-steady’ (2001:vii). Robin Campbell, in his own translations of Seneca, has argued that contemporary translation must avoid both literality or excessive invention and inspiration capturing both sound and sense (1969:26). The texts I use in this book are therefore inconsistent, idiosyncratic and personal. This, as I have noted, is neither a work of classics nor history, but of social and aesthetic theory. I use the Loeb Classical Library for the original texts and literal translations at times, but more often I use my favourite translations. This is often because of a particularly loved turn of phrase, because my old copies are so scored with markings that it is impossible not to use them, or because it was my entrance-point to a specific author. In our generation the translation and interpretation of the Oresteia by Robert Fagles is impossible to avoid. Its dark beauty radiates from every page. The flawed but beautiful translations of Homer by E.V. Rieu, Martin Hammond’s visceral prose translation of the Iliad, the Agamemnon by Ted Hughes have all become part of the body of our cultural world. Long may readers persist in their readings of what are taken to be ‘ur-texts’, but these multiple translations are the objects which

Introduction  3 produce our social world and imaginaries. Reading the Iliad in English still makes me giddy with excitement that ‘events’ so distant to us in space and time wherever we are in the world can still shape how we perceive our work, the people we love, and our social fates and destinations. Let us take a minor myth that I have reflected on for a long time in order to illustrate the resonance of stories and how difficult it might be to fathom their meanings. Tereus was given Procne as a wife and they had a son called Itys. Tereus fell in love with Procne’s sister Philomela and raped her. He pretended that Procne had died, but he hid her out in the forests. He then married ­Philomela but cut out her tongue. She could not speak again but she wove letters on a robe and so got a message to Procne. Procne went to search for her sister, and when she found her Procne murdered Itys the son and served him as meat for Tereus to eat. He only became aware of what he had eaten when Procne displayed the severed head of his son to him. The sisters then fled. Tereus pursued them across the land with an axe and they were overtaken at Daulia in Phocis. The sisters prayed to the gods to change them into birds, whereupon Procne became a nightingale and Philomela a swallow. The nightingale laments through song. The swallow is silent (see Pollard 1977:164–165). Other later iterations of this story, like that of Ovid for example, transpose the metamorphoses of the sisters, with Philomela becoming a nightingale. The fixity of the original story is thereby dispersed. The mythic motif is unstable. It has versions. Yet is there an ur-version? We might think of a story as having an origin in a particular period or place, or of having an author. This author may have retold the story orally and can be seen to have begun its multiple proliferations and iterations in order that it comes down to me reading it in Pollard’s work on birds and Greek culture. This person may not, however, have been the first person to write it down. Indeed it may have been part of a common memory-store of mythic motifs of a number of storytellers. Each proliferation reducing the fixity of the original story until it becomes materially embodied in a text, and even then the orality may have given form to a series of texts each with its own variant. Some are lost, some become canonical, some compete with other rival texts. Yet even then we are still faced with the fact that the first telling, deep in antiquity, does not necessarily reveal any kind of historicity even though it takes place in a recognised historical landscape. Procne and Philomela may indeed have been fictions, their fixity in text more akin to the novel or the short story or poem which refers only to its own aesthetic truth rather than to a real world at all. This then threatens the very meaning of the myth. Do the tellers want to reveal a truth that they hold or are they opening the motif up to the multiple interpretations of its listeners and readers? Whatever historical truth it might have been, the repository of it is largely dispersed. What remains is an enigma. We simply do not know whether

4  Introduction these were real people traversing real landscapes and actually asking to be transformed into birds. The magical and ritual motif of the metamorphosis is not the reason for dispelling truth and actuality. The idea that human beings can be transformed into birds is indeed mythic, and threatens the solidity and materiality of human scientific rationality. But this is threatened even now, in the twenty-first century, assailed from all sides as we are by superstitions and gods and magic. The dispersal of actuality is performed less by this than by the total inability to reveal intent, authorship, fixity and message in this mythic motif. The story remembers but it does not really know what it is remembering. Did the author see the metamorphosis and the ending of their flight from Tereus by literally flying into the air? Or was it something that they had heard, had come from the gods in a dream or thought up literally as a fiction? Indeed what we do know of classical myth is that it bears within it, marked upon it, traces of memory-structures that sometimes do hint at historical events and processes that might well have happened. But these stories are often trying to account for their own mysteries. It might be that faced with elements of nature the tellers are trying to understand and account for, like the song of some birds and the lack of song of others, the world with which they are faced, live within and endure. The life world and imaginaries, indeed the entire structural thought-world, of the Greeks confronts the material world and comments upon it and accounts for the lives lived within that world or those which once inhabited that world as their ancestors. This book then attempts to understand how the memory-forms and structures of the ancient world are recomposed away from their discernible moments of origin. It thinks about their re-elaborations and their continued utility to the organisation of our inward lives. It also works through the social theory of repetition: the ways in which the human sciences have attempted to think about questions of the classical. A significant number of aestheticians and critical theorists have attempted to use classical motifs in order to explain aspects of ongoing human and ecological problems. The way they figurate classical heroes and gods and delineate and use aesthetic objects is an important part of this work and can help us rethink the ‘classical’ social sciences and the problems it sets itself as well as what they take to be their sociological ‘objects’ and human ‘subjects’. In the first chapter we begin to elucidate the ways in which the deep past is presented to us, and specifically relate this to the idea of critical theory and critique. The chapter examines the ways in which the ­memory-objects of the past such as texts and aesthetic objects like statues are recomposed in multiple ways throughout history. Even when their message is clear or they embody some kind of meaning, those messages and meanings become transposed over time and retranslated. Sometimes the meanings are dispelled even when traces of original intentions or historical truths are revealed in unusual ways often unknown to the author. The burning of bodies, burial mounds and the passing round of lots in the Iliad hint

Introduction  5 at historical actualities. We then begin to delineate what we might mean by ‘critical theory’, and particularly how critical theorists of the first-­ generation Frankfurt School began to read the Odysseus motif to which we return in a later chapter. We read the critical theory of that tradition as essentially a theory of domination before examining a subsequent critical tradition which stresses antagonisms that lie at the heart of economic and aesthetic categories and resist the theory and practice of domination. We conclude the chapter by thinking about critical theory as a political project and the implications of this for building the programmes, edifices and ‘palaces’ of the future. In the second chapter we begin to address some of the central themes of the book by exploring Marx on the classical world. Marx’s early studies (long before he and Engels delineated the ‘materialist conception of history’) were on Epicurus and Democritus, and his classical education was revealed in almost the entirety of his work. He often used classical analogies and motifs, and both he and Engels were deeply informed by the histories of Greece and Rome as well as their cultural forms. There are processes that we can observe in Marx’s early works on classical philosophy which look to be the genesis of his dialectical approach to history. There are also motifs and ideas that he would later redevelop or discard. Social theorists and analysts have generally agreed that these writings inform the emergence of later Marxist conceptions of nature and politics. But the classical analogies of Marx and Engels also reveal something else: that epochs re-emerge with similar patterns of elevation and cancellation; and that it is almost impossible to think about social theory without the re-emergence of motifs like the ghost of Achilles. We can also reframe the Marxist social theory of writers like Thomson and De Ste. Croix by examining ideas of the multitude, the chorus and the idea of ‘world’ that seemed trivial to later scholars but are in fact decisive in understanding both Marx and the fate of contemporary social theory. In Chapter 3 we begin to examine and theorise the idea of aesthetic objects. The Marxist project to understand the forces and relations of production and social reproduction (including the production and reproduction of the aesthetic and its material forms) finds its most enigmatic formulation in the late notebooks of Theodor Adorno and critical theory. There is no attempt to provide any kind of exposition of Adorno’s mysterious and impenetrable late notebooks. But we do ‘expose’ certain types of concepts about materiality, spirit, incarnation and repetition that Adorno recomposes and comes back to time and time again. This links to new materialist and realist philosophies of objects and nature that have emerged over the last two decades largely by way of readings of Heidegger rather than Marx. This chapter sets the scene for the kinds of objects that the classical world offers to us for use and what meanings these material entities might disclose or dispel, or whether we can see them as acting as containers of meaning at all.

6  Introduction In the fourth chapter we examine not just the classical myth of the fall of Troy but the significance of Troy for contemporary and twentieth-century social theory. The protean story of the Trojan War would inform the classical world and subsequent social formations, and persist as a compelling metaphor. But what might these metaphors mean? They hint at a peculiar type of human identity and culture that emerges in the interregnum between the ‘actual’ war and its representation in the Iliad some centuries later. This might be because the Iliad displays a shift in the nature of the human mind or because it acts as the foundational myth of European cultures. It is important to address what the war and the fall of Troy can tell us about the nature of human societies and social thought and expression. Its emanation in material culture and the continued persistence of its motifs (like the wooden horse, like the wrath of Achilles and the wiliness of Odysseus, like the story of Helen and her captivity and fate, like the monstrous Atreides – the brothers Menelaus and Agamemnon) can reveal processes of possession and dispossession and of aesthetic objects and material culture which are utterly decisive for the way we shape social theory today. In Chapter 5 we attempt to fathom the mystery that the hero Achilles offers us. He embodied the notion of force and action as opposed to the O ­ dyssean virtues of interiority and enlightenment. Half-divine, semi-­human, this creature of action would mark out the territory of war upon the plains before Troy. He will come to be seen as the exemplification of ­violence, war, torture and horror, and the re-emergence of his ghost after his death would claim his rights and his honours long after his passing. We offer a reading of the Achilles motif by Rachel Bespaloff and Simone Weil and their concepts of both force and resistance. In Chapter 6 we examine the great addendum to the Iliad: the journey of one man and his comrades home towards Ithaca. This story, like the wrath of Achilles, has as its consequence a set of philosophical and social theories which use the Odyssean motifs as analogies for certain sets of human behaviour. The figure and the journey of Odysseus have served to support certain types of reworking of social theory in the work of writers such as Jon Elster and Adorno and Horkheimer. Odysseus as a human seems to embody certain types of characteristics and ‘interiority’ that are seemingly different to that of the Iliad and become part of the self-understanding of humans in classical, medieval and modern societies. The journey itself has also contributed to our understanding of the ‘world’. This is not because we can locate the places that Odysseus finds himself traversing, like Circe’s island (although some have attempted to do so with very mixed results), but because it illustrates the cosmologies and ‘natures’ of the early Greek world. Further, the Odyssean motifs also help us think about the emergence of patriarchy, the nature of the gods and what exile and homecoming can mean in our own age of movement and migration.

Introduction  7 In the next chapter we explore those very gods who whisper into the ear of Odysseus or are embedded and embodied in the half-divine human frame of Achilles. We explore the ancient conception of the gods and what they might reveal about our own attempts to understand the world. We also think about the forays and contestations between gods and human beings, and how far these can be aesthetically represented and recomposed in successive generations. The schisms and fractures between humans, gods and animals are also addressed, including the permeable boundaries and ­moments of collision and the generation of divine and human forms. The idea of the ­‘theomachy’ is also important as it becomes one contest (if not the final) between gods and humans as the latter try to dispel and overcome the gods by eliminating them, making them disappear or laughing at them. This abdication of ritual and attempt to kill the gods would have profound consequences for the human sciences in early modernity and our societies where we can still see the shadows of gods all around us. In Chapter 8 we examine the issue of decomposition and composition in the aesthetic form of the statuesque. As gods were dying just as much as humans some philosophers have talked about the ‘divine decomposition’. ­Perhaps as a consequence of the disappearance or invisibility of the gods and of humans who were wont to die their images became ‘petrified’ in the ancient world literally in the form of statues. This process of ­enfiguration not only alerts us to the huge aesthetic importance of the sculptural work of archaic and classical Greece (and ultimately Rome). It also means that there are a series of questions to address. What does the statue actually embody and can it come alive again? If these statues are part of ritual ­veneration what kinds of spirit, representation and ‘being’ do they enclose, embody and potentially reveal to us? Why do these sculptures of gods, humans and animals proliferate throughout antiquity and beyond, and can we see them as replications of real original beings at all? We develop here a new social-­theoretical methodology for addressing the material, sculptural remnants of the ancient world and what it reveals about our minds, theories and ­philosophies rather than what it might reveal about the classical world: which would itself be the task of historians of art and the statuesque. In the ninth chapter we return to some of the most powerful stories of the ancient world. The myths of Atreus and his sons Agamemnon and ­Menelaus are enmeshed with the collisions and confrontations within a ­single ­family. These include Atreus and his brother Thyestes, Menelaus and Helen, ­Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and Iphigenia and Orestes and A ­ egisthus. The revolving murders, sacrifices and revenger myths are some of the most monstrous of the ancient world, and attempts have been made to locate these massacres in the specific rooms of the palace of Mycenae. We address the ultimate fate of these myths, of the beginnings of war and revolution in the sacrificial grove of that ancient palace, and of the collapse of civilisations.

8  Introduction We can use these motifs, metaphors and analogies to rethink not just the objects of our human sciences and philosophy but also the ecological and genocidal predicaments that we are currently faced with in our human encampments and impulses towards domination. We conclude by examining the relations between art and material forms and the survival of the ­human and other species in a world which was founded upon and still obsesses about the dark room in the palace of Mycenae.

1 Out of the ancient earth

Introduction We are out of the ancient earth and no longer in it. But many things, beings like ourselves included, came out of the ancient earth. Some things and some types of being persisted into newer worlds and social formations. Some things and beings were lost. This includes texts of lost classical plays and even mythical beings like the gods which were part of the lived ritual experience of ancient societies. This process of persistence, preservation and cancellation is part of the vagaries of historical development and the cultural evolution of human beings and their gods and objects. Yet this immediately raises problems of what types of human beings and what kinds of ancient societies we are talking about. On the one hand the invention of the cultural and physiological ‘human’ is a product of modernity, albeit related to ideas and themes in the philosophy of ancient thinkers like Aristotle and Epicurus. Perhaps it is more telling that these ‘classical’ human beings considered themselves, or those humans of their own mythological past, to be Argives and Trojans, Lapiths and Ionians rather than humans per se. Further, there were many kinds of ancient and archaic societies enmeshed with the human past, including those of Africa and Neolithic and Bronze Age Western Europe as well as classical Greece (Hudson 2016, 2017a, 2017b). This text refers to the ancient world of classical Greece (and to a lesser extent Rome) and its human beings and divine entities. But it is not about that world, but about ours. This needs some initial elaboration. The ancient world of classical Greece informs this book for three central reasons. First, because ideas about humans, about art and about gods that still persist have their first documentation, if not their origins, in ancient Greece. Perhaps most importantly these societies initiate an obsession with what humans are: about their identities and differences between humans and animals, between humans and gods, and within the human camp between Achaean and Trojan, European and Barbarian. These categories and their further elaborations persist even now. Second, the city-states of Greece, and specifically the islands of Ionia, are situated on what became then and exists still now as a fracture line between

10  Out of the ancient earth different kinds of civilisations. Indeed those lines are not borders per se but permeable boundaries determined by geography and the ocean. Those boundaries both deflected and dispelled people from different interacting civilisations, but also allowed for incorporation, adoption and hybridity. Third, the motifs, myths and stories of this period still inform our civilisation (and indeed perhaps still bedevil it). This may be, as some have thought, because they illustrate a common human nature that we today and those of the ancient past still share. On the other hand it may be that there is no such thing as that common humanity, and we simply adopt and adapt a restricted group of archetypal motifs. We reincorporate these motifs into new formations as humans evolve and endlessly change and constantly reproduce and recompose stories and cultures inherited from their past or the past of other, now dead, civilisations. Again, the attempt to delineate those myths, motifs and stories is not an attempt at studying ‘classics’. This is not a history or analysis of the ancient world of Greece but an analysis of our current human world and its predicament, and it illustrates a central mystery about this world. This mystery lies in the endless compulsion to readapt, reuse and replicate the motifs of the ancient world in order to try and provide solutions to our modern crises and the challenges thrown up by social and cultural formations and civilisations profoundly different to those of the ancient world. Is it, like the idea of a common or united humanness, that we are faced with the same social predicaments of those archaic social formations? Or is it because the texts and ideas of classical Greece epistemologically restrict us to view our own, profoundly different social world through the lens of the ancient one? It may be that the texts and artefacts of the classical world provide us with a repository or a store of motifs, images and words that can be adapted and used as resources. They provide clues, counter-archives, alternative readings, matrices and templates and a place, the Greek agora and the Roman civic space, to which we can return in order to think about that world and ours. Both the lost utopias and the lost torture-cellars offer ways of thinking about us. Indeed they are a constant presence. These social formations and their cultures persist in both their external forms and in forms of human inwardness: in both architecture and in self-understanding. As Barrow has said: ‘Rome never fell, she turned into something else’ (1949:208). The motifs of the classical world make us revel with delight or recoil with horror because we are their cultural descendants.

The repetitious classical world This book then is not a history of the ancient world but a sociology of its repetitions. It offers a methodology of reading motifs, objects and stories in order to illustrate us not them. It is therefore not a history of philosophy, of art or of material objects. It does indeed think with philosophy, art and material objects and their multiple recompositions in places far away geographically

Out of the ancient earth  11 and culturally from their origin. The processes of spatio-temporal recomposition do have at their base both a wealth and a paucity of ideas, art and objects with which to play with, use and re-display. The survival of these artefacts acts as the substrate of their repetition even when the original centaurs and Argive warriors that they often represent and reveal do not survive, are not present or had never existed in the first place. In certain key ways the line of Homer, the picture of Achilles on a vase, the centaurs and Lapiths of sculpture are themselves repetitions of earlier cultural forms and motifs. The actual genesis of these motifs is lost to us and was also lost to Homer. In some ways the reworking of ancient forms is a way of both remembering and persistent misremembering. Aside from the contingent nature of these motifs and that fact that our remembering is based on the survivals rather than the losses, the tasks that these motifs perform as they traverse different historical epochs and geographical territories is different. What the story of Troy made apparent to readers and listeners in third-­c entury Athens is different to its appearances and apparition in our time. One of the problems that readers and historians are often faced with is what the stories actually represent. Often texts are used to provide clues to the society and history from which they have emerged. Equally, historians frequently examine the societal and archaeological context to examine the text. That interrelationship and dialectic, indeed what Charles Martindale has called ‘dialectical classics’ (1993:xiii), between the world and the text has often led to the emplacement of a specific story in a specific location. It leads many readers to the actual city of Troy or the actual tomb of Agamemnon. Of course that actuality is nothing of the sort. There was no ‘world of ­Odysseus’, there is no ‘mask of Agamemnon’. These ancient worlds are what Moses Finley has called ‘Never-Never Lands’ (1999). The numerous projects that attempt to locate the text in a space and to situate stories in a location that can be identified have indeed had some successes archaeologically, but they are also projects of mismatch, slippage and misremembering. Indeed we have no idea whether Achilles and Odysseus ever existed at all, which makes attempts to find their tombs and their houses even more superficial. But, even in the absence of the original, their shadows and repetitions persist and haunt us in many subsequent forms. We replicate maps of Troy in our mazes, the fleeing refugees of Troy give birth to the invented royal dynasties of both Rome and ancient Britain, our children still learn the story of the wooden horse of Troy. These attempts to repeat and replicate perform certain kinds of functions but also display certain forms of conflict and dispossession. They are attempts to understand our mysteries and predicaments in forms inherited from myth. Maurice Bowra has noted that in addition to their historical development as a people and culture there was something mysterious about the Greeks. It was that somehow they stood ‘outside history’ as a ‘driving, daemonic force’ (1973:11). For Bowra this was intimately connected to the notion of light and lucidity. That there was something significant about the materiality of the

12  Out of the ancient earth Greek world in terms of its landscape that profoundly affected its cultural forms (1973:21). As Bowra argues, ‘their minds, like their eyes, sought naturally what is lucid and well-defined’ (1973:22). The daemonic force itself offers us a clue to the persistence of that lucidity and the compulsion for subsequent civilisations to return to its light and landscape. The daemon is an incorporeal form that can both guide and seize the form of human beings. It guides the human and shapes its intentions. This spirit can literally, like all the dead of world history, seize control of the living and shape them to its own ends (Hudson 2002). Likewise the living being can seize control of the dead and incorporeal form and use it for its own ends. This induces the notion of the transhistorical: the specific motifs born in one historical moment which persist through the course of history. These motifs are likewise extra-territorial. Born as they are in that specific spatial location, they can traverse landscapes and geographies in order to become part of globalised cultural forms. These entities (daemons, stories, images and so on) become the extra-temporal resources for subsequent civilisations. They are produced by history and place but also transcend the historical and the geographic specificity of their origins. Immediately we confront the problem of the authentic and the originary of that specific spatio-temporal moment. The problem lies in this: it may never have happened. What we confront is indeed a multitude of repetitions with the original. Or it may be that the original is so remote to us that we can only hear the echoes of it in Homer. It is a sound mirror or a sonorous cave where we can only hear the after-effects. The fact that we do have traces of historical factualities and actualities protruding through the sedimented layers of the Iliad and the Odyssey may make us cautious about the denial of those worlds and to entirely consider them as ‘never-never lands’. We simply cannot say that that world was never, only that it might have been. In any case this matters less than the echo and the repetition itself. We are not trying to trace the originary moment rather than mapping its consequences. The Greek gods may never have existed, but we can still map the ritual practices that were a consequence of this ‘non-existence’. Indeed the gods are existent entities precisely because they were real, material forces in the life world of both the ancients and of us. The multiple versions of the half-divine Achilles that followed on from his death and passing do not need an actual death to be proliferated. The repetitive motifs are protean without a proteus. But Achilles’ death may have happened, and it may have happened in the place that has been fastened on as the most likely site of the towers of Ilium. We do not know, and indeed the multiple repetitions of the story problematise that knowing and that enlightenment. Indeed the endarkenment of their world and of ours perhaps makes lucidity all the more decisive. Scholars have long been convinced of the historicity of Troy even when other parts of Homer’s narratives, and specifically the journeys of Odysseus, become unstable, mythic and rather unlikely. The further away Aeneas,

Out of the ancient earth  13 Brutus and Odysseus move away from that actual place the more fabulous their further adventures become and the more fragile the actual geography and seascapes of the Aegean and the Mediterranean become. Here is historicity and what we might call geographicity, real place and real history. Here is De Burgh: ‘The world of Homer was a real world’ (1961:4). Here are Wace and Stubbings: ‘Schliemann did not discover Mycenae and Troy: they had never been lost’, (1962:vi-vii). Yet the actuality does not reveal itself easily. It is manifested by excavations which literally reveal that which has been buried in places that were often intangibly associated with the mythic traditions of Homer, as we shall see later. Indeed, as Helen Thomas and Frank Stubbings have argued: ‘Homer’s world is revealed to us as it were in passing’ (in Wace and Stubbings 1962:283). That world is lost, and reconstructions based on the catalogue of the ships or the passing of lots or even the geography of Odyssean harbours will not re-manifest that world. Archaeology and textual exegesis, even when hand in hand and complementary (and they are so often not), will not make that world somehow reappear. It can only emerge again as a ghost and an apparition. The relentless search to discover origins (especially ones that aren’t there or are impossible to find) is an integral part not just of human cultures generally but of social theory and philosophy. Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin have spoken of this urge as somehow ‘extrascientific’ (1992:xvi). It is a problem which is metaphysical and philosophical, and this problem often dispenses with science and research. It is about understanding what we are as ideas and networks of humanness. Indeed they argue that ‘humanness is what we feel about ourselves’ (1992:xx–xxi). This question haunted the minds and cultures of the ancient world, and it continues to haunt us. Attempts to understand the human, the proto-human and the extra-human continue, now as much as then, to elaborate questions of distinction, classification and elaboration. We have a diversity of exterior forms and of interior being. We have things in common with other human beings, animals and supernatural beings like ghosts and deities. We have profound differences also. But like the ancient world we are obsessed with the exact boundaries and divisions and meeting points between the human, the animal and the deity. Elsewhere we have examined the borders between differing types of human (Hudson 2016), between the human and the mythical being (Hudson 2017a), between the human and the ghost (Hudson 2017b), and between the human and the machine and the animal (Hudson 2017c). Here we explore the relations between that most significant and imaginary intersection: that of the human and the god. The elision and the collision between the human world and the animalistic, the machinic, the spectral and the divine is of central importance to the social imaginaries of both ancient and contemporary worlds. These imaginaries of fusion, schism and social memory are often phrased in terms of what we have lost. Indeed they are often profoundly nostalgic. We have a nostalgia for our gods, ghosts and discarded social forms. It is

14  Out of the ancient earth worth quoting George Steiner at some length to illustrate these nostalgic imaginaries of genesis and origin. For Steiner: It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. These are often as highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement, against that past. The echoes by which a society seeks to determine the reach, the logic and authority of its own voice, come from the rear. Evidently, the mechanisms at work are complex and rooted in diffuse but vital needs of continuity. A society requires antecedents. Where these are not naturally at hand, where a community is new or reassembled after a long interval of dispersal or subjection, a necessary past tense to the grammar of being is created by intellectual and emotional fiat … the ultimate motive may be metaphysical. Most history seems to carry on its back vestiges of paradise. At some point in more or less remote times things were better, almost golden. A deep concordance lay between man and the natural setting. The myth of the Fall runs stronger than any particular religion. There is hardly a civilization, perhaps hardly an individual consciousness, that does not carry inwardly an answer to intimations of a sense of distant catastrophe. Somewhere a wrong turn was taken in that ‘dark and sacred wood’, after which man has had to labor, socially, psychologically, against the natural grain of being. (1971:3–4) The discarded and lost detritus of human culture then become the antecedents out of which social formations are built. Social formations are imaginary structures built from the rubble of prior civilisational forms, even forms which are themselves quite mythical and cannot be found in any kind of material record. Indeed, imaginaries are, as Steiner says, the product of catastrophe and disaster. This is why the stories of Troy are so powerful and protean. The lost city, its discarded and enslaved refugees, its treasures, its dead and ghostly warriors and its lost and distant gods are revivified time and time again in new locations, among new peoples, in new imaginaries, architectures and material objects. The tale of Troy has proliferated and multiplied, and as it has done so its ghosts have been embodied time and time again in new human frames, surviving like a virus through successive generations of humans, recomposed and reworked. It has become part of an embodied multitude: of organic beings that hold within their interior a set of stories which emanated from a place most of them will never visit over 3000 years ago amongst a small number of contesting soldiers fighting over a provincial Asian town. It is remembered by the multitude entirely because it accidentally survived as so much did not. It is remarkable that we are still

Out of the ancient earth  15 faced, because of this, with ideas of the eternal mutability of human beings and what Theodor Adorno called ‘human invariants’ (2013:10). Indeed these stories are almost purely imaginary as much as they are widely held social imaginaries. Umberto Eco has written of history as a theatre of illusions and fictions and what he calls the ‘dominion of the false’ (1999:2). Under this dominion many fictions become profligate. Cornelius Castoriadis has argued that the classical world is so central to us precisely because it is both proximal and distant. He argues for the singularity of that classical moment in terms of its definition of our continents, philosophies and politics: ‘I cannot ignore the fact that my own thought, however original I may deem it to be, is but a ripple, at best a wave, in the huge social-historical stream which welled up in Ionia twenty-five centuries ago’ (1991:19). The social-historical imaginary of Ionia and the classical world predetermines the limited, but potentially exponential, number of gods, motifs and stories that we have inherited. But it also prefigures and elaborates the damaging obsession with dividing cultures and continents from one another. We have inherited our languages and cultures from the ancient world but also the obsession with delineating the boundaries of ­Europe and Asia in the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans. This is undoubtedly true and continues to mark the fissures between cultures. Yet the ancient world was one which was generous, syncretic and viral. Many Greek deities had an African and Asian genesis. The ancient world was certainly a foundational moment for so many aspects of our history and culture. Michel Serres (2015), in his work on foundations to which we return later, has argued for an understanding of Greece and Rome as places of ‘beginning’. Kostas Vlassopoulos (2007, 2013) has argued for the dissolution of a Eurocentric perspective on classical history. He displaces the vision of empire and unification with one which contests a ‘national’ narrative of Greece against the Asiatic or the barbarian. The interaction of cities, colonies and empires would signal the emergence of globalisation, but it also signified the sheer cultural multiplicity of the ancient world. Yet it is the modelling of the mind and ‘interior’ forms rather than the polis and the agora that concerns us. David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce have argued that one of the central inherited motifs of the classical world was the notion of depth: The trope of ‘depth’ is ubiquitous in Westerners’ and, indeed, other people’s thought. It is one of the metaphors we all live by. Myths are said to have deep meanings. In the Hellenic world, myths were said to have a hypnoia, an ‘underthought’. Myths themselves are often built on notions of symbolic depth. (2005:251) This is undoubtedly true for what Lewis-Williams had previously called the ‘mind in the cave’ (2002). Yet others, as we shall see, have questioned the idea

16  Out of the ancient earth of depth and interiority in the early Greek mind (Jaynes 1990). Indeed the idea of ‘metaphors that we live by’ hints at a certain degree of stasis. Rather, the forms of the metaphor are used time and time again but they accrue new meanings and significances rather than simply acting as the ‘container’ or the mode of ‘carrying over’ from the archaic to us. When Lewis-Williams and Pearce write of the Greek notion of ‘polyopsia’ they see the metaphor as simply reflective of the originary location. However reflected it is still the same image: ‘a single image may suddenly multiply into a series of repeated images, rather like infinite reflections in parallel mirrors’ (2005:273). The multiplication of the image and the metaphor can happen, but the Troytown maze is not a direct metaphor or copy or image of the original. The intention of its makers is not to simply copy but to use the original motif to make something entirely new or to embed new secrets in the landscape and create new embodied metaphorical and metaphysical containers in the human frame. These are refracted and deflected and dispersed metaphorical embodiments and imaginaries built from the refuse of ancient motifs in entirely new ways. For Lowes-Dickinson, in his meditations on Plato’s dialogues, the recourse and return to the enigma and mystery incarnated in Greek thought and literature can help us rethink our own sense of impasse and crisis: For our passions, our intellects, and our spirits are in unstable equilibrium; and until we connect the spiritual life with the political and the political with the spiritual, both will remain paralysed. That is the riddle the sphinx sets to man, age after age; and civilisation after civilisation is devoured for inability to answer it. We are still waiting for our Oedipus; and we shall never find him by denying that the enigma exists. (1947:x–xi) For George Steiner, the sense of nostalgia and catastrophe is intimately related to what he calls the ‘exilic’ status of human beings. Not just an exile from Troy but from an Eden (and an intimate relationship to our deity) from which we have been expelled. This ‘estrangement’ from gods and from nature is best expressed, for Steiner, in the notion of the fall (1986:14–15). As Steiner has said: ‘It is a defining trait of western culture after Jerusalem and after Athens that in it men and women re-enact, more or less consciously, the major gestures, the exemplary symbolic motions, set before them by antique imaginings and formulations’ (1986:108). What he calls the ‘mythical ordering’ of the world is there before Troy, and indeed ‘antedate[s] Mycenae’ (1986:114). The metaphors invented and propelled into human history by the Greeks have become the most compelling structures of thought that we have. For Steiner: It is by their light that we set out. It is they who first set down the similes, the metaphors, the lineaments of accord and of negation, by which we

Out of the ancient earth  17 organize our inward lives. It is they who first saw the wine-dark in the sea and the green flame in the laurel. Our lion-heart and fox-cunning are theirs. To come home to the Greek world and its myths is to attempt to give to our resources of expression something of the lustre and knifeedge of beginnings. (1986:133) The inward life of the human body and human culture is structured and organised by thoughts, expressions and ideas that are millennia old and yet we still use them. So why the longevity and persistence of these metaphors from ‘the myths of the first heroes on their first forays into the border countries of chaos’? (Steiner 1986:136). Partly it is because the Homeric myths lie specifically on the boundary of oral and textual cultures. This allows the extra-territoriality of meaning to achieve extension across great distances of space and time. Not only does it allow for new readers, publics, the use of metaphor; it also allows for the creation of new types of replicable human beings modelled upon the heroes. As Steiner says: ‘New “Antigones” are being imagined, thought, lived now; and will be tomorrow’ (1986:304). As Crome has argued, in his reading of sophist philosophy, one still has to abandon the search for an originary origin: What has been passed down to us reaches us in a form that is abstracted from its original context … It is perhaps tempting to imagine that the task of restoration would be akin to the labour of the picture restorer: the delicate removal of the additions of later hands – the various veils imposed by more censorious eras – or the stripping away of accretions of dirt and discoloured varnish, in order to lay bare the original painting in the naked glory of its original colours. Nothing could be further from the truth. With the sophists, to strip away the additions and accretions would simply leave nothing. (2004:15) It is indeed in the logics rather than the essence of the myth that meaning might lie. In his analysis of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of the Oedipus myth, Patrick Wilcken has argued that myth is inherently social and has to be explained socially. On one level the myth tells a story, but on another level the myth has to be seen as a ‘logical configuration’ which is confronting ‘intractable social contradictions’ (Wilcken 2010:224). This may not mean that the social contradictions are the same across different epochs and continents. Only that the recourse to recapitulation and repetition of metaphor is a way of understanding the different catastrophes and crises that face human beings in different ages. The imaginary then allows us to organise both our inward lives and our outward. It both structures our interior and our exterior. But it is not a free-floating metaphor extracted from nothing: it is a product of attempts to contest, to wield power, to extract.

18  Out of the ancient earth It is fundamentally earthly. As Karl Radek once noted, the logos is a logos extracted from material earthly labour. For Radek: Within the microcosm of the word is embedded the macrocosm of history. The word, like the concept, is abridged history, an ‘abbreviature’, or epitome of social-historical life. It is a product of this life, not a Demiurge of history, not a Logos creating a world out of nothing. (1977:195–196) The abbreviature of the word or the metaphor hints at the world that surrounds it in the same way that the world invests itself in the word. But why should social theory and sociological thought move beyond classical exegesis and elaborations of the ancient world to attempt to understand ourselves through the classical lens? Hélène Cixous has argued that the humanly created labyrinth of a text is something that is difficult to escape from (1991:105). This is what Herrenschmidt has described as the writing between visible and invisible worlds (Bottéro et al. 2000:69). For thinkers like De Maistre the continuation of fables and madness under Greek names, emblems and masks continued unabated into the beginning of modernity (see Camus 1971:161). For others, like Michelet, the historian himself is a conjurer up of the dead who want to live again (Barthes 1992a:102). The framing and reframing of the classics is a process of what Humphreys has called ‘discipline-formation’ (2004:23). This formation of an ancient earth is the mapping of a territory, a description and a process of colonisation of discipline and desire (2004:8–11). In this, the reversion to the classics and the receiving of them in our own earth testifies to our own civilisational problems and, specifically, the trans-historical constellations of ideas and cultures which maintain the disciplinary formations and imaginaries of our world. For Johann Arnason there is a question of the social visibility and imagined being of the world, and not just of its politics and economics. For Arnason: In addition to these constitutive core structures of civilizations, comparative analysis must deal with the more outwardly visible patterns which often served to identify the specific objects of civilizational analysis: the multi-societal complexes as well as the traditional and regional configurations that we usually have in mind, when we speak of civilizations in the plural. (2003:x) The social field of these cultural constellations signifies the active construction of the social world by human beings (Arnason 2003:30). Nowhere are these constellations as persistent as those of the ancient Greek world which, for Arnason and Murphy, ‘is a salient feature of contemporary thought’ (2001:7). As they note: ‘decisive turns and formative trends

Out of the ancient earth  19 in twentieth-century thought have been linked to reinterpretation or rediscoveries of Greek sources. The variety of approaches to this omnipresent legacy does not exclude subliminal connections between them’ (2001:7). ­Positing Cornelius Castoriadis as the most potent re-appropriator of classical thought (2001:8), they argue for both the persistence between the ancient and the modern and an unrepeatable schism. For Arnason and Murphy that included what they perceive as a constellation of ‘interrelated radical innovations’, and specifically that of the human itself and its political and social logics. They argue: To insist on the specificity of the Greek experience is not to imply that we can resurrect or redefine the idea of a Greek model. Rather, the very notion of a model is doubly misleading. On the one hand, the Greek achievement depended on an unprecedented, unparalleled and unrepeatable constellation; comparative analysis is essential to our grasp of this context, but it should serve to underline the exceptional features of the trajectory which began with the emergence of the Archaic Greek polis. On the other hand, the institutional and cultural inventions of the Archaic and Classical periods had more to do with the opening of new horizons than with the construction of definitive models. (Arnason and Murphy 2001:9) The ‘survival, diffusion and reactivation’ of the cultural constellations of the ancient polis (Arnason and Murphy 2001:10) were possible because openness and the potential for autonomy were present in the city-state. As each new epoch reappropriated Greek culture so this would ‘lead to more or less utopian re-imaginings of the lost political world behind it’ (2001:10). Ultimately we would come to see the world of the Hellenic imagination promoting the idea of the multiply-changing human form and the human itself as ‘Promethean’ and ‘demiurgic’ (Kearney 1988:30). Like the ‘haven of whirlwinds and darkness’ that Rimbaud encountered on the Cimmerian shore (1997:61), so philosophers like Marx immersed themselves in the Greek imaginary and ‘renounced the reality of modernity’ ­(McCarthy 2003:5). The ancient earth does not just ask for a re-­ announcement, but becomes itself the grounds for social critique of our own social formations. As Goux has argued in the case of psychoanalysis, it is not because we rediscover Oedipus within ourselves that accounts for the complex, but because our social and psychic formulations are already Oedipean (and we might add Achillean and Odyssean and Antigonean also). For Goux: Reduced to a provocative antithesis, my own thesis might be expressed as follows: it is the Oedipus myth that explains the complex. In other words, it is within a specific historical institution of subjectivity, within the framework of a particular symbolic mechanism (of which the ­Oedipus myth is the most powerful manifestation), that something like

20  Out of the ancient earth the ‘Oedipus complex’ has been able to command attention and elicit description. It is because the West is Oedipean that Freud discovered the ‘Oedipus complex’. (1993:2) And, as both Marx and Rimbaud discovered: uncovering the complex lays bare the society which is mythically structured by the archaic world. The vortex of modernity would find its own patterns by recourse to the ancient world. This is because our modernity is so irredeemably ancient.

The emergence of Critical Theory We have already hinted at notions of critique and the meaning of critical theory. It is important to further elucidate what critical theory is and how we make critical our theory. Theory is speculative and abstract, but is always more or less anchored to the concrete lifeworld of human beings: their modes of subsistence and production, the generation of their ideas, the powers they accrue to themselves or wield over others. In its most elemental form theory criticises the current order of those modes of production, ideological devices and social powers. Yet a capitalised Critical Theory emerged in the twentieth century as a specific school and institute (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research) associated with thinkers like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and others linked to them, like Walter Benjamin. Further, there was a more expanded field of critical theory remotely linked to Critical Theory in the work of Gramsci, Lukács, Colletti and what has come generally to be known as ‘Western Marxism’, as opposed to the state ideology of ‘Eastern’ Marxism in the Soviet Union (the former including the traditions of structuralist Marxism). Further, there have been generations of global left, feminist and Marxist theories and theorists influenced by the Frankfurt School, even including those theorists who might associate themselves with poststructuralism and other modes of thought seemingly disconnected from the themes of Adorno and his co-thinkers, including the autonomist ­Marxism of thinkers such as Antonio Negri. Other thinkers like Heinrich Blücher, ­ ornelius Castoriadis Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Rachel Bespaloff and C are also important as they stand in a critical relationship to ­Marxism and Critical Theory whilst retaining a profound entanglement with Marx and with currents of thought such as phenomenology. Indeed Critical Theory had no unifying principle, intellectual coherence or common political programme, and so neither does critical theory in its more extended definition. The critical theory that we work with, play with and think with is a generous and expansive critical theory purposely disunified, disaggregated, dismembered and disarticulated. It is based on readings of Marx, Critical Theory (and particularly Adorno) and Western Marxism more generally, but also engages with a wider range of theories linked to phenomenological and poststructuralist readings in so far as they too are reading Marx and

Out of the ancient earth  21 moving beyond the boundaries of classical Marxism. In this generous and expanded field it might be that any theory of society can then be seen as critical if it in some ways criticises one, all or any aspect of contemporary society. This would not be warranted because in reading Marx and Critical Theory we are situated within three broad ways of thinking that are distinctive: the traditions of thinking and theorising; the distinctive methodological basis of that tradition; and, perhaps decisively, the kinds of concepts that are played with and thought through. These concepts include ideas of the human, of the geist/spirit, of force, of domination, enlightenment and cosmos. In so far as I think these are the central concepts of critical theory and Critical theory they each are developed in the chapters that follow. Further, there is something again distinctive about the expanded field of critical theory in its Frankfurt incarnation. This lies not just in its distinctive reading of Marx, which I share, or in its reading of Freud, which I do not, but in its relationship to the classical world. Thinkers like Adorno were obsessed with the classical and, in so far as each theme of force, domination and so on exemplifies a particular kind of reading, so they are married in a dialectical relationship in this work to classical characters and motifs like Troy, Achilles, Odysseus, the Atreides and the classical statue and classical deity. Indeed, as the Critical Theorists are reading the classics and reworking them in their own ways in order to critique the social formations in which they exist, so they are reading the work of others who are approaching the classical world in profoundly different ways. This includes thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Rachel Bespaloff, Hermann Broch, Simone Weil and ­Martin Heidegger amongst others and, in turn, it is appropriate to also perceive them as critical theorists in a generous sense. The claim might be that ­Heidegger is so removed from the progressive programmes of ­Frankfurt School ­Marxism to make this a bridge too far. In actuality, in terms of their political trajectories there was very little to distinguish them in their later lives in relation to liberatory and emancipatory projects, as opposed to their youth. Certainly in the cases of Adorno and Horkheimer it is clear that by the end of their academic careers they had little time for the political projects and programmes of the left even when they were still so profoundly influenced by Marx. We will return to this, but it is worth thinking about which Marx they are reading. In the absence of the revolution which Marx looked to (and critical theory has been perceived as an extended discourse on that absent or missing revolution) we find the emergence of the interregnum of Stalinism and the degeneration of the emancipatory project of Marxism. Rather than making a revolution it revelled in its exercise of force, in its domination of human beings and territories, in the subjugation of the ­human ‘spirit’, and in its creation of new gods and the statuesque of despotism and totalitarianism. Our work here then documents a new way of thinking about domination, force and spirit by returning to the reading and repetition of the classical and to a more open reading of Marx that stresses the agonistic and antagonistic and the kinds of counter-archival gestures which point to alternative

22  Out of the ancient earth forms of social formation to that with which we are confronted. For us Marx is the theorist of the crack and the fracture, the archivist of the epochal shift and the analyst of the multiple parallelograms of forces in the social field. Indeed, like Adorno and other subtle and nuanced thinkers, we return to Marx-in-movement and the moment of Aufheben: the preservation, elevation, cancellation, supersession, sublimation and negation of species, forms, epochs and civilisations. This is the reason to re-read and think with critical theory and the classical world because that very world is sublimated into our own and into the social forms of the future. It might be, as we are searching for our utopias, that we cast back into the classical world for exemplars ­(Ferguson 1975; Quest 2017). Equally, re-reading the history of critical theory can help us take stock of social theory today and its trajectory. Rolf Wiggershaus, in his definitive history of the critical sociology of the Frankfurt School, has argued that its defining feature was its perception of society as an ‘antagonistic totality’ and its reliance on Critical ­Theory as a descriptor of what it did for the entirety of its history (1994:1–2). ­A ndrew Feenberg has stressed that at the very core of Critical Theory are antagonism and opposition, and that its emergence marked new modes of reflection on the social (1981:23). Yet the tradition was never a uniform phenomenon (Wiggershaus 1994:657). As David Held has argued: ‘Critical theory, it should be emphasized, does not form a unity; it does not mean the same thing to all its adherents’ (1990:14). For Douglas Kellner Critical Theory is marked by its very multidisciplinarity and by an attention to the emancipation of the oppressed from domination. As he notes: ‘Critical Theory is thus informed by a critique of domination and a theory of liberation’ (1989:1). This emancipatory project would ultimately be renounced by Adorno and his abdication of revolutionary practice (1989:209). Yet, as Martin Jay has argued, Critical Theory was often parasitic upon other theories and traditions, and what really marks it was a hostility to ‘closed philosophical systems’ and an openness to social theory from all kinds of traditions (1973:41). Indeed the openness of the dialectical process and an understanding of the Hegelian core of the Marxist project meant an aversion to the closed systems. As Susan Buck-Morss has argued: ‘Critical Theory looked to Marxism as a method rather than a cosmology, and it considered dialectical thinking to be the core of that method – dialectics as the tool for a critical analysis of society, not for building metaphysical systems’ (1977:ix). Moishe Postone, in his own reflections on domination and social theory, has opened up an understanding of the kinds of forces that a critical social theory has to understand in contemporary capitalism. As Postone argues: The result is a historically new form of domination – one that subjects people to impersonal, increasingly rationalized, structural imperatives and constraints that cannot adequately be grasped in terms of class domination, or, more generally, in terms of the concrete domination

Out of the ancient earth  23 of social groupings or of institutional agencies of the state and/or the economy. It has no determinate locus and, although constituted by determinate forms of social practice, appears not to be social at all. (2005:75) These new forms of domination also mark the difference between a critical theory which challenges that domination and other kinds of social theory which perpetuate domination (Postone 2005:79). The attempt of a critical social theory to account for the theoretical contradictions of the dominant orders of capital on the one hand and challenging that order is entirely different. Does the abandonment of the progressive potential of Critical Theory by its original advocates mean that its whole theory of domination collapses? Or does this final negation which is the logical culmination of the whole disunified tradition reflect something? This might be that even if endarkenment is not preferable to enlightenment at least it was the truth of the world as they found it. There were no routes open to them if the Enlightenment project was almost in its entirety a project of domination.

Critique and antagonism For Habermas one of the central motifs of the original Frankfurt School project, as represented by Adorno and Horkheimer, was its radical project to redefine and rethink the Enlightenment (1997:107). Simon Clarke, in his own rethinking of crisis and Marxism, has argued that whatever the promises of the Enlightenment, it turned into a project not of liberation and emancipation but of domination (1991:320). For Clarke: ‘The Critical Theorists … detached Marx’s critique of capitalism from any social or historical foundation, to reduce it to a philosophical critique whose tragedy was that it found itself increasingly in the interstices of culture and on the margins of society’ (1991:329). This primarily philosophical critique then becomes, for Clarke, the abandonment of the emancipatory social practice linked to emancipatory social theory (1991:329). The return to a more open reading of Marx has also meant a return to the antagonistic, class-struggle focus of new emancipatory practices represented by thinkers such as Clarke, John Holloway and Werner Bonefeld. In their recent work they have presented new readings of Adorno specifically which have attempted to transcend Critical Theory as a theory of domination into a new critique which opens up and explores the crisis at the heart of social and economic categories in order to disclose unremitting antagonism and movement. Fundamentally their work is about the meaning of critique. When critique abandons its focus on antagonism and struggle in order to just offer a theory of domination it reasserts that very domination. As John Holloway has argued: There is a whole new world of academic analysis opened up: to theorise the new patterns of accumulation, to give a name to the new form of

24  Out of the ancient earth domination, and in so doing to consolidate it. Crisis-as-rupture is forgotten, or remembered only in so far as rupture is seen as a preliminary phase of restructuring. The new patterns are seen as established, having ‘emerged’ as a new reality which has to be accommodated, rather than as a project, which capital has yet to impose through hard struggle. From being a theory of struggle, Marxism, once struggle is forgotten, easily becomes a theory of domination. (1992:168) Bonefeld, Gunn and Psychopedis, in their introduction to ‘Open Marxism’, have argued that the very categories of Marxism itself have to be opened in the ‘crisis-ridden’ social world (1992:xi). The fragile concept of domination as a category itself has to be opened up. As the authors argue: Rather than coming forward simply as a theory of domination – ‘­domination’ reporting something inert, as it were a heavy fixed and given weight – open Marxism offers to conceptualise the contradictions internal to domination itself. Crisis, understood as a category of contradiction, entails not just danger but opportunity. Within theory, crisis enunciates itself as critique. (1992:xi) Critique becomes a way of formulating the interrelationships between theory and practice (1992:xi). Werner Bonefeld argues that the meaning of critique in Marx is the revelation of the human content in the categories of capital, themselves depending on ‘human social practice’, which is then rendered invisible (2001:53). Human beings are ruled by abstractions even when the world is of their own making. The fetishism of category and object therefore have to be unpacked and the human content and antagonisms uncovered ­(2001:54–55). The ‘world of things’ has to be returned to human social practice as the human is the foundation of social existence (2001:56). For Bonefeld: Marx’s critique is intransigent towards any reification and fetishism, to any notion that the relations between the things, the perverted forms of capital, embody extra-human properties or that labour is a mere ­macro-economic factor. The world of things is a world in and through which human social practice exists in the mode of being denied. (2001:59) Bonefeld argues that Adorno’s social theory is a critical tool in which to uncover the reified thing and ‘decipher the human social practice hidden in things’ (2012:122). The perverted, fetishized object is the object of decipherment to Adorno’s social theory (Bonefeld 2012:126). Critique then, argues John Holloway, is about the revelation of the category or object to reveal the antagonism which lies at their heart. Each concept has to be unpacked layer

Out of the ancient earth  25 after layer in order to reveal the human, antagonistic content (2012:515). For Holloway: We open the category and find the way in which human activity is organised. The categories of thought are expressions of the social relations that underlie them … When we criticise the categories, we criticise the social relations that give rise to those categories. We open both. We see commodity and value as social relations, and open them up to discover the dual character of labour that is at the root of both social relations and their conceptualisation … What we see first, then, is the dominant moment of the antagonistic unity. And something awful happens. Our critique degenerates into a theory of domination. Marxism becomes a theory of capitalist domination. Reactionary claptrap, in other words – a theory that encloses us in the enclosure it pretends to criticise. A theory of Cassandra, a theory that separates the analysis of capitalism from the movement of struggle, a theory that understands Marxism as the analysis of the framework within which class struggle develops. We do not want a theory of domination, we want a theory of struggle. We do not want to moan, we want to change the world. (Holloway 2012:516) We will return to the ‘theory of Cassandra’ in a moment. As Holloway examines his object, he phenomenologically reveals the sedimented layers of the concept in order to reveal the locus of struggle. For Holloway the operation and the method is to: Open the category and look again, look more carefully. Beneath and beyond the dominant moment of the antagonism we see the subordinate moment and it is moving, struggling. Beneath value we see use value, beneath the state we see anti-state forms of social organisation, beneath abstract labour we see concrete labour (or concrete doing). (2012:516) Concrete doing, the making and fabrication of the world, is revealed and the critical theorist is enmeshed in this doing and making. She reveals crisis and opens up the way for critical theory to be crisis theory. Indeed critical theory without the elucidation and the decipherment of crisis is not critical at all. Without crisis critical theory avoids an enmeshment with antagonism and becomes yet again just a theory and practice of domination (Holloway 2012:517). Without denying the force and antagonisms inherent in repeated crises of late capitalism we are immediately faced with a problem: when humans critically uncover categories and objects they inevitably find humans there and human social practice. This reassertion of humanism, a compulsion present in all forms of critical theory, often averts our gaze from what I think is the central crisis: the crisis of the human itself and not just in its bourgeois

26  Out of the ancient earth or proletarian form. The fact that enlightenment, human knowledge and humanism have been so catastrophic only led Adorno and Horkheimer to divorce their theoretical practice from emancipatory practice. So should we be displacing and decentring that very human social practice which has marked the geological record, committed speciescide in the name of social progress, initiated ecological catastrophe and extended a human movement and human invasion which has been so catastrophic as to potentially indicate future human extinction? (see Hudson 2017c). Yes, our theory should be a theory of crisis: about the boundaries between humans and other animals, about human intervention and signalling in the geological record, about the great human acceleration of industrialism and about its future; but these long predate our current crises and predicaments. They have their origin in human labour and aspiration going back to the Neolithic, but we find the foremost indications of these compulsions to domination, force, understanding the human and so on in the classical world. This makes a critical theory of the classical all the more urgent. It also makes problematic a social and critical theory which is tied to the very political programmes that accelerate rather than alleviate the human crisis: to increasing human control of nature, animals, the means of production, and culture. When Holloway bemoans what he calls the ‘theory of Cassandra’ he is precisely missing something of great significance. The Cassandra motif and story is a powerful rendition of what we mean by the human crisis. If the theory of Cassandra is to critique without political practice then this is the point that Adorno is brought to. Cassandra has intimations of the future; she knows that when she steps over into the door of Agamemnon’s palace that she will be slaughtered alongside him by Clytemnestra. Only ­Cassandra can see the blood beyond the entrance of the house of Atreus at Mycenae and refuses to step forward beyond its lintel. She perceives her fate and the doom of those in the past: the little children in the cooking pot, the rooms of sacrifice at the heart of the city where body-parts are hung from the sacred trees as trophies (Aeschylus 1999:52–53). The unending dialectic of catastrophe is framed by messages. These are the signals of the beacons to warn Clytemnestra that the king is returning, but also include the apparitions that Cassandra experiences which often come from the future as signals to her in the present. Cassandra knows what has happened and the signals intimate what will happen to her and to the king. Having received those signals, and terrified, she still steps through the doorway of the palace. So Cassandra sees the murder on the beach, the murders perpetrated by Atreus in the sacred room at the heart of the city, her own fate as she steps into the palace. Her phenomenological experience of vision and observation is as if she was more than prophetess but, unlike a divine, is mortal. For Jenkyns: She began the scene inarticulate, wholly imprisoned in herself. She has passed through the beauty of lyric horror into the calmer tones of dialogue, and now finally, like Achilles at the end of the Iliad, she has

Out of the ancient earth  27 broadened her vision to encompass the whole of humanity: in the midst of her suffering she has the moral largeness to understand that there are others whose lives are worse than her own. At the end of her long emotional journey she is drained of everything but the plainest words. And now, clear-eyed and unillusioned, she walks into the house and to her death. (2015:65) The earth cannot take any more blood. The house is already full (Jenkyns 2015:69). Indeed Cassandra uncovers, excavates and sees but she is still paralysed. The King she is tied to will be killed, her murderess will be avenged, but her home and people have already been dispersed and destroyed like those of Adorno’s in Auschwitz. To see and perceive our fate is enough. What Cassandra and Adorno both saw was negation and darkness as well as struggle and antagonism. Dostoevsky was obsessed with the motif of the ‘crystal palace’ or ‘crystal edifice’. For him it stood both for the technological triumph of capitalism and ultimately of socialism: a socialism of new and pristine social relations where all questions will disappear when faced with mathematical certainty (1993:25). Human suffering will disappear, as will doubt and negation, a suffering which is the beginning of human consciousness itself (1993:34). The ‘crystal edifice, forever indestructible’ fills Dostoevsky with fear, loathing and horror as he speaks from underground through the crack in the floor (1993:34–38). Like Marx this speaking from the cracks, the fissure, the fracture, the geological underground is central to Dostoevsky and Adorno; and, as the latter knew, the incipient totalitarianism of the twentieth century would make the voices on the margins all the more perspicacious and necessary. We need the Cassandras of social and critical theory to oppose what Dostoevsky calls the ‘translunary’ thinkers of positivity and affirmation (1993:45). Like Cassandra we stand between the world of the living and the dead: the places that are the interstices between worlds.

