Greek Literature and the Ideal: The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age 0192866702, 9780192866707

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Greek Literature and the Ideal

OUP CORRECTED PROOFS – FINAL, 28/7/2022, SPi

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Greek Literature and the Ideal The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age ALEXANDER KIRICHENKO

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Alexander Kirichenko 2022 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2022 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022939677 ISBN 978–0–19–286670–7 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866707.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books Limited Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Für Farouk

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Preface The original impulse to write what has eventually evolved into this book was my interest in the central role that the idealizing images of Rome play in the development of Roman literature. From Cicero’s discussion in De re publica of the mixed constitution of the Roman republic as the best conceivable political order to the praise of the Roman Empire as a reinvigorated version of the mythical Golden Age in Augustan and post-Augustan Roman poetry, portrayals of Rome as an ideal state are so ubiquitous in Roman literature that they appear to be one of its primary raisons d’être. It did not take me long, however, to realize that, before hoping to achieve a better understanding of the inextricable conjunction between Roman literature and the idealization of Rome, I would need to go back to the roots and analyse the cultural dynamics responsible for the production of ideal realities in Roman literature’s Greek models. This is precisely what this book sets out to do, leaving the Roman adaptations of those ideal realities for a later study. The epilogue to this book points to some of the possible avenues of exploration that such a future study could pursue. What testifies to the “Roman origins” of this project is that some of its constituent parts go back to articles that I have published on (at least partly) Roman topics: there is some degree of conceptual overlap between Chapter 4 and “Staying Alive: Plato, Horace, and the Written Text” (Chesi—Spiegel, eds, Classical Literature and Post-Humanism, London 2020, 315–22) as well as between Chapter 5 and “Callimachus Romanus: Propertius’ Love Elegy and the Aetiology of Empire” (Klooster—Wessels, eds, Inventing Origins: The Function of Aetiology in Antiquity, Leiden 2022, 65–100). Likewise, conference talks and invited lectures that, over the last years, I have given (again, predominantly on Roman topics) in London, Basel, Trier, Groningen, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Leiden, Paris, St. Petersburg, Charlottesville, Rome, Newcastle, Durham, Mainz, and Jerusalem have allowed me to develop some of the ideas that have proven instrumental for the genesis of this book. I am grateful to the audiences at all these locations for challenging my assumptions and correcting my misconceptions. I am also grateful to my colleagues at the Humboldt University for creating an intellectually stimulating atmosphere as well as to

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my students in both Trier and Berlin for joining me in my inquiries into the interactions between Greek and Roman literature. My special thanks go to the anonymous Press readers whose sympathetic and thoughtful engagement with my work has immensely helped me to improve what was originally a rather jumbled manuscript and whose incisive comments have saved me from many errors. My editor Charlotte Loveridge has been truly invaluable in navigating me through this exciting intellectual adventure. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for all remaining mistakes and imperfections. This book could not have been written without the generous and longstanding support provided by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which has allowed me to conduct my research with an extraordinary degree of freedom and flexibility. Alexander Kirichenko Berlin November 2021

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Contents General Introduction

1

I. ARCHAIC GREECE: MYTH AND TRUTH Introduction 1. Homer and the Heroic Ideal Heroic Essentialism and Agonistic Culture in the Iliad The Return of Odysseus Converting Myth into Power

2. Hesiod and the Language of Truth

25 27 27 40 48

63

The Theogony on the Origins of Poetry A Farewell to Kings The Art of Truth-Making

63 73 84

Conclusion

92

II. CLASSICAL ATHENS: IDEOLOGY AND DIALOGUE Introduction 3. The Ideal State of Athens The Collective Hero of Attic Tragedy Imperial Athens as a Tragic City Living on the Isles of the Blest

4. Plato’s Ideal State of Philosophy

95 97 97 105 113

121

Socrates and Athens Socrates Leaving the City Plato’s Dialogic Writing

121 134 142

Conclusion

164

III. PTOLEMAIC ALEXANDRIA: MEMORY AND MAKE-BELIEVE Introduction 5. Memory and Desire in Callimachus The City of the Muses

169 173 173

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 In and Out of Alexandria Desire and Writing

181 193

6. Theocritus’ Poetic Landscapes

201

The Bucolic Therapy of Desire Mimesis and Ideology

201 220

Epilogue

237

References Index Locorum General Index

243 273 283

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General Introduction In his recent monumental study of the formation of the classical literary canon, Reviel Netz resuscitates the age-old question of Greek literature’s contribution to the development of European culture. He gives the following answer: [T]he survival of a classical canon was important in two ways: (1) in that it left behind a tradition that, in literary form, preserved the ideals of the faceto-face city (what I refer to as “the polis of letters”); and (2) in that it created a gap between culture and state: what was canonized was not a state ideology but in some sense defined a social space away from the state—providing, as it were, the conditions for the emergence of civic society.¹

The ideals of intellectual autonomy and public debate characteristic of later periods of Western literate culture from Hellenistic Greece to early modern Europe emerge on this interpretation as an aftermath of what Netz himself describes as the “modestly scaled event” of Athenian democracy. Intuitively plausible as this account may be, it seems to me to miss two important points: (1) the rise of classical Athenian culture was inseparable from what was arguably the first attempt in Greek history to devise a comprehensive state ideology, and what was canonized in Athenian literature itself was not so much “a social space away from the state” as a series of idealized self-images inspired by that state ideology;² (2) the ideals of intellectual autonomy and public debate embodied by democratic Athens did not appear ex nihilo but can be regarded as projections onto the microcosm of a single polis of the pervasive spirit of competitiveness that characterized the geographically scattered world of archaic Greece—a decentralized network of aristocratically governed independent communities.³ As Irad Malkin reminds us:

¹ Netz 2020, 3. ³ Cf. Zajcev 1993.

² Cf. Loraux 1986; Thomas 1989; Cohen 2000; Barbato 2020.

Greek Literature and the Ideal: The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age. Alexander Kirichenko, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Kirichenko 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866707.003.0001

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     Greek civilization came into being just when the Greeks were splitting apart. It took the form familiar to us during the Archaic period at the time the Greeks were separating, migrating, and founding new communities in everwidening horizons, reaching both the western Mediterranean and the eastern Black Sea. . . . Greek civilization as we known it emerged . . . . not in spite of distance but because of it. . . . It was distance and network connectivity that created the virtual Greek center.⁴

What we call Greek literature developed in this socio-political space—a space that never had a single undisputed centre, a space in which linguistic commonality always went hand in hand with geographical dispersion, and a space in which power and authority could not be wielded unchallenged but had to be negotiated by a multiplicity of competitive actors.⁵ The goal of this book is to view Greek literature as a crucial factor in the cultural production of space⁶ and the political geography of Greece as a crucial factor in the production of literary meaning. It will focus on the schematic images that Greek literature painted of three patterns whereby power was exercised and distributed over the spatial expanses of the Greek world in the course of its history—a decentralized network of aristocratically governed independent communities (archaic Greece), a democratic city controlling an empire of subordinate “allies” (classical Athens), and a microcosm of the entire Greek world located on foreign soil, ruled by quasi-divine royals, and populated by immigrants (Ptolemaic Alexandria). Without denying the singular significance of Athenian democracy, this book will show that the enduring cultural appeal of archaic, classical, and Hellenistic literature, its formative impact on the subsequent development of European culture, may indeed have to do with its geographical origins—its status as a cultural practice that came into existence and continued to develop in response to the persisting need to create cognitively feasible models of a changing geopolitical reality characterized by an extraordinary degree of complexity and diversity. Walter Burkert famously defines myth as “a traditional tale with secondary, partial reference to something of collective importance.” He goes on to specify:

⁴ Malkin 2011, 3–5. See also Kowalzig 2007, 24–32. ⁵ Recent years have seen many publications on the interrelations between literature and geography in the Ancient Greek world. See e.g. Purves 2010; Thalmann 2011; Skempis—Ziogas 2013; Gilhuly— Worman 2014; Hawes 2017; Neer—Kurke 2019; Lewis 2020. ⁶ On the notion of the cultural production of space, see Lefebvre 1991. Cf. Bourdieu 1977; de Certeau 1984.

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Myth is traditional tale applied; and its relevance and seriousness stem largely from this application. The reference is secondary, as the meaning of the tale is not to be derived from it—in contrast to fable, which is invented for the sake of its application; and it is partial, since tale and reality will never be quite isomorphic in these applications. And still the tale often is the first and fundamental verbalization of complex reality, the primary way to speak about many-sided problems.⁷

From specific features of local landscapes in the mythologies of Aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea to the Promised Land of the Hebrew Bible, geography is doubtless one of the most important aspects of “complex realities verbalized” in mythical narratives.⁸ Greek mythology, too, constitutes “the primary way to speak” about the geography of early Greece. In the absence of a unifying hegemonic centre, Greek myths provided a flexible mechanism for negotiating power relations among the Greek settlements separated by immense geographical distances.⁹ Geographically coterminous with the known world, Greek mythology served to translate the bewildering complexity of political geography into manageable narrative terms—into a network of crisscrossing storylines that imposed on what would otherwise be a cognitively unwieldy territory a sense of structured order.¹⁰ Stories of travelling gods are a case in point. Leto’s search for a place to give birth to Apollo not only creates a hierarchy between the countless localities that reject her and the floating Delos that welcomes her but also results in stabilizing the map of the Aegean, with Delos firmly tied to the sea ground at its centre.¹¹ Apollo’s travel around Greece until he kills the chthonic serpent guarding the oracle of the Earth both establishes a similar hierarchy between Delphi and the rest of the world and transforms the site of the new sanctuary from a discrete dot on the map, linked only to the earth on which it stands, into an integral part of a complex geographical network.¹² And Demeter’s search for Persephone, engulfed by the earth and leaving its surface barren and uninhabitable, similarly results in the privileged status of Eleusis—a place

⁷ Burkert 1979, 22–3. ⁸ On the “emplaced myths” of Aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea, see Rumsey—Weiner 2000. On the Promised Land, see Wazana 2013. ⁹ Malkin 1994, 1998, 2011. See also contributions in Hawes 2017. ¹⁰ Burkert 1979; Buxton 1994; Johnston 2018. ¹¹ H.Ap. 30–87; Pi. fr. 33c–d SM. Nishimura-Jensen 2000, 289–90. See also Clay 2006, 33–46. ¹² H.Ap. 214–546. Clay 2006, 56–94. See also Eckerman 2014, on the construction of Delphi in Pindar.

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where all Greeks can now partake of unique blessings.¹³ In addition to travelling, gods leave traces on the cultural landscape of Greece by siring children with mortal women—a process that also produces an intertwined network of cultural memories, which the author of the Catalogue of Women takes care to match with the physical geography of Greece.¹⁴ The semi-divine children of the gods (such as Heracles, the Argonauts, and Theseus) not only serve as ancestors of local aristocratic families but, like their divine parents, also travel, leaving behind yet more cultural memories and turning the geography of the Mediterranean into a yet more multi-layered palimpsest of stories—a spatially vast narrative universe that now follows the routes of the Greek colonial expansion to the outermost west and the outermost east.¹⁵ It is only when the geographically dispersed heroes converge in one place, first in Sparta to woo Helen (Hes., Cat. frr. 196–204), then in Troy to retrieve her (cf. the Catalogue of the Ships in Iliad 2), that the heroic age comes to an end:¹⁶ the Trojan War is followed by the final dispersal of the nostoi, which turns the landscape of Greece into a notional collection of memories of that most glorious Panhellenic endeavour. Greek mythology can thus be seen as a cultural instrument whereby the Greeks of the archaic period oriented themselves in the geographically challenging world that they inhabited. But its function cannot be reduced to creating a parallel fictional universe that translated geography into narrative terms. As Claude Calame has demonstrated in numerous publications, Greek myths only became graspable to the archaic Greeks themselves as poetic “enunciations” intended to produce what he calls “pragmatic” effects in the ritualized contexts of their performances.¹⁷ Jacob Mey defines literary pragmatics as follows: Literary pragmatics studies the kind of effects that authors, as text producers, set out to obtain, using the resources of language in their efforts to establish a “working cooperation” with their audiences, the consumers of the texts. Such

¹³ H.Cer., esp. 480 ὄλβιος ὃς τάδ᾿ ὄπωπε ἐπιχθονίων ἀνθρώπων. Clay 2006, 202–66. See also Cosmopoulos 2015, esp. 8–10. ¹⁴ West 1985. See also Ormand 2014. ¹⁵ On the network-like character of Greek mythology, see Johnston 2018, esp. 121–46. ¹⁶ Cingano 2005. See Hes. fr. 204.96–100, cf. Cypria fr. 1: Clay 2003, 168–72. ¹⁷ e.g. Calame 1986, 1996, 2004, 2005, 2009a, 2009b, 2017. For recent introductions to pragmatics as a linguistic discipline, see Mey 2001; Allan—Jaszczolt 2012; Huang 2013; Baron—Yueguo—Steen 2017. For recent developments in the burgeoning field of “cultural pragmatics,” see Alexander—Giesen— Mast 2006.

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efforts rely on a precise understanding of the conditions of those resources, when directed at a particular audience among the consumers of a literary work.¹⁸

To borrow John L. Austin’s famous phrase, literary pragmatics can thus be perceived as a study of how literature “does things with words.”¹⁹ By telling myths, Greek poets always “do things with words.” In their hymns, elegies, and lyric poems, they use myths in order to mould the audiences’ perceptions of the social, political, and emotional here and now:²⁰ each paean performed by theoric choruses at Delos and Delphi is conceived of as an imitation of the sanctuaries’ foundation myths;²¹ Archilochus, in a recently rediscovered elegiac poem, justifies having fled from the battlefield by telling the myth of the Achaeans defeated by Telephus;²² Sappho evokes a prayer once addressed to Hera by the Atridae as a model for her own prayer;²³ Ibycus draws an analogy between a series of Iliadic episodes and “unfading fame” that he is now bestowing on the Samian tyrant Polycrates;²⁴ and Pindar and Bacchylides conceive of specific victories in the Panhellenic athletic contests as palimpsests of multiple mythical layers pertaining both to the sites of the games and to the victors’ hometowns.²⁵ “To do things with words” is to perform what, in his theory of “universal pragmatics,” Jürgen Habermas describes as “strategic actions”²⁶—i.e. intentional actions aimed at achieving success and which cannot be executed unless one has pictured the ideal state of affairs in which the goal has already been fulfilled. This book will investigate how Greek literature, too, “does things with words” by constructing ideal realities—schematic fictional worlds in which the achievement of what can be described as collective goals is presented either as a fait accompli or as being within reach. It will argue that it is precisely by offering such collective goals that Greek literature not only endows political geography with a sense of purposeful structure but also develops some of its most distinctive modes of meaning making. It is to account for the dialectic ¹⁸ Mey 1999, 12. See also Johansen 2002. ¹⁹ Austin 1975. ²⁰ On the formulaic nature of Greek elegy and its connections with epic, see Garner 2010. See Bowie 1986, and Aloni 2009, on epic and elegy as cognate genres developing synchronically from the same traditional heritage. See also Bowie 1990; Nagy 1990; Vetta 1992; Aloni 2009, 88–91; Irwin 2005, 15–52. ²¹ For Delos, see Kowalzig 2007, 63–72. For Delphi, see Rutherford 2001, 4–29; Furley—Bremer 2001, 14–15; Lonsdale 1993, 51–70; Peponi 2009. ²² Obbink 2006. On the use of myth in archaic elegy, see also Aloni 2009. ²³ Sappho 17: Calame 2009b, 3–7. On the pragmatics of myth in Sappho, see also Caliva 2019. ²⁴ Ibycus fr. 282a, esp. 47–8 καὶ σύ, Πουλύκρατες, κλέος ἄφθιτον ἑξεῖς / ὡς κατ᾿ ἀοιδὰν καὶ ἐμὸν κλέος. ²⁵ Nagy 1990, 116–45 and 199–214; Krummen 1990; Kurke 1991; Currie 2005; Instone 2007; Davies 2007. On the “production of space” in Pindar’s epinicians, see also Neer—Kurke 2019 and Lewis 2020. ²⁶ Habermas 1979, 1–68.

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between political geography and literary pragmatics that I adopt the term “pragmatics of space”—a term used in the field of social geography to conceptualize the interrelations between the ways in which space shapes social practice and the ways in which social practice shapes space, comprising the totality of “things” that social actors “do with space” as they adjust to its physical constraints and, imaginatively or literally, transform its (perceived or given) properties.²⁷ My objective is to show that the pragmatics of Greek literature (the sum total of the cognitive and emotional effects that it seeks to produce by conjuring up imaginary worlds, mythical or otherwise) is, in essence, always a pragmatics of space—i.e. that the shifting patterns of political geography constitute a crucial driving force behind the formation of ideal realities that Greek literature urges its recipients to internalize, thereby helping them to orient themselves in, and to make sense of, the world they inhabit. My greatest hope is that the conclusions I reach in this book will be of interest not only to students of Greek literature but also to a wider academic readership. But since my own training is in classical philology (in what, in the eyes of some non-classicists, constitutes “the forgotten origins of the modern humanities”),²⁸ the bulk of this book will consist of what classical philologists traditionally do—i.e. close readings of canonical Greek texts. It is my conviction that, to stay intellectually relevant to the modern humanities, classical philology must not only engage in a dialogue with other academic disciplines but also use its own resources to raise questions that go beyond its narrow confines. Before I give a more detailed summary of the book’s contents, I would like to make a brief digression in which I will both attempt to theorize what, in my title, I call “the ideal” and offer a specimen of the method (i.e. the use of textual analysis to elucidate what literature “does with words” as it interacts with the world around it) that I will continue to apply throughout the subsequent chapters. One of the premises on which I base my investigation is that the conjunction between the construction of ideal realities and the production of meaning that I detect in Greek literature can be viewed as an extension of a fundamental conceptual mechanism underlying the modus operandi of other, pre-literary, instruments of intentionality. In what follows, I argue that (1) the imaginative construction of ideal realities plays the central role both for the human ability to perform intentional actions in general and for the functioning of such primary cultural artefacts designed to enhance that ability as material tools, rituals, and spoken language and that (2) the function ²⁷ Lussault—Stock 2010. See also Werlen 1993. Cf. de Certeau 1984; Lefebvre 1991. ²⁸ Turner 2000.

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of these cultural artefacts as instruments of intentionality conceptually precedes their ability to produce meaning. Obviously, these claims do not provide answers to typical “philological questions,”²⁹ and, in my discussion, I freely borrow concepts from a number of other fields—such as cognitive science, anthropology, semiotics, and linguistics. But while doing so, I use a characteristically philological toolkit: I read an episode of a canonical Greek poem and then bring that reading to bear on an interpretation of the text as a whole. * * * The purple cloth that Helen weaves in Iliad 3 contains a quintessential representation of the poem’s spatio-temporal parameters: functioning both as a notional map of the space in which the narrative of the Iliad unfolds and as visual shorthand for the entire preceding nine years of the Trojan War, its static image epitomizes the fact that the “many battles that the horse-taming Trojans and the brazen-coated Achaeans” (Il. 3.126–7) have fought because of Helen (Il. 3.128 ἕθεν εἵνεκ᾿ ) have been unable to bring them any closer to achieving their goal.³⁰ While it can be perpetuated in a pictorial representation, the state of indeterminacy cannot last forever in the temporal reality of the narrative. The ensuing single combat between Paris and Menelaus, intended to break the impasse, reduces the war to its conceptual essence—to two men desiring the same woman and fighting to possess her. In contrast to the armies locked in a standoff on the Trojan plain, there is no parity between the two rivals. Their first visual contact makes both of them visualize a hypothetical future in which their duel will result in Menelaus’ victory—a denouement that Menelaus is as eager to achieve as Paris is eager to avoid: when Menelaus sees Paris, he expects to kill him as easily as a hungry lion tears apart a stag or a goat (Il. 3.21–9), and when Paris sees Menelaus, he trembles like someone who has seen a venomous snake (Il. 3.30–7).³¹ When the duel finally does take place, the combatants’ weapons evolve into materialized extensions of their imaginations. Efficient instruments of attack for Menelaus and faulty instruments of defence for Paris, their spears and shields turn into tangible manifestations of their unequal abilities to implement or to avert their respective anticipations of the future: the spear that Paris hurls at Menelaus to forestall his impending defeat fails to scratch his opponent’s ²⁹ Cf. Schwindt 2009. ³⁰ Austin 1994, 28–41; Roisman 2006, 9–11; Lesser 2019, 196–8. Cf. Elkins 1998, 173: “Pictures depend on immobility in order to raise questions about the passage of time.” See also Mitchell 1986, 47–52. ³¹ Stoevesandt 2004, 179–80. Cf. van der Mije 2011. On the lion similes in the Iliad, see Lonsdale 1990. On similes as a tool of “secondary focalization” in the Iliad, see de Jong 1987, 126–7, with further examples.

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shield, while Menelaus’ spear pierces Paris’ shield and cuirass and tears his tunic (Il. 3.346–60).³² But success in battle is more than a matter of physical and technological superiority. It is synonymous with divine support—the invisible presence of supernatural beings whose actions, in contrast to those performed by humans, are always expected to achieve the intended results: Priam assumes that the outcome of the combat between Paris and Menelaus is known to the gods before it has even begun (Il. 3.308–9), while Paris ascribes Menelaus’ victory to Athena (Il. 3.439 νῦν μὲν γὰρ Μενέλαος ἐνίκησεν σὺν Ἀθήνῃ) and is confident that, next time, some god will help him win (Il. 3.440 πάρα γὰρ θεοί εἰσι καὶ ἡμῖν).³³ Presumed to be able to arrange human affairs with the same ease with which humans manipulate inanimate objects, gods are invoked in rituals in order to assure that humans will respect the agreements that they conclude among themselves. The sacrificial rite that Agamemnon and Odysseus perform before the fight between Paris and Menelaus conjures into being a sacred space purified of all non-functional elements, while the easily manipulable objects left within that space serve to reify the effortlessness with which the gods, if they feel inclined to do so, can fulfil the worshippers’ wishes: with his hands ritually cleansed (Il. 3.270), Agamemnon cuts wool from the heads of sacrificial lambs (Il. 3.273), slits their throats (Il. 3.292–3), makes a wine offering (Il. 3.295–6), and prays to Zeus to make sure that the brains of the violators of the oath be poured out on the ground like the sacrificial blood and wine (Il. 3.298–301).³⁴ When the Achaeans and the Trojans echo Agamemnon’s prayer by asking Zeus to bring peace between the warring parties by letting the one responsible for the disaster of the Trojan War die in the duel (Il. 3.320–3), they reveal that, addressed to the gods, language, like ritual, is expected to allow humans, however briefly, to imagine what it feels like to possess some of that executive control over contingent events which the gods are presumed to be able to exercise in full measure and at all times. Thus, Iliad 3 reveals the construction of imaginary realities in which the desired outcome has been reached and/or the dreaded one averted as a crucial precondition of the ability to perform intentional actions and presents weapons, rituals, and language as cultural tools that assist humans in implementing that ability. These tools, however, prove to be no less unreliable than the imaginary scenarios that they help to put into practice. Menelaus’ sword ³² Fenik 1968, 102–4; Stoevesandt 2004, 181. ³³ Cf. Stoevesandt 2004, 281. ³⁴ Burkert 1985, 250–2; Rollinger 2004; Kitts 2005, 129–33.

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breaks into pieces when he strikes Paris’ helmet (Il. 3.361–3), while Zeus remains unresponsive to both rituals and prayers (Il. 3.302 οὐδ᾿ ἄρα πώ σφι ἐπικραίαινε Κρονίων) and allows Aphrodite to transpose Paris, who is about to be killed by Menelaus, from the battlefield into his sleeping chamber (Il. 3.380–2), thereby letting the prospect of unequivocal resolution longed for by the human actors give way to an irreducibly ambiguous situation: although there is no doubt that he has been defeated (Il. 3.456–60), Paris is, in violation of the oath, allowed to keep Helen, and although he breaches the oath, he cannot be accused of wrongdoing because he does not act out of his own free will but is a passive pawn in the complex political game played by the gods (cf. Il. 4.1–103). By showing that the ability, bolstered by weapons, rituals, and language, to imagine ideal realities in which one’s intentions have been fulfilled is both indispensable for executing intentional actions and ultimately futile in the face of the uncontrollable powers that rule the world, Iliad 3, as in a nutshell, illustrates the dialectic of intentionality that permeates the poem as a whole. The battle narrative of the Iliad consists of countless micro-stories in which combats between individual warriors are staged as confrontations between mutually exclusive ideal realities produced by two intentional subjectivities— realities in which each of the two combatants imagines himself to be victorious and his opponent dead.³⁵ Adopting terms used in cognitive linguistics, one could say that the process of planning ahead, which enables Homeric warriors to perform intentional actions, involves operating with two “mental spaces” (i.e. idealized cognitive models)—(1) the “source space” based on sensory input (a schematic mental image of the situation that calls for action) and (2) the “target space,” which preserves the overall structural parameters of the “source space” while replacing its indeterminacy with a sense of closure and thereby cancelling the need for any further action.³⁶ Just as Menelaus imagines in Book 3 that he will kill Paris as effortlessly as a lion kills a stag or a goat, so elsewhere in the Iliad, too, such “target spaces” are often visualized by means of similes—a process that involves mapping the common-sense hierarchies of the “great chain of being,” in which predators are self-evidently stronger than tame animals, humans stronger than predators, and natural disasters stronger

³⁵ On the Homeric battle scenes, see Fenik 1968; Latacz 1977; Griffin 1980, 103–43; van Wees 1994; Hellmann 2000; Tsagalis 2012, 27–61; Horn 2018. ³⁶ On the notion of “mental spaces” in cognitive linguistics, see Fauconnier 1994; Fauconnier— Turner 2002.