2 Marx, Epicurus and the classical world

Introduction In this second chapter we begin to address some of the central themes of the book by exploring Marx on the classical world. Marx’s early studies (long before he and Engels delineated the ‘materialist conception of history’) were on Epicurus and Democritus, and his classical education was revealed across the entirety of his work. He often used classical analogies and motifs, and both he and Engels were deeply informed by the histories of Greece and Rome as well as their cultural forms. There are processes that we can observe in his early works on classical philosophy which look to be the ­genesis of his dialectical approach to history. There are also ­motifs and ideas that he would later redevelop or discard. Social theorists and analysts have generally agreed that these writings inform the emergence of later Marxist conceptions of nature and politics. But the classical analogies of Marx and Engels also reveal something else: that epochs re-emerge with similar patterns of elevation and cancellation, and that it is almost impossible to think about social theory without the re-emergence of motifs like the ghost of Achilles. We can reframe the Marxist social theory of writers like Thomson and De Ste. Croix by examining ideas of the multitude, the chorus and the idea of ‘world’ that seemed trivial to later scholars but are in fact decisive in understanding both Marx and the fate of contemporary social theory. If Ovid, is the ‘celebrant of a happy modernity’ of metamorphoses, as Richard Jenkyns has said (2015:246), then Marx uses the classics to announce a metamorphosis of rupture and departure in modernity. Marx stands between worlds on the fracture between epochs and, like Cassandra, between the worlds of the living and the dead.

Abstraction: revealing the classical world Henri Lefebvre has remarked, in his discussion of Marx and modernity, that ‘For a long time the “modern” has been seen as the opposite of the “ancient”‘ (1995:168). It is a source of irony that far from the modern being opposite to or supplanting the ancient, the nature of the modern is defined

Marx, Epicurus and the classical world  29 and delineated by cultural forms and motifs inherited from antiquity. As Henry Chadwick has said: ‘The ancient classical world is a large entity to take leave of. How did it all end? Or should one ask how it survived so long?’ (1986:807). The classical world did not come to an end. Not only is it the origin of much of our social thought, for example in Aeschylus (Abaffy 2012), it is also the fate of much of humanity to think of itself in the stories and motifs inherited from that world. There was no leave-taking even when we left those confined rooms of the Mycenaean palace or the Athenian stage. Those very specific locations and the tales that were said to happen there ultimately became part of the global history of humanity and its self-­ understanding. But those stories also offered something else: a contradictory process of de-­territorialisation as the tales were ripped out of those locations and dispersed (initially with fleeing peoples and refugees) and of extra-territorialisation which transcended the earthly world of humans. This transcending of the earthly world was itself quite remarkable and is apparent at the earliest moments of extant Greek Myth. If we look at the Iliad there are four locations noted (as opposed to the multiple locations of the Odyssey). Three of these locations were the city of Troy, the Greek encampments by the ships and the battlefield of the plain. These were places of human contest, grief and death. The gods often appeared there in the guise of humans and intervened in their affairs. But more often they were situated in the fourth place: Mount Olympus. This was not a human place but one that belonged to the gods alone. It lay far from the battlefield. No human could or would want to go there, although the gods would often leave it and travel in various god-like manners to the places of the human world. In terms of knowing about Olympus either humans had made this story up themselves (and some later classical writers accused Homer of doing this) or they had heard from their traffic with the gods about their divine home. In fact we know from Homer much about what conversations were going on in Olympus in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. But the fact remains that this was a place of deities, and immortal ones at that, not a place for the mortal lives of humans and their mourning. But the most distinctive aspect of Olympus was that it was not just separated and severed from the human world, but that it was outside the human world. In one sense it is a literal exteriority to the human world: humans cannot reach it. But it was also an exteriority of visibility. Olympus stood so high and above the human earth that its modes of seeing were universal. It could look down on all of human life (or at least those Greeks and ‘barbarians’ with which these deities concerned themselves). It could look into their interiors from these heights, and the gods could whisper to humans or inhabit their bodies from there also. This standpoint was outside of the ­human earth, universally surveying it and intervening upon it from a vast abstract distance. This cosmological approach is a process of such abstraction from the concrete world of human beings that it had a profound influence on social thought. This god-like visibility (even when the gods themselves

30  Marx, Epicurus and the classical world remained often invisible) became an aspiration of all of those thinkers, like Hegel and Marx, who wanted to understand the entirety of human existence, history, culture and spirit from a standpoint both removed from and intimately related to concrete, earthly human experience. The philosopher who has addressed this abstraction, unearthliness and visibility is Hannah Arendt in her own discussion and critique of Marx and human work and labour. In her introduction to The Human Condition ­Margaret Canovan talked about attempts to look at the earth from a ‘cosmic perspective’ which challenged the boundaries and limits of the natural and the human world (Arendt 1998:xv). As Canovan says of Arendt’s penchant for understanding her own world with the tools of Greek cosmology: ‘she finds in ancient Greece an Archimedean point from which to cast a critical eye on thinking and behaving that we take for granted’ (Arendt ­1998:vii-viii). This Archimedean point is a point of transgression and of observation. For Arendt: But today we may almost say that we have demonstrated even scientifically that, though we live now, and probably always will, under the earth’s conditions, we are not mere earth-bound creatures. Modern natural science owes its great triumphs to having looked upon and treated earth-bound nature from a truly universal viewpoint, that is, from the Archimedean standpoint taken, wilfully and explicitly, outside the earth. (1998:11) This capacity to transcend the world is the product of human technical and scientific methodology. The ‘human artifice of the world’ transcends that world (most powerfully and literally in a spaceship) as it transcends the ‘earth’ of purely animalistic labour upon that earth (Arendt 1998:2). But this is less to do with the hubris and the mortality of humans facing gods (as we shall see later in Arendt’s understanding of the half-divine Achilles) than with what she calls ‘natality’ – the constant birth into the world of new human entities – and indeed what we might see as the proliferation not just of humans but also of new protean forms of gods. For Arendt: Labor and work, as well as action, are also rooted in natality in so far as they have the task to provide and preserve the world for, to foresee and reckon with, the constant influx of newcomers who are born into the world as strangers. (1998:9) The activity of work, of fabrication, of making, of art is not just to elaborate upon the human world, reflect on it or extend its domination but to initiate new generations, multiple generations of new humans into earthly, and by extension universal and cosmological, existence. The social imaginaries

Marx, Epicurus and the classical world  31 inherited from antiquity are handed to those in birth to recompose and re-elaborate in their turn. Our basic ideas of universalism, democracy, of human thought and of cosmology into which new generations are birthed have their origins, if we can indeed find them, in their specific antique locations. The life of activity and of fabrication have their origin in antiquity, and their ultimate culmination, for Arendt, lies in the work of Marx: The term vita activa is loaded and overloaded with tradition. It is as old as (but not older than) our tradition of political thought. And this tradition, far from comprehending and conceptualizing all the political experiences of Western mankind, grew out of a specific historical constellation: the trial of Socrates and the conflict between the philosopher and the polis. It eliminated many experiences of an earlier past that were irrelevant to its immediate political purposes and proceeded until its end, in the work of Karl Marx, in a highly selective manner. (Arendt 1998:12) The creation and fabrication of the world then is not just a response in the face of death and finality but in the face of birth, of genesis and of origin. Natality and its places of birth and nativity are about the constant bringing into being of new human entities into the world. Looking towards Aeschylus and the Oresteia specifically, Friedrich Engels himself reflected on blood, birth and kinship in the classical world (1942:6–7). Natality and activity, for Engels, are about different forms of making and production as defining the essence of human beings. For Engels: We find the upper stage of barbarism at its highest in the Homeric poems, particularly in the Iliad. Fully developed iron tools, the bellows, the hand-mill, the potter’s wheel, the making of oil and wine, metal work developing almost into a fine art, the wagon and the war-chariot, ship-building with beams and planks, the beginnings of architecture as art, walled cities with towers and battlements, the Homeric epic and a complete mythology – these are the chief legacy brought by the Greeks from barbarism into civilisation. When we compare the descriptions which Caesar and even Tacitus give of the Germans, who stood at the beginning of the cultural stage from which the Homeric Greeks were just preparing to advance, we realise how rich was the development of production within the upper stage of barbarism. (Engels 1942:25) The bringing into birth of new human beings was not just about fabrication for its own sake or art as just making but about the wholesale conquest of nature (Engels 1942:124). Of course the historical insights of Engels have been subject to some question in both their detail and their general typology, resting as they do on the work of Lewis Henry Morgan (see Hudson 2017c).

32  Marx, Epicurus and the classical world But the point still stands that the abstractions, standpoints, epistemologies, concepts of both Marx and Engels were impossible without thinking through the lens of classical antiquity. For Morgan himself Homer announced the natality of civilisation itself. Writing was central to that origin and commencement, as Morgan notes: ‘The production of the Homeric poems whether transmitted orally or committed to writing at the time fixes with sufficient nearness the introduction of civilisation among the Greeks’ (1977:31). This allowed the wholesale invention of gods, theologies and cosmologies that could be transmitted in order that the newly born humans could think of their lives and existences in the context of their ancestral and antique past, including their familial origins (like Julius Caesar, Achilles and so on) in the gods themselves. Often, as Morgan says, some human families considered themselves to have a ‘common superhuman ancestor and genealogy’ (1977:239). Often commentary on the classical world from within the Marxist tradition has focused on specific themes like the demos or the nature of class structures in antiquity. Perhaps more importantly there have been attempts to understand the nature of the classical world as part of a more general historical typology of modes of production which are either successive, coexist temporally or combine in new hybrid social formations. Geoffrey de Ste. Croix used Marx’s historical method to try and empirically demonstrate the nature and development of Greek society (1981:ix). Noting the ‘silence’ of classical scholars on Marx (1981:20) he also reveals the complexity of Marx’s reading of the classics of antiquity, not just in his doctoral thesis and notebooks on Epicurus but in the depth and elaboration of his engagement with classical history and literature generally (1981:23–24). Trade and production are of course central to de Ste. Croix’s own reading, and he approvingly quotes Marx from the Grundrisse on the trading peoples of antiquity, like the gods of Epicurus, as operating in the spaces between worlds (1981:25). This concept of the ‘space between the world’, of the ‘intermundia’, is decisive, I would argue, for any understanding of Marx’s reading of the classical world and for the development of his thought. On the one hand the space is that between civilisations who come into contact and trade, interact and combine as in the links between Mycenaean civilisation and Crete. On the other it is about the collision and contestation between differing epochs of production; from bronze to iron, warfare to pastoralism, and of different relations of production and trade. But it is also about epistemological spaces ‘in-between’ which are moments of encounter and contact which profoundly change human thought, self-conception and self-determination (including the space between our world and the universe or ‘space’). It may be that the power of these in-between spaces in antiquity account for their continuing capacity to illustrate and elaborate continuing or differing human problems and predicaments. This is thinking from the margins, the fracture and the fissure. So de Ste. Croix recounts Marx humorously recalling Spartacus as a ‘splendid fellow’ (1981:25). This allows Marx to see Spartacus as someone

Marx, Epicurus and the classical world  33 ‘in-between’ who in his slave rebellion was beckoning and summoning another world; but it also helps organise the social world and how we perceive it. Using the tools of classical antiquity, ordering and re-ordering its motifs, Marx begins to see human and social forms as ‘organized states’ (1981:27). These natures and behaviours can be accounted for through the lens of antiquity (de Ste. Croix 1975). In the classical world these natures were irredeemably linked to the gods and to the notion of fate in a world which was not itself yet a product of human technique. Earthly labour, in Arendt’s sense, has not yet become the full fabrication of the human world of domination. In his own Marxist reading of the classics Trotsky (himself hunted as if in a Greek tragedy) notes the different ‘worlds’ of the classical and the modern: The faith in an inevitable fate disclosed the narrow limits within which ancient man, clear in thought but poor in technique, was confined. He could not as yet undertake to conquer nature on the scale we do today, and nature hung over him like a fate. Fate is the limitation and the immobility of technical means, the voice of blood, of sickness, of death, of all that limits man, and that does not allow him to become ‘arrogant’. Tragedy lay inherent in the contradiction between the awakened world of the mind, and the stagnant limitation of means. The myth did not create tragedy, it only expressed it in the language of man’s childhood. (Trotsky 1991:269–270) The ‘limitation’ of technique in antiquity meant therefore an incapacity to fully humanise the earth in humanity’s own image. They had to adopt and adapt the motifs which exemplified the powers of the gods and of nature. The Homeric myths and material cultures of antiquity mirrored for some commentators the earthly realities of existence and transposed them in new forms. Gods are, for Marxists like George Thomson in his studies of classical tragedy, a product of the social world. For Thomson: ‘The Achaean Olympus is the mirror of social reality’ (1949:414). Like de Ste. Croix he transposes the class structures and propulsions that Marx perceives in capitalist production into the deep and vast and distant past as if they are somehow proximal. For Thomson these societies of archaic and classical Greece were the products of class formations and, quite literally, class warriors. For Thomson: ‘It was the fruit of struggle, fought for in innumerable raids and battles amidst the smoke of burning cities and the groans of homeless captives. The force that drove it forward was the class-struggle’ (1949:432). Marx then, influenced by the motifs, stories and civilisations of the classical world, was able to initially achieve two things. Firstly, there is his understanding of his world backwards into the distant past as if it were part of the same unfolding story. The classical world, perceived as profoundly different to the modern, is at the same time seen as the ‘childhood’ of the human world and thereby part of the same biological and corporeal process

34  Marx, Epicurus and the classical world of development. Secondly, it allows him that position over and above the global world, humanity, territory and history with which to observe and notate and elaborate vast human distances and epochs. Marxism begins as a totalising impulse of such propulsion that everything is subsumed and used within its vast processes of abstraction: an abstraction which utilises the ‘concrete’ moment of Achilles on the Trojan plain in order to illustrate the universality of Marx’s method and the human invasion of the earth and its productive forces.

Multitude: leaves and chorus The concept of the multitude has become a significant part of contemporary Marxist discourse. Its origin in the classical world is one aspect of this, but there are also ways we can rethink the idea of human collectivities and classes that can rely on classical motifs like leaves and choruses. The analogy of humans with multitudinous leaves is one which appears at various points in classical literature, and it is designed to contrast the immortality of the gods against the natality and mortality of humans. Like leaves, ­humans are born and die within a short span of time and their entity is blown away with the wind. As Richard Jenkyns says of the use of the leaf analogy in Mimnermus: He was also to give to the simile of leaves the plangent quality that seems so natural to us: we are like leaves that open out in the spring sunshine, and like them our time is brief. Death comes soon, or age, and once our prime is past it is better to die than live. (2015:38) But the natal is as important as the mortal. The bringing into being of the leaf is both a displacement and a cancellation of previous leaves and a birth out of that prior mass. The leaf is not exactly the same as its ancestor but it dies in the same way. The leaf metaphor appears in Glaucus’s words in the Iliad and in several other places in Homer (Jenkyns 2015:11; Nicolson 2014:98). As Plato had noted in the Timaeus: ‘Ever since Homer had compared the generations of men to falling leaves the Greeks had been sharply and intensely aware of the transitoriness of human life’ (1977:9). The transitory human life is opposed to the persistence of the gods. A separate enfiguration and corporealisation of the human mass appears in the dramatic Greek chorus. As Tim Whitmarsh has said of the ancient theatre: ‘The interplay between the chorus, an anonymous collective body, and the named actors neatly encapsulated the dynamics of a society that was constantly anxious about the relationship between individual and community, and between elite and mass’ (2016:99). The space of performance in Athens was both public and deeply political, and the organisation of space was part of the social relations of Athenian society (Wiles 1997). But

Marx, Epicurus and the classical world  35 Athenian stagecraft was also about something else: it reflected an ongoing maintenance of origin myths of Athenian and wider Greek society. The protean nature of the Homeric myths was the base-source for the drama of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides as well as wider cosmological concerns with the ur-myths of the Greeks and the gods of Olympus. But the chorus is itself intriguing in its modes of observation and its commentaries and judgements. It relates in certain types of measurement to the characters that it comments on. Sometimes the chorus is distant and sometimes close to the action, and indeed sometimes part of the incorporated cast of the play. Often it demands measure and rationality and at other times it calls for revenge. It does not speak for the audience which is watching the play, but provides ways of perceiving the action which is not immediately available to the characters in the play. George Steiner has argued that: ‘Far beyond any turning stage or proscenium arch, the chorus is a device whereby the antique playwright can exactly calibrate and modulate the distances, the sight-lines, between audience and myth, between spectator and scene’ (1986:166). Jenkyns argues that the origin of Greek drama may have emerged from choral performance (2015:55) and indeed the ritual origins of much of classical drama is perhaps obvious. Further, and particularly in Euripides, is the emergence of the machinery of the ‘deus ex machina’, the ‘god from the device’. This was literally a crane with a platform where a god appears to initiate or enact judgement (Jenkyns 2015:58). In his work on poetics and aesthetics Aristotle himself developed some insights into the radical new invention of the ‘deus ex machina’: Furthermore, it is obvious that the unravelling of the plot should arise from the circumstances of the plot itself, and not be brought about ex machina, as is done in the Medea and in the episode of the embarkation in the Iliad. The deus ex machina should be used only for matters outside the play proper, either for things that happened before it and that cannot be known by the human characters, or for things that are yet to come and that require to be foretold prophetically – for we allow to the gods the power to see all things. However, there should be nothing inexplicable about what happens, or if there must be, it should be kept outside the tragedy, as is done in Sophocles’s Oedipus. (Aristotle, Horace and Longinus 1965:52) Aristotle is dismayed about the use of the ‘machine’ as a device internal to the plot signalling the intervention of the gods in the human drama. It can, however, be appropriately used as a mode of godlike observation exterior to the drama which offers a vantage point over and beyond the actions of humans. Cicero had noted of the ‘deus ex machina’ that it was a refuge in the intervention of the divine in order to elaborate upon and disentwine the intricacies of theatrical plot (1972:91). What Jenkyns calls the ‘inescapable

36  Marx, Epicurus and the classical world smash of ineluctable forces’ (2015:89) in the Greek tragedies is not necessarily that between humans and gods, but between humans and their own innate weaknesses. The ‘deus ex machina’ appears for example at the end of the Medea by Euripides but there is no deity represented here, just the bleak and horrific Medea herself standing alone (Jenkyns 2015:98). This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of both the chorus and the ‘deus ex machina’: their point of observation and judgement over and above both the characters and the audience. Both of them offer the position of abstraction de-located from the concrete actions within the performance. This mode of observation, measurement and retribution offers the chorus a position of godlike intervention without actually becoming gods or using machines. It opens up a privileged insight into the workings of drama, of history and of human life. We will return to the chorus, the leaves and the ‘deus ex machina’ as we examine some aspects of the multitude and what this offers in terms of understanding inheritances from antiquity. The concept of the ‘multitude’ has come to some prominence within recent Marxist thought and there is a full discussion of its relationship to art, politics and social theory elsewhere (Hardt and Negri 2004; Toscano 2009; Virno 2004). It is worth quoting Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri at length on multitude: As a first approach we should distinguish the multitude at a conceptual level from other notions of social subjects, such as the people, the masses, and the working class. The people has traditionally been a unitary conception. The population, of course, is characterized by all kinds of differences, but the people reduces that diversity to a unity and makes of the population a single identity: ‘the people’ is one. The multitude, in contrast, is many. The multitude is composed of innumerable internal differences that can never be reduced to a unity or a single identity-different cultures, races, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations; different forms of labor; different ways of living; different views of the world; and different desires. The multitude is a multiplicity of all these singular differences. The masses are also contrasted with the people because they too cannot be reduced to a unity or an identity. The masses certainly are composed of all types and sorts, but really one should not say that different social subjects make up the masses. The essence of the masses is indifference: all differences are submerged and drowned in the masses. All the colors of the population fade to gray. These masses are able to move in unison only because they form an indistinct, uniform conglomerate. In the multitude, social differences remain different. The multitude is many-colored, like Joseph’s magical coat. Thus the challenge posed by the concept of multitude is for a social multiplicity to manage to communicate and act in common while remaining internally different. (Hardt and Negri 2004:xiv)

Marx, Epicurus and the classical world  37 The multiple rather than the singular social subject then is like the ‘manyheaded hydra’ of working-class history and subjectivity (Linebaugh and Rediker 2000), the Hydra itself being a motif from classical mythology. This monster, the tree with all of its leaves and the chorus comprised of its different subjects all indicate the multiple subjects of which a formation is comprised. Jacques Rancière, in his development and critique of this notion of the multitude, has framed it in such a way as the multiplicity faces and transcends the ‘One’: the ‘Event’, ‘Messiah’ or the god. In the context of our later discussions of gods, the divine and sculptural embodiment, reading Rancière means understanding the relation between singularity and multiplicity, and indeed transcending those divisions (2010:87). Further, it means re-elaborating the relationship of the multiple human to the singular god, of the single moment of history to its multiple repetitions and proliferations and again transcending those divisions. Like the monstrous Hydra and like the god Proteus the human itself becomes both a unity and network of entanglements and possibilities (On the demos see Rancière 2010:32, where the demos is not a socially inferior category but a category which speaks when it should not speak; and on the political classics more generally see Hammer 2002 and Seaford 1994.) The human proletarian represented by proletarian deity Sisyphus is a being of lucidity who can grasp his own fate at the same time as he is tortured and cast down. As Camus argues: Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition; it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. (1975:109) The monstrous, the choral, the deciduous as classical analogies for the multitude express this hesitation to divide the singular from the multiple; but they also in different ways express an opposition to the imposition and singularity of the gods with their own distinctive modes of observation of the world and of humans. In some ways the conglomeration of the mass and the multitude create, as in Marxism, the spaces between worlds of what Epicurus develops as the concept of the intermundia (Whitmarsh 2016:176). But they also ultimately offer a parallel vision to that of gods: an omni-mundia which has the capacity not just to displace the divine but creates forms of abstraction and observation of the world and of human history from both above and within. The multitude becomes the archive of the whole of ­humanity and its methods of measurement and judgment because it is the container of the whole of humanity and its cultures, including the cultures of antiquity. These archives become further resources for self-understanding and reviewing the human predicament. The traverse between worlds (from Crete to Arcadia, from pastoralism to production, from antiquity to the modern, from this world into space) becomes at the same time a method

38  Marx, Epicurus and the classical world of omni-disciplinary study of a universal humanity and the cultures it inherited and created for itself. That universalist understanding or the aspiration towards it allows for the propulsion into new worlds of human making and fabrication: utopia, communism, the concentration camp, the slave ship, spaces of exception and suspension. It even creates the philosophical space in which to explore the world and the universe and to experiment and play with culture and thought. In some ways this does not just lie in the trial of Socrates and the world it produced, but in the garden of Epicurus where thought is allowed to develop in a place of contemplation. Indeed the journey of Marx himself towards that ‘Archimedean’ position of abstraction lay in the Epicurean garden and Marx’s first attempt at philosophical speculation. Further, the classical analogy of the multitudinous also appears for the first time as a Marxian concept in Marx’s doctoral studies of and notebooks on Epicurus. The Epicurean garden allowed for the development of the traverse between worlds and the totalising understanding of human cultures as they begin to eclipse and eradicate the divine, or indeed resurrect it in new forms.

Epicurean notes The relation between gods and humans in Epicurean philosophy is one of the great inheritances of the ancient world (Warren 2005). Some have seen Epicurus as prefiguring atheism, and indeed some of his ancient critics accused him of displacing the gods (Whitmarsh 2016). John Bellamy Foster has argued that Epicureanism itself was a central component in the rise of materialism, humanism and the Enlightenment (2000:58). The concept of the mortality of humans and their relation to the divine becomes central to Marx and to the concept of the multitude and their gods (Foster 2000:58–59). As Foster argues: ‘Marx saw the essence of Epicurean materialism as lying in its conception of the mortality of both human beings and the universe’ (2000:58). We can extract some aspects of this by first examining some themes which emerge from Marx’s initial set of notebooks on Epicurus (2010b). The notebooks were essentially extracts from Epicurus and other writers and translated by Marx from the Greek and Latin. They become the ultimate basis for Marxist abstraction and also for an empirically grounded and universalistic rendition of actual earthly life and material forms. The reason for this lies in the particular approach of Epicurus and his observation of physical, biological and cosmological phenomena. Marx notes (literally notates) Epicurus and his injunction to observe empirically information about the unknown by perceptual observation (Marx 2010b:406). Marx underscores the words of Epicurus to Menoeceus: Not the man who denies the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believe about them is truly

Marx, Epicurus and the classical world  39 impious. For the utterances of the multitude about the gods are not true preconceptions, but false assumptions; hence the multitude believe that the greatest evils happen to the wicked and the greatest blessings happen to the good from the hand of the gods. For being entirely prejudiced in favour of their own virtues, they grant their favour to those who are like themselves and consider as alien whatever is not so. (2010b:406) This passage, as Tim Whitmarsh has argued (2016), is opening the case for the dismissal or at least the unknowability of the gods: gods who are, in essence, perceived purely through the lens of the multitude. The dissolution of the bonds of submission of humans by the gods means dismantling the human projection of the gods in the universe. Marx takes a number of passages and examines the confrontation between the earthly, concrete world on the one hand and that of the ideality and the absolute on the other. There is a manifold series of imagined determinations between them on the part of human beings and philosophy in particular. These imaginaries are to be revealed ‘only as the ideality of the concrete’ (2010b:413). The contradiction between the concrete and the ideality is expressed forcefully in the atomic imaginaries of Epicurus, which, as we shall see later, are profoundly illustrative of what matter, materials and objects might imaginatively contain and reveal. For Marx: We have seen that the atoms, taken abstractly among themselves, are nothing but entities, imagined in general, and that only in confrontation with the concrete do they develop their ideality, which is imagined and therefore entangled in contradictions. They also show, by becoming one side of the relation, that is, when it comes to dealing with objects which carry in themselves the principle and its concrete world (the living, the animate, the organic), that the realm of imagination is thought of now as free, now as the manifestation of something ideal. This freedom of the imagination is therefore but an assumed, immediate, imagined one, which in its true form is the atomistic. (2010b:414) Epicurean atomism, Marx argues, shakes the whole nature of the divine and of the divine in nature. But it does this by seeing the ‘divine, the idea, embodied in nature’ (2010b:423–424). This embodiment of the divine, the ideal, the absolute in nature and specifically in the tangible, earthly, material objects of the world is a revolutionary step to understanding the immanence of nature, and is only then a short step towards the divine being utterly banished from the world in its entirety. The gods assume the shapes of rocks or are immanent in the earth’s landscapes and are then gradually made to disappear. This is profoundly related to the idea of the ‘empty

40  Marx, Epicurus and the classical world world’ and the spaces between the worlds of the intermundia (2010b:426). Marx elaborates: Here, first, worlds are presupposed for the creation of the world, and the place where this occurs is the void. Hence what was foreshadowed to begin with in the concept of creation, viz. that what was to be created is presupposed, is substantiated here. The notion without its closer d ­ efinition and relation to the others, that is to say, as it is provisionally presupposed, is empty or disembodied, an intermundium, an empty space. (2010b:426) Eventually, for Marx, Epicurus extends the void, makes the world empty and indeterminate. It is a world of the indolent, idle, absent or ‘otiose god’ (2010b:430). This is the moment that Marx reveals one of his most mysterious cosmological formulations: As the meteors, the visible heaven, are for the ancient philosophers the symbol and the visible confirmation of their prejudice for the substantial, so that even Aristotle takes the stars for gods, or at least brings them into direct connection with the highest energy, so the written heaven, the sealed word of the god who has been revealed to himself in the course of world history, is the battle-cry of Christian philosophy. The premise of the ancients is the act of nature, that of the moderns the act of the spirit. The struggle of the ancients could only end by the visible heaven, the substantial nexus of life, the force of gravity of political and religious life being shattered, for nature must be split in two for the spirit to be one in itself. The Greeks broke it up with the Hephaestan hammer of art, broke it up in their statues; the Roman plunged his sword into its heart and the peoples died, but modern philosophy unseals the word, lets it pass away in smoke in the holy fire of the spirit, and as fighter of the spirit fighting the spirit, not as a solitary apostate fallen from the gravity of Nature, it is universally active and melts the forms which prevent the universal from breaking forth. (2010b:430–431) Antiquity has nature and earth and substantiality. The Christian medieval world has the logos, the word, the text. Nature is severed for the ancients in order to dialectically fuse and recombine materiality and spirituality. The weighty gravity of the natural and the material is shattered by the spirit, the geist, the ghost, the entity that lies incorporated and embodied within the material form. As Marx says, the spirits of the Greeks come to us across the vastness of the cosmos like ‘pure light’ (2010b:500). This is of course just the groundwork and plans for his full work on Epicurean philosophy, yet the divine and the deity and their dispelling and destruction become a compelling part of Marx’s analysis. This is the moment

Marx, Epicurus and the classical world  41 where the gods ‘swerve’ away from nature at the same time as they become embodied in the material object, the sculpture, the statuesque. These become the genesis of every part of our discussion: the eidola. For Marx: These gods of Epicurus have often been ridiculed, these gods who, like human beings, dwell in the intermundia of the real world, have no body but a quasi-body, no blood but quasi-blood, and, content to abide in blissful peace, lend no ear to any supplication, are unconcerned with us and the world, are honoured because of their beauty, their majesty and their superior nature, and not for any gain. And yet these gods are no fiction of Epicurus. They did exist. They are the plastic gods of Greek art. (2010a:51) Marx argues that the eidola are quite literally simulations. They are the form of natural bodies but only their surface, their skin and their covering. They are pure appearance whose interior is lifeless. We can empirically describe these entities because they appear to us sensually as any exteriority would, but their interiors are empty and without substance or, in the case of the statue, are just mute and lifeless stone. They are phantasmic images of something dead or absent. Étienne Balibar sees the eidola as simulacra in Epicurus and also the origin of the archaic lineage of the ideological (1995:124). As Barbour has argued, ‘in Marx’s reading, the eidola emerge and dissipate, and only exist to the extent that they leave an impression on the senses – something that is, over time, destined to expire’ (2012:95). The sensual existents are simply pure form even if we can see, smell, touch, taste and hear them. Yet they are still simulacra and apparitions rather than existing sensuous beings. As Paul Allen Miller has said of Derrida reading Marx, the eidolon is the ‘afterimage or anticipation that haunts our immediate existence’ (Miller 2016:233). Derrida sees the eidola as inseparable from death; they are literally the ‘figures of dead souls’ (1994:184). In some ways this is reminiscent of the figures of the funereal and monumental sculpture, the capturing of a form in stone of something which has passed away or from our sight and senses as a being. These imaginaries, sculpted from stone, are the sublation, supersession, cancellation and preservation into a new material entity of the old dying being. The ‘plastic gods of Greek art’ are a way of both preserving and destroying the gods and deities that they formally represent. The plasticity of these apparitions, petrified or sculpted into the stone, also reveals profound differences between their different versions and begins to question issues of form and substance, of exterior and interior, as we will see in subsequent chapters. In one sense they are enmeshed in hybridity and the in-between. They are the objects of the intermundia. They traverse between the worlds of the living and the dead, of the god and the animal and the human, of the Achaean and the Trojan. They are de-territorialised,

42  Marx, Epicurus and the classical world de-natured or un-natured beings: those who have had their ‘natures’ dispelled, dispersed or frozen. As mute, stone archives they can still impart meaning, still represent and still mystify. They will ultimate become part of the omni-mundia: the raising up of humanity to divine status as humanity itself dispels and represents its gods. The figure of the wooden horse with its soldiers in its interior, the mythical centaur as a recombination of ‘real’ beings, the statue of Marcus Aurelius and his horse, the stone form of ­Dionysos and his Maenads on a bas-relief, the wrath of Achilles painted on a classical Greek vase, Helen weaving in her bower in Troy. They are themselves multitudinous and part of the bringing into birth not just of sculpted forms but of new cultures and new types of humanity, albeit ones which return back to the same motifs to answer questions about who they are, what they were and where they are going.

3 Mnemosyne Art, memory, objects

Introduction In this chapter we begin to examine and theorise the idea of aesthetic objects specifically in deference to the goddess Mnemosyne and her infinite capacity to remember. Jean-Pierre Vernant, in his discussion of Mnemosyne, notes that she knows of all that has been, all that is, and all that will be (2006:115–117). The Marxist project to understand the forces and relations of production and social reproduction (including the production and reproduction of the aesthetic and its material forms) finds its most enigmatic formulation in the late notebooks of Theodor Adorno and critical theory and its analysis of mnemonics. There is no attempt to provide any kind of exposition of Adorno’s mysterious and impenetrable late notebooks. But we do ‘expose’ certain types of concepts about materiality, spirit, incarnation and repetition that Adorno recomposes and comes back to time and time again. This links to new materialist and realist philosophies of objects and nature that have emerged over the last two decades, largely by way of readings of Heidegger rather than Marx. This chapter sets the scene for the kinds of objects that the classical world offers to us for use and what mnemonics these material entities might disclose or dispel, or whether we can see them as acting as containers of meaning or memory at all.

Critical theory and objects Walter Benjamin has argued that it is memory that generates traditions and culturally forms and informs subsequent generations. The invention of text is a later accrual to and development of human culture and it emerges on that fracture where the old oral, epic cultures are dissipating or changing. Memory becomes enshrined in the text itself and ultimately in the form of the novel. This transforms the story-memory into the text-memory. For Benjamin: Mnemosyne, the rememberer, was the Muse of the epic art among the Greeks. This name takes the observer back to a parting of the ways in world history. For if the record kept by memory – historiography – constitutes

44  Mnemosyne: Art, memory, objects the creative matrix of the various epic forms (as great prose is the creative matrix of the various metrical forms), its oldest form, the epic, by virtue of being a kind of common denominator includes the story and the novel. When in the course of centuries the novel began to emerge from the womb of the epic, it turned out that in the novel the element of the epic mind that is derived from the Muse – that is, memory – ­manifests itself in a form quite different from the way it manifests itself in the story. (Benjamin 1969:96–97) The birth and nativity of the novel in the epic stresses the natality of those born into its memory-structures. Each generation learns anew its ways of remembering from these forms. The muse Mnemosyne indicates a different type of temporal duration in human culture: that between the fleeting oral tale and the endlessly perpetuated and proliferated text. The novel, from Homer onwards, endures and becomes enshrined in each generation even when the original story has disappeared. This relative fixity then leads to the extension and endless proliferation of the original story in its many versions and iterations. From one telling it becomes a multiple telling. As Benjamin argues of the invocation of the muse in the Homeric epics: What announces itself in these passages is the perpetuating remembrance of the novelist as contrasted with the short-lived reminiscences of the storyteller. The first is dedicated to one odyssey, one battle; the second, to many diffuse occurrences. It is, in other words, remembrance which, as the Muse-derived element of the novel, is added to reminiscence, the corresponding element of the story, the unity of their origin in memory having disappeared with the decline of the epic. (1969:97) From the one odyssey and the one battle we have the diffusion of remembrance, proliferating so distantly from that original moment of memory that we do not know ultimately whether that memory was there originally or is itself just a fiction. The development of this sense of Homeric textuality and fixity (which happens long after the oral tellings of ‘blind’ Homer) also allows for the proliferation of images and objects which are parasitic on the Homeric version of Troy, for example. Yet they also, in their own ways as memory-objects and containers of meaning, may present alternative histories and memories to that of the textual version. The vase iterates its stories and memories in its own manner according to its materiality or the particular embodied versions of Homer present within the interior of the vase painter. Critical theory, and Marxism more generally, has had a long-standing concern with aesthetics (Carter 2013; Mitchell 2006; Schwartz 2005). There is also a growing literature on Adorno’s late aesthetic work (Bernstein 1992;

Mnemosyne: Art, memory, objects  45 Jameson 1990; Nicholson 1997; Zuidervaart 1991). Robert Hullot-Kentor has retranslated and reworked Adorno’s work over recent years and elaborated on the difficulties of translation and exposition. In terms of Aesthetic Theory Hullot-Kentor has stressed its antagonistic and agonistic nature as well as its enigmatic relationship to his other work (Adorno 2013:viii). In some ways the entirety of the work is about the central question of the aesthetic object. Adorno reflects upon understanding the object from within its own interior or knowing the object from the interior of our human selves. The method of self-immersion that Adorno examines means the disappearance of the subject into the aesthetic object, which thereby dissolves the classical question of subject-object relationships. The disappearance of the interfering voice of the subject then allows, as Hullot-Kentor notes, the ‘thing-in-itself’ to speak (Adorno 2013:ix). This understanding of the primacy of the object and its relationship to the observation of the subject has a long tradition within social and anthropological thought. In extreme cases the dissolution of the subject means the subject only survives as a form of residual sedimentation within the work. As Claude Lévi-Strauss said: What matters is the work, not the author who happened to write it; I would say rather that it writes itself through him. The individual person is no more than the means of transmission and survives in the work only as a residue. (Wilcken 2010:4) John Roberts, in his analysis of art history and historical materialism, has examined questions of the autonomy of the object and its use value for the social and the ways in which objects are in turn aesthetically autonomous and ideological social entities (1994:29). The question of art history hinges on the ways in which history inscribes itself upon the object and how the object itself intervenes in history or has social powers and effects. In their discussion of aesthetic objects (within the context of theatre) and archaeological artefacts Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks have examined the multiplicity of the artefact: An artefact, as is accepted, is a multitude of data points, an infinity of possible attributes and measurements. Which ones are made and held to constitute its identity depends conventionally upon method and the questions being asked by the archaeologist. But we also hold that the artefact is itself a multiplicity. Its identity is multiple. It is not just one thing. The artefact does not only possess a multitude of data attributes, but is also itself multiplicity. We come to an object in relationships with it, through using, perceiving it, referring to it, talking of it, feeling it as something. This as is vital. It is a relationship of analogy – as if it were

46  Mnemosyne: Art, memory, objects something. And it is always ironically something else – our references to the object are always metaphorical. (Pearson and Shanks 2001:99) The notion of the sensuous object proposing or dispelling meaning depending on the questions we ask of its multitude is central to Adorno, and particularly if we can think of this historically deposited object as being able to tell us something about the history from which it emerged and which shaped it. Further, the object itself has the social powers to shape history, memory and culture in turn. As Adorno says elsewhere in his philosophy of music: aesthetic objects self-evidently display the ‘power of the social totality’ (2006:3). The aesthetic object displays the world from which it emerges. For Adorno: ‘This is only music; how must a world be made in which even questions of counterpoint bear witness to irreconcilable conflicts?’ (2006:5). This is why Adorno himself witnesses the role of the avant-garde music and literature of his period as the ‘truth’ and testament to the endarkenment of the world. It elided meaning because the social formations from which it was emerging were in a state of flux and darkness. Adorno notes: The truth of this music appears to reside in the organized absence of any meaning, by which it repudiates any meaning of organized ­society – if which it wants to know nothing – rather than it being capable on its own of any positive meaning. Under present conditions, music is constrained to determinate negation. (2006:19) The ‘determinate negation’ of the object continues the history of the social world into a specific artefact which then allows us to trace endarkenment and nihilism in its properties (see Benzer 2012). Quentin Meillassoux has expressed the dual nature of the observed and inscribed object: on the one hand, we acknowledge that the sensible only exists as a subject’s relation to the world; but on the other hand, we maintain that the mathematizable properties of the object are exempt from the constraint of such a relation, and that they are effectively in the object in the way in which I conceive them, whether I am in relation with this object or not. (2008:10) The sensible, sensual object thereby exists beyond the constraints of at least the initial human observer. When we examine Meillasoux’s concept of the ‘arche-fossil’ the nature of observers beyond the human come to attention. In this dual nature the properties, affordances and inscriptions of the object both repel meanings imposed by observers at the same time as potentially revealing meanings, to those observers, that exist within or upon the object. The

Mnemosyne: Art, memory, objects  47 methodological attentiveness to the object reveals what has been left upon it in its genesis, interaction and engagement with the world and with history. But it also conceals as much as it reveals beyond the attention and observation of individual human beings that may be revealed only to gods or imagination. In Adorno’s lectures on the sociology of musical artefacts he traces for his students the relation between the musical artefact, the social world and the ‘socially organized individuals’ who are listening to it (1989:1). Often this was intimately related to class structures of subjectivity and aesthetic production and appreciation (1989:55). For Adorno the artefact was either truthful or it was ideological. If it displayed the ‘fissures and fractures’ of the society from which it emerged in its own fissures and fractures then it transcended mystification (1989:63). Adorno therefore looked to discern ‘the social complexion of music in its own interior’ (1989:70). By examining the interior of the artforms we begin to discern the powers within. Sociology of art and music becomes the search to discover the ‘force of gravity of extant forms’ (Adorno 1989:93) and how the social appears in the texture of its materiality. It is here that Adorno begins to rethink his aesthetic theory in the late and unfinished notebooks and, reworks the nature of the socially and historically determined artefact and the determinations it in turn thrusts out into the world.

The refracted social object Adorno talks of aesthetic objects as refractions of the social world. Aesthetic refraction, he argues, is impossible with something to be refracted. He argues that ‘Artworks are afterimages of empirical life’ (2013:5). There is the earthly world of empirical life, a life of both humans and nature. The aesthetic is a distillation and preservation of aspects of earthly existence, but it also has its own laws and nature as part of its inner life as an aesthetic rather than as an empirical object (2013:1). This does not mean, with all of the social invested in the object as an entity, that we are able to give the object a ‘social function’, and indeed the idea of art as having that kind of function is a contradiction within Adorno’s work. At times he says that art is to have no social function at the same time as tasking it with providing an adequate refraction of the world. This adequate refraction is not to mirror the world empirically but to display in its own fractures the fractures of the fractured world. In that process of refraction Adorno argues that aesthetic objects engage in a process of estrangement from the world that they have come from: ‘Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity’ (2013:2). This leads to one of Adorno’s most important formulations: Important artworks constantly divulge new layers; they age, grow cold, and die. It is a tautology to point out that as humanly manufactured

48  Mnemosyne: Art, memory, objects artifacts they do not live as do people. But the emphasis on the artifactual element in art concerns less the fact that it is manufactured than its own inner constitution, regardless of how it came to be. Artworks are alive in that they speak in a fashion that is denied to natural objects and the subjects who make them. Thus they come into contrast with the arbitrariness of what simply exists. Yet it is precisely as artifacts, as products of social labor, that they also communicate with the empirical experience that they reject and from which they draw their content. (2013:5) Both affirming and rejecting the analogy of the artwork as biological organism allows Adorno to think of them temporally as entities that are born, grow old and die. They have inner constitutions just like human beings and metabolisms that are alive and that can speak. As Adorno notes: these ways of speaking are different from those of natural, empirical objects and of the human subjects who make the aesthetic object. One defining feature is that they are made rather than simply the ‘arbitrary’ discarded detritus of social or natural existence. In that making the object is a sedimented being which has the ‘imprinting’ of social and natural relations scored upon it (2013:6–7). For Adorno: ‘The identity of the artwork with existing reality is also that of the work’s gravitational force, which gathers around itself its membra disjecta, traces of the existing’ (2013:9). These traces of existents find their way into the dimensions, forms and interiors of the aesthetic objects. Even though we can discern the traces of the social and natural in them, they are not reducible to simply the mirroring of a social form or simply its product. The refraction inherent within the object is therefore not simply reflection but the genesis of a new ‘inward space of men as the space of their representation’ (2013:10). In the very making of the object the humans transform their own interior worlds just as much as they mould and transform exterior forms of the empirical world.

The endarkenment of the world The question of an art that is servile to political programmes was anathema to Adorno. His famous injunction against Stalinised art serves to illustrate his utter hostility to ‘political’ artworks: ‘Rather no art than socialist realism’ (2013:73). Even in terms of capitalist civilisation Adorno noted that the art should be ascetic and life ‘voluptuous’ rather than the reverse as it is in bourgeois social formations. If art is to refract the fissures and fractures of the civilisation from which it emerges it should not perform any kind of ‘social function’ for that society. The increasing violations of humanity on the part of Stalinism and Nazism (and indeed their common hostility to modernist avant-garde art) meant for Adorno that any artistic refraction of this had to somehow reveal within it the elisions, torment and horror emanating from the empirical world. As Adorno says: ‘The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art’ (2013:27).

Mnemosyne: Art, memory, objects  49 The idea of the ‘radically darkened art’ is for Adorno quite simply a matter of colour: ‘Radical art today is synonymous with dark art; its primary color is black. Much contemporary production is irrelevant because it takes no note of this and childishly delights in color’ (2013:53). The positive, programmatic visions of totalitarian art on the one hand and the ‘cheerful’ entertainment of bourgeois society on the other were equally an affront to the dead that had been murdered by totalitarianism and capitalism. The accumulated pain and memory of suffering could only be refracted appropriately through dark art (2013:53). Avant-garde art modifies and reworks the empirical world. It is an explosion or a ‘voracious vortex’ of modernism (2013:32). Experimental art is able to enunciate the ‘disaster’ not through photographic documentation or empiricism but through ‘a radically darkened objectivity’ (2013:27). This art is the ‘memory of accumulated suffering’ (2013:352). But the art itself is not just a refraction, it creates new empirical forms out of the manipulation and twisting of matter. The labour of making art literally torments the material to create new empirical forms in the world that are sensual and tangible. In the making as well as the completed work this torment reflects the torment of the world from which it emerges. As Adorno notes: The violence done to the material imitates the violence that issued from the material and that endures in its resistance to form. The subjective domination of the act of forming is not imposed on irrelevant materials but is read out of them; the cruelty of forming is mimesis of myth, with which it struggles. Greek genius expressed this idea, allegorizing it unconsciously: An early Doric relief from Selinunte, at the archaeological museum in Palermo, portrays Pegasus as having sprung from the blood of Medusa. (2013:68–69) The struggle between the maker and the made is a violence undertaken by the artist against the material and the material against the artist. Each is struggling to retain or transform the other. But the arts itself, its ‘cruelty of forming’, is mimetic of the basic motifs of human civilisation in which all true art emerges from blood and darkness. The beautiful statues of classical antiquity literally emerge from the myth, memory and imaginary of monsters. We will return to the making and techniques of memory shortly.

Spirit, apparition, phantasm, gods, the dead, statues Adorno makes the argument that there is no such thing as images as products of ‘fixed, archaic invariants’ (2013:118). He had little tolerance for the archetype or a collective unconscious. The notion that each image is a copy of an archaic invariant is dismissed by Adorno in favour of the appearance and reappearance of the apparition (2013:116). In some ways this haunting and reappearance is the persistence within critical theory of the spirit or

50  Mnemosyne: Art, memory, objects geist which continues to inhabit human aesthetic forms. The mimesis apparent in Euripides for example is a dialectic between the likenesses of humans, of natural forms and of other ‘species’ like gods and monsters. They persist because they intimate the boundaries and permeability of the concept of the human. As Adorno writes of Euripides: Since, however, the images of a terrifying nature have from the outset mollified those gods mimetically, the archaic grimaces, monsters, and minotaurs already assume a human likeness. Orderly reason already governs these mixed creatures; natural history did not allow their kind to survive. They are frightening because they warn of the fragility of human identity, but they are not chaotic because threat and order are intertwined in them. (2013:71) The question then becomes, for mimesis and refraction, how far the spirits and apparitions of the archaic past still continue and persist into the artworks of the present. This constantly revivified world of ghosts, the memory of the pain of the dead, is invested into the cruelly manipulated and literally tortuous artworks of theatre and sculpture. These artworks, for Adorno, become the locus of spirits. They are imprisoned within its form, just as ghosts were profound emanations of specific landscapes. For Adorno: ‘In its aesthetic manifestation, spirit is condemned to its locus in the phenomenon just as spirits were once thought to have been condemned to their haunts; if spirit does not appear, the artworks are as negligible as that spirit’ (2013:121). Yet this appearance and apparition of the spirit within the work may still escape our perception. As Adorno notes: ‘Artworks speak like elves in fairy tales: “If you want the absolute, you shall have it, but you will not recognize it when you see it”’ (2013:173). The elves say things that we cannot quite grasp or understand, they speak in different languages, from the spaces between other worlds. Their point is not to communicate but simply to persist. The ghost in the statue continues to be mysterious, even more so when the works themselves are born, live for a while and die just like human beings. If we take the petrified statue as representing and refracting the spirit of what it purports to represent then we need to examine the nature of this material and temporal being. These works are not necessarily ‘timeless’, or at least if they are they have to destroy everything organic or living that might lead to decomposition and dissolution. As Adorno says, the continued existence of the work means the elimination of life: ‘If the idea of artworks is eternal life, they can attain this only by annihilating everything living within their domain’ (2013:72). And what if those apparitions which appear and continue to be represented in art could never have had a material existence in the first place? What indeed is then refracted or mimetically represented within the statue of the centaur and of Medusa? This appearance or apparition is itself a cipher for Adorno. The aesthetic appearance of the ‘non-existent as if it existed’ brings into question the

Mnemosyne: Art, memory, objects  51 ‘truth’ or fictionality of art (2013:114). Fabrication then means not just making something, but a radical act of invention of something which has no factual existence in the empirical, earthly world. Yet there is an expectation of art here. It can invent what does not yet exist and make possible an objective entity, itself refracted from forms in the social world (2013:114). For Adorno: Although the nonexisting emerges suddenly in in artworks, they do not lay hold of it bodily as with the pass of a magic wand. The nonexisting is mediated to them through fragments of the existing, which they assemble into an apparition. It is not for art to decide by its existence if the nonexisting that appears indeed exists as something appearing or remains semblance. As figures of the existing, unable to summon into existence the nonexisting, artworks draw their authority from the reflection they compel on how they could be the overwhelming image of the nonexisting if it did not exist in itself. (2013:115) History and society are sedimented just as much into the nonexisting as the existing. They are not simply conjured up out of nowhere but out of the discarded detritus of world history and archaic social formations.

Making and technique The earthly empirical world is a material place which is the genesis of the matter and the techniques which transform that matter into art. The autonomous ‘inner-aesthetic’ practice is bound up with the techniques of ­‘extra-aesthetic productive forces’ (Adorno 2013:45). The torture and torsion of the materials of art, including the aestheticisation and memory of a specific human body, is a remaking of the earthly world. Fabrication and construction are in relation with the imaginaries and aspirations of the artist in terms of their making. These techniques provide technical solutions and opportunities to objectify the products of the artistic imagination (2013:33). For Adorno: ‘In art the more that must be made, sought, invented, the more uncertain it becomes if it can be made or invented. Art that is radically and explicitly something made must ultimately confront its own feasibility’ (2013:36). The prosthetic extension of the artist’s corporeal body through technique extends her subjectivity into the made object (2013:40). Adorno delineates the phenomenological relationship between the hand and the drawing and the photograph and empirical life: There is an obvious qualitative leap between the hand that draws an animal on the wall of a cave and the camera that makes it possible for the same image to appear simultaneously at innumerable places. But the objectification of the cave drawing vis-à-vis what is unmediatedly seen already contains the potential of the technical procedure that effects the

52  Mnemosyne: Art, memory, objects separation of what is seen from the subjective act of seeing. Each work, insofar as it is intended for many, is already its own reproduction. (2013:45) What fascinates Adorno is the ‘deformation’ of the human figure and face in avant-garde modernism as the reworking of archaic and primitive forms of invention even when the technical capacity has developed since the advent of Palaeolithic cave art (2013:49). This returns to the different kinds of cultural landscapes and empirical worlds which face the artist in different historical and aesthetic epochs. The question of technique and making is best illustrated by Adorno’s demarcation between natural and cultural landscapes or between nature per se and a making which transforms it (2013:85). Making (the making of a ‘pure artefact’) commits acts of violence upon the materiality of nature. The artefact is the ‘opposite of what is not made, nature’ (2013:85). Or in reality a nature which is at least not in origin made by human beings but may be by gods. The ‘artifactitious domain’ of the cultural landscape is the opposite of ‘natural beauty’ for Adorno (2013:88). The cultural landscape is both a fabrication and an attempt at deception. It is an attempt at mastering the untamed and the wild (2013:88–89).

Arche-fossils, objects and observation Adorno’s aesthetic objects are the product of human making, intention and fabrication. He distinguishes them from purely natural objects of the ­empirical earthly world which are not fabricated but found. Often these natural objects act as the materials tormented or chiselled into the shape of the artwork. The aesthetic object has its exteriority and interiority, its form and substance. It may be that the spirit or ghost inhabits the aesthetic object recomposed from the long history of aesthetic forms since the beginning of ­human making. Often artefacts become so because they are the products of both nature and human observation, as we have seen above. But do we have to even have that observed human object? Can we not have extra-human, pre-­intentional objects that avert the human gaze or never come before it? Quentin ­Meillassoux has attempted to examine these ‘mind-independent entities’, or what he calls the arche-fossil (2008:21). Beginning his discussion with scientific discourses about the pre-human world, Meillassoux initially examines statements regarding epochs anterior to humans and human relations with the earthly world. These statements might be concerned with archaic animal ­species, geological sedimentation, cosmology – and they are largely centred on the material residues that persist into our world of human observation. They are ‘ancestral statements’ only witnessed by gods (2008:23). For Meillassoux: I will call ‘arche-fossil’ or ‘fossil-matter’ not just materials indicating the traces of past life, according to the familiar sense of the term ‘fossil’,

Mnemosyne: Art, memory, objects  53 but materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event; one that is anterior to terrestrial life. An arche-fossil thus designates the material support on the basis of which the experiments that yield estimates of ancestral phenomena proceed – for example, an isotope whose rate of radioactive decay we know, or the luminous emission of a star that informs us as to the date of its formation. (2008:22) The ancestral phenomenon creates routes and tracks to uncover its traces. It allows for the development, as Meillassoux understands it, to rise above our frames of human observation and into the universality of the gods and their vision of the entirety of existence. Meillassoux argues that: The arche-fossil enjoins us to track thought by inviting us to discover the ‘hidden passage’ trodden by the latter in order to achieve what modern philosophy has been telling us for the past two centuries is impossibility itself: to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not. (2008:48) This returns us to the Archimedean standpoint, beyond the world. Indeed it is the position of the omni-mundia. Whether those objects are accessible to interpretation opens up new forms of speculative realisms and materialisms. The ancestral artefact does not refract or reflect the primordial world from which it emerges. Neither does the archaeological artefact refract or reflect one or other archaic human social form. These objects are not mirrors or lenses. Neither are they made by human beings. The observations that human beings take from the object are either refuted or made possible by the object itself as a multiplicity. The aspiration to map the object in its totality means understanding the mass of the traces that the object offers to us. Each object may offer forms of data inscribed in it by its emergence from and contact with the earth. Aesthetic objects are different. Although they use the materials offered by the world, including clay, feathers and stone, they are fabricated objects of technique and they are made explicitly as mirrors and lenses. They are literally metaphors of something beyond the object either in the interior imagination of human beings or in the exterior world beyond the human body, and they refract those natural, social or psychological relations. They are therefore trace-documents and archives of the world and of the humans who are fabricating them. There are also further descriptions we can make. The first lies in the question of truth. How far does the aesthetic object fictionalise the world that it came from? Can we trust that the representations it makes of gods, Minotaurs and Medusas are of actual living things that are remembered? In one sense it is impossible to make those judgements, but the lived reality

54  Mnemosyne: Art, memory, objects in the human imagination of these creatures is exactly the same as the lived imagination of dead kings. Secondly, the questions we ask of the object may only disclose that which we question upon. This means that the ritual artefact of a comb or a loom may offer different answers whether we are asking questions about labour or faith but around the materiality of the same artefact. It may be that the aesthetic artefact can tell us much ethnographically about the kinds of social formations it emerged from. What we might call the relations of artefactuality and artefictionality are closely enmeshed with the materials we use as artists and the imaginaries that we are conjuring up in our subjectivities. Monsters never seen on the earth may rise time and time again in the clay beneath our hands. The fabricated object can never be entirely ‘artificial’; its artifice is indeed irredeemably related to real material entities without which the artifice is impossible. The object displays the traces of dead worlds and the logics of dead worlds just as much as it exists as an object in and of itself (Hudson and Shaw 2015).

Objects and mnemonics of Troy We can begin to excavate the mnemonic territory of the ancient world by making an initial approach to the city of Troy. By making an approach we mean a literal encounter between our human observation and a specific location: even if that location as the origin of mythic structures can be contested. Indeed that contestation takes place on the materiality of the space and the objects that are excavated there. They are irredeemably related to the kinds of texts and discourses that prefigured this place becoming the place where Achilles and Hector fought even as this space may have been the locus for those stories and the city itself the domus of Priam. Indeed, to extend the excavatory metaphor means to see our language, our cultures and our stories as layered as the many destroyed strata of ‘Troy’. The apparitions of that space have re-emerged time and time again in our cultures as part of a vast sedimentation process that is half a mnemonic device and half a radical act of forgetting and displacement. Perhaps, as Robin Sowerby has noted, the most intriguing element in our material sedimentation and our language is the fact that ‘archaic elements co-exist side by side with later forms’ (1995:5). The question that we might begin with is the historicity of the Trojan War and whether Hissarlik is its location. Peter V. Jones has indeed noted that it may be conceivable that Homer knew of Hissarlik and its connection with the mythic structures of Troy even if the historicity itself is to be disputed (in Homer 1991:xxxvi). The multiple phases of Schliemann’s ­Hissarlik excavations, conducted between 1870 and 1890, may indicate that Troy VIIa is the layer that indicates the catastrophe of Troy with the geography sitting reasonably well with the account of Homer, of Greek tradition and of the folk memories associated with the location (Hammond and Scullard

Mnemosyne: Art, memory, objects  55 1970:1097–1098). Hammond and Scullard almost fully accept the historicity of the tale and of its location: If there ever was a Troy of Priam with some basis of reality it must have stood in this place and at this time. Archaeological and linguistic discoveries during the past twenty years have convinced many scholars that there is a residue of historical truth in many Greek traditions and legends, and Schliemann’s identification of Troy has surely been confirmed. (1970:1098) Recent accounts of the various layers of Troy have tried to assess the materiality of the location in conjunction with the Homeric myths and the ways in which there is a mutual interaction between the materials excavated and the mnemonics of the myth as expressed by Homer (Grethlein 2008; ­Bachhuber  2009). Edwards et al. have argued that Troy VIIa was rebuilt after an earthquake (1975:161). Not only do they address, in their definitive study of the ancient world, the historicity and materiality of the war; they also notate the ‘final holocaust’ of Troy VIIa (1975:162). They argue: It came to its end in a devastating conflagration that swept over the entire citadel and reduced all of the houses to ruins. Under the masses of stone that fell into the streets inside the South Gate were found remnants of the skeletons of two human victims of the catastrophe, which has the appearance of the handiwork of man. (Edwards et al. 1975:162) The elision between the material excavation, its indication of architectural destruction and the human cost of war and Homeric myth is itself just indicative of Troy as a specific, actual, empirical space (1975:342). John Boardman and his collaborators have noted that of all the representations of Troy in early Greek art the theme of the ‘fight by the ships’ recurs time and time again as well as Achilles and his Myrmidons (Boardman et al. 1967:124). A remarkable relief from Mykonos illustrates the mythic power of the destruction of Troy in the ancient world. As Boardman et al. note: A relief pithos from Mykonos carries a pictorial account of the Sack of Troy. The cruel atrocities of the victorious Greeks are depicted in the friezes. With great flashing swords the soldiers threaten defenceless women and mothers who, with arms upraised, implore mercy as their children are slaughtered before their eyes. The picture on the neck leaves no doubt of the events described; it shows the famous wooden horse on its high legs with wheels on the feet. The whole of the available picture space is filled with figures of armed warriors; the artist has not concerned himself with the epic events leading up to the fall of Troy, but

56  Mnemosyne: Art, memory, objects has chosen the dramatic high point of the action. The Greeks in their strange horse are already within the walls and now the horse, the masterpiece of the wily Odysseus, begins to come to life. From its body and neck, as if in a metope and triglyph frieze, the heads of the Achaeans emerge, their great eyes stare down and the concealed weapons have been brought out – helmets and shields and baldrics heavy with menace for Troy. (Boardman et al. 1967:155) By the time of the production of this artefact the myth had been extra-­ territorialised from its initial (if itself fictionalised) location. Even if Homer had been aware of or had visited the site of Hissarlik, the maker of this relief undoubtedly had not. Further, this incarnation of visual memory as a mnemonic device had its origin in text and orality rather than visuality. Extending out into the Greek ‘world’ and subsequent social formations the Troy motif would ultimately, even though originating in a specific location, become part of universal human culture. Why this should be the case is mysterious. There was the fact of its survival when so much else was lost, but also the appropriation by different social formations and heritages of its genealogical descent and lineage. Troy and the Trojans become ways of situating the social genesis and nativity of a whole set of civilisations, including Rome and what was perceived as ancient Britain. The story of the wooden horse, captured at this moment on the vase, becomes so much a part of Greek and ultimately global culture that the Greeks then, and we now, can provide the narrative context for those warriors about to seize the city from the interior of their ‘hollow lair’ (Homer 1991:53). We know what has happened and what is going to happen. Further narratives in the future and others that are now lost to us, including lost works of Homer, added detail and further stories to the core myth, but in essence the set of stories achieves both some fixity and recognition. These formulae and motifs can be presented and re-presented in different orders, conjunctures and with differing degrees of meaning and signification from the ‘Troytown’ mazes of England to contemporary novels which literally ‘flesh out’ the core mythic structures. The vase itself becomes both a memory of preceding events and a new mnemonic device which encodes this new iteration of the story for future observers. The wooden horse itself is de-located from its origin within the gate of Troy and relocated in a multiple series of new locations both geographically and in terms of the material transmissions of clay, stone, film, writing. This suggests the re-specification of different meanings in each new location as well as transmitting older meanings which persist into the new ‘worlds’ of its re-materialisation. As Otto Brendel notes of the D21 sarcophagus in the British Museum which represents one continuous relief of a battle between the Greeks and the Trojans as well as other stories from Greek mythology:

Mnemosyne: Art, memory, objects  57 This programme, relying on literary knowledge and visual memory alike, presupposes preformed iconographic formulae which can be put together at will, in paratactic order … The reliefs of the London sarcophagus reflect two unequal illustrative sources: a frieze of battle in the tradition of epic narratives; and isolated episodes of Greek drama. (1995:386) Brendel notes that the motifs and meanings change in terms of style and staging, and the Etruscan iterations seemingly preferred the drama of Euripides for visual display (1995:386). Of course these styles and stagings postdate both Homer and the world from which the myths first appeared. Within that mythic world what were their own forms of visual expression and motif-making, and were these comparable to both the oral/textual renditions by Homer and the visual motifs of the statuesque and the clay vase? William Taylour has noted of Mycenae and its trade and military networks that the figurative itself is almost entirely absent in its clay pottery. Later cultures would use the mythic motifs of the period figuratively but there is an absence of humans on their vases, with only the ‘flickering lamp of legend’ illuminating the gaps in the material record (1958:1). The absence of the human in art may signify something profound about the contesting warring armies before the city of Troy: an absolute absence of humans on that battlefield.

4 Human Troy

Introduction In this chapter we examine not just the classical myth of the fall of Troy but the significance of Troy for contemporary and twentieth-century social ­theory. The protean and multipliable story of the Trojan War would inform the classical world and subsequent social formations and persist as a compelling metaphor into our own period. But what might these metaphors mean? They hint at a peculiar type of human identity and culture that emerges in the interregnum between the ‘actual’ war and its representation in the Iliad some centuries later. This might be because the Iliad displays a shift in the nature of the human mind or because it acts as the foundational myth of European cultures. It is important to address what the war and the fall of Troy can tell us about the nature of human societies and social thought and expression. Its emanation in material culture and the continued persistence of its motifs (like the wooden horse, like the wrath of Achilles and the ­w iliness of Odysseus, like the story of Helen and her captivity and fate, like the monstrous Atreides – the brothers Menelaus and Agamemnon) can reveal processes of possession and dispossession and of aesthetic objects and material culture which are utterly decisive for the way we shape our notions of humanness. Yet a central question remains to which we return: was Troy an actual place? Archaeologist Carl W. Blegen has argued, for example, that the siting of Troy at Hissarlik is indisputable: Mathematical computations of the exact area of the citadel and conjectural calculations of the possible number of the inhabitants are likewise futile so far as the identification of the site is concerned. There is no alternative site. If there ever was a Troy (and who can really doubt it?), it must have stood on the hill at Hissarlik. (Wace and Stubbings 1962:385) It was, as perceived in this way, never a ‘lost’ Troy at all, and this in turn reaffirms the historicity of the war and by extension the heroes that fought there.

Human: Troy  59 Alexander the Great visited and so, according to Lucan, did Julius Caesar after the battle of Pharsalus. Caesar looked for traces of the great wall that surrounded the city, but it was a place now only of names rather than material remnants. Lucan tells us that Caesar built an altar, as did ­A lexander to Achilles, dedicated to his own ancestor Aeneas (­ 1956:220–222). We see, even in this, the significance of Troy for the social powers of the earth.

Approaching Troy The towers of Troy, of Ilion, of Ilium have fallen but still stand high (see Cook 1973:92–93). Writing of Homer and Philippe Sollers, standing at each end of a chain millennia long, Roland Barthes notes their respective notion of the human being traversing the earth: In it, a man is desperately seeking for something. At one moment he is carried far away from the object of his quest, at the next he is brought closer to it, by the forces making up this interplay, as in any novel. What is this man? What is the object of his desire? What is it that bears him up? or resists him? (1987:44–45) Homer indeed documented, if not invented, elaborations of humanness and of human identity that still persist. He may have even been documenting the emergence of the human as a concept in what Camille Paglia has called ‘his epic arcs of cinematic light’ (1990:72). Homer’s Iliad is one of the foundational moments of European civilisation. It does not offer a single myth but a set of entwined stories. Although gods enter the fray as advisers on or inspirers of certain courses of action the Iliad is about a very specific group of human beings in a very specific location situated within a very limited time frame of a number of days. It is remarkable that these stories which have so specific an origin have become so central to ways in which large numbers of human beings think about their origins and the origins of their civilisation. The story itself is relatively simple and has its origins in Bronze Age Mycenaean culture, although it was shaped into the form of epic (in a fluid oral manner) and subsequently written (with then some degree of fixity) many centuries later. Ostensibly the writer of both the Iliad and the Odyssey (and other epic poems now lost to us) is Homer, although there is some debate about whether he composed both poems, was an amalgam of many poets, or indeed existed at all. The story of the Iliad is centred on the semi-divine Achilles and his wrath: a wrath at having a slave-girl denied him as booty, which leads him to abdicate the fight with the Trojans at a critical point, leading to the death of his beloved Patroclus. It tells the story of the vengeance Achilles then takes against the Trojan prince Hector. The Trojan War provides the context ­ chilles for this small and specific drama, but we learn little about how A and the kings Agamemnon and Menelaus (the Atreides) have come to find

60  Human: Troy themselves in those great human encampments on that beach in Asia M ­ inor. Nor do we find the story of the subsequent defeat of Troy in the Iliad. Audiences listening to these poems in antiquity would have known that wider context and mythical structure. Paris of Troy woos and steals Helen, wife of Menelaus. Menelaus seeks to persuade the high king Agamemnon to make war against the Trojans and recapture Helen. Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter, Iphigenia, on a beach to secure favourable winds. A great army of Achaeans, Argives or Greeks (depending on the whim of the poet) prosecutes a war for a decade upon the great plains before Troy before the city is subdued by the trickery of the wooden horse. The population of Troy is either massacred, taken as slaves or flees. These fleeing exiles are part of the most protean element of the story because many subsequent cities and civilisations would see their origins lying in those refugees. The stories of their lost city would inspire the foundation of both Rome and Britain. The stories within the great story include the sacrifice of children, the massacring of old men and women, the travels of Odysseus towards his home and the murderous horror that awaited Agamemnon on his return to Mycenae. Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of any story is what John Berger has called the ‘reflecting subject’. For Berger: The discontinuities of the story and the tacit agreement underlying them fuse teller, listener and protagonists into an amalgam. An amalgam which I would call the story’s reflecting subject. The story narrates on behalf of this subject, appeals to it and speaks in its voice. (Berger and Mohr 1989:285) This is indeed fascinating when we examine the status of the Iliad. The stories within the Iliad, as we shall see, present a set of dislocations and challenges. Not only have some commentators initiated the idea of a multiple authorial Homeric subject but there are also the issues of subsequent reworkings and re-elaborations of both the form of the epic and the stories entwined within that form. But this was not a story which emerges from nowhere. The very fact that the stories and even the forms of telling were already evident to the audiences receiving them, entangling the teller and the listener in an amalgam, makes the Iliad particularly powerful. Further, each subsequent generation has used the protagonists as ways of thinking about their own lives, problems and aspirations. Some cultures and families have claimed direct familial ancestry from the protagonists of the Iliad and certainly, as we have noted, it has become the genesis myth of families, cities and civilisations. To follow Berger, then, is to think of the ‘reflecting subject’ as the entirety of the amalgam of speaker, audience and ­protagonist – it speaks not just in the voice of Achilles but that voice continues to reverberate within us. We continue to rework our Achilles and our Odysseus into new human frames. It is a reflecting subject of entire civilisations, and

Human: Troy  61 ultimately of global civilisation. As Roberto Calasso has said: ‘Greece was founded on the Iliad’ (1993:90). Yet so much more was also founded on it. If we can then initially examine what we might call this ‘foundational’ myth of Greek and European civilisation: in what kinds of ways do the Homeric poems act as ‘foundations’? Firstly, they were among the first written extant texts that survive from ‘European’ antiquity. This immediately raises a set of problems. There are problems about their status as ‘texts’ largely because they are committed to writing much later than their origin and also because the stories they tell are from even further back into the vast depths of Mycenaean culture: a culture which had long collapsed and disappeared from living memory. There are also problems about the foundational status of the Iliad as a ‘European’ document because, of course, at its time of composition the concept of ‘Europe’ was in its infancy, if it existed at all. The poems are probably a product of the Ionian Islands off Asia Minor rather than mainland Europe, their actions take place within Asia Minor, and there are many debates about the Asiatic and indeed African roots of Greek myth (Bernal 1987). Secondly, the proliferation of these myths and stories through orality at first and then textually were also linked to the dispersal of peoples and the cultural extension of Greek antiquity and its motifs. Again the survival of textual fragments was a product of translation and recomposition specifically into Roman antiquity and the Latin of Virgil and Seneca (who would themselves recompose these basic myths into new poetic and dramaturgic form). But the survival of the textual fragments of Greek antiquity was also made possible by the great Islamic libraries of late antiquity and the medieval period. As the stories proliferated new types of human being and new cultures saw in Achilles something of themselves, or thought they did. The original archetypes of early Greek culture became part of the self-reflection and self-obsession of the European west. They even affected the nature of Norse cosmology. The Edda accounts for the origins of the Norse gods in the fall of Troy (Sturluson 2005:5). Fascinatingly, in the Edda Odin sits in his watchtower of Hlidskjalf at Troy (which is in this version at the centre of the earth). As Sturluson tells us: ‘When Odin sat in its high seat, he could see through all worlds and into all men’s doings’ (2005:18). The ravens Hugin and Munin often sat on Odin’s shoulders, and through their agency he knew the world, representing, as they do, the complementary embodiment of thought and memory. This presents us with a third foundational problem: the interpretation of the civilisational and geographical fracture that the Iliad in particular presents. This fracture is that of Europe and Asia itself. Later translations and commentaries saw the book as the beginning of reflections about identity and difference that would mark the relations and the boundary line between continents and cultures. The luxurious, despotic, scented east would be contrasted with the ‘Spartan’, disciplined and ultimately democratic west, and commentators would read back into the stories of Achilles and Troy the

62  Human: Troy beginnings of the fracture (Alexander included who would see his familial descent from Achilles as a mandate to subdue the east). Not only do our cultural forms of theatre and poetry descend from Greek antiquity, so do our limited number of stories and motifs. Read back into the past and our current self-reflection still reaches for Achilles in order to understand our personal, philosophical and political predicaments. These predicaments are ultimately ones of tragedy. The tragic dimension is one of the central inheritances from antiquity that humans use to make sense of their inward lives and politics. It makes them epic. George Steiner has argued that the re-enactment of private grief on the public stage, with its choruses of measure and retribution we might add, are the central inheritance from Greek culture. The ideas and dimensions of human beings as tragic animals are in essence Greek, and the forms of their theatrical expression are undeniably Athenian (1995:3). The tragic imagination that humans use in order to illuminate their interior may have a very specific origin. For Steiner: ‘It is impossible to tell precisely where or how the notion of formal tragedy first came to possess the imagination. But the Iliad is the primer of tragic art’ (1995:5). It is the matrix by which self-knowing begins to proliferate. That moment of genesis and subsequent proliferation is situated in a place: a now destroyed obscure city of Asia Minor. As Steiner argues: the fall of Troy is the first great metaphor of tragedy. Where a city is destroyed because it has defied God, its destruction is a passing instant in the rational design of God’s purpose. Its wall shall rise again, on earth or in the kingdom of heaven, when the souls of men are restored to grace. The burning of Troy is final because it is brought about by the fierce sport of human hatreds and the wanton, mysterious choice of destiny. (1995:5) This marks the first human moment of conquest and destruction, and the tragic and wanton annihilation of Troy becomes the marker for all subsequent wars. Troy did not defy god. The gods whispered in the ears of both sides. The war was a product not of gods but of human passions. Achilles did not destroy because a god told him to do so but because his passions were human and recognisable to all of us. This may not be because we share a common human ‘nature’ with Achilles, but his concerns either still resonate with us or we use him as a motif or cipher in order to illustrate ourselves. Achilles is both proximal and vastly distant to us. If the predicament of Achilles is a human one this does not mean that the gods are entirely absent (indeed Achilles himself is half-divine). The Iliad illustrates traffic and converse between the human and the gods. The gods come from Olympus and we see them there and on the battlefield, even if in disguise. The attempts by humans to conquer nature, to dispel the gods,

Human: Troy  63 to make the human primary are all observable in the great poem. It marks a moment of transition between different types of human being, of subjectivity and, as we shall see, of mind, including the sentience and subjectivity of the gods. But even if the fully human world beckons it is not yet here. As Steiner notes: There are attempts in the Iliad to throw the light of reason into the s­ hadow-world which surrounds man. Fate is given a name, and the elements are shown in the frivolous and reassuring mask of the gods. But mythology is only a fable to help us endure. The Homeric warrior knows that he can neither comprehend nor master the workings of destiny. Patroclus is slain, and the wretch Thersites sails safely for home. Call for justice or explanation, and the sea will thunder back with its mute clamour. Men’s accounts with the gods do not balance. (1995:5–6) The eventual deliverance of Odysseus is not a marker of balance and of justice. There is little judgement observable in Homer. The good and the great are slain. Innocents like the son of Hector and the daughter of Agamemnon are sacrificed and destroyed. The gods are jealous and petty, not just and measured. The just and the measured would come only with the demos and the polis of Athenian democracy, and even that was mitigated by its status as a slave state.

Homer and the Homeric The Homeric oral and poetic tradition has its origin in the heroic age of Mycenae, and in many ways it was a continuation of the social memory of the early period transferred from generation to generation. As Kirk argues: That a tradition of oral heroic song maintained itself for so long, and grew to so late and startling a climax, is surprising enough. But fortunately the final collapse of the Achaean system, drastic as it was, had not brought about a total dispersal of population; many survivors were able to cultivate and transmit the memory of the heroic past. (1965:3) If at least one foundational moment in European self-consciousness lies in the Iliad then how did one, albeit talented, poetic voice in an obscure corner of the continent in the vastness of antiquity become of such overwhelming import? Part of the reason is that the very concept of the individual lies in the Iliad. The philosophical ideas of inwardness, subjectivity and consciousness, even if not born on the plain before Troy, find their first extant expression there (Murdoch 1992:294). Richard Jenkyns, in his survey of the classical literary world, has argued for the powers of invention and

64  Human: Troy imagination of classical authors (2015:ix). The tale of Troy, for Jenkyns, has come to be central to the European imagination (2015:6). The systematic and frequent formulae of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the very modes of expression and adjectivisation, create whole new worlds out of the individual characteristics of ‘swift-footed Achilles’ (2015:4). For Jenkyns: The formulae tell a similar tale, for they are not meaningless: they present a good world, in which men are godlike, women beautiful, the earth fertile and the sea full of fish. The sense of the world’s goodness is a part of the poem’s tragic character: there is so much to lose. (2015:7) The tragedy of the Iliad is that, through wanton violence, obsession and the killing of innocents, a world which is essentially bountiful and good is lost to the mortals who enter into the shadowy halls of Hades. The loss of the world is not the loss of a world of the gods but a fully human world of food, sexuality, love and nature. It is a boundlessness discarded by violence. As Adam Nicolson has said of death in Homer: ‘Death is not a release into beautiful immateriality, but an expulsion from vivid life’ (2014:112). Alan Garner, in his analysis of the global resonance of the Iliad, has argued that each generation tells anew its own iteration of the Homeric world (1997:41). For Garner: My impression, when reading Plato, is that of drinking cold, fresh water. To me, Aeschylus is blood and darkness. And Homer is leather, oak, the secrets of the smith; Man; God; Fury; above all, magic and wonder in the world of Chaos and the logic of Dream. (1997:42) But this reading of Plato, Aeschylus and Homer is not direct and unmediated, and of course could not possibly be. Garner’s is a translated Homer, but it is also a Homer with universal resonance. The oral cultures of the aboriginal memory are comparable, for Garner, to the Hellenic ‘anamnesis’ (1997:57). The philosophical imaginaries of oral societies and indeed our world make Achilles walk again and again. As Garner says, ‘Indeed he must: he has such a lot to remember’ (1997:58). This act of remembrance is, as we shall see, central to any reading of Achilles. Understanding what is embodied in the warrior frame of Achilles, that has proved so compelling for his re-waking, re-walking and re-invention, is important. His embodied frame provides both a template for future action and imagination and an empty shell which we can fill with our own substance and concerns. Achilles carries the memory of both his past and ours, but his ghost also carries the intimations of our future. Even though there is an incorporation of ritual into Homer, and Homer’s work would in the future be used as part of ritual enactment, neither the

Human: Troy  65 Iliad nor the Odyssey is in any way a holy book of revelation and scripture. Even though, as Steven Fischer argues in his history of reading, they were Europe’s most copied books they were not in any way liturgical or served any ritual or religious purpose. The Greek gods neither read nor dictated their laws to humans, or indeed much concern themselves with the moral lives of humans at all (Fischer 2005:49). This is not to say that the texts of Homer were not treated with reverence. Indeed H.D.F. Kitto has noted that Homer, as a secular text, achieved an almost biblical literalism and fundamentalism in the ancient world (Kitto 1957:44). The entirety of the Greek imaginary, epistemology and cosmology was rooted in Homer. It culturally forged, for Kitto, the very idea of Europe and of the Greek people (1957:45). What Kitto calls the geological ‘strata’ of the Homeric epics (1957:63) allows eventually for an understanding of human ‘inwardness’ as itself stratified and sedimented. Like both Troy and the epic poems that document Troy, that very inwardness would come to be excavated in order to uncover the nature of the human mystery. Plato himself questioned the grandiosity of the reception of Homer and Homer as the source of everything valuable in Greek culture (1955:375). Arguing that the poet ‘strengthens the lower elements in the mind’ (1955:382), Plato denigrates Homer as a poet of shadows rather than the political life of the polis. He says directly to Homer: ‘if our definition is wrong and you are not merely manufacturing shadows at third remove from reality, but are a stage nearer the truth about human excellence, and really capable of judging what kind of conduct will make the individual or the community better or worse, tell us any state whose constitution you have reformed, as Lycurgus did at Sparta and others have done elsewhere on a larger or smaller scale. What city owes the benefits of its legal system to you? Italy and Sicily owe theirs to Charondas, we owe ours to Solon. Tell us who is similarly indebted to you?’ (Plato 1955:376) Longinus, as another and later classical commentator, noted how Homer both divided and equated the gods of that heroic age of deity and warrior. For Longinus: In his accounts of the wounds suffered by the gods, their quarrels, their vengeful actions, their tears, their imprisonment, and all their manifold passions, Homer seems to me to have done everything in his power to make gods of the men fighting at Troy, and men of the gods. But while for us mortals, if we are miserable, death is appointed as a refuge from our ills, Homer has given the gods immortality, not only in their nature, but also in their misfortunes. (Aristotle, Horace and Longinus 1965:111)

66  Human: Troy If the warriors of that archaic age were indeed godlike it was because they were indeed half-divine like Achilles. The society of Troy was at the beginning of the human age which would soon shed its whispering and exhorting gods. Adam Nicolson, in his contemporary reading of the decisive role of Homer in our society, has argued that Homer is ‘the most miraculous and ancient of survivals in our culture’ (2014:14). Nicolson notes the folkloric tradition which sees Homer himself as born from a daimon and, like ­Achilles, only half-human. As Nicolson notes: ‘Homer, even in the tradition of the ancient lives, seems to exist as a kind of miasma, a suggestion of himself, more an idea than a man, a huge and potent non-being’ (2014:48–49). Homer is s­ imply an act of memory and committal rather than a being. He is a ­m nemonic device by which a whole society remembers itself, the ‘embodiment of retrospect’ (2014:49–50). He exists only in the immaterial forms of orality (2014:68). For Nicolson: ‘Like all great art, Homer is essentially transitional, emergent, hung between what is lost and what does not yet exist’ (2014:61). Yet in some ways Homer is the writer of the never-has-been rather than what was lost. Even though there may have been some residual social memory of the heroes of the Bronze Age past in the oral cultures of the Ionian islands Homer’s poetry is not a work of remembrance let alone of history: what it remembers may not have existed. In fact for contemporary analysis of Homer it is the metaphorical insights of Homer that have achieved importance. Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of Walter Benjamin’s work, has outlined this sense of the importance of Homer. For Arendt: Since Homer the metaphor has borne that element of the poetic which conveys cognition; its use establishes the correspondances between physically most remote things – as when in the Iliad the tearing onslaught of fear and grief on the hearts of the Achaians corresponds to the combined onslaught of the winds from north and west on the dark waters (Iliad IX, 1–8); or when the approaching of the army moving to battle in line after line corresponds to the sea’s long billows which, driven by the wind, gather head far out on the sea, roll to shore line after line, and then burst on the land in thunder (Iliad IV, 422–23). Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about. (1969:14) For Benjamin himself there is a radical displacement by Homer in modernity. Far from mortal human minions acting as the playthings or the objects of contemplation of the Olympian gods, in modernity the human is an object of contemplation for itself. For Benjamin: Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached

Human: Troy  67 such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. (1969:242) The cognition and the conveyance that Arendt argues is central to Homer is the metaphoric transferral of meaning not just from an object of contemplation into consciousness (the winds on the dark waters). The metaphoric transferral operates across oceans, languages, continents, peoples and epochs, conveying meaning into new embodied, cognitive faculties profoundly dislocated from that specific moment on that plain before Troy. Adam Nicolson argues that Homer elucidates for us who we actually are; but his power lies not in an insight into a common human nature but into a specific mode of thinking about consciousness. As Nicolson notes, the foundation myth is not about the foundation of peoples or civilisations but about introspection: Homer is a foundation myth, not of man nor of the natural world, but of the way of thinking by which the Greeks defined themselves, the frame of mind which made them who they were, one which, in many ways, we have inherited. The troubled world described by Homer remains strangely familiar. (2014:xviii–xix) If the ‘Homeric ghosts’ themselves emerge from their own retrospective world then our response to Homer is an examination of both retrospection and introspection rather than an empirical delineation of the world as ‘reportage’. (Nicolson 2014:xxi) The world of the ‘epic’ is inseparable from an understanding of the thought of Homer (Morris 1986; West 1988). Yet that thought itself is inseparable from the complex aesthetic production of the text, and specifically its orality and ‘soundings’ (Taplin 1992). Indeed these ‘soundings’ are for classicists like Taplin about what he calls the ‘underlying geology’ of the Iliad ­(Taplin 1986:52) and the fact that the entire ‘thought-world’ of the Greeks, and to some extent subsequent civilisations, lay with Homer and his surviving poems (1986:50). Indeed this ‘thought-world’ and the ‘geology’ of the poems were located in only four specific landscapes for Taplin – that of the city of Troy, the Greek encampments, the plain in between them where the battles were largely fought and the Olympus of the gods (1986:55). This would achieve a huge amount of significance in later centuries when excavators came up with the idea that these specific places with which the ‘thoughtworld’ of entire civilisations could be co-located could actually be found as material entities and landscapes.

68  Human: Troy

The seventh city: the multiplicity of Troy What A.R. Burn, in a history of classical Greece, calls the ‘castle-place’ of Schliemann (1983:24) is a fragile entity. Looking back to Finley’s ‘­never-never lands’, Burn questions the actuality of the city: That the Greeks took Troy at all, we are reminded by M.I. Finley, it would be rash to claim as certain, when we remember that ­Charlemagne, as a matter of cold fact, won no victory and fought no Saracens at Roncesvalles. (1983:55–56) The idea of Troy as manifested in the Iliad and a geographically locatable city of Troy are two entirely different phenomena (see Leaf 1912). The attempt to conflate them or even to identify the place from which the Homeric myths emerged has obsessed archaeologists and philologists for the last two centuries. Yet, like the characters of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Troy motif itself has been recomposed throughout subsequent history; into mazes, caverns, new cities, entire civilisations. Its importance as a motif within ­European civilisation cannot be underestimated even as it remains an enigma or cipher. Indeed fathoming the meaning of Troy entails an understanding of the context by which it is revivified from the resources of social and literary memory. As Richard Jenkyns has said of the Aeneid, that attempt by Roman antiquity to claim Troy and the fleeing exiles for itself as its primary foundational myth, the question of Troy is decisive for the nature of the world. As Jenkyns says: ‘For the first time the theme is one of world-historical importance … it unfolds destiny’s plan for the future governance of the world’ (2015:204). Indeed the Troy motif does not just unfold the geological strata of the archaic world; it implies a sense or multiple senses of destination. This may be perceived as the ultimate destiny of ­peoples prophesied at the fall of Troy: Aeneas and his followers, Roman civilisation, Europe. This in itself entails the suppression or extinction of others: Troy itself, Dido and Carthage, Asia. But it might also be that new human types read into their own sense of selfhood and destination something of the fleeing exiles, and indeed might see themselves as in similar predicaments to those weaving their way through the falling towers of the ancient city to other places and fates. Robert Graves remained fascinated by the mythic structures of Troy and its mythological genesis (1992:621–630). In some ways he refuted the idea of Troy as a non-place, and instead thought of it as a place that had had some sense of reality and materiality. In his notes Graves remarks on this geographically locatable city: The situation of Troy on a well-watered plain at the entrance to the Hellespont, though establishing it as the main centre of Bronze Age trade

Human: Troy  69 between East and West, provoked frequent attacks from all quarters. Greek, Cretan, and Phrygian claims to have founded the city were not irreconcilable, since by Classical times it had been destroyed and rebuilt often enough: there were ten Troys in all, the seventh being the Homeric city. The Troy with which Homer is concerned seems to have been peopled by a federation of three tribes – Trojans, Ilians, and Dardanians – a usual arrangement in the Bronze Age. (1992:627) Graves himself was obsessed by explaining stories by recourse to the truths, ritual or otherwise, that compelled their production: this was a search for the actual meanings that the myths represented in symbolic form. The idea of the ‘seventh city’, a concept of course first emerging from the nineteenth-century excavations, hints again at the complex geological strata of the material city and the literary and historical sedimentation of the poetry. But the seventh city of Troy would not just be replaced by the eighth, ninth and tenth city but by hundreds of other copies and replications made largely in the complete visual and material absence of the earlier Troys. In fact the original was itself an imaginative construction even for Homer, who could have had no real sense of any kind of material and geographical reality of Troy. Yet for Graves the Trojan War was historically verifiable as a ‘trade war’ between rival maritime civilisations (1992:664; and see Wright 1998). Even the woods of Troy had some material reality for Graves: The boughs which face Troy across the sea burst early into leaf, but presently go bare; while those on the other side are still green in ­w inter-time. When the elms grow so high that the walls of Troy can be clearly discerned by a man posted in their upper branches, they wither; saplings, however, spring again from their roots. (1992:657) Ultimately, through the stratagem of the wooden horse, the Achaean soldiers entered Troy and massacred or enslaved its population (Graves 1992:692–698). In Seneca’s The Trojan Women the Roman playwright sees the towers of Asia toppled into ruination (1966:155). For Hecuba in the play all anyone will take away from the burning city is dust (1966:158). The fall of Troy brings for Seneca a set of successive tragedies as Achilles returning from Hades demands that the slave Polyxena be sacrificed on his own burial mound as his bride (1966:162–163) with the son of Achilles, Pyrrhus, demanding of Agamemnon that the ghost of his dead father be honoured with the blood of Troy (1966:168). The widow of Hector, Andromache, as she herself is grieving for her husband, also suffers the murder of her son, who is thrown from the single tower still standing in the city so that he cannot avenge his father’s death (1966:181).

70  Human: Troy In Livy’s histories of the ancient world the Trojan origins of Rome are noted. Indeed Rome, under the guidance of the fleeing refugee Aeneas, would be a new Troy and a replication of that destroyed people and civilisation (1971:34–35). The Romans considered themselves, and especially so those who had settled in Lavinium, as of Trojan descent (1971:57). H.H. S ­ cullard, in his comprehensive history of the Roman world, indicates the genesis myths of Rome that Virgil would codify and elaborate upon (1970:245–246). So we have Troy as protean motif borne by fleeing exiles, as the foundational moment of Europe and contemporary human consciousness, as a multipliable image that can be redrawn time and time again. There are maps of the seventh city, although no mapmaker ever mapped it. It comes to us as an imaginary that we can picture in our minds, but we can have seen no such place. The text of Homer allows for this propulsion of memory without an original. The seventh city brings to birth almost everything we know of ourselves.

Aeneas as refugee Although the myths of Trojan dispersal were Roman rather than Greek Robert Graves did note the origins of the Aeneas motif. He notes that in the earlier years of the war Aeneas remained neutral: Yet Achilles’s provocative raid obliged the Dardanians to join forces with the Trojans at last. Aeneas proved a skilled fighter and even ­Achilles did not disparage him: for if Hector was the hand of the Trojans, Aeneas was their soul. (Graves 1992:660) The idea of Aeneas as the ‘soul’ of the Trojans was of decisive importance, for it was only he who was to carry and embody the Trojan spirit and social memory into the exile of journeying and the eventual settlement of the new Troy in Latium. As W.F. Jackson Knight writes, in the introduction to his own translation of the Aeneid, the beginning of the new Troy begins with the utter apocalypse and disaster of the old: ‘When in the Aeneid we read of the Greeks sacking Troy, it seems as if no Trojan can escape the final annihilation. The new destiny of the Trojan remnant starts from utter despair’ (Virgil 1958:13). The destruction and erasure of the old serves to open up a series of possibilities to rewrite the future of Aeneas and the other survivors. The disaster allows for the proliferation of multiple human destinies that could have ended within the burning city of Troy itself. It also allowed for the persistence of the social memory of the disaster. One of the most remarkable passages of the Aeneid lies in the arrival of Aeneas and his companions at Carthage. Whilst waiting for the Queen in the mighty palace he sees adorned upon the walls of the temple a tableau of the course of the Trojan War, the city of Ilium itself and the battles of the

Human: Troy  71 war arrayed in their correct order. Even more dramatically he sees depicted people he has known, including those of his own family and the warriors that he had fought against. He sees the Atreides, Agamemnon and Menelaus depicted, as well as King Priam and the ‘merciless’ Achilles. As he gazes upon Priam depicted in the bas-relief of the walls Aeneas weeps. Aeneas weeps for the massacred and his lost city: It was only a picture, but sighing deeply he let his thoughts feed on it, and his face was wet with a stream of tears. For he seemed to see again the antagonists warring around the defences of Troy, on one side the Greeks in flight before the charge of Troy’s manhood, and on another the Trojans in retreat, and the crested and chariot-borne Achilles in pursuit. (Virgil 1958:42) He sees the massacre of the ‘snow-white’ tents and Diomedes wet with blood. He sees Achilles pursuing Troilus, and the weeping women of the city. He looks upon Achilles sending back the body of Hector to the Trojans (Virgil 1958:42). Most importantly, as he looks upon the tableau of the war upon Troy, Aeneas sees himself depicted there in the battle against the Greeks, and whilst contemplating this he is interrupted by the arrival of the queen (1958:42). It has been seven years since the disaster at Troy and already it is being petrified into the memory of stone. Aeneas remembered again later the death of King Priam at Troy, to which Aeneas would never return: Priam’s destiny ended here, after seeing Troy fired and Troy’s walls down; such was the end fated to him who had augustly ruled a great empire of Asian lands and peoples. His tall body was left lying headless on the shore, and by it the head hacked from his shoulders: a corpse without a name. (Virgil 1958:67) The name, though, would persist even when the materiality of his organic being was dispelled. A lineage had died and been reborn; civilisations ended in that obscure Asian locality and new ones were born from its destruction. The social memory of Troy would endure in orality, textuality and in the visuality of stone. The destruction of the city and its king becomes the central incident that would give birth to classical civilisation. As R.G. Austin has argued in his study of Virgil and the wooden horse: Virgil knew this very problem; and he knew that in handling the tangles of myth that invested the Tale of Troy, diversely treated before him by many writers, he must allow nothing to distract attention from the single overwhelming fact, Troy is overcome, And Priam dead. (1959:18)

72  Human: Troy As Austin argues, even Dante would, many centuries later, see the souls of Ulysses and Diomedes expiating in hell for the destruction they had wrought upon Troy and Priam with their betraying wooden horse (1959:25). In his introduction to the selections of Virgil in English translation Ken Gransden has pointed to the essentially imitative practice of Virgil basing his poetry on emblematic Greek models, and especially on Homer. He recreated and retranslated Homeric myth into commentaries on his own period (Gransden 1996:ix). Perhaps crucially Virgil was aware that the fall of Troy remained undescribed by Homer in either the Iliad (whose termination ended long before the fall of the city) or in the Odyssey (concerned as it is with the returning heroes). But the fall is still ‘that crucial event of antiquity’ (Gransden 1996:xv). Unlike the harmonic Homer, Gransden notes that ­Virgil is the poet of dislocation, dissonance and ambivalence (1996:xviii) perhaps because Aeneas himself is dislocated and indeed is a metaphor for the very idea of homelessness (1996:xix). For Gransden the structure of ­Virgil’s great epic work reflects the disintegration and un-homedness of its hero. As Gransden notes: The structure of the Aeneid is complex. Legend coexists with events which occurred in the author’s lifetime. The treatment is synchronic, not diachronic. Events far ahead of Aeneas’ time are brought into the text through passages of prophecy, a technique which became a feature of later epics’. (1996:xviii) Indeed the fact that Aeneas has already passed into myth, mimesis and ­representation by way of the pictures in Dido’s palace signifies an almost epochal shift even though it is only seven years since his expulsion from Troy. Even as Aeneas was founding his own new Troy in Latium so other ­refugees from the lost city were creating their own Troys on the fringes of European civilisation. Gerald of Wales, in his own reading of Virgil, sees his own locality as itself a place where a new Troy has emerged. As ­Gerald declaims: ‘What could my own feeble efforts add to the Fall of Troy, to Thebes or Athens, or what happened on the coast of Latium?’ (1977:212). He follows ­Geoffrey of Monmouth in seeking the Trojan origin of the Welsh kingdoms: ‘It was Brutus who led the last of the Trojans to this western island, after they had been held captive in Greece’ (Gerald 1977:231). Brutus, himself fleeing Troy, becomes the foundational myth of Britain, and even the soothsayers of the Britons are perceived as the descendants of Calchas and Cassandra (1977:247). The loss of both Troy and the subsequent loss of the entirety of Britain, Gerald argues, was a punishment for the vice of homosexuality. He imputes the intention of the Emperor Constantine to rebuild Troy in Britain until he heard a voice condemning this ‘detestable vice’ and decided that instead of building a new city of Sodom he would build his Troy at Byzantium

Human: Troy  73 (1977:264). But Gerald also argues that the rebellious nature of the Welsh is so because they cannot forget their former Trojan greatness and the majesty of their Trojan kingship and dynasty (1977:274). Geoffrey of Monmouth elaborates upon the story of the lost Trojan exiles and the origins of Brutus. As Geoffrey argues: Brutus then called the island Britain from his own name, and his companions he called Britons. His intention was that his memory should be perpetuated by the derivation of the name. A little later the language of the people, which had up to then been known as Trojan or Crooked Greek, was called British, for the same reason. (1966:72) Not only was London the Troia Nova built by Brutus upon the banks of the Thames (Geoffrey 1966:73) but so also did Julius Caesar gaze upon the Britons and recognise the common Trojan ancestry of both the Romans and the British (1966:107). Hannah Arendt has argued that the struggles of the refugee Aeneas are a foundational myth of liberation and an ‘escape from annihilation’ (1973:205). Yet this escape and liberation was the essence of a revolution. This revolution is based on the gap in historical time between the end and the beginning and between ‘a no-longer and a not-yet’ (1973:205). This revolution as repetition ultimately re-established the old autocratic order of the new Troy at Rome (1973:209). As Arendt argues: What matters in our context is less the profoundly Roman notion that all foundations are re-establishments and reconstructions than the somehow connected but different idea that men are equipped for the logically paradoxical task of making a new beginning because they themselves are new beginnings and hence beginners, that the very capacity for beginning is rooted in natality, in the fact that human beings appear in the world by virtue of birth. (1973:211) The appearance of each human generation was both a beginning and a reconstruction of the archaic. In some ways the nature of Troy, as an act of almost perpetual and persisting imaginative revivification, is an exploration not just of the cultures that summon it up to give themselves lineages and social powers; it is also an attempt to traverse the human mind. John Berger has said that ‘Most manmade objects refer back to the event of their own making. Their presence depends upon the use of the past tense. This house was built of stone’ (1980:185). Indeed we, as human beings, go back to Troy continually: in Troy’s case not to its genesis but to the moment of its destruction and dispersal, to that seventh city of strata and sedimentation. This city was built of stone, and its memory

74  Human: Troy persists and is rebuilt in all kinds of new locations and cultures. We cannot enter that city physically and materially but we do so in our memory and imagination. The imaginative recomposition of that lost place performs certain kinds of functions and serves to illustrate fractures and conflicts which are still embodied in new human beings. Talking of Ferdinand ­Cheval’s vernacular palace at Hauterives, France, John Berger has written: Whether you climb up its towers, walk through its crypts or look up at a façade from the ground, you are aware of having entered something. You find yourself in a system which includes the space you occupy. The system may change its own image, suggesting different metaphors at different times. I have already compared it with a forest. In parts it is like a stomach. In other parts it is like a brain – the physical organ in the skull, not the abstract mind. (1992:87) We cannot enter and fathom the crooked streets and turning ways of Troy except in this imaginative re-entrance: we can still see the wooden horse, the child thrown from the tower, the plain upon which Achilles strides. Rediscovering Troy is an entrance into the mind of our culture. Carl Blegen, in his account of the materiality of Troy, has talked of it as a kind of city as apparition: its ‘Great Tower of Ilion’ rising above its fastnesses (1963:13–14). Like the sedimented lays of Homer, so the great Schliemann came to Troy to lay bare the layers of the lost city. As Blegen notes: As he proceeded, he began to notice that the debris did not form a single homogenous mass but had grown up by gradual accumulation in numerous superposed layers, one above the other, and evidently representing a like number of chronological stages or periods. (1963:28) This search for the layers of an actual, empirical Troy which gave birth to the myths is further reinforced by Walter Leaf’s geographical ethnography of the excavation site in April 1903 where he not only notates the topography of Troy and the Troad but also encounters definitively the ‘Tomb of Ajax’ (1912:27–28). What A.H. Sayce has called the ‘impenetrable night’ of the lost city was a darkness dispelled by Schliemann’s investigations and excavations (Schliemann 1976c:v). Schliemann’s intention was always clear to himself and to others: The single object of my excavation from the beginning was only TO FIND TROY, whose site has been discussed by a hundred scholars in a hundred books, but which as yet no one has ever sought to bring to light by excavations. (1976c:279)

Human: Troy  75 Rudolf Virchow, in his own introduction to the work of Schliemann, has argued that the spade and the imagination of the archaeologist laid bare the ‘Burnt City’ for all to see (Schliemann 1976a:ix). Not only do we come to understand who and what kind of people the Trojans were, we also see the city emerging at its point of catastrophe. As Virchow witnesses: ‘Almost the whole is burnt to ashes. How enormous must have been the fire that devoured all this splendour! We seem to hear the crackling of the wood, the crash of the tumbling buildings!’ (Schliemann 1976a:xiv). The city is dispelling its shroud of earth and unveils itself (1976a:xvi). Indeed this unveiling was a direct result of seeing an image of Aeneas fleeing the burning city: an image which haunted Schliemann and compelled him to rediscover the home of the escaping refugee (1976a:3).

Cosmos Philip Hardie, in his magisterial critical study of the Aeneid, argues that the great poem has either been seen as an epic of optimism about Augustus and Rome (and thereby a commentary on contemporary politics of Virgil’s period) or as an existential tragedy of pessimism about individual human lives. In actuality its concerns are more to do with the contrast and distinction between cosmological visions of nature and versions of human history and politics: what Hardie calls cosmos and imperium (1986:1–2). The ‘formlessness of individual experience’ (1986:2) is contrasted with the ordered cosmology of the universe and with the shield of Aeneas himself which stands as the representation in symbolic form of cosmos and imperium. The shield is a ‘recapitulation in microcosmic form’ of mythic structures (1986:3). Struggles around Gigantomachy, Titanomachy and Typhonomachy mark the poem as well as cosmic kingship as the ‘astral apotheosis’ of dead rulers (1986:7–9). The Aeneid has both a cosmological basis and pretensions towards universality and the ‘universal empire’ of Rome (1986:25). The cosmology rests itself not upon the shield of Aeneas but on that greater shield of which it is an echo: the shield of the mighty Achilles, which is itself a mirror of the cosmos (1986:25–26). As Hardie argues: The alternative, spatial, sequence is found in the Homeric ecphrasis of the Shield of Achilles, in which scenes of the three world-divisions of earth, sky, and sea, and of the heavenly bodies, are a prelude to the localized description of the two cities and other scenes of human life. This cartographic type of cosmic setting is fitting to the static quality of the work of art, and will be repeated in later ecphrases and actual works of art. (1986:67) The abstraction from the empirical to the universal and of the microcosmic to the macrocosmic reflects that relationship between the individual

76  Human: Troy human entity and the divine (or even of Troy and Olympus). It reaffirms the cosmological relationship between the politics of a city like Rome with a divinely ordered cosmos (1986:68–69). Nowhere is that more fully expressed than in the struggle of the gods with the monstrous or the demonic or the ­‘Gigantomachic storm’ which threatens to submerge divinely ordered life and the puny inhabitants of the earth (1986:85). The microcosmic and macrocosmic catastrophe was a way of expressing that nature itself could be submerged by unnatural forces. As Hardie notes: ‘the function of ­Gigantomachic allusion was political and historical; mythical and natural events act as images of events in the human world’ (1986:120). For Hardie: ‘Meteorological violence is a foretaste of the final dissolution of the ordered world’ (1986:190). This storm finds its apotheosis in that which threatens to submerge another wandering traveller as he leaves Troy: the wily ­Odysseus and the human attempt to survive the supernatural storm perpetrated against him by the gods (1986:201–202). Jean-Pierre Vernant has argued for an understanding of the mind of that Homeric hero in the storm: its perspectives on space and time and symbolic practices, amongst other things (2006:9). As the Greek world moves towards ­ uman an empirical art that actually traced the passages and appearances of h beings away from pure geometry, so our vision of the human changes within the parameters of the Homeric works themselves. For Vernant: The transformations in the individual from Homer to the classical period seem quite startling, for Homeric man had no real unity and no psychological depth but was subject to sudden impulses and inspirations that were thought to be of diverse origin. The Homeric individual was, in a sense, alienated both from himself and from his actions. Then, however, man began to discover the internal dimension of the subject; the body came to be seen as something distinct, psychological impulses were taken to be unified, and the individual (or at least certain values linked with the individual) emerged. (2006:17) The new types of human beings that emerge on the battlefields of Troy and with Odysseus swimming through the storm intimate new relationships between humans, their cosmos and the nature of their interior world. The relation of human to god, of the microcosm to the macrocosm, of the discovery that a human being can have a depth and an interior creates a humanness that persists amongst us. For Vernant: In moving away from the present, we are only separating from the visible world. We step outside our own human universe and discover behind it other regions of being, other cosmic levels normally inaccessible to us. Beneath are the infernal world and all its inhabitants; above is the world of the Olympian gods. The past is an integral part of the cosmos.

Human: Troy  77 To explore it is to discover what is hidden in the depths of being. History as sung by Mnemosyne is a deciphering of the invisible, a geography of the supernatural. (2006:120–121) The memory of Mnemosyne, as in the catalogue of the ships in Homer, becomes a way of understanding ourselves as products of both the visible and the invisible world and of the living and the dead. Memory allows the human to transcend the human life-span and overcome death in order, as Vernant says, to escape time and return to the divine (2006:130). It allows for the elaboration of cosmology and for an understanding of the invisible world beyond the human senses. Ultimately it would allow for the visitation of Odysseus into the world of the dead in order to find his way home to the remembered land of his origin.