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10      than humans,³⁷ onto interactions between warriors whose disparity is not rooted in nature but has to be negotiated in battle. A similar function is fulfilled in the Iliad by memories of the heroic past: here, the anticipated “target spaces” of victory are presented as projections into the future of the glorious deeds performed by one’s ancestors in the past.³⁸ Both the images of natural disparities in the similes and the codified memories of the semantically unequivocal past mapped by Homeric heroes onto their future actions can be seen as cognitive instruments of reducing entropy, which allow one to experience an illusion of control over unpredictable events. Revealed by the use of these cognitive instruments in the Iliad is a mechanism whereby no intentional action can be performed unless the actor has envisaged an ideal reality in which the anticipated transition from the “source space” of intention to the “target space” of the desired outcome has already taken place.³⁹ Throughout the Iliad, gods are cast as invisible causes of the success of intentional actions performed by humans—their presence equated with victory and their absence with defeat.⁴⁰ Although, as listeners/readers of the Iliad, we can clearly see that the divine realm is characterized by the same degree of contingency as the human one,⁴¹ it often appears to the human inhabitants of the poem’s fictional world to be synonymous with an ideal reality in which transitions from intention to outcome encounter no obstacles and are subject to no constraints. In other words, the divine world is often perceived in the Iliad as a concretization of the fundamental mechanism of human cognition whereby one conceives of contingent events beyond human control as intentional actions performed by conscious beings. As Mark Turner observes:⁴² Grasping a physical object so as to control it is a common body action performed by an actor. If we grasp a physical object, we can do what we want with it: We can put it into our mouth, throw it, throw it away, give it ³⁷ On the “great chain of being” as the basis of poetic language in general, see Lakoff—Turner 1989, 160–213. On the system of similes in Homer, see Minchin 2001, 132–60. On similes as a means of characterization in the Iliad, see Ready 2011. ³⁸ e.g. Il. 4.370–400, 5.633–54, 12.310–38, 14.110–32, 20.200–58. ³⁹ On theories of intentional action in modern philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, see Schlosser 2019. ⁴⁰ e.g. Il. 2.412–18, 3.276–91, 4.101–3, 6.305–10, 6.476–81, 7.202–5, 8.526–8, 10.278–82, 12.164–72, 15.372–6, 16.233–48. Griffin 1980, 148–50; Horn 2014, 87–8. See also Henrichs 2010, esp. 35–7, on “power” as a defining characteristic of the Greek gods. ⁴¹ On the moral ambiguity of the Homeric gods in general, see Dodds 1951, 1–18; Lesky 1961; Griffin 1980, 169–70; Burkert 1985, 119–25; Kullmann 1985; Yamagata 1994; Kearns 2004. For a critique of the tendency, widespread among Classicists, to vindicate the Homeric gods—a tendency reminiscent of “the never-ending discussions of divine theodicy among Christian theologians,” see Versnel 2011, 160–2. On divine “politics,” see Elmer 2013, 146–73. ⁴² Turner 1996, 33–5.

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away, put it into a pocket, enjoy it as we wish . . . . It is common to project action-stories of grasping and controlling physical objects onto other eventstories. . . . Projecting the actor from the source story personifies something in the target story. Suppose we map the body action of taking away onto the event-story of becoming unemployed. Then the state of being employed corresponds to a physical object. Enjoying that state corresponds to having the physical object in our grasp. Ceasing to enjoy that state corresponds to having the physical object removed from our grasp. Something causally related to this change can be personified as the actor of that change. We can say that a machine took our job away or recession took our job away, thus projecting the actor of take away onto the machine or the recession.

These remarks reveal the general tendency of our embodied cognition to conceptualize any pattern of impersonal causality linking two random points in time as a deliberately executed transition from the “source space” of intention to the “target space” of outcome.⁴³ Tellingly, the first illustration that Turner offers of what he calls the “events-are-actions image-schema” is the prologue to the Odyssey, where Apollo is said to have “taken” from Odysseus’ companions “the day of their return” (Od. 1.9 αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ).⁴⁴ Like other supernatural beings of the religious imagination, the Homeric gods can thus be viewed as personifications of the human propensity to personify contingent events by making them appear like intentional actions.⁴⁵ What is more, the fact that the human characters of the Iliad see humanly relevant events as actions performed by the gods enables them to interpret the entire observable world (not only birds and celestial phenomena but also such things as disease, success in battle, political authority, and physical beauty) as a collection of signifiers that point to signifieds located in the divine realm—signifieds whose meaning, if it is not immediately apparent, can always be reliably deciphered by an expert seer.⁴⁶ Within this transparent semiotic system, human events become what Ch. S. Peirce calls “indices” of divine actions, i.e. non-arbitrary signs, which, like a rash indicating measles or the weathervane indicating the wind’s direction, refer to the ⁴³ For an introduction to the theory of embodied cognition, see Lakoff—Johnson 1999. ⁴⁴ Turner 1996, 26–37. ⁴⁵ The evolutionary mechanisms responsible for the emergence of the concept of supernatural agency are analysed in the cognitive science of religion. See e.g. McCauley—Lawson 1993 and 2002; Boyer 2001; Atran 2002; Pyysiäinen 2009. See also Larson 2016, on the use of cognitive science specifically in the study of ancient Greek religion. ⁴⁶ e.g. Il. 1.43–52, 1.62–100, 2.283–332, 4.75–84, 4.404–10, 6.77–101, 7.47–53, 8.75–7, 8.171–3, 8.245–50, 10.274–82, 11.52–5, 12.200–7. See Johnston 2008, 109–43.

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12      objects they denote “by being really affected” by those objects.⁴⁷ The “theology” of the Iliad reveals the conceptual precedence of wishful thinking over signification: the Homeric gods encapsulate the comforting notion of intentional agency that never fails, while the imaginary transformation of the visible world into a system of indices pointing to that invisible intentional agency only seems to come into being as a means of endowing the contingency of human existence with intentional meaning.⁴⁸ While the gods are treated in the Iliad as invisible causes of human success and failure, weapons function as visible metonymies of their wielders’ intentional subjectivities. Like other material tools used by humans, weapons are designed to facilitate the transition from the “source space” of intention to the “target space” of outcome.⁴⁹ Each episode of the battle narrative of the Iliad consists of endless clashes between attack and protection weapons—with lances, arrows, spears, javelins, stones, and swords encoding the warriors’ anticipation of victory, and with shields, helmets, cuirasses, and greaves designed to prevent others from implementing their hostile intentions.⁵⁰ But in addition to being means of killing and/or protection from being killed, weapons in the Iliad are also emotionally effective signs of superiority, which the Homeric heroes project in order to intimidate their enemies and to exercise authority among their fellow warriors. Just as, for warriors, noble genealogy and divine descent are taken to indicate a superior ability to implement their intentions in battle, so the fact that weapons have been owned by great heroes of the past or, better still, manufactured by Hephaestus, too, is taken to indicate their superior quality as instruments of intentionality.⁵¹ When weapons are cast as embodiments of such semantically unequivocal notions as heroic glory or divine omnipotence, their efficacy in the future, too, begins to look like a foregone conclusion. Similarly, the terrifying pictorial images on Homeric shields (such as Agamemnon’s shield in Book 11 depicting the allegorical divine figures of Gorgo, Fear, and Terror)⁵² echo the “natural” hierarchies that, in the Homeric similes, serve to make the outcomes of battles appear preordained. The signifying power of Homeric

⁴⁷ Quoted in Rappaport 1999, 54. The examples are taken from Rappaport 1999, 55. See also Johansen 2002, 35–8. ⁴⁸ Cf. Boyer 2001, 195–231; Pyysiäinen 2009. ⁴⁹ For a detailed discussion of cognitive mechanisms that underlie human tool use, see Vaesen 2012. See also Hutchins 2005, on the indispensable role of “material anchors” for human cognition in general. ⁵⁰ Van Wees 1994. ⁵¹ e.g. Il. 7.132–57, 7.219–23, 8.191–5, 12.102, 16.452–507, 18.478–608, 21.140–83; 23.560, 23.799–800, 23.804–23. See Crielaard 2003, esp. 54–5. ⁵² Il. 11.32–7. Cf. the description of Athena’s aegis at Il. 5.738–42.

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weapons becomes particularly apparent when Patroclus assumes that he will be victorious against the Trojans because, wearing Achilles’ armour, he will be mistaken for Achilles himself (Il. 16.40–5) and when the new shield that Hephaestus creates for Achilles to replace the one that Hector had despoiled from Patroclus’ dead body (Il. 18.478–608) is framed in the narrative as a transparent sign of Achilles’ unrivalled superiority: while everybody else is terrified by the look of this work of divine art (Il. 19.14–15 οὐδέ τις ἔτλη / ἄντην εἰσιδέειν, ἀλλ᾿ ἔτρεσαν), Achilles rejoices as he confidently holds in his hands what is in effect an image of the entire world as it can normally be seen only to the gods (Il. 19.18–19).⁵³ The ability of weapons to facilitate the achievement of desired outcomes both physically and semiotically explains why they function in the Iliad as desirable objects, which, if taken from the enemy, not only become tangible tokens of victory but are also presumed to transfer to their new owners the signifying power that inheres in them.⁵⁴ Thus, Homeric weaponry echoes the tendency of Homeric “theology” to reveal signification as an auxiliary of intentionality. While the gods are synonymous with the ideal notion of unfailing intentionality of which human actions can only partake to varying limited degrees, weapons are material tools designed to facilitate (both physically and semiotically) the anticipated transition from intention to outcome. The fact that they are imaginatively imbued with memories of semantically unequivocal mythical events and project pictorial images of self-evident superiority turns them into notional indices of their wielders’ ability to prevail over their opponents. Needless to say, the purported indexicality of Homeric weapons, unlike the “natural” indexicality of a rash or a weathervane, is nothing but a product of wishful thinking—a cultural construct designed to bolster the illusion that the success of one’s intentional actions is always within reach. As the Homeric narrative repeatedly demonstrates, however, this cultural construct is no less indispensable for the human ability to perform intentional actions than the idea that contingent human events indicate the existence of an imaginary realm inhabited by supernatural beings whose intentions never fail to achieve the desired outcomes. Like weapons, rituals, too, function in the Iliad as instruments of intentionality. As in Book 3, sacrificial rites enact throughout the Iliad the desire of human actors to harness the gods’ supernatural ability to influence uncontrollable ⁵³ One the divine perspective represented on the shield, see Purves 2010, 46–55. On the shield description in general, see Becker 1995. ⁵⁴ e.g. Il. 7.136–50, 8.191–7, 16.781–3, 16.844–54, 17.59–60, 17.124–7, 21.182–3, 22.367–9. Cf. Horn 2018, 367.

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14      events.⁵⁵ By performing formalized actions in specially designated settings devoid of any elements that are not pertinent to the performance (e.g. stringently observing the ritual script that regulates the things that must be done before, during, and after the sacrificial killing),⁵⁶ ritual actors bring into existence an imaginary space purified of what Mary Douglas calls “matter out of place”—any superfluous elements that may destroy the sense of purposeful structure.⁵⁷ As she explains: Dirt is matter out of place. . . . Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. This idea of dirt takes us straight into the field of symbolism and promises a link-up with more obviously symbolic systems of purity.⁵⁸

By enacting in the empirical here and now ideal realities completely cleansed of “dirt,” ritual agents effectively enable themselves to experience a semblance of divine omnipotence: in ritual performances, formalized protocols for manipulating passive physical objects (e.g. the ritual killing guaranteed to be performed in accordance with the prescribed scenario because the sacrificial animals are presumed to be willing to comply with it)⁵⁹ evolve into an approximation of the ease with which the supernatural powers invoked in rituals are expected to manipulate things that escape human control.⁶⁰ Granted, there is a difference, to a human observer, between divine actions and ritual performances: human events are linked to divine actions as signifiers to signifieds while ritual performances are expected to serve as formative models for future extra-ritual events.⁶¹ And yet, ritual acts can be perceived as human attempts to emulate the gods’ ability to “translate” contingent events into intentional actions. To imitate that divine ability, ritual performers resort to symbolic substitutions—formalized manipulations of sacrificial objects, domestic animals, and liquids symbolizing intentional actions that the gods are called upon to perform in the future. Although, in ritual performances,

⁵⁵ e.g. Il. 1.458–66, 2.305–6, 2.421–9, 7.313–22, 9.218–20, 18.558–60, 19.252–6, 23.166–77. Cf. Seaford 1994, 42–73; Hitch 2009, 93–140; Naiden 2013; Larson 2016, 40–7 and 200–4. ⁵⁶ Van Straten 1995; Hitch 2009, 60–92. ⁵⁷ Douglas 1966. Cf. Geertz 1973, 87–125; Bourdieu 1977 and 1991; Tambiah 1979; Smith 1987; Rappaport 1999, 107–38. ⁵⁸ Douglas 1966, 44. ⁵⁹ Burkert 1966 and 1983. For a critique of this idea, see Naiden 2013, 83–90, with references. ⁶⁰ Cf. Malinowsky 1948, esp. 8–18. See also Patton 2009, on the “divine reflexivity” of ritual. ⁶¹ Cf. Bell 1997, 61–89.

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indexicality gives way to symbolism (i.e. the use of signs in which, according to Peirce’s classification, the link between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary and conventional),⁶² the symbols of rituals remain infused with the indexical force that they seem to inherit from the conceptual model of divine signs. For the nexus between ritual performances and their intended outcomes (e.g. the nexus, in Book 3, between the performed pouring of the sacrificial wine and the future punishment of oath-breakers) is postulated to be as uninfringeable (and as “natural”) as the nexus between divine actions and human events in the indexical signs sent by the gods.⁶³ As a result, in rituals, too, signification emerges to be the product of a human desire for the unattainable ideal of intentional agency that never fails. Language spoken by humans throughout the Iliad resembles ritual in that it, too, serves to facilitate imaginative transitions from “source spaces,” which call for intentional actions, to “target spaces,” in which those actions have already been executed and in which there is no need for any further actions. Language’s symbolic substitution of articulate sounds for absent things is akin to ritual’s symbolic substitution of easily manipulable objects for intractable social interactions: just as, in a ritual act, the observable reality of wine and sacrificial blood poured on the ground signifies a hypothetical case of the treaty-breakers’ brains being poured in a similar manner in the future (Il. 3.298–301), so in ritual language, too, physical sounds uttered in the social here and now signify imaginary states of affairs that the speakers strive either to turn into reality or to avert.⁶⁴ When in the Iliad expressions of volition are accompanied by sacrifice, they are envisaged to induce those who otherwise pursue their individual agendas (the gods and the humans) or act at cross purposes (the Achaeans and the Trojans) to act as one and, thereby, to decrease the degree of entropy that typically characterizes social events: paired with sacrifice, a promise becomes an oath binding to both warring parties;⁶⁵ a prayer becomes an invitation to the gods not only to repay the debt incurred by the sacrificial offering but also to recognize the ritual acts performed in their honour as emulations of their own omnipotence and to activate that omnipotence to the benefit of the worshippers;⁶⁶ and words of thanksgiving ⁶² Johansen 2002, 38–40. ⁶³ Cf. Rappaport 1999, 58: “[I]n all religious rituals, there is transmitted an indexical message that cannot be transmitted in any other way and, far from being trivial, it is one without which canonical messages are without force, or may even seem nonsensical.” See also ibid., 107–38. ⁶⁴ For an account of the possible co-emergence of ritual and language, see Rappaport 1999. On the evolution of language from the motor skills required for the use of material tools, see Bozzoli et al. 2019. ⁶⁵ e.g. Il. 3.245–301, 19.250–65. Karavites 1992, 48–107; Kitts 2005; Farenga 2006, 134–41. ⁶⁶ e.g. Il. 2.412–31, 16.233–48. Cf. Pulleyn 1997, 16–38.

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16      become proof of the unshakable validity of the pact between the gods and the humans.⁶⁷ Tellingly, ritual language (the language of marriage ceremonies and shipnaming) serves as a primary model for John L. Austin’s notion of speechacts—“performative utterances,” which, unlike “constative utterances,” cannot be true or false but can only be “felicitous” or “infelicitous,” depending on whether or not they succeed in producing the intended result in the context.⁶⁸ In the Iliad, language tends to be performative rather than constative not only in ritual but also elsewhere.⁶⁹ The Iliad abounds not only in “illocutionary” (ritual) utterances, whose performative force is inherent in the speech-acts themselves, but also in “perlocutionary” utterances intended to make their addressees act in certain ways⁷⁰—i.e. to produce what Jürgen Habermas calls “communicative actions”:⁷¹ exhortations and rebukes infuse warriors with a desire to fight,⁷² promises serve to secure cooperation,⁷³ threats are used to discipline one’s subordinates or to intimidate and weaken one’s enemies,⁷⁴ implorations seek to obtain help or to convince a stronger opponent to spare one’s life,⁷⁵ and bragging about one’s ancestors serves to make the addressee feel inferior to the speaker.⁷⁶ In the context of war, where every action is potentially a matter of life and death, the ideal of spoken language appears to be similar to the ideal language of ritual—language that consists only of “felicitous” speech-acts and in which the transition from intention to outcome is as reliable as the link between the signifier and the signified in the semantically unequivocal (indexical) “sign language” of the gods.⁷⁷ But like Book 3, the Iliad as a whole, too, reveals not only a virtual identity between the ability of the human imagination to construct ideal realities and the human ability to perform intentional actions but also the physical limitations of the cultural instruments designed to enhance that ability. When two mutually exclusive ideal futures, in which an intentional agent is victorious

⁶⁷ e.g. Il. 10.570–1; 18.550–60. Cf. Pulleyn 1997, 39–55; Larson 2016, 40–7. ⁶⁸ Austin 1975. See also Rappaport 1999, 113–17, on links between “performativeness” and ritual. ⁶⁹ Martin 1989; Beck 2012. ⁷⁰ Austin 1975, 89–132. ⁷¹ Habermas 1979, 1–68. ⁷² e.g. Il. 4.303–9, 4.338–48, 4.509–13, 5.464–92, 5.529–32, 5.787–91, 7.123–60, 11.286–90, 11.465–71, 12.269–76, 13.222–30, 14.131–2, 15.733–41, 20.354–63. At Il. 4.318–25, Nestor effectively equates his “verbal” contribution to battle with the fighting performed by younger heroes. On exhortations in the Iliad, see Latacz 1977. ⁷³ e.g. Il. 1.514–27, 8.287–91, 9.262–76, 10.391–9, 11.131–5, 18.324–7, 19.140–1, 20.83–5, 23.195, 24.660–8. See Karavites 1992. ⁷⁴ e.g. Il. 8.399–408, 11.441–5, 13.446–54, 13.810–32, 15.14–33, 15.206–17, 15.343–51, 21.321–3. Cf. Martin 1989, 14–22. ⁷⁵ e.g. Il. 5.684–8, 10.378–81, 11.131–5. Cf. 22.338–43 (Hector asking Achilles to return his dead body). Crotty 1994, 3–104. ⁷⁶ See above, n. 38. ⁷⁷ Cf. Martin 1989, 89–145.

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and his opponent dead, clash in a real battle, one of those futures, obviously enough, tends to become factual and the other counterfactual. But when this procedure endlessly repeats itself, the multiplicity of intentional actions dissolves into a single contingent event of war, which no individual human actor is able to control. Accordingly, the use of weapons to implement one’s intention to kill an opponent does not put an end to the necessity to use weapons in the future but leads to a never-ending carnage and eventually results in the uncontrollable event of the earth overflowing with blood (cf. e.g. Il. 4.451 ῥέε δ᾿ αἵματι γαῖα). Likewise, sacrificial rituals do not necessarily produce the intended results: Homer’s human characters are acutely aware that, irrespective of their diligence in observing religious duties, the decision as to whether or not to grant their wishes ultimately depends on the extent to which those wishes accord with the gods’ pre-existing designs.⁷⁸ The efficacy of performative language in the Iliad proves to be quite limited too: not only do speech-acts in the Iliad regularly “misfire” (i.e. fail to result in the intended outcome) because they are subject to the same constraints as the intentional actions whose success they seek to enhance,⁷⁹ but the poem is also famous for going out of its way to show that oaths are routinely broken, orders disobeyed, and prayers ignored.⁸⁰ The tragic poignancy that the Iliad ascribes to human existence is thus that humans continue to rely on cultural instruments of intentionality even though they know full well that the results produced by those instruments are likely to be overruled by intentional actions performed by other actors, both human and divine—actions that merge into a contingent continuum, which seems predetermined because no single human actor can influence its flow. * * * The Iliad shows that weapons, rituals, and spoken language function as instruments of transforming specific “source spaces” (real-life situations that call for intentional actions) into specific “target spaces” (situations in which the intended outcomes have been reached): weapons are used to achieve particular goals in the here and now of combat; rituals seek to secure the well-being of their performers; and spoken language serves to effect a particular kind of change at the moment of utterance. Like weapons, rituals, and spoken language, Greek literature, too, will be shown in this book to be an instrument of intentionality that serves to construct ideal “target spaces.” ⁷⁸ e.g. Il. 8.236–44. Cf. Il. 19.96–131. Cf. Dodds 1951, 1–18; Versnel 2011, 163–79. ⁷⁹ Cf. Austin 1975, 14–45; Bourdieu 1991, esp. 72–6. ⁸⁰ e.g. Il. 2.110–15, 2.419–20, 4.64–126, 5.826–34. Naiden 2013, 131–82.

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18      Its most obvious difference from the cultural artefacts that I have just discussed is that Greek literature does not serve to enhance one’s ability to perform specific intentional actions but contributes to enabling Greek culture as a whole to exercise conceptual control over the geopolitical patterns into which the territory inhabited by the Greeks falls in the course of its history. These geopolitical patterns can be regarded as “source spaces” for whose inhabitants Greek literature constructs shared “target spaces”—ideal realities that function as matrices for collective intentional actions, as common objects of desire, and as focal points that endow the political geography of Greece with a sense of purposeful structure. In addition, my contention will be that, as in the cultural artefacts discussed above, in Greek literature, too, intentionality conceptually informs signification. Just as the human desire to appropriate the divine ability to act upon one’s intentions without encountering any obstacles imaginatively transforms the symbolic dimensions of weapons, rituals, and performative language into indices of their users’ longed-for status as unfailing intentional agents, so the need to exercise conceptual control over geopolitical spaces, too, I will argue, results in Greek literature in the imaginative construction of non-arbitrary, indexical, signs: the Iliad conceives of the status of Achilles as a shared object of emulation within the geographically scattered world of archaic Greece by presenting his success in battle as an index of his heroic essence; Attic tragedy and oratory present Athens’ right to rule over her imperial subjects as an index of the natural superiority of the Athenian citizens; and Callimachus and Theocritus intimate that the unparalleled degree of personal contentment enjoyed by the Greek inhabitants of Alexandria is in effect an index of their cultural “Greekness.” And just as the Iliad lays bare the inherent physical limitations of such instruments of intentionality as weapons, rituals, and spoken language, so other texts of Greek literature, too, reveal literary constructs of unfailing intentionality to be just that—constructs that do not represent things as they are but conjure up unattainable ideals: Hesiod’s Works and Days exposes the degree to which Homer’s heroic ideal is in fact inapplicable to its self-proclaimed modern heirs; Plato reveals the ideology of Athenian exceptionalism as an empty cipher that possesses no referent in contemporary reality; and Callimachus and Theocritus present their ideal Alexandria not only as a cultural environment uniquely conducive to poetic creativity but also as an imaginative product of that very creativity. But while the physical limitations imposed on weapons, rituals, and spoken language eventually let the multiplicity of intentional actions dissolve into an uncontrollable contingency of human existence, Greek literature can create

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alternative ideal realities unaffected by the mutability of “real life” because they are presumed to be notionally identical with literary language itself. Like ideological constructs of unfailing intentionality, such imaginary realities authenticate their status as embodiments of the ideal by posing as nonarbitrary signs. But while the non-arbitrariness of the ideological constructs is indexical in nature (they tend to conceive of observable realities as “symptoms” of underlying essences), the non-arbitrariness of purely textual ideal realities is closer to that of an “icon”—a sign that, in contradistinction to the arbitrary symbol and the “natural” index, Peirce defines as a sign that signifies by forming an analogy to its signified.⁸¹ I will show that, in the Works and Days, Hesiod propounds the ideal of poetic language whose status as a transmitter of divine truths is bolstered by the fact that the manner in which it produces meaning forms an iconic analogy to the manner in which a farmer produces food by synchronizing his actions with the cycles of nature; that the effect that Plato’s dialogic writing seeks to exercise on the reader is analogous to his portrayal of the transformative effect that Socrates’ oral conversations exercised on his interlocutors (an effect that consists in purifying their “souls” of ideology and inspiring them with a love of wisdom); that the content of Callimachus’ aetiological poetry (an archive of Greek cultural memories) constitutes a formative analogy to the effect that he aims to achieve by his writing (i.e. to turn his contemporary reality into a similar object of cultural memory); and that the ideal bucolic landscapes described in Theocritus’ Idylls (landscapes whose inhabitants seem to be congenitally incapable of experiencing any other desire than a desire for aesthetic pleasure) constitute a formative analogy to the status of Theocritus’ poetry itself as a domain of pure form. One of the outcomes of my analysis will be that, in Greek literature, there is a close linkage between the ideologically motivated pragmatics of space and the formation of basic literary modes of meaning making. Part I (“Archaic Greece: Myth and Truth”) demonstrates that the heroic ideal of the Iliad serves as a common object of emulation for the spatially dispersed, competitive aristocratic culture and that Hesiod’s notion of poetic language as a transmitter of transcendental truths reproduces the basic conceptual structure of that ideal. Part II (“Classical Athens: Ideology and Dialogue”) draws a similar connection between the ideology of Athenian exceptionalism, propounded in tragedy and patriotic oratory, and Plato’s dialogic writing: while the former

⁸¹ Mitchell 1986, 54–63; Johansen 2002, 30–5. On Peirce’s “icons” and on iconic phenomena in language, see also De Cuypere 2008. See also Kirichenko 2016a, for an application of this conceptual framework to the interpretation of Pindar’s epinicians.