5 Force Achilles

Introduction In this chapter we attempt to fathom the mystery that the hero Achilles offers to us. He embodied the notion of force and action as opposed to the ­Odyssean virtues of interiority and enlightenment. Half-divine, semi-­ human, this creature of action would mark out the territory of war upon the plains before Troy. He will come to be seen as the exemplification of violence, war, torture and horror. The re-emergence of his ghost after his death would claim his rights and his honours long after his passing. As Bonnard has said: ‘The greatness of Achilles is illumined by the conflagration of a world that seems to be passing away, the Achaean world of warfare and pillage. But is this world really dead, does it not survive in our own age?’ (1962:57). The power of the Achillean motif is that it draws us again to the conflagrations of our period and the subjugation of weakness by power. If Achilles exemplifies power then Helen exemplifies the dominated and the subjugated. We conclude the chapter by visiting her bower as Achilles fights below.

War and the Iliad Jean-Pierre Vernant thinks about war in the ancient world as ludic: as both a form of gaming and of ritual display (1982:27). For Vernant: War in classical Greece is an agon. It takes the form of an organised competition which rules out both the fight to the death to annihilate the enemy as a social and religious being, and conquest designed to absorb him totally. (1982:31) Yet the agon of Troy would be ludic, ritual and a fight utterly to the death, to annihilation and slavery. The annihilation of Troy and its people of course signifies to us the centrality of suffering and force to both the classical Greek world and subsequent human cultures (see Neal 2006a). As Adam Nicolson describes the Iliad: ‘Speed, scale, violence, threat; but every

Force: Achilles  79 spark with humanity in it’ (2014:7). Martin Hammond, in his introduction to his own viscerally challenging translation of the Iliad, has argued for the poem as a ‘cornerstone of western civilisation’ and central to European self-understanding (Homer 1987:7). Hammond notes the intensity and the compression of the Iliad in contrast to the long timescales and geographical expansiveness of the Odyssey. For Hammond: The astonishing compression of immediate reference to a particular fragment of a major war, and that before its conclusion, allows the poem’s scope to expand to the presentation of a universal and tragic view of the world, of human life lived under the shadow of death, against a vast and largely unpitying divine background. War is not the main subject of the Iliad, nor heroism, but human suffering and death. The young men, for all their godlike greatness, die: the old men, the women and children suffer and grieve: the gods, exempt from pain, look on. (Homer 1987:15–16) In the midst of the slaughter Homer’s vision of war is an unparalleled rendition of cruelty and subordination. In his account of the fighting at the ships Homer assumes the role of divine observer looking down on the battlefield. Yet, unlike the ‘unpitying’ gods, he describes the monstrousness and the misery of the fight and the flames around the stone wall, even to the point of the anguish of the gods at the defeat of their allies (Homer 1987:217). The horror of the fight is seen in the actions of Patroclus upon the field as described by Homer: ‘Anguish for his fallen companion came over Patroklos, and he darted through the front-fighters like a swift hawk who scatters the jackdaws and starlings’ (1987:285). We will return to these bird analogies later. In the midst of other later wars and holocausts two women writers happened upon the Iliad to try and fathom the war in which they were enmeshed. Simone Weil (1965) and Rachel Bespaloff (1947) wrote separate and quite different essays which attempted to use the Iliad to explore force, violence and human meaning (collected together as Weil and Bespaloff 2005). ­Ronald Osborn has tried to uncover the significance of Homer for both Weil and Bespaloff: What the two writers were engaged in were imaginative revaluations of Homer in response to the unfolding crisis of totalitarianism. They sought to uncover new ways of thinking about violence and power in the present in the light of Homer’s ancient and mythical past. If Bespaloff is more true to Homer’s text in some ways than Weil, her praise of Hector is nevertheless equally conditioned by her fear of Nazism and her desire to encourage the forces of resistance. (Osborn 2008:177)

80  Force: Achilles For Weil the extinction of grace by war and massacre, a war in which she participated, was understandable only if we can uncover the history of force and coercion. Understanding the weakness of human beings in the face of utter, profound and meaningless violence is her theme. The momentum of force irrationally accelerates and dominates our social formations. In ­Osborn’s reading of the Iliad the ‘total war’ of Trojan and Achaean replaces all concepts of human dignity and grace. As he notes: When Patroclus is slain at the end of Book Sixteen the unstoppable drift toward total war, in which no rules or conventions apply, is finally realized. The two sides engage in a battle of unprecedented fury and destruction for the entirely irrational purpose of seizing Patroclus’ dead body – the Trojans to further mutilate it and then feed it to wild dogs, the Greeks to prevent this humiliation at whatever cost. The idea that war might somehow be mediated by reasonable agreements, heroic values of resistance, and religious scruples, such as those governing the burial of the dead, has been reduced to a shambles by the internal dynamics of war and the logic of violence itself. (Osborn 2008:178) Indeed the wrath, jealousy and revengefulness of all sides (exemplified, as we shall see, by the embodiment of those vices in Achilles) leads to the discarding of ordinary human feelings. The biological obliteration of Achilles, even when his shade returns to the battlefield or is encountered by Odysseus in the underworld, is not his end. He is transformed into a story and an epic. This memory of him, persisting after death, would be the substrate for all his future versions. This includes those iterations of Achilles on the battlefields of Bespaloff and Weil. Mnemosyne did not forget Achilles (see Bowra 1973:51). Written after the fall of France in 1940, Simone Weil’s essay has become a classic account of violence and the ways in which the Iliad exemplifies and recognises ‘force’. For Weil the central theme of the epic poem is the concept and practice of force. For Weil: The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as a historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors. (1965:6)

Force: Achilles  81 The material flesh of human beings is submitted to force, and those who recognise the power of force (the totalitarian impulse) see themselves in the mirror of the Iliad. Ultimately force wielded upon the human form transforms the living entity into a corpse diminishing and dispelling its life-force (Weil 1965:6). As Weil says, ‘it turns a man into a stone’ (1965:7). For Weil: From its first property (the ability to turn a human into a thing by the simple method of killing him) flows another, quite prodigious too in its own way, the ability to turn a human into a thing while he is still alive. He is alive; he has a soul; and yet – he is a thing. An extraordinary entity this – a thing that has a soul. And as for the soul, what an extraordinary house it finds itself in! Who can say what it costs it, moment by moment, to accommodate itself to this residence, how much writhing and bending, folding and pleating are required, of it? It was not made to live inside a thing; if it does so, under pressure of necessity, there is not a single element of its nature to which violence is not done. (1965:7) The subjection and prostration of the human form before force spares no one in the Iliad, just as no one who exists as a human upon the earth remains unaffected by it (Weil 1965:27). For Weil the Iliad is the central device with which to understand and condemn Europe and recognise that the admiration of force, hatred and the destruction of the weak is to be overcome (1965:30). Force, for Weil, is entangled with living human form, and methodically dismantles it even unto death. But force also objectifies and alienates the living human form from its very interior: the soul. Finding itself encased within the living human frame the soul of the human is captured and trapped. It endures force and violence in its captivity and inhabitation. Its only escape from being made to live inside a material entity of flesh and blood is to have its being extinguished with further acts of force against the material body. If force turns ‘a man into a stone’, extinguishing its vibrant living existence, then we can use the metaphors of force in order to understand the ways in which the sculpture (including the representation of classical deities and heroes) of the human form is itself an act of violence perpetrated on the material. Often this sculptural act of violence against the stone turns the stone into a human, revealing the geist within the rock, the spirit within the form. The aesthetic object is inseparable from the forces wielded upon it and which reveals the forms of human beings out of the mute and enigmatic stone. The concept of the human itself can be seen perhaps for the first time in the enigma and representation of the ghosts of Achilles. Rachel Bespaloff presents a different vision of the war. Hector and Helen are her heroes, the first because of his defence of the weak and the latter because of her non-combatant exile and captivity (see Benfey 2005:xxi). For Bespaloff, Hector is the guardian of the ‘perishable joys’, of human

82  Force: Achilles weakness, of children (Weil and Bespaloff 2005:43). Each of the stories of Hector would, for Bespaloff, ‘bring Ilion back to life in the centuries to come’ (2005:44). The expansively human Hector meets the impassive, wrathful Achilles on the plain. Their collision, and Hector’s subsequent death, provides a decisive part of Bespaloff’s reading. There stands A ­ chilles, having pursued Hector: the former as deaf to argument and ­human feeling as the Typhonomachic storms of Virgil, of a ­hurricane. Hector comes to a halt and quite literally meets his end as he stops to fight. His a­ ppointed hour is met and Achilles sends him ‘to pasture in ­Hades’ (2005:45). ­Achilles sordidly vents and ravens himself upon the body of the defeated Hector (2005:48). For Bespaloff: ‘Not the wrath of ­Achilles, but the duel between Achilles and Hector, the tragic confrontation of the revenge-hero and the resistance-hero, is what forms the Iliad’s true center and governs its unity and its development’ (2005:48). Achilles seeks r­ evenge; Hector embodies resistance and defence. Both are forms of force, and in the context of the war in which Bespaloff was herself writing and thrown into exile, resistance has to confront the monster and the tyrant: ‘To condemn force, or to absolve it, would be to condemn, or absolve, life itself’ (2005:50). Yet in this struggle situated in ‘the heart of man, and, at the same time, the Cosmos’ (2005:50) the heroes become both godlike and more human than human. At the heart of the struggles of contesting forces lies Achilles, purveyor of violence, possession, lust and vengefulness. Born semi-divine, he is, for Bespaloff, the ‘earthbound Achilles, whom force has made half-god, and violence half-beast’ (Weil and Bespaloff 2005:51). Achilles wages war upon the earth, and would ultimately descend below it and rise again from it. He is a curious amalgam of the animalistic, the human and the divine: For Achilles, his dual nature, half-human, half-divine, is mainly a source of jars and discords. As a god, he envies the gods their omnipotence and immortality; as a man, he envies the beasts their ferocity, and says he would like to tear his victims’ bodies to pieces and eat them raw. (Weil and Bespaloff 2005:54) He longs for all of these things, and the cosmos would deny him them all but his apparition stays with us amidst all wars and human contests: ‘the glitter of empty triumphs and mad enterprises – all these things are Achilles. Without Achilles, men would have peace; without Achilles, they would sleep on, frozen with boredom, till the planet itself grew cold’ (Weil and Bespaloff 2005:54–55). Outside of the raging earth, looking on it from our point of abstraction and omniscience theory cannot comprehend the fury of Achilles. We can only look down upon him, as does Homer and the gods, desecrating the body of Hector. Again we face the storm, the destructive powers of nature,

Force: Achilles  83 the radically inhuman; but far from nature being a ‘backdrop’ it is part of the being of contesting and struggling human beings. Rachel Bespaloff sees Achilles for what he is, the embodiment of the storm: If Achilles here is merely a part of nature, all of nature echoes the plight of existence, flung into the torrent of phenomena. Endowed with divine and human attributes, nature is far from being that great Whole into which man dissolves in blissful annihilation. On the contrary, nature participates in the struggles of men; heaven and earth, rivers and mountains, take an interest in the conflict. (Weil and Bespaloff 2005:69) Above the world Bespaloff turns towards Zeus serenely surveying the ‘pageant’ of destruction: contemplating, dominating, imparting to the flux of war its ‘metaphysical meaning’ (2005:69). As she looks at Zeus she sees something in the god: ‘He will not outlive its pageant’ (2005:69). Indeed the moment that interiority is discovered the gods will begin to fade. And what of war? Does Bespaloff struggle with Weil in both participating in resistance and denying force? War is not to be judged. It is beyond comprehension: ‘Silence is the only answer, silence and that disabused, dispassionate look which the dying Hector casts on Achilles’ (Weil and Bespaloff 2005:71). In her analysis Bespaloff examines the other war documented by Tolstoy in War and Peace. Indeed it becomes the world of two cities. The later war is still part of our Homeric world because we never, ever left that world. We are there already. What brings each of these writers together is that very cosmological vision from above of the battlefield. Each of them is capable of ‘planetary pauses’ of universal contemplation and observation (2005:72–73). The cities begin to be dismembered, burned and destroyed. Both Tolstoy and Homer seem to weep for the ‘perishable existence’ of the human earth. For Bespaloff: The cities too – burned-out Moscow, empty as a deserted beehive, Ilion threatened in its opulence, soon to be dethroned and dismembered – have individual lives; they have a soul, a fate, a sanctity all their own. Holy Troy, Moscow, holy city, these are the epic’s real centers of gravity. They are the geographical point where the threads of events crisscross, and the metaphysical place where the religious transformation of fact into sacred fiction is accomplished. The city may be burned to the  ground, not a stone of its buildings left standing, but it survives in the epic as a living witness to the real or imaginary lives it supported, to the real or legendary struggles of which it was the stake (Weil and Bespaloff 2005:74) Achilles stood victorious before the body of Hector but died before Troy was taken. There is something quite different about the interior worlds and

84  Force: Achilles the agency of Achilles and his comrade Odysseus. This is decisive for the destruction of Achilles and for Odysseus’s survival. As Bespaloff argues: Achilles has conquered, but he will not exploit his victories. It is ­Odysseus who will level Ilion, guardian of the routes to Asia and the barbarian seas. With Achilles, cruelty is not a technique, still less a method, but a sort of paroxysm of irritation in pursuit and counterstroke. (Weil and Bespaloff 2005:80–81) This paroxysmal, pathological violence would end with the death of revengeful Achilles. His form of or lack of ‘inwardness’ would be left behind on the plain before Troy. Other forms of inwardness and interiority were about to emerge with Odysseus entangled in his own storm. For Bespaloff: ‘The crises which disrupt the individual do not alter the constants of human Becoming. History remains a tangled succession of catastrophes and breathing spaces, of problems provisionally set, resolved, or conjured away’ (Weil and Bespaloff 2005:90). No ‘messianic peace’, imposed by Zeus or by human kingdoms, would ever come (2005:95). Catastrophe and momentary pauses in the catastrophe would continue up to 1812 and beyond. Violence and force become transhistorical entities. They are never to diminish or be dispelled in their intemporal kingdoms or republics of violence and affliction. But the humans perpetrating those catastrophes would indeed change.

The many ghosts of Achilles Tim Whitmarsh has argued, in his analysis of the theomachy and the war against the gods, that ‘The Iliad and the Odyssey are about what it is to be human, not a god’ (2016:32). Indeed each of those epic poems is about their respective protagonists who become the instruments that Homer uses to explore the problems of humanity, of war and of exile and homecoming. They are at once emblematic of certain human features (wrath, wiliness), but are also attempted representations not just of human types or characteristics but of real humans, with the complexities and problems that come with humanness. The plains of Troy are a liminal territory in which gods and humans and Trojans and Achaeans interact. In a remarkable passage Robert Graves writes of the kinds of relationships that the gods had with the humans: When the Trojans became aware that Achilles and his Myrmidons had withdrawn from the field, they took heart and made a vigorous sortie. Agamemnon, in alarm, granted them a truce, during which Paris and Menelaus were to fight a duel for the possession of Helen and the stolen treasure. The duel, however, proved indecisive, because when Aphrodite saw that Paris was getting the worst of it, she wrapped him in a magic mist and carried him back to Troy. (1992:668)

Force: Achilles  85 Perhaps what is most telling about this passage is that the intervention takes place because of the decisive absence of a human being from the field: the absence of Achilles. The half-human and half-god Achilles was sulking in his tent after being denied a slave, and would ultimately die on the plain before the besieged city. He would enter Hades, where he would be remembered as both a human warrior and a worshipped semi-deity (Graves 1992:680). Unlike the gods, including his own mother, Achilles was a restless vagabond in the world, bearing nothing but his armour and accompanied only by his Myrmidon warriors (see Hammer 1997). As Adam Nicolson has said, ‘he recognises that we are all vagabonds on earth, nothing belongs to us, our lives have no consequence and our possessions are dross. We are wanderers, place-shifters, the cosmic homeless’ (2014:152). Achilles would traverse the seas to reach the plains of Troy, and he would stride about the plain in those years of war. His vagabondage and the severing by force of his human form and his soul would lead him into the depths of Hades. He would even break out of the jaws of hell onto the plain once more to demand that his slave-bride be sacrificed on his burial mound, a burial mound that the incipient divine and descendant of Achilles, Alexander the Great, would later come to sacrifice upon. The significance of Achilles for human culture is immense. As G.S. Kirk has argued: It would be falsifying the balance of the poem to claim that it is the mental and emotional history of Achilles that chiefly matters; but the transformation of his pride and anger, first in the Embassy into doubt of the whole heroic code, then into indecision and the compromise that leads to Patroclus’s death, then into self-reproach and grief, then into obsessional madness, and finally into some sort of reluctant acceptance of the basic laws of society and at least a similitude of generosity – all this is the moral core of the whole poem, and that which raises it beyond the level of reiterated cruelty and death to a more universal plane of pride, purgation and divine law (1965:112–113) In terms of divine law Richard Jenkyns has noted the fixity of humans and the mobility of gods upon the plains of Troy. The gods come forwards and backwards from Olympus to the battlefield (2015:8). As Jenkyns says of Homer, his gods are not remote beings: In a few places he gives a mighty representation of the gods’ numinous transcendence, but mostly he sucks the numen out of them. If a warrior meets a god in the field, his response is not to fall on his knees in worship, but to consider whether to stand or retreat. (Jenkyns 2015:9) The difference between the gods and the humans lies in the mortality of the latter. Like the pictures that Aeneas encounters in the palace of Dido, ­Jenkyns notes also that the world is depicted upon the shield of Achilles. Yet

86  Force: Achilles here war is only one part of the cosmic existence of human beings (2015:10). After Achilles kills Hector, Jenkyns notes the fracture between life and death: Food and drink, those good, plain pleasures, are where we end. But beyond that immediate moment is war, with yet worse to come: Achilles will die, and Priam, and Troy be destroyed. The Iliad ends with feasting, and on the brink of hell. (2015:19) Again there was much to lose in losing life to violence and force, and hell would return not just in a material way upon the battlefield but literally opening up with the returning ghost of Achilles. Humphrey Kitto has described the centrality of the Achilles myth to Homer and the Iliad: It is not for us to say whether it was from pondering on this episode of the war that Homer was led to this conception, which he then saw could be expressed through the Achilles-story: the important thing is that this is his subject, that such a cause has an effect: and that it is out of this clearly conceived subject, and not merely from literary contrivance, that the Iliad derives the essential unity which informs it, in spite of its epic expansiveness and of later accretions. (1957:47) The subject and subjectivity of Achilles does in many ways act as the cipher for ‘total war’, for force and for vengeance; and Kitto points to an important aspect of this figuration of Achilles as he kills: In this passage, as in all Classical Greek art, there is a notable absence of natural background. We see neither the towering walls of Troy nor the Scamander shimmering in the distance; we do not know where this Assembly of the Greeks is held, whether in a tent, or on a hill-side, or on the shore beside the hollow ships. As in Greek vase-painting, all our attention is concentrated on the human figures. (1957:52) These are indeed human figures and not products of nature or landscape. Even when humans think of themselves as the descendants of deities, half-deities or incipient deities, it is their human characteristics in Homer that are at the fore. As Kitto makes clear, the incipient deification of humans that was always a possibility in the ancient world was often challenged by Homeric reminders that it was impious to think oneself a god (1957:61). As Oliver Taplin has argued: Achilles is the greatest warrior, the greatest looter and killer of all. But what makes him great is not that, but the uniquely penetrating way in

Force: Achilles  87 which he thinks matters through. He sees and expresses the human condition without evasion or periphrasis. (1986:59–60) Being half-divine in origin, it is not the impulse to divinity that drives Achilles forwards to kill and maim but his embodiment of human desires and impulses. The setting and the context for his embodiment of the human condition is repetitive and stylised in a way that Achilles’ actions are not as a creature of propulsion. As Taplin makes clear of the formulae that Homer uses: Thanks to the repeated phrases and scene-sequences we are in a familiar world where things have their known places. It is a world which is solid and known, and yet at the same time coloured by the special diction with an epic nobility. Robes, beds, sheep, springs, mountains – their constancy is conveyed by the traditional language. The sun rises each day in familiar terms; Achilles remains swift however inactive he may be. Set against this formulaic backcloth are the unique, terrible events. The sun sets as ever, but Hector is dead. In Homer we have a supremely pervasive counterpoint of static and dynamic, the constant and the ephemeral. (1986:72) The constancy and predictability of the systematic cosmologies of nature are contrasted with the force that Achilles wields against the nature of ­human flesh. Taplin argues that the body of Achilles and his armour are an a­ malgam constructed by the oral poetic tradition, as an aesthetically coherent formula whilst also historically impossible (1986:73). This oral poetic tradition, whilst historically unfaithful, is for Taplin an entire aesthetic cosmology which captivates the universal imagination in its depiction of the social memory of heroism and war (1986:75). Indeed the Achilles myth and motif is a story and only because it works as such can its retelling proliferate. The act is one thing and the telling of the act is another thing entirely. In a remarkable passage in her own retelling of the problem of the human condition Hannah Arendt has examined the Achilles motif: This unchangeable identity of the person, though disclosing itself intangibly in act and speech, becomes tangible only in the story of the actor’s and speaker’s life; but as such it can be known, that is, grasped as a palpable entity only after it has come to its end. In other words, human essence – not human nature in general (which does not exist) nor the sum total of qualities and shortcomings in the individual, but the essence of who somebody is – can come into being only when life departs, leaving behind nothing but a story. Therefore whoever consciously aims

88  Force: Achilles at being ‘essential’, at leaving behind a story and an identity which will win ‘immortal fame’, must not only risk his life but expressly choose, as Achilles did, a short life and premature death. Only a man who does not survive his one supreme act remains the indisputable master of his identity and possible greatness, because he withdraws into death from the possible consequences and continuation of what he began. What gives the story of Achilles its paradigmatic significance is that it shows in a nutshell that Eudaimonia can be bought only at the price of life and that one can make sure of it only by foregoing the continuity of living in which we disclose ourselves piecemeal, by summing up all of one’s life in a single deed, so that the story of the act comes to its end together with life itself. Even Achilles, it is true, remains dependent upon the storyteller, poet, or historian, without whom everything he did remains futile; but he is the only ‘hero’, and therefore the hero par excellence, who delivers into the narrator’s hands the full significance of his deed, so that it is as though he had not merely enacted the story of his life but at the same time also ‘made’ it. (Arendt 1998:193–194) Arendt argues that the ‘self-disclosure’ of Achilles becomes not just the prototype of propulsion and action in the ancient world, but ultimately of the ‘agonal spirit’ of the subsequent Greek polis (1998:194). For Arendt the labour of humans is to produce word and narrative in order that their mortality be transcended: ‘By their capacity for the immortal deed, by their ability to leave non-perishable traces behind, men, their individual mortality notwithstanding, attain an immortality of their own and prove themselves to be of a “divine” nature’ (1998:19). Perhaps part of the irony is that the Achilles myth accidentally survived the Bronze Age of Greek antiquity. Homer’s lost epics point to the very perishability of narrative, and specifically oral narrative. Achilles is both a contingent and accidental motif on the one hand and, on the other, a myth which has achieved, in spite of this, a degree of universality. Achilles is, as Arendt says, an entity of palpability. His very physicality is expressed in his every move upon the battlefield as he runs and destroys. Homer’s epic is a hymn to his material body and how that body acts as a vehicle and a container for his passions and obsessions. His end does indeed leave nothing but a story as his material remains depart into the earth. His spirit would for a long time persist. Odysseus encounters his shade in Hades and converses with him there. Achilles emerges from Hades onto the plain after the fall of Troy and long after his own death. Perhaps his ghost persists into the world even now in the form of the geist which inhabits his sculptured form or his spirit amongst the pages of translations of Homer. Achilles makes his own story through the very act and fact of his death. Only in the departure of his human body does he become of universal significance, if only as a ghost and a story rather than the semi-divine that he indeed was.

Force: Achilles  89

Troy and the bicameral mind Assessing the universality of the Achilles motif and other myths within Homer, Jacques Rancière has argued that Homer was not an inventor of fiction or a fabricator of metaphors but somebody to whom history and imagination were entangled. His characters, for Rancière, were not indeed characters at all but ‘personified abstractions’. This is because the humans of that time had no sense of their own subjectivity or individuality. The inwardness of subsequent forms of consciousness is not present in the actions of Achilles, and in some ways Achilles is mute and unable to achieve introspection (Rancière 2010:160–161). This notion of the non-subjectivity of Achilles, as someone who can only act and propel, has been explored in perhaps one of the most remarkable psychological journeys of the last half century: that of Julian Jaynes and the development of the ‘bicamerality’ hypothesis. The basic hypothesis of the bicameral thesis is that there is a transition from a non-conscious to a conscious humanity (with the development of concepts of introspection and interiority) at around about the point where humans begin to develop writing. Before this humans were literally the playthings of gods and rulers who whispered in their ears. They were creatures of force and action rather than sentient beings who could reflect, philosophise and introspect. A large part of the bicameral thesis is concerned with Homer’s account of Troy and the relationship between gods and humans upon the battlefield. Jaynes sees the human interior spatially as an ‘introcosm’ (1990:1) filled either with the injunctions of divinity to act, submit and obey or with something approaching subjectivity, itself only made possible by the shift from the bicameral to the modern mind. Examining as he does ideas of consciousness as landscape, strata, chemistry and machine, this allows for his argument that human sentience is unique in comparison to other animal species that cannot reach into or see the interior consciousness of others (1990:5). Consciousness entails interiority and there is a chasm between animals and humans, just as there is a fracture between bicameral and modern ­humans (Jaynes 1990:9). For Jaynes introspection and retrospection are not just about the recall and retrieval of visual phenomena but the re-­narrativisation of elements into new patterns (1990:28). The conscious mind is enmeshed with and entangled in the empirical world, for Jaynes, and metaphorically builds its own mind from elements in that outside empirical field of the ‘real’ world. Rather than being a ‘repository’ from which images can be retrieved, the mind is an operating device or machine that traverses between exteriority and interiority (1990:55). Consciousness operates with the real world by way of analogy and metaphor, creating a self that can observe those interior and exterior spaces and manipulating the meaning of those experiences that consciousness has with the world out there. As Jaynes notes: ‘Conscious mind is a spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness operates only on objectively observable things’

90  Force: Achilles (1990:65–66). Consciousness then is an invention of an ‘analogue world’ on the basis of language and the concept that it makes possible. Not only does Jaynes argue that consciousness post-dates language, it also probably postdates or emerges at the same time as writing (1990:66–68). Exploring the origins of consciousness and the mentality of early h ­ umans means uncovering and understanding that moment when writing first emerges. This brings Jaynes to his reading of the Iliad. For Jaynes: ‘I propose here to regard the poem as a psychological document of immense importance. And the question we are to put to it is: What is mind in the Iliad?’ (1990:69). Jaynes argues that there is a disjunction in humans between the body and the psyche in the Homeric world. Far from the concept of the psyche implying our notion of soul, in Homer the warrior bleeds out his psyche as part of his dying body (1990:69). Indeed Jaynes argues that the warriors of the Iliad were not conscious. For Jaynes: A similar absence from Iliadic language is a word for body in our sense. The word soma, which in the fifth century B.C. comes to mean body, is always in the plural in Homer and means dead limbs or a corpse. It is the opposite of psyche. There are several words which are used for various parts of the body, and, in Homer, it is always these parts that are referred to, and never the body as a whole. So, not surprisingly, the early Greek art of Mycenae and its period shows man as an assembly of strangely articulated limbs, the joints underdrawn, and the torso almost separated from the hips. It is graphically what we find again and again in Homer, who speaks of hands, lower arms, upper arms, feet, calves, and thighs as being fleet, sinewy, in speedy motion, etc., with no mention of the body as a whole. (1990:71) The warriors had no concept then of their body or indeed their soul. They do not think and reflect and have no capacity for introspection. Only the gods determine purpose and action (Jaynes 1990:72). The heroes of the Iliad literally have no ego; they are simply listeners to the injunctions of gods and act on what they are told to do. Homer listens to the muses himself ‘among the ruins of Agamemnon’s world’ (1990:72). As Jaynes says of Achilles: It is one god who makes Achilles promise not to go into battle, another who urges him to go, and another who then clothes him in a golden fire reaching up to heaven and screams through his throat across the bloodied trench at the Trojans, rousing in them ungovernable panic. In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness. (1990:72) What then are gods for Jaynes? They were certainly voices that emerged from the organisation of the central nervous system but read and understood as

Force: Achilles  91 entities that stood above subjective consciousness as personae. They were agents of instruction and admonition that controlled the actions of human beings (Jaynes 1990:73–74). They literally were the hallucinatory divinities in disguise who were the articulation of the disarticulated body and mind of the early human. For Jaynes then: ‘The Trojan War was directed by hallucinations. And the soldiers who were so directed were not at all like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they did’ (1990:75). The automatic response to the injunctions of gods was not then like the ‘human’ condition of acting and narrative that Arendt postulates for Achilles. Achilles is a robot and not fully human in a modern sense. He is a warrior of the bicameral kingdoms who could neither see himself nor see into others. He was simply a follower of voices. This is the essence of the bicameral mind: of speaking and ordering (Jaynes 1990:75). As Jaynes argues: The picture then is one of strangeness and heartlessness and emptiness. We cannot approach these heroes by inventing mind-spaces behind their fierce eyes as we do with each other. Iliadic men did not have subjectivity as do we; he had no awareness of his awareness of the world, no internal mind-space to introspect upon. In distinction to our own subjective conscious minds, we can call the mentality of the Myceneans a bicameral mind. (1990:75) The absence of ‘mind-space’ also means the presence of the ‘historical substrate’ of the Iliad which is not to be perceived as a fabrication but as a document of historical Mycenaean culture (Jaynes 1990:76). That historical culture and its automatons, fighting the battles of their gods upon the Trojan plain, are theocratic beings and entities, not the prey of individual hallucination but of theological structure (1990:79–80). The nature of the human condition, if we can even call it that at this early stage of history, is that of a fracture between the controlling god and the human as follower. Human introspection is radically absent. For Jaynes: Somehow we still wish to identify with Achilles. We still feel that there must, there absolutely must be something he feels inside. What we are trying to do is to invent a mind-space and a world of analog behaviors in him just as we do in ourselves and our contemporaries. And this invention, I say, is not valid for Greeks of this period. (1990:84) The ‘bicameral kingdoms’ (Jaynes 1990:149) were places and cultures without empathy or introspection. The ‘hallucinated presence’ of gods lived in both mind and exteriorised into the temple (1990:150). These divine hallucinations were essentially auditory, and once writing begins to fix the words of

92  Force: Achilles god they become more distant and provide fewer injunctions and proposals to humans who can begin to ignore them. The powers of the bicameral gods began to wane (1990:208). There were also changes in the perception of the unified body, which began to be itself perceived as a space which had an interior. As Jaynes notes: All these metaphors are extremely important. Saying that the internal sensations of large circulatory and muscular changes are a thing into which strength can be put is to generate an imagined ‘space’, here located always in the chest, which is the forerunner of the mindspace of contemporary consciousness. And to compare the function of that sensation to that of another person or even to the less-frequent gods is to begin those metaphor processes that will later become the analog ‘I’. (1990:263) The shift to the visuality of writing and the visualisation of the interior beings begins to displace the auditory and hallucinatory power of the whispering deities (Jaynes 1990:269). As Jaynes argues of the Iliad: ‘No one in any way ever sees, decides, thinks, knows, fears, or remembers anything in his psyche’ (1990:271). This is profoundly different from the next Homeric moment where Odysseus, unlike Achilles, does see, decide, think, fear and remember.

Helen at her weaving Hélène Cixous, watching Helen at her weaving, sees the woman who has brought the catastrophe of war upon the city of Troy: ‘Ho! Mad Helen who single-handedly destroys so many lives in Troy’ (1998:135). Cixous argues that the patriarchy blames the war on Helen and not on others like Achilles (1998:135). Homer’s vision of Helen, as Achilles and Hector fight (ostensibly for her) upon the fields outside her bower, marks one of those planetary pauses in the history of the war. Helen offers a cipher but also a sense of pause and peace as she weaves in her room, for many consider Helen to be the origin of the war. Jean-Pierre Vernant documents the ‘doubles’ of Helen, her apparitions that come to haunt Menelaus crying for her in his bedroom. Her ghost and the memory of her inhabits the space where he is, but the figurine of her lies painted in the room, and even as he sleeps her dream figure comes to haunt him (Vernant 2006:326). These are all the eidola of Helen which would compel him and his brother Agamemnon towards the destruction of Troy and her recapture. The first entrance of Helen into the Homeric world sees her at her weaving in a bower in Troy. In many ways it is the enigma of Helen and her fate that is as telling as the wrath of Achilles. The enigma lies in the decisive question of her own interior world and the conflicting stories about her. Roberto

Force: Achilles  93 Calasso looks backwards to disputations with Homer about whether Helen was actually within the walls of Troy at all: So the centuries-old accusation against Homer, that he was a craftsman of deceit, turns out to be true, does it? For overridingly literary motives, Homer kept quiet about the supreme scandal of the Trojan War: that blood had been spilled for a woman who was not actually there, for an impalpable ghost. For hundreds, even thousands of years, the poet’s story would be repeated, prolonging to the end of time the deceit that took the heroes to their deaths beneath the walls of Troy. (1993:129) The ghost of Helen would have many fates in many stories but, unlike ­Achilles, her narrative is not one of action but of inaction: whether she was captured by Paris or consented to depart; loved Paris or Menelaus; was present in the city or not; taken home or discarded; a traitor to Troy or to the Achaeans; died at Rhodes, Sparta or Olympus, or spent eternity as the ghost-­companion of Achilles. Like the pictures of the war in Dido’s palace, we first encounter Helen weaving the images of the war which is being fought only for her. As Richard Jenkyns notes of her: ‘the enigmatic figure of Helen, also self-reflective and also an artist, who is first seen in the poem embroidering a tapestry on which she is depicting the Trojan War itself’ (2015:12–13). Adam Nicolson has noted the overwhelming production of cloth in the city of Troy: ‘It is a historical truth that Troy spun and wove’ (2014:196). Ted Hughes, in his reworking of Aeschylus, had a vision of King Menelaus crying through the night for his lost wife, only to wake and be tortured by the vision of the statue of her looking upon him from her stone body (Aeschylus 1999:24). Our concepts of beauty can be seen to have their origin in Helen, as Camus has noted of the story of Helen in exile (1975:167–171). As Camus says, reflecting on Helen also allows for a reflection on our own world: ‘We have exiled beauty: the Greeks took up arms for her’ (1975:167). For Camus the Helen motif encapsulates the human condition present within our modernity. If Achilles represents force then Helen represents creation: Admission of ignorance, rejection of fanaticism, the limits of the world and of man, the beloved face, and finally beauty – this is where we shall be on the side of the Greeks. In a certain sense, the direction history will take is not the one we think. It lies in the struggle between creation and inquisition. Despite the price which artists will pay for their empty hands, we may hope for their victory. Once more, the philosophy of darkness will break and fade away over the dazzling sea. O midday thought, the Trojan war is being fought far from the battlefields! Once more the dreadful walls of the modern city will fall to deliver up – ‘soul serene as the ocean’s calm’ – Helen’s beauty. (Camus 1975:171)

94  Force: Achilles Other commentators, like Norman Austin (1994), have exhaustedly explored the Helen motif and her contradictions. Hanna Roisman has examined the status of Helen within the Homeric texts: ‘a complex and suffering figure with a good mind, who strives for autonomy, expression, and belonging, within and despite the many constraints to which she is subject’ (2006:1). Yet it is in the weaving that the enigma of Helen can be fully explored. As noted earlier, when we first encounter Helen she is weaving in a room in the city of Troy: The weaving, however, is done in silence. One of the striking features of this scene is that Helen does not speak. She says not a single word. Her silence creates a certain mystique, but it also emphasizes her powerlessness and her isolation. Her weaving may be seen as an effort to break through these barriers to being and belonging, but, like poetry, it is a one-way form of communication in which the maker stands apart from the persons addressed. (Roisman 2006:11) The weaving, taking place in silence, is a form of action and of communication about the events that she was the catalyst for. As she weaves, ­Roisman argues that Helen documents her own suffering and the suffering of others: ‘Her self-referential weaving, with all that it implies, endows her with stature and raises her above her plight as a captive and possession and above the plight of the other females who seem to be possessions in the Iliad’ ­(2006:10–11). Helen’s weaving, for Roisman, becomes a liberatory act which refutes the external definitions of herself and creates modes of self-­definition as a woman (2006:10). In some way this is the first rendition of the ‘cloth’ metaphor of memory. Lesley Millar, for example, has examined the ways in which ancestral knowledges are woven into cloth with complex negotiations of the subjugated cultures, specifically of women (2007:9–10). The cloth and the weave are ways of rethinking time and memory: ‘Dissolving, slipping through the porous membrane of time, conflating experiences: memories are the wayward threads we use to reconstruct the narrative of our life’ ­(Millar 2013:13). The fragments of the weave hint at ‘Membrane, fold, thread and pattern: cloth and memory’ (2013:15). Beverley Ayling-Smith, Carol ­Quarini and Bob White have noted the relationship also between textiles and mourning: By using textiles to evoke the psychic pain of being marked, stained, repaired and remade it is possible to connect with the intense emotions of mourning. Mourning, melancholia and grief are all emotions that we experience through the course of life which indelibly mark our memory and all can be understood through the medium of cloth. (Ayling-Smith et al. 2012:5)

Force: Achilles  95 Adam Nicolson has reasserted the power of weaving for understanding the nature of Mycenae, from which Agamemnon and his purple cloths emerged, and its detritus: The Shaft-Grave Greeks, in this vision, are the people of the blade and the mask, the Trojans of the loom and the embrace. One slices and rejects, the other weaves and holds; but Homer stands beyond and embraces them both. (Nicolson 2014:109) Nicolson sees Agamemnon’s destruction of human beings as an agency of force, coercion and violence, the weave of the ligature and sinew hacked through by the blade of the great king (2014:109). Out of this horror Homer emerges to make a beautiful weave out of violence. For Nicolson: He makes a poem of death that is itself a thing of woven beauty. That is the essential picture of the Iliad, a great history cloth, a tapestry of sorrow, in which the non-city is set against the city, where the marginal and contingent confronts the settled and the secure. The poem is hinged to that difference: the loved against the abused, the creative against the destructive forces of life. And the fact of the poem itself is a kind of ­super-weaving, a weaving of severance and weaving into one shining cloth if incomparable understanding. (2014:109–110) Like the weave on the patterned cloth or the wooden ship, Nicolson argues, that inherited social memory is re-forged through endless re-weaving (2014:74). Rachel Bespaloff sees Helen as the prisoner of the passions she excited in others. She becomes the passive figuration of desire: ‘Pleasure is extorted from her; this merely makes her humiliation the more cruel’ (Weil and ­Bespaloff  2005:57). Like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Helen has escaped from her home with Menelaus in order to wipe out the social memory of that past and create a love which lies in the future as a possible world. But for Bespaloff: ‘They awake in exile and feel nothing but a dull disgust for the shriveled ecstasy that has outlived their hope’ (2005:57). The apparition of Helen in spectral, figurative and dream-form to Menelaus is a literal embodiment. It is her body which makes an appearance, in however spectral a form. But she also begins to embody the entire genocide of a people because of her appearance. This accounts for the misgivings about her on the part of the Trojans: ‘Nobody can forgive the stranger for being the embodiment of the fatality that pursues the city’ (2005:59). Homer sees her in her bower, watches her lament for and feel compassion over the body of Hector, desolated by his death (2005:60). Homer watches her step loftily to watch the fight between Paris and Menelaus from the walls of the city.

96  Force: Achilles There follows a scene of starry serenity in which the human accent, however, is still audible. Priam asks Helen to tell him the names of the most famous of the Achaian warriors that he can see in the enemy camp. The battlefield is quiet; a few steps away from each other, the two armies stand face-to-face awaiting the single combat that will decide the outcome of the war. Here, at the very peak of the Iliad, is one of those pauses, those moments of contemplation, when the spell of Becoming is broken, and the world of action, with all its fury, dips into peace. The plain where the warrior herd was raging is no more than a tranquil ­m irage to Helen and the old king. (Weil and Bespaloff 2005:62) The grand scene of the battle is portrayed by Homer upon the plains below Helen’s wall. She surveys all. She is the ethnographer of a battle. Only she can name. She knows the world of each contesting army and they are all fighting for her. She watches helplessly and we still watch her. She persists into all of our wars. For Rachel Bespaloff her apparition continues to haunt us: ‘She is there still, since nations that brave each other for markets, for raw materials, rich lands, and their treasures, are fighting, first and forever, for Helen’ (Weil and Bespaloff 2005:63). Helen would ultimately cease making her tapestry of the war that she herself had initiated. She would or would not return to Sparta. She lies with Menelaus or still lives in Hades with Achilles. Yet, another protagonist is now leaving Troy in the woven, wooden ship. It would be a long time before Odysseus, having fought by the side of Agamemnon and Achilles to win back Helen, could ever return home to Ithaca.

6 Enlightenment Odysseus

Introduction In this chapter we examine the great addendum to the Iliad: the journey of Odysseus homewards to Ithaca. This story, like the wrath of Achilles, has as its consequence a set of philosophical and social theories which use the Odyssean motifs as analogies for certain sets of human behaviour. The figure and the journey of Odysseus have served to support certain types of reworking of social theory in the work of writers such as Jon Elster and Adorno and Horkheimer. Odysseus as a human seems to embody characteristics and ‘interiorities’ that are seemingly different to previous cultures and become part of the self-understanding of humans in classical, medieval and modern societies. The journey itself has also contributed to our understanding of the ‘world’. This is not because we can locate the places that Odysseus finds himself traversing, like Circe’s island (although some have attempted to do so with very mixed results), but because it illustrates the cosmologies and ‘natures’ of the early Greek world. Further, the Odyssean motifs also help us think about the emergence of patriarchy, the nature of the gods and what exile and homecoming can mean in our own age of movement and migration.

The return to Ithaca Bernard Knox, in his introduction to the Fagles translation of Homer, has noted the centrality of Homer’s epic to classical Greece: ‘august, authoritative, inimitable, a vision of life fixed forever in forms that seem to have been molded by gods rather than men’ (1996:12). The ‘rhythmic microcosm’ of wandering Odysseus is a rhythm of the natural world and of human destinations (1996:13). This Odysseus, the ‘man of twists and turns’, is a human of enlightenment and knowledge. He succeeds in his enterprise not through force but through intellect. Further, he endures most of his travails alone. Gradually each of his comrades who leave Troy with him is submerged in the struggle to return home: he is no longer one of many heroes fighting between the beached ships and the walls of Troy. He is on his own, first as admiral of a small fleet,

98  Enlightenment: Odysseus then as captain of an isolated ship, and finally as a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a piece of wreckage. (Knox 1996:24) This journey into temptation and shipwreck, of gods and monsters, initiates new ways of understanding the sentient human being. As Knox says, this emphasises: the unique aspect of Odyssean heroism at the expense and often to the exclusion of the recognizably Achillean aspects of the heroic vengeance that concludes the epic is paralleled by a tendency to find new developments on Olympus, in the nature and action of the gods. (1996:41) In fact the dissolution of the Achillean human being and the emergence of the Odyssean would ultimately signal the fate of the gods and their decomposition. After the horrors of the war at Troy Robert Fagles has argued of the Odyssey that the ‘dominant symbolism is that of light after darkness’ (Fagles and Stanford 1979:14). Indeed the travels of Odysseus are full of light and radiance after the visceral horror of the Trojan destruction. But for some commentators the Odyssey marks the birth of a new culture and new types of human being. As Oliver Taplin has said of Odysseus’s travels: ‘these are the archetypal adventures of the European consciousness’ (1986:63). Human consciousness, for writers like Julian Jaynes, actually begins with the Odyssey. There is a fracture in civilisations and human types between the writing of the Iliad and that of the Odyssey some years later – if indeed they were composed by the same person. This fracture in the poems replicates the fracture between the specific locale and limited timescale of Troy in the Iliad and the much more expansive journey of Odysseus over vast oceanic distances and over the best part of two decades. Metaphorically, as the past lies with the blood and guts of Troy, so new worlds are beckoned in with the Odyssey. As the great Marxist classicist George Thomson has said: ‘the future lies with rugged Ithaca’ (1949:430). The Odyssey is also in many ways a gaze at the departing gods. Reading the Odyssey, Albert Camus saw this as a decisive break towards humanism and away from the deities which had previously controlled the fate of human beings. It was a renunciation of gods that contemporary rebellions maintain. As Camus has written: In this noon of thought, the rebel thus disclaims divinity in order to share in the struggles and destiny of all men. We shall choose Ithaca, the faithful land, frugal and audacious thought, lucid action, the generosity of the man who understands. In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love. (1971:269)

Enlightenment: Odysseus  99 The first step was interaction with the gods and then their humanisation by the ancient world. Out of animism stepped gods who looked like ­humans and who would ultimately be dispensed with in the search to make humans divine. The gods still whisper in the ear of Odysseus and he still encounters them, but this is becoming his world and not theirs. It is their passing and his homecoming to Ithaca that matters (see Broodbank 2000; Dougherty 2001; Helms 1998). The journey of Odysseus is about the search for home after long years of war and exile. As Richard Jenkyns has said: The Odyssey is therefore not an odyssey, in the modern sense of the term: the hero relates his years of wandering in retrospect. We saw that the Iliad is as tightly controlled in space as in time, and here the Odyssey is in extreme contrast: Odysseus begins at the furthest distance imaginable, on an island in outer Ocean, and the narrative takes him into ever smaller spaces, first back into the Mediterranean world, then to his island, to his house, and lastly to the most narrow and intimate place, in bed with his wife. (2015:20) As both Finley and Jenkyns note, Odysseus begins his journeys in real geographies and histories and then, as he is blown west, ‘enters fairyland’ (Jenkyns 2015:22). He encounters and resides upon the islands of Calypso and Circe, that ‘divinized demi-mondaine’, as Jenkyns calls her (2015:23); but Odysseus seeks only Ithaca and his wife Penelope. Calypso, the goddess in her vaulted cave, herself offered succour to the mourning mortal, but to no avail: Day after day she does her best to banish Ithaca from his memory with soft, persuasive words; and Odysseus, who would give anything for the mere sight of the smoke rising up from his own land, can only yearn for death. (Homer 1991:4) Yet the travels of this isolated exile, who loses all of his comrades and ends up naked on a beach in a strange land, is profoundly social. It is an ethnography of the fabulous fairylands that he encounters and which, of course, never existed. As Jenkyns further notes: whereas the Iliad suggests the ultimate loneliness of the hero, the ­Odyssey is social poem. Most of it takes place on islands. Islands can be places of isolation, like Calypso’s Ogygia or Circe’s Aiaia, but they can also be the units within which a whole society is contained, as is Ithaca. The Odyssey studies both man the individual and man as a social animal, and understands that these two elements of human experience are

100  Enlightenment: Odysseus indivisible: at the end of it the hero has recovered his people, his property and his most private place. (2015:27) This marks the irreducibility of Odysseus to private psychological or public social human being. He is both and more because his entanglements with the world are so rich and complex: its geographies, gods, monsters, comrades, enemies and lovers. The origins of the Odyssey in the Mycenaean Bronze Age (Homer 1988:xi; and see Ahl and Roisman 1996) display many features of that society, but it is also a text with many contradictions: of geography, history and language. Aristotle himself looked at the Odyssey as a simple story of a man kept from his home for years (1965:55), but he also recognised that the Homeric vision of Odysseus was partial. Homer did not, as Aristotle makes clear, mention that Odysseus feigned madness to avoid war or that he was wounded on Mount Parnassus (1965:43). But the episodic and momentary nature of the book reflects the complex wanderings and liminality of its hero. Yet, like Achilles, so this hero becomes a cipher, a method of self-understanding. Odysseus not only becomes emblematic of a new type of human being but also of a set of embodied philosophical attributes which have much to tell us about our contemporary conditions of human existence.

Odysseus and critical theory As Rachel Bespaloff has said of Odysseus as a mode of thinking: ‘Later on, the philosophers, heirs of Odysseus, introduce the Trojan horse of dialectic into the realm of tragedy’ (Weil and Bespaloff 2005:58). The ‘man of twists and turns’ is an eminently dialectical being. The question of ­Odysseus as philosopher was an active, if minor, question in the classical world. As ­Anthony Gottlieb has recently pointed out: ‘It is in their praise for the virtue of theoria that the philosophers came furthest from the Iliad and the ­Odyssey’ (2016:282). The idea that there was certainly no space in the Iliad for introspection and self-understanding is put forward by commentators like Jaynes, and certainly Odysseus was not a philosopher in the same way as Aristotle and his reflections on nature. As Gottlieb notes: He did not poke out the Cyclops’ solitary and unusual eye because he wanted to dissect it or formulate syllogisms about its working parts. Homer’s works would have been very different if his heroes had kept taking time off for contemplation and the pursuit of knowledge; they were more likely to take time off for sulking, as Achilles did. (2016:282) Is there though a radical difference in the contemplations of Odysseus and Achilles? The spatial and temporal compression of the Iliad did indeed leave

Enlightenment: Odysseus  101 little space for reflection or indeed theoria, but Achilles embodies, without knowing, in his interior being and in his exterior actions, the congealed substance of a set of attributes of decisive importance to philosophy. The more expansive spatial and temporal context of the Odyssey (decades rather than weeks, the Mediterranean and Aegean world rather than the plain before Troy) allows for a more expansive and generous engagement with the world and with oneself. Odysseus encounters many people, monsters, islands, civilisations, gods. His acts of remembrance are profound. The social memory of his wife and his home compel him forwards as if to reach backwards in time. If Achilles is the human of action, the ‘wily’ Odysseus is the human of reflection and stratagem. Through his cognitive faculties, rather than the power of his body, Odysseus evades death, journeys into Hades, escapes monsters, woos and defeats witches, escapes the clutches of Sirens whilst enduring and experiencing their utmost power, returns home, defeats his enemies and lies in the bed again with Penelope. Like Achilles he embodies and represents, even as a ‘real’ human would, certain impulses towards theoria as well as displaying Homeric concerns of human/god interaction, the lightness of nature, the sense of being human and lucidity. In his introduction to Hesiod, himself at the beginning of both classical Greek literature and philosophical reflection, M.L. West has argued that later writers felt that both Hesiod and Homer had simply transposed discreditable human characteristics into divine form and indeed, with their construction of divine genealogies and powers, had just invented gods as an inversion of human virtues (Hesiod 1988:xx). Hesiod himself had noted the complex interactions between gods and human in Homer, with Circe and Calypso entangling themselves with mortal men and gods and humans giving birth to half-divines (1988:33). Yet the sexual entanglement with minor immortals did not make a god of Odysseus even if he often looked like one in his intellect and beauty. The characteristics of Odysseus are fully human ones. Odysseus as a motif forms a significant part of the philosophical project of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. It is not my task to provide an exegesis of this but just to expose some of the sedimented layers of the Odyssean myth in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997). The central project of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique is to present an immanent analysis and revision from within the Enlightenment of its limitations and failures. Their project is one of examination and redress. As they argue: ‘The point is rather that the Enlightenment must examine itself, if men are not to be wholly betrayed. The task to be accomplished is not the conservation of the past, but the redemption of the hopes of the past’ (1997:xv). The critique of the Enlightenment is one of radicalisation, not a reversion to pre-Enlightenment myth and darkness or a propulsion towards a new ‘endarkenment’ where the hopes it raised are entirely extinguished. Indeed understanding the Enlightenment and the redrawing of its tasks means coming to terms with the specific dialectic that it offers and has offered since Homer. For Adorno and Horkheimer: ‘The first traces the

102  Enlightenment: Odysseus dialectic of myth and enlightenment in the Odyssey, as one of the earliest representative testimonies of Western bourgeois civilisation’ (1997:xvi). The idea of the testimony that Homer offers of course long predates the arrival of bourgeois civilisation, but the specific notion of humanness that the Odyssey begins to delineate is inseparable from the type of human being that the bourgeois world would ultimately bring to fruition. This is the ­proto-bourgeois self that Adorno and Horkheimer see in Odysseus ­(1997:43–46). Hand in hand with the advent of bourgeois capitalist civilisation and its modes of production and utilisation of nature comes the project of Enlightenment: the project to banish obscurity and mythic structures in favour of luminosity and knowledge. These hopes have, however, become obscured or extinguished by the advent of technology, barbarism and totalitarianism: in essence the radiation of new mythic structures of domination which have subsumed the liberty and sovereignty of human beings. As Adorno and Horkheimer note: ‘the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant’ (1997:3). The liberation from fear is a liberation from the past, from fate and from the limitations of geographical nature. The failure of the Enlightenment in the disaster of modernity can only be explained if we go deep into the mythic past of humanity where humans for the first time emerge as forms of individuality and selfhood. The Odysseus of Adorno and Horkheimer is attempting to return home, to achieve not just selfhood but to remain as a living existent, and to fulfil his own humanity and individual aspiration. He does this through logic, knowledge, individual persistence, wiliness and application. Yet he is constantly deflected from his logical route home by storms, witches and monsters. Some of these he is enchanted by, some seek to destroy him, some enchant him and seek his destruction at the same time. These forces are the powers of the mythic past from which his self is seeking to escape even though he is a product of those myths. This marks the moment where the mythic structures are dispelled in favour of human knowledge and emancipation, but they will not let our hero escape without a fight. We can see this in his enchantment by and evasion of the Sirens who seek his destruction. For Adorno and Horkheimer: The entanglement of myth, domination, and labor is preserved in one of the Homeric narratives. Book XII of the Odyssey tells of the encounter with the Sirens. Their allurement is that of losing oneself in the past … What Odysseus left behind him entered into the nether world; for the self is still so close to prehistoric myth, from whose womb it tore itself, that its very own experienced past becomes mythic prehistory. (1997:32) Odysseus would be destroyed if he succumbed to the enchantment of these voices from the past. The enchantment lies in embracing his origins in

Enlightenment: Odysseus  103 darkness rather the than the empirical world of the future to which he looks. The mythic structures are indeed part of his self: a self which has a tripartite essence. The self of Odysseus is a dialectical combination and assemblage of three things: the self of the past, of the present and of the future. The struggle against the sirens (who know everything of the past, including the history of Troy) is a struggle of his present and future self against his past self, the self that would like to submerge itself into the darkness of myth (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997:32–33). The meaning of his journeys lie in Odysseus’s attempt to directly return home which are constantly deflected by the social powers of the past. The storms, often summoned by the gods of the past, threatened to deflect, disperse or destroy him (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997:47). Ultimately, through his intellect, he defeats the storms of nature and the deities which cause them and allows his actualisation as a future self, albeit one tied to visions of his past in his home of Ithaca (1997:48–49). His journey to his future then is also a reversion to the mythic past of his home which evades him. As Adorno and Horkheimer argue: Odysseus loses himself in order to find himself; the estrangement from nature that be brings about is realized in the process of the abandonment to nature he contends with in each adventure; and, ironically, when he, inexorable, returns home, the inexorable force he commands itself triumphs as the judge and avenger of the legacy of the powers from which he escaped. (1997:48) His loss and his sacrifices become part of the powers at his command. The sacrifice and destruction of myth can become itself mimetic and the Enlightenment, as Ray Brassier has noted, itself becomes compelled to repeat the same motifs: Thus the book’s thesis can be paraphrased as follows: the sacrificial logic of myth is repeated in reason’s own compulsive attempt to overcome myth by sacrificing it. Enlightenment reiterates mythic sacrifice by striving to sacrifice it. But as a result, it unwittingly mimics the fatal compulsion which it intended to overcome. (Brassier 2007:32–33) The multiple (and multipliable) self of Odysseus hints that the Homeric humans were not, as Moses Finley has pointed out, an ‘integrated psychic whole’ but were in fact quite fluid entities (1999:25). In the Typhonomachic storm of the ocean the Homeric self, struggling to emancipate itself from its past, also knows that it is the product of nature’s monsters. The ‘inner’ organisation of the new self (the self of the present and of the future) is constantly assailed by the self which is the inheritance of the past. The failure of

104  Enlightenment: Odysseus Enlightenment, as Brassier says, is that it cannot escape the compulsion to repeat the mythic modes of the past even as it tries to emancipate itself from them. For Adorno and Horkheimer: At the Homeric level, the identity of the self is so much a function of the unidentical, of dissociated, unarticulated myths, that it must derive itself from those myths. The inner organization of individuality in the form of time is still so weak that the external unity and sequence of adventures remains a spatial change of scenery, of the spots sacred to the local deities by whose virtue the storm drives and tosses. (1997:48) The voyaging through time and space, first away and then towards Ithaca, is the unity of the Odyssean self. It becomes his congealed substance. He is the sum of those experiences: of his present self as he journeyed towards the future self and tried to escape his mythic subjectivity. These geographical markers are, for Adorno and Horkheimer, the markers and places of mythic time and indeed belong to myth (1997:48), even though ultimately Odysseus would find himself in Ithaca: a place of empirical reality, free from monsters. As J.M. Bernstein argues in his introduction to a selection of Adorno’s writings on mass culture, it is the encounter of Odysseus with the Sirens that is most protean in terms of art itself: Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens figures in their account as an allegorical anticipation of the role of art in modernity. The song of the Sirens, which tells of all that has ever happened, promises happiness through relief from the relentless striving that is the meaning of the future under the aegis of the drive for self-preservation. Death, however, is the price the Sirens exact for their enchantment. Cunning Odysseus devises two strategies of escape: his men, who must row with all their strength through the danger, have their ears stopped with wax; Odysseus has himself bound firmly to the mast of the ship. The rowers, like modern labourers, must not be distracted from their work; while Odysseus, who can hear the beauty of the Sirens’ song, is impotent to realize the happiness it promises. (Adorno 1991:5) The song of the Sirens enchants and gathers humans so they can be destroyed. Jon Elster uses the ‘Ulysses and the Sirens’ motif to explore the notion of constraint and self-constraint in social theory. The idea of ‘binding oneself’ is a motif which allows for an understanding of how we can limit our own actions and impacts, often for reasons of altruism (1984:viii). Elster argues, in his reading of Cicero reading the myth, that the Sirens offered knowledge to human beings: ‘the Sirens (in this reading) used the prospect

Enlightenment: Odysseus  105 of knowledge merely as a means of enticing their victims to the rocky shores’ (2000:2). Yet sometimes we should bind ourselves in order not to acquire or use knowledge. In the case of Ulysses/Odysseus he bound himself in order to hear that which was offered to him but was unable to be enticed, or indeed use that knowledge. As Elster notes of this reading: historical progress has often taken the form of gaining new knowledge that enhances our mastery over nature, including, sometimes, human nature. Because this knowledge can also have destructive consequences, one might ask whether it might not sometimes be better to abstain from acquiring it. (2000:2) The relationship of enlightenment to restraint and domination becomes even more important if Odysseus could use that knowledge in a terrifying manner: as if he himself was monstrous in his turn. This is the predicament of an entire species which could come, through techniques of knowledge, to dominate nature and destroy other living entities (see Hudson 2017c for a fuller elaboration of this). The Sirens themselves remain enigmatic. As John Pollard has argued, the Siren ‘art-form’ of hybrid human and bird may have expressed the ambiguity and indeed the magical power of those who sit on the fracture lines between the living and the dead (1977:189). This is expressed in the geography of their meadow. It seems to be bedecked with flowers, but the myth becomes darker as we realise that ‘it was full of mouldering human bones and dried-up human skins’ (Kerényi 1958:52). Ernle Bradford, in his wonderful, if quixotic (or Odyssean) attempt to sail and traverse the fabulous geographies of Homer, has himself actually tried to find what he calls ‘Siren Land’ (1985:117). Bradford felt that Odysseus would never forget the Sirens, having been the only one without beeswax in his ears (1985:128). The land and the Sirens remain with us for Bradford as they did for Odysseus: I do not think that they are entirely dead, but only that their song has been drowned by the roar of the world. Like an old picture they have been obscured by centuries of varnish, smoke, and over-painting. But the X-ray can still discover them, and a careful restorer can bring them swimming into the light. (Bradford 1985:129) Horkheimer’s obsession with the Odyssean motif was first shared in a letter to Friedrich Pollock, where he stated that the Odyssey was the first document on the anthropology of human beings as rational and enlightened entities (Wiggershaus 1994:323). Habermas notes that the enlightened contestation with mythic forces already at its beginning begins to revert to mythology

106  Enlightenment: Odysseus (1987:109). It is worth quoting Habermas at some length on his own analysis of the mythic motif as used by Adorno and Horkheimer: The human race has removed itself even further from its origins in the world-historical process of enlightenment, and yet it has not dissolved the mythic compulsion to repetition. The modern, fully rationalized world is only seemingly disenchanted; there rests upon it the curse of demonic reification and deadly isolation. In the paralyzing effects of an idling emancipation is expressed the revenge of primordial forces upon those who had to emancipate themselves and yet could not escape. The compulsion toward rational domination of externally impinging natural forces has set the subject upon the course of a formative process that heightens productive forces without limit for the sake of sheer self-preservation, but lets the forces of reconciliation that transcend mere self-preservation atrophy. The permanent sign of enlightenment is domination over an objectified external nature and a repressed internal nature. (Habermas 1987:110) The Odyssey in David Held’s analysis is ‘an enactment of the dialectic’ of enlightenment and domination. For Held, even at the very origins of ‘Western’ thought, the dialectic between autonomy and repression (amongst others things) already had some power (1990:401). The homecoming to Ithaca offers a reconciliation of the contestation and dialectic between people and nature and amongst human beings themselves, but the reconciliation never came to fruition (1990:407). If, as in Douglas Kellner’s reading, Odysseus is the articulation and anticipation of the ‘bourgeois subject’ and its descent into domination and totalitarianism (1989:87), so he also exemplifies the patriarchy of male power: Homer’s text is read as an allegorical journey in which Odysseus overcomes primitive natural forces (immersion in pleasure, sexuality, animal aggressivity and violence, brutal tribalism and so forth) and asserts his domination over the mythic/natural world. In his use of cunning and deceit, his drive towards self-preservation and refusal to accept his mythic fate, his entrepreneurial control over his men and his patriarchal power over his wife and other women, Odysseus is presented as a prefiguration of bourgeois man who reveals the connections between self-preservation, the domination of nature and the entanglement of myth and enlightenment. (Kellner 1989:91) The ‘multivalent’ and ‘multidimensional’ hermeneutic reading of Adorno and Horkheimer indicates the reification and existential separation from both nature and himself on the part of Odysseus (Kellner 1989:92). This

Enlightenment: Odysseus  107 alienated being becomes the template for subsequent human thinking. As Kellner argues: For, as Odysseus overcomes all the challenges to his sovereignty and power through mythic, natural and human forces, he is increasingly separated from nature, other humans and even the capacity for pleasure and relaxation in his body. Like later bourgeois society and individuals, Odysseus is alienated from nature, his body and other people as he sets up boundaries between these domains, and even establishes a boundary within his own body between reason and passion, mind and body – a division and opposition that would later be the foundation of classical and modern philosophy. (1989:92) Martin Jay argues that this separation and alienation was an ‘ominous’ foresight of the worlds to come. As Odysseus struggles against his fate so he becomes separated and divided from the ‘totality’. He was homesick for an island and a nature which he could not find (1973:264). The monsters that Odysseus encounters are the remnants of his mythological self and the mythic structures of darkness from which he emerged. They are, for Adorno and Horkheimer, the representations of ‘ossified covenants, claims from prehistory’ (1997:57–58). It is in the mythic nature of Scylla and Charybdis to destroy, Circe to enchant, Polyphemus to eat. They are compelled to repeat what they are and what is in their nature to do: ‘Each of the mythic figures is programmed always to do the same thing. Each is a figure of repetition: and would come to an end should the repetition fail to occur’ (1997:58). Yet the proto-Odyssean self is becoming in the process of his encounter with the monsters free of these social powers of the past and represents an incipient universal, rational and logical being against the natural and the ‘inevitability of fate’ (1997:58). Again Brassier questions how far we can escape from the repetitious and the mimetic: Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment’s destruction of superstition merely reinstates myth: this is the speculative thesis proposed by Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Our contention … will be that this dialectic of myth and enlightenment is structured by an entwinement of mimicry, mimesis, and sacrifice which not only underlies the book’s ‘excursus’ on Odysseus and its celebrated chapter on anti-Semitism, but arguably also furnishes it with its fundamental conceptual core. (2007:32) For Adorno and Horkheimer the Sirens represent defiance and infatuation as the same process. The infatuation with their song is the infatuation with the powers of the past that compel the future enlightened self to defeat. Indeed

108  Enlightenment: Odysseus it is the social memory of home and homesickness with which Odysseus is himself infatuated (1997:78). It may be, as Adorno and Horkheimer note of Odysseus, that there is no ultimate refuge for humans except in death, in the dark halls of Hades (1997:75). Odysseus did not linger long there and would soon return to the light of Ithaca. Indeed it is back in Ithaca where the true monster would emerge: Odysseus himself. In his analysis of the self as a ‘pandemonium of competing forces’ (1999:1) Slavoj Žižek encounters the myth of Odysseus/Ulysses and the Sirens as itself a strange meeting between two opposing forces. Reading Kafka on the Sirens, Žižek sees them staring at and not singing to Ulysses. They reverse the gaze, displacing his listening with their observation. As Žižek notes: ‘Ulysses was in fact so absorbed in himself, in his own longing, that he did not notice that the Sirens did not sing, but just stared at him, transfixed by his image’ (1999:305). Indeed this is transfixing because Odysseus is indeed the monster. This is the realisation, Žižek argues, that ‘the Monster out there is myself’ (1999:305). Heinrich Blücher, in his unpublished lectures at the New School for Social Research in the 1950s and Bard College in the 1960s, has argued that the Greek myths are about the development of humanity and its idea of itself. Yet there is something more here. Blücher argues that the heroes, and Greek culture more generally, were obsessed with killing monsters. They hated monsters and wanted a cosmos that was both free of these alien entities and fully human (1967:2). Odysseus did not have to blind the Cyclops. Blücher argues that Odysseus committed this act because he could not resist it, knowing that he would go down as a blinder of monsters in song, story and myth. This would have terrible personal consequences for him as Poseidon would take his revenge for this act against Odysseus by throwing him into the oceans of fable from which he could find his way back only with difficulty and after a visit to the land of the dead (1967:5). For Blücher the notion of killing and blinding monsters was a continuation of the binding of the Titans in order to create an Olympian and ultimately a human world and cosmos. He asks: How do Homer’s gods defeat the titans? They bind them and this binding of the Titans (including Prometheus) is what has made human life possible for us in the West. This notion that there are forces in life that man must bind comes initially out of Greek myth, the only myth in all the world that carried with it from its very beginnings a hatred of monsters. This is the real content of all early Greek myth. That man, by conquering the monsters within the world can make a place on earth for human beings and for humanity. (Blücher 1954:1) Yet the self-binding of Odysseus also hints at binding for other purposes than that of evading the Sirens. Self-binding of humans in that human world has to take place to restrain murderous compulsions on the part of Odysseus

Enlightenment: Odysseus  109 and humans more generally. The monsters lie within as well as without. This may mean something of significance when we think about containing, restraining or banishing the monstrous that lies within the human interior: the killing of the slave girls, the wrath of Achilles, genocide and ecological catastrophe.

The Never-Never Lands and the end of bicamerality There is and was an empirically verifiable island of Ithaca, and indeed it may be that Troy had some material existence. As for Circe’s and C ­ alypso’s islands, the place of the Sirens, of Scylla and Charybdis, of the isle of Polyphemus, of the beautiful land of Nausicaa, these are what Moses Finley has called the ‘Never-Never Lands’ of the Odyssey (1999:51). The Homeric epics are indeed fictions, and part of the tradition of classical and contemporary commentary has been on whether the epic poem can tell us about the history from which it emerges and whether the history of the period can illuminate the epic poems for us. In many ways the Odyssey is a ‘psycho-­ historical’ rather than empirical document. For Finley: They were too civilized to believe that it was the god Poseidon who bodily prevented Odysseus from reaching his home in Ithaca, or that Zeus impregnated Leda in the guise of a swan, or that there were witches like Circe with the power to turn men into swine. These are symbolic tales, allegories, parables, perhaps dreamlike reflections of the unconscious, conveying elaborate ethical and psychological analyses and insights. (1999:22) One of the great contradictions of this is that these emerge exactly at that moment where the human interior is being illuminated and elaborated upon for the first time. For Richmond Lattimore, expanding upon his translation of Homer, the ‘world of the wanderings’ is essentially an assemblage of real and imaginary concepts and places. At the beginning and the end of the ­Odyssey lie real places; the rest are almost entirely mythical. In the journeys the only ‘real’ people that Odysseus encounters are those of his friends and family who he encounters in the land of the dead. The gods themselves seem to be departing, leaving only minor divinities like Circe and Calypso (Homer 2007:9). Lattimore even thinks of Homeric Ithaca as largely an imaginative production, its geography radically different from that of the real island. As Lattimore says: I am thus forced back to the belief that the places of the Wanderings are combinations. They are made by the imagination. They are in part sheer fancy; and sailors’ stories can involve monsters and enchanted places, as well as authentic report. But they probably contain bits and pieces of solid unassimilable fact. The lands of the Wanderings seem

110  Enlightenment: Odysseus to stand on the same footing as their inhabitants. These too are of this world and stature, rather than that of Olympos and the Olympians. Yet they are not quite of this world either. They are people endowed like no people we shall ever meet, and live in places where no one, since ­Odysseus, will ever go. (Homer 2007:15) This recombination of fancy and verifiability, of the self of the past and that of the present and the future, is about the elision of worlds, or what Jaynes would consider to be non-human and human consciousness. As Peter Jones has noted in his introduction to the epic of ‘return and recognition’ (Homer 1991:xxii), the poems reflect not the world of Odysseus himself or Troy or Mycenae but largely Homer’s own world and concepts. The obsession with that more archaic world is an intriguing question (Homer 1991:xxxvi). It may be that it was the nature of the Odyssean self and its emergence from utter darkness at the birth of humanity that intrigued the world of eighth-century Homer. From the humans who had been turned into pigs by Circe but whose minds remained human to the ‘mindless disembodied ghosts’ that O ­ dysseus encounters in Hades (Homer 1991:149, 173) these were experiences that would mark the notion of humanness in European civilisation: that there were multiple selves embodied within one human form and that those selves could transcend even death, and even wander from human body to human body (Hudson 2017b). At one point in this ‘fairyland’ Odysseus says to Athene: ‘And take your stand at my side, filling me with the spirit that dares all, as you did on the day when we pulled down Troy’s shining diadem of towers’ (Homer 1991:204). That partnership between human and god which persisted through all the battles of Troy would now be threatened by the new human selves arriving on the historical stage. Julian Jaynes has argued that, after the clash of the bicameral kingdoms in the Iliad, there is a huge fracture between that epic poem and the Odyssey in terms of the human mentalities they respectively address (1990:272). The persistence of an Odyssean cult in some parts of the Greek world pointed to the emergence of ideologies which focused on how conquered peoples would persist and survive (1990:272). Yet this was also a world in which the gods were becoming absent. For Jaynes: ‘In a word, Odysseus of the many devices is the hero of the new mentality of how to get along in a ruined and god-weakened world’ (1990:273). The Odyssey makes a virtue of guile and inventiveness: It is a journey of deviousness. It is the very discovery of guile, its invention and celebration. It sings of indirections and disguises and subterfuges, transformations and recognitions, drugs and forgetfulness, of people in other people’s places, of stories within stories, and men within men. (Jaynes 1990:273)

Enlightenment: Odysseus  111 Whilst the Iliad is a poem of empire and war, the Odyssey is a poem about defeats, and makes poetically visible the world after the collapse of ­Mycenae and the Dorian invasions. The collapse of the bicameral kingdoms was leading to the necessity of new human characteristics of intellect and introspection in order that human beings survive. The destruction was of one non-conscious human type and its ruling gods and its replacement by new kinds of humans whose gods were far more distant, existing only in texts or in temples, neither of which could be visited with ease. The gods return to a room or a box, out of reach and silent – a container, archive or ark. For Jaynes the disappearance of the gods created a kind of interregnum in which all kinds of monsters appeared: Seers and omens, these hallmarks of the breakdown of bicamerality, are more common. Semi-gods, de-humanizing witches, one-eyed giants, and sirens, reminiscent of the genii that we saw marked the breakdown of bicamerality in Assyrian bas-reliefs a few centuries earlier, are evidence of a profound alteration in mentality. And the huge Odysseyan themes of homeless wanderings, of kidnappings and enslavements, of things hidden, things regained, are surely echoes of the social breakdown following the Dorian invasions when subjective consciousness first took its mark. (1990:273) The arrival of subjective consciousness also initiates human morality for the first time, something which was noticeably absent in the Iliad and on the plains of Troy, where the warriors were simply ‘god-controlled puppets’ (Jaynes 1990:275). The Odyssey, Jaynes argues, is the fundamental story of human identity, and is indeed a voyage to and into the self as the bicameral mind is breaking down (1990:276). In a powerful passage Jaynes notes the emergence in a single human frame of the new human of the future, free from his gods: And as this series of stories sweeps from its lost hero sobbing on an alien shore in bicameral thrall to his beautiful goddess Calypso, winding through its world of demigods, testings, and deceits, to his defiant war whoops in a rival-routed home, from trance through disguise to recognition, from sea to land, east to west, defeat to prerogative, the whole long song is an odyssey toward subjective identity and its triumphant acknowledgement out of the hallucinatory enslavements of the past. From a will-less gigolo of a divinity to the gore-spattered lion on his own hearth, Odysseus becomes ‘Odysseus’. (1990:277) The journey towards introspective consciousness and subjective identity submerges the bicameral duality of god as controller and human as receiver into the multiple notion of the introspective self. The Homeric human can

112  Enlightenment: Odysseus account for her own interior; the selves which are of the past, present and future each metamorphosing into the complex holistic identity of a single being. The gods were no longer heard or seen. They had either gone silent or died (Jaynes 1990:320). And what of the gore-spattered lion on his own hearth? If Odysseus is the proto-bourgeois self of antiquity at that moment he announces his liberation from mythic structures and gods, he is also the agent who announces new types of destruction. If Achilles is the agent of unthinking violence and force, Odysseus is the agent of wiliness and revenge. Having navigated through the ‘fairyland’ of the ‘wanderings’, he returns once more to his home. There, through subterfuge and disguise, he wins back his home and wife from the suitors who had occupied his home and consumed its victuals in his absence. This is the Ithaca of contestation and disputation (Wace and Stubbings 1962:416) where the right to inhabit Penelope’s bed gives the right to the land of Ithaca (Vernant 1982:65–66). Ithaca becomes the original geography of the patriarchy. The suitors’ pursuit of Penelope had now failed, and it was time for patriarchal Odysseus to wreak revenge upon them and upon the slave girls of the house who had been their collaborators. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that Homer describes the death of the slave girls with some precision, almost as if the poet wants to memorialise their passing (1997:79–80). Unlike ­Odysseus, who kills them on a wire with no mercy, Homer is devising another reading already locked into Odysseus’s vengeance. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that: ‘Homer prevents us from forgetting the victims, and reveals the unutterable eternal agony of the few seconds in which the women struggle with death’ (1997:80). For Homer the mnemonic narrative of the death of the slave girls is a moment of consolation simply because it happened so long ago and perhaps cannot again. As Adorno and Horkheimer argue: ‘Homer offers consolation for the entanglement of prehistory, savagery, and culture by recourse to the once-upon-a-time device. Yet the epic is novel first, and fairy tale after’ (1997:80). The ‘once-upon-a-time’ device signals that this savagery would indeed happen time and time again. The repetition of brutality and murder of that once wrought by the enlightened, conscious Odysseus onwards would itself incorporate the darkness into enlightenment and intimate that savagery, far from being overcome, would be incorporated into its project. If, as Graves says, every encounter of the Odyssey was a metaphor for a death its hero avoided (1992:728), so the death of the slave girls was the final punishment against humanity for the survival of Odysseus. Yet it is a revenge not against Poseidon and the other gods who had deflected him away from his homeward path, but a revenge against the most obscure, unnamed, oppressed women slaves of the house. Graves’s words are stark: ‘The guilty maid-servants were summoned and set to cleanse the hall of blood with sponges and water; when they were done, Odysseus hanged them in a row’ (1992:734). Like Helen in her bower in Troy, we encounter Penelope

Enlightenment: Odysseus  113 at her weaving. In Penelope’s case this is not an iteration of war but of the shroud of Laertes. This is explicitly used as device to halt or alter time. As ­Christopher Tilley has noted on cloth metaphors and weaving: Homer’s description of Penelope weaving Laertes’s shroud by day and then unravelling it by night, seeking to halt time and not be forced to choose a suitor, is a powerful evocation of the richness of weaving metaphors in the production of symbolic statements. (1999:57) Margaret Atwood (2005), in her retelling of Penelope and the death of the slave girls, sees Penelope herself as haunted by their killing. In her introduction to the play The Penelopiad Atwood notes that: ‘The play you hold in your hands is the echo of an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo of an echo’ (2007:1). The male gaze upon Penelope is one of desire (Felson-Rubin 1994), and the gaze of Odysseus upon the slave girls contains both an eye to their enchantment and another to their butchery. At the beginning of human introspection the darkness and the murder that we saw with Achilles in a different form upon the plains of Troy persist in their power. In her introduction to the novel The Penelopiad itself Atwood notes the absence of Odysseus from his home. She questions that the tales he tells are true: ‘Odysseus is said to have spent half of these years fighting the Trojan War and the other half wandering around the Aegean Sea, trying to get home, enduring hardships, conquering or evading monsters, and sleeping with goddesses’ (2005:xix). Odysseus is a creature of ‘stratagems’ (2005:xix). Atwood begins with Penelope herself already dead and trying to uncover the history of the slave girls and their ghostly voices. She is in ‘this state of bonelessness, liplessness, breastlessness’ (2005:1). She is an apparition and the signals of her ghostly presence are difficult to fathom. As Penelope says: The difficulty is that I have no mouth through which I can speak. I can’t make myself understood, not in your world, the world of bodies, of tongues and fingers; and most of the time I have no listeners, not on your side of the river. Those of you who may catch the odd whisper, the odd squeak, so easily mistake my words for breezes rustling the dry reeds, for bats at twilight, for bad dreams. (Atwood 2005:4) Like all humans, Penelope was once made of ‘perishable flesh’ and her mortal bodily form has passed from the world. Like Arendt, Atwood’s Penelope sees natality as central to understanding power, repetition and violence: Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. Through

114  Enlightenment: Odysseus children, alliances were forged; through children, wrongs were avenged. To have a child was to set loose a force in the world. (2005:24) It is Odysseus’s own child who would welcome him back to Ithaca and destroy the slave girls of the house with him. She had heard the stories of his wanderings, but she was certain that Odysseus himself was still alive – his ghosts did not reach her and there were no signals back from the land of the dead (Atwood 2005:111). After their deaths Odysseus would persist into modernity, as would Penelope. He would achieve many future incarnations in other human frames (2005:187–189). But Mnemosyne would ensure that the social memory of the slave girls would persist against the murdering and abusing master of the house. It promises vengeance against the patriarchy which had destroyed them: We can see through all your disguises: the paths of day, the paths of darkness, whichever paths you take – we’re right behind you, following you like a trail of smoke, like a long tail, a tail made of girls, heavy as memory, light as air: twelve accusations, toes skimming the ground, hands tied behind our backs, tongues sticking out, eyes bulging, songs choked in our throats. (Atwood 2005:192) If the traverse of Achilles across the battlefield and of Odysseus across the ocean promise anything it is human mobility: a mobility of the interior and the exterior worlds. It dissolves the fixity of the self through plurality within and a set of souls that would move from body to body. The self is, as Cecilia Sjöholm has said: ‘always encroached upon and beset by the multiplicity of alterities through which it appears’ (2015:13). These alterities are acts of apparition, of assuming space and shape and talk and gesture (2015:13). These alterities are, as Cixous has said in her multiple readings of Ulysses, about naming and hybridity: Let us return to our characters on the front lines of departure. And to their names. Because all of this mythical and mystical adventure is closely linked to the question of the name one carries, of the importance carried by the proper name, of the force hidden in the name. Force of the name of D(a)edalus, beneficial and malefic force. And do not forget that the name has the power to survive, to outlive the person who carries it. (Cixous 1998:104) ­ aedalus The name, the trace, the ghost survives. Through Odysseus as with D we open up the world to a constant transformation and metempsychosis: ‘Through Daedalus, who steers from one extreme to the other, we thus have

Enlightenment: Odysseus  115 access to the passage, to the trans, to the crossing of borders, to the de-­ limitation of genuses-genders-genres and species, to construction and to ­deconstruction, to metamorphosis’ (Cixous 1998:105). We continue to traverse the plain and the sea with our apparitions in our interiors. We create the transhistorical precisely because these stories have transit as part of their modalities of existence and of proliferation.

7 Cosmos The classical gods

Introduction In this chapter we explore those very gods who whisper in the ear of O ­ dysseus or are embedded and embodied in the half-divine human frame of Achilles. We explore the ancient conception of the gods and what they might reveal about our own attempts to understand the world. We also think about the forays and contestations between gods and human beings, and how far these can be aesthetically represented and recomposed in successive generations. The schisms and fractures between humans, gods and animals are also addressed, including the permeable boundaries and moments of collision and the generation of divine and human forms. The idea of the ‘theomachy’ is also important as it becomes one contest (if not the final) between gods and humans as the latter try to dispel and overcome the gods by eliminating them, making them disappear or laughing at them. This abdication of ritual and attempt to kill the gods would have profound consequences for the h ­ uman sciences in early modernity and our societies where we can still see the shadows of gods all around us.

Contesting deities John Ferguson has argued that the Greek gods in the Homeric epics refracted earthly concerns. For Ferguson: Even in the Homeric poems we can trace an element of aspiration as well as reflection; this is particularly true of The Odyssey. The political organization of the gods … reflects the political organization of men, but it is enacted on a higher plane. (1975:11) This enaction upon the heady heights of Olympus was a sublimation of the ways that Homer and his contemporaries thought about the structure of the divine and the social world. The classical writer Menander once mocked  the clashing cymbals that humans used to prostitute the gods to

Cosmos: The classical gods  117 their will. He argued that this intervention in the divine was itself a fabrication and mockery of human beings (Menander and Theophrastus 1967:231). Yet, as Julian Jaynes has argued, the detritus of the divine continued beyond the collapse of the bicameral kingdoms. The temples and churches, and even the burning bush, became places that gods would speak from (1990:151). Even dead kings sometimes attained a kind of retrospective divinisation and continued their presence in new forms (1990:155). Gods continued to exist in streams and trees, but monotheism itself brought a god which was at once incredibly distant and also profoundly close. The bicameral objects of worship spoke the words of gods and enunciated and verbalised power. They were mnemonic devices which represented the congealed social memory of living and dead kings and gods (1990:167). Ghosts were simply the continued presence of the dead that were taking time, as ‘voices’, to fade. Their gradual disappearance came as an act of haunting (1990:163). In antiquity these mnemonic objects were often in the form of statues. As Jaynes says of the Mesopotamian deities: ‘The god himself was a statue. The statue was not of a god (as he would say) but the god himself’ (1990:179). The statue of the god was not a representation in the absence of the god but a signification of divine presence which continued in its incarnation in form. The inhabitation of the living god within the petrified body of stone hinted that geist or spirit was the nature of its interior, even when its exterior seemed mute and unmoving. The gods in their continued persistence corresponded with the borders of this form. The device is one that retains both the memory of the god and often its real, persisting being. These devices were also often the objects of both veneration and summoning as ­humans asked them for things: to mediate, legislate, grant. The ‘inanimate’ object was therefore exceedingly adamant, had agency and could act to do things. Indeed the power that the object offered to humans was that the divine power could accrue to the human through the human worship and placation of the device. The nature of the divine in the classical world is of course central to Greek tragedy and the self-understanding of humans specifically in the struggles between the idea of a human earth and a divine cosmos (see Cauvin 2000; Parker 1997, 1999). But what was critical about the gods and their relationship to human beings was not just about intervention (the gods whispering to Achilles on the battlefield) but about their indifference. Indeed this indifference was part of the fracture between humans and gods. As Oliver Taplin has said of the Homeric gods: ‘For the gods there are no crucial ­turning-points in past or future; their life is diluted by immortality’ (1986:57). The human multitude of leaves, passing within a season, was largely irrelevant to the immortal gods. Very few gods continued to be born, but humans were born and reborn and died time and time again. If anything the human mortal was a source of amusement to the gods who could not grow old or die. As E.F. Watling has said of the gods of Sophocles, there were multiple types and distinctions of god and the divine. The supreme ‘god’ of legislation and

118  Cosmos: The classical gods judgement was represented by Zeus, the second order of anthropomorphic entities who sometimes conversed with humans, specific gods representing aspects of nature and a large and ‘indeterminate’ set of ‘nameless powers, mostly of evil’ (Sophocles 1947:18–19). Sometimes the gods in Sophocles would become distant or inapparent: ‘bird-lore and god-craft all were silent’ (1947:38). Often the birds themselves, as Pollard argues in his analysis of birds in Greek culture, were seen as the emissaries of the gods: their embassy in animal form (1977:116). Birds were often thought of as divine or even, as in the hybrid Sirens, as representing the souls of the dead (1977:17). Those closest to the divine and the dead, like Cassandra, were often represented as swallows (1977:32). The deities appeared in bird form precisely because their real visualisation was too terrifying. As Pollard argues: It is notable that the gods rarely appear in their own shape in Homer, except when consorting with one another. Generally speaking the gods were too awful to reveal themselves direct to men and even Achilles, who was partly divine, was appalled by Athena’s visible presence. (1977:159) Robert Graves remained intrigued as to why Zeus and Themis had intervened in and planned the war against Troy. Was it to make Helen famous in the fracture between Europe and Asia or to ‘exalt the race of the demi-gods’ or simply to commit genocide against the multitude of human beings on the earth? (1992:631). For Roberto Calasso, in his magisterial analysis of the ancient world and its impact on the modern, the nature of the gods become part of new ways that humans would define themselves against and with the deities. For Calasso: In the solitude of the primordial world, the affairs of the gods took place on an empty stage, with no watching eyes to mirror them. There was a rustling, but no clamor of voices. Then, from a certain point on (but at what point? And why?), the backdrop began to flicker, the air was invaded by a golden sprinkling of new beings, the shrill, high-pitched cry of scores of raised voices. Dactyls, Curetes, Corybants, Telchines, Silens, Cabiri, Satyrs, Maenads, Bacchants, Lenaeans, Thyiads, Bassarides, Mimallones, Naiads, Nymphs, Titires: who were all these beings? To evoke one of their names is to evoke them all. They are the helpers, ministers, guardians, nurses, tutors, and spectators of the gods. The metamorphic vortex is placated; once surrounded by this noisy and devoted crowd, the gods agree to settle down into their familiar forms. Sometimes that crowd will appear as a pack of murderers, sometimes as an assembly of craftsmen, sometimes as a dance troupe, sometimes as a herd of beasts. That worshipping crowd was the first community, the first group, the first entity in which one name was used for everybody. We don’t even know whether they are gods, daímones, or human beings.

Cosmos: The classical gods  119 But what is it that unites them, what makes them a single group, even when different and distant from one another? They are the initiated, the ones who have seen. (1993:302) The gods needed an audience of both lesser gods and eventually of human beings to act as their witness, their chorus. The ‘primordial world’ was one of darkness and solitude for the greater gods. They began to surround themselves with a new multitude of deities. This ‘metamorphic vortex’ is part of new forms of the social, a multitude, a plurality of entities rather than just a single being. These entities, like the humans who see the gods after this, are the ones who have seen and observe the divine. Ultimately these greater and lesser entities would be dispelled by their own human audiences and visitants seeking their own deification through the human conquest of nature (see Hudson 2017c). The attempt by the Enlightenment and modernity to create universal positions of observation, to move between the earth and the cosmos in terms of the abstract and the concrete, to utterly transform and transcend nature, was an attempt to accrue to human beings the powers of gods. As far back as Greek antiquity we can see these aspirations to divinity, if only for specific human beings like emperors and kings. The great family of the Caesars were the descendants of divines (claiming descent from Venus), and were incipient gods in their impact on the social and natural world. Ultimately some of them would become actual gods (Suetonius 1957:11). Later emperors like Vespasian would mock their automatic deification upon death. ­Suetonius recalled the emperor’s death bed joke: ‘Dear me! I must be turning into a god’ (1957:285). Claude Lévi-Strauss himself once began to write a play on the transition of human emperors into gods, tentatively titled ‘The ­Apotheosis of ­ uman Augustus’ (Wilcken 2010:95). In some ways it was an easy leap from h into divine as the gods themselves were, as Moses Finley argued, already humanised or created in the mirror of humans. As Finley notes: The humanization of the gods was a step of astonishing boldness. To picture supernatural beings not as vague, formless spirits, or as monstrous shapes, half bird, half animal, for instance, but as men and women, with human organs and human passions demanded the greatest audacity and pride in one’s own humanity. (1999:17) These metamorphoses were of course common in the mythic structures of antiquity. Gods turned into other beings, as well as vice versa. Ovid saw his great poem of metamorphosis as a tale of bodies changing qualitatively into other bodies. Sometimes only bodies changed; sometimes it was the entire nature of the being. Often the metamorphosis was a disguise; at other times the entity was entirely transformed in soul and form (Ovid 1955:31).

120  Cosmos: The classical gods The interactions and transformations that Ovid described included ­Pentheus and the Bacchae (1955:100–101) and the many metamorphoses of Achilles (1955:308–309). Ovid also famously describes the emergence of the shade of Achilles out of his insubstantial form once again into material entity upon the plain of Troy, emerging literally out of a gaping hell (1955:322). But Ovid also describes the metamorphosis of other natures, including the emergence and submergence of strata and islands, of insects self-generating out of dead carcases and of the transmigration of souls (1955:372–376). Ultimately Ovid would observe, almost like a god, the metamorphosis of entire civilisations: ‘Now Sparta is a tract of worthless land, lofty Mycenae has fallen, what but a name is Oedipus’ city, Thebes? What remains of Pandion’s Athens but ­ hantoms, and a name?’ (1955:375). Yet their kings remained as formless p would often return as divines and semi-divines in the civilisations and cities that were to come.

Caligula the god, Alexander the god Robert Graves in Claudius the God recounts the incipient divinisation of Caligula. Caligula descends into madness and retreats into his room to complete the metamorphosis. Claudius is one of the first to visit the new deity who has convinced himself that his entire being has changed. Claudius, frightened for his life that the new ‘god’ might kill him in a murderous rage, panders to the emperor. He notes that Caligula has the pallor of a god and the wisdom, and prostrates himself before the divine (Graves ­1986:332–334). Perhaps the most powerful rendition of the divine metamorphosis of Caligula is that by Albert Camus, who relates the emperor’s madness both to the totalitarianism that Camus had endured and fought against and also to the nature of human possibility. At the beginning of Camus’s play Caligula is beginning to ‘depopulate’ his entire world of other human beings (1965:22). Caligula is the archetype of a god/man who wants to tamper with and transform nature and other human beings, and in doing so become godlike within the confines of the earth: ‘I am taking over a kingdom where the impossible is king’ (1965:42). As one of his subsequent assassins would say, ‘He is converting his philosophy into corpses’ (1965:47). The solitary Caligula can only find comfort in the dead, and in the dead who he has specifically killed. They are his companions, the congealed substance of his past which is constantly with him in this ‘ghoul-haunted wilderness of mine’ (1965:62–63). Through theatre and dance he entertains himself and expresses his divinity even as he is about to destroy the very audience that is watching his tableau (1965:83–84). There is an absolute philosophical logic to his destruction of lesser beings: When I don’t kill I feel alone. The living don’t suffice to people my world and dispel my boredom. I have an impression of an enormous void when you and the others are here, and my eyes see nothing but empty air.

Cosmos: The classical gods  121 No, I’m at ease only in the company of my dead … Only the dead are real. They are of my kind. I see them waiting for me, straining towards me. And I have long talks with this man or that, who screamed to me for mercy and whose tongue I had cut out. (Camus 1965:92–93) Enlightenment only comes for Caligula in the solitude of his divinity. As he becomes more godlike the more he creates solitude by destroying those around him and adding them to the massed ranks of the dead (Camus 1965:96). As he is being murdered in the palace, and before the proclamation of Claudius as the new emperor (and subsequently god), Caligula shouts out that he is still alive. But is this as a man or as a god? Does his divinity begin here as his human body is destroyed? (1965:97). What of the statues that Caligula had made to express his divinity? Claudius had them replaced or destroyed. The ‘meaning’ of Caligula has often, for commentators, rested upon the kinds of philosophy that have been ascribed to him. There is the ­Nietzschean Caligula (Arnold 1973) and the de Sadean hero where Caligula is the ‘figurative equivalent of a system of thought’ in the former’s denunciation of Christianity (Larson 2013:360). Camus’s Caligula has also been perceived as a human who challenged the very definition of death and dying (Scherr 2014). Sophie Bastien, in her magisterial work on Camus and Caligula, has made the equivalence between Caligula and Dionysos as gods (2006:128). Yet John Pollini has convincingly argued that these are, in some ways, misreadings of Caligula and that his ‘insanity’ is a misperception (2012:377–378). Pollini argues for a dramaturgical approach to Caligula and that his ‘impersonations’ of gods such as Zeus be perceived as part of his thespian tableaus (2012:378–379). Often, Pollini argues, the assault against Caligula is part of a monotheistic bias against the plurality of divine worship, and that there is no real evidence that Caligula claimed to be a living god outside of the discourses of his enemies and castigators after his death (2012:379–380). The dual nature of Caligula as a combination of human and divine was distorted by later writers who used the whole question of divinity as a topos for ‘evil tyrants’ (Pollini 2012:382). Indeed Caligula’s aspiration to set his own statue up in the holy of holies in the temple of Jerusalem may have been a logical and strategic act of intimidation against the Jewish people (2012:390). The concept that the statuesque is present with the numen of Caligula is discussed by Pollini (2012:385–386). The incarnation in the object of divinity was something which was beyond representation. These were the real presences that could be worshipped in the form of the object. The question of whether an emperor like Augustus could possess numen rather than be divine has been debated specifically as he is deified later (Fishwick 1969, 1970), whereas others see the role of animism and pre-animism in the incarnation of spirits and ghosts within objects (Rose 1935).

122  Cosmos: The classical gods In some ways it is the will to deification personified by Alexander the Great that fully exemplifies the numinous faculties of the semi-divine. Indeed the multiple image of Alexander has seen an incarnation of both unearthly divinity and earthly power in sculpture (Whitley 2001:415–416). Andrew Stewart (1994) has argued that the physiognomic power of his dispersed images mobilises an ‘idea’ of Alexander for a multiplicity of ends and places. In Mary Renault’s analysis of the ‘nature’ of Alexander she sees his moment and manner of death, as well as the deposition of the body, as an unsurpassed event in human history (2001:10). Renault notes the ways in which biographers of Alexander like Curtius are situated within both the history of Alexander and in the wake of the totalitarian Caligula. For Renault: ‘The date most favoured for Curtius is just after the dreadful Caligula, one of whose little conceits was dressing as Alexander. A deified Macedonian, three centuries safely dead, was a propagandist’s gift for a tyrannic proto-Caesar’ (2001:16). The model of Alexander that was offered was of someone who began as a human and became a divine through his own will and reckoning. Caligula would use this numinous model to fully incarnate his own self as a divine. Like Alexander, he became obsessed with his family lineage in order to engineer and fabricate divine descent from Augustus and divines before that. For Alexander himself his lineage was unsurpassed, tracing origins to both Achilles and the Trojans, and ultimately to Zeus himself. As Renault notes: In calm interludes of this life he was taught, like all high-born children, his ancestry. It went back on both sides to Zeus; on his mother’s, there was the heroic strain of Achilles, but also the royal blood of Troy. He was brought up to honour both sides in that great war; to treat neither with contempt or hate. (2001:30) The replication of the mythic structures of Troy was an obsession for ­ lexander. He was proud of his Achillean ancestry, and apparently kept A a copy of the Iliad under his pillow (Renault 2001:34). Plutarch also noted that Alexander replicated the heroism of the war by stripping and ceremonially racing around the burial mound of Achilles before sacrificing upon it (Renault 2001:83). Arrian notes that he laid a wreath upon the tomb of Achilles and aspired to emulate his hero as he moved further into the Asian continent as if he was subduing new Troys (1958:36). As he first entered Asia, Arrian notes the commemorations of Alexander: Once ashore, he travelled inland to Troy and offered sacrifice to ­Athena, patron goddess of the city; here he made a gift of his armour to the temple, and took in exchange, from where they were hung on the temple walls, some weapons which were still preserved from the Trojan war.

Cosmos: The classical gods  123 These are supposed to have been carried before him by his bodyguard when he went into battle. (1958:36) The reversion to the heroes of the Trojan war were part of Alexander’s own divinisation and linked, like Caligula’s, to the warrant and affordance offered by achieving divine ancestorship. Divinity was both something to be born into and acquired, to achieve and often to shed. The deities were enmeshed in the social and earthly powers of colonisation, empire and the achievement of totalitarianism and the suppression of dissent: a dissent which was pulverised because it stood against divine legislation and not just human ambition.

Gods and the divine Herbert Jennings Rose has also explored both the numen and the idea of the daimon. The notion of the daimon is that of a ‘superhuman’ being rather than a god or an ‘intermediate, semi-divine’ person. It is also connected with the idea of agency, remembrance and endurance (Rose 1935:243). This notion of the semi-divine, neither god nor human, entails a being which has a perception and understanding of the past. The gods themselves often walk with and amongst humans. Cameron and Long have documented the discourse of Synesius, who witnessed gods literally sanctifying the new ­Egyptian king. Osiris made an appearance among humans: ‘At last, not through screens, nor yet by any of the usual signs, the gods themselves proclaim the king, and the populace hears the proclamation handed down from the gods’ (1993:347). Cameron and Long document the notion of divine intervention amongst Synesius and other writers: How irresistible a thing is the wisdom of god! No weapon is mighty nor mind ingenious unless god stands by it! And so it is that before now men have waged war against themselves. It seems to me an excellent observation that man is god’s plaything, and with his affairs god ever jests and gambles. I think Homer was the first of the Greeks to understand this. (1993:385) The playing with mortals who have little understanding is often about their ‘abduction and metamorphosis’, as Roberto Calasso has noted (1993:5). In the Linear B tablets, Calasso argues that many names of gods were included, only some of which went on to inhabit Mount Olympus. The others disappeared (1993:10). The question of how creatures metamorphosed intrigued the ancients. As well as gods and humans, the process of metamorphosis transformed objects and generated monsters (1993:13). Goddesses like Ariadne died and were reborn many times: ‘That stone in Argos, that constellation in the sky, that hanging corpse, that death by childbirth, that

124  Cosmos: The classical gods girl with an arrow through her breast: Ariadne was all of this’ (1993:23). But, as Calasso argues, the form that the Olympian gods would take most often was that of the human. They disguised themselves as humans in the human world and walked amongst them (1993:54). These new ‘humanised’ gods of Olympus used humans for their own pleasure: ‘The earth was there for raids, whims, intrigues, experiments’ (1993:89). Aside from inscriptions upon tablets and memorialisations in the later poetry of Homer, representational art was unknown in Dark Age Greece (Coldstream 1977:17). Yet the gods often had a remarkable persistence, even after the destruction of Mycenae and the Dorian invasions (1977:327). Some gods persisted and survived, and would ultimately become incarnated in the stasis of the sculpture: their shadows trapped as numen in the marble. These numinous entities were enshrined in animistic carvings like the Roman household gods of Lares and Penates. They were, as Barrow has argued: ‘vague powers, now becoming formless deities’ (1949:14–15). It was Cicero who later reflected most obstinately on what these gods and their representations actually were. He saw the nature of the gods as a question which, however ‘dark’ and difficult, could illustrate much about the human condition and the classical human mind. Cicero notes the different theories about the multiple shapes in which the gods appear, about their habitations and the nature of their life and existence. Indeed Cicero sees this as a central philosophical question (1972:69). He noted that the gods could wax and wane, but he also recognised that they could potentially be the embodiment of ‘mute and inanimate forces’ (1972:80, 85). The gods could be bodiless or wrapped in human form, and Cicero notes the Epicurean notion that the gods were contrived notions of human beings or the personifications of dead human beings (1972:86). Cicero looked back to the poetics of divinity and noted their discourse on the gods: who present us with gods afire with rage or mad with lust, and make us the spectators of their wars, their battles, their violence and wounds; of their hates, quarrels, altercations; and also of their births and deaths, their complaints and lamentations, their lusts erupting into excess of every kind, adultery, captivity, and intercourse with human beings, so that mortals may have gods for parents. (1972:87) The nature of the gods was in form similar to human beings. They shared similar emotional impulses and committed acts of savagery like human beings. If some, like Epicurus, saw the gods as the production of humans and their mirror still others, like Cotta, saw that men were the mirror of the gods and produced by them (Cicero 1972:106). But for Cicero the gods were explicable only if we could understand them as comparable to human beings. The way that humans envisioned gods was always in human form and human bodies, and this is how they manifested themselves to humans

Cosmos: The classical gods  125 (1972:89). A critical difference, however, lay in the universal insights of the god whose immortality gave it a unique insight into the human world and the world of nature: ‘Who would not fear a god who foresees everything, ponders everything, notices everything? A god who makes everything his own concern, a curious god, a universal busybody?’ (1972:91–92). Yet these gods were also creators who made human beings as objects of contemplation and reflection of a divinely ordained universe (1972:138). Of course this invite to admiration would become all the more powerful as paganism began to be eclipsed by monotheism.

Ghost, soul, spirit, anima In a remarkable section of his work on the imaginary and the social, Cornelius Castoriadis has tried to account for what I have called elsewhere the ‘genealogy of ghosts’ and the productive logic of centaurs (Hudson 2017a, 2017b). The mythical entity – whether animal, human or god, or a hybrid version of each – is at first, for Castoriadis, the ‘word’ that names it. This reference is to the imaginary being, and one which can be defined either by its image or by the word. Yet Castoriadis argues that the imaginary being is not just a word or an image, but refers to a ‘reality’ or ‘lived being’ because at various times in history cultures live amongst, worship or see the entity which is defined in words or images. The concept or object of the entity is an existent for those cultures. Gods, for example, are not just a word or an image, but are seen by those cultures to have a real ‘presence’. Further, Castoriadis argues that we can only grasp the entity in terms of its consequences, results and derivatives: the traces it leaves behind in the world. It may be that we see the sculptural rendition of gods and centaurs as these derivatives from cultures who lived the real existence of these beings. For Castoriadis: How can we grasp God, as an imaginary signification, except on the basis of the shadows (Abschattungen) projected onto the effective social action of a people – but, at the same time, how could we overlook that, just like the thing perceived, he is the condition for the possibility of an inexhaustible series of such shadows, but, unlike the thing perceived, he is never given ‘in person’? (1987:141–142) This non-personification and refusal of tangible embodiment becomes the condition for the proliferation of these deities. They are not rooted to single bodies or single places. They are protean beings of metamorphosis. As George Thomson notes, they can also inhabit human frames temporarily. Being able to speak prophecies is a function of the possession of a human frame by a divine entity (1949:460). The deities inhabit human frames to speak power and stride amongst humans, like Bacchus amongst the ­Maenads. Thompson noted this in the cremated Homeric heroes of Achilles

126  Cosmos: The classical gods and others. These entities survived as shadows long after their material frames had been dispersed. They could even, in their dispersal, become deified. This would ultimately signal a cultural shift towards the eternal and the mystical. As Thomson argues: In the ideology of cremation the dead man survives merely as a disembodied spirit. The Homeric concept of the soul as a ghost or shadow of the living person was a step on the road to Orphic mysticism, in which the soul was treated as immaterial and immortal. (1949:504) These entities that survived into the cultures of the future and became part of the collective sense of human identity might also begin to delineate something else. Rather than shadows projected onto history by dead, dispersed heroes or witnessing the continuing presence of gods, these entities may be ‘archetypal’ forms generated by and persisting through the collective unconscious. Carl Jung has examined the analogies of the archetype to explain psychology and psychological sedimentation, including the solar, lunar, meteorological and vegetal (1991:5–6). For Jung the mythological structure of nature is a projection of the interior human world and its obsession, and its analogies are a way of exteriorising inner human forces and dramas. As Jung notes: All the mythologized processes of nature, such as summer and winter, the phases of the moon, the rainy seasons, and so forth, are in no sense allegories of these objective occurrences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man’s consciousness by way of projection – that is, mirrored in the events of nature. The projection is so fundamental that it has taken several thousand years of civilization to detach it in some measure from its outer object. (1991:6) The anima, the beings that are summoned as a natural archetype from the human unconscious, have lain there for an age (Jung 1991:25–27). It is an abbreviature of our common, sedimented human past. It emerges and reemerges as a motif because we have a limited set of archetypes present in our human interior. When we see the dispersed remnants of human bodies being swept away we also see in some cases the continuation of that being long past its inhabitation in a material body. On the other hand, human beings do not persist like gods. They have no immortality. It is their insubstantial shades that continue in the underworld. Gods, by contrast, have no such mortality. Their difference to the human lies in the fact that, unlike the human leaves, they persist. This is noted by Hannah Arendt:

Cosmos: The classical gods  127 Immortality means endurance in time, deathless life on this earth and in this world as it was given, according to Greek understanding, to nature and the Olympian gods. Against this background of nature’s ­ever-recurring life and the gods’ deathless and ageless lives stood m ­ ortal men, the only mortals in an immortal but not eternal universe, confronted with the immortal lives of their gods but not under the rule of an eternal God. (1998:18) Confronted by a nature which ceaselessly recurs and repeats, and by gods who persist long beyond the human time-span, human beings are simply mortal. They eventually come to death or stand to meet it, as did Hector facing Achilles. But human beings are also, for Arendt, different to animals. Animals have a sense of immortality because as units they are inseparable from their species. Their immortality as a species is because they procreate the same forms and entities time and time again. Only humans are mortal. It is the key marker of human existence. They have sentience and a sense of subjective, individual life. They have the consciousness of their own life and their own death. For Arendt: The mortality of men lies in the fact that individual life, with a recognizable life-story from birth to death, rises out of biological life. This individual life is distinguished from all other things by the rectilinear course of its movement, which, so to speak, cuts through the circular movement of biological life. This is mortality: to move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order. (1998:18–19) The tragedy for Arendt is not mortality but natality: that human beings are brought to birth time and time again and relearn and repeat in their rectilinear biographical existences things inherited from the past. The recurrence and circularity of mythological motifs, of gods, of entities in human culture is an attempt then to break out of the rectilinear and restore the past, the immortal and the enduring in successive human frames. Once brought to birth the gods do not die. They remember everything and do not have to relearn in each successive generation of being. They are part of a divine cosmos within which humans and gods coexist in distinctive ways.