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20      naturalizes the (im)balance of power between the inherently superior “ideal state of Athens” and its inherently inferior “allies,” the latter seeks to replace that (by now discredited) conceptual centre of the world with a structurally cognate, yet more solid, foundation of a meaningful life—with the “ideal state” located in the philosopher’s soul. And finally, Part III (“Ptolemaic Alexandria: Memory and Make-Believe”) maintains that the ambiguous geopolitical status of Alexandria both as a place geographically extraneous to the Greek world and as one of its new competitive centres is responsible not only for the idealized images painted by Callimachus and Theocritus—images intended to make the newly founded Ptolemaic capital irresistibly attractive to every person of Greek culture—but also for the ways in which the two poets cast their own oeuvres as emphatically private domains of memory, desire, and aesthetic pleasure. Each of the three parts of this book consists of two chapters. Chapter 1 begins by showing that the essentialist ideal embodied by Achilles is the product of inverting the standard political mechanisms of “symbolic interactionism” (the exercise of power by means of emotionally effective symbolic substitutions) and that the funeral games for Patroclus in Iliad 23 reveal the institution of athletic contests as a social context in which that impossible ideal becomes the virtual centre of the geographically and politically dispersed world of archaic Greece. In the rest of the chapter, I read the Odyssey as a sophisticated reflection on the role played by epic poetry itself in establishing the heroic ideal as an indispensable factor of aristocratic politics—as a force that, by projecting the heroic ideal onto local politics, lends a sense of purpose and cohesion to the amorphous political space of archaic Greece. At the beginning of Chapter 2, I interpret the prologue to the Theogony as a similar, yet more forceful, assertion of the crucial role that poetry plays in securing the stability of local aristocratic power. Then I proceed to argue that, in the Works and Days, Hesiod demonstrates what happens when the harmonious symbiosis between poetry and aristocratic power is shattered (from incarnations of the heroic ideal, kings become transformed into speakers of “crooked words” that signify nothing and possess no authority) and that he uses the agricultural ideal of a farmer producing food by synchronizing his actions with the cycles of nature as a metaphor for how his own poetic language “does things with words” by aligning itself with divine truths. By doing so, I maintain, Hesiod positions himself as the only true winner of the competition that permeates all aspects of archaic Greek culture: he casts his own language as the closest thing in his contemporary world to the essentialist ideal of Homeric heroism, and it is this language that he offers his recipients as

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a guide to achieve a degree of self-sufficiency comparable to that of heroic essentialism. As the first two chapters trace a trajectory from the essentialism of the heroic ideal to Hesiod’s ideal of poetic language as a container of divine truths, so the next two trace a similar trajectory from the ideology of Athenian exceptionalism to Plato’s ideal of dialogic writing. Chapter 3 discusses the development of the Athenian equivalent of the ideology of heroic essentialism (i.e. the notion of the Athenian people as a collective hero)—from tragedy’s contribution to its formation to its radical reformulation in Thucydides’ version of Pericles’ funeral oration and to its ruthless parody in Plato’s Menexenus. Chapter 4 begins by reading the Crito, the Apology, and the Symposium as acts of dialectically dismantling two competing (yet complementary) versions of the “ideal state of Athens”—a city of self-identical “earth-born” citizens and an insatiably acquisitive empire. Then I interpret the Phaedrus as a reflection on the ability of Plato’s writing to replace, in the reader’s “soul,” the ideological phantom of the ideal state of Athens with a desire for the “ideal state of philosophy.” I conclude by reading Plato’s Republic and Timaeus/Critias as a further reflection on the dialogic writing envisaged in the Phaedrus—writing that, in contrast to Hesiod’s monologic discourse, does not purport to communicate transcendental truths but animates the reader to undertake a philosophical quest of her own. In the last two chapters of this book, I investigate connections between Ptolemaic royal ideology and poetry produced in the context of the royal court. Chapter 5 begins by drawing an analogy between Callimachus’ portrayal of Alexandria in the Aetia and the Iambi (a city not only literally inhabited by Greek immigrants but also figuratively woven out of their cultural memories) and his notion of poetry as a site of intertextual memories. It concludes by pointing to similarities between the process of recollecting the spatially and temporally remote world of Greek culture, staged in Callimachus’ aetiological poetry, and the process of longing for an ever-elusive beloved—a process that Callimachus not only describes but also enacts in his erotic epigrams by parading them as epitomes of semantic elusiveness. The first half of Chapter 6 focuses on Theocritus’ bucolic Idylls, which, as I argue, construct their ideal worlds by banishing the Callimachean desire for the unattainable into the realm of mimetic representation and by letting their inhabitants experience no other desire than a desire for poetry and art. The second half of the chapter shows that Theocritus’ encomiastic portrayals of Alexandria in Idylls 14 and 15 are based on the same principles as his

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22      construction of the bucolic landscapes: like poetry in Idyll 11, Alexandria is described in Idyll 14 as a remedy of unrequited love, and in Idyll 15 the city emerges not only as a Panhellenic dream come true but also as an ideal place where, as in the bucolic world, the only desire that one can possibly experience is a desire for beautiful artworks and beautiful songs—a desire that, as it turns out, one can easily satisfy by attending a religious festival at the royal palace. After showing that, in Greek literature, such fundamental modes of meaning-making as the monologic communication of the truth, the dialogic encouragement to search for the truth on one’s own, and the complete abandonment of any transcendental goals for the sake of cultural memory and/or aesthetic pleasure can be seen as products of the changing modes of the characteristically Greek pragmatics of space (i.e. the need to exercise conceptual control over a geographically dispersed, yet culturally cohesive territory), I conclude this book with a brief Epilogue in which I point to what I see as some of the most significant ways in which that spatial pragmatics influenced the subsequent development of Greek and Roman literature.

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PART I

ARCHAIC GREECE Myth and Truth

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Introduction Displayed at the sites of the Panhellenic athletic games, pictorial representations of heroic deeds (such as the images of the twelve labours of Heracles and the chariot race between Pelops and Oenomaus that adorned the temple of Zeus in Olympia) served to remind the contestants that their efforts were construed as attempts to live up to mythical models.¹ Visually indistinguishable from statues of mythical heroes, lifelike victor statues effected a similar elision between the empirical reality of athletic contests and the imaginary reality of heroic myth.² The odes of Pindar and Bacchylides not only echoed the effect produced by such visual images by equating their addressees’ political authority with their status as epitomes of the heroic ideal³ but also did something that immobile monuments were physically incapable of—i.e. bringing the victors’ heroic fame to their hometowns and spreading it around the entire Greek world.⁴ By offering the unattainable ideal of heroic excellence as a common object of emulation to the aristocratic elites of the geographically dispersed Greek communities, epinician poetry constituted a vital instrument of spatial pragmatics: not only did it project a sense of purposeful structure onto the political space of archaic Greece by placing the heroic ideal at its

¹ Stewart 1983, 133–4. ² Depew 2000; Steiner 2001, 219–34; Smith 2007, 107–11; Τhomas 2007, 159–60. Cf. Tanner 2006, 57–67 and 116–34. On the heroization of athletes, see Currie 2005, 120–57. ³ See Davies 2007; Instone 2007. Not only does Heracles serve as the most prominent paradigm of athletic excellence in the epinicians (Nieto Hernández 1993), but an entire series of aetiological myths (the myth of Oenomaus and Pelops looms quite large in Pi. O. 1; cf. O. 9.10 and O. 10.24) are also introduced as models for various ritual aspects of the respective games. See e.g. Nagy 1990, 116–45 and Krummen 1990, 158–68, on O. 1; Krummen 1990, 237–47, on Pi. O. 3. See also Currie 2005, with detailed discussions of P. 2, 3, 5, N. 7, and I. 7; and Fearn 2007, on Ba. 13 and 15. Calame 2009b, 7–16. To give a few characteristic examples of Pindar’s use of local heroic myths, the odes dedicated to Aeginetan victors teem with references to the deeds of the Aeacidae who originally hailed from Aegina (Burnett 2005, esp. 49–50); the Sicilian odes set the glory of their addressees vis-à-vis myths relevant to Sicily (Lewis 2020); Pythian 5 portrays the return of victorious Arcesilaus to Cyrene as a notional reenactment of the city’s foundation by the mythical hero Battus (Krummen 1990, 98–151); and in Olympian 7, Diagoras’ return to Rhodes is paralleled with three foundational moments of the island’s mythical past—the establishment of an Argive settlement by Tlepolemus, the birth of Athena from Zeus’ head, and the emergence of the island itself from the sea: Kowalzig 2007, 224–66. See also Neer— Kurke 2019. ⁴ Kurke 1991. See esp. Pi. O. 6 and N. 5: Kirichenko 2016a.

Greek Literature and the Ideal: The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age. Alexander Kirichenko, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Kirichenko 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866707.003.0002

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26  :    conceptual centre, but it also converted the imaginary realities of heroic myth into a very much real political authority.⁵ Matured at the close of the archaic period, the epinician genre constituted a culmination of the mode of spatial pragmatics that had determined the development of Greek poetry from its first beginnings. In what follows, I will argue that, taken together, the Iliad and the Odyssey can be considered to anticipate epinician poetry’s use of the heroic ideal as a conceptual centre of the dispersed Greek world and that the need to create such a centre may have been responsible for shaping not only the plots of the Homeric poems but also Hesiod’s notion of poetic language as a transmitter of transcendental truths.

⁵ Cf. Hornblower 2009. On the close link between poetry and the victorious athlete’s prestige in Pindar’s epinicians, see also Kirichenko 2016a, 9–11, with references.

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1 Homer and the Heroic Ideal Heroic Essentialism and Agonistic Culture in the Iliad Like many other Greek myths, the myth of the Trojan War serves to impose a sense of purposeful structure on the cultural geography of archaic Greece. What this myth postulates as the centripetal force that turns the discrete dots on the map listed in the Catalogue of the Ships in Iliad 2⁶ into a cohesive cultural space is a shared desire for a contested object—the desire to retrieve Helen morphing into a desire for Panhellenic glory.⁷ Troy is thus depicted in the Iliad not only as a common enemy of all Achaeans but also as a paradigmatic Panhellenic site that constitutes a notional centre of the otherwise politically amorphous territory that they inhabit—a place where, by attempting to excel in battle, each warrior has a chance to assert his superior authority over his fellow Achaeans. In the General Introduction, I mentioned that the human inhabitants of the Iliad’s fictional world often (and often mistakenly) perceive the gods as embodiments of the unattainable ideal of intentional agency that never fails. In what follows, I will analyse the manner in which the Iliad constructs Achilles as an arguably more dependable epitome of that ideal. In Iliad 2, conventional politics (both divine and human) is presented as an art of disguise. To force Agamemnon to attack the Trojans, Zeus sends him a false dream (Il. 2.6 οὖλον Ὄνειρον)—“a messenger of Zeus” (Il. 2.24 Διὸς δέ τοι ἄγγελός εἰμι), who, appearing in the guise of Nestor, promises that he will capture Troy on that very day (Il. 2.37 αἱρήσειν Πριάμου πόλιν ἤματι κείνῳ).⁸ Zeus’ strategy is both disarmingly simple and pre-eminently efficient: he makes Agamemnon act against his own best interest (cf. Il. 2.38 νήπιος, οὐδὲ τὰ ᾔδη ἅ ῥα Ζεὺς μήδετο ἔργα) by promising him what he wants to hear and by wrapping that promise in two layers of authority—Nestor’s and his own. To make the war-weary Achaeans obey what he thinks is a straightforward expression of the divine will, Agamemnon, too, begins by telling them what they want to hear: he pretends to be fed up with what he describes as Zeus’ ⁶ On the geography of the Catalogue of the Ships, see Visser 1997. ⁸ For a detailed analysis of this episode, see Seibel 1994.

⁷ Cf. Blondell 2013.

Greek Literature and the Ideal: The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age. Alexander Kirichenko, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Kirichenko 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866707.003.0003

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28  :    empty promises of victory and urges the troops to sail home to their wives and children (Il. 2.110–54). His trick consists in having previously instructed Odysseus and Nestor to perform a mock political debate whose goal is to persuade the Achaeans to act against Agamemnon’s ostensible command and to continue to fight (Il. 2.75 ὑμεῖς δ᾿ ἄλλοθεν ἄλλος ἐρητύειν ἐπέεσσιν). Although he fails to realize that by performing what he sees as a clever stratagem of his own he is in fact implementing Zeus’ will, Agamemnon succeeds in misleading the Achaeans as efficiently as Zeus has misled him.⁹ Privy to Agamemnon’s plan, Odysseus prevents the Achaean kings from embarking on a homeward journey¹⁰ by displaying a visually striking token of royal power. In the General Introduction, I mentioned that, in Homeric weapons, divine provenience, heroic pedigree, and terrifying pictorial images are presumed to function as non-arbitrary indices of the objects’ superior quality. Likewise, Agamemnon’s golden sceptre, which was manufactured by Hephaestus and originally belonged to Zeus (Il. 2.100–8), is framed in the text as an incontrovertible sign of the king’s quasi-divine authority over his subordinates.¹¹ But while the semiotic dimension of weapons is deemed to enhance their primary function as physical instruments of killing and/or protection from being killed, the signifying power of Agamemnon’s sceptre is used in this scene as a substitute for the ostensible meaning of the king’s words. When Odysseus brandishes the sceptre to lend weight to his warning that Agamemnon’s proposal to discontinue the war may in fact be a veiled premonition of the Zeus-like anger that will be visited upon anyone who fails to discern his true intention (Il. 2.190–7), he seeks to substitute what he presents as a non-arbitrary index of royal authority for what is now revealed as arbitrary (and, therefore, potentially misleading) symbols of Agamemnon’s original speech. As Pierre Bourdieu appositely remarks:

⁹ Some readers see in this episode an instance of Agamemnon’s incompetent leadership, whose disastrous consequence can only be rectified by Odysseus and Nestor: e.g. Rose 2012, 118–19. But in fact, everything happens in accordance with Agamemnon’s clandestine plan, which consists in boosting his army’s fighting morale, necessary for capturing Troy: he pretends to urge the troops to depart (cf. Il. 2.73–4), they take this encouragement literally, Odysseus and Nestor present counterarguments (cf. Il. 2.75), and the Achaeans embrace them as if they corresponded to what they had wanted to do all along. Cf. Elmer 2013, 86–104. ¹⁰ Ever since Aristotle (Poet. 1454b1–2), it has been customary to see Odysseus in this episode as acting in accordance with Athena’s divine intervention. It seems to be less straightforward than that. Hera and Athena are as unaware of the details of Agamemnon’s plan as they are of Zeus’, so that they take what they see at face value (Il. 2.142–65) and prompt Odysseus to prevent the Achaeans from sailing home before they have captured Troy (Il. 2.166–81). But in fact, Odysseus, who knows what Agamemnon has in mind (cf. Il. 2.74–6), needs no prompting, while Athena emerges to be no less gullible than the Achaeans manipulated by their leaders. ¹¹ Cf. Gernet 1968, 93–137.

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[A]uthority comes to language from outside, a fact correctly exemplified by the skeptron that, in Homer, is passed to the orator who is about to speak. . . . . It is the access to the legitimate instruments of expression, and therefore the participation in the authority of the institution, which makes all the difference—irreducible to discourse as such—between the straightforward imposture of masqueraders, who disguise a performative utterance as a descriptive or constative statement, and the authorized imposture of those who do the same thing with the authorization and the authority of an institution. The spokesperson is an impostor endowed with a skeptron.¹²

By acting as an authorized “impostor endowed with a skeptron” and by using that skeptron as a substitute for Agamemnon’s words, Odysseus does not “disguise a performative utterance as a constative statement.” Instead, he futilely attempts to disguise the symbolic system of royal power as a system of indices expressive of a transcendental divine essence. Odysseus’ confrontation with Thersites confirms the purely symbolic status of Agamemnon’s authority. Thersites describes Agamemnon’s quasi-divine privilege not only as a pinnacle of injustice but also as an empty show—its visually impressive paraphernalia employed to mask the ruler’s self-absorbed arrogance and rapacity (Il. 2.226–34). Thersites himself epitomizes the opposite of his view of Agamemnon. The fact that, in his speech, he echoes Achilles’ vitriolic critique of Agamemnon in Book 1 (cf. Il. 2.225–42 and 1.225–44)¹³ indicates that Thersites regards his own words as self-evidently true. But he naïvely assumes that this truth will remain valid even though it is now conveyed not by the “best of the Achaeans” (cf. Il. 2.239) but by someone who is not only hideously ugly but also possesses no political authority of his own (Il. 2.216 αἴσχιστος δὲ ἀνὴρ ὑπὸ Ἴλιον ἦλθε).¹⁴ When his speech is met with derision and when, to drive the point home, Odysseus uses Agamemnon’s golden sceptre as a kind of weapon by striking Thersites with it (Il. 2.243–77), Thersites is forced to realize that, in the political world he inhabits, truth wrapped in a visually unappealing clothing is always bound to lose to an “authorized imposture” buttressed by emotionally effective arguments from authority.¹⁵ By publicly humiliating Thersites, Odysseus discredits the idea of discontinuing the war.¹⁶ But to implement Agamemnon’s plan of an immediate ¹² ¹³ ¹⁴ ¹⁶

Bourdieu 1991, 109. Thersites concludes his speech by quoting Achilles verbatim: Il. 2.242 = 1.232. Nagy 1979, 253–64. ¹⁵ Cartledge 2009, 33–6. Cf. Scodel 2002, 204–9. Elmer 2013, 93–100.

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30  :    attack on the Trojans, Odysseus and Nestor need to inspire the war-weary Achaeans with a genuine desire to fight. Echoing the speech that Agamemnon has delivered earlier in Book 2, Odysseus begins by feigning sympathy for those who long to return home to their wives and children (Il. 2.291–7). But then he mentions an omen sent by Zeus prior to the Achaean fleet’s departure from Aulis—a snake turning to stone after devouring nine sparrows, which Calchas had interpreted as a promise of victory after nine years of fighting (Il. 2.299–332)—and makes everyone so curious about the outcome of the prophecy (Il. 2.299–300 ὄφρα δαῶμεν / ἢ ἐτεὸν . . . . ἦε καὶ οὐκί ) that the Achaeans, united in their anti-war sentiment just a moment earlier, now unanimously support Odysseus’ proposal to the opposite effect (Il. 2.335 μῦθον ἐπαινήσαντες Ὀδυσσῆος θείοιο).¹⁷ To stoke their rising enthusiasm, Nestor stresses that, by prolonging the war, they would also be able to examine the truthfulness of another sign sent by Zeus on the day they departed for Troy (Il. 2.348–9 Διὸς αἰγιόχοιο / γνώμεναι εἴ τε ψεῦδος ὑπόσχεσις, εἴ τε καὶ οὐχί )—a propitious lightning that appeared to their right (Il. 2.353 ἀστράπτων ἐπιδέξι᾿, ἐναίσιμα σήματα φαίνων). Now there is no more disagreement among the Achaean troops, and, to enhance the effect of the performance, Agamemnon pretends that the reason why he is prepared to desist from his original feigned proposal to sail back to Greece is that he, too, has been convinced by the arguments presented by Odysseus and Nestor (Il. 2.370–93). This episode demonstrates that conventional politics in the Iliad consists in using emotionally effective symbolic substitutes (dreams, words, artefacts, and omens) in order to imperceptibly replace the will of the ruled with the will of the rulers. Earlier in the narrative, Agamemnon demonstrates that there is another sense in which politics can be perceived as an art of substitution. In Iliad 1, Agamemnon’s authority is described in purely quantitative terms: by comparison with every other Achaean king, he rules over more people (cf. Il. 2.577–8 ἅμα τῷ γε πολὺ πλεῖστοι καὶ ἄριστοι / λαοὶ ἕποντ᾿ ) and is entitled to receiving a larger portion of the spoils (cf. Il. 1.163–8, 281).¹⁸ This numerical approach to power is generally accepted in the Iliad as an incontestable fact of social reality.¹⁹ At the same time, the narrative goes out of its way to expose the inherent fragility of that approach. While authority projected by superior numbers is too manifest to be questioned or argued against, authority based on nothing but numbers is inherently vulnerable as it automatically shrinks in

¹⁷ Cf. Haubold 2000, 53–60. ¹⁸ For a sophisticated discussion of the ideology of the dasmos in the Iliad, see Brown 2016, 54–143. ¹⁹ Haubold 2000, 24–8; Scodel 2008, 1–32.

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proportion to the numerical decrease.²⁰ At the beginning of the Iliad, Agamemnon is acutely aware of the vulnerability of his quantitative power. Granted, he considers Chryseis to be every bit as valuable as his own wife Clytemnestra (Il. 1.113–15). And yet when the plague forces him to return Chryseis to her father, it is not so much the prospect of parting specifically with her that causes him distress. What bothers him is that, by letting one of his concubines go, he will be humiliated in the eyes of his subordinates: while they are allowed to keep their share of the spoils, he will manifestly have less than he had before (Il. 1.118–20). It is, therefore, no consolation to him to hear Achilles’ reassurance that he will get many times as much when Troy is captured (Il. 1.127–9). What Agamemnon seems to find intolerable is the idea that his possessions may decrease even by the tiniest bit and even for the briefest moment of time—for even that, he fears, will be enough to cause damage to his authority. To prevent that from happening and to restore what he sees as the natural order of things, Agamemnon has to make sure that the numbers stay the same—that his loss is immediately compensated by a substitute of equivalent value provided by one of the Achaean chieftains.²¹ When Achilles demands that Agamemnon return Chryseis without receiving any immediate compensation (Il. 1.122–9), Agamemnon naturally interprets this proposal as an overt attempt to replace him as the supreme ruler of the Achaeans (Il. 1.287–9).²² Being an expert practitioner of the art of substitution is thus inseparably linked in Iliad 1 to the anxiety of being replaced by someone else. Agamemnon proves to be wrong: Achilles cannot replace him, because, endowed with radically different conceptual natures, the two kings are not interchangeable. In an attempt to act as an umpire between Agamemnon and Achilles, Nestor draws a sharp contrast between them: while Agamemnon’s superiority is quantitative (he rules over more people), Achilles’ superiority is a matter of inner quality (as a son of a goddess, he is much stronger, Il. 1.280–1).²³ Indeed, Agamemnon’s quantitative superiority is of an entirely different magnitude from the superiority of Achilles whom the Iliad defines as a fence protecting all Achaeans from the dangers of war (Il. 1.283–4 ὃς μέγα πᾶσιν / ἕρκος Ἀχαιοῖσιν πέλεται πολέμοιο κακοῖο). This metaphor is highly suggestive. The nine-year-long stalemate, with which the poem begins, is a ²⁰ Haubold 2000, 60: “Agamemnon’s fame as a hero among other heroes depends on the laoi more than anything else. He is ‘greatest’ only as long as they are ‘most’.” ²¹ Wilson 2002, 49–53; Rose 2012, 110–12; Brown 2016, 123–7. ²² Wilson 2002, 61–4; Scodel 2008, 127–33. ²³ Rose 1992, 74–6; Muellner 1996, 102–16; Horn 2014, 148–61.

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32  :    consequence of parity between the two warring sides. The main reason why the Achaeans, who outnumber the Trojans and their allies by the ratio of ten to one (cf. Il. 2.119–28), cannot capture Troy is the city’s impregnable fortifications built by the gods (cf. Il. 21.447 ἵν᾿ ἄρρηκτος πόλις εἴη).²⁴ The main reason why the Trojans cannot oust the Achaeans from the Trojan plain is that they have no warrior comparable in strength to Achilles: it is taken for granted that it is only in the absence of Achilles that the Trojans can dare to attack the Achaeans (e.g. Il. 1.240–4, 4.509–13, 14.364–7). An important implication of the assumption that, as a warrior, Achilles is always victorious is that, unlike every other character of the Iliad, he is presumed to be able to determine the successful outcome of whatever he intends to do. It is precisely this unique ability that turns Achilles into a protective fence—a metaphor that establishes a notional equivalence between Achilles and the Trojan wall. Achilles is in other words as indispensable to the Achaeans as the Trojan wall is to the Trojans. While other forms of authority (both divine and human) are shown in the Iliad to operate by artfully disguising arbitrary symbols as non-arbitrary indices, Achilles’ authority alone derives from a self-evident indexical essentialism—from his really being what he appears to be. Tellingly, the conceptual gap between Agamemnon and Achilles is further corroborated by the difference that the Iliad draws between their sceptres. An elaborate artefact manufactured by Hephaestus and boasting a pedigree that goes all the way back to Zeus (Il. 2.100–8), Agamemnon’s sceptre derives its authority from symbolically referencing the absent divine realm—a merely symbolic value that, in Book 9, Diomedes reminds Agamemnon not to confuse with the incontestable physical reality of superior strength (Il. 9.38–9 σκήπτρῳ μέν τοι δῶκε [sc. Ζεύς] τετιμῆσθαι περὶ πάντων, / ἀλκὴν δ᾿ οὔ τοι δῶκεν). Achilles, by contrast, corroborates his adamant determination to withdraw from battle by appealing to a sceptre whose description is reduced to its plain materiality—a carved piece of dead wood that will never again sprout leaves (Il. 1.234–9).²⁵ Unlike Agamemnon, Achilles rejects any form of authority that operates by means of symbolic substitutes, and like Achilles himself, his sceptre, too, is fully identical to what it is.²⁶ Thus, the Iliad equates Achilles’ status as an unfailing intentional agent with an indexical essentialism incompatible with the very idea of substitution. The difference between the flimsiness of his own symbolic authority and the solidity of Achilles’ indexical essentialism is the lesson that Agamemnon is ²⁴ Grethlein 2008, 32–5; Garcia 2013, 110–30. ²⁵ Brown 2016, 305–13. ²⁶ Cf. Nagy 1979, 180; Lynn-George 1988, 48–9; Grethlein 2008, 35–9.