The tiered cosmos David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce have developed the idea of the tiered cosmos by attempting to understand the origin of divinity in the Neolithic mind (2005) and previously in Lewis-Williams’s work on the revolution in Palaeolithic consciousness (2002). Lewis-Williams and Pearce

128  Cosmos: The classical gods self-consciously use mining analogies in order to elucidate their methodology, seeing their work as excavating seams rather than mapping the totality of social forms and human cultures. They argue that: We are therefore in some ways like miners, rather than geologists. Miners seek out the richest seams; there is no point in wasting time on uneconomic seams with only traces of the desired coal or precious metal. Geologists, on the other hand, study all the rocks and formations in their chosen region. (Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2005:7) This excavatory, archaeological metaphor explores ethnographic instances as illustrations of wider social and religious forces (Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2005:9). Lewis-Williams and Pearce’s prior work in consciousness has allowed them understand the kinds of sedimented evidences (literally in the archaeological record) that point to certain kinds of social strategies present in the period they are studying. They note that this allows them to observe strategies in the layers even when they may never have encountered those phenomena in their society or in other social formations. This is because they have a universalist notion of human consciousness and are able to observe persisting human cognitive traits in the archaeological record (2005:9–10). This has some importance in terms of what cognitive phenomena they see embedded in the archaeology. Indeed what they see is the ‘chthonic realm’ of divinity and deities literally embedded in the Neolithic floors of human habitation (Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2005:11). By thinking through the question of cognition and artefact they have developed their notion of the emergence of the ‘tiered cosmos’ of the human social world. This cosmos is one of symbolic hierarchy between humans, kings and gods. It is a world of meaning and negotiation rather than a cosmos cognitively compelled: ­‘Human beings are not automatons, slaves to their neural pathways’ (2005:41). But their social formations are embedded in imaginaries of dreaming and hallucination. Like the Achilles of Julian Jaynes, the gods are whispering in their ears. Cognitive delusions such as micropsia and ­macropsia, where we see things either very small or very large (2005:46), are indeed reminiscent of the processes of specificity and abstraction that we observe in the Bronze Age-situated poems of Homer, where the gods look down from the vast distances of Olympus onto the plains of Troy. For Lewis-Williams and Pearce the realm of the spirits and deities is embedded cognitively in human beings: hence the delusory and hallucinatory visions of gods. The revolution in the Neolithic mind is one of meaning and the emergence of interpretive cosmologies where the delusions were put in a hierarchical and devotional form as part of a new ‘social dispensation’ (2005:59). The later flights of Hermes, the descent into Hades by Odysseus, the horror of the warriors turned into pigs by Circe are reminiscent of this

Cosmos: The classical gods  129 neurological transformation that took place in the Neolithic. As Lewis-­ Williams and Pearce note: The problem of how the spirit realms can be spatially removed and, at the same time, immanent in the material world is resolved by a further understanding of human neurology. Flight and tunnel-travel, to be sure, suggest space, but the sensations of flight and underground journeys are experienced within the brain, that is, inside one’s head. Then, too, hallucinations, as we have seen, are frequently projected onto a person’s immediate environment – outside of one’s head; hallucinations (perhaps of spirit beings and animals) are therefore also part of this world. (2005:69) Like Jung, who reads the world of nature as a projection of the inner human drama, so the Neolithic mind projects beyond its mind its interior reflections and hallucinations. In the same way that Castoriadis visualises the absent but persisting entity, so the Neolithic mind begins to visualise not just beings but an entire cosmological structure. The structure itself is a product of and propelled by the interior vision within the human mind. It begins to structure the world out there in a meaningful cosmology as the delusions become exteriorised. It creates levels and hierarchies and places beings such as gods, humans and animals in various habitations within the tiers. This is a process of ‘seeing’ rather than listening, and so quite different from Jaynes and his whispering gods. It allows for the passage of ‘seers’ through the different levels of the cosmos, with social power accruing to those who can make these journeys. These passages are enwrapped in cognitive human universals (Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2005:69–70). They are literally the passages through the intermundia of Marx and ­Epicurus, and still persist in our ways of understanding our cosmology through abstract thought and observation. Fundamentally this traverse is between the worlds of life and of death and between the mortal and the immortal world: hence the persistence of the cult of the dead in human societies. For Lewis-Williams and Pearce: ‘We suggest that their view of the cosmos entailed multiple stages of post-mortem existence that were lived out in multiple cosmological levels analogous to those we find in small-scale societies worldwide’ (2005:79). The hierarchies of the living and the dead are parallel and are in coexistence (2005:79; see also Hudson 2000, 2002). The Palaeolithic dead were a constant presence, as Lewis-Williams and Pearce argue: The dead, frequently provided with items from the world of the living, were thus on the threshold of the nether tier of the cosmos; they were in a mediatory position, neither completely absorbed into the lower tier or tiers of the cosmos nor still part of everyday life. (2005:85)

130  Cosmos: The classical gods Ultimately the cosmos would be ordered into new sacred buildings and spaces and the dead separated out from human habitations (Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2005:88–89). New forms of sacrifice would emerge that reflected both social power and the expression of interior impulses of theocratic delusion. The sacrificers literally ‘control “death” as cosmological tradition’ between worlds (2005:127). These transitional points between the worlds were often guarded by the spirit animals of the ‘vertical axis mundi’ (2005:145). These ‘ur-forms’ are essentially neurological before becoming mythological (2005:160). As Lewis-Williams and Pearce argue: ‘If Neolithic people cried from the depths, they did so from the deep tiers of their cosmos and from the depths of their minds – and the difference between the two was negligible’ (2005:280). These transitions between worlds can be seen in later Bronze Age ­Denmark. As P.V. Glob remarks on the Himmerland wings: A find in a cremation grave in Himmerland suggests that the survivors, in their concern for the dead, sought to assist this celestial flight. Mixed with the burnt bones of a young person were those of the wings of at least six jackdaws and two crows, as well as two crows’ feet. We cannot doubt the intention behind the laying of so many wings on the pyre: the twelve small wings and four large ones were to bear his soul safely to the land of the dead. (1973:163) But, as we have found, the land of the dead lies in our interior. Steven Mithen has examined the relationship between cognition, animality and objects. He argues: By combining, say, what one knows about people with what one knows about animals one can imagine an entity that is part human and part animal … Similarly, by combining what one knows about people with what one knows about physical objects, one can create ideas of beings that can live for ever (like rocks), walk on water (like a floating branch), or are invisible (like the air we breathe) … But when such beings cannot be seen, except perhaps during hallucinations, how should one communicate with them? The problem is not only that they can be neither seen nor heard, but that they remain as vaguely defined entities because they do not relate to any evolved part of the human mind, such as the categories of ‘human’, ‘animal’, or even simply ‘living being’. On the other hand, supernatural beings are usually believed to have mind-reading powers – they know what we and everyone else think; they have been described by the anthropologist Pascal Boyer as ‘complete strategic agents’. Accordingly, there is no need to communicate with them by language, the primary role of which is the transmission of information. Music, however, is ideal. (Mithen 2005: 271–272)

Cosmos: The classical gods  131 We shall examine the ways in which agency is made captive within the object in the next chapter; but it may be that the reason for the encapsulation is that gods disperse, decompose or go away, and that making them present within objects or animals somehow retains their power. This process of decomposition began in the ‘theomachy’ of the ancient world.

The decomposition of the gods The radical humanisation of the gods in the ancient world was, as we have seen, a step towards banishing the gods altogether in a journey towards incipient human divinisation. Michel Foucault has questioned this directly by displacing this humanism and its autonomy and reaffirming that it has little chance of replicating the deities it has replaced. He notes: Discourse is not life: its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don’t imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he. (Foucault 1972:211) In some ways this is a comment on Nietzsche and the idea of ‘divine decomposition’. In the tableau that Nietzsche presents a madman flies through the city seeking God. But is God lost or in hiding or emigrated, the people of the city ask? The madman replies that human beings have killed him and this has challenged the whole nature of the cosmos. The divine is dead and decomposes. The murderous deicide of the people intimates the greatness of the deed and intimates incipient deification of humans themselves. The churches are no longer the place of the living God, but his tomb (Nietzsche 2001:181–182). This process of decomposition emerges in classical antiquity and continues still. Tim Whitmarsh (2014), in examining the Sisyphus motif, has argued for the emergence of an atheist aesthetic in the classical world. His remarkable monograph on the advent of atheism in antiquity has transformed our understanding of belief in the ancient world. He argues first and foremost for the idea that the philosophical questions about divinity that emerged first in ancient Greece still continue to obsess us. Indeed what he calls the ‘modernist mythology’ of atheism as a modern invention has to be challenged and overturned. The ‘post-Enlightenment West’ is not exceptional in its embracing of anti-theism (Whitmarsh 2016:4–5). Indeed Whitmarsh argues that we must ‘acknowledge the crucial role of Greco-Roman thought in the shaping of Western secular modernity’ (2016:12). The ancient world could be both hostile and punitive towards atheism, so Whitmarsh’s project to elucidate its atheism is often a search to uncover the history from below of an idea in philosophical texts. The later monotheistic idea that the son of God could be born into the world was remarkable: ‘How can a god be born into human flesh? How can

132  Cosmos: The classical gods a deity be of this world?’ (Whitmarsh 2016:23). But of course this happened in parallel ways with the Olympian gods. They could appear to humans in human form even though they resided as spirit in the temples dedicated to them, and they could even procreate with humans as well as fight with them (2016:23). Indeed fighting is of the essence of the Olympian gods – they are always fighting in wars and always facing crises (2016:42). Yet even though they were still seen to reside in the temples and even walk among human beings, the poetics of the ancient world, and the very humanisation of the gods, laid the way for their disappearance. As Whitmarsh argues: atheism was a narrative possibility within Greek myth. A world without gods could be imagined. The possibility that the Olympian gods might cease to exist (or at least to hold power over the cosmos, which amounts to the same thing) was built into the Greeks’ story-world’. (2016:43) The gods could indeed have some ephemerality rather than immortality. The concept of theomachy, the battle between human and god, was most obvious in the struggles of Pentheus against Dionysos and the Bacchae; and in many ways it was wrapped in the compulsion for humans themselves to aspire to divinity (Whitmarsh 2016:44–45). It was not necessarily blasphemous to want the divinisation of humans, and neither was it the antithesis to divinity. It was replication and usurpation (2016:45, 51). There was a kind of class struggle between humans and gods around which humans would be invested as divines post-mortally or around which humans would persist as gods into the future, having been turned at some point into deities. Whitmarsh points to the Sisyphus myth as exemplifying that moment which erases the dividing line between mortality and immortality and human and deity (2016:48). This moment of transition and struggle is a revolutionary one, not just for the class system of human and divine but also for human thought. For Whitmarsh: Although they end up reaffirming the power of the gods by showing them beating down the upstart humans who challenge them, theomachies also explore (albeit temporarily and provisionally) the possibility that the divine order might be overthrown and that humans could live self-sufficiently, without the gods. (2016:51) The humans who were most likely to become gods either in their lifetime or after death were kings. What Whitmarsh calls the ‘anthropoid deities’ (2016:53) were flexible and opaque beings, and indeed the concept of the ‘god’ was notoriously difficult to define (2016:59, 148). What Whitmarsh calls the ‘deification of dead kings’ was based on a cultural problem about whether the king was actually divine or just ‘god-like’ (2016:148–149). Indeed

Cosmos: The classical gods  133 he argues that ‘Kings are not gods: they die’ (2016:148). The question of incipient deification was an important meme rather than ‘mytheme’ of the Greek world (2016:155). It was almost expected of kings to deify themselves or be deified by others: Homeric poetics initiated this notion. But it is in ­Epicurean philosophy rather than Greek kingship that we see the displacement of the gods, if not their death. Indeed Epicurus refutes atheism by arguing that if we see the deities and mythical beings in dreams then they must somehow be existents (Whitmarsh 2016:174–175). Indeed to Epicurus the gods can be perceived by mind alone and not the empirical senses (2016:175). They are imaginaries of the divine, and ultimately their divorce from the empirical world of observation is what will signal their collapse. But, unlike in the monotheistic religions, the divine was never ultimately a social force of conquest and subjugation. For Whitmarsh: In the worlds of archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Greece, religion was never a driver of historical events. No war was ever fought for the sake of a god, no empire was expanded in the name of proselytization, no foe was crushed for believing in the wrong god. (2016:193) But many wars were fought by humans so that they themselves would become gods.

Gods and humans in the classical theatre There is some dispute about whether Aeschylus did actually write his play on Prometheus, and there is also disagreement about a remarkable aspect of the play: about whether Prometheus was impersonated by an actor or was a puppet/machine through which the actor spoke from behind (Aeschylus 1961a:153). The Promethean myth not only displays ideas of transgression between the human and the divine but also the willingness of some deities to aid and develop humans. The chorus itself comes to Prometheus, chained to his rock on the Scythian wilderness, as a winged ship or like a chorus of birds (1961a:24–25). Prometheus is the advocate of the human against divine violence and mastery and, reminding us of the journeys of ­Odysseus, the play points to cunning rather than force as the future of humanity (1961a:27). But also Prometheus teaches the humans cosmology, mathematics, writing, prophecy, animal taxonomy, the occult, the lore of ships and the arts of memory (1961a:34–35). The choruses in other plays by Aeschylus perform different tasks. In Seven against Thebes it is the divided chorus of the multitude. One part stands with Eteocles in the interior of the city, while one part stands with Polyneices on the exterior (Aeschylus 1961b:120). In The Suppliants the Danaids themselves are the chorus, and represent supplication and suffering rather than the balance and judgement evident in other classical plays (Aeschylus 1961c).

134  Cosmos: The classical gods Perhaps the most remarkable and enigmatic reflection on the gods lies in The Bacchae by Euripides. Dionysus arrives in the city to demonstrate to it that he is a god and to challenge Pentheus, who is perceived as an enemy of divinity and excludes the god from his libations and prayers. Dionysus himself has assumed, for this purpose, the form of a man (Euripides 1973:193). Ultimately the challenge between the deity and the human would end in the female Bacchic followers of Dionysus, the Maenads, ripping apart and consuming the body of Pentheus. His own mother is part of this and cradles the head of her son, thinking, in her madness initiated by the god, that it is the  head of the hunted lion (1973:232–233). Roberto Calasso has examined the interior world of the Maenad to fathom her relationship to god, to ­herself and to nature, in a passage from his reflections on Greek myth: A Maenad had a fawn tattooed on her soft, bare right arm. She was breast-feeding a fawn, stroking and playing with it. Then she grabbed it, tore it to pieces, and sank her teeth into the still pulsing flesh. Why this sequence? And why must this sequence forever take the form of a sudden raptus, when really it was a ceremony? What went on inside the Maenad? Dionysus tormented her with pleasure in every vein. The Maenad ran, didn’t know how to respond. The sacrifice, that slow, solemn butchery, wasn’t enough to quell her frenzy. The only thing that would work was ‘the pleasure of eating live flesh’. Altarless, she wandered through the trees. Dismembering the fawn, she devoured the god, mixed in its blood. She who was possessed thus tried herself to possess a part of the god. But what happened afterward? A great silence. The sultry heart of the woods. Strips of bleeding flesh glimpsed through the leaves. The god wasn’t there. Life – incomprehensible, opaque. (Calasso 1993:307–308) Even as the Maenad takes its pleasure upon the fawn and the human, the god disappears and the world becomes truly ‘alterless’. Even in the destruction of Pentheus the god has begun to disappear, and by the time this tableau was displayed in the Athenian theatre the gods had been largely dispersed and the victory of Pentheus assured. When examining the interior world of the Maenad we are looking at something unfathomable in its ‘madness’. Michael Parsons, in his psychoanalytical survey of The Bacchae, has argued that the motion of self-knowledge is central to its production: specifically the self-understanding of Pentheus himself. As Parsons argues: What happens when a parallel world breaks through, and we are brought face to face with those who represent the selves we did not become? Pentheus, in Bacchae, epitomises the relation between prejudice and psychosis. He has arrived only very insecurely at who he is. Faced with an alternate self that embodies too much that is still conflicted in his own self, he finds the confrontation unbearable, and is driven

Cosmos: The classical gods  135 to attack this Other, denying any connection between them. When his attempts to obliterate the Other collapse, the normal psychosis of his prejudice turns to overt madness. (2000:89) As the ‘human’ Pentheus confronts Dionysus and the Maenads he is confronting the world from which humans have emerged; of the gods, of nature, of the irrational. He embraces the world of what would become reason and rationality but is driven mad and then pursued by the forces, selves and worlds that he has abdicated. His psychosis is literally unnatural, whereas that of the Maenads is a product of nature and the sedimented past which he is trying to overcome. In his introduction to the collections of translation of Horace into English D.S. Carne-Ross has noted the reversion to barbarism that Horace himself was witnessing in Rome: ‘Barbarism moving in, the fall of eternal Rome … What hope had he of surviving through the shadowy interregnum stretching out on the far side of calamity?’ (Carne-Ross and Haynes 1996:1). H ­ orace himself was inspired, argues Carne-Ross, by Bacchus: As an analogue to the exalted emotion that has taken possession of him, he tells how a ministrant of the god, a Bacchanal, standing on a mountain ridge at night, gazes in wonder at a strange remote world, trodden only by wild, barbarian feet. (Carne-Ross and Haynes 1996:35) In their discussion of the relief of the Maenad in the Palazzo di Conservatori in Rome, Boardman et al. convey a vision of a mad being and its pulsating body draped by civilising shrouds: The maenad dances in drunken frenzy, her right hand, which holds a knife, arched over her head; with it she also grasps a corner of her dress, which, in a broad upward-swinging curve, serves as a foil to the movement of her body. She swings her left hand behind her; in it can be seen half the body of a goat which she has torn apart in her delirium. The folds of the thin peplos both envelop and reveal the firm limbs beneath. The figure expresses the vital Late Classical contrast between the sensuous warmth of the body’s structure and the cool elegance of its draperies. (Boardman et al. 1967:520) The bacchanal and this Maenad stand at several moments of transition: that between humans and gods; between the world of myth and Athenian democracy, of different conceptions and routes of selves within the same human interior. But are we still waiting for our god to come or has he been before? The ‘other’ of Pentheus and the Maenad, of the routes taken and not

136  Cosmos: The classical gods taken, would become part of the thematic of Europe and what it considered to be pathological or healthy. As Jacques Rancière has said: If we conceptualize it politically, then the ‘infinite respect for the other’ cannot take the form of an infinite wait for the Event or the Messiah, but instead the democratic shape of an otherness that has a multiplicity of forms of inscription and of forms of alteration or dissensus. (2010:61) This multiplicity of inscription by gods and those who remember or look forwards to them is of decisive significance for understanding an incipient human deification. At the beginning of human, historical time Adorno saw the music of Pan and the dance of the Maenad as both wildness and the mode of its taming, of violence and of pacification (Adorno 1991:26). The ravaging, murderous Maenad still haunts our ‘civilisation’.

The past, present and future god Before we move to think about the sculptural incarnation of gods and heroes in the penultimate chapter, I want to contrast three different versions of god: that of the past, the present and the future. Each of these iterations are almost comments in passing and not really central to the writings of these three very different authors: historian, sociologist, poet. In fact their vocations as each deeply impacts on their successive and temporal visions of god and the divine. In his idiosyncratic master-work on the heroic in history Thomas ­Carlyle remarks on the nature of divinity. He argues that gods are phenomena of memory. For Carlyle: ‘Did any set of human beings ever really think the man they saw there standing beside them a god, the maker of this world? Perhaps not: it was usually some man they remembered, or had seen’ (1841:67–68). With hindsight, human beings cast back to remember what they thought of as a man or a woman at the time, as a god. They were not aware that a god walked amongst them, but as time has passed they begin to think of that entity which they had encountered as a divine and endowed with special powers which they were not aware of at the time. It may be that long after the crucifixion those who had heard the Sermon on the Mount began to discern divine features in the man to whom they had listened. This is a god as a historical mnemonic phenomenon: a product of the goddess Mnemosyne. But what about God as a sociological phenomenon that illustrates not history but our own social forms of the present? Let us listen to Latour’s story at some length: For instance, the story of the empty tomb in the Gospel of St Mark (Mark 16) is not to be read as information about the distant empirical tomb in the outskirts of Jerusalem sometime around Easter, AD 30, but about the reader of the Gospel and the kind of signs he needs in order to

Cosmos: The classical gods  137 understand for himself that Jesus is alive, that he has risen from the dead. The silly empirical question of the women ‘Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?’ (Mark 16:5) is replaced by the angel’s admonishment, ‘He has risen, he is not here. See the places where they laid him.’ The good reader of such a text is not the one who asks the silly question ‘What really happened there? Would I find traces of the empty tomb if I were to go to that place in Jerusalem and dig the ground?’, but the one who asks the question: ‘What is happening to me, now, hearing the angel’s voice? Jesus is not really there, out there, any more. This is, indeed, what the angel means. Stop asking silly questions. He has risen. He lives now.’ And in the process, the reader becomes the writer or the commentator, or the preacher of another text that transforms, translates, embroiders and adds to the unbroken chain of commentaries. (Latour 1988:167) This passage displaces the notion of God as a remembered being with the god as social device to illustrate what is happening to me here and now ‘hearing the angel’s voice’. This god of the present is of our temporal moment. The abdication of any attempt to ascertain the historical and empirical status of the remembered god is because that god is no longer there (out there), if indeed he ever existed. The task of analysis is to analyse us as the product of those vast memory forces and supposed happenings, not the happenings themselves. Rainer Maria Rilke offers a poetic analysis of the dilemma of God and the divine. He argues that ‘they, who are long gone, are in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our destiny, as blood that pulsates, and as gesture that rises up out of the depths of time’ (1962:50). In this sense the continued repetition of predispositions and gestures that still arise from the archaic world are our inheritance from the dead of world history. Here is the remembered god of Carlyle and the god as effect upon our human present of Latour. But Rilke, even in this sentence, is beginning to outline the destiny of gods: gods that are indeed present within us. For Rilke the god is not decomposing but fructifying in our own inward lives: Why do you not think of him as the coming one, imminent from all eternity, the future one, the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you from projecting his birth into times that are in the process of becoming, and living your life like a painful and beautiful day in the history of a great gestation? For do you not see how everything that happens keeps on being a beginning, and could it not be His beginning, since beginning is in itself always so beautiful? If he is the most perfect, must not the lesser be before him, so that he can choose himself out of fullness and overflow? – Must he not be the last, in order to encompass everything within himself, and what meaning would we have if he, whom we long for, had already been. (1962:49–50)

138  Cosmos: The classical gods Our lives are the gestations of future gods. We are all, as Homeric poetics admit, leaves on a tree. But there is the tree itself, which is developing and forming as a living being of which the human is only part of its multitude. The god to come is the congealed perfection of the entirety of the human leaves of the past. The god is not remembered, or has been, or even a phenomenon that we use to think about ourselves. God is not dead, for Rilke, but imminent in history and immanent in all human forms. The aesthetic rendition of this numen, this real presence, concerns us more as we look at the figurative explication of the deity. When Bernard Stiegler begins to develop his theory of technics it is by way of a reading of the classics, and specifically of Jean-Pierre Vernant’s understanding of extant Greek myth. Stiegler, reading Vernant, argues that the very essence of mortality is not the appearance, the natality, but the disappearance, the mortality. This disappearance is the single condition of their human life (Stiegler 1998:189). For Stiegler: Through sacrifice mortals are put in their place: between the beasts and the gods, in this in-between (between appearing and disappearing) resulting from a deviation. It is not a matter of recalling a state of nature, nor of claiming what ‘human nature’ ought to have been; there was no fall, but a fault, no hap nor mishap, but mortality. (1998:190) There was no primordial state of being or Garden of Eden, but just this: the biological decay of the entity. Animals have a nature, a predestination, for Stiegler: a disposition towards repetition and reproduction. The dispensation and disposition of humans in their own disappearance is to invent, realise, fabricate, produce – and in doing so invent our earth of technics, a technics which then subordinates humanity with all of its qualities to its own compulsions (1998:193–194). The compulsion of technique to then memorialise the human form even as it passes and disappears from the world is an exercise of radical re-appearance. As the body decomposes the flesh becomes, quite literally, clay and stone. Jean-Pierre Vernant considers the divine pantheon to be both a mirror and a refraction of the humanly organised world below. But the pantheon is also a classificatory system in and of itself, with its own symbolic language, properties and intellectual aspirations (1982:ix). Examining the mythic structures of the gods entails the examination of that system and the human history which is sedimented into the mythic forms of the gods. It resolves the gods into real, earthly, empirical life (1982:x). Only then can we relate the aesthetic and ritual autonomy of mythic structures to the society and the way it reveals itself to itself as myth and ritual (1982:x). The Greek gods are animate; they perform entire worlds in play and revel in human catastrophe and intervention. The formless non-existents are active. Even more so when they solve the problem of divine decomposition by sublimating themselves and their spirit into the sculpted stone.

8 Spirit The classical statue

Introduction In this chapter we examine the issue of decomposition and composition in the aesthetic form of the statuesque. As gods were dying in the same manner as humans, some philosophers have talked about ‘divine decomposition’. Perhaps as a consequence of the disappearance or invisibility of the gods and of humans who were wont to die, their images became ‘petrified’ in the ancient world in the form of statues. This process of figuration alerts us to the huge aesthetic importance of the sculptural work of archaic and classical Greece (and ultimately Rome). But there are a series of questions to address: • • •

What does the statue actually embody and can it come alive again? If these statues are part of ritual veneration what kinds of spirit, representation and ‘being’ do they enclose, embody and potentially reveal to us? Why do these sculptures of gods, humans and animals proliferate throughout antiquity and beyond, and can we see them as replications of real, original beings at all?

We develop here a new social-theoretical methodology for addressing the material, sculptural remnants of the ancient world and what it reveals about our minds, theories and philosophies rather than what it might reveal about the classical world: which would itself be the task of historians of art and the statuesque.

Plastic visions Maurice Bowra has indicated the power of the ‘plastic vision’ of Greek art (1973:166). The technical and aesthetic find their highest expression in what Alex Potts has called ‘the sculptural imaginary’ and its domination of European civilisation in its monuments and mnemonic devices (2007:xiii). But what are these sculptures and monuments for, and why should these

140  Spirit: The classical statue imaginaries reflect empirical realities at all? Guillaume Apollinaire once pointed to these aesthetic renditions of the imaginary: Whether it may be the statue of a hero, or a sacred beast, or a divine being, the practical purpose of sculpture is to represent illusory appearances. This artistic imperative has been understood since time immemorial and explains the anthropomorphic nature of the gods, for the human form is what can be most easily legitimised from nature while allowing the greatest scope to the artist’s imagination. (2007:43) These illusions of appearance are also literally appearances. They are at once apparitions and reveal only their surface. What is congealed in their inner being and substance is something else again, even if they can thought to have any kind of interiority at all rather than just the display of pure form and surface. It may also be that the relation between the sculpted being, its statuesque form and the sculptor herself may indicate networks of tensions and antagonism as the material and conceptual entity of the statue is revealed. Examining sculpture entails understanding the form and the surface of an object as well as its substance and interior. It allows for an understanding of human force upon material, either through sculpting out of stone or moulding clay; and it is enmeshed with ideas of serendipitous discovery of form through play as well as the intent to make form out of the properties of the material. This discovery of the reality interior to the surface marks both classical philosophy and sculpture. H.D.F. Kitto has examined the relations between philosophy and sculpture in ancient Greece. He argued that: It is not only the philosophers who have this mental habit of disregarding what is on the surface – the transitory appearances of things, their multiplicity and variety – and trying to reach the inner, the simplifying, reality. Do we not find something very similar in Greek sculpture, which, until the beginning of the fourth century at least, made not the slightest attempt at portraying the individual, but strove always to perfect its representation of the Athlete, or the God? (Kitto 1957:182) The attempt to discover the god within the stone was also a way of uncovering the ‘sublimated kings’ who had become gods or the power of the divine in human form (Kitto 1957:196). Andrew Stewart, in his analysis of the classical body, has argued that the Greek body was of central importance to its culture (1997:3). But, as he notes, it continues to have a problematic and contested status: ‘Yet never before has the Greek body undergone such scrutiny and emerged from the

Spirit: The classical statue  141 process so decentred; far from being an open and unproblematic unity, it is beginning to look decidedly more like a battleground’ (1997:7). Stewart argues that the idea of Greek art as a mirror of Greek life is untenable. The relation of imaginary to actuality and fantasy to reality continues to bedevil the representation of the Greek body and the body it may be thought of representing. The relation between sign and referent has slipped, and to think of the statuesque as a verisimilitude is misplaced. Sculpture is quite simply not a reflection of everyday life (1997:12). For Stewart: ‘Art monumentalizes, freezes, denies time, negates absence, and challenges decay; but it also enlivens, makes present, and pleasures’ (1997:43). The atemporal, transhistorical persistence of these ‘frozen’ entities remains an enigma. If they are not modes of representation or direct representation, what do they convey to us and how do we read them? The standing stones of the prehistoric were often considered later in folklore to be ‘petrified beings’: often kings who were turned to stone by witches (Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2005:177). In The Epic of Gilgamesh the ‘stone ones’ were considered to be the guardians of those transitional places between life and death (Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2005:179). As Lewis-Williams and Pearce note: ‘It is likely that part of the significance of standing stones was that they represented, or embodied, beings of some sort’ (2005:179). The significance of the stone being is that it persists beyond the somatic body. The stone being replaces the human or divine form in decay. As Julian Jaynes has argued: ‘And in place of the corpse is a statue, enjoying even more service and reverence, since it does not decompose’ (1990:143). What then is our methodology for understanding sculptural heads and their meaning, and not just within the boundaries of the classical world but the inheritance of them into subsequent periods? The ‘stone being’ both enables and frustrates meaning. It contains and it transmits. It can be read and we can receive its messages. The emergence of the sculpture and architecture of the neo-classical was an attempt to rework and reconsider the meaning of ancient art. The ‘return to antiquity’ in the late eighteenth century was an attempt to repeat a process that the neo-classicists thought was the key to the classical: the mimesis of nature (Honour 1972:xxiii). This initiated modes of imitation that were more than mere copying, which was perceived as degenerate (1972:xxiv). It was a search for spirit, truth and numen at the heart of the form. As Hugh Honour has said: ‘The study of Antiquities was thus regarded as a means of penetrating the eternally valid truths which were thought to underlie the superficial diversities of the visible world’ ­(1972:xxiii). In many ways mirroring the archaic was a way of casting a light on what has been called the ‘mirrored personae’ of certain artists (Gedo 1994:35). More critically this was because, as John Boardman has said: ‘The subject matter of Greek art was essentially man’ (1986:275). So the neo-classical search for the eternally valid truth was not only about nature per se but also specifically about the truth of ‘man’. As Boardman says, even the Greek monsters

142  Spirit: The classical statue made sense only in relation to human beings. They are both plausible and designed to be confronted and subsumed in human victory rather than to ‘terrify’ (1986:275). Yet the stone beings also would ultimately decay. As J.H. Plumb has said: Greek art has gained immeasurably through decay – the skeleton is frequently more elegant, more moving than the flesh. And the Greek art that we possess is skeletal; the purified structure of stone, all colour gone, the garish eyes of lapis or ivory lost from their sockets, the vivid paint washed from the limbs. (Andrewes 1991:xxvi) But the central point, even before we note that it becomes skeletal, is that the statue has lost its human flesh. But it may be that, like the neo-classical return to the antique form, the stone entity may wake again (see Herder 2002; Jenkyns 2015:249). Indeed the history of sculptural form is imbued with the relation of human touch to the touch of stone: the palpable relation between the material and the hand that touches or forces (Irvin 2013, Koed 2005; Potts 2000; Read 1956). The palpability, or the haptic of stone and hand, is enmeshed in the idea of what we are trying to touch (Bailey 2011, 2015; Bailey and Reeve 2014; Zuckert 2009). Does the dissolved being of the hero or god locked in the stone or the clay persist in spirit and form in those material objects? And what is their meaning now for us who still look upon them with regard?

The development of Greek sculpture John Boardman has argued that most statuary in the archaic period of Greek sculpture was either to memorialise the dead or to act as votive offerings in temples (1978:63). It is therefore a way of representing the human and offering a sacrifice to the god. They are forms of representation and of the beginnings of a realist approach to human form, offering new ‘replicas’ of human beings (1978:65). As Martial wrote of his own later work: ‘You will not find here Centaurs, Gorgons or Harpies: my page smells of man’ (Jenkyns 2015:272). Richard Jenkyns argues, in his survey of classical Greek and Roman literature, that there was a gap between visual and literary art, albeit concerned with the ‘human’ obsession: Visually, they aimed at perfecting a small number of forms: the nude male and clothed female body in sculpture, in architecture the Doric and Ionic orders and the post-and-lintel method of construction. Their literature, however – whether verse, history or abstract thought – was daring and innovative, sometimes wild or experimental, and constantly searching for new ground. (Jenkyns 2015:85)

Spirit: The classical statue  143 The Homeric poems indeed explored their world in profoundly new ways initiating, as we have seen, new conceptions of human consciousness. In some ways the advent of that art of human form was revolutionary. As Charbonneaux et al. have argued: ‘Classicism is in effect the triumph of reason, of a rational order that assigns to man an eminent and determining place in the general harmony of the cosmos. Is not man as Sophocles said, the greatest wonder in nature?’ (1972:xi). This is something with which the classical archaeologist George Hanfmann has concurred, arguing that Greek sculpture quite literally embodies the Greek belief in humanity (1967:11). For Hanfmann the sculpture of the archaic period, itself surveyed exhaustively by Boardman, developed a progression increasingly towards a naturalistic rendition of the human body (Hanfmann 1967:18). This sculpture increasingly began to ‘deify’ the human body, a body which ultimately would be mortified by subsequent Christian cultures (1967:43). For Hanfmann there was a parallel between ­human beings and gods, and it lay in the notion of embodiment: ‘It is the common bond of gods and men; but divine bodies do not grow old or die’ (1967:19). Carl Bluemel, in his unparalleled study of the unfinished blocks of stone of classical Greece, has noted the unfinished beings of those half-­uncovered by sculpture (1955:13). The history from below of quarrying, grading and carving that Bluemel presents displays the emergence of form under the weight of human sculptural force, and of both humans and gods. John Walsh, in a critical introduction to ‘marble art’, has examined the ways in which the properties of marble provided the material basis for sculpture and our readings of it: The subject was not the spiritual glories of Greek sculpture but rather the more practical properties of marble itself – its origins, its travels, its uses, the changes it undergoes with the passage of time – and how these might affect our judgment of the pieces made from it. (True and Podani 1990:9) As part of the same set of studies there have been analyses of the composition, form and dispersal of sets of statues from their original location ­(Delivorrias 1990) and relations between assemblage of marble, its reworking and its relationship to its original placement (Harrison 1990). This hints at the central place of both material culture and archaeological sedimentation in the examination of Greek sculpture. James Whitley has argued for the primacy of an archaeological approach to classical sculpture. He argues that: ‘Archaeology is the study of material culture. All art is material culture, though not all material culture is art. Classical art history therefore is archaeology or it is nothing’ (2001:xxiii). The archaeology of ancient Greece, he argues, has to be an ‘archaeology of objects’ (2001:3), including when that archaeology addresses abstract concepts such as the archaeology of democracy, theatre and the agora in classical Athens (2001:332–336).

144  Spirit: The classical statue Whitley argues that the mimetic image is central to the culture of ancient Greece (2001:195). But he also questions the naturalistic and realistic understanding of the classical statue: But what, it may fairly be asked, was all this sculpture for? Many things, of course, but one thing they were not was portraits as we understand the term. Of course, they were meant to represent gods, heroes and other generic figures … but these could not, by definition, be likenesses. They were idealised representations of how gods or heroes ought to appear, using the language of realism without in any sense being realistic. (Whitley 2001:278) Yet the question of ‘likeness’ and the mimetic portrayal of the gods is naturalistic in one sense in that the gods were part of the lived reality of those communities. Indeed the sculptors were sculpting from reality in their representation of the gods, even if that ‘reality’ was on an imaginary level. If the language of realism is being used it is absolutely because they are trying to realistically represent their gods rather than display an idealised form. In some ways Whitley’s discussion of the temples displays this imaginary relationship between human and god. The gods resided in sanctuaries that humans could visit and within which votive offerings could be proffered (2001:134, 140–141). The votive as an object was a decisive part of the material culture that remains to us. As Whitley says: ‘A votive offering is a gift to a god. Anything dedicated by a mortal, which, once dedicated, becomes the inalienable property of that god, and so is retained within the god’s temenos, is a votive’ (2001:140). The transition of the object from the human hand to the divine space also problematises, for Whitley, the question of who that god is and who the offering is to in the tomb cults of archaic Greece. Indeed he remarks that it could be linked to ancestry and genealogy. The tomb cults may have entailed the worship of ancestors, even imaginary ones, who were heroes in the myths that had been handed down to the cults (2001:152). Yet it is the object in which divinity is displayed and represented that we find the relation of human material labour to the deity most decisive for our understanding of how the motifs and gods of the ancient world persisted in marble.

Mimesis and the divine Ray Brassier has argued in his reflections on extinction that: ‘science’s repression of mimesis not only mimes death, inorganic compulsion – it is death, the inorganic, that mimes reason. Mimesis is of death and by death. Life was only ever mimed by death, the animate a mask of the inanimate’ (2007:47). Classical sculptural form is at once a persistence into death of that which was once alive. But it is also the persistence and copying (from the imaginary) of what has never been alive, even if gods and centaurs were

Spirit: The classical statue  145 existents for the lived experience of whole peoples. The inorganic marble was once organic in its very material being even as it represents inorganically, once-existing organic forms. It is at once, in its material properties and in its sculpted form, a testament to the metabolisms of the organic being it displays (in its material) and represents (in its form). Only the latter is mimesis of death and by death in Brassier’s sense. The divine and human physiognomies in classical sculpture were part of an attempt at reason and ‘anatomical realism’ (Burckhardt 1963:137–139). The question then emerges of what meanings persist on the exterior of the sculpted form and within its interior. Is the marble sculpture only form or is there a spirit, ghost or apparition within? Jacques Rancière’s reading of Schiller and the Juno Ludovisi points to the appearance of the statue as self-containment and dwelling ‘within’ as traits of its divinity. The statue is a goddess because it defers purpose and volition. It is a figuration and embodiment of the qualities of the goddess rather than the work or labour of art as an ‘object of will’ (Rancière 2010:117). The statue is autonomous as appearance rather than an aesthetic product; but it also contains within its interior the autonomy and artistic expressiveness of an entire people: those of classical Greece. It is their heterogeneity – where life, art and myth are not displaced from each other – that the goddess expresses. Yet the statue ultimately becomes a ‘sensorium’ in which the object becomes separate from its functionality as an aesthetic object (for example in votive ritual). This product is aestheticized rather than functionalised, becomes of pleasure rather than of use. Form ultimately subjugates the material just as humanity emancipates itself from materiality (2010:118). Yet the statue also has a historicity: ‘The statue is a living form. But the meaning of the link between art and life has shifted’ (Rancière 2010:123). Rancière now reads Hegel: The statue, in Hegel’s view, is art not so much because it is the expression of a collective freedom, but instead because it figures the distance between that collective life and the way it can express itself. The Greek statue, according to him, is the work of an artist expressing an idea of which he is aware and unaware at the same time. He wants to embody the idea of divinity in a figure of stone. But what he can express is only the idea of the divinity that he can feel and that the stone can express. The autonomous form of the statue embodies divinity as the Greeks could at best conceive of it - that is, deprived of interiority. (2010:123) This deprivation of interiority in which the material is subdued by form then creates pure aesthetic surface, and indeed the deprivation may hint at the fact that, in certain ways of reading the classical, both the gods and the humans themselves are deprived of interiority. But whilst the lack of human interiority leads us to pure action in Achilles, the lack of sculptural interiority

146  Spirit: The classical statue leads us to absolute inaction, in-animation, and mute silence. If there is a being, interiority or ghost locked in the stone then it seems to be silent. Michel Serres, in his Second Book of Foundations (2014), has examined closely the notion of the statuesque and what it might mean in the ancient world and ours. For Serres the statue is not a ‘static’, inanimate entity. The statue recomposes our understandings of the dead and, specifically, the dead body. Statues become kinds of transhistorical phenomena which can lead us back to the world of the dead. Serres is compelled to understand what we know as human beings and what we don’t in relation to the ancient world (2014:6). The statues exemplify the social technologies in which myth is transposed into different epochs even when the original function or meaning of an object, motif or story has disappeared (2014:7). For Serres the violence of language is an onslaught against the meanings of the object, but the logics that it displays in its historic materiality persist: Statues precede languages, these latter have buried them, just as the religions of the word destroy, with blows of stones and letters, the idolatries that engendered them … the iconoclast’s fury against fetishes rings like a parricidal anger. Statues pass before languages and produce hominity first, before these languages refound it. Our ideas come to us from idols, language itself admits it; better, our ideas come back from them, like ghosts. (2014:23) Indeed it may be that the object continues to emblematically hold in its interior not just ideas and logics but the ghosts of the deities themselves. Indeed the object becomes the vehicle for messages from the dead to the living: Menhir, dolmen, cromlech, cairn, pyramid, tombstones, boxes for the dead imitating my mother the Earth, mute objects, raised statues, or standing ghosts, resurrected from the black box when the shutter falls down that we thought we had closed for ever, cippi, effigies of marble, granite or plaster, bronze, steel, aluminum, composite materials, full, dense, heavy, immobile, masses marking places and indifferent to time, pierced, bored, hollow, become boxes again, empty, light, white, mobile, automobile engines indifferent to places wandering through time, carrying the living. (Serres 2014:24) The vehicle is the ‘mute genealogy’ of the dead worlds. The dead are literally objectified beyond their ‘unspeakable state’ of decomposition (Serres 2014:24). They exemplify and display the dead logics of dead worlds ­(Hudson and Shaw 2015). In Tucker’s analysis of Brancusi’s The Sleeping Muse of 1910–1911 we can begin to delineate some further aspects of the sculptural imaginary and the

Spirit: The classical statue  147 relation between ancient and modern aesthetic renditions of human and divine forms. For Tucker: Brancusi’s definitive form for marble was first arrived at with The Sleeping Muse of 1910: the portrait head removed from its neck and shoulders; the features in process of absorption into the continuous surface; the orientation of the form, its relation to gravity, starting to determine its internal proportions. For the first time, Brancusi cast from marble into bronze. Bronze becomes a carving material for Brancusi, something other than a means of making clay permanent. He worked on the bronzes, making each cast individually different, and from the marble Prometheus made his first highly polished bronze. The features have virtually disappeared; expression is generated by the diagonal axis of the head and the vestigial neck. Polishing is the last refinement of carving, the abrasion and removal of fractional quantities of material. The reflective surface must surpass in perfection the smooth and translucent marble; in the bronze, it becomes a container for the image of the spectator and the environment, shaped and modulated in the form of the object. (1977:48) What is fascinating about the sleeping muse is that we do not know whether the muse is a god or a woman. The model was certainly a woman, but was this simply the matrix for the elaboration of a goddess? Sharing a comparable form, the woman becomes the template of the god. It may be the reverse. Brancusi uses the woman because the woman is herself the echo of the divine in human form. But the reflective surface allows not only for both the representation of that sculpted woman, the intimation of the divine Muse as a deity but also reflects our own features which become distorted in the bronze mirror. Indeed the mirror deflects meaning on to us: we see ourselves as the very sleeping muse literally disincarnated from the being of the sculpture itself.

Representing the human One of the earliest philosophical renditions of sculptural human form lies in Seneca. For Seneca matter lies inactive until human labour makes it into products; this is the relation between matter and cause: the thing that brings the product into being (1969:118). These products are mimetic of nature: Take a statue: it had the matter to be worked on by the sculptor and it had the sculptor to give configuration to the matter – bronze, in other words, in the case of the statue, being the matter and the craftsman the cause. It is the same with all things: they consist of something which comes into being and something else which brings them into being. (Seneca 1969:118)

148  Spirit: The classical statue The statue continues through time and space, and even though the individual human life disappears humanity itself continues as a species and remains unaffected by the disappearance of its individual elements (Seneca 1969:120). The human body is a physical burden and a torment for Seneca. Only the philosophical reflection upon nature can free it from its captivity and liberate the soul from the physical body (1969:122). Sculpture is philosophy materialised and embedded in human form. As the flesh dissolves so we can see the petrification into stone as an end to human suffering and material life. As Seneca notes: ‘What is death? Either a transition or an end’ (1969:124). In this case a transition of the body into another statuesque form as a mnemonic device or the worldly extinction of a being in its entirety. We have examined some of the philosophical implications of a specific statue of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius elsewhere (Hudson 2017a). Marcus Aurelius, as a philosopher, was obsessed with the stoic understanding of human form and human flesh and what it contained in its interior: ‘of its viscid blood, its bones, its web of nerves and arteries’ (Aurelius 1964:45). The dissolution of the body hinted at the temporariness of human life. Its oblivion could not be averted. Only philosophy could offer the divine that lingered within human flesh as a mode of reflection upon how the spirit encounters, enters and leaves the individual human body (1964:51). Like the bodies of animals that were subsumed and buried into the form of the ­human multitude through consumption (1964:68), so all earthly substance is subject to decay and dispersal: ‘The substance of us all is doomed to decay; the moisture and the clay, the bones, and the fetor. Our precious marble is but a callosity of the earth’ (1964:146). Indeed the only way that human form persists is in the force applied to the marble and to the clay. Arthur Lane, in his classic study of Greek pottery, has argued that there was a cultural shift from the early geometric pottery which was not representational, in any sense, of nature. It may have been that the artists were perceptually incapable of translating a natural object in the world into aesthetic form. This was probably related to their concept of humanness and their inability to copy a human in their art (1971:11). Lane elucidates the phenomenological discovery of the human copy on the statue and the pottery: When he started making a statue, the early Greek sculptor first marked on the face of his stone block the outline of the figure as seen from the front. He then moved round and marked on the side of the block the figure as seen in profile. Formal progress in sculpture depended eventually on the sculptor’s ability to bridge and at length abolish the transition between two planes set at right angles. The early painter, on the other hand, could select distinctive items from the two viewpoints and combine them in one figure; head and legs in profile, the triangular torso in full view. The third dimension gave him no trouble, for the figure was

Spirit: The classical statue  149 regarded as flat. A team of horses or a rank of warriors abreast were arranged like a spread hand of playing cards. (1971:15) The transition between the front, sides and back were made more complex by the fact that even though the frontal face appears early in Greek art it presented difficulties for the artists and was generally reserved for the depictions of monsters (Lane 1971:15). John Berger, in his early art criticism, tried to uncover the relationship between drawing and sculpture, and specifically the drawing and sculpting of the human form. In some ways the drawing is the record of an event which has been. For Berger: This is quite different from the later process of painting a ‘finished’ canvas or carving a statue. Here you do not pass through your subject, but to try to re-create it and house yourself in it. Each brush-mark or chisel-stroke is no longer a stepping-stone, but a stone to be fitted into a planned edifice. A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – seen, remembered or imagined. (1979:23) The subject of sculpture may be the ‘inert material’ itself, challenging not the human figure but the material mass which at this point, before figuration, refutes meaning. The work is being forced into something: ‘It is an object striving to become an image: a prophecy of life not yet manifest’ (Berger 1979:84–85). The material becomes corporeal and somatic with the weight of force applied by the human hand.

Making monsters Yet when we draw or shape we do not necessarily represent humans but can literally make monsters. In a remarkable passage in C.S. Lewis the young Edmund enters the witch’s castle, only to find a large group of beings who had been turned into stone by her: As he got into the middle of it he saw that there were dozens of statues all about – standing here and there rather as the pieces stand on a chess-board when it is half-way through the game. There were stone satyrs, and stonewolves, and bears and foxes and cat-a-mountains of stone. There were lovely stone shapes that looked like women but who were really the spirits of trees. There was the great shape of a centaur and a winged horse and a long lithe creature that Edmund took to be a dragon. They all looked so strange standing there perfectly life-like and also perfectly still, in the bright cold moonlight, that it was eerie work crossing the courtyard. (Lewis 1997:89)

150  Spirit: The classical statue The problem that the statue offers is what it was and what it is now. Indeed it is also a problem in what the statue will become. These are petrified beings, turned into stone by the violence of the White Witch and which were once living. They will eventually be freed from her spell and turn back into living beings once again. The question remains whether they are paused or dead beings with any interior world at all persisting within them. The question of the ghost in the sculpted statue is exactly of this order. Antonio Negri has argued that: ‘If a monster is wandering in the world, we need to catch him, imprison him, cage him’ (Casarino and Negri 2008:204). Writing of the Greek mind and its social world, Negri has argued that the monster is a figuration which is opposed to the idea of the good society and balance. It is out of kilter with the world which produces it. For Negri: The monster is outside this economy of being. In the Greek language, ontology disqualifies the monster. If he inhabits classical antiquity, he can only do so by accepting to be demonized in metamorphic mythology. The monster wanders in the dream and in the imaginary of folly: he is a nightmare for those who are ‘beautiful and good’: it can exist only as catastrophic destiny that must be atoned, or as divine event (Casarino and Negri 2008:194) The metamorphic mythology of the monster stands for impurity and multiplicity, and as catastrophe. But in what manner, in Greek art, does the monstrous depiction remain a representation of something seen, remembered or imagined? The depictions of Maenads in vase paintings are very specific, as if they had been witnessed (Graves 1992:651). But the Maenads, however monstrous, remained as human beings. It may be that clues to statuesque representation lie in the ‘animal style’ of Greek art. Robert Cook, in his magisterial work on Greek pottery, has argued that in the mature geometric period figuration of living entities like humans, horses and deer begins to appear for the first time in elemental forms (1960:20). Eventually the ‘animal’ and the ‘human’ styles would diverge and exist in separate fields. Ultimately human figures in action would become more prevalent as the animalistic work dissipated (1960:39). But it is as this moment in the ‘ripe’ animal style of 625–550 bc that the monstrous appear. As Cook notes: The siren and the Boread appear already in Protocorinthian, but are more congenial to the Ripe style, where figures with wings, worn outstretched in the new fashion, one to the front and one to the back, have the merit of filling more space. Whatever the origin or ultimate significance of the half-human creatures, their use was almost always decorative. It is futile to ransack catalogues of Corinthian vases for evidence of obscure cults. The Gorgon, though, may truly be a Gorgon. Its disembodied head, the Gorgoneion, is an ornamental – perhaps also an

Spirit: The classical statue  151 apotropaic – device from early in the seventh century, but the full-length type in the familiar story of Medusa appears at Athens before and in Corinthian not long after the middle of the century. (1960:53) Eventually, in Attic art, the degeneration of Gorgon art begins. For Cook: ‘art has found a human level and there is less sympathy for the old monsters’ (1960:71). But the disembodied head of the Gorgon is of the same status as the centaur: the shadows cast upon history by the ‘Never-Never Lands’ of the mythical world (see also Higgins 1967:30–32 on the gorgoneion). Carl Kerényi, in his description of the mythic ‘deeps’ of the ritual Greek world, has tried to account for the ‘existential forms’ of deities and monsters (1958:2–3). Even the moon, for disciples of Orpheus, becomes the face of the Medusa and the gorgoneion (1958:44). Karl Schefold, in his search to understand the ritual origins of Greek art, has argued for what he calls the ‘extratemporal significance of the creation’ of the aesthetic object and its inner form. For Schefold this is the spirit or geist within the work. The Gorgon’s head achieves this ‘extratemporal significance’ which persists into our life-worlds. The aesthetic product intimates to us the relationship between the imaginary species and the cosmologies and rituals which contain all existent and all imaginary beings. For Schefold: it is fortunately possible to reconstruct one of the metopes in which the whole space is occupied by the head of a Gorgon. It might, indeed, be more accurate to describe it as overrun by the head for, here once again, the interior motif overlaps the border: in the top right-hand corner we see the thickset, powerful head of a snake. There is a strong contrast between the elegance of the framing border and the glaring, squinting eyes and the huge mouth with its grinning teeth; but the repulsiveness is kept within limits by nobility of line and colour. Terror has been mastered and fitted into the cosmos. (1966:35) The terror of the Gorgon hints at the dismissal from our world, by Perseus, of its frightfulness and fulfils the aim of the human mastery of nature and over the other selves that humans could have become. The refutation of the Gorgon reaffirms the boundaries between human and other monstrous aspects of itself, just as the Maenad displays the still ongoing possibilities of human madness in all of its forms. Stewart has once more alerted us to the monster and the barbarians who lay beyond the walls of the polis, and specifically the Gorgon awaiting (1997:182–183). He argues that the Medusa is a ‘double-hybrid’, at once male and female and beast and human in a process of superimposition (1997:184). The stare of the Gorgon continues to fascinate. As Stewart argues: ‘For in the Gorgon, the natural world – man’s antithesis – becomes bestiality run

152  Spirit: The classical statue amok’ (1997:184). This bestiality is not just an animality but a gaze that turns human beings into stone. Its desiring gaze freezes the human beings who cannot evade it (1997:185). The gaze of the Gorgon is not an expression of the civilised polis, but a nihilistic stare of un-nature and of the dead. For Stewart: ‘Her look is not a glance which is mobile, human, intersocial, and focused, but an all-encompassing, empty stare – a ghastly perversion of the gaze’ (1997:185). He continues: Like death, its origin and terminus, Medusa’s stare is everywhere and nowhere, and like death, it freezes my glance and turns it into a replica of itself: the blank-eyed gaze of the dead, forever staring fixedly at everything and nothing. (1997:185) It freezes, it petrifies, it stares. The gaze is not a gesture of meaning and communication but it is a material gaze quite literally. The stare forces the other beings metabolism to change profoundly from living flesh into petrified stone. As Roland Barthes has said: ‘It is Medusa: who petrifies those who look at her. Which means that it is evident. Is it seen? Not even that: a gelatinous mass which sticks onto the retina’ (1995:122). From the gaze which imprints on the retina the body petrifies from the eyes outwards over the whole of its physical, material being until it dispenses with life entirely in its interior. Susan Woodford has examined the flexibility and fluidity of the myths in her decoding of the Greek image (1986:10). Her Medusa story retells the Gorgon’s subjection to Perseus, and specifically the surprise of the birth of Pegasus and Chrysaor from her severed neck: ‘Such obstetric eccentricities are only to be expected from monsters like Medusa’ (1986:42). Jean-Pierre Vernant has argued that the kolossos, the archaic statue, brings into human life the image and the power of death. Death is the petrification of the living being (2006:328). For Vernant: Persephone sends the head of the Gorgon to meet those who desire to enter as living men into the realm of the dead, and that the Gorgon is a magical instrument of death who changes anyone who looks upon her into stone. (2006:328) This is the empty nihilistic gaze as material instrument, as the fabricator of death. As the light of the world disperses so does the flesh turn into an unseeing mass. For Vernant, this is a moment of transmission and of transportation between the world of the living and that of the dead. He notes of this process of petrification: Through a sort of reciprocal relationship between the faculty of sight and the property of being visible both of which are associated with the

Spirit: The classical statue  153 light of day, the disappearance of a living man from the world of light and the entrance into the world of night can also be expressed by the image of his transformation into an unseeing block of stone. (2006:329) The statue itself becomes the figuration and persistence of the now-dead being, the manifestation of the power of the once-living being and a representation of the status of the living and dead (Vernant 2006:331). The mimetic, mnemonic device (that which both describes and remembers the once-living being) is the afterlife of the existent: an attempt at empirically describing that which has been lost. For Vernant it is an artifice and a counterfeit of the real being whose life has now dispersed (2006:334).