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forced to learn when Achilles withdraws from battle. Until the death of Patroclus in Book 16, the entire narrative consists in futile attempts to find a substitute for Achilles—by letting other heroes excel in battle²⁷ or by constructing a wall around the Achaean camp (Il. 7.436–7).²⁸ It becomes obvious soon enough that neither the other heroes nor the wall are strong enough to ward off the onslaught of Hector. To the likes of Diomedes, Ajax, Agamemnon, and Idomeneus, who take turns in receiving the brunt of the Trojan attack, Achilles remains a constant absent presence—the gold standard against which they measure their own inadequacy (cf. Il. 5.787–91, 7.109–19, 7.226–32, 8.470–83, 9.225–51). Likewise, the Achaean wall, set on fire and breached in Book 12 (Il. 12.175–81, 469–71, cf. 15.352–89), proves to be no obstacle to Hector’s relentless advance.²⁹ As a result, the Achaean wall, its hasty construction preceded by no sacrifice to the gods (Il. 7.450), emerges not only as a bastard imitation of the divinely built Trojan wall but also as a blatantly inadequate substitute for Achilles—the only true bulwark of the Achaeans. Achilles’ irreplaceability goes hand in hand with his adamant reluctance to accept substitutes. To Agamemnon, Chryseis has a predominantly numerical value, which ensures that he owns more than his subordinates: she is nothing but one item among his vast possessions and can, therefore, be easily replaced by another similar item. Whether that substitute be Briseis or any other captive woman is of no importance for maintaining what Agamemnon sees as a proper numerical balance (cf. Il. 1.131–47). To Achilles, by contrast, Briseis proves to be as irreplaceable as he himself is to the Achaeans (cf. Il. 1.346–92 and 9.632–42).³⁰ Achilles’ instinctive reaction to Agamemnon’s demand to replace Chryseis with Briseis is a desire to solve the conflict the way he normally would on the battlefield—to wit, by killing his offender (Il. 1.188–93)—, and it is only a direct divine intervention (Athena manifesting herself to Achilles alone) that keeps him from doing so (Il. 1.193–223).³¹ But what at first looks like a divine force restraining Achilles from punishing Agamemnon results in a punishment that is both more sophisticated and politically more radical. Agamemnon is portrayed as a leader who presides over a political system in which power is measured numerically and who is, therefore, acutely aware of the fragility of his position. What Achilles does is subversive of the system itself: by removing that one element (himself) without

²⁷ Fenik 1968; Hellmann 2000. ²⁸ Garcia 2013, 97–101. ²⁹ Clay 2011, 56–86; Tsagalis 2012, 102–5; Garcia 2013, 104–10. ³¹ Griffin 1980, 158–60; Wilson 2002, 60–1; Scodel 2008, 137–9.

³⁰ Brown 2016, 132–3.

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34  :    which the Achaean army becomes helplessly exposed to the Trojan attack (cf. Il. 1.240–4), Achilles not only curbs Agamemnon’s arrogance by contributing to a drastic reduction of the number of the Achaean warriors over whom he so much prides himself to rule but also lays bare the inadequacy of viewing political power only in terms of symbolic interactionism rather than indexical essentialism.³² It does not take long for Agamemnon to realize that what he has lost by forcing Achilles to give up Briseis is not a single good warrior but the warfighting capacity of his entire army. And when, in Book 9, he sends an embassy to convince Achilles to return to battle, Agamemnon definitively learns that Achilles’ uniqueness is intimately linked to his opposition to the art of substitution, which in the Iliad forms the basis of politics and culture. The rhetorical virtuosity with which Odysseus and Phoenix extol Agamemnon’s promise not only to return Briseis but also to compensate for the offence with a stunning amount of gifts produces on Achilles no effect whatsoever (Il. 9.225–665).³³ To underscore the futility of their performative rhetoric (a verbal substitute for the material substitute of Agamemnon’s gifts),³⁴ Achilles states that there are neither words nor luxury goods in the entire world (not even the combined riches of the Egyptian Thebes) that could make him change his mind (Il. 9.379–87).³⁵ Rather than causing admiration, however, Achilles’ uncompromising stance is repeatedly deplored in the text as an unheard-of abomination: to Patroclus, Achilles’ lack of empathy with his dying comrades is a shocking sign of inhumanity—a sign of his having been born from “the blue sea and precipitous rocks” (Il. 16.34–5 γλαυκὴ δέ σε τίκτε θάλασσα / πέτραι τ᾿ ἠλίβατοι)—, while his adamant indifference to words and gifts is unfavourably contrasted with the flexibility with which the gods allow themselves to be softened by prayers and sacrifices (Il. 9.496–501).³⁶ As the narrative continues, the wrath of Achilles is revealed to be an increasingly more complex and ambivalent phenomenon. From Achilles’ original viewpoint, his withdrawal from battle proves to be a great success: not only does it tame Agamemnon’s pride by diminishing the number of his troops, but it also makes him realize that his entire great army is useless without Achilles. But at the same time, while exposing Agamemnon’s symbolic approach to power as a sham, Achilles’ ³² Haubold 2000, 53–68. Cf. Scodel 2008, 49–58; Rose 2012, 117–18; Brown 2016, 74–5. ³³ Nagy 1979, 42–58; Martin 1989, 183–96; Lynn-George 1988, 90–1; Muellner 1996, 136–55; Wilson 2002, 83–104; Farenga 2006, 76–95; Scodel 2008, 140–50; Brown 2016, 295–7. ³⁴ Cf. Lynn-George 1988, 106–22. ³⁵ Wilson 2002, 90–3; Horn 2014, 162–81. ³⁶ Wilson 2002, 104–8.

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wrath results in the death of Patroclus—a friend whose unique identity is inseparable from Achilles’ own sense of self. Patroclus is cast not only as the last substitute for Achilles but also as his mimetic double, whose failure makes Achilles’ irreplaceability appear all the more self-evident: assuming that he will be victorious against the Trojans because, wearing Achilles’ armour, he will be mistaken for Achilles himself (Il. 16.40–5), Patroclus ends up being killed and despoiled by Hector. Most importantly for the progression of the plot, the fact that Achilles sees Patroclus as inseparable from himself causes him to shift his wrath from Agamemnon to Hector.³⁷ The only reason why Achilles reconciles himself with Agamemnon, accepts his gifts (Il. 19.238–81), and regretfully admits that so many Achaeans have died because of his wrath (Il. 19.56–73) is that he cannot take revenge on Hector unless he re-joins the Achaean troops.³⁸ But he resumes the fighting not for someone else’s but only for his own sake—neither bribed by Agamemnon (cf. Il. 19.146–53) nor out of empathy with the dying Achaeans, but because he feels compelled to avenge the death of his own alter ego.³⁹ Once Achilles plunges into battle, war stops being a contingent event constituted by a disorderly clash of opposing forces and becomes a single unidirectional action entirely controlled by Achilles himself. It is this time not multiple actors chaotically killing each other (cf. Il. 4.451) but Achilles alone who, compared in Book 20 to a personified force of nature (Il. 20.490–4), turns the earth into a gory mess, through which he treads unperturbed as he seeks a direct confrontation with Hector (Il. 20.495–503). And as the narrative continues, Achilles is portrayed as a force both superior to nature and antagonistic to it. In Book 21, the countless bodies of the Trojans killed by Achilles cause the Scamander and the Simoeis to flood the Trojan plain (Il. 21.233–323), and when Hephaestus sends fire to combat the inundation, the entire landscape becomes covered with boiling water (Il. 21.324–80), creating a chaotic mixture of the primordial elements (earth, water, and fire), which reverberates in a fullscale battle that now arises among the gods (Il. 21.383–513). With the image of the cosmos on his shield (18.478–608) and single-mindedly keen on killing Hector, Achilles emerges in the midst of that chaos as a spectacular emblem of structure, purposefulness, and meaning—an epitome of the ideal of an intentional agency that never fails to achieve the intended results.

³⁷ On Patroclus as Achilles’ double, see Nagy 1979, 94–117; Lowenstam 1981; Brown 2016, 319–30. ³⁸ Cf. Haubold 2000, 68–83. ³⁹ Wilson 2002, 116–20; Horn 2014, 181–93; Brown 2016, 305–39.

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36  :    Although they try to do their best, even the gods cannot prevent Achilles from implementing his intention (Il. 22.167–86), and when, in Book 22, Hector is finally dead, Achilles is at first ready to accept nothing less than a complete obliteration of his enemy’s body (Il. 22.395–404), which he intends to mutilate beyond recognition and to throw as fodder to dogs and birds (Il. 22.335–7, 354).⁴⁰ Achilles’ determination to make Hector disappear without a trace is in keeping with his general abhorrence against substitutes—against the ransom that Hector’s family is willing to offer in exchange for his body as well as against any symbolic tokens of memory (a proper funeral or a tombstone) replacing his living presence (cf. Il. 22.345–54). It is only Hector’s unconditional non-existence that, in Achilles’ eyes, can compensate for the loss of Patroclus. There is no doubt that the Iliad presents Achilles’ essentialism as an epitome of the heroic ideal.⁴¹ But the poem simultaneously goes out of its way to highlight that, inspiring as it may be to those who strive to win battles, the heroic ideal cannot be uncritically adopted as a model for any other type of social interaction. The last two books of the poem offer a perspective on how the heroic ideal personified by Achilles can become a productive force in cultural/political reality. It is only a divine intervention that, in Iliad 24, can force Achilles to abandon his uncompromising stance and to accept Priam’s gifts in exchange for the body of Hector (Il. 24.22–140). But the encounter between Achilles and Priam is not so much an illustration of divine omnipotence as a powerful image of the possibility of compromise between the purity of the heroic ideal and the complexity of social reality.⁴² The encounter with Priam enables Achilles to practice the political art of symbolic substitution that he has so adamantly rejected before: Achilles’ acceptance of a substitute for what he has heretofore declared to be exempt from exchange is intimately linked to the fact that he recognizes himself in Priam (Il. 24.486–551)—that he sees Priam’s grief for Hector both as a mirror image of his own grief for Patroclus and as an adumbration of Peleus’ grief for Achilles himself (Il. 24.511–12 αὐτὰρ Ἀχιλλεὺς κλαῖεν ἑὸν πατέρ᾿, ἄλλοτε δ᾿ αὖτε / Πάτροκλον).⁴³ As a result, Achilles’ indexical essentialism and the symbolic interactionism of politics stop being the mutually exclusive notions that they were at the beginning of the Iliad. The willingness to accept a substitute, which in Iliad 1 was framed as an icon of the arbitrariness of Agamemnon’s symbolic power and contrasted ⁴⁰ Horn 2014, 200–24. ⁴¹ Cf. Muellner 1996, 102–16; Horn 2014, 148–61, 238–40. ⁴² Cf. Wilson 2002, 126–33. ⁴³ Crotty 1994, 3–23; Muellner 1996, 168–75.

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with Achilles’ essentialism, emerges now as a sign of mutual respect among aristocratic equals.⁴⁴ But the surprising ability for compromise that Achilles demonstrates in the last scene of the Iliad does not indicate a sudden softening of his character. In Iliad 23, Achilles is shown to acquire that ability in the ritual context of the funeral games for Patroclus—a social institution presented in the text as responsible for the integration of the essentialism of the heroic ideal into the social reality of aristocratic politics and culture.⁴⁵ Although the games are celebrated to commemorate the death of Patroclus, they are entirely focused on Achilles.⁴⁶ They are preceded by the announcement that Achilles is eventually to be buried in the same golden vessel in which Patroclus’ ashes are now about to be placed (Il. 23.91–2, 243–4), and since, earlier in the narrative, Achilles’ determination to continue to fight at Troy was said to trigger a chain of events that would inexorably lead to his own death in battle (Il. 9.410–16),⁴⁷ Patroclus’ funeral effectively becomes an anticipation of Achilles’. The fact that the funeral games for Patroclus follow Achilles’ victory over Hector and that Achilles himself constitutes their focal point (he announces the contests, determines the rules, fixes the prizes, and awards them) also turns these athletic contests into a celebration of Achilles’ status as a personification of the heroic ideal. Achilles is not only the best warrior but also the best athlete: to the games’ participants, there is no doubt that, if he were to compete, he would win the chariot race (Il. 23.274–9), the running race (cf. Il. 23.791–2), and probably the rest of the contests as well. Achilles’ intentional actions are thus presumed to produce nothing but successful outcomes not only in battle but also in athletic competitions. There is a striking difference, however, between the ways in which Achilles’ superiority is framed in these two settings: while Achilles’ nonparticipation in battle brings the Achaean army to the edge of collapse, his non-participation in the games is essential to their modus operandi. The reason why Achilles is not competing (apart from the obvious fact that he is the organizer of the games) is not his reluctance but the fact that he is

⁴⁴ Cf. Seaford 1994, 172–80; Zanker 1994, 115–26; Hammer 2002, 170–98; Farenga 2006, 95–108; Elmer 2013, 178–82. ⁴⁵ Cf. Wilson 2002, 126–33. ⁴⁶ On the “neoanalytical” tendency to regard Patroclus’ funeral in the Iliad as a reflex of the portrayal of Achilles’ funeral in some pre-Homeric poem, see Seaford 1994, 154–9; Burgess 2009, 90–2, with references. ⁴⁷ Nagy 1979, 59–66; Griffin 1980, 163–4; Burgess 2009, 43–55; Halliwell 2011, 74–6; Horn 2014, 235–8.

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38  :    self-evidently beyond competition—i.e. that he is an incarnation of the ideal to which everybody else is trying to live up (cf. Il. 23.274–86). The funeral games for Patroclus not only place Achilles outside the social interactions among the competitors but also show that the ideal personified by Achilles in Iliad 1–22 can by no means be copied one-to-one in a cultural/ political reality in which things happen by chance rather than by design and in which, to negotiate differences, one relies on symbolic substitutions rather than on essentialist truths. While it is impossible to contest Diomedes’ status as the winner of the chariot race (Il. 23.499–513), Achilles’ natural instinct in awarding the lower prizes is to disregard petty contingencies and to award the second prize to Eumelus, who is universally known to be the best charioteer, even though, in this particular race, he came in last because of an accident with his chariot (Il. 23.536–8).⁴⁸ Unsurprisingly, this awkward attempt by Achilles to reconcile ideal with reality is challenged by the actual winner of the second prize—Antilochus, who delivers an agitated speech in which he demands that Achilles give him the award he has earned, setting a separate prize for Eumelus (Il. 23.543–54).⁴⁹ Given Achilles’ habitual immunity to performative rhetoric (e.g. Il. 1.292–302, 9.225–665, 19.154–237, 21.74–119, 22.337–66), it is rather astonishing that he immediately gives in to Antilochus’ demand (Il. 23.558–62).⁵⁰ What happens next is more astonishing still. Although he insists that Achilles play by the rules, Antilochus himself is not exactly a paragon of fair sportsmanship. We learn that he uses tricks (Il. 23.515 κέρδεσι) to defeat Menelaus, while Menelaus himself is wary of being cheated of his prize and asks Antilochus to swear that there was no foul play involved (Il. 23.570–85). Rather than committing perjury, however, Antilochus resorts to another clever trick: citing his youthful impatience for victory, he declares that he is willing to concede the prize to Menelaus out of respect for his age and higher status (Il. 23.587–95)—an offer that Menelaus predictably declines (Il. 23.602–11).⁵¹ Since Achilles is smiling as he agrees to award the second prize to Antilochus (Il. 23.555), there is no doubt that he admires his friend’s talent as a negotiator. It is, therefore, all the more revealing that Achilles gives the remaining prize (the one left unused because Eumelus had received an extra award) to Antilochus’ father Nestor (Il. 23.615–23)—the best Achaean orator whose only accomplishment in this contest consisted in teaching his son the clever tricks that enabled him to score so well despite his rather modest skills ⁴⁸ Cf. Tsagalis 2012, 109–17. ⁵⁰ Farenga 2006, 148–52.

⁴⁹ Brown 2016, 118–20, 204–6. ⁵¹ Farenga 2006, 153–9; Scodel 2008, 103–6; Brown 2016, 206–7.

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as a charioteer (Il. 23.306–48).⁵² By rewarding both Eumelus’ athletic excellence and Antilochus’ (and Nestor’s) artful dexterity, Achilles does something of which he has been incapable in the previous narrative: he makes a compromise between the unequivocal clarity of the heroic ideal and the complexity of political reality, showing thereby that, in order to serve as an efficient mechanism of cultural regulation, the single-minded fixation on the absolute selfidentity of things, inherent in the conceptual structure of the heroic ideal, must be reconciled with the subtle art of symbolic substitution that forms the basis of all social interactions. The compromise that Achilles enacts between the indexical essentialism of the heroic ideal and the symbolic interactionism of conventional politics correlates with the status of the athletic games themselves as a symbolic substitute for battle—a contest that, like the mimetic fighting among the gods, reproduces the competitiveness of real warfare without ending in contestants’ death.⁵³ Just as the attempts by the immortal gods to re-enact human heroism turn the tragedy of war into a laughable farce (wounded by Diomedes, Aphrodite and Ares pitifully whine for a little while, but then their ichor is wiped off as if it were curded cheese and their wounds disappear without even leaving a scar),⁵⁴ so defeat in the games, too, gives no cause for mourning but leads to comic relief—e.g. when Ajax loses the running race by slipping on a heap of cow dung (Il. 23.773–84).⁵⁵ The message communicated by Iliad 23 seems to be that it is only in the mimetic setting of athletic games that the unattainable heroic ideal can become a culturally productive instrument of political authority—a mechanism by which what may otherwise look like an arbitrary aristocratic privilege, buttressed only by an emotionally manipulative symbolic economy, can be credibly converted into a “natural” index of one’s inner essence. While, at the beginning of the narrative, Achilles’ indexical authority, based only on what he is, formed an opposition to Agamemnon’s symbolic authority, measured by the number of his subordinates and the amount of his possessions, the difference between these two types of authority is now effectively cancelled out: for, rather than being arbitrary (symbolic) signs of privilege, numbers (one’s rank in a competition and the value of the prize that one receives) are used now as an exact (indexical) tool of measuring the distance between each contestant and the essentialist ideal embodied by Achilles.⁵⁶ ⁵² ⁵⁴ ⁵⁵ ⁵⁶

Clay 1983, 179–80; Farenga 2006, 159–60; Grethlein 2007, 160–3. ⁵³ Schäfer 1990, 129–47. Il. 8.416–17, 899–906: Garcia 2013, 174–87. See also Griffin 1980, 179–204. Cf. Clay 1983, 133–41. Clay 1983, 176–8; Grethlein 2007, 158–60; Purves 2010, 58–9. Cf. Brown 2016, 190–214.

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40  :    The Iliad emphasizes that the games celebrated by Achilles are based on an established pattern and belong to a universally known cultural institution: Nestor is said to have excelled in the funeral games for Amarynces (Il. 23.629–31) and Euryalus to have won the first prize in the funeral games for Oedipus (Il. 23.677–80). Like the funeral games for Patroclus, those earlier occasions are framed in the text as Panhellenic tests of valour measured against the gold standard set by the deceased heroes. The Iliad as a whole can be read as an aetiology of the ideological rationale not only of those legendary games but also, proleptically, of the historically attested Panhellenic contests celebrated in Greece from the archaic period onwards. Troy is cast in the Iliad as the only place where Achilles can truly come into his own: it is only by being contrasted to all the other great heroes who flock to Troy from the entire Greek world that Achilles can be plausibly portrayed as an epitome of the heroic ideal—an ideal that postulates an absolute identity between indexical essentialism and unfailing intentional agency. The funeral games for Patroclus can be seen as a model for all other Panhellenic athletic contests: they define games as mimetic substitutes for heroic warfare and athletes as emulating, as closely as is humanly possible, the unattainable heroic ideal epitomized by Achilles. By casting Achilles as a common object of emulation for all Achaeans, the Iliad anticipates the mode of spatial pragmatics that, a few centuries later, will reach its apogee in the epinician poetry of Pindar and Bacchylides—poetry that transforms the political geography of archaic Greece into a culturally cohesive space by putting the heroic ideal at its conceptual centre. In the rest of this chapter, I will argue that the Odyssey, too, anticipates the spatial pragmatics of the epinician genre by foregrounding poetry itself as a unique cultural force capable of converting heroic myth into political authority.

The Return of Odysseus The moment his ship is blown off course, Odysseus enters not only a fantastic realm inhabited by man-eating monsters and sorceresses turning men into animals but also what, by comparison with the familiar reality of heroic epic, is an inverted world. While most actions performed in the Iliad are motivated by preoccupations with memory—by the desire both to live up to the reputation of one’s glorious ancestors and to be posthumously glorified in epic song—, whatever happens to one at sea leads to increasingly more obscurity and oblivion. Hidden from the inhabitants of dry land, those lost at sea gradually

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fade from memory, and Odysseus’ long absence, too, results in the Ithacans forgetting their king, despite the fact that he used to treat them like a gentle father (Od. 5.11–12 οὔ τις μέμνηται Ὀδυσσῆος θείοιο / λαῶν, οἷσιν ἄνασσε, πατὴρ δ᾿ ὣς ἤπιος ἦεν).⁵⁷ In addition to being forgotten, long-term seafarers run the risk of forgetting where they are headed. Almost everything in the marine world of Odysseus’ wanderings conspires to induce oblivion: by eating lotus, Odysseus’ companions immediately forget about their homecoming journey (Od. 9.97 νόστου τε λαθέσθαι); Circe attracts men by her enchanting singing (Od. 10.221 ἀειδούσης ὀπὶ καλῇ), gives them a drug that makes them forget their home country (Od. 10.236 ἵνα πάγχυ λαθοίατο πατρίδος αἴης), and turns them into docile animals; the Sirens use a similar tactic in order to kill those charmed by their beautiful song; not only is Calypso an etymologically transparent personification of concealment (cf. καλύπτω / Καλυψώ) avoided by all humans and gods alike (Od. 7.244–54), but her goal also consists in making Odysseus forget Ithaca and stay with her forever (Od. 1.57 ὅπως Ἰθάκης ἐπιλήσεται);⁵⁸ and populated by immaterial shades that can never leave their confinement (Od. 11, passim), Hades is an epitome of death conceived of as a disappearance without a trace—the domain of oblivion par excellence.⁵⁹ The physical immortality that Calypso promises Odysseus will enjoy if he chooses to stay with her (Od. 5.135–6 ἔφασκον / θήσειν ἀθάνατον καὶ ἀγήρων ἤματα πάντα) does not differ all that much from the royal existence (Od. 11.485 μέγα κρατέεις νεκύεσσιν) that Odysseus discovers the shade of Achilles to be leading in Hades: both consist in a blissful eternity synonymous with an eternal obscurity (cf. Od. 5.55–158 and 11.488–503). In contrast to the shape-shifting Proteus, whose encounter with Menelaus in Odyssey 4 casts the sea as a domain of narrative indeterminacy which can be tricked into yielding a happy ending (for, in the end, Proteus agrees to help Menelaus to find his way back home),⁶⁰ Calypso—as an allegory of concealment and isolation— turns the sea into a locus of absolute closure, where physical immortality is, in the eyes of the outside world, indistinguishable from death. To achieve the only kind of fame worth striving for in the epic world (i.e. the fame of an exemplary

⁵⁷ Haubold 2000, 111–12; Cantarella 2002, 159–66. ⁵⁸ Cf. Segal 1994, 100–6, 134–5; Cantarella 2002, 188–202. ⁵⁹ Cf. Cantarella 2002, 212–33. See also Gazis 2018, 79–206, for a study of Hades in the Odyssey as a realm of absolute invisibility. ⁶⁰ On Proteus in the Odyssey, see Buchan 2004, 50–71.