The new Laocoon The myth of Laocoon of Troy is secondary to that of Achilles and Odysseus, but the afterlife of Laocoon has continued: specifically around the question of sculptural form and meaning. These meanings have transformed depending on who has observed different permutations of the Laocoon myth or the same sculptures at different times (Curtis 2007; Daehner 2007; Greenberg 1992; Potts 1994; Wallenstein 2010). Pliny had noted and described the Laocoon sculptures long before they were rediscovered and re-recognised in 1506. As Jens Daehner has noted, this had significant implications for understanding the meaning of statues in different temporal contexts and imaginaries: The fact that it was immediately recognised suggests there was, in the early sixteenth century, a clear image of what the ‘Laocoon’ should look like. In other words, had it not been found in 1506 it would surely have been reinvented one day. The imaginary image only needed to be matched with the actual image – a process not unlike that experienced by the first-time visitor to the Vatican’s Belvedere Court. The ‘Laocoon’, it seems, was already there; it must have existed in the Renaissance mind even before the sculpture came out of the ground. Where did that image come from? (2007:17) The origin of the Laocoon did not come from visuality at all but from text (Daehner 2007:17). What we have with the re-emerged Laocoon is one that has existed on an imaginary level enshrined within the texts that described it and then recomposed into multiple visual versions. Its rediscovery in ‘reality’ both contests and collaborates with the original ‘imaginary’ phenomenon. As Penelope Curtis has argued: Laocoon’s’ different aspects have been variously appealing in different eras. The apparent simplicity of this show should allow us to focus

154  Spirit: The classical statue on its formal and expressive values. ‘Laocoon’ has fascinated artists and writers because it embodies what sculpture can and cannot do. It concentrates a narrative in a single work, but is nevertheless expressive of its longer history. It thus embodies the ‘pregnant moment’. Its constraints are both formal and literal; its beauty constituted from their pain. The limits of sculpture are here defined and revealed to be productive. (2007:7) The very boundaries of the Laocoon’s form provide capacity for a multiplicity of Laocoons. The question of the relation between the textual and the visual Laocoon has been explored by Sven-Olov Wallenstein (2010) in his notes on the reflections of Lessing and Herder and the Laocoon motif. For Wallenstein: Homer, Lessing suggests, is able to create both visible and invisible things, whereas visual artists must limit themselves to what is visible, which produces a degraded representation of things like the gods: the visual artists must show us the cloud that hides the god as if it were a material screen, whereas the writer, who draws on the abstraction inherent in words, may present us with the idea of the nonvisible, and in this he can also direct our attention to moral and psychological processes that the visual artist can only allude to indirectly through outward signs. (2010:6) The gods of Homer can whisper, they can be described and at the same time shrouded in the imagination. Visuality gives a degree of fixity to the imaginary entity. The nonvisible has to be shrouded if it is to remain nonvisible. Wallenstein reflects on Hegel’s notion of the metamorphosis of form, each form pointing the way to the next. As god symbolically enters the temple so the ‘lightning of spirit’ enters the sculpture and the divinity merges with the human form. The sculpture, the new form, becomes the representation of the ideal and the classical (2010:6).

Heidegger and the sculptural The nature of palpability and creation seems irredeemably phenomenological. The relation of observation to objects, of the hand and the tool that are brought to bear on the material, the nature of form are themes which have obsessed phenomenological practice (Corse 2008). This includes the nature of shadows, the status of imaginary entities and how real structures can appear as apparitions (Sokolowski 1974:89–90). This is the moment to work through one of Heidegger’s famous later texts on the origin of the work of art in order to think about sculpture, creation and form. The Holzwege

Spirit: The classical statue  155 ­(Heidegger 2002), containing ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, is the first post-war collection of Heidegger’s essays. It has been exposed and interrogated by Thomson (2011) and Mitchell (2010), but it is worth examining some discrete aspects of the essay in terms of what it elucidates of sculpted ‘being’ and the relations of art to the life-world. The first aspect is that works of art present themselves as ‘things’. They are present to us as work in our world as material entities: in public spaces, churches, homes, collections, exhibitions (Heidegger 2002:2). For Heidegger this thing is that without which work and art is impossible: A mere thing is, to take an example, this block of granite. It is hard, heavy, extended, massive, unformed, rough, colored, partly dull, partly shiny. We can notice all these features in the stone. We take note of its characteristics. Yet such characteristics represent something proper to the stone. They are its properties. The thing has them. The thing? What are we thinking of if we now call the thing to mind? Obviously the thing is not merely a collection of characteristics, and neither is it the aggregate of those properties through which the collection arises. The thing, as everyone thinks he knows, is that around which the properties have gathered. One speaks, then, of the core of the thing. (2002:5) The determinations of and properties accruing to the object are situated within imaginaries and interpretations that ‘ground’ the object in certain ways (Heidegger 2002:6). If we take the Greek experience of being and the divine as presence then this shapes that grounding. It is a lived divine experience of the object and what is invested in its properties. Yet if we see the persistence of classical sculpture into the Roman period, for Heidegger the thinking and the form exist, but without the primordial experience of divine encounter and logos that was present for the Greeks. This translation creates exile and the ‘rootlessness’ of European thought. For Heidegger: ‘Roman thinking takes over the Greek words without the corresponding and equiprimordial experience of what they say, without the Greek word. The rootlessness of Western thinking begins with this translation’ (2002:6). For Heidegger, first and foremost, the unworked object is matter that has not yet achieved its structured form: ‘The granite block, resting in itself, is something material possessing a definite, if unstructured, form. “Form”, here, means the distribution and arrangement of material parts in a spatial location which results in a particular contour, that of a block’ (2002:9). The contour of the granite already has its distribution and arrangement of properties within itself even when unworked. Its contours, in its space, are prior to the creative labour of sculpture. The act of labour in Greek classical sculpture exists in a ritual and imaginative space which is not

156  Spirit: The classical statue proffered to other times and spaces. Indeed the persistence and dislocation into other spaces is a tearing out of the ‘essential space’ of their origin. For Heidegger: The ‘Aegina’ sculptures in the Munich collection and Sophocles’ Antigone in the best critical edition are, as the works they are, torn out of their own essential space. However high their status and power to impress, however well-preserved and however certain their interpretation, their relocation in a collection has withdrawn them from their world. Yet even when we try to cancel or avoid such displacement of the work – by, for example, visiting the temple at its site in Paestum or Bamberg cathedral in its square the world of the work that stands there has disintegrated. (2002:19–20) The disintegration of the classical world and the dispersal of its objects have indeed withdrawn those objects from their world. From here on their ­encounter is with new epochs and geographies even when they remain what they once were to those who first encountered or created them in their archaic life-worlds. Yet there can be no turning back to the world of the ­archaic. For Heidegger: World-withdrawal and world-decay can never be reversed. The works are no longer what they were. The works themselves, it is true, are what we encounter; yet they themselves are what has been. As what has been they confront us within the realm of tradition and conservation. Henceforth, they remain nothing but objects of this kind. That they stand there before us is indeed still a consequence of their former s­ tanding-in-themselves. But it is no longer the same as that. Their former self-sufficiency has deserted them. (2002:20) The old interpretations of those objects may or may not still be certain, but new meanings and observations accrue to them and refract the properties of the entity. They are objects of finitude which make possible or dispel the meaning that new human observers perceive upon or within them. This making visible again, as in the Laocoon statues, creates new hybrid beings where we perceive new things again within the object or even begin to discern things that were once there but are no more. Heidegger gazes upon the Greek temple and what it makes newly visible for him. The temple is not representational for Heidegger; it ‘portrays nothing’. It stands there in its landscape, the one it was built to exist within. Yet its architecture contains the figure of a god, and indeed conceals that god within its precinct. The temple captures and encloses the deity as a presence,

Spirit: The classical statue  157 but the god expresses its divinity through the architecture of the holy structure. Yet the architecture of the temple remains once the divinity has disappeared from the lived reality of its people. For Heidegger: It is the temple work that first structures and simultaneously gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire for the human being the shape of its destiny. The all-­ governing expanse of these open relations is the world of this historical people. From and within this expanse the people first returns to itself for the completion of its vocation. (2002:20–21) The temple becomes the template of the fate of an entire human culture and its concepts of nature. For Heidegger: Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws out of the rock the darkness of its unstructured yet unforced support. Standing there, the building holds its place against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm visible in its violence. The gleam and luster of the stone, though apparently there only by the grace of the sun, in fact first brings forth the light of day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of the air. The steadfastness of the work stands out against the surge of the tide and, in its own repose, brings out the raging of the surf. Tree, grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter their distinctive shapes and thus come to appearance as what they are. (2002:21) The ground, the earth, the temple make visible to that people its home and its centre of being: the earth the mode of protection of its proliferating beings (Heidegger 2002:21). The temple initiates self-understanding on the part of human beings and their observations of the world. These open modes of observation persist ‘as long as the god has not fled from it’. The sculpture of the god also supports this open vision, not as representation of god but as real presence: ‘The work is not a portrait intended to make it easier to recognize what the god looks like. It is, rather, a work which allows the god himself to presence and is, therefore, the god himself’ (2002:21–22). The concealment of the god within the temple is really about the ‘unconcealment of beings’ (2002:28). It may be that the death of the god within the marble that still persists creates an even more open version of humanity as its self-­ comprehension expands and begins to divinise itself as a species contesting their own gods.

158  Spirit: The classical statue Heidegger’s discussion of the fourfold encapsulates the mutual interrelations between nature and living entities. He notes: But ‘on the earth’ already means ‘under the sky’. Both of these also mean ‘remaining before the divinities’ and include a ‘belonging to men’s being with one another’. By a primal oneness the four – earth and sky, divinities and mortals – belong together in one. (2001:147) To speak of the divine is to speak of both presence and concealment and its relation to the fourfold as a sense of oneness between them: The mortals are human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies, and indeed continually, as long as he remains on earth, under the sky, before the divinities. When we speak of mortals, we are already thinking of the other three along with them, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four. (2001:148) Dwelling on the earth is a dwelling in ‘things’ and amongst ‘things’ for human beings; but it is also an apparition and a fabrication. In our sense this is of significance for the technique which allows for the production of statuesque ‘things’. As Heidegger says: ‘To the Greeks techne means neither art nor handicraft but rather: to make something appear, within what is present, as this or that, in this way or that way. The Greeks conceive of techne, producing, in terms of letting appear’ (2001:157). And not just of letting appear but revealing or literally unconcealing the being in the heart of the stone.

Yourcenar, Camus, Barthes and transition If we can imagine this new human force without gods and the new emperors who began to deify themselves in sculptural form we can see the new open visions of proto-divine humanity. Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian offers important insights into the interregnum between the collapse of the Olympian gods and that moment when Christian monotheism achieves supremacy in the west: a moment when she argues that humans stood alone for a brief duration (1986:269). The survival and persistence of the sculptural images of the empire hint not only at the unimaginable distance between us and them but also our proximity. As Yourcenar notes: Experiments with time: eighteen days, eighteen months, eighteen years, or eighteen centuries. The motionless survival of statues which, like the head of the Mondragone Antinous in the Louvre, are still living in a past time, a time that has died. The problem of time foreshortened in terms

Spirit: The classical statue  159 of human generations: some five and twenty aged men, their withered hands interlinked to form a chain, would be enough to establish an unbroken contact between Hadrian and ourselves. (1986:270) It is a time that has died, but we can still imagine the unbroken biological and organic links between Hadrian and ourselves as dying and decomposing human beings. Yet the statue persists and the organic form of Hadrian and his lovers persist in this petrified form even when Yourcenar is obsessed with calculating the distance between the Emperor Hadrian and herself. The boundaries and barriers between epochs and human beings become almost unfathomable (Yourcenar 1986:270–271). These are cultural and epistemological borders and fractures, yet Yourcenar intends to depict an emperor that we recognise not as a deity but as a human being. As she reconstructs the books and the library which, like Heidegger’s temple to the Greek people, built Hadrian, her work becomes an archaeology of Hadrian’s human interior rather than an archaeology of objects (1986:273). Like the spirit within the sculpture this is a transportation, more than by analogy, into the interior being of another human being: ‘One foot in scholarship, the other in magic arts, or more accurately and without metaphor, absorption in that sympathetic magic which operates when one transports oneself, in thought, into another’s body and soul’ (1986:275). This not only allows her to see the passing of humans and civilisations but also to look upon the face of ­Hadrian’s lover as he might: It has exquisite delicacy. The young head, pensively inclined, is framed by the tendrils of a vine twined in subtle arabesque; the brevity of life comes inevitably to mind, the sacrificial grape and the fruit-scented air of an evening in autumn. Unhappily, the marble has suffered from storage in a cellar during the recent war-years: its whiteness is temporarily obscured and earth-stained, and three fingers of the figure’s left hand have been broken. Thus do gods pay for the follies of men. (Yourcenar 1986:280) The historical fractures on the statue display its temporal status as a remnant of a prior epoch and part of the material detritus of a civilisation. Yet as we reinvent the motifs the classical period we do not reinvent their abundance but persist in replicating a limited number of motifs (Yourcenar 1986:116). Like Hadrian gazing upon his own face in a sculpture of him, we are only interested in what we see of ourselves and our lovers (1986:117). As Hadrian says of the latter, in Yourcenar’s fiction: ‘I was counting desperately on the eternity of stone and the fidelity of bronze to perpetuate a body which was perishable, or already destroyed’ (1986:118). It is perishable and dispersed like the peoples and civilisations that gave birth to these statues.

160  Spirit: The classical statue The human rebellion against divinity was also part of the incipient deification of human beings. As Camus says: The rebel deifies more than he denies. Originally, at least, he does not deny God, he simply talks to Him as an equal. But it is not a polite dialogue. It is a polemic animated by the desire to conquer. The slave starts by begging for justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown. He too wants to dominate. His insurrection against his condition is transformed into an unlimited campaign against the heavens for the purpose of capturing a king who will first be dethroned and finally condemned to death. Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. (1971:31) The death and decomposition of god is not a ‘natural’ process: the gods do not conform to the laws of nature of which they are the emblems or originators. The death of god is an entirely insurrectionary human impulse to deify themselves in philosophical and artistic form: literally embodied in sculpture. For Camus the sculpture is not necessarily about semblance but about the gesture which indicates the whole of humanity to ‘imprison’ and capture the nature of the human. For Camus: Then, and only then, does it erect, on the pediments of riotous cities, the model, the type, the motionless perfection which will cool, for one moment, the fevered brow of man. The frustrated lover of love can finally gaze at the Greek caryatides and grasp what it is that triumphs, in the body and face of a woman, over every degradation. (1971:222) It is the real that triumphs in art. The imaginary which is enshrined in the Gorgon’s head is taken and recomposed from real nature. Even if pure formalism can dispel more and more of the real, ultimately what that brings us to is simply the silence of the form without the content (Camus 1971:233–234). Yet still the voice speaks from within the heart of the form. For Camus the ‘extra-temporal’ essences of the centaur are hallucinations and fictions: they are both transitory and trans-historical (1975:46). Yet the empirical world is often returned to ‘stones, flesh, stars and those truths the hand can touch’ (1975:137). The world is all that there is. As Camus writes: I have not written, day after day, fighting articles and texts, I have not taken part in the common struggles because I desire the world to be covered with Greek statues and masterpieces. The man who has such a desire does exist in me. Except that he has something better to do in trying to instil life into the creatures of his imagination. (1975:190)

Spirit: The classical statue  161 For Roland Barthes the vision of a Caesar is an ‘announcement’ and a sign in the world (2012:19). As an object of magnificence the Caesar (in this case in film) becomes for Barthes pure surface, devoid of interiority: only one man fails to sweat, remains smooth-skinned, unperturbed, and watertight: Caesar. Of course, Caesar, the object of the crime, remains dry, for he doesn’t know, he doesn’t think, he alone must sustain the firm, polished texture of a judicial piece of evidence. (2012:21) In his writings on Tacitus and death the process by which the end of a life takes place is a moment of catastrophe and immediacy. The process of death is a form of liquidity, and literally of liquidation. As Barthes notes: to open the veins or to have them opened, to make death liquid, in other words, to convert it to duration and purification: one sprinkles the gods and the bystanders with blood, death is a libation; it is suspended, procrastinated, and one exerts a capricious freedom over it at the very heart of its final fatality. (1981b:102) This libation is the last sprinkling of a life before decay and petrification. For Barthes: ‘Tacitean death is an open system, subject at once to a structure and a contestation, to a repetition and a direction; it seems to proliferate on all sides and yet remains imprisoned in a great moral and existential intention’ (1981b:102). And Tacitean death, like the Oresteia, partakes of our time as much as theirs (Barthes 1981a:59). As spectators of those literary and theatrical deaths we watch that ancient libation upon the earth from our time and our earth. We receive those deaths, millennia gone, as signals from their dead world. The libation of Agamemnon’s blood is perceived by us as enacted before us upon a stage or in imagination. As Barthes says, there is a unity and a solidarity between those deaths and ours: ‘Nearly ­twenty-five centuries separate us from this work: the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, the substitution of new gods for old, and of arbitration for ­retaliation – none of this belongs to our present history’ (1981a:65–66). The transformation of those living heads into stone, of unimaginable distance and profound proximity, hint at what Barthes calls the ‘incontestable transformation of barbarism’ (1981a:66). Blood-libation is an act of rebellion and revenge. The libation is frozen in a moment that persists in the ‘living’ stone.

9 Domination The Atreides

Introduction In this chapter we return to some of the most powerful stories of the ancient world. The myths of Atreus and his sons Agamemnon and Menelaus are enmeshed with the collisions and confrontations within a single family. These include Atreus and his brother Thyestes, Menelaus and Helen, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and Iphigenia and Orestes and Aegisthus. The revolving murders, sacrifices and revenger myths are some of the most monstrous of the ancient world, and attempts have been made to locate these massacres in the specific rooms of the palace of Mycenae. We address the ultimate fate of these myths, of the beginnings of war and revolution in the sacrificial grove of that ancient palace, and of the collapse of civilisations. We can use these motifs, metaphors and analogies to rethink not just the objects of our human sciences and philosophy but also the ecological and genocidal predicaments that we are currently faced with in our human encampments and impulses towards domination. We conclude by examining the relations between art and material forms and the survival of the human and other species in a world which was founded upon and still obsesses about the dark chamber in the palace of Mycenae.

The intestine Maurice Bowra has pointed to what he calls the ‘intestine struggles’ of Mycenae (1973:17). Mycenae was the palace of the house of Atreus and of the Atreides. The murders and violence take place within that house in two senses: they are familial crimes and are situated within the walls of a house. In a different sense of the intestinal, the crimes take place in the depths of the body of the house: in the house as body and stomach, with the dark bower at its root. Thyestes and his children come to the house and the children are murdered in its depths. Agamemnon is lured into the house and meets his fate there. Cassandra wavers on its lintel knowing that she is moving towards her death in the house, and still steps into it. We enter the house with them or hear the cries from a far-off room. This is not battle upon the

Domination: The Atreides  163 plains of Troy but contestation within the house. Camille Paglia, in her own work on sexual personae, has argued that ‘Aeschylus makes the ancient legend of the House of Atreus a metaphor for the birth of civilization out of barbarism’ (1990:100). The story itself is enmeshed in sexuality, violence and horror, but revenge after revenge ultimately brings balance and order to the myth. This was a fragile balance and order which would itself be overthrown by the post-­classical world. The mnemonic theatrical reminiscence of Mycenae in Aeschylus and Seneca amongst others would allow for the persistence of those motifs into successive human cultures. We recognise those motifs embodied in other human beings: in monarchs, tyrants, lovers. This is what Joseph Campbell called the ‘tyrant monster’ of myth, a tyrant who is ‘Self-terrorized, fearhaunted’ (1993:15). The dead are remembered and mis-remembered even in the act of their disarticulation and dismemberment: even as they articulate their shrieks and screams in their final throes of death. Mycenae has been fallen for 3000 years, but stories of a few of its inhabitants towards the end of the city still obsess our imagination (Andrewes 1991:22–23). Some years after the events, described by Homer and others, it collapsed with the Dorian invasions (Andrewes 1991:32) – if those events ever happened at all. Mycenae signifies tyranny without ‘divine restraint’ (Graves 1992:665). The high king Agamemnon, as Martin Hammond has said, is a ‘stage-tyrant’ of the highest order (Homer 1987:18). With his brother Menelaus they are the Atreides, the sons of the monstrous Atreus. In the end, after sacrificing their daughter Iphigenia to get to Troy, Agamemnon returns to his wife Clytemnestra, who, greeting him with purple cloths for him to tread upon, tempting him to divine destruction, herself kills her husband (Graves 1992:415). As Robert Graves says in his reworking of the myth, it survives in so theatrical and stylised a form that its origins are impossible to fathom except that the physical tomb of Agamemnon is still noted as lying in the city itself (1992:416–417; and see Gere 2006). But the murder of Agamemnon is unusual. For Graves: ‘Agamemnon dies in a peculiar ­manner: with a net thrown over his head, with one foot still in the bath, but the other on the floor, and in the bath-house annexe’ (1992:417). This is a liminal death which happens between spaces, neither fully exterior or interior to the house, his body suspended between humanness and the divinity that he had been tempted to reach. It is a death that is also suspended between worlds: an ‘intermundian’ destruction. We will return to the Atreides, their father and the rooms of the palace in a moment, but let us look at one person’s journey into the city of Mycenae in order to elucidate the imaginaries of death and beauty that remained there for him to encounter. Like a Troy that was never lost, so Alan Wace has argued that the ‘site of Mycenae has always been known’ (Wace and ­Stubbings 1962:387). It is this place that Henry Miller will visit shortly before the ­Second World War and its own Homeric conflagrations.

164  Domination: The Atreides

Henry Miller and Mycenae Henry Miller’s traverse into the halls, rooms and tombs of Mycenae is one of the most enigmatic journeys into a city in literary history. Miller encounters on his way to Mycenae a high mountain pass: the Carrefour, the labyrinth of ‘meaningless butcheries’ and ‘vengeful massacres’ (1963:23). For Miller: The ancient Greek was a murderer: he lived amidst brutal clarities which tormented and maddened the spirit. He was at war with everyone, including himself. Out of this fiery anarchy came the lucid, healing metaphysical speculations which even today enthrall the world. (1963:23) He imagines the ghostly seas of blood across the plateau and the bodies strewn across the mountain slope. Yet these places are also places of contact and encounter between human beings. The labyrinth is not just one of murderousness but of the ‘luminous Carrefour of a changing humanity’ (Miller 1963:23). Even the rocks of Greece breathe eternality. They are stones which can never die and to which human beings return upon death (1963:59). Miller’s journey is ‘a voyage into the light. The earth became illuminated by her own inner light. At Mycenae I walked over the incandescent dead’ (1963:60). The incandescence is that which remains from the dead of world history. Miller perceives the cycles of generation and degeneration in the ruined city. Its humans emerged into life as heroes and gods: and then, as if exhausted and dazzled by the unprecedented and ­divine-like flowering, relapsed into a dark and bloody intestinal conflict which lasted for centuries, ending at a point so far back as to appear mythological to their successors. At Mycenae the gods once walked the earth, of that there can be no question. And at Mycenae the progeny of these same gods produced a type of man who was artistic to the core and at the same time monstrous in his passions. (Miller 1963:89) The archaeological and historical fabric and fabrication draped over Mycenae does not, for Miller, penetrate its mysteries, which are beyond conjecture: ‘We must await the return of the gods, the restoration of faculties which now lie dormant’ (1963:89). As Miller enters through the Lion gate he sees the city as a navel of humanity (1963:92–93). The dead generations, including his own, have been extinguished in this place: ‘the ghosts of antediluvial men’ (1963:93–94). For Miller: ‘Mycenae was first heavy-footed, slow, sluggish, ponderous, thought embodied in dinosaurian frames, war reared in anthropophagous luxury, reptilian, ataraxic, stunning and stunned. Mycenae swung full circle, from limbo to limbo’ (1963:94). The humans that would ultimately initiate the modernity

Domination: The Atreides  165 of ‘furnace’ and ‘factory’ are poor in comparison to the ciphers of the departed gods (1963:95). Miller looks upon the tombs of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, but he sees only Agamemnon and his great mask there, his immensity filling the bee-hive tomb (1963:97–98). Miller looks towards the future recovery of the divinity present in humans beings: ‘If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms’ (1963:239). Each step that Henry Miller takes is a step into understanding his own past and identity as the final efflorescence of the humanity and divinity that was born in this city.

The purple fabrics Nowhere is the horror of Mycenae expressed more forcefully than in the Oresteia, and nowhere is there a more significant reading of it than in ­Robert Fagles’s essay on his own translation of Aeschylus (1979). As he says of the Atreides and their father: ‘The house of Atreus is the embodiment of savagery. No other Greek family can rival it for accumulated atrocities’ (1979:14). The Oresteia itself is a journey from proto-human savagery into the civilisation of those who would be witnessing the plays in the Athenian theatre (1979:19). The murderous struggle between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra is our struggle in our own life-worlds. For Fagles: The Fury of the Father collides in Argos with the Fury of the Mother, and the Mother wins a battle to the death. But these forces reappear and concentrate within the son, Orestes; they begin to wage a dialectical struggle, straining towards a crucial resolution. Civilization, as Aeschylus sees it, hangs on their success. This Theogony is a battle on which the house of Atreus, the house of the gods, and all our houses stand or fall. Aeschylus insists that each generation create a new alliance between the forces in contention for its world; and he presents their conflict in a range of ways, from cosmic to intensely personal. (1979:22) There are fabrics in all of our houses, but those that Clytemnestra throws to the floor are those sacred to the gods and not for human beings, even kings, to walk upon. But Agamemnon is doomed to his temptation and his fate. As someone who would like to be, or to emulate, a god he sees the challenge strewn across the floors of the palace and reluctantly steps upon them, only to seal his murderous fate (1979:32). The profound dialectical contestation between life and murder, the past and the future, the god and the human is expressed in one moment as he steps upon the purple fabric. For Fagles: The sea is both the reservoir of their riches and the incarnation of their never-ending strife, a harvest and a grisly reaping both. Thus the sea reflects the tapestries and Clytaemnestra’s victim, the deadliness beneath the surface grandeur of the fabrics and the man. The sinuous red line they

166  Domination: The Atreides form is in the vein of Agamemnon – they fuse his slaughters and his bloodline, his will and his hereditary guilt. And at every step he takes upon them he exceeds his limits and retraces his descent; he commits an Olympian outrage that will be punished by the forces of the Earth. For as he tramples on the gods he re-enacts his trampling on the innocents of Troy and on his ­daughter – just as his forebear trampled on the banquet of his c­ hildren – and so the king reactivates the curse. As if caught in a slow-motion camera, all his murderous acts dissolve into a single act, deliberate and majestic and profane, that accelerates towards the murder that awaits him. (1979:34) This moment upon the fabric transforms our understanding of history and myth as well as continuing the history of slaughter that marks this family and brings mythic Mycenae eventually to its end. The theatrical tableau that Clytemnestra has initiated in order to revenge herself upon her husband would continue into her own destruction. The assassination of Agamemnon is both judgement and an invite to judgement. For Fagles her ‘sacramental power’ means she is ‘the great artist of ritual’ (1979:34). The continuing murders and savagery within the family are, for Fagles, the fullest expression of the Hegelian dialectic which would continue on into the generations to come as it persisted into the family at the will of the murderous father of the Atreides (1979:92). In Agamemnon (Aeschylus 1979) the king calls for the tributes due to a man and not to a god. He wants earth to work on not the ‘gorgeous’ fabric (1979:138). The vermilion and purple fabric is only the initiation for the bloody marks that would be trailed through the palace by Agamemnon and indeed the others of the Mycenaean future, as witnessed by the chorus in the translation by Ted Hughes (Aeschylus 1999:11). In this translation the king sees himself, through the chorus, as a blighted monster, wearing the dress of his murdered daughter as a turban upon his head (1999:13). Even as the signals of the beacons fly from Asia into Europe so Clytemnestra waits to perpetrate her own crime upon her returning husband, and recalls the destruction of Troy and its own mutilations, amputations and eviscerations (1999:18–20). In this translation the sea is recalled again, flushing the fabrics with blood of the lungs, the liver, the artery, wet and hot as if coming from the depths of the ocean (1999:44; and see Jenkyns 2015:63). Oliver Taplin has argued that the notion of action is central to Greek tragedy (1978:1). In his reading of the Oresteia he sees the purple fabric itself as a path that Agamemnon will take (1978:78–79). This is a palace that ­Cassandra can see into. She sees it full of blood and corpses (1978:32–33). Nowhere is this blood more present than in the fabric, but the metaphor is troubling and significant. As Taplin notes: the significance of the purple cloth is not simple and obvious: this ­ nusual scene is complex and puzzling in a way that is (appropriately) u unusual in Greek tragedy. Some meanings are more prominent than

Domination: The Atreides  167 others; some are explicit, some implicit; some literal, some symbolic; some are invoked at the time, others emerge into focus only in retrospect. (1978:82) Like Cassandra, Agamemnon has a ‘prevision of his death’ as he steps upon the fabric (1978:82–83) before disappearing into the navel, bowels or intestines of the house. At the beginning of the Oresteia the beacons are fired across the ocean to signal the end of Troy and the return of Agamemnon. As Camille Paglia notes, this initiates a new stream of blood to add to that of the fallen Troy. She notes: The Oresteia begins with a signal fire bouncing from summit to summit, Troy to Argos. Clytemnestra’s device to learn of Troy’s fall, it is the flame of rage passing from that war to this. It is the murderous chain of causality, the bloodline of three generations of the House of Atreus, like the red carpet trod by Agamemnon, the stream of his own blood. (1990:102) These signals are witnessed first by the watchman standing in the night upon the walls of Mycenae. These signals are of both victory and catastrophe. They are messages from a dead world back to those waiting to receive the heroes once again to their homes. The signals allow Clytemnestra to plan and prepare for the homecoming of Agamemnon. As Richard Jenkyns has noted, Aeschylus is unflinching before this unremitting horror. He describes the prayers and cries of Iphigenia on the beach as she is being killed by her own father to gain fairer winds: Iphigenia’s prayers and cries are unavailing, and in language of appalling beauty the chorus describe how the attendants hold her above the altar, gagged to prevent her uttering ill-omened words, lovely as a picture, her saffron robes flowing to the ground. We should be in no doubt what Agamemnon has to endure. (Jenkyns 2015:61) Having experienced the horror of murdering his own daughter, the king is even more prepared to murderously subdue Troy. Having experienced the loss of her daughter, Clytemnestra is radiant in her mission to destroy her husband. As Roland Barthes is reading Racine and his Iphigénie he examines the chambers of power and slaughter. The location of the Iphigenian massacre is not just the beach but the murderous rooms of the palace: This geography sustains a special relation between the house and its exterior, between the Racinian palace and its hinterland. Although there

168  Domination: The Atreides is only one setting, according to the rules, one might say that there are three tragic sites. There is first of all the Chamber: vestige of the mythic cave, it is the invisible and dreadful place where Power lurks. (Barthes 1992b:3–5) The chamber, for Barthes is the locus or the domus of power itself. But it is a hidden chamber in the heart of the palace. It is murderous because it is secret and invisible (1992b:4). From the chamber of power, to the ships waiting on the beach, to the journey to Troy, the dialectics of domination and violence submerge all feeling. For Barthes: ‘The Racinian habitat knows only one dream of flight: the sea, the ships; in Iphigénie, a whole people remains imprisoned by the tragedy because the winds fail to rise’ (1992b:3). The children of Thyestes are massacred and cooked in the chamber. Cassandra steps into it. It is the holy, ritual centre of the palace. Metaphor begets metaphor begets metaphor as the blood of Agamemnon falls like rain offering itself to the earth (Jenkyns 2015:64). Indeed the destruction of the body of the king is a rebellion against rule, monarchy and domination (see Lefort 1986:302–306 on monarchical states and the human body). It supplants the lineage of the king with that of the queen, which will itself be overturned by her vengeful son in turn. If Agamemnon tempts fate by stepping towards the divine on the fabric, so Clytemnestra tempts fate by moving beyond the nature of a woman. As Hélène Cixous has argued: The fact, for example, that there exists a woman who is not a woman and yet is woman. The difficulty of thinking, for example, that Clytemnestra, according to the Greek tragedies, has a virile strength; that she is described as having a virile force in the act of assassinating Agamemnon. If I take literally the unconscious of my great Tragic Greek, I am forced to wonder who, in Clytemnestra, kills Agamemnon. For Clytemnestra is going to be condemned as a woman, whereas it’s as a man that she executed Agamemnon. (1991:43) The Clytemnestra who killed Agamemnon was the sedimented, congealed incarnation of the many deaths that had preceded this and, specifically, the children killed by Atreus and her own daughter sacrificed upon the beach. Beyond filial devotion it is the weight of the past and of the crimes of her husband and his father that wields the knife in her hand. The usurped persona of masculine/murderer could only wield a knife if the essence of the woman is unthinkable as killer. Jean-Pierre Vernant has argued that Clytemnestra precisely usurps this male space and power (2006:166–167). The ghosts of the past are seen most brutally in Seneca’s ‘inhuman’ rendition of the Atreus myth (Seneca 1966:36). Thyestes, brother of Atreus, comes, tired by war and fratricidal bloodletting, to the house of Atreus at

Domination: The Atreides  169 Mycenae (1966:74). There stands the city of power and within the house is a room that can hold a ‘multitude’, but in this case a multitude of ghosts (1966:74). Deep in the heart of the palace is the chamber of the sacred grove with its trees strewn with ritual offerings. It is full of the ghosts of the dead, and it is here that Atreus brings the children of Thyestes to their sacrificial end before he feeds their remnants to his brother in a stew (1966:74–75). Even the gods are appalled by this, as Atreus examines their entrails and sees the children’s hand in a gesture of supplication in the food. Constellations fall into the sea, the world is engulfed in the blackness of a starless night (1966:82–88). And yet within this barbarism Atreus achieves both his revenge, his attainment of semi-divinity and his persistence into myth.

Collapse The collapse of Mycenae would come with the great Dorian invasions from the north and with it the collapse, as Julian Jaynes would have it, of the bicameral mind (1990:255). The advent of human subjectivity heralded the very introspections that would bring the theatrical tableaux of the Oresteia to life on the Athenian stage. For Jaynes: Palaces and villages that once held fealty to Agamemnon and his gods were looted and burned by other bicameral peoples who, following their own admonitory visions, probably could not communicate with nor have pity on the natives. Survivors were slaves or refugees, and refugees conquered or died. Our greatest certainties are negative. For all that the Mycenean world had produced with such remarkable uniformity everywhere – the massive stone architecture of its god-ordered palaces and fortifications, its undulant frescoes of delicate clarity, its shaftgraves with their elaborate contents, the megaron plan of its houses, the terra-cotta idols and figurines, the death masks of beaten gold, the bronze and ivory work and distinctive pottery – all stopped and was never known thereafter. (1990:255) For Jaynes the great epics of Homeric poetics and of Athenian drama were the response to this catastrophe. The poets mythologised this lost and absent world where the gods walked amongst human beings. As Jaynes says: It is even plausible that all this political havoc was the very challenge to which the great epics were a defiant response, and that the long narrative chants of the aoidoi from refugee camp to camp worked out into an eager unity with the cohesive past on the part of a newly nomadic people reaching at lost certainties. Poems are rafts clutched at by men drowning in inadequate minds. And this unique factor, this importance

170  Domination: The Atreides of poetry in a devastating social chaos, is the reason why Greek consciousness specifically fluoresces into that brilliant intellectual light which is still illuminating our world. (1990:256) The repetition and reconvention of the voices and gestures of the past would now never end. We recapitulate these stories once again even past the ‘radical impulses of nihilism’ that George Steiner has seen in the crises of modernity (1986:122). As Shanks and Tilley have argued, the recomposition of the past, beyond the museum is a project of some urgency: the task is to dismantle the great metaphysical and rhetorical structure, the architecture of discourse erected in the name of a conserved past, not in order to smash and discard the contents, but in order to rescue them, reinscribe their meaning. (1987:7) If what Henry Miller calls the ‘infra-human specimens’ of modernity and science (1963:81) are to move to further stages of self-understanding and self-composition then the re-inscription of our myths is necessary. Our imaginary repertoires of discourse and story, our objects and sculptures, our genealogies and proto-divinities are about both our deification and our defiance as a species. Beyond the polis we have seen the monsters lurking. Indeed the polis would replace the chamber in the palace and restore the constellations to their order in the cosmos. As Richard Tomlinson has argued, Greece was a world of cities (1992:xi). As he has argued in his analysis of the classical city: ‘For the Greeks, the city – the polis – was not merely a natural way of life, but the only acceptable one for normal human beings’ (1992:1). Mycenae itself was a predatory imperial power in actuality and in the myths that would come later. The Cyclopean walls that remained of the city would intimate its heroic and semi-divine nature to successive generations up until its full mythification in Greek drama (1992:31). At the pinnacle of the city lay the palace itself, surrounded by the ‘tombs’ of Atreus, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. Mycenae encapsulates the very idea of domination, antagonism and autocracy. Tomlinson argues that: ‘All the evidence suggests a community dominated and controlled by a restricted privileged group and a distinction between the community outside the citadel and that within it, however one expresses this in political phraseology’ (1992:40). The archaeological materiality displays the ‘unthinkable power’ of mythic Mycenae (1992:42). As A.F. Harding has noted in his analyses of Mycenae and Bronze Age Europe, the city was a place of developed techniques of military power and extension, and was a central part of the trade, military and cultural formations across the seas surrounding it (Harding 1984:4–5 and 2000:167).

Domination: The Atreides  171 Alan Wace, who excavated at Mycenae in the 1920s (see Taylour 1964:17), offers a different phenomenological understanding of the city to that of Miller. Wace surveys Mycenae from the ridge directly above the dome of the treasury of Atreus. He witnesses the ravens, magpies and partridges among the asphodel roots in the ruins, and looks toward the tomb of Agamemnon (1949:3–6). He surveys it, walks through it, remarks on its natural history and the relation of myth to its material structures: Here indeed on this lofty and isolated peak may well have blazed the fire signal which according to tradition, carried on the chain of beacons flashed across the Aegean from Troy to tell Clytemnestra that Priam’s city had been stormed and given to the flames. (Wace 1949:47) This moment would be where Clytemnestra begins to sharpen her knife in the interregnum between the first signal and the arrival of the king at his own door. Here in the ruins the stones of Mycenae persist for Wace: the alabaster, clay, breccia, flint, green stone, gypsum, green porphyry, limestone, marble, obsidian, poros, red stone and steatite (1949:135–138). It was amongst these stones that Schliemann (1976b) had begun to initiate his own destiny and uncover the fate of both Troy and Mycenae. Hermann Broch’s commentary on the Troy of Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff notes the planetary or ‘planetarian pauses’ of observation in the heart of the places where the slaughter occurred (2005:106). Broch used myth, as we as readers all do, to offer judgement on and reckoning with his own world, and specifically the loss of totality (see Thomas 1953:597). Broch argues that myth is the first and foremost expression of ‘every phenomenal cognition of which the human mind is capable’ (2005:108). Philosophy and theory is built upon and is a reversion to and a rejection of mythic structures and archaic modes of thought. For Broch: Philosophy is a constant fight against the remnants of mythical thinking and a constant struggle to achieve mythical structure in a new form, a fight against the metaphysical convention and a struggle to build a new metaphysics; for metaphysics, itself bounded by myth, bounds philosophy, which without these boundaries would have no existence at all. (2005:108) The dialectic of myth and philosophy would open up new Odyssean vistas to thought, open up interiority and ultimately lead to cosmological, abstract ideas on the nature of the universe, human thought and social formation. This planetarian observation and comprehension is initiated in the ‘blindness’ of Homer (Broch 2005:116). Homer listened, he heard the echoes of Mycenae and Troy, and he recomposed them all the better that we might

172  Domination: The Atreides listen and see the world that he whispers into our ears. His humanisation of the gods and his deification of the human would ultimately initiate more and more worlds and imaginaries. For Broch: It is true that they are not stripped of their abstract, mythical character; what they were they remain – mere names of the gigantic forces they represent, forces which keep in motion the model of the world and the struggle of man. (2005:110) Homer’s planetary humanism is the beginning of all future cosmologies: even as Helen watches the battle below, Penelope weaves the shroud, Achilles slays Hector and Odysseus swims in the ‘wine-dark sea’. The agonism and antagonism of mythic history continues. Let us hope that the contestations that took place in Mycenae do not bring the ruin of an entire planet: ‘A future Ulysses has probably been born. One can only hope that he will be seeking to return to his Ithaca, and not fleeing from the ruins of “a Troy” that encompasses the whole world’ (Bradford 1985:x).

The meaning of critical theory The meaning of critical theory, in all of its iterations, lies in the excavation of the concepts, motifs, stories, objects and formations as if they were sedimented strata. This geological, archaeological analogy is particularly useful for looking at the stratification and sedimentation of cities like Troy and ­Mycenae in a material sense. It is also useful for the unpacking of sedimented imaginaries full of domination, antagonism and resistance. If Marx is the theorist of the fracture standing at the interstices between the worlds of the intermundia, so the ‘theory of Cassandra’, as Holloway names it, is decisive. We need our Cassandras even when there is little hope of survival, let alone victory. Indeed the defeat of the political programmes which Critical Theory in its Frankfurt guise complemented and interacted with makes the ‘theory of Cassandra’ all the more necessary. She stands, embodying the visions of the living and dead, on the lintel of the house of Mycenae. She knows what her ultimate fate will be, but she still steps over the lintel into the darkness of the house. Her lucidity is everything. This lucidity as we examine the strata of Mycenae and our own congealed, sedimented human interiors may reveal darkness and horror; but it may also excavate new ways of thinking, living, revealing that may offer clues to others ways of existing in the other worlds beyond ours. The despair, negation and endarkenment that some Critical Theorists were led to were a response to a century of unremitting defeat. It is understandable that their politics became a politics of nihilism whilst other Critical Theorists gloried in their adoration of totalitarianism. There are dangers in lucidity. The luminosity of enlightenment has often entwined knowing with power and domination. This entanglement is

Domination: The Atreides  173 represented by Odysseus. He twists and turns in his wiliness. He understands how to escape and how to destroy. Even when he swims upon the storm in the sea we know he will survive. He masters nature at the same time as separating himself from it. We do not know whether the stories he tells of sleeping with witches and goddesses are true or not. Certainly they enter the realm of fabulation along with the imaginary geographies he traverses and monsters he encounters. Let us look at his interior and what makes possible his stories. What he has accrued to himself through his years on the battlefield and the long journey home is experiential memory. His congealed substance is mythic story and travelogue. Most of all he remembers Ithaca and Penelope. He weeps on the beach thinking of his home far away. Or he says he wept. The circumnavigation of his fairytale world brings him back once more to where he began, only to find that his home is being subjugated by the suitors. The very substrate of his power is threatened in the subjugation of food, lineage, house and his wife’s bed. In an act of unrelenting and swift violence he restores his patriarchal order and his dominion over house and Penelope. The massacre of the slave girls, like birds hanging on a line, would symbolically redefine the ownership of the house, the wife and the bodies of the domus. No other human being had, in their interior, the memory of a visit to Hades or the remembrance of the song of the Sirens. He carried his dead with him, their social memory part of his material substance and so, in his stories the dead are carried to us. We replay the social memory of Achilles in Hades because Odysseus endured, carried that knowledge, and then told us. Only Cassandra sees and contains more, but she has become enslaved and no survival or victory is possible for her. If Odysseus becomes the proto-bourgeois subjectivity, so Cassandra stands for a lucidity without redemption or hope. The signals across the ocean from Troy to Mycenae connect those two cities. The messages signal an end to war and the return of a king. They signal both homecoming and catastrophe. They also signal a fracture between worlds and epochs: between the eclipse of the gods and the rise of the sentient human, between Asia and Europe, between orality and writing. Ultimately the classical legacy would dominate Europe, and the stories of a few people in an obscure lost city would proliferate through many social worlds. Helen at her weaving bemused at the embodiment within her of emblematic beauty, distressed by war, a cipher, weaves in our stories still. The violent exactitude of Achilles as the embodiment of revenge and force stands alongside the genocidal Atreides. Menelaus weeps in his room as he sees the statue of his lost wife and she appears to him in dreams. Agamemnon kills his own daughter on a beach to placate the gods because Menelaus has begged him to retrieve Helen. And what is her fate? Did she live a long and happy life with her husband and thought no more of Paris, or was she starved and deserted on an island or butchered by her husband in his wrath at his desertion? We know that the Achaeans sought her through the twists and turns of the city of Troy, killing as they went. The towers of Ilium fell to

174  Domination: The Atreides their revengeful swords and were burned. Every city across Asia and Europe fell at one time or another, but very few of them became epic remembrance. Mnemosyne is both spare and prolific in what she allows us to remember. If Troy and its aftermath do issue in new forms of human interiority and self-understanding then this is precisely because the gods are departing. It is no surprise that Greek culture would be foundational to atheism, democracy and humanism. Yet the problem and significance of mimesis and representation still remain. We know that often Greek aesthetics portrays some sense of ideal form, although often the sculpture attempts to replicate the real visages and figures of humans. We can see the development and the transition of the idea of the human on the manifold iterations of the Greek vase and, ultimately, in the Roman statuesque. These are surface representations of form but they interact with complex fields of meaning and signification. The statue is a container of these meanings even when displayed upon its outer surface. Yet the aesthetic object or artefact is also a container for other things: spirits, the divine, the ghost. As the gods were decomposing so they were sublimated into another form by the sculptural hand wielding its force upon the rock. This is in order that the form which always lay within the rock achieved its shape. The sculpture marked both remembrance and discovery of form. These continued as mnemonic objects of Achaea, often interacting with the complex assemblages of motifs and stories inherited from Homer specifically as the foremost author of Greek cultural form and meaning. Aeschylus’s Agamemnon is not that of Homer, but it offers another version and another version will come after his. This detritus of a dead culture proliferates and litters European culture. It is refound, re-used, re-worked. We obsessively come back to those ruined stones lying in the city street or the museum or the texts of a poem or a play. They are an archive of ruin, genocide and dispossession; but they are also a ­counter-archive in which the slave girls can speak again against Odysseus the murderer. Odysseus is enmeshed with the dead: those he carries with him and those he encounters. Our being acts as a container of the memory of the dead. In Heinrich Blücher’s remarkable unpublished lectures from his period at the New School of Social Research he talks of the visit of Odysseus to the dead and what this means for our modernities: I would have wished for more time to have another session on Homer but I will not be able to come back to him and I regret that, because I would have liked to help you to see Hades. Let me only say this much to you. If you approach Homer in a very very modern way then you will see that we are all living with Hades, because the idea of shadows which cannot speak or act any more, which cannot add anything more to their lives is very much with us today. We are all living with those shadows. Those are our dead ones and we all carry them within us and we can make them speak to us again in this memory which Hades is when we

Domination: The Atreides  175 give them our blood just as Odysseus must spend his blood so that the shadows in Hades might be able to speak to him. We can make our shadows that live in our memories speak by giving them our blood, the blood of our interest and of our love for them, and as long as we live and carry them within us we can go back to Hades again as Odysseus went back and we can learn from it if only we are able to love the shadows enough. (Blücher 1954:11) The dead persist as part of our congealed social being. Odysseus remembers but he also encounters the ghost. His journey to the dead is a visit to a place both interior to himself and exterior. He has been told how to get to the land of the dead and what he must sacrifice to do so. It exists as both imaginary geography that he can traverse to and the fracture between the world of the living and that of the dead. He does not exist (like the cursed Cassandra) constantly on that border looking both into the lands of the living and the lands of the dead. He steps over the boundary when he faces one way or the other. The border of the living and the dead is literally a fracture line running through Cassandra’s embodied being. When she steps over the border it is the physical lintel of a house. She steps from the world of light and lucidity into the house of darkness and death. She meets her physical end in the chamber of the house and then passes fully into Hades. When Odysseus visits the dead he endures its momentary darkness and then passes into the living world again. Although he continues to retain the memory of the dead which he has encountered (and we know this because he will tell the story of it) it remains as a moment of adventure, travelogue and ellipses. What this reveals is something different from Cassandra’s embodiment of death, prophecy and seeing. Cassandra is cursed because she can see everything but is paralysed in being unable to do anything about what she sees. She both sees and cannot evade her fate or the fate of others. She is both physically enslaved and enslaved by her ghosts. She does not finally come home. Her end is in the bloody Mycenaean chamber. Odysseus wanted to visit and see the dead because he wanted something from them. He was lost and wanted directions to get back home to Ithaca. Only the dead could provide this. Little wonder that Cassandra moans and prophesies doom and Odysseus becomes emblematic of statehood, domination and patriarchy: including the domination of the ghosts who he prostrates to his will. He will also add to the many ghosts of Hades on his return to Ithaca in his murder of the suitors and of the slave girls. We should also be alert to the fact that Odysseus tells his own story. If his nature is as a myth-making subjectivity then perhaps we should trust less in his own account of his travels. The fabulous nature of his geography once he escapes the company of other men and departs from ‘actual’ geography may hint that he may not have been doing what, in his wiliness, he tells us he has been doing. Wooing goddesses and witches and slaying monsters may

176  Domination: The Atreides just be a story to distract us from what he was really up to. Indeed this is proto-bourgeois myth-making which confounds both the listener but also mystifies and enchants the teller, enmeshed as he is as much in his imaginary existence as he is in his real life. The lived reality of those monsters becomes as real to him in his retelling as it does to his listeners. Yet it may be that his monster is present, that the binding of Odysseus tells us more about him than the Sirens, and that those who want to slay monsters should look from the Cyclops back towards Odysseus and to Achilles and Agamemnon: ­humans of flesh and blood. Cassandra and Iphigenia have nothing to fear from monsters: the terrorism comes from men. As Hannah Arendt has said, there was a genocidal Achillean plan to wipe out the gens Hectorea which would ultimately be resurrected in Rome (1973:209). Agamemnon explicitly tells Chryses, when he came to beg for his daughter, that far from setting her free she was to grow old in his palace, her own world destroyed, working at his loom and sharing his bed as a slave. He calls for the absolute extermination and extinction of the entire Trojan people, including babies in their mothers’ wombs. The ravening of Hector by Achilles is so calculated and cruel in its desecration that reading it again is almost unbearable. Homer displays the ravening, the genocidal impulse, the totalitarian gesture; and his future audiences and readers in the classical world would learn the civilising moment of kindness, care and restitution at its core in the Odyssey and the Iliad. Homer lingers over the hanging of the slave girls and the ravening of Hector as a form of memorialisation and critique. Indeed Homer’s is an antagonistic, poetic gesture of lucidity confronted by the darkness. Cornelius Castoriadis argues, in his own antagonism towards Aristotle, that: It is unthinkable, for a classical Greek, that slavery might be justified, given that he learns to read and to write with the Iliad, where one knows from the start that the most noble characters one encounters in this epic are going to be reduced to slavery (after the poem ends, in the continuation of the legend). Who would ever dare to think that Andromache and Cassandra are slaves ‘by nature’. (Castoriadis 1997:97) Indeed the remembrance of Andromache and Cassandra which propels our culture is both a signal from the past and a warning of the future. Andromache’s are enslaved and endure their grief even now. Critical theory is the lucid examination of those conditions and the fables with which they are enwrapped. The concepts of critical theory that we have used here (the human, enlightenment, force, cosmos, spirit, domination) interacting with characters and motifs like Helen, Achilles and Agamemnon, are not comprehensive. In the same way that myth is a notation and abbreviature of the world, so the concepts we have excavated are an abbreviature and an approach towards

Domination: The Atreides  177 critical theory. In previous work we have examined the imaginary of the slave, the ghost and the animal as historic and aesthetic objects. Here we have the transhistoric being: an entity of non-history or ante-history. This being is fabulous, fictional, protean. Its transhistory is exemplified by its crossings of the borders and interstices between worlds. Like the beacon signals between Troy and Mycenae, like Dostoevsky’s repulsion before the crystal edifice, like Marx and the intermundia, those entities speak from the fractures, the crack and fissure. They have been with us for 3000 years and will persist into all the futures and extinctions of emerging humanity, and indeed what will come after them.