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42  :    hero), Odysseus needs to return to Ithaca—a place that, despite Calypso’s divine charms, he has not been able to forget (Od. 5.18–20, 215–24).⁶¹ What Odysseus epitomizes in both Homeric poems is a radical discrepancy between appearance and reality: in Iliad 2, he acts as a master of political rhetoric who ingeniously manipulates the Achaeans into doing the opposite of what they had originally intended to do (Il. 2.246–332), and in Odyssey 4 the role that he plays in the Trojan War consists in performing deceitful tricks— spying on the Trojans in disguise and making sure that the Achaeans hidden inside the Trojan horse remain undetected (Od. 4.235–89).⁶² When he finds himself in the inverted world of the sea, Odysseus proceeds to rely on artful stratagems similar to those that had brought him success during the Trojan War. His escape from Polyphemus—by hiding both his men and himself underneath the Cyclops’ rams and by calling himself No One (Οὖτις), i.e. by using language to camouflage his identity—is reminiscent both of his dexterity in protecting the deceptive credibility of the Trojan horse and of his notorious skills as a rhetorical manipulator.⁶³ Likewise, by taking a potent potion (Od. 10.287 φάρμακον ἐσθλόν) to protect himself from Circe’s metamorphic drugs (Od. 10.236 φάρμακα λύγρ᾿ ), he evokes his immunity to the unmasking effect of Helen’s mimetic voice in the Trojan horse episode in Odyssey 4 (cf. Od. 4.265–89).⁶⁴ It takes Odysseus a long time to realize that what dependably works on the dry land of epic warfare is of no use at sea. Although his tricks do seem to produce the desired effect in the short term, they end up taking him further and further away from his goal. By fooling Polyphemus, he incurs the wrath of Poseidon who swears to do his best to prevent him from ever reaching Ithaca (Od. 1.64–79 and 9.524–36).⁶⁵ Although he avoids being turned into an animal by Circe, the only way he can leave her island is by travelling to the realm of the dead (Od. 10.488–540).⁶⁶ And although, unlike most other people, he is not forced to stay in Hades forever, he is in the end trapped on Calypso’s island, which, as a locus of eternal obscurity, is uncannily similar to Hades. While Odysseus himself blames his delayed homecoming on the unreason of his companions (the fact that they untied Aeolus’ bag of winds and ate the cows of Helios),⁶⁷ his account leaves no doubt that his belated recognition of ⁶¹ Vernant 1996. Cf. Farenga 2006, 188–205. ⁶² Olson 1989. ⁶³ On the pun between Οὖτις/οὔ τις and μή τις/μῆτις (i.e. the characteristic cleverness of Odysseus), see Peradotto 1990, 143–70. On Odysseus in the Polyphemus episode as a “master of language,” see Cook 1995, 94–6. Cf. Buchan 2004, 18–35 and 89–132. ⁶⁴ Cf. Grethlein 2017, 65. ⁶⁵ Cook 1995, 49–92. ⁶⁶ Cantarella 2002, 198–201; Bakker 2013, 89–90. ⁶⁷ Od. 10.1–55, 12.260–419, cf. 1.7–9: Cook 1995, 111–27; Bakker 2013, 74–113.

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the uselessness of his habitual tricks in the inverted world of the sea had crucially contributed to the failure of his efforts to find his way back home.⁶⁸ As he continues to rely on his deceitful subterfuges, Odysseus discovers that, in addition to being synonymous with oblivion, there is another sense in which the sea can be viewed as a conceptual inversion of the Iliad’s portrayal of the Trojan War: while the Trojan War enables Achilles to evolve into an epitome of unfailing intentionality, Odysseus experiences the sea as a place where all intentional actions are doomed to failure. There is a telling difference between the ways in which Menelaus and Odysseus rescue themselves from being trapped in the sea. In Odyssey 4, Menelaus relies on what is recognizably a Trojan horse tactic inspired by Odysseus’ earlier example: hiding underneath seal hides, he and three of his companions let Proteus mistake them for part of his own seal herd, re-emerge when he falls asleep, and hold him tight as he transforms himself into all kinds of shapes until he finally regains his original appearance and tells them that, in order to return home, they need to sail back to Egypt and sacrifice there to the Olympian gods (Od. 4.351–480, cf. 4.235–89).⁶⁹ Odysseus, by contrast, cannot leave Calypso’s island until the Olympian gods order her to let him go (Od. 5.1–147). Nor does he resort to constructing a Trojan-horse-like artefact. Instead, he creates an object whose function is fully identical to its appearance. Functionally, the scene in which Odysseus builds a raft in Odyssey 5 (Od. 5.228–61) echoes the production of Achilles’ new armour by Hephaestus in Iliad 18 (Il. 18.468–617).⁷⁰ Under the guidance of Calypso, who facilitates his toil in a similar way as the automated golden maidens assist Hephaestus in the Iliad (cf. Od. 5.234–58 and Il. 18.417–21), Odysseus becomes a craftsman whose ease in turning formless matter into a useful artefact comes close to the ideal of divine action effecting an automatic transition from intention to outcome—an ideal that finds its most tangible expression in Hephaestus’ craftsmanship.⁷¹ Furthermore, both acts of craftsmanship mark pivotal points in the progression of the respective plot—a transition from contingency that eschews human control to a transparent course of events entirely determined by the protagonist’s intentional actions: just as, by donning his new armour, Achilles transforms war from an uncontrollable clash of conflicting desires ⁶⁸ Cf. Grethlein 2017, 208–13. ⁶⁹ On Proteus in the Odyssey, see Buchan 2004, 50–71. ⁷⁰ For a comparison between Odysseus and Hephaestus, see Newton 1987. ⁷¹ On Hephaestus’ golden maidens, see Francis 2009. Granted, Odysseus cannot compete with Hephaestus in producing anthropomorphic robots and moving tripods (cf. Il. 18.373–89) or in representing the entire world on a shield. But with Calypso’s help, he works, not unlike Hephaestus (Il. 18.482 ποίει δαίδαλα πολλὰ ἰδυίῃσι πραπίδεσσιν, cf. Il. 18.380), with utmost efficiency (Od. 5.243 θοῶς δέ οἱ ἤνυτο ἔργον) and expertise (Od. 5.245 ἐπισταμένως).

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44  :    into a purposeful action entirely controlled by his own will, so Odysseus’ raft, too, turns the sea from a locus of spatial and cognitive disorientation into a manageable space through which Odysseus, despite Poseidon’s determination to prevent it, succeeds in reaching his destination. Most importantly, the raft, in contrast to the Trojan horse, is not a mimetic device that conceals its true function but, by analogy with Achilles’ new armour, an artefact that serves to put an end to Odysseus’ concealment.⁷² The metaphorical significance of the raft becomes more palpable still in retrospect when Odysseus reaches the island of the Phaeacians. The raft turns out to be an adumbration of the more solid vessel that, in the end, will succeed in retrieving him from a virtual state of non-existence—a ship provided by the inhabitants of Scheria (cf. σχεδίη-Σχερίη).⁷³ The last location that Odysseus visits on his voyage through the fantastic world of the sea, the island of the Phaeacians is the opposite of the island of the Cyclopes, which serves as the entry gate into that world. The spatial distance between the two islands corresponds to a striking contrast between their societies.⁷⁴ The Cyclopes lead a singularly primitive existence: they live in caves, practice no agriculture, eat human flesh, form no social bonds, possess no political institutions, obey no laws (Od. 9.108, 112–15), reject the civilized norms of hospitality, and are prone to unprovoked violence.⁷⁵ The Phaeacians, by contrast, enjoy a hypercivilized society: they live in beautiful houses (Od. 7.84–94, 107–10), consume delicate food that the earth produces all year round (Od. 7.114–28), produce superb artefacts, wear finest clothes (Od. 7.95–7), sail on preternaturally swift ships (Od. 8.557–63), worship the royal rulers as if they were gods (Od. 7.11 θεοῦ δ᾿ ὣς δῆμος ἄκουεν and 71–2), engage neither in internal conflicts nor in international wars (Od. 6.270–2), dedicate their copious leisure to song, dance, music, baths, feasting, and sleep (Od. 8.246–9), and offer hospitality to any stranger who visits them (cf. Od. 7.159–206).⁷⁶ In keeping with these differences, the two islands play the opposite roles in the overall trajectory of Odysseus’ wanderings: as the cause of Poseidon’s wrath, Odysseus’ blinding of Polyphemus marks what the god himself futilely plans to turn into a point ⁷² Cf. Dougherty 2001, 36–7. ⁷³ The conjunction of σχεδίη and Σχερίη at Od. 5.33–4 seems to be rather revealing: Zeus predicts that Odysseus will sail to Scheria (34 Σχερίην) on a raft (33 ἐπὶ σχεδίης) and that the Phaeacians will then send him home on a ship (37 πέμψουσιν δ᾿ ἐν νηὶ φίλην ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν). As a result, Σχερίη effectively fulfils the function of a metaphorical, yet more dependable, σχεδίη. ⁷⁴ Dougherty 2001, 95–101, 122–42. Tellingly, this spatial distance is not a natural given but a matter of choice, for the Phaeacians had willingly migrated far away from the Cyclopes (Od. 6.4–6): Clay 1983, 125–32. ⁷⁵ Cook 1995, 97–110; Bakker 2013, 53–73; Grethlein 2017, 127–30. ⁷⁶ Olson 1995, 184–9; Dougherty 2001, 81–94.

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of no return,⁷⁷ while the Phaeacians do succeed in bringing Odysseus home in violation of Poseidon’s will (Od. 8.564–71). In the beginning, Odysseus’ stunning physique, enhanced by Athena to the point of making him look like a god (Od. 6.243), misleads the Phaeacians into thinking that he could become one of them: Nausicaa can imagine no better husband nor can Alcinous a better son-in-law (Od. 6.239–46, 7.309–15).⁷⁸ The reason why Odysseus cannot stay is not only that he is keen on returning to Ithaca but also that the world of the Phaeacians is radically opposed to the world of heroic epic from which he originates.⁷⁹ Not only are the Phaeacians unfamiliar with war but their interest in athletics—an imitation of warfare that stops short of killing the opponent—is also modest by comparison with their enthusiasm for non-competitive dancing and singing (Od. 8.236–55).⁸⁰ The Phaeacians’ predilection for stories of the Trojan War, including stories about Odysseus, only serves to underscore the pacifism of their own existence. Accessible to them only as a subject matter of songs performed by the epic singer Demodocus, war constitutes an object of curiosity no less alien to the Phaeacians, and therefore no less fascinating, than the amusing notion of erotic rivalry among the gods (the topic of the longest poem recited by Demodocus in Odyssey 8). To the Phaeacians, both the human tragedy of war and the comedy of divine adultery emerge as contrastive foils to the ideal social order that they enjoy themselves. Nothing betrays Odysseus’ fundamental “out-of-placeness” in the ideal world of Scheria more than his attitude towards athletics and martial epic. On Scheria, athletic contests do not play the same culturally constitutive role as the funeral games for Patroclus and Achilles do in Iliad 23 and Odyssey 24, nor are epic songs meant to produce a sense of emotional identification in the audience. The Phaeacians are neither boxers nor wrestlers (Od. 8.246), and their non-violent athletic contests, along with “banquets, lyre, dance, change of clothes, warm baths, couches” (Od. 8.248–9), and Demodocus’ epic songs (Od. 8.254–5), are integral elements of their hedonistic lifestyle. With his reactions breaching the established cultural protocol, Odysseus reveals himself as an unassimilable foreigner among the Phaeacians. It is hardly surprising that a nautically minded Phaeacian compares Odysseus’ refusal to take part in the agonistic fun to the behaviour of a lawless pirate who refuses to play by the civilized rules of seafaring (Od. 8.159–64).⁸¹ But it is not so much this misidentification as Odysseus’ reaction to it that unveils him as a figure ⁷⁷ Haubold 2000, 106. ⁷⁸ Murnaghan 1987, 93–5; Dougherty 2001, 130–4. ⁷⁹ Cf. Haubold 2000, 115–16. ⁸⁰ Clay 1983, 130. ⁸¹ Cf. Dougherty 2001, 49.

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46  :    fundamentally alien to Scheria: he begins by attacking his challenger with undisguised hostility (Od. 8.165–85), and, when he does after all throw a discus, his physical prowess completely eclipses the modest achievements of the Phaeacians (Od. 8.186–233). Likewise, Odysseus’ spontaneous outburst of tears (Od. 8.92 and 522–31) in reaction to the two songs that Demodocus sings about him (an otherwise unattested episode of the strife between Odysseus and Achilles followed by a version of the tale of the Trojan horse, which focuses on Odysseus’ crucial contribution to the Achaean victory) betrays him as a native of the epic world rather than as someone who could adopt the Phaeacian convention of enjoying epic as a source of an emotionally detached aesthetic pleasure.⁸² Scheria is thus both radically opposed to heroic ethos and intimately associated with the production and reception of epic poetry. The status of Scheria as a locus of poetry implies that, as a mythical character, Odysseus is very much at home there (it is after all on Scheria that he has already attained what constitutes the ultimate goal of an epic life, i.e. a fame that “reaches the sky”: Od. 8.74, cf. 9.20) but that, as a physical presence, he constitutes a discordant element in its ideal society. As a result, the Phaeacians’ selfimposed obligation to bring strangers lost at sea back to where they belong (cf. Od. 8.566 ἐπεὶ πομποὶ ἀπήμονές εἰμεν ἁπάντων) becomes in Odysseus’ case conceptually coextensive with the impact that epic poetry generally seeks to achieve—i.e. to preserve and to spread fame. From this perspective, the fact that Odysseus is the last hero that the Phaeacians are allowed to bring back to the “real” world effectively becomes an allegory of the epic tradition construed as an ideal place that remains forever unattainable in the physical sense but that continues to radiate the authority of myth and to preserve it from being forgotten.⁸³ To bring Odysseus back to Ithaca, the Phaeacians do not necessarily need to know his name or country of origin, for their supernatural ships require no navigation at all to transport their passengers to their home countries (Od. 8.557–63).⁸⁴ Odysseus’ revelation of his identity (Od. 9.19 εἴμ᾿ Ὀδυσεὺς ⁸² Peradotto 1990, 94–142; Goldhill 1991, 1–56; Segal 1994, 118–21; Finkelberg 1998, 88–99; Pucci 1998, 131–77; Grethlein 2007, 165–6; Halliwell 2011, 38–9 and 77–83; Peponi 2012, 44–63. ⁸³ Cf. Dougherty 2001, 151–7. ⁸⁴ In fact, it is only the Phaeacian smart ships that need to know where Odysseus comes from (Od. 8.556 ὄφρα σε τῇ πέμψωσι τιτυσκόμεναι φρεσὶ νῆες), but since they “understand the thoughts and minds of men” (Od. 8.559 ἀλλ᾿ αὐταὶ ἴσασι νοήματα καὶ φρένας ἀνδρῶν), there is, strictly speaking, no need to share that information with them either. Nor are the rich gifts, promised by Alcinous, conditional on the stranger’s divulging his identity. Antinous’ curiosity seems to be “poetically” motivated: he is desperate to solve the mystery of Odysseus’ emotional reaction to Demodocus’ songs about the Trojan War (Od. 8.533–41 and 577–86).

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Λαερτιάδης) followed by a detailed account of his adventures at sea, from his departure from Troy in Odyssey 9 to his arrival on the island of Calypso in Odyssey 12, is therefore not something he has to do in order to secure his passage.⁸⁵ In addition to sealing the guest-friendship between the Phaeacians and himself (cf. Od. 9.18),⁸⁶ his self-revelation serves to corroborate the status of Odysseus’ rescue from the sea as a metaphor for the cultural function fulfilled by epic poetry in general.⁸⁷ Given the poem’s extraordinary preoccupation with tensions between appearance and reality, it is rather surprising that the question of the factual plausibility of Odysseus’ apologoi is never raised in the text.⁸⁸ Instead, Alcinous attests to Odysseus that his account cannot be a lie (Od. 11.366 ψεύδεα) because it is composed in graceful words (Od. 11.367 μορφὴ ἐπέων), contains excellent thoughts (Od. 11.367 φρένες ἐσθλαί), and is told with a skill comparable to that of an epic bard (Od. 11.368 μῦθον δ᾿ ὡς ὅτ᾿ ἀοιδὸς ἐπισταμένως κατέλεξας).⁸⁹ This assessment of Odysseus’ narrative has important implications for the Odyssey as a whole. When Odysseus recognizes himself in Demodocus’ songs, he states that they ring so true (Od. 8.489 λίην γὰρ κατὰ κόσμον) as to make him wonder whether the singer had witnessed the events of the Trojan War first-hand or heard about them from an eyewitness (Od. 8.491 ἢ αὐτὸς παρεὼν ἢ ἄλλου ἀκούσας).⁹⁰ Confronted with Odysseus’ fundamentally unverifiable account, Alcinous, by contrast, stresses that the truth of an epic bard’s art is a matter of expertly matching “graceful words” and “excellent thoughts.”⁹¹ By describing Odysseus’ account as a specimen of that art, Alcinous in effect declares irrelevant the very question of whether any of its individual details are factually true. Instead, Alcinous’ recognition of “excellent thoughts” in Odysseus’ “graceful words” appears to pertain to the fact that the effect achieved by those words is identical to the pragmatic function of epic poetry personified by the Phaeacians themselves, who, by bringing Odysseus home, turn the danger of eternal oblivion into a prospect of eternal fame. Odysseus’ own narrative, too, can be perceived as a sophisticated reflection on epic poetry as a remedy against oblivion: not only does he create unforgettable images of a death-like non-place in which even the most glorious deeds result in increasingly more obscurity but his

⁸⁵ Pace Most 1989; Dougherty 2001, 52–7. ⁸⁶ Murnaghan 1987, 99–100. ⁸⁷ Cf. Goldhill 1991, 24–36; Segal 1994, 85–109. ⁸⁸ Cf. Grethlein 2017, 107–9. ⁸⁹ Goldhill 1991, 65–6; Halliwell 2011, 54–5. Cf. Pratt 1993, 55–94; Bergren 2008, 79–100. ⁹⁰ Ford 1992, 121–4; Pratt 1993, 11–54; Halliwell 2011, 84–8; Peponi 2012, 49–50; Grethlein 2017, 93–5. ⁹¹ Cf. Goldhill 1991, 47–56.

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48  :    self-portrayal as an unlikely survivor of a virtual non-existence turns the very fact that he is able to tell his story into a powerful proof of the ability of epic storytelling to defy oblivion. As a consequence, Odysseus’ meta-epic narrative resembles in its modus operandi both the raft that he constructs to sail from Ogygia to Scheria and the ship on which the Phaeacians bring him to Ithaca: in contrast to the Trojan horse, both the two vessels and Odysseus’ story are not mimetic devices that contrive to deceive but masterfully crafted artefacts that do exactly what they profess to do and thereby transpose Odysseus from concealment to visibility, from non-existence to being, from oblivion to fame.⁹²

Converting Myth into Power The simple fact that Odysseus successfully returns home after a twenty-yearlong absence does not guarantee the restoration of his royal authority. Just as his homecoming journey correlates in the Odyssey with a meta-epic account of epic poetry as a remedy against oblivion, so his re-installation as a legitimate king of Ithaca, too, is conceived of as what is, in essence, a poetic process—a process that, as I will show in the remaining part of this chapter, forms an integral part of the sophisticated reflection that the Odyssey offers on the role that poetry plays in archaic Greek culture in converting the imaginary worlds of Panhellenic myth into a tangible reality of local aristocratic power. In Odyssey 4, Helen and Menelaus described Odysseus as a master of deceit who, dressed as a beggar or hiding inside the Trojan horse, excels in concealing his identity until it becomes opportune to reveal it (Od. 4.235–90). In Odyssey 16, Telemachus encounters an old man dressed in rags and introduced to him by Eumaeus as a Cretan suppliant who arrived on Ithaca fleeing from his Thesprotan kidnappers (Od. 16.61–7). When Eumaeus leaves to tell Penelope of Telemachus’ safe return, the old man changes his appearance, reveals himself as Telemachus’ father, tells him about his rescue by the Phaeacians, and announces a plan to recapture his house from the suitors with the help of Athena disguising him as an old beggar (Od. 16.172–307).⁹³ The restoration

⁹² On the conjunction between songs and ships in early Greek poetry in general and for a metapoetic reading of Odysseus’ raft different from mine (as a metaphor for improvised oral poetry), see Dougherty 2001, 20–37. On “surviving lethal dangers” as the key concept of the epic nostos tradition, see Bonifazi 2009. ⁹³ Murnaghan 1987, 103–5; Goldhill 1991, 9–12.

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of political order is staged in the second half of the Odyssey as an act of vindicating the truth by performing a plausible lie. The very idea that, to prove his aristocratic worth, a king may have to renounce the outward paraphernalia of royal authority and impersonate a beggar would be unimaginable in the heroic world of the Iliad. The fact that an attempt by the ugly and socially inferior Thersites to convince the Achaean assembly of what he himself considers to be the truth causes nothing but laughter is a clear indication that, in the Iliad, a recognizable aristocratic exterior is indispensable for exercising political authority (cf. Il. 2.225–77). As I showed at the beginning of this chapter, most of the Iliad’s characters, both divine and human, achieve their political goals by relying on symbolic substitutes (the gods on omens, dreams, and metamorphoses, the humans on artefacts and manipulative rhetoric) that enable them to implement their intentions by concealing them underneath emotionally effective surfaces that others easily mistake for real things. The main concern of the Iliad, I have argued, consists in positing the possibility of a political authority based on more than impressive surfaces, and it is in opposition to the politics of the emotionally manipulative symbols of authority that the Iliad constructs the image of Achilles—by casting him as a non-arbitrary index that possesses no distinction between surface and essence, by showing that his absence brings the political system based on substituting appearances for reality to the brink of collapse, and by portraying him in Book 24 as an emblem of an ideal aristocratic politics whose actors do not seek to manipulate their equals as if they were inanimate objects but are able to discern in others a human subjectivity that they take for granted in themselves. There is no doubt that the Odyssey takes for granted the essentialist ideal of aristocratic authority propounded in the Iliad: the premise that Odysseus is the only legitimate king of Ithaca is as stable in the poem as the immovable marriage bed that he had hewn for Penelope and himself from a still-rooted trunk of an age-old olive-tree (cf. Od. 23.183–204).⁹⁴ The tension enacted in the Odyssey is, therefore, not between different ways of legitimating political authority but, quite bluntly, between truth and falsehood—between Odysseus claiming ownership over what lawfully belongs him and the suitors attempting to seize someone else’s property. This shift from the performative to the constative radically transforms the meaning of human appearance: the selfevidently true proposition that Odysseus is the only legitimate king of Ithaca and the only legitimate husband of Penelope remains valid even if he looks like ⁹⁴ Zeitlin 1995b.

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50  :    a beggar, nor does the suitors’ royal exterior diminish the falsity of their presumption that they can replace Odysseus.⁹⁵ Rather than promoting multiple arbitrary desires that contradict each other and cancel each other out, discrepancies between appearance and reality are used in the Odyssey to achieve what is considered to be a single unequivocal truth. While in the Iliad divine metamorphoses form a subcategory of the manipulative ploys that the powerful practice to pursue their divergent agendas,⁹⁶ Athena, who in the Odyssey never tires of changing her metamorphic disguises, functions as an unstoppable motor that propels the plot towards the victory of Odysseus’ truth over the suitors’ falsehood.⁹⁷ The fact that, upon hearing Odysseus’ first “Cretan tale” in Book 13, Athena not only praises his habitual ability to tell “lies and tall tales” (Od. 13.294–5 οὐδ᾿ ἐν σῇ περ ἐὼν γαίῃ, λήξειν ἀπατάων / μύθων τε κλοπίων, οἵ τοι πεδόθεν φίλοι εἰσιν) but also relies on that ability to smuggle him into his own house disguised as a beggar reveals Odysseus’ unique talent in telling “factually false stories that resemble reality” (cf. Od. 19.203 ἴσκε ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγων ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα) as a divinely sanctioned instrument of achieving the truth.⁹⁸ Just as the factually false story of Odysseus’ captivity at the hands of “fierce wild men” told by Athena in Odyssey 1 not only communicates the truth of his survival and eventual return but also prompts Telemachus to search for more similar stories,⁹⁹ so Odysseus’ “Cretan tales,” too, serve both to conceal and to reveal the truth. Hiding underneath different fictitious personae in order to adumbrate the revelation of his identity, Odysseus, like a divinely inspired poet (Od. 17.518 ἀοιδόν), casts a spell over his listeners as he carefully adjusts his narratives to their respective personalities (cf. Od. 17.519–20).¹⁰⁰ The most detailed of the “Cretan tales,” the one he tells the swineherd Eumaeus in Book 14, not only transposes into the empirically more accurate geography of the Eastern Mediterranean the trajectory of Odysseus’ wanderings through the fantastic world of the sea (complete with a loss of all companions and a sevenyear-long captivity, Od. 14.192–359) but also evokes the true life story of Eumaeus himself, a king’s son abducted by Phoenician merchants and sold to Odysseus’ father as a slave (Od. 15.390–484).¹⁰¹ The story that disguised ⁹⁵ Cf. Rose 1992, 106–19. See also Bernsdorff 1992. ⁹⁶ Clay 1974 and 1983, 157–70. ⁹⁷ Cf. Clay 1983, 213–39. ⁹⁸ Clay 1983, 186–212; Murnaghan 1987, 1–19. Cf. Goldhill 1991, 6–9, 37. See also Finkelberg 1998, 131–60. ⁹⁹ Cf. Grethlein 2017, 51–2. ¹⁰⁰ Goldhill 1991, 37–47; Halliwell 2011, 47–54; Peponi 2012, 70–1; Bakker 2013, 138–9; Grethlein 2017, 195–9. ¹⁰¹ Segal 1994, 164–83; Olson 1995, 120–39. Cf. Dougherty 2001, 45–7.

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Odysseus tells Penelope in Book 19 consists for the most part of a detailed description of Odysseus’ real appearance during a fictitious encounter with the character he is now impersonating—a description designed to provoke in Penelope a strong emotional response and to enhance her longing for her husband’s return.¹⁰² Conversely, the suitors’ inability to perceive the hidden truth of Odysseus’ words portends their destruction: the story that Odysseus tells Antinous in Book 17, in which he presents his fictitious character’s poverty as a consequence of the unlawful life of a pirate that he had led in the past, communicates a covert warning that the suitors’ “devouring” of Odysseus’ property, too, will not remain unpunished.¹⁰³ While Odysseus’ mimetic duplicity indicates the presence of an unassailable truth underneath the illusory surface, the suitors, deluded into thinking that they could take Odysseus’ place, emerge as empty shells—as surfaces that signify, literally, nothing. Odysseus’ ability to create appearances that resemble reality is not only inspired by divine models but is also supported by a metamorphic goddess busily acting behind the scenes. The unambiguous falsity of the suitors’ pursuit is, by contrast, linked to the fact that their actions do not function as visible indices of invisible divine presences.¹⁰⁴ At the very beginning of Odyssey 1, Zeus singles out Aegisthus, murdered by Orestes to avenge the death of Agamemnon, as the prime example of those humans whose troubles are caused solely by their own insolence rather than by the scheming gods.¹⁰⁵ In the ethical universe of the Odyssey, this assessment would equally apply to the suitors, who, acting without divine consent, have no one but themselves to blame for their undoing.¹⁰⁶ The suitors’ status as empty surfaces goes hand in hand with their fundamental misapprehension of the nature of royal power. Rather than seeing in it a non-arbitrary index signifying the king’s unique identity, they resemble the Iliadic Agamemnon in assuming that it derives exclusively from the superior amount of the king’s possessions (i.e. Odysseus’ innumerable pigs, sheep, goats, and cattle), whose meaning does not extend beyond their material value.¹⁰⁷

¹⁰² Peradotto 1990, 120–42; Levaniouk 2011, esp. 36–50 and 56–81. ¹⁰³ Cf. Bakker 2013, 114–34, on both the suitors and Odysseus’ companions punished for their ἀτασθαλίη –“criminal behaviour due to human inability to deal with abundance.” ¹⁰⁴ Cf. Grethlein 2017, 227–42. ¹⁰⁵ Kullmann 1985, 5–6; Kearns 2004, 68–9. ¹⁰⁶ Griffin 1980, 165; Clay 1983, 215–18; Cook 1995, 21–8; Olson 1995, 205–23; Yamagata 1994, 28–39; Bakker 2013, 47–8. ¹⁰⁷ Cf. Bakker 2013, 36–52, on the suitors, who “dine to destroy” Odysseus’ household, thereby diminishing Telemachus’ wealth and undermining his claims to kingship, as a perversion of the heroic feasting of the Iliad, based on the notion of equal distribution and conducive to social cohesion.

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52  :    The suitors’ “materialism” (i.e. their inability to perceive anything but things that can be eaten or touched) is not only a symptom of their singular literal-mindedness (i.e. the naïve notion that the world consists only of semantically unequivocal material things) but also severely impairs their ability for pretence and turns them into an easy prey for those who do possess that ability. What Penelope famously does to fend off the dreaded prospect of marrying a “worse man” (e.g. Od. 20.82 χείρονος ἀνδρός) is to stage a veritable coup de théâtre: she promises to choose a new husband after she has finished weaving a funerary shroud for Laertes but postpones that moment indefinitely by un-weaving every night what she wove on the previous day (Od. 2.85–128). In addition to reifying the proverbial notion of “weaving a duplicitous scheme,”¹⁰⁸ Penelope’s weaving enacts an ingenious dialectic between absence and presence as well as between falsehood and truth. The undeniable truth of the material presence of the fabric woven by Penelope is in fact an instantiation of a lie which the suitors, incapable of seeing beyond the material surface of things, take at face value, while the nothingness into which the cloth dissolves every night is conceptually coextensive with the truth of Odysseus’ absence—the truth being that the void he had left behind cannot be filled by anyone else. It is hardly surprising that this semiotic subtlety baffles the literalminded suitors so much that it takes them more than three years to discover the gap between the surface appearance and the actual meaning of Penelope’s performance (cf. Od. 2.106–9).¹⁰⁹ Duplicitous Odysseus, by contrast, always bases his actions on the assumption that appearances are deceiving.¹¹⁰ Conversely, the masquerade that he performs to return to power exploits the suitors’ literal-mindedness—both their naïve trust in the outward appearance of things and their inability to see the inherent ambiguity of their own actions. Odysseus’ impersonation of a beggar stages a sophisticated parody of the suitors themselves—a parody that their literal-mindedness prevents them from seeing as such until it becomes too late. The beggar’s professed interest in nothing but food can be perceived as parroting the suitors’ insatiable consumption of the meat provided by Odysseus’ household. The suitors find it exceedingly amusing to see what they mistake for a beggar fighting with another beggar for the right to stay in Odysseus’ house and to continue to consume his food. The irony is further ¹⁰⁸ e.g. Il. 6.187 πυκινὸν δόλον ἄλλον ὕφαινε. Cf. Il. 3.212; Od. 4.678, 4.739, 9.422. ¹⁰⁹ Murnaghan 1987, 117–47; Clayton 2004, 31–56; Heitman 2005, 85–103; Vetter 2005, 33–61; Lesser 2019, 197–8. ¹¹⁰ Characteristically, Odysseus’ first thought, when he fails to recognize Ithaca upon his arrival, is that the Phaeacians must have deceived him: Od. 13.187–216.

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increased by their blissful unawareness that Odysseus’ victory over Irus is only a mild foretaste of what they are soon to experience themselves (cf. Od. 18.235–42).¹¹¹ As a result, they let what they see as a destitute old man join them in their banquet under the false assumption that he is a harmless parasite who poses no threat to them. Beguiled by Odysseus’ performance, they blithely continue their feasting until, in Book 22, Odysseus abandons his disguise and begins to shoot them one by one.¹¹² By winning the archery contest in Book 21 and by killing the suitors’ leader Antinous at the beginning of Book 22, Odysseus achieves the goal of re-establishing his position as the king of Ithaca. Like the funeral games for Patroclus in Iliad 23, the archery contest, in which Odysseus proves to be the only one able to operate his bow, is conceived of as a test of genuineness, which both affirms the non-arbitrary (indexical) nature of his royal power and unveils the suitors’ aspirations as an empty pretence. The killing of Antinous sends an unequivocal signal to the rest of the suitors that any disrespect for the royal prerogatives is an offence that the king is prepared to prosecute with all due severity (Od. 22.8–42). Once Odysseus’ identity is thereby revealed beyond any doubt, the suitors unconditionally accept both their defeat and the king’s authority (cf. Od. 22.45–59). Moreover, Eurymachus submissively begs him not to do any harm to what are after all his own people (Od. 22.54–5 σὺ δὲ φείδεο λαῶν / σῶν) and promises that each of them will contribute the worth of twenty oxen as well as gold and bronze to compensate for what they had eaten and drunk during Odysseus’ absence (Od. 22.56–9).¹¹³ If the Odyssey were just an account of a local power struggle, the prospect of a diplomatic settlement, which now seems so close at hand, would make the killing of the remaining suitors utterly redundant.¹¹⁴ But the narrative telos of the Odyssey does not consist in finding the most economical solution of the task of restoring the proper political order on an insignificant island, too tiny and too jagged to possess enough plain terrain for riding horses (Od. 4.605–8). Rather, it seems to consist in parading Odysseus as a paradigmatic figure ¹¹¹ Pucci 1987, 161–2; Thalmann 1998, 102–4; Bakker 2013, 140–1. ¹¹² Murnaghan 1987, 55–90; Goldhill 1991, 14–15; Bakker 2013, 69–73. ¹¹³ Haubold 2000, 119–23; Buchan 2004, 174–6. ¹¹⁴ Many modern critics are sensitive to the ethically problematic nature of Odysseus’ killing of the suitors: Grethlein 2017, 243–69, with references. For an idiosyncratic attempt to shed a positive light on this ethical conundrum, see Dougherty 2001, 161–76, who reads Odysseus’ return as a variation on a typical colonial foundation narrative—with the suitors cast as Polyphemus-like savages whose death is indispensable for the “re-foundation” of Ithaca. Cf. Cook 1995, 152–7; Bakker 2013, 53–7. The fact that the suitors behave like savages does not cancel out the fact that they are Odysseus’ “own people” (Od. 22.54–5). There is no doubt that the Odyssey as a whole encodes the archaic Greeks’ proto-colonial experiences: Malkin 1998. But the main concern of the Odyssey’s conclusion is not with (re-)foundation but with putting an end to civil strife within an existing community.

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54  :    whose incredible homecoming (cf. Od. 1.1–95) symbolizes the central role of epic song in the aristocratic culture of archaic Greece. The archery contest possesses a conspicuous metaphorical dimension: the fact that Odysseus strings his bow like a singer stringing a lyre (Od. 21.406 ἀνὴρ φόρμιγγος ἐπιστάμενος καὶ ἀοιδῆς) and then, by pulling it, makes the string “sing” (Od. 21.411 ἡ δ᾿ ὑπὸ καλὸν ἄεισε) shows that the authentication of Odysseus as a genuine king of Ithaca is very much a poetic process.¹¹⁵ The killing of the suitors, too, can be read as an act of merging political power with poetry. The manner in which Odysseus rejects Eurymachus’ offer of material compensation is reminiscent of the scene in Iliad 9 in which Achilles rejects Agamemnon’s gifts: just as Achilles stresses that he would not change his mind even if Agamemnon gave him twenty times as much as he had offered and then added to it all the riches of Egyptian Thebes (Il. 9.379–87), so Odysseus, too, assures the suitors that he would not succumb to their entreaties even if they gave him all their paternal possessions and then put more things on top (Od. 22.61–2).¹¹⁶ Furthermore, Odysseus’ uncompromising determination to avenge the suitors’ transgression by killing each and every one of them (cf. Od. 22.63–4) evokes Achilles’ reluctance to accept anything less than the death of Hector in recompense for the death of Patroclus—a goal that he achieves by killing everyone who stands in his way.¹¹⁷ And finally, Odysseus’ more or less single-handed killing of all the hundred-and-eight suitors (apart from Athena who continues to act behind the scenes, he only relies on the assistance of three human subordinates—Telemachus, the swineherd, and the cowherd—who do not kill any of the suitors) emerges as an act of emulating Achilles’ victorious single combat against the entire Trojan army, the gods, and the forces of nature in Iliad 20 and 21.¹¹⁸ As a result, the killing of the suitors casts Odysseus’ emotional reaction as a re-enactment of the wrath of Achilles and Odysseus himself as an incarnation of the essentialist ideal epitomized by Achilles—his indexical essentialism manifesting itself both in his inability to accept substitutes and in his unrivalled success in battle.¹¹⁹ The fact that, at the end of the poem, Odysseus enacts the ideal personified in the Iliad by Achilles draws attention to a more comprehensive analogy between the narrative of Odysseus’ homecoming and the narrative of the Trojan War. The Odyssey is informed by the anxiety that, by leaving one’s ¹¹⁵ Goldhill 1991, 66; Segal 1994, 98–100. ¹¹⁶ Bakker 2013, 151–2. Cf. Schein 1999, 352–4. ¹¹⁷ See Bakker 2013, 150–6, esp. 151, on Odysseus transformed, with the killing of the suitors, into “a stern avenger vying with Achilles.” ¹¹⁸ Pucci 1987, 127–38. Cf. Nagler 1990. ¹¹⁹ Murnaghan 1987, 61–3; Cook 1995, 151–2. Cf. Muellner 1996, 32–47.

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country for too long in pursuit of international fame, one may severely jeopardize the stability of one’s power at home. Repeatedly mentioned in the Odyssey as a foil to Odysseus, Agamemnon, murdered upon his homecoming by his adulterous wife and her new husband, is the clearest illustration of what can go wrong if one fails to maintain a proper balance between international and local authority.¹²⁰ In contrast to Agamemnon, whose royal power is successfully usurped by a single contender, Odysseus’ power is cast as an unattainable object of a collective eroticized desire—the suitors’ desire to marry Penelope synonymous with their desire to rule over Ithaca (cf. Od. 22.48–53). This narrative trick notionally turns Penelope into a provincial version of Helen wooed by countless suitors,¹²¹ Odysseus’ household into a miniature image of Troy besieged by “the best of the Achaeans,” and Odysseus himself into a Hector-like figure—but one who, in contrast to Hector, protects his miniature version of Troy with an Achillean efficiency.¹²² Seen against this background, Odysseus’ “heroic” killing of the suitors serves to draw an analogy between local royal power and the “unfading fame” of Achilles: both are distinctions aspired to by many but obtained only by a single person who truly deserves it.¹²³ As a result, the narrative of the return of Odysseus amounts to a transformation of the Panhellenic heroic ideal embodied by Achilles into an instrumental factor of local politics. The two Hades scenes, in Odyssey 11 and 24, also draw attention to this aspect of Odysseus’ story. Odysseus’ encounter with the shade of Achilles in Odyssey 11 indicates that the return of Odysseus can be read as an act of rescuing the Achillean ideal from eternal oblivion. That the perpetual obscurity of Hades constitutes the conceptual opposite of the epic ideal of eternal fame becomes apparent from Achilles’ famous dictum that it is better to be a poor man’s slave among the living than a king of the dead (Od. 11.488–91).¹²⁴ Tellingly, the choice that Achilles himself faced in the Iliad was not between the troublesome life of a slave and the privileged existence as a shade in Hades but between a long and comfortable life as a king, which he could lead upon his return to Phthia, and the “unfading fame” that he would attain by dying in battle at Troy (Il. 9.410–16).¹²⁵ The second nekyia in Odyssey 24 also confirms that, after death, Achilles will forever enjoy “noble renown among all men” (Od. 24.93–4 ἀλλά τοι αἰεὶ / πάντας ἐπ᾿ ἀνθρώπους κλέος ἔσσεται ἐσθλόν, Ἀχιλλεῦ). Albeit worse than the worst kind of life, Achilles’ premature death ¹²⁰ ¹²² ¹²⁴ ¹²⁵

Katz 1991, 29–53; Olson 1995, 24–42. ¹²¹ Cf. Lesser 2019. Cf. Reece 1993, 178–81. ¹²³ Cf. Haubold 2000, 137–44. Nagy 1979, 119–20; Gazis 2018, 184–94. On this discrepancy, see Gazis 2018, 182–4, with references.

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56  :    becomes justified because it will result in the notional immortality of epic fame.¹²⁶ The Iliad famously portrays Achilles not only as an epitome of the heroic ideal but also as an archetypal epic singer (Il. 9.189 τῇ ὅ γε θυμὸν ἔτερπεν, ἄειδε δ᾿ ἄρα κλέα ἀνδρῶν). In contrast to a real epic singer, however, Achilles, who only sings to himself, is physically incapable of spreading “the glory of men” all over the Greek world. In order for his own epic fame to become universally known, it needs to be able to leave Troy where, after death, Achilles himself remains forever. Although the Odyssey envisages two different forms of post-mortem existence for Achilles, both of them are emphatically static. In Odyssey 11, Achilles’ shade, along with the shades of all other dead, is forever imprisoned in Hades. And in Odyssey 24, Achilles’ posthumous fame is commemorated by means of two cultural artefacts limited in time and/or space—the one-off occasion of his funeral games (Od. 24.85–92) and a massive tumulus constructed for him on the shore of the Hellespont, which, although visible to the seafarers sailing by (Od. 24.80–4), is capable neither of communicating the exact reasons for his fame nor of guaranteeing the spread of that fame elsewhere.¹²⁷ The return of Odysseus serves to compensate for the spatial limitations imposed on Achilles. From his conversation with the shade of Tiresias in Odyssey 11 (Od. 11.119–37, cf. 23.266–84), Odysseus knows that, by returning home, he will be able not only to emulate Achilles’ martial prowess on a local scale but also to achieve what Achilles, buried at Troy, is by definition incapable of—i.e. to spread the glory of heroic epic throughout the whole world, including places located so far inland that their inhabitants have never heard of the sea.¹²⁸ Odysseus’ rejection of Calypso’s offer of physical immortality reveals that Achilles and Odysseus symbolize two complementary facets of the manner in which epic poetry establishes the cultural authority of the heroic ideal. What turns Achilles into an embodiment of the heroic ideal is his conscious choice of a premature death over a long life and eternal obscurity. But it is only Odysseus’ choice of homecoming and eventual death over the eternal obscurity of physical immortality that can turn that ideal into an authoritative force in politics and culture—a force that outlives Achilles’ physical demise.¹²⁹

¹²⁶ Nagy 1979, 36–41. ¹²⁷ On tombs in Homer as unstable “timemarks,” see Grethlein 2008, 28–32. Cf. Garcia 2013, 131–57; Grethlein 2017, 250–1. Cf. Burgess 2009, 40–2. ¹²⁸ Segal 1994, 187–94; Tsagalis 2008, 72–5; Purves 2010, 71–80; Grethlein 2017, 255–9. See also Peradotto 1990, 59–93. ¹²⁹ Clay 1983, 96–112; Goldhill 1991, 93–108. Cf. Nagy 1979, 59–68.

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The Odyssey is far from envisaging the transformation of the heroic ideal into a factor of domestic politics as a smooth process whereby a universally valid principle is mechanically projected onto a specific occasion. While, at the end of the Iliad, the status of Achilles as an embodiment of the heroic ideal is self-evident to everyone, including not only Agamemnon but also Priam, who submissively offers him a ransom for Hector’s dead body, Odysseus’ reenactment of Achilles’ heroic stance does not meet with unconditional acceptance. Odysseus himself is aware of the fact that the physical annihilation of one’s opponents, a self-evident necessity in an international war, is a hazardous way of negotiating power in domestic politics: after the killing of the suitors, he tells Telemachus that one would normally have to go into exile even for murdering a single fellow countryman (Od. 23.117–22)—a trifling crime in comparison to what they have done by decimating an entire generation of the local aristocratic class.¹³⁰ When the news of the suitors’ death reaches their fathers, they become eager to take revenge on the overbearing king who, after losing every single one of his Ithacan companions on his way back from Troy, returned to kill the best of those who had stayed at home (Od. 24.426–9).¹³¹ To the suitors’ fathers, Odysseus is thus not an incarnation of royal authority but an inept king who, being responsible for the deaths of too many of his own people, has forfeited the right to rule.¹³² As the king and a sizeable group of his subjects turn out to possess incompatible views of the political situation, the last scene of the poem portrays the beginning of what under normal circumstances would inevitably evolve into a full-fledged civil conflict. It is only a divine intervention that puts an end to the fighting between Odysseus and the suitors’ surviving relatives and brings about what looks like a happy resolution—with both parties solemnly swearing to put their enmity behind, to forget their grievances, and to live in harmony ever after (Od. 24.473–548).¹³³ Although there is no doubt that this deus ex machina ending is framed in the text as a triumph of justice,¹³⁴ it leaves Ithacan society in a precarious position: the ease with which the oaths sanctioned by the gods are violated in the Iliad militates against assuming that the agreement between Odysseus and his aggrieved subjects can lead to a long-lasting peace.¹³⁵ As a result, the solution that the Odyssey offers to the tension between the king and

¹³⁰ ¹³¹ ¹³² ¹³³ ¹³⁴ ¹³⁵

Bakker 2013, 129–32; Grethlein 2017, 219–20. Haubold 2000, 100–44; Buchan 2004, 2–4 and 133–80; Grethlein 2017, 213–27, with references. Kullmann 1992, 303–4; Haubold 2000, 125–6. Cantarella 2002, 240–53; Bakker 2013, 114–34. e.g. Il. 2.110–15, 2.419–20, 4.64–126, 5.826–34. Naiden 2013, 131–82.

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58  :    his rebellious people raises the urgent question of whether (or how) it can serve as a foundation of a stable political settlement.¹³⁶ The Odyssey does not answer this question directly. But the openness of the ending urges one to go back to the preceding narrative in search for possible clues.¹³⁷ The most striking feature of the Odyssey is that it combines a straightforward, fairy-tale-like, account of a legitimate king defeating a band of potential usurpers with a much more elusive meta-epic narrative in which an Iliadic hero, long presumed to be dead, is effectively willed into existence by epic poetry itself.¹³⁸ Odyssey 1–4 portrays Odysseus as an ideal ruler yearned after by his powerless son who can only derive hope for a better future from stories of his father’s epic past.¹³⁹ In Odyssey 5–12, Odysseus rescues himself from the danger of eternal oblivion by providing an unforgettable account of the virtual non-existence that he is now in the process of leaving behind—an account to which the king of Scheria, the quintessential locus of epic poetry, authoritatively attributes the degree of truthfulness otherwise only to be expected from an epic song. And finally, by emulating Achilles at the end of the poem, Odysseus demonstrates that what his homecoming has transposed from the realm of non-existence into the social reality of local politics is the heroic ideal personified in the Iliad by Achilles. The overlap between these two narratives effectively blends local royal authority with the authority of epic song. Projected onto the figure of a legitimate king protecting his own family and kingdom, the essentialism of epic heroism is transformed from an unattainable ideal, imaginable only in the temporally and spatially remote world of the Trojan War, into a cornerstone of domestic politics practiced in what, to a contemporary recipient, would have been recognizable as an archetypical archaic Greek community.¹⁴⁰ At the same time, as a meta-epic character who rescues the heroic ideal personified by Achilles from eternal oblivion by emulating it in the social reality of a typical archaic Greek community, Odysseus epitomizes a royal authority whose legitimacy is inseparably linked to its status as an instantiation of that poetic ideal. The stability of the political system described in this compound narrative is thus not a matter of specific policies implemented by the king but is dependent primarily on the cultural prestige of epic poetry. Tellingly, the Odyssey does

¹³⁶ Grethlein 2017, 253–9. Cf. Buchan 2004. ¹³⁷ Cf. Christensen 2019, on the cognitive challenge of the open ending of the Odyssey. ¹³⁸ Cf. Bakker 2013, esp. 1–35. ¹³⁹ Cf. Ford 1992, 101–10; Olson 1995, 65–90; Ford 2002, 5–10. ¹⁴⁰ Morris 1986; Ulf 1990, 175–268; Raaflaub 1997; Thalmann 1998. Cf. Cantarella 2002, 70–7 and 143–53.

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not anticipate that, after his violent victory, Odysseus will continue to rule over Ithaca as if no disruption had ever taken place. Instead, fulfilling the prophecy that he had received from Tiresias in Hades (Od. 11.119–37), Odysseus is to undertake another journey, whose goal is to spread the fame of heroic epic as far away from its geographical origins as is conceivably possible—among those who are so unfamiliar with the sea that they will mistake an oar for a winnowing fan (Od. 23.266–84).¹⁴¹ As a result, Odysseus emerges not as a model king but as an epitome of the authority of epic: he relies on that authority to restore his legitimate power and, after handing it over to his heir, departs on another epic adventure. What is more, although the poem does not say so in quite so many words, it makes it sufficiently apparent that the peace brokered by Athena can last past Odysseus’ departure (and death) only as long as the Ithacans remain convinced of the status of royal power as an incarnation of the heroic ideal—a status that is inherently debatable.¹⁴² The only authority that can vouchsafe for the truthfulness of that identification is epic poetry itself. References to epic poetry scattered throughout the Odyssey establish a direct correlation between the stability of royal power and the status that poetry enjoys at court. The cultural prestige of Demodocus’ epic songs is directly linked in Odyssey 8 to the ideal nature of the Phaeacian kingdom, where all imperfections, both tragic and comic, have been banished into the aesthetically pleasing realm of poetry. Closest to this untroubled harmony between poetry and power is Menelaus’ Spartan court in Odyssey 4, where the song that a “divine bard” sings at the double wedding of Menelaus’ children (Od. 4.17 μετὰ δέ σφιν ἐμέλπετο θεῖος ἀοιδός) reveals poetry both as a manifestation of the tranquil leisure that the king enjoys upon his belated return from the Trojan War and as a celebration of the biological continuity of the royal house. In his account of the Achaeans’ returns in Odyssey 3, by contrast, Nestor provides a negative example of what happens to political order if poets are treated with disrespect: departing to the Trojan War, Agamemnon left Clytemnestra under the tutelage of a singer (Od. 3.267 πὰρ δ᾿ ἄρ᾿ ἔην ἀοιδὸς ἀνήρ) and it was only after the poet had been left on a remote island as “fodder for birds” (Od. 3.271 οἰωνοῖσιν ἕλωρ καὶ κύρμα) that she dared to enter an adulterous marriage with Aegisthus (Od. 3.272 τὴν δ᾿ ἐθέλων ἐθέλουσαν ἀνήγαγεν ὅνδε δόμονδε), which resulted in Agamemnon’s death. The fate of Agamemnon’s singer serves as a foil to the role that epic poetry plays on Ithaca, where it crucially contributes to the restoration of political ¹⁴¹ See above, n. 122.

¹⁴² Cf. Tandy 1997, 166–89.

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60  :    order. In contrast to Agamemnon’s singer, Phemius remains at Odysseus’ house from beginning to end. In Odyssey 1, Phemius’ song about “the mournful return of the Achaeans from Troy” (Od. 1.326–7 ὁ δ᾿ Ἀχαιῶν νόστον ἄειδε / λυγρόν) is framed in such a way as to draw attention to the unique ability of epic to conjure absent things back into existence. To the suitors, as to the Phaeacians, epic song, along with dance, is nothing but an “ornament of the feast” (Od. 1.152 μολπή τ᾿ ὀρχηστύς τε τὰ γάρ τ᾿ ἀνθήματα δαιτός)—entertainment devoid of any personal significance, to which they, bewitched by the bard’s superb art, display no emotional reaction (Od. 1.325–6 οἱ δὲ σιωπῇ / εἵατ᾿ ἀκούοντες).¹⁴³ But while the aesthetic detachment with which the Phaeacians listen to Demodocus is effectively synonymous with the status of their ideal world as a place where epic poetry is produced in order to exercise its pragmatic effect elsewhere, the suitors’ insensitiveness to the content of Phemius’ song is an eloquent sign of their “out-of-placeness” in Odysseus’ house. Since to Penelope, by contrast, the song about the homecomings of the other Achaeans is a painful reminder of the twenty-year-long absence of her husband, she bursts into tears and asks Phemius to choose a different song instead (Od. 1.332–44).¹⁴⁴ Unlike Penelope, Telemachus still hopes that Odysseus will one day return to punish the suitors (Od. 1.115–17). When Telemachus asks Penelope not to interfere with Phemius’ choice of song, it is, therefore, not only because he finds consolation in the fact that others have suffered too (Od. 1.354–5) but also because the song about “the mournful returns” of others implicitly confirms that Odysseus’ return remains unsung, that his story has not yet reached final closure, and that he, therefore, may still come back.¹⁴⁵ It is thus Phemius’ song that enhances Telemachus’ determination to travel to the mainland in search of stories about his father—stories that make his return appear increasingly more likely—and that, by conjuring up in Penelope’s mind an image of Odysseus himself, intensifies her revulsion against marrying “a worse man” (cf. Od. 20.82). Phemius contributes to maintaining the king’s authority not only during his absence but also after his return. In Odyssey 22, Phemius stresses that Odysseus would later regret having killed the singer (Od. 22.344–5 αὐτῷ τοι μετόπισθ᾿ ἄχος ἔσσεται, εἴ κεν ἀοιδὸν / πέφνῃς) who seems to “sing to him as to

¹⁴³ Segal 1994, 127–8; Peponi 2012, 30–2. Cf. Halliwell 2011, 45–9. ¹⁴⁴ Goldhill 1991, 60–1; Peponi 2012, 33–8; Grethlein 2017, 53–9. Pace Ewan Bowie (1993, 16–17), there is no indication in the text that Phemius mentions the death of Odysseus. Like Nestor’s stories in Odyssey 4, Phemius’ account of “the return of the Achaeans” can only focus on those whose fate is already known, having nothing to say about Odysseus. ¹⁴⁵ Cf. Ford 1992, 101–10; Olson 1995, 65–90; Ford 2002, 5–10.