References

Abaffy, N.B. (2012) ‘The Radical Tragic Imaginary: Castoriadis on Aeschylus and Sophocles’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 8(2):34–59. Adorno, T.W. (1970) Asthetische Theorie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, T.W. (1989) Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E.B. Ashton, New York: Continuum. Adorno, T.W. (1991) The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ­London: Routledge. Adorno, T.W. (2006) Philosophy of New Music, translated, edited and with an Introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Adorno, T.W. (2007) Dream Notes, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge: Polity. Adorno, T.W. (2013) Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Adorno, T.W. and Horkheimer, M. (1997) Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, London: Verso. Aeschylus (1961a) ‘Prometheus Bound’, in Prometheus and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 20–52. Aeschylus (1961b) ‘Seven against Thebes’, in Prometheus and other plays, trans. Philip Vellacott, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 88–120. Aeschylus (1961c) ‘The Suppliants’, in Prometheus and Other Plays, trans. Philip ­Vellacott, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 54–86. Aeschylus (1979) The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides, trans. Robert Fagles, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Aeschylus (1999) The Oresteia: A New Version, trans. Ted Hughes, London: Faber and Faber. Ahl, F. and Roisman, H.M. (1996) The Odyssey Re-Formed, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Andrewes, A. (1991) Greek Society, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Apollinaire, G. (2007) ‘Duchamp-Villon’, in Wood, J., Hulks, D. and Potts, A. (Eds), Modern Sculpture Reader, Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 41–43. Arendt, H. (1969) ‘Introduction: Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940’, in Benjamin, W., ­Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken, 1–55. Arendt, H. (1973) On Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Arendt, H. (1998) The Human Condition, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Aristotle, Horace and Longinus (1965) Classical Literary Criticism, trans. T.S. Dorsch, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

180 References Arnason, J.P. (2001) ‘Autonomy and Axiality: Comparative Perspectives on the Greek Breakthrough’, in Arnason, J.P. and Murphy, P. (Eds), Agon, Logos, Polis: The Greek Achievement and Its Aftermath, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 155–206. Arnason, J.P. (2003) Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions, Leiden: Brill. Arnason, J.P. and Murphy, P. (Eds) (2001) Agon, Logos, Polis: The Greek Achievement and its Aftermath, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag. Arnold, A.J. (1973) ‘Camus’ Dionysian Hero: “Caligula” in 1938’, South Atlantic Bulletin, 38(4):45–53. Arrian (1958) The Life of Alexander the Great, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt, ­Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ashmole, B. and Yalouris, N. (1967) Olympia: The Sculptures of the Temple of Venus, London: Phaidon. Atwood, M. (2005) The Penelopiad, Toronto: Knopf. Atwood, M. (2007) The Penelopiad: The Play, London: Faber and Faber. Auerbach, E. (2003) Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, trans. Willard Trask, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Aurelius, M. (1964) Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Austin, N. (1994) Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Austin, R.G. (1959) ‘Virgil and the Wooden Horse’, Journal of Roman Studies, 49:16–25. Ayling-Smith, B., Quarini, C. and White, B. (2012) Cloth and Memory, Tunbridge Wells: Direct Design. Bachhuber, C. (2009) ‘The Treasure Deposits of Troy: Rethinking Crisis and Agency on the Early Bronze Age Citadel’, Anatolian Studies, 44:1–18. Bailey, R. (2011) ‘Herder’s Sculptural Thinking’, Parallax, 17(2):71–83. Bailey, R. (2015) ‘Concrete Thinking for Sculpture’, Parallax, 21(3):241–258. Bailey, R. and Reeve, H. (2014) ‘Sculptural Substance: An Interview with Hester Reeve’, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 7(3):545–556. Bakker, E. (1999) ‘Mimesis as Performance: Rereading Auerbach’s First Chapter’, Poetics Today, 20(1):11–26. Balibar, E. (1995) The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner, London: Verso. Barbour, C. (2012) The Marx Machine: Politics, Polemics, Ideology, Lanham: Lexington. Barringer, J.M. (2008) Art, Myth and Ritual in Classical Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barringer, J.M. (2014) The Art and Archaeology of Ancient Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barrow, R.H. (1949) The Romans, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Barthes, R. (1977) ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana, 142–148. Barthes, R. (1981a) ‘Putting on the Greeks’, in Critical Essays, trans. Richard ­Howard, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 59–66. Barthes, R. (1981b) ‘Tacitus and the Funerary Baroque’, in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard, 99–102.

References  181 Barthes, R. (1987) Sollers Writer, trans. Philip Thody, London: Athlone Press. Barthes, R. (1989) The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, Berkeley: University of California Press. Barthes, R. (1991) The Grain of the Voice; Interviews 1962–1980, trans. Linda Coverdale, Berkeley: University of California Press. Barthes, R. (1992a) Michelet, trans. Richard Howard, Berkeley: University of ­California Press. Barthes, R. (1992b) On Racine, trans. Richard Howard, Berkeley: University of ­California Press. Barthes, R. (1995) Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard, London: Papermac. Barthes, R. (1997) Sade/Fourier/Loyola, trans. Richard Miller, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Barthes, R. (2005) The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–1978), trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier, New York: Columbia University Press. Barthes, R. (2012) Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, R. (2013) How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces: Notes for a Lecture Course and Seminar at the Collège de France ­(1976–1977), trans. Kate Briggs, New York: Columbia University Press. Bastien, S. (2006) Caligula et Camus: Interférences Transhistoriques, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Benfey, C. (2005) ‘Introduction: A Tale of Two Iliads’, in Weil, S. and Bespaloff, R., War and the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy, New York: New York Review of Books, vii–xxiii. Benjamin, W. (1969) Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken. Benzer, M. (2012) ‘Lifelong Death Penalty: Adorno, Beckett’s Drama, Sociology’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 12(1):94–121. Berger, J. (1979) Permanent Red, London: Writers and Readers. Berger, J. (1980) About Looking, London: Writers and Readers. Berger, J. (1984) And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, London: Writers and Readers. Berger, J. (1992) Keeping a Rendezvous, London: Granta. Berger, J. and Mohr, J. (1989) Another Way of Telling, London: Granta. Berlinzani, F. (2013) ‘Game, Ingenuity, Utopia. Acoustic Automata in the Greek and Roman World: Some Reflections/Gioco ingegno utopia. Automata sonori nel mondo greco-romano: Alcuni spunti di riflessione’, Lanx, 13:27–51. Bernal, M. (1987) Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation, Vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985, London: Free Association Books. Bernstein, J.M. (1992) The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Berryman, S. (2009) The Mechanical Hypothesis in Ancient Greek Natural Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bespaloff, R. (1947) On the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy, Princeton: Princeton ­University Press. Blegen, C.W. (1963) Troy and the Trojans, London: Thames and Hudson. Blücher, H. (1954) ‘Lecture III. Homer (1954): Three Lectures by Heinrich Blücher (New York School for Social Research)’, The Blücher Archive, www.bard.edu/ bluecher/homer_54/homer_954_pf.htm, 1–11, accessed 17/11/2017.

182 References Blücher, H. (1967) ‘Lecture IV. Homer (1967) (Bard)’, The Blücher Archive, www. bard.edu/bluecher/homer_67/Homer_1967_pf.htm, 1–7, accessed 17/11/2017. Bluemel, C. (1955) Greek Sculptors at Work, London: Phaidon. Boardman, J. (1978) Greek Sculpture: The Archaic Period, London: Thames and Hudson. Boardman, J. (1985) Greek Sculpture: The Classical Period: A Handbook, London: Thames and Hudson. Boardman, J. (1986) ‘Greek Art and Architecture’, in Boardman, J., Griffin, J. and Murray, O. (Eds), The Oxford History of the Classical World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 275–310. Boardman, J. (1995) Greek Sculpture: The Late Classical Period and Sculpture in Colonies and Overseas, London: Thames and Hudson. Boardman, J., Dörig, J., Fuchs, W. and Hirmer, M. (1967) The Art and Architecture of Ancient Greece, London: Thames and Hudson. Boardman, J., Griffin, J. and Murray, O. (Eds) (1986) The Oxford History of the Classical World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bonefeld, W. (2001) ‘Kapital and its Subtitle: A Note on the Meaning of Critique’, Capital and Class, 75:53–63. Bonefeld, W. (2012) ‘Negative Dialectics In Miserable Times: Notes on Adorno and Social Praxis’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 12(1):122–134. Bonefeld, W. (2016) ‘Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Economic Objectivity’, History of the Human Sciences, 29(2):60–76. Bonefeld, W., Gunn, R. and Psychopedis, K. (1992) ‘Introduction’, in Bonefeld, W., Gunn, R. and Psychopedis, K. (Eds), Open Marxism: Volume 1: Dialectics and History, London: Pluto, ix–xx. Bonnard, A. (1962) Greek Civilization: From the Iliad to the Parthenon, London: George Allen and Unwin. Bottéro, J., Herrenschmidt, C. and Vernant, J.-P. (2000) Ancestor of the West: Writing, Reasoning, and Religion in Mesopotamia, Elam and Greece, trans. Teresa ­Lavender Fagan, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bowra, C.M. (1973) The Greek Experience, London: Cardinal. Bradford, E. (1985) Ulysses Found, London: Century. Brassier, R. (2007) Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bremmer, J. (1999) ‘Erich Auerbach and His Mimesis’, Poetics Today, 20(1):3–10. Brendel, O.J. (1995) Etruscan Art, Yale: Yale University Press. Broch, H. (1946) The Death of Virgil, trans. Jean Starr Untermeyer, New York: Pantheon. Broch, H. (2005) ‘The Style of the Mythical Age: On Rachel Bespaloff’, in Weil, S. and Bespaloff, R., War and the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy, New York: New York Review of Books, 101–121. Bromley, A.G. (1986) ‘Notes on the Antikythera Mechanism’, Centaurus, 29:5–27. Broodbank, C. (2000) An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Broodbank, C. (2013) The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World, London: Thames and Hudson. Browning, G.K. (2000) ‘Marx’s Doctoral Dissertation: The Development of a Hegelian Thesis’, in Burns, T. and Fraser, I. (Eds) The Hegel-Marx Connection, ­Basingstoke: Macmillan, 131–145.

References  183 Bruce, J.D. (1913) ‘Human Automata in Classical Tradition and Mediaeval Romance’, Modern Philology, 10(4):511–526. Brumbaugh, R.S. (1966) Ancient Greek Gadgets and Machines, New York: Crowell. Buck-Morss, S. (1977) The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, W ­ alter Benjamin and the Frankfurt Institute, Hassocks: Harvester. Burckhardt, J. (1963) History of Greek Culture, trans. Palmer Hilty, London: Constable. Burn, A.R. (1983) The Pelican History of Greece, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Calasso, R. (1993) The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, trans. Tim Parks, New York: Knopf. Calvet, L.-J. (1994) Roland Barthes: A Biography, trans. Sarah Wykes, Cambridge: Polity. Cameron, A. and Long, J. (1993) Barbarians and Politics at the Court of Arcadius, Berkeley: University of California Press. Campbell, J. (1993) The Hero With a Thousand Faces, London: Fontana. Camus, A. (1965) Caligula and Cross Purpose, trans. Stuart Gilbert, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Camus, A. (1971) The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Camus, A. (1975) The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Carlyle, T. (1841) On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, London: James Fraser. Carne-Ross, D.S. and Haynes, K. (Eds) (1996) Horace in English, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Carter, W. (2013) ‘Towards a History of the Marxist History of Art’, in Carter, W., Haran, B. and Schwartz, F.J. (Eds), ReNew Marxist Art History, London: Art/Books, 14–28. Casarino, C. and Negri, A. (1998) In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Castoriadis, C. (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Cambridge: Polity. Castoriadis, C. (1991) Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castoriadis, C. (1997) ‘The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary’, in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, trans. David Ames Curtis, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 84–107. Castoriadis, C. (2001) ‘Aeschylean Anthropogony and Sophoclean Self-Creation of Anthropos’, in Arnason, J.P. and Murphy, P. (Eds), Agon, Logos, Polis: The Greek Achievement and Its Aftermath, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 138–154. Cauvin, J. (2000) The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cazeaux, C. (2007) Metaphor and Continental Philosophy, Abingdon: Routledge. Chadwick, H. (1986) ‘Envoi: On Taking Leave of Antiquity’, in Boardman, J., ­Griffin, J. and Murray, O. (Eds), The Oxford History of the Classical World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 806–828. Charbonneaux, J., Martin, R. and Villard, F. (1971) Archaic Greek Art, 620–480 BC, London: Thames and Hudson. Charbonneaux, J., Martin, R. and Villard, F. (1972) Classical Greek Art, 480–330 BC, London: Thames and Hudson.

184 References Cicero (1972) The Nature of the Gods, trans. Horace C.P. McGregor, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cixous, H. (1998) Stigmata: Escaping Texts, London: Routledge. Clarke, S. (1991) Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology: From Adam Smith to Max Weber, 2nd edition, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Coldstream, J.N. (1977) Geometric Greece, London: Ernest Benn. Cook, R.M. (1960) Greek Painted Pottery, London: Methuen. Cook, J.M. (1973) The Troad: An Archaeological and Topographical Study, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Corse, S. (2008) Craft Objects, Aesthetic Contexts: Kant, Heidegger, and Adorno on Craft, Lanham: University Press of America. Crome, K. (2004) Lyotard and Greek Thought: Sophistry, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Crome, K. (2006) ‘Lyotard and the Greeks: On the Problem of Nature in “The Differend”‘, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 11(3):93–105. Curtis, P. (2007) ‘Preface’, in Henry Moore Institute (Ed.), Towards a New Laocoon, Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 7. Daehner, J. (2007) ‘Whose Laocoon? The Origins of a Universal Image’, in Henry Moore Institute (Ed.), Towards a New Laocoon, Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, 17–19. Dawson, D. (1992) Cities of the Gods: Communist Utopias in Greek Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. De Burgh, W.G. (1961) The Legacy of the Ancient World, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Delivorrias, A. (1990) ‘Disiecta Membra: The Remarkable History of Some Sculptures from an Unknown Temple’, in True, M. and Podany, J. (Eds), Marble: Art Historical and Scientific Perspectives on Ancient Sculpture: Papers Delivered at a Symposium Organized by the Departments of Antiquities and Antiquities Conservation and Held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, April 28–30, 1988, Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 11–46. Derrida, J. (1994) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, London: Routledge. De Ste. Croix, G.E.M. (1975) ‘Karl Marx and the History of Classical Antiquity’, Arethusa, 8(1):7–41. De Ste. Croix, G.E.M. (1981) The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Dodds, E.R. (1951) The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley: University of California Press. Doob, P.R. (1990) The Idea of the Labyrinth: From Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Dostoevsky, F. (1993) Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, London: Vintage. Douchet, S. (2005) ‘La Peau du centaure à la frontière de l’humanité et de l’animalité’, Micrologus, 13:285–312. Dougherty, C. (2001) The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of ­Homer’s Odyssey, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doy, G. (1998) Materializing Art History, Oxford: Berg. Doy, G. (2002) Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture, London: I.B. Tauris. Drachmann, A.G. (1963) The Mechanical Technology of Greek and Roman Antiquity: A Study of the Literary Sources, Copenhagen: Munksgaard.

References  185 Eagleton, T. (1990) The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford: Blackwell. Eco, U. (1999) Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Edensor, T. (2005) Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, Materiality, Oxford: Berg. Edwards, I.E.S., Gadd, C.J., Hammond, N.G.L. and Sollberger, E. (Eds) (1975) The Cambridge Ancient History, 3rd Edition, Volume II, Part Two: History of the ­Middle East and the Aegean Region, c1380–1000 B.C., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elster, J. (1984) Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality, ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elster, J. (2000) Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engels, F. (1942) The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, trans. ­A lick West and Dona Torr, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Euripides (1963) Medea and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Euripides (1973) The Bacchae and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fagles, R. and Stanford, W.B. (1979) ‘A Reading of “The Oresteia”: The Serpent and the Eagle’, in Robert Fagles (Ed.), Aeschylus: The Oresteia, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 13–97. Feenberg, A. (1981) Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory, Oxford: ­Martin Robertson. Felson-Rubin, N. (1994) Regarding Penelope: From Character to Poetics, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fenves, P. (1986) ‘Marx’s Doctoral Thesis on Two Greek Atomists and the Post-­ Kantian Interpretations’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 47(3):433–452. Ferguson, J. (1975) Utopias of the Classical World, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Finley, M.I. (1999) The World of Odysseus, London: Pimlico. Fischer, S.R. (2005) A History of Reading, London: Reaktion. Fishwick, D. (1969) ‘Genius and Numen’, Harvard Theological Review, 62(3):356–367. Fishwick, D. (1970) ‘Numina Augustorum’, The Classical Quarterly, 20(1):191–197. Foster, J.B. (2000) Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press. Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, London: Routledge. Freedman, L. (2003) The Revival of the Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art, New York: Cambridge University Press. Fried, M. (1998) Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Garner, A. (1997) ‘Achilles in Altjira’, in The Voice That Thunders, London: Harvill, 39–58. Gedo, M.M. (1994) Looking at Art from the Inside Out: The Psychoiconographic ­Approach to Modern Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geoffrey of Monmouth (1966) The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gerald of Wales (1977) The Journey through Wales and The Description of Wales, trans. Lewis Thorpe, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gere, C. (2006) The Tomb of Agamemnon, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

186 References Gere, C. (2009) Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Ginsberg, W. (1989) ‘Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and the Politics of Interpretation’, The Classical Journal, 84(3):222–231. Glob, P.V. (1971) The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved, trans. Rupert Bruce-­ Mitford, New York: Ballatine. Glob, P.V. (1973) The Mound People: Danish Bronze-Age Man Preserved, trans. Joan Bulman, London: Faber and Faber. Glover, T.R. (1966) The Ancient World: A Beginning, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gottlieb, A. (2016) The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, London: Penguin Random House. Goux, J.-J. (1993) Oedipus, Philosopher, trans. Catherine Porter, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gransden, K.W. (Ed.) (1996) Virgil in English, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Graves, R. (1986) I, Claudius and Claudius the God, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Graves, R. (1992) The Greek Myths: Complete Edition, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Greenberg,C. (1992) ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, in Harrison, C. and Wood, P. (Eds), Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwell, 554–560. Grethlein, J. (2008) ‘Memory and Material Objects in the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey”’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 128:27–51. Grollios, V. (2017) Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory ­Tradition, Abingdon: Routledge. Habermas, J. (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge: Polity. Hammer, D. (1997) ‘Achilles as Vagabond: The Culture of Autonomy in the “Iliad”‘, The Classical World, 90(5):341–366. Hammer, D. (2002) The Iliad as Politics: The Performance of Political Thought, ­Norman: Oklahoma University Press. Hammond, N.G.L. and Scullard, H.H. (Eds) (1970) The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon. Hanfmann, G.M.A. (1967) Classical Sculpture, London: Joseph. Hardie, P.R. (1986) Virgil’s Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harding, A.F. (1984) The Mycenaeans and Europe, London: Academic Press. Harding, A.F. (2000) European Societies in the Bronze Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin. Hardwick, L. (2004) Translating Words, Translating Cultures, London: Duckworth. Hardwick, L. and Stray, C. (Eds) (2007) A Companion to Classical Receptions, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Harrison, E.B. (1990) ‘Repair, Reuse, and Reworking of Ancient Greek Sculpture’, in True, M. and Podany, J. (Eds), Marble: Art Historical and Scientific Perspectives on Ancient Sculpture: Papers Delivered at a Symposium Organized by the ­Departments of Antiquities and Antiquities Conservation and Held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, April 28–30, 1988, Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 163–184. Heaney, S. (2004) The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles’ Antigone, London: Faber and Faber.

References  187 Heidegger, M. (2001) ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York: Perennial Classics, 143–159. Heidegger, M. (2002) ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–56. Held, D. (1990) Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas, Cambridge: Polity. Helms, M.W. (1988) Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge and Geographical Distance, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Herder, J.G. (2002) Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, trans. Jason Haiger, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hesiod (1988) Theogony and Works and Days, trans. M.L. West, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Higgins, R.A. (1967) Greek Terracottas, London: Methuen. Holloway, J. (1992) ‘Crisis, Fetishism, Class Composition’, in Bonefeld, W., Gunn, R. and Psychopedis, K. (Eds), Open Marxism: Volume 2: Theory and Practice, ­London: Pluto, 145–169. Holloway, J. (2012) ‘Crisis and Critique’, Capital and Class, 36(3):515–519. Holloway, J., Matamoros, F. and Tischler, S. (Eds) (2009) Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism, London: Pluto. Holquist, M. (1999) ‘Erich Auerbach and the Fate of Philology Today’, Poetics Today, 20(1):77–91. Homer (1987) The Iliad: A New Prose Translation, trans. Martin Hammond, ­Harmondsworth: Penguin. Homer (1988) The Iliad, trans E.V. Rieu, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Homer (1990) The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles, New York: Penguin. Homer (1991) The Odyssey, trans. E.V. Rieu, revised trans. D.C.H. Rieu, London: Penguin. Homer (1996) The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, New York: Viking Penguin. Homer (2007) The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore, New York: Harper Perennial. Honour, H. (1972) ‘Neo-Classicism’, in Council of Europe (Eds) The Age of Neo-­ Classicism: The Royal Academy and the Victoria and Albert Museum, L ­ ondon, ­ ritain, 9 September–19 November 1972, London: Arts Council of Great B xxi–xxix. Hudson, M. (2000) ‘The Clerk of the Foresters Records: John Berger, the Dead, and the Writing of History, Rethinking History, 4(3):261–279. Hudson, M. (2002) ‘On the Dead of World History’, Race and Class, 43(4):26–33. Hudson, M. (2016) The Slave Ship, Memory and the Origin of Modernity, London: Routledge. Hudson, M. (2017a) Centaurs, Rioting in Thessaly: Memory and the Classical World, New York: Punctum. Hudson, M. (2017b) Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory, London: Routledge. Hudson, M. (2017c) Species and Machines: The Human Subjugation of Nature, ­London: Routledge. Hudson, M. and Shaw, T. (2015) ‘Dead Logics and Worlds: Sound Art and Sonorous Objects’, Organised Sound, 20(2):263–272. Huhn, T. and Zuidervaart, L. (Eds) (1991) Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

188 References Humphreys, S.C. (2004) The Strangeness of Gods: Historical Perspectives on the ­Interpretation of Athenian Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irvin, S. (2013) ‘Sculpture’, in Gaut, B. and Lopes, D.M. (Eds), Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, London: Routledge, 606–615. Jameson, F. (1990) Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic, ­London: Verso. Jay, M. (1973) The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950, London: Heinemann. Jaynes, J. (1990) The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Jenkyns, R. (2015) Classical Literature, Harmondsworth: Pelican. Johnson, N. (1995) ‘Cast in Stone: Monuments, Geography and Nationalism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 13:51–65. Jones, P.V. (1988) Homer’s Odyssey: A Companion to the English Translation of ­Richmond Lattimore, London: Bristol Classical Press. Jung, C.G. (1991) The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R.F.C. Hull, London: Routledge. Junker, K. (2012) Interpreting the Images of Greek Myths: An Introduction, trans. Annemarie Künzl-Snodgrass and Anthony Snodgrass, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kearney, R. (1988) The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture, ­London: Routledge. Kellner, D. (1989) Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity. Kerényi, C. (1958) The Gods of the Greeks, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Kirk, G.S. (1965) Homer and the Epic: A Shortened Version of The Songs of Homer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kitto, H.D.F. (1957) The Greeks, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Knox, B. (1996) ‘Introduction’, in Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles, New York: Viking Penguin, 3–64. Koed, E. (2005) ‘Sculpture and the Sculptural’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63:147‐154. Konuk, K. (2010) East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Landauer, C. (1988) ‘Mimesis and Erich Auerbach’s Self-Mythologizing’, German Studies Review, 11(1):83–96. Lane, A. (1971) Greek Pottery, London: Faber and Faber. Larson, J. (2013) ‘Albert Camus’ Caligula and the Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade’, Philosophy and Literature, 37(2):360–373). Latour, B. (1988) ‘The Politics of Explanation: an Alternative’, in Woolgar, S. (Ed.), Knowledge and Reflexivity: New Frontiers in the Sociology of Knowledge, London: Sage, 155–177. Lawrence, A.W. (1972) Greek and Roman Sculpture, London: Jonathan Cape. Leaf, W. (1912) Troy: A Study in Homeric Geography, London: Macmillan. Leakey, R. (1994) The Origin of Humankind, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Leakey, R. and Lewin, R. (1992) Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human, London: Little, Brown. Lefebvre, H. (1995) Introduction to Modernity: Twelve Preludes, September 1959–May 1961, trans. John Moore, London: Verso.

References  189 Lefort, C. (1986) The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lerer, S. (1996) Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lewis, C.S. (1997) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, London: Collins. Lewis-Williams, D. (2002) The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art, London: Thames and Hudson. Lewis-Williams, D. and Pearce, D. (2005) Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos and the Realm of the Gods, London: Thames and Hudson. Linebaugh, P. and Rediker, M. (2000) The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Boston: Beacon. Livy (1971) The Early History of Rome, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Logue, C. (2001) War Music: An Account of Books 1–4 and 16–19 of Homer’s Iliad, London: Faber and Faber. Loraux, N. (2000) Born of the Earth: Myth and Politics in Athens, trans. Selina ­Stewart, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lowes-Dickinson, G. (1947) Plato and his Dialogues, West Drayton: Penguin. Lübecker, N. (2009) Community, Myth and Recognition in Twentieth Century French Literature and Thought, London: Continuum. Lucan (1956) Pharsalia: Dramatic Episodes of the Civil War, trans. Robert Graves, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Martindale, C. (1993) Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, K. (1975) ‘Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume One, New York: International Publishers, 25–105. Marx, K. (2010a) ‘Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature’, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume One, 1835–43, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 25–108. Marx, K. (2010b) ‘Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy’, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume One, 1835–43, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 403–509. McCarthy, G.E. (2003) Classical Horizons: The Origins of Sociology in Ancient Greece, Albany: State University of New York Press. Meillassoux, Q. (2008) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier, London: Continuum. Menander and Theophrastus (1967) Menander: Plays and Fragments/Theophrastus: The Characters, trans. Philip Vellacott, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Millar, L. (Ed.) (2007) Cloth and Culture Now, Canterbury: University College for the Creative Arts. Millar, L. (2013) ‘Cloth and Memory: Fragments, Re-Constructions and Re-­ Creations’, in Millar, L. (Ed.), Cloth and Memory 2, Saltaire: Salts Estates, 11–17. Miller, H. (1963) The Colossus of Maroussi, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Miller, P.A. (2016) Diotima at the Barricades: French Feminists Read Plato, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, A.J. (2010) Heidegger among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

190 References Mitchell, S. (2006) ‘Max Raphael: Aesthetics and Politics’, in Hemingway, A. (Ed.), Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left, London: Pluto, 89–105. Mithen, S. (2005) The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Morgan, L.H. (1977) Ancient Society, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr. Morris, I. (1986) ‘The Use and Abuse of Homer’, Classical Antiquity, 5(1):81–138. Morris, I. (1987) Burial and Ancient Society: The Rise of the Greek City-State, ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morris, I. (1992) Death Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morris, I. (1999) Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in Early Iron Age Greece, Oxford: Blackwell. Morris, S.P. (1992) Daidalos and the Origins of Greek Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Murdoch, I. (1992) Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, London: Chatto and Windus. Nance, M.R. (1924) ‘Troy Town’, Journal of the Royal Institute of Cornwall, 71:262–279. Neal, T. (2006a) ‘Blood and Hunger in the Iliad’, Classical Philology, 101(1):15–33. Neal, T. (2006b) The Wounded Hero: Non-Fatal Injury in Homer’s Iliad, Bern: Peter Lang. Negri, A. (2009) Art and Multitude, trans. Ed Emery, Cambridge: Polity. Nicholson, S.W. (1997) Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nicolson, A. (2014) The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters, London: William Collins. ­ ambridge Nietzsche, F. (2001) The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman, Cambridge: C University Press. O’Meara, L. (2012) Roland Barthes at the Collège de France, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Osborn, R.E. (2008) ‘Geometries of Force in Homer’s Iliad: Two Readings’, Humanitas (National Humanities Institute), 21(1):168–178. Ovid (1955) The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Mary M. Innes, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Paglia, C. (1990) Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New Haven: Yale University Press. Papadopoulos, J.K. and Ruscillo, D. (2002) ‘A Ketos in Early Athens: An Archaeology of Whales and Sea Monsters in the Greek World’, American Journal of Archaeology, 106(2):187–227. Parker, R. (1997) ‘God’s Cruel and Kind: Tragic and Civic Theology’, in Pelling, C. (Ed.), Greek Tragedy and the Ancient Historian, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 143–160. Parker, R. (1999) ‘Through a Glass Darkly: Sophocles and the Divine’, in Griffin, J. (Ed.), Sophocles Revisited: Essays Presented to Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Oxford: ­Oxford University Press, 11–30. Parsons, M. (2000) The Dove that Returns, The Dove that Vanishes: Paradox and Creativity in Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge. Patterson, T.C. (2003) Marx’s Ghost: Conversations with Archaeologists, Oxford: Berg. Pearson, M. and Shanks, M. (2001) Theatre/Archaeology, London: Routledge.

References  191 Petronius (1969) The Satyricon and the Fragments, trans. J.P. Sullivan, H ­ armondsworth: Penguin. Plato (1951) The Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Plato (1955) The Republic, trans. H.D.P. Lee, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Plato (1969) The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Plato (1977) Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Pollard, J. (1977) Birds in Greek Life and Myth, London: Thames and Hudson. Pollini, J. (2012) From Republic to Empire: Rhetoric, Religion, and Power in the Visual Culture of Ancient Rome, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Pollitt, J.J. (1972) Art and Experience in Classical Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Postone, M. (2005) ‘Critical Social Theory and the Contemporary World’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 19:69–79. Potts, A. (1994) Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, New Haven: Yale University Press. Potts, A. (2000) The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist, New Haven: Yale University Press. Potts, A. (2007) ‘Introduction: The Idea of Modern Sculpture’, in Wood, J., Hulks, D. and Potts, A. (Eds), Modern Sculpture Reader, Leeds: Henry Moore Institute, xiii–xxx. Preziosi, D. (1989) Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science, New ­Haven: Yale University Press. Pye, D. (1971) The Nature and Art of Workmanship, London: Herbert Press. Quest, M. (2017) ‘Direct Democracy and the Search for Identity for Colonized People: The Contemporary Meanings of C.L.R. James’s Classical Athens’, Classical Receptions Journal, 9(2):237–267. Radek, K. (1977) ‘Contemporary World Literature and the Tasks of Proletarian Art’, in Scott, H.G. (Ed.), Soviet Writers’ Congress, 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 73–182. Rancière, J. (2010) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. Steven Corcoran, London: Continuum. Read, H. (1956) The Art of Sculpture, New York: Pantheon. Renault, M. (2001) The Nature of Alexander, London: Penguin Classics. Rilke, R.M. (1962) Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M.D. Herter Norton, New York: Norton. Rimbaud, A. (1997) A Season in Hell, trans. Paul Schmidt, Boston: Bulfinch Press. Roberts, J. (1994) ‘Introduction: Art Has No History! Reflections on Art History and Historical Materialism’, in Roberts, J. (Ed.), Art Has No History! The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art, London: Verso, 1–36. Roisman, H. (2006) ‘Helen in the Iliad; Causa Belli and Victim of War: From Silent Weaver to Public Speaker’, American Journal of Philology, 127(1):1–36. Rose, G. (1992) The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society, Oxford: Blackwell. Rose, G. (1996) Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, H.J. (1935) ‘Nvmen inest: “Animism” in Greek and Roman Religion’, Harvard Theological Review, 28(4):237–257. Rubel, A. (2014) Fear and Loathing in Ancient Athens: Religion and Politics during the Peloponnesian War, London: Routledge.

192 References Rufus, Q.C. (2004) The History of Alexander, trans. John Yardley, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Schefold, K. (1966) Myth and Legend in Early Greek Art, London: Thames and Hudson. Scherr, A. (2014) ‘Camus and the Denial of Death: Meursault and Caligula’, Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 69(2):169–190. Schliemann, H. (1976a) Ilios: The City and the Country of the Trojans, New York: Arno Press. Schliemann, H. (1976b) Mycenae: A Narrative of Researches and Discoveries at ­Mycenae and Tiryns, New York: Arno Press. Schliemann, H. (1976c) Troja: Results of the Latest Researches and Discoveries on the Site of Homer’s Troy, 1882, New York: Arno Press. Schwartz, F.J. (2005) Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in ­Twentieth-Century Germany, New Haven: Yale University Press. Scullard, H.H. (1970) From the Gracchi to Nero: A History of Rome from 133 BC to AD 68, London: Methuen. Seaford, R. (1994) Reciprocity and Ritual: Homer and Tragedy in the Developing City-State, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seneca (1966) Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. E.F. Watling, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Seneca (1969) Letters from a Stoic/Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, trans. Robin Campbell, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Senseney, J.R. (2011) The Art of Building in the Classical World: Vision, Craftsmanship, and Linear Perspective in Greek and Roman Architecture, Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Serres, M. (2014) Statues: The Second Book of Foundations, trans. Randolph Burks, London: Bloomsbury. Serres, M. (2015) Rome: The First Book of Foundations, trans. Randolph Burks, London: Bloomsbury. Shanks, M. and Tilley, C. (1987) Re-Constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shapiro, G. (1995) Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel, Berkeley: University of California Press. Sjöholm, C. (2015) Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things, New York: Columbia University Press. Snodgrass, A.M. (1977) Archaeology and the Rise of the Greek State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Snodgrass, A.M. (1998) Homer and the Artists: Text and Picture in Early Greek Art, New York: Cambridge University Press. Sokolowski, R. (1974) Husserlian Meditations: How Words Present Things, ­Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Sophocles (1947) The Theban Plays, trans. E.F. Watling, London: Penguin. Sowerby, R. (1995) The Greeks: An Introduction to Their Culture, London: Routledge. Stafford, A. (1998) Roland Barthes, Phenomenon and Myth: An Intellectual Biography, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Steiner, G. (1971) In Bluebeards Castle: Some Notes towards the Redefinition of ­C ulture, London: Faber and Faber.

References  193 Steiner, G. (1986) Antigones: The Antigone Myth in Western Literature, Art and Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steiner, G. (1995) The Death of Tragedy, London: Faber and Faber. Stewart, A. (1994) Faces of Power: Alexander’s Image and Hellenistic Politics, ­Berkeley: University of California Press. Stewart, A. (1997) Art, Desire, and the Body in Ancient Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sturluson, S. (2005) The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology, trans. Jesse L. Byock, ­London: Penguin. Suetonius (1957) The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Taplin, O. (1978) Greek Tragedy in Action, London: Methuen. Taplin, O. (1986) ‘Homer’, in Boardman, J., Griffin, J. and Murray, O. (Eds), The Oxford History of the Classical World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 50–77. Taplin, O. (1992) Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad, Oxford: Clarendon. Taylour, W. (1958) Mycenean Pottery in Italy and Adjacent Areas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylour, W. (1964) The Mycenaeans, London: Thames and Hudson. Thomas, R.H. (1953) ‘The Novels of Hermann Broch’, The Cambridge Journal, 6(10):591–604. Thomson, G. (1949) Studies in Ancient Greek Society: The Prehistoric Aegean, ­London: Lawrence and Wishart. Thomson, G. (1973) Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Thomson, I.D. (2011) Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilley, C. (1999) Metaphor and Material Culture, Oxford: Blackwell. Tilley, C. (2004) The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, London: Berg. Tomlinson, R. (1992) From Mycenae to Constantinople: The Evolution of the Ancient City, London: Routledge. Toscano, A. (2009) ‘The Sensuous Religion of the Multitude: Art and Abstraction in Negri’, Third Text, 23(4):369–382. Trotsky, L. (1991) Literature and Revolution, trans. Rose Strunsky, London: RedWords. True, M. and Podany, J. (Eds) (1990) Marble: Art Historical and Scientific Perspectives on Ancient Sculpture: Papers Delivered at a Symposium Organized by the ­Departments of Antiquities and Antiquities Conservation and Held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, April 28–30, 1988, Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum. Truitt, E.R. (2015) Medieval Robots; Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art, ­Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tucker, W. (1977) The Language of Sculpture, London: Thames and Hudson. Van de Grift, J. (1984) ‘Tears and Revel: The Allegory of the Berthouville Centaur Scyphi’, American Journal of Archaeology, 88:377–388. Vellacott, P. (1961) ‘Introduction’, in Aeschylus, Prometheus and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 7–18. Vernant, J.-P. (1982) Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd, ­London: Methuen. Vernant, J.-P. (1998) Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, New Edition, trans. Janet Lloyd, New York: Zone Books.

194 References Vernant, J.-P. (2001) ‘Forms of Belief and Rationality in Greece’, in Arnason, J.P. and Murphy, P. (Eds), Agon, Logos, Polis: The Greek Achievement and Its Aftermath, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 118–126. Vernant, J.-P. (2006) Myth and Thought among the Greeks, trans. Janet Lloyd and Jeff Fort, New York: Zone Books. Vernant, J.-P. and Vidal-Naquet, P. (1988) Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd, New York: Zone Books. Versnel, H.S. (2011) Coping with the Gods: Wayward Readings in Greek Theology, Leiden: Brill. Vidal-Naquet, P. (2001) ‘Beasts, Humans and Gods: The Greek View’, in Arnason, J.P. and Murphy, P. (Eds), Agon, Logos, Polis: The Greek Achievement and Its ­Aftermath, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 127–137. Virgil (1958) The Aeneid, trans. W.F. Jackson Knight, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Virno, P. (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Vlassopoulos, K. (2007) Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History beyond Eurocentrism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vlassopoulos, K. (2013) Greeks and Barbarians, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wace, A.J.B. (1949) Mycenae: An Archaeological History and Guide, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wace, A.J.B. and Stubbings, F.H. (1962) A Companion to Homer, London: Macmillan. Wallenstein, S.-O. (2010) ‘Space, Time, and the Arts: Rewriting the Laocoon’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2(1):1–13. Walsh, D. (2008) Distorted Ideals in Greek Vase-Painting: The World of Mythological Burlesque, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Warren, J. (2005) Facing Death: Epicurus and His Critics, Oxford: Clarendon. Weil, S. (1965) ‘The Iliad, or the Poem of Force’, trans. Mary McCarthy, Chicago Review, 18(2):5–30. Weil, S. and Bespaloff, R. (2005) War and the Iliad, trans. Mary McCarthy, New York: New York Review of Books. West, M.L. (1988) ‘The Rise of the Greek Epic’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 108:151–172. Whitley, J. (2001) The Archaeology of Ancient Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitmarsh, T. (2014) ‘Atheist Aesthetics: The Sisyphus Fragment, Poetics, and the Creativity of Drama’, Cambridge Classical Journal, 60:109–124. Whitmarsh, T. (2016) Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, London: Faber and Faber. Wiggershaus, R. (1994) The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political ­Significance, trans. Michael Robertson, Cambridge: Polity. Wilcken, P. (2010) Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory, London: Bloomsbury. Wiles, D. (1997) Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodford, S. (1986) An Introduction to Greek Art, London: Duckworth. Woodford, S. (2003) Images of Myths in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References  195 Wright, J.C. (1998) ‘The Place of Troy among the Civilizations of the Bronze Age’, The Classical World, 91(5):356–368. Yourcenar, M. (1986) Memoirs of Hadrian and Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian, trans. Grace Frick, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Žižek, S. (1999) The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, ­London: Verso. Zuckert, R. (2009) ‘Sculpture and Touch: Herder’s Aesthetics of Sculpture’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67:285–299. Zuidervaart, L. (1991) Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Index

Abstraction 28–34, 75–76, 82–83, 119 Achilles 1, 5–7, 11, 12, 19, 21, 26, 28, 32, 34, 42, 54–55, 58–77, 78–96, 98, 100–101, 108, 112–113, 116–117, 118, 120, 122, 125–128, 145, 153, 172–173, 176 Adorno, T.W. 5, 15, 20–27, 43–57, 97, 101–108, 112, 136, on cultural landscapes 52, on the darkness of the world 48–49, on ghosts 49–51, on music 46–47 Aegisthus 7, 162 Aeneas 12–13, 59, 68, 70–77 Aeneid 70–77 Aeschylus 26, 29–31, 35, 64, on Mycenae 163–177 Aesthetics, theories of 43–57 Agamemnon 1, 6–7, 11, 26, 58–77, 84, 90, 92, 161, murder of 162–177 Ajax 74 Alexander the Great 59, 62, 84, 120–122 Andromache 69, 176 Antigone 17 Aphrodite 84 Arendt, H. 20–21, 30–33, 66–67, 73, 87–88, 91, 113, 126–127, 176, on natality 29–31 Aristotle 9, 35, 40, 100, 176 Arnason, J.P. 18–19 Arrian 122–123 Athene 110, 118 Athens 34–35 Atreides, the 6, 21, 58–60, 71, 161–177 Atreus 1, 7, 26, 162–177 Atwood, M. 113–115 Augustus 119, 121–122 Aurelius, M. 42, 148 Austin, N. 94

Austin, R.G. 71–72 Ayling-Smith, B. 94 Bacchus 125, 135 Balibar, É. 41 Barbour, C. 41 Barrow, R.H. 10, 124 Barthes, R. 152, 158–162, on Racine 167–168 Bastien, S. 121 Benjamin, W. 20, 43–44, 66–67 Berger, J. 60, 73–74, on sculpture 149 Bernstein, J.M. 104 Bespaloff, R. 6, 20–21, 95–96, 100, 171–172, on Iliad 79–84 Bicamerality 89–92, 109, 117, see also Jaynes 169–170 Blegen, C.W. 58, 74 Blücher, H. 20, 108, 174–175 Bluemel, C. 143 Boardman, J. 55–56, 135, 141–143 Bonefeld, W. 23–24 Bonnard, A. 78 Boyer, P. 130 Bradford, E. 105 Brancusi, C. 146–147 Brassier, R. 103–104, 107, 144–145 Broch, H. 21, 171–172 Bowra, M. 11–12, 139, 162 Brendel, O. 56–57 Brutus 13, 72–73 Buck-Morss, S. 22 Burn, A.R. 68 Caesar, J. 32, 59, 73 Calasso, R. 61, 92–93, 118–119, 123–124, 134 Caligula 120–123 Calchas 72

198 Index Calypso 99, 101, 109, 111 Cameron, A. 123 Campbell, J. 163 Campbell, R. 2 Camus, A. 37, 93, 98, 120–121, 158–162 Canovan, M. 30 Carlyle, T. 136–138 Carne-Ross, D.S. 135 Cassandra 25–27, 28, 72, 118, 167–168, death of 172–177 Castoriadis, C. 15, 19–20, 125, 129, 176 Chadwick, H. 29 Charbonneaux, J. 143 Charlemagne the Great 68 Cheval, F. 74 Chrysaor 152 Chryses 176 Cicero 35, 104, 124 Circe 6, 97, 99, 101, 107, 109–110, 128 Cixous, H. 18, 92, 114–115, 168 Clarke, S. 23 Claudius 120–121 Clytemnestra 7, 26, 162–177 Colletti, L. 20 Cook, R. 150–151 Cosmos 75–78, 82, 108, 116–138 Critical Theory 5, 20–23, 43–57, 100–103, 105–107, and domination 171–177 Crome, K. 17 Crystal edifice 27, 177 Curtis, P. 153 Curtius 122 Daehner, J. 153 Daedalus 114 Dante 72 De Burgh, W.G. 13 Deities 116–138 De Maistre, J. 18 Democritus 5, 28 Derrida, J. 41 De Ste Croix, G.E.M. 5, 28–33 Deus ex Machina 35–36 Dido of Carthage 68, 70–72, 93 Diomedes 71–72 Dionysos 42, 132, 134–135 Domination 22–26, 161–177 Dostoevsky, F. 27, 177 Eco, U. 15 Edwards, I.E.S. 55 Elster, J. 6, 97, 104–105 Endarkenment 48–49, 172–177

Engels, F. 5, 28–42 Enlightenment 23, 38, 78, 97–115, 119, 121, 172–177 Epic of Gilgamesh 141 Epicurus 5, 9, 28–42, 124, 129, 133 Eteocles 133 Euripides 35–36, 50, 57, 134 Exteriority 29–30 Fagles, R. 2, 97–98, 165–166 Feenberg, A. 22 Ferguson, J. 116 Finley, M.I. 11, 68, 99, 103, 109, 119 Fischer, S. 65 Foster, J.B. 38 Foucault, M. 131 Frankfurt School 5, 20–22, 43–57, 172–177 Freud, S. 20, 21 Garner, A. 2, 64 Geoffrey of Monmouth 72–73 Gerald of Wales 72–73 Ghosts 78, 80–81, 84–88, 93, 95–96, 117, 120–125, 139–161, 173–177 Glaucus 34 Glob, P.V. 130 Gorgons 150–153, 160 Gottlieb, A. 100 Goux, J.-J. 19–20 Gramsci, A. 20 Gransden, K.W. 72 Graves, R. 68–70, 84, 112, 118, 120, 163 Gunn, R. 24 Habermas, J. 105–106 Hades 64, 82, 84, 88, 96, 101, 108, 110, 128 Hadrian 158–162 Hammond, M. 2, 55, 79, 163 Hanfmann, G.M.A. 143 Hardie, P. 75–76 Harding, A.F. 170 Hardt, M. 36 Hector 54, 59, 63, 70–71, 79, 81–83, 86–87, 92, 95, 127, 172, 176 Hecuba 69 Hegel, G.W.F. 145, 154, 166 Heidegger, M.5, 21, 43, on sculpture 154–159 Held, D. 22, 106 Helen 6–7, 42, 58–77, 78, 81, 84, 92–96, 112, 118, 162, 172–173, 176 Herder, J.G. 154

Index  199 Hermes 128 Herrenschmidt, C. 18 Hesiod 101 Hissarlik 54–56, 58 Holloway, J. 23–25, 172 Homer 2–3, 4, 6, 11–12, 29, 32, 34, 44, 54–57, 58–77, 78–96, 97–115, 116–117, 123–124, 128, 162–177 Homeric poems 63–67 Honour, H. 141 Horace 135 Horkheimer, M. 6, 20, 21, 26, 97, 101–108, 112 Hudson, M. 9, 12, 13, 26, 31, 105, 110, 119, 125, 146–147 Hughes, T. 2, 93, 166 Hugin and Munin 61 Hullot-Kentor, R. 45 Humphreys, S.C. 18 Hydra 37 Iliad 26, 29, 31, 34, 58–77, 78–96, 97–98, 99–100, 110–111, 122, 176 Interiority 6, 15–17, 29–30, 76–77, 78–79, 81, 83–84, 89–97, 111–112, 145–146 Intermundia 32–33, 37–38, 40–41, 50, 53, 129, 172–177 Intestine 162–163 Iphigenia 1, 7, 60, 162–163, 167–168, 176 Ithaca 96–99, 103–104, 106, 108–109, 112, 114, 173–175 Jackson-Knight, W.F. 70 Jay, M. 22, 107 Jaynes, J. 15, 98, 100, 109, 117, 128–129, 141, 169–170, on bicamerality 89–92 Jenkyns, R. 26, 28, 34–36, 63–64, 68, 85–86, 93, 99, 142, 167 Jones, P.V. 54, 110 Jung, C.G. 126, 129 Kafka, F. 108 Kellner, D. 22, 106–107 Kerényi, C. 151 Kirk, G.S. 63, 85 Kitto, H.D.F. 65, 86, 140 Knox, B. 97–98 Laertes 113 Lane, A. 148–149 Laocoon, sculpture of 153–154, 156 Latour, B. 136–138 Lattimore, R. 109

Leaf metaphors 34–38 Leaf, W. 74 Leakey, R. 13 Lefebvre, H. 28 Lessing, J.E. 154 Lévi-Strauss, C.17, 45, 119 Lewin, R. 13 Lewis, C.S. 149–150 Lewis-Williams, D. 15–16, 127–130, 141 Liquidity 161–162 Livy 70 Logue, C. 2 Long, J. 123 Longinus 65 Lowes-Dickinson, G. 16 Lucan 59 Lukács, G. 20 Making 51–54 Marcuse, H. 20 Martial 142 Martindale, C. 11 Marx, K. 5, 19–24, 27, 31, 43, 129, 172–177, on classics 5, 21, 28, on Epicurus 28–42, 43, on Spartacus 32–33 Mazes 16, 56, 68 Medea 36 Medusa 49–50, 53, 151–152 Meillassoux, Q. 46–47, 52–53 Menander 116–117 Menelaus 6–7, 58–77, 84, 92–93, 95–96, 162–177 Menoeceus 38 Michelet, J. 18 Millar, L. 94 Miller, H. 163–165, 170–171 Miller, P.A. 41 Mimesis 144–147 Mimnermus 34 Minotaur 53 Mitchell, A.J. 155 Mithen, S. 130 Mnemosyne 43–57, 77, 80, 114, 136, 174 Monsters 149–153 Morgan, L.H. 31–32 Multitude 28–42, 46, and chorus 34–38 Murphy, P. 18–19 Mycenae 1, 7–8, 16, 26, 29, 57, 60, 61, 90–91, 100, 110–111, 120, 124 and violence 162–177 Mykonos 55

200 Index Natality 29–31, 44, 73, 113–114, 127, 138 see also Arendt, H. Naturalism 143–144 Nazism 27, 48, 79 Negri, A. 20, 36, 150 Neo-classicism 141–142 Neolithic, the 26, 127–130 Nicolson, A. 64, 66–67, 78–79, 84, 93, 95 Nietzsche, F. 131 Nostalgia, theories of 13–14

Postone, M. 22–23 Potts, A. 139 Priam 54–55, 71–72, 86, 96, 171 Primordiality 118–119, 138, 155 Procne and Philomela myth 3–4 Prometheus 108, 133 Proteus 37 Prose Edda 61 Psychopedis, K. 24 Pyrrhus 69

Objects 4–5, 47–48, 58 Odin 61 Odysseus 1, 5–7, 11–13, 19, 21, 56, 58, 78–96, 97–116, 128, 133, 153, 172–177, and Enlightenment 97–115 Odyssey 29, 59, 72, 97–115, 116 Oedipus 19–20 Olympus 29, 35, 62, 67, 76, 85, 98, 110, 116, 123–124, 128, 132 Orestes 7 Origins of myth 3–4 Orpheus 151 Osborn, R.E. 79–80 Osiris 123 Ovid 28, 119–120

Quarini, C. 94

Paglia, C. 59, 163, 167 Palaeolithic, the 127–128 Paris 60, 84, 95, 173 Parsons, M. 134 Patroclus 59, 63, 79–80, 85 Pearce, D. 15–16, 127–130, 141 Pearson, M. 45 Pegasus 49, 152 Penelope 101, 112–114, 172–173 Pentheus 120, 132, 134–135 Persephone 152 Perseus 151–152 Petrification 139–142, 149–153 Pevensey, E. 149–150 Pharsalus 59 Plato 16, 34, 64–65 Pliny 153 Plumb, J.H. 142 Pollard, J. 105, 118 Pollini, J. 121 Pollock, F. 105 Polyneices 133 Polyphemus 107, 109 Polyxena 69 Pope, A. 2 Poseidon 109, 112

Racine, J. 167–168 Radek, K. 18 Rancière, J. 37, 89, 136, 145 Refraction 47–49, 53 Renault, M. 122 Rieu, E.V. 2 Rilke, R.M. 137–138 Rimbaud, A. 19–20 Roberts, J. 45 Roisman, H. 94 Rose, H.J. 123 Sayce, A.H. 74 Schefold, K. 151 Schiller, F. 145 Schliemann, H. 13, 54–55, 68, 74–75, 171 Scullard, H.H. 55, 70 Scylla and Charybdis 107, 109 Seneca 2, 61, 69, 163, on sculpture 147–148 Serres, M. 15, 146 Shanks, M. 45, 170 Shaw, T. 146 Sirens 97, 105, 107–108, 109, 118, 150, 173, 176 Sisyphus 37, 131–132 Sjöholm, C. 114 Socrates 38 Sollers, P. 59 Sophocles 35, 117–118, 143, 156 Sowerby, R. 54 Sparta 65 Spartacus 32–33 Spirit 139–161 Stalinism 48 Statues 41–42, 49–51, 139–161 Steiner, G. 14, 16–17, 35, 62–63, 170 Stewart, A. 122, 140–141, 151–152 Stiegler, B. 138

Index  201 Stubbings, F. 13 Sturluson, S. 61 Suetonius 119 Synesius 123 Tacitus 31, 161 Taplin, O. 67, 86–87, 98, 117, 166–167 Taylour, W. 57 Theatre 133–135 Themis 118 Theomachy 7, 116–138 Thersites 63 Thomas, H. 13 Thomson, G. 5, 28, 33, 98, 125–126 Thomson, I.D. 155 Thyestes 1, 7, 162, 168–169 Tilley, C. 113, 170 Tolstoy, L. 83, 95 Tomlinson, R. 170 Totality 46–47, 172–177 Translation, theories of 1–4 Trotsky, L. 33 Troy and Trojan War 1, 6, 11, 12, 14, 21, 29, 34, 54–57, 58–77, 78–96, 97–98, 103, 112–113, 172–177 Tucker, W. 146–147

Venus 119 Vernant, J.-P. 43, 76–77, 78, 92, 138, 152–153, 168 Vespasian 119 Virchow, R. 74–75 Virgil 61, 70–77, 82 Vlassopoulos, K. 15 Wace, A.J.B. 13, 163, 171 Wallenstein, S.-O. 154 Walsh, J. 143 War in the Classical world 78–84, 95–96 Watling, E.F. 117 Weil, S. 6, 20–21, 171–172, on Iliad 79–84 West, M.L. 101 White, B. 94 Whitley, J. 143–144 Whitmarsh, T. 34, 39, 84, 131–133 Wiggershaus, R. 22 Wilcken, P. 17 Woodford, S. 152 Yourcenar, M. 158–162 Zeus 109, 121–122 Žižek, S. 108