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a god” (Od. 22.347–8 ἔοικα δέ τοι παραείδειν / ὥς τε θεῷ).¹⁴⁶ And in Odyssey 23, Phemius, spared from Odysseus’ killing spree, helps the king to gain enough time to reunite with Penelope and to retreat to Laertes’ house in the country before the onslaught of the suitors’ fathers: by letting passers-by believe that there is a wedding celebrated inside Odysseus’ house, the sound of Phemius’ songs prevents the rumours of the suitors’ death from spreading around Ithaca too quickly.¹⁴⁷ Seen through the prism of these references to the intimate links between epic poetry and royal authority, the open ending of the Odyssey can be read as an invitation to ponder more closely on the crucial importance of the mutual dependence between singers and kings for the stability of an aristocratic society—a society portrayed in the Odyssey as a political system in which singers depend on kings for their lives and in which, more importantly, kings depend on singers for their power.¹⁴⁸ Just as the Phaeacian episode portrays poetry not only as a remedy against oblivion but also as a powerful instrument of turning the uncontrollable world into a place where actions reliably result in intended outcomes, so mentions of poetry elsewhere in the Odyssey, too, intimate that it is indispensable for turning royal power from a contested commodity into an inalienable possession used by its rightful owner to replace chaos with a stable political order. Taken together, the Iliad and the Odyssey reveal that the heroic ideal of unfailing intentionality can be regarded as a product of the political geography of archaic Greece—a dispersed network of independent communities that lacked a single hegemonic centre—and that the pragmatic effect of archaic Greek poetry crucially depends on positioning that unattainable ideal at the virtual centre of that geopolitical space. By parading athletic games as a social setting in which the heroic ideal becomes a means of translating aristocratic privilege into a “natural” index of one’s inner worth, the Iliad presents it as the gold standard by which authority can be negotiated among the competing rulers of culturally cognate yet geographically dispersed and political independent entities. And the Odyssey tells a paradigmatic story that reveals that the stability of royal power within any such independent city-state is a matter of plausibly portraying that power as a projection of the Panhellenic heroic ideal—a task that only poetry can fulfil. The inextricable link established in the two Homeric poems between aristocratic authority and the heroic ideal serves to conceptualize the pragmatic ¹⁴⁶ Goldhill 1991, 59; Bakker 2013, 156. ¹⁴⁷ Cf. Segal 1994, 107–8, 138–9. ¹⁴⁸ Cf. Segal 1994, 142–63; von Reden 1995, 34–7; Dougherty 2001, 50–2; Bakker 2013, 156.

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62  :    function that myth fulfils in other genres of archaic Greek poetry.¹⁴⁹ Most notably, epinician poetry exercises its pragmatic effects by reproducing the entire spatial trajectory enacted in the Iliad and the Odyssey—a trajectory that leads from measuring one’s inner worth against the gold standard of the heroic ideal in the context of the Panhellenic athletic games and towards the eternal fame that the victor obtains thanks to poetry performed in his hometown.¹⁵⁰ Concomitantly, the epinician poets emphasize with a much higher degree of self-confidence the indispensable role that poetry plays in securing the stability of aristocratic power¹⁵¹—a notion that, in the Odyssey, Homer advocates rather cautiously by suggesting that there may be connections between the fate of epic kings and the status that poetry enjoys at their courts. In the next chapter, I will analyse the contribution that the two Hesiodic poems make to the archaic Greek discourse of the nexus between poetry and power.

¹⁴⁹ Nagy 1990.

¹⁵⁰ Kurke 1991, esp. 13–31; Currie 2005, 47–84.

¹⁵¹ Hornblower 2009.

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2 Hesiod and the Language of Truth The Theogony on the Origins of Poetry By impersonating a beggar, Odysseus pretends to be someone whose personhood is entirely reduced to the digestive function of his belly (cf. Od. 17.559 γαστέρα βοσκήσεις).¹ Irus, a beggar scrounging for food everywhere on Ithaca, is said to be “notorious for his insatiable belly” that compels him “to eat and drink all the time” (Od. 18.2–3 μετὰ δ᾿ ἔπρεπε γαστέρι μάργῃ / ἀζηχὲς φαγέμεν καὶ πιέμεν).² Disguised as a beggar, Odysseus, too, is immediately taken for such a belly on legs: the goatherd Melantheus, who supplies the suitors with meat, assumes that the only thing that the new beggar has on his mind is “feeding his ravenous belly” (Od. 17.228 βόσκειν ἣν γαστέρ᾿ ἄναλτον). When he comes to his own house, Odysseus does his best to look the part: although he agrees to wait outside while Eumaeus goes into the banquet hall, he reminds the swineherd of the pressing needs of his “voracious belly” (Od. 17.286 γαστέρα . . . μεμαυῖαν), and when Antinous, reluctant to share food, throws a stool at him to make him go away, Odysseus, with his usual tongue-in-cheek, complains that he was attacked not because he was protecting his property but because of his “wretched belly” (Od. 17.473 γαστέρος ἕνεκα λυγρῆς).³ Quite fittingly, therefore, when Antinous urges the two beggars to fight for the privilege of eating at Odysseus’ house, what he sets as the winner’s prize is one of the goats’ bellies filled with fat and blood which the suitors had earmarked for their supper (Od. 18.44 γαστέρες αἵδ᾿ αἰγῶν)—a condition that Odysseus says he is forced to accept because of his “mischievous belly” (Od. 18.53–4 ἀλλά με γαστὴρ / ὀτρύνει κακοεργός). While the suitors continue to mistake him for a mere belly, Odysseus lets others see glimpses of the truth protected by this disguise (cf. Od. 16.172–307). Even during his fight against Irus, the beggar’s rags cannot entirely conceal Odysseus’ heroic body (Od. 18.66–71). And when, after his victory, Penelope invites the stranger for a conversation about her missing husband, she, too, ¹ Pucci 1987, 157–87; Crotty 1994 134–43, Bakker 2013, 136–7. ² Thalmann 1984, 102–4; Bakker 2013, 140–1. ³ Rose 1992, 108–12. Cf. Nagy 1979, 222–42.

Greek Literature and the Ideal: The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age. Alexander Kirichenko, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Kirichenko 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866707.003.0004

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64  :    sees in him more than a beggar: unlike Melantheus and Antinous, she assumes that there must be a human identity underneath the subhuman surface—that the beggar, as she puts it, cannot “originate from a fabled oak-tree or a rock” (Od. 19.163 οὐ γὰρ ἀπὸ δρυός ἐσσι παλαιφάτου οὐδ᾿ ἀπὸ πέτρης).⁴ In response to this assumption, Odysseus makes up what the text designates as one of his typical “lies that resemble real things” (Od. 19.203 ἴσκε ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγων ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα)—a credible tale of false origins (Od. 19.165–202) in which he mentions an encounter between the fictitious character he is impersonating and the real Odysseus (Od. 19.221–48). The reason why he invents this selfevident lie is to gain trust with Penelope and to make her more receptive to the truth of Odysseus’ homecoming, which he then proceeds to disclose (Od. 19.262–307). It is in reaction to Odysseus’ mixture of plausible lies and unbelievable truths that Penelope, who shrewdly refrains from betraying whether or not she has recognized the stranger’s true identity,⁵ comes up with the idea of an archery context as the most reliable instrument of determining the truth beyond any doubt (Od. 19.572–81). At the beginning of the Theogony, in a passage that has been termed “one of the most enigmatic statements about poetry to be found in Greek literature,”⁶ Hesiod describes his initiation into the art of poetry by the Muses in recognizably Odyssean terms. In the Odyssey, Odysseus is taken for a “mere belly.” In the Theogony, too, the Muses address Hesiod, a self-styled herdsman grazing his sheep on the slopes of Mount Helicon (Hes. Th. 23), as one of the “shepherds of the fields, disgraceful things, nothing but bellies” (Hes. Th. 26 ποιμένες ἄγραυλοι, κάκ᾿ ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἶον). But then from a “mere belly” the Heliconian Muses transform him into a singer by sharing with him their own poetic art: they give him a sceptre (Hes. Th. 30), breathe into him “a divine voice” (Hes. Th. 31–2), and order him to sing of “what will be and what was” (Hes. Th. 32), “to hymn the race of the eternal gods” (Hes. Th. 33), and always to praise the Muses themselves both first and last (Hes. Th. 34). The wording that the Muses use to introduce themselves is almost identical to the way Homer characterizes Odysseus in Odyssey 19: “We know how to say many lies that resemble real things” (Hes. Th. 27 ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ⁴ This is similar to Antinous asking Odysseus about his name at Od. 8.550–4: Alcinous’ “every human has a name” (8.552 οὐ μὲν γάρ τις πάμπαν ἀνώνυμός ἐστ᾿ ἀνθρώπων) corresponds to Penelope’s “no one comes from nowhere.” See also Patroclus’ remark in Iliad 16 that Achilles’ uncompromising stance makes him resemble someone born “from the blue sea and precipitous rocks” (Il. 16.34–5 γλαυκὴ δέ σε τίκτε θάλασσα / πέτραι τ᾿ ἠλίβατοι): being born from a rock equals not being human. ⁵ On the vexed question of whether Penelope recognizes the stranger as Odysseus in Od. 19, see Doherty 1995; Levaniouk 2011. ⁶ Pucci 1977, 8. See also Feddern 2018, 119–36, with copious references.

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ὁμοῖα, cf. Od. 19.203 ἴσκε ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγων ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα).⁷ Read against the backdrop of the Odyssey scene in which the stranger can only lend authority to the truth of Odysseus’ return by inventing a patently fictitious story, the Muses’ specification that “we also know how to utter the truth if we want” (Hes. Th. 28 ἴδμεν δ᾿, εὖτ᾿ ἐθέλωμεν, ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι) does not need to be interpreted as a polemic against the lies of other poets, such as Homer—a polemic that would characterize Hesiod’s own theogonic poetry as an unadulterated expression of the transcendental truth.⁸ Rather, the words of the Muses can be construed to emphasize that, like Odysseus’ lies, their own lies, too, not only resemble “real things” but can also uncover hidden truths.⁹ Since the Muses impart this Odyssean ability to Hesiod, his entire poem, including the initiation scene, can also be regarded as a collection of such “lies”—factually false, yet expressive of a deeper truth. There is another connection between Hesiod’s initiation scene and Odyssey 19. The rhetorical question with which Hesiod marks the return from the autobiographical digression to the actual task that the Muses had imposed on him—“but what are these things concerning an oak-tree or a rock to me?” (Hes. Th. 35 ἀλλὰ τίη μοι ταῦτα περὶ δρῦν ἢ περὶ πέτρην;)¹⁰—enjoys in scholarship the status of an interpretative conundrum that is so insoluble that most readers tend to join Martin West’s assessment that “[i]t is best to acknowledge that the truth is lost in antiquity.”¹¹ But viewed through the ⁷ On the “lies” of Hesiod’s Muses, see e.g. Svenbro 1976, 50–9; Thalmann 1984, 143–7; Rose 1992, 117–18; Pratt 1993, 95–114; Katz—Volk 2000. ⁸ Many see in Hes. Th. 27–8 a polemic against “lying poets” (either Homer or local genealogies and theogonies) delivered by a poet convinced that he himself is in the possession of the truth: e.g. Svenbro 1976, 46–73; Neitzel 1980; Nagy 1990, 45; Leclerc 1993, 71; Arrighetti 1996; Finkelberg 1998, 157–60; Koning 2010, 304; Canevaro 2015, 43. The paraphrase in West 1966, 162 is typical of this approach: “The Muses seem to be saying, ‘You have lived your life in ignorance of the truth. But now you shall tell it to men. Admittedly, we sometimes deceive; but when we choose, we can reveal the truth, and we are going to reveal it to you’.” For more references, see Clay 2003, 57; Tor 2017, 62. ⁹ For a semantic overview of Hesiod’s ἔτυμα and ἀληθέα, see most recently Tor 2017, 65–72. See also Stoddard 2004, 83–5. The majority of scholars have traditionally found it difficult to accept that Hesiod may have claimed for his poetry anything short of absolute—transcendental—truth. Cf. Detienne 1967, 18: “Les Muses revendiquent fièrement le privilège de ‘dire la vérité’ (ἀλήθεα γηρύσασθαι).” But see also 75–8, for a more balanced assessment. For interpretations accepting the fundamental indeterminacy of the Muses’ statement, see e.g. Stroh 1976; Pucci 1977, 8–44; Arthur 1983; Thalmann 1984, 146–52; Clay 2003, 57–64 (esp. 59, n. 43: “To refuse to accept the paradoxical character of the text will not make it go away; better to confront it and live with the consequences”); Halliwell 2011, 18; Tor 2017, 72–103. ¹⁰ Cf. West 1966, 167. ¹¹ West 1966, 169. He proposes the following hypothetical meanings but does not find any of them compelling enough: “(1) Why do I digress? (2) Why do I go around in circles? (3) Why do I boast? (4) Why do I speak of the less important instead of the more important? (5) Why do I relate what no one will believe?” What exacerbates the situation is that this passage is the only instance of περὶ δρῦν ἢ περὶ πέτρην in archaic Greek literature—all later attestations quoting the Hesiodic phrase as a proverbial formula used to conclude a digression. There is a tendency in recent scholarship to see in this phrase a reference to the gift of prophecy that Hesiod has received from the Muses: O’Bryhim 1996; López-Ruiz 2010, 48–83; Forte 2015.

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66  :    prism of Odysseus’ conversation with Penelope in Odyssey 19, this phrase becomes less opaque. It is after all in response to Penelope’s assumption that the stranger does not “originate from a fabled oak-tree or a rock” (Od. 19.163 οὐ γὰρ ἀπὸ δρυός ἐσσι παλαιφάτου οὐδ᾿ ἀπὸ πέτρης) that the disguised Odysseus invents for himself a false genealogy (a paradigmatic Odyssean “lie that resembles real things”) and then, having constructed a trustworthy speaking persona, proceeds to reveal the truth of his own return (Od. 19.165–202). In a similar vein, what Hesiod constructs in the initiation scene is a figurative pedigree of his theogonic narrative—a pedigree that, like Odysseus’ “Cretan tale,” serves to lend authority to the speaker’s voice by claiming that his account comes from a reliable source. Hesiod’s “things concerning an oak-tree or a rock” could then be interpreted as an unverifiable story of origins—“a lie similar to a real thing,” which Hesiod has to invent in order to gain his recipients’ trust in the “truth” that he is so eager to convey to them.¹² In that case, Hesiod’s reluctance to dwell at length on “these things concerning an oak-tree or a rock” (ἀλλὰ τίη μοι . . . ;) could be seen as a particularly powerful gesture of poetic authority—an authority that, according to the poet’s fiction, so obviously derives from the authority of the Muses that, unlike Odysseus who, in his “Cretan tales,” never tires of expatiating on his fictional origins, Hesiod can now refrain from defending his credentials and focus on communicating to his human recipients the divine songs of the Muses.¹³ In the proem, Hesiod sums up the content of the Muses’ song no less than three times, and each time he presents it as thoroughly centred on Zeus. The song of the Muses cited in the first lines of the Theogony begins with Zeus (Hes. Th. 10–11 περικαλλέα ὄσσαν ἱεῖσαι, / ὑμνεῦσαι Δία τ᾿ αἰγίοχον) and proceeds in reverse chronological order from the Olympian gods, to the Titans, and finally to a triad of primordial beings (Hes. Th. 20 Γαῖάν τ᾿ Ὠκεανόν τε μέγαν καὶ Νύκτα μέλαιναν).¹⁴ When, right after the initiation scene, Hesiod praises the Muses for pleasing the mind of Zeus (Hes. Th. 36–7), ¹² This is how Plato seems to have understood this expression. In the Phaedrus, Socrates explains that the reason why he has invented a fictional story featuring Egyptian gods is that, in contrast to the ancients who were content with hearing the truth even if it came “from a tree or a rock” (Pl. Phdr. 275b6–7 τοῖς μὲν οὖν τότε . . . ἀπέχρη δρυὸς καὶ πέτρας ἀκούειν ὑπ᾿ εὐηθείας), today’s sophisticated young people are only receptive to stories that feature speakers identified by name and place of origin (Pl. Phdr. 275c1–2 σοὶ δ᾿ ἴσως διαφέρει τίς ὁ λέγων καὶ ποδαπός. οὐ γὰρ ἐκεῖνο μόνον σκοπεῖς, εἴτε οὕτως εἴτε ἄλλως ἔχει). Cf. Pl. Ap. 34d, R. 544d. Like both Homer’s Odysseus and Plato’s Socrates, Hesiod constructs a respectable speaking persona in order to convey what he considers to be the truth. Cf. Forte 2015, 4–6. ¹³ On Hesiod constructing an authoritative narrative persona in the Theogony, see Stoddard 2004, 34–59. ¹⁴ Clay 2003, 54–6.

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he refers to their genealogical account of Zeus’ ancestors, which, like Hesiod’s own subsequent narrative, begins with Gaia and Uranus (cf. Hes. Th. 44 ἐξ ἀρχῆς).¹⁵ And after narrating the circumstances of their birth, Hesiod once again summarizes the Muses’ hymn of Zeus—the undisputed king of heaven who after vanquishing his father Cronus established an ideal political order among the Olympian gods (Hes. Th. 71–4).¹⁶ Thus, the very existence of the Muses is synonymous in Hesiod with praising Zeus. What is more, the subsequent narrative demonstrates that their celebrated ability to “tell lies that resemble real things” can in fact be perceived as a projection of the conceptual essence of their laudandus. While there is no doubt that, like Homeric Achilles, Hesiodic Zeus epitomizes the ideal of intentional agency that never fails, it is quite obvious, too, that, like Homeric Odysseus, he enacts that ideal by relying on “lies that resemble real things.” Right after his birth, Zeus himself becomes an instrument of deceit. Zeus’ father Cronus is portrayed in the Theogony as what, from the “gastric” perspective of the proem, can be described as “a mere belly”: unwilling to surrender his power to a stronger son, he swallows his children, transposing them from Rhea’s belly (Hes. Th. 460 νήδυος ἐξ ἱερῆς μητρός) directly into his own (Hes. Th. 487 τὸν τόθ᾿ ἑλὼν χείρεσσιν ἑὴν ἐκάτθετο νηδύν).¹⁷ Echoing the endless pregnancy forced on her by Uranus, Gaia hides the newly born Zeus from his voracious father in her own “depths” (Hes. Th. 483 ζαθέης ὑπὸ κεύθεσι γαίης, cf. 158 Γαίης ἐν κευθμῶνι), in a cave on Crete, and lets Rhea replace the baby with a large stone, swathed to look like a newborn (Hes. Th. 485 μέγαν λίθον), which the literal-minded Cronus swallows without noticing the difference. What Hesiod effectively casts as Zeus’ inborn affinity to “lies that resemble real things” becomes, in the subsequent course of the narrative, a crucial factor responsible for his seizing universal power and securing its stability. Although Hesiod’s Zeus demands unconditional truthfulness from others (cf. Hes. Th. 383–452), he himself remains for a long time a far cry from Nereus, the Old Man of the Sea, who, uniquely in the Theogony, embodies the unadulterated essence of truthfulness, honesty, infallibility, mildness, lawfulness, and justice (Hes. Th. 233–6).¹⁸ These qualities, admirable in themselves, do not take one far in Hesiod’s universe. They certainly do not make one king of the gods, for Zeus himself only becomes an adamant enforcer of these values

¹⁵ Clay 2003, 69–70. ¹⁷ Stocking 2013, 191–2.

¹⁶ Cf. Faraone 2012; Scully 2015, 30–49. ¹⁸ Detienne 1967, 29–50; Scully 2015, 40–1.

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68  :    after he has completed his power struggle.¹⁹ Hesiod leaves no doubt that Zeus’ installation as the ruler of the universe is primarily due to his physical superiority over the other gods (Hes. Th. 881–5).²⁰ But to make sure that his power remains uncontested, Zeus resorts to more sophisticated stratagems. When he begins to make provisions for his own future progeny, the scenario familiar from the previous generation seems at first to be about to repeat itself. Like his father Cronus, Zeus is alarmed by a prophecy that he will lose his royal power to a stronger son (Hes. Th. 892–8). But in contrast to Cronus, who relies on nothing but unadorned brute force as he devours his own new-born children, Zeus uses “flattering words” (Hes. Th. 890 αἱμυλίοισι λόγοισιν) to deceive his pregnant wife and to swallow her along with their unborn child (Hes. Th. 899–900).²¹ By swallowing pregnant Metis, Zeus makes female “cleverness” an integral part of himself (this is how he becomes μητίετα Ζεύς)²² and gives birth to Athena (Hes. Th. 924–6)²³—a female deity who, despite being equal to Zeus in strength and wisdom (Hes. Th. 896 ἶσον ἔχουσαν πατρὶ μένος καὶ ἐπίφρονα βουλήν), poses no threat to his power.²⁴ The children that he later has with other goddesses are all born into a stable cosmic order and automatically become its integral parts: they are either positively connoted abstractions signifying the ideological underpinnings of Zeus’ rule (Lawfulness, Peace, and Justice, Hes. Th. 901–3),²⁵ or, if they are anthropomorphic creatures endowed with a more complex personality, they fulfil specific tasks delegated to them by their father.²⁶ The Prometheus episode underscores the status of Zeus as an unrivalled master of deceit who can never be deceived by others (cf. Hes. Th. 613 ὣς οὐκ ἔστι Διὸς κλέψαι νόον οὐδὲ παρελθεῖν). By letting the humans enjoy the choicest chunks of sacrificial meat while leaving the gods with nothing but bones covered in fat, Prometheus enacts a clever subterfuge distinctly reminiscent of the swathed stone that Cronus had naively accepted as a substitute for baby Zeus.²⁷ Unlike his literal-minded father, Zeus can clearly see through the ruse (Hes. Th. 550–1 Ζεὺς δ᾿ ἄφθιτα μήδεα εἰδὼς / γνῶ ῥ᾿ οὐδ᾿ ἠγνοίησε δόλον),²⁸ but instead of preventing it from taking effect, he uses it as a pretext for a still cleverer ruse of his own (Hes. Th. 551–2 κακὰ δ᾿ ὄσσετο θυμῷ / θνητοῖς ἀνθρώποισι): he allows Prometheus to have his way but then punishes the ¹⁹ Pucci 2009, 51–3. ²⁰ Faraone 2012. ²¹ Detienne—Vernant 1974, 72; Stocking 2013, 192–3; Scully 2015, 41–2. ²² Detienne—Vernant 1974, 61–75 and 104–10. Cf. Loney 2014, 526–8. ²³ Cf. Arthur 1983, 72. ²⁴ Stocking 2013, 183–4. ²⁵ Scully 2015, 34. ²⁶ Cf. Haubold 2002, 15. ²⁷ Vernant 1980, 193–7; Clay 2003, 101–2; Pucci 2009, 58–62. ²⁸ Stocking 2017, 57–8. Some think, however, that Prometheus does after succeed in deceiving Zeus. See Clay 2003, 109–13, with references and counter-arguments. See also Loney 2014.

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humans for his deceit by forbidding them the use of fire (Hes. Th. 562–4). When Prometheus steals fire (Hes. Th. 565–7), Zeus devises two separate punishments for Prometheus himself and for his mortal protégés. While Prometheus’ punishment is brutally straightforward (he is tied to a rock and has his self-regenerating liver ceaselessly eaten by an eagle, Hes. Th. 521–5),²⁹ men are punished in a more perfidious way that echoes the manner in which Prometheus had tried to deceive Zeus (cf. Hes. Th. 573–84):³⁰ Zeus lets Hephaestus and Athena manufacture another “lie that resembles the real thing”—the first woman in existence, irresistibly enticing on the surface but gluttonous and lazy underneath,³¹—and, by making women indispensable for procreation, turns them into the most manifest token of his own rule, a burden that the heretofore all-male humanity will from now on have to carry forever (Hes. Th. 570–612).³² The creation of women in order to keep men at bay is one of multiple instances where Zeus relies on female power in order to enforce his own universal authority. The eldest daughter of Oceanus, Styx functions as a manifestation of Zeus’ determination to curtail any attempt at deceit among the gods: her name serves as an inviolable oath, and she is the one who severely punishes the gods if they commit perjury (Hes. Th. 383–403).³³ And if Styx is a symbol of Zeus’ unlimited ability to restrict the power of the gods, Hecate, described in terms almost identical to those Hesiod uses to praise the omnipotence of Zeus in the prologue to the Works and Days,³⁴ is a symbol of Zeus’ ability to abet or to thwart at will (Hes. Th. 429 ᾧ δ᾿ ἐθέλῃ) the success of any human endeavour—from the rule of kings to hunting and shepherding (Hes. Th. 404–52).³⁵ The Muses, too, belong to the female forces without which Zeus proves unable to consolidate the stability of his rule. Hesiod lists the Muses (Hes. Th. 915–17) among the vast progeny that Zeus fathers with various goddesses after establishing his cosmic order (Hes. Th. 886–949). Tellingly, the Muses’ mother, the goddess of memory Mnemosyne, who as a daughter of Gaia and Uranus belongs to the generation of Zeus’ parents (Hes. Th. 135),

²⁹ Judet de la Combe 1996; Clay 2003, 115–16. ³⁰ On the “Pandora” figure in the Theogony as a work of art (a sculpture) and its significance for Hesiod’s conceptualization of his own poetic art, see Wickkiser 2010. On Pandora and the “golden maidens,” see Blümer 2001, 213–24; Clay 2003, 123: “In fact she is sister to Hephaestus’ golden robot maidens.” ³¹ Casanova 1979, 63–4; Zeitlin 1996, 53–86. Cf. Clay 2003, 119–21. ³² Clay 2003, 102–3; Stocking 2013, 194–6; Rose 2012, 177–80. ³³ Blickman 1987; Lye 2009; Faraone 2013, 304–6; Petrovic—Petrovic 2018, 72–4. ³⁴ Cf. Hes. Th. 442–3 ῥηιδίως . . . ῥεῖα, 447 ἐξ ὀλίγων βριάει καὶ ἐκ πολλῶν μείονα θῆκεν, Op. 5–7 ῥέα μέν γὰρ βριάει, ῥέα δὲ βριάοντα χαλέπτει, κτλ. ³⁵ Clay 2003, 133–40; Pucci 2009, 53–5.

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70  :    remains childless until she is impregnated by Zeus, and this does not happen until Zeus solidifies his power by defeating Mnemosyne’s siblings, the Titans (cf. Hes. Th. 915–18). This chronology offers a crucial insight into Hesiod’s view on the origins of poetry: before Zeus’ rise to power, there may have been things worth remembering, but there seems to have been nothing worthy of becoming the subject matter of song. It is only the installation of Zeus as the king of the gods that calls for the emergence of poetry—an art whose sole task consists in praising the divine order instituted by Zeus (cf. Hes. Th. 66–7).³⁶ The Muses’ task to induce “oblivion of bad things and a rest from cares” (Hes. Th. 55 λησμοσύνην τε κακῶν ἄμπαυμά τε μερμηράων) emerges as a product of Zeus delegating his own inborn capacity for deceit to a separate entity and turning that capacity into a beneficent art that makes the lives of his subjects more bearable by conjuring up uplifting images of his own glorious deeds. In the refined form practiced by the Muses, the art of deceit remains as important for the stability of Zeus’ rule as its raw prototype was for his seizing power, so that, as proponents of that art, the Muses enjoy a very special standing amongst Zeus’ children. They are neither ideologically weighty abstractions (such as Lawfulness, Peace, and Justice: Hes. Th. 901–3)³⁷ nor are they Zeus’ little helpers who fulfil specific tasks to relieve their busy father.³⁸ Rather, like Styx, Hecate, and the women, they are responsible, in a most fundamental manner, for the proper functioning of the entire political order instituted by Zeus. The relationship between Zeus and the Muses is thus symbiotic rather than strictly hierarchical: as a quintessential projection of the quality that allowed Zeus to rise to power, the Muses crucially contribute to maintaining the stability of Zeus’ rule over his subjects. The relationship between Hesiod and the Muses is characterized by a similar symbiosis. As the Muses’ existence is conceptually coextensive with their task of praising Zeus, so the singer’s poetic authority is existentially dependent on the Muses: it is only by identifying his song with the song of the Muses that the singer can construct a respectable pedigree for his own theogonic account. But at the same time, the Muses need Hesiod as much as Zeus needs the Muses. As the stability of Zeus’ power is predicated upon its being praised by the Muses, so the Muses’ song can only reach its human addressees through the mediation of a human singer, whose main task incidentally consists in praising the Muses themselves (Hes. Th. 34 σφᾶς δ᾿ αὐτὰς πρῶτόν τε καὶ ὕστατον αἰὲν ἀείδειν).

³⁶ Cf. Pache 2008, 233–4.

³⁷ Scully 2015, 34.

³⁸ Cf. Haubold 2002, 15.

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When, later in the proem, Hesiod mentions “kings,” it begins to transpire that his portrayal of the intricate interdependence between Zeus and the Muses, as well as between the Muses and the human singer, serves to conceptualize the position of poetry in contemporary political reality. When Hesiod singles out Calliope as the Muse who “attends on kings” (Hes. Th. 80 βασιλεῦσιν ἅμ᾿ αἰδοίοισιν ὀπηδεῖ), the praise of the Muses morphs into a praise of kings, who emerge not only as projections of the universal power of Zeus but also as primary recipients of “the gifts of the Muses” (Hes. Th. 81–97). Although kings are “from Zeus” (Hes. Th. 96 ἐκ δὲ Διὸς βασιλῆες) and although the “straight judgments” with which they “settle causes” (Hes. Th. 85–6 διακρίνοντα θέμιστας / ἰθείῃσι δίκῃσι) form an analogy with the honours that Zeus had justly divided among the immortals (cf. Hes. Th. 73–4), the nearly divine authority of royal power (Hes. Th. 91 θεὸν ὣς ἱλάσκονται) is simultaneously predicated upon the “honey-sweet words” (Hes. Th. 84 τοῦ δ᾿ ἔπε᾿ ἐκ στόματος ῥεῖ μείλιχα, cf. 97), which the Muses pour like heavenly dew directly into the mouths of kings (Hes. Th. 83 γλυκερὴν χείουσιν ἐέρσην).³⁹ It thus turns out that kings can only successfully exercise their royal power because they rely on the “sacred gift of the Muses” (Hes. Th. 94 Μουσάων ἱερὴ δόσις)—skilfully using words to put an end to strife and to restore justice to those who have been harmed (Hes. Th. 86–90).⁴⁰ Hesiod’s image of kings exercising their authority at the agora by resorting to “the gift of the Muses” (= persuasive rhetoric) is vividly reminiscent of Homer’s portrayal of Odysseus, who, in Iliad 2, restores concord among the war-weary Achaeans by delivering an eloquent speech (Il. 2.284–332) and who, in the Odyssey, regains his power by relying on the art that Hesiod’s Muses claim for themselves—the art of “telling lies that resemble real things” (Od. 19.203). Seen through the prism of the subsequent theogonic narrative in which Zeus is featured as the paradigmatic proponent of that art, it is precisely thanks to the “gift of the Muses” that Hesiod’s kings can be said to “be from Zeus.” While kings “are from Zeus,” singers are “from the Muses and the farshooting Apollo” (Hes. Th. 94 ἐκ γάρ τοι Μουσέων καὶ ἑκηβόλου Ἀπόλλωνος). Like the Muses, singers can make listeners forget their cares (Hes. Th. 102–3 αἶψ᾿ ὅ γε δυσφροσυνέων ἐπιλήθεται οὐδέ τι κηδέων / μέμνηται, cf. 55) by singing heroic epics (Hes. Th. 100 κλεῖα προτέρων ἀνθρώπων) and hymns to the Olympian gods (Hes. Th. 101 μάκαράς τε θεοὺς οἳ Ὄλυμπον ἔχουσιν).⁴¹ This double identification (kings  Zeus//singers  the Muses) is an invitation to ³⁹ Faraone 2012, 41–2. Cf. Scully 2015, 39–40. ⁴¹ Thalmann 1984, 134–56.

⁴⁰ Faraone 2012, 46–8.

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72  :    read Hesiod’s portrayal of the symbiotic relationship between Zeus and the Muses as a cipher for how the poet himself envisages the ideal relationship between kings and singers—a co-dependency in which kings need singers as much as singers need kings. The emphasis in the proem on royal power as a projection of the power of Zeus reveals that the chief goal of Hesiod’s theogonic account consists in conceptualizing human kingship, which, like Zeus’ divine rule, is based on a combination of unfailing intentionality and “honeysweet words” (Hes. Th. 84). As a condensed form of the gift that the Muses have given to kings, “the sweet voice” of singers (Hes. Th. 97) is therefore as crucial to the stability of royal power as the song of the Muses is to the stability of Zeus’ rule.⁴² Thus, the proem to the Theogony provides a much more explicit formulation of the ideal of a symbiotic relationship between poets and kings, which the Odyssey cautiously advocates by linking Agamemnon’s death to the harm done to his singer (Od. 3.271–2) and by portraying Phemius’ uninterrupted presence at the royal court as essential to Odysseus’ restoration as the legitimate king of Ithaca. Viewed through the prism of the Odyssey’s reflections on the political function of poetry, the Muses’ mocking address to Hesiod in the initiation scene as a “mere belly” (Hes. Th. 26) acquires an additional dimension. In Odyssey 22, the fact that Odysseus spares Phemius, even though he used to entertain the suitors at their feasts (Od. 22.352 πωλεύμην μνηνστῆρσιν ἀεισόμενος μετὰ δαῖτας), draws a clear distinction between the “mere bellies” eating up his resources and the “divine singer” instrumental to maintaining and restoring the king’s authority. In any system of poetic patronage, a singer is by definition always a “belly”—a parasite fed by his aristocratic patron in exchange for his songs.⁴³ But as Hesiod explicitly stresses in the initiation scene and as he demonstrates throughout his poem by insisting that singers are as indispensable to kings as the Muses are to Zeus, he is indeed much more than a “mere belly.” As a consequence, the “truth” revealed by the “plausible lies” that Hesiod tells in the Theogony concerns, first and foremost, the origins of poetry in his contemporary world. Just as, in Hesiod’s theogonic account, an entire new world of supernatural anthropomorphic creatures is produced from inanimate nature thanks to the mutual desire imparted to the primordial beings by Eros,⁴⁴ so poetry, too, emerges as a product of what is in effect a mutual

⁴² Cf. Scully 2015, 48–9. ⁴³ Cf. Hornblower 2009. ⁴⁴ Mondi 1989; West 1997, 278–92; Rutherford 2009; López-Ruiz 2010, 87–94; van Dongen 2011; Haubold 2017.

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desire—the singers’ desire for royal patronage and royal authority and the kings’ desire for poetic representation.⁴⁵ In the Theogony, kingship and poetry are profoundly deficient by themselves, and they both desperately need each other in order to come into their own. Without the “gentle words” of the Muses (cf. Hes. Th. 90), kings would never be revered like gods (cf. Hes. Th. 91 θεὸν ὣς ἱλάσκονται), nor would they be “from Zeus” unless singers portrayed them that way. Concomitantly, the only way for the “lies” of singers not only to “resemble real things” but also to pass for “truths” is by being associated with the observable authority of kings. Unless they serve to conceptualize real political power, those “lies” will forever remain just that—entertaining fairytales that may induce a shared experience of an imaginary reality but that no one would ever bother to find either “real” or “true” in the literal sense. But the symbiotic relationship between singers and kings envisaged in the Theogony can only be maintained if both parties respect the terms of the contract on which it is implicitly based. To prove that they are not “mere bellies” (Hes. Th. 26 γαστέρες οἶον) gratuitously fed by their aristocratic patrons, singers have to be “from the Muses” (Hes. Th. 94–5 ἐκ γάρ τοι Μουσέων . . . / ἄνδρες ἀοιδοὶ ἔασιν)—i.e. to play the same role vis-à-vis kings as the Muses play vis-à-vis Zeus. And in order for singers’ praises not to be mere “lies that resemble real things” but to pass for truths, kings have to be “from Zeus” (Hes. Th. 96 ἐκ δὲ Διὸς βασιλῆες)—i.e. not to diverge too obviously from the principles of justice which the Theogony itself describes as an inviolable foundation of Zeus’ rule after his rise to power. In the rest of this chapter, I will show that Hesiod’s Works and Days demonstrates what happens when this contract is breached.

A Farewell to Kings Like the Theogony, the Works and Days begins with an address to the Muses, who continue to praise Zeus in their songs (Hes. Op. 1–2). But the power of Zeus seems in the meantime to have solidified to such an extent that, to project his authority, he does not need the “plausible lies” of the Muses anymore: it can now be simply taken for granted that Zeus is a transcendental regulator of human affairs, an omnipotent ruler who, with unlimited ease (Hes. Op. 5–7 ῥέα, ῥεῖα, ῥεῖα), rewards everyone in accordance with their deserts.⁴⁶ In contrast to the kings of the Theogony, who “are from Zeus,” the kings of the ⁴⁵ Cf. Rose 2012, 180–1.

⁴⁶ Clay 2003, 140–9.

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74  :    Works and Days have nothing in common with this elevated image: while in the Theogony kings are praised for “settling causes with straight judgments” (Hes. Th. 85–6 διακρίνοντα θέμιστας / ἰθείῃσι δίκῃσι), in the Works and Days only Zeus can be invoked to “straighten with justice” (Op. 9 δίκῃ δ᾿ ἴθυνε θέμιστας) those causes that kings settle “crookedly,” “with crooked words,” and “with crooked judgments” (Hes. Op. 194 μύθοισι σκολιοῖς ἐνέπων, 262 δίκας σκολιῶς ἐνέποντες, 219 σκολιῇσι δίκῃσι, cf. 221 and 264).⁴⁷ Far from being an abstract notion, the kings’ “crookedness” in the Works and Days concerns a specific act of injustice committed against the poet himself. Hesiod illustrates the moral corruption of royal power by telling a banal family drama. He reports that he and his brother Perses had equally divided their inheritance (Hes. Op. 37 ἤδη μὲν γὰρ κλῆρον ἐδασσάμεθ᾿). The reason why Hesiod has to insist on respecting the “straight judgments, the best ones, those sanctioned by Zeus” (Hes. Op. 36 ἰθείῃσι δίκῃς, αἵ τ᾿ ἐκ Διός εἰσιν ἄρισται) is that Perses, as it seems, took more than was his due (Hes. Op. 37–8 ἄλλα τε πολλὰ / ἁρπάζων) with the intention to bribe the “gift-guzzling kings” (Hes. Op. 38–9 βασιλῆας / δωροφάγους) into allotting him the whole inheritance rather than his lawful half (cf. Hes. Op. 40 νήπιοι, οὐδὲ ἴσασιν ὅσῳ πλέον ἥμισυ παντός).⁴⁸ Now that kings turn out to be prone not only to violating the principles of divine justice in general but also to committing acts of injustice against singers, the idea of a symbiotic relationship with kings loses the sanctified aura that it had in the Theogony and becomes a trivial exchange of material favours, while royal power itself becomes transformed from a faithful image of the rule of Zeus into an undignified instance of the right of the stronger prevalent among animals. The fable of the hawk and the nightingale shows that, like the hawk, the kings are free to do whatever they want to those who are weaker, e.g. to eat them for dinner (Hes. Op. 209 δεῖπνον δ᾿, αἴ κ᾿ ἐθέλω, ποιήσομαι)—even if, like the nightingale (or like Hesiod), they happen to be singers (Hes. Op. 208 καὶ ἀοιδὸν ἐοῦσαν).⁴⁹ The moral of this fable, which Hesiod hopes will be clear to ⁴⁷ Kumaniecki 1963; West 1978, 48–52; Thalmann 1984, 56–62; Heath 1985, 245–53; Hamilton 1989, 53–84; Golla 2016, 21–38. On the central part of the Works and Days as a coherent “treatise on justice,” see Beall 2005/6. On the connections between work and justice in the Works and Days, see Erbse 1993; Calame 2004; Edwards 2004, 19–21. On the Hesiodic kings’ legal authority, see Edwards 2004, 118–23. Cf. Tandy 1997, 203–34; Nelson 1998, 34–6. ⁴⁸ It is not entirely clear whether Perses has already bribed the kings or is still planning to do so. See e.g. Gagarin 1974; Schmidt 1986, 19–28; Blümer 2001 (vol. 2), 5–17; Clay 2003, 34–6; Beall 2004, 6; Edwards 2004, 43–4; Canevaro 2015, 28. ⁴⁹ Pace Nelson 1997 and 1998, 77–81, who defends the idea of the hawk signifying Zeus and the nightingale the kings. For a discussion of other interpretations, see van Noorden 2014, 59–64; Canevaro 2015, 54–60.

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kings (202 νῦν δ᾿ αἶνον βασιλεῦσιν ἐρέω φρονέουσι καὶ αὐτοῖς), seems to be precisely that, by alienating those who create exalted images of their royal power, kings will be revealed for what they are—greedy predators striving for material gain. The Works and Days as a whole can be read as an eloquent illustration of that moral: while the kings of the Theogony are “from Zeus” and while the Homeric poems draw clear distinctions between the aristocratic ideal and its distortions (between the indexical essentialism of Achilles and the symbolic authority of Agamemnon as well as between Odysseus rightfully protecting his royal power and the suitors whose royal appearance cannot hide their beggar-like hunger for someone else’s food), the kings of the Works and Days are completely stripped of any poetic mystique and portrayed as a homogeneous class of unscrupulous liars. Perses is beguiled by the kings’ “crooked” words that he hears at the agora (Hes. Op. 29 ἀγορῆς ἐπακουόν), and his plan to bribe the kings so as to get hold of Hesiod’s share of the inheritance puts him in the same category of “freeriders.” The protreptic rhetoric of the poem is based on the notion that, although he has strayed from the right path, Perses is fundamentally able to make the right choice, to mend his ways, and to live in accordance with the principles of justice sanctioned by Zeus.⁵⁰ On a closer look, all of the poem’s parables, myths, and exhortations turn out to pursue the same rhetorical goal—to “straighten” the addressee’s judgment by directing it away from the “crookedness” of the kings and towards the principles of justice sanctioned by Zeus. The brief hymn to Zeus with which the poem begins (Hes. Op. 1–10) is followed by a parable in which two mythologized images of Strife are emphatically contrasted with each other—the bad Eris, responsible for violence and war (Hes. Op. 14 ἣ μὲν γὰρ πόλεμόν τε κακὸν καὶ δῆριν ὀφέλλει), and the good Eris, placed by Zeus “at the roots of the earth” (Hes. Op. 19 γαίης ἐν ῥίζῃσι), who urges even a lazy man to work hard so as to outdo his competitors (Hes. Op. 20).⁵¹ Hesiod’s emphasis that there are indeed two Erides rather than one (Hes. Op. 11–12 οὐκ ἄρα μοῦνον ἔην Ἐρίδων γένος, ἀλλ᾿ ἐπὶ γαῖαν / εἰσὶ δύω) is a comment on the uniform concept of Eris in mythological poetry—not only in

⁵⁰ On Hesiod’s “paraenetic rhetoric,” see Schmidt 1986. ⁵¹ On the meaning of “envy” in this passage (cf. Hes. Op. 23–6 ζηλοῖ δέ τε γείτονα γείτων, κτλ.), see Hunter 2014, 5–7, with references. On the role of competition in the Works and Days, see Hamilton 1989, 59–61.

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76  :    Hesiod’s Theogony but also in the Homeric tradition.⁵² Not only does the bad Eris (Hes. Op. 15 σχετλίη) evoke the Eris that Hesiod himself describes in the Theogony as the mother of a lengthy list of negatively connoted abstractions pertaining both to the human body (Hunger, Battles, Agony, Murder) and to human speech (Falsehoods, Lying Words, Disputes, and the personified Oath severely punishing perjurers),⁵³ but his emphasis that humans only honour her because they are forced to do so by the will of the gods (Hes. Op. 15–16 ὑπ᾿ ἀνάγκης / ἀθανάτων βουλῇσιν Ἔριν τιμῶσι βαρεῖαν) also conjures up the image of eris in the proem to the Iliad where the origins of the strife between Achilles and Agamemnon (Hom. Il. 1.6 ἐρίσαντε, 1.8 ἔριδι) are attributed to the will of Zeus (Hom. Il. 1.5 Διὸς δ᾿ ἐτελείετο βουλή). It is particularly important to the distinction that Hesiod draws between the destructive Eris of war and the competitive Eris of productive labour that what serves as the arena of Eris in the Iliad used to be an agricultural landscape, which still retains visible traces of its peaceful past.⁵⁴ By repeatedly mentioning Eris in conjunction with agriculture, Homer reveals both superficial similarities and fundamental differences between warfare and peaceful work: the Achaeans and the Trojans preparing to clash with each other are compared in Book 11 to two groups of reapers moving towards each other from the opposite sides of the field with Eris rejoicing at the approaching bloodshed (Il 11.73 Ἔρις δ᾿ ἄρα χαῖρε πολύστονος εἰσορόωσα); the mention of Eris in the description of the City at War on the shield of Achilles in Book 18 (Il. 18.535 ἐν δ᾿ Ἔρις) is followed by the description of a group of ploughmen urged to speed up their progress by the prospect of a glass of wine that they will receive at the end of each round (Il. 18.541–9); and the appearance of Eris in Book 20 signals the beginning of the most gory battle scene of the Iliad (Il. 20.48 ὦρτο δ᾿ Ἔρις κρατερὴ λαοσσόος)—the scene that culminates in a simile in which Achilles’ horses that tread on Trojan corpses are compared to oxen grinding barley with their feet on the threshing floor (Il. 20.495–9). ⁵² Thus, Hesiod himself seems to anticipate his reception in later Greek literature as an antipode of Homer. On the ways in which Hesiod’s poem engenders its own reception, see Canevaro 2015, esp. 48–50. On Homer and Hesiod as an “inseparable duo” in ancient reception, see Koning 2010. Recent years have witnessed a veritable explosion of studies on the reception of Hesiod in antiquity: Irwin 2005, 155–98; Koning 2010; Boys-Stones—Haubold 2010; Hunter 2014; van Noorden 2014; Canevaro 2015 (with a broader theoretical focus). On the vexed question of the relative chronology of Homer and Hesiod, see e.g. Blümer 2001 (vol. 1), 107–260; Koiv 2011; Golla 2016, 60–5. ⁵³ Hes. Th. 226–32. Cf. Op. 804 Ὅρκον . . . τὸν Ἔρις τέκε πῆμ᾿ ἐπιόρκοις: Scully 2015, 37. On connections between the Eris passages in the Theogony and in the Works and Days, see e.g. Hamilton 1989, 54–7; Gagarin 1990; Nagler 1992; Most 1993, 76–82; Blümer 2001, 35–50; Canevaro 2015, 104–8. ⁵⁴ There are still boundary stones visible on the battlefield (Hom. Il. 21.405 οὖρον ἀρούρης), which gods now use as weapons.

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While Homer uses his indivisible Eris as an emblem of war that completely engulfs the peaceful world of agriculture, Hesiod’s splitting of the concept allows him to envisage productive labour as a means of making violence and rapacity disappear without a trace. Although Hesiod’s bad Eris is related to the martial Eris of the Iliad, in the peaceful world of the Works and Days she can only exist in a figurative form reminiscent of the “verbal” progeny that Eris has in the Theogony—as a war of words fought by the kings at the agora (Hes. Op. 28–9). Her unmistakable Homeric/aristocratic associations imply that, when embraced by Perses, the bad Eris becomes a symbol of his futile attempt to live in a world to which he does not belong—the world of epic warfare and aristocratic privilege.⁵⁵ The discrepancy between his non-aristocratic status and the “kingly” ways that he strives to adopt reveals his pursuit to be as “crooked” as the words of the kings, if not more so: by imitating the kings, Perses not only reproduces the characteristic “crookedness” with which they use language to obtain what they are not entitled to possess but also commits a blatant act of “cultural misappropriation”—adopting a cultural protocol incompatible with his own social standing. The “straightening” effect of Hesiod’s rhetoric consists in reducing the bad Eris to the status of a cultural fantasy and replacing her with the only force that reliably leads to prosperity in the “real” world that Perses and Hesiod both inhabit. That force is the good Eris whose domain comprises not only agriculture but also every other acquisitive activity based on competition with one’s equals (pottery, construction, poetry, and, curiously enough, even mendicancy, Hes. Op. 17–26)— rather than on violence against the weaker.⁵⁶ The myth of Pandora also serves to demonstrate that the only way for people like Perses and Hesiod to survive in the “real” world is not to imitate the rapacity of the kings but to do their own honest work, irrespective of what it is. Like the bad Eris, Pandora has a prototype in the Theogony—in the episode in which, on Zeus’ behest, Hephaestus creates the first woman to punish men for Prometheus’ theft of fire.⁵⁷ In the Works and Days, Hesiod adapts this story to the rhetorical strategy that he now pursues. The fact that the nameless “maiden” of the Theogony now becomes Pandora—the name explicitly etymologized in the text as “a gift of all gods” (Hes. Op. 81–2 Πανδώρην, ὅτι πάντες Ὀλύμπια δώματ᾿ ἔχοντες / δῶρον ἐδώρησαν)⁵⁸—evokes ⁵⁵ Cf. Schmidt 1986, 80–121. ⁵⁶ Hamilton 1989, 57–66; Zarecki 2007. ⁵⁷ On the Pandora myth in the Theogony and in the Works and Days in general, Casanova 1979; Most 1993, 89–90; Blümer 2001 (vol. 2), 51–200; Clay 2003, 100–29; Musäus 2004, 31–56; Canevaro 2015, 108–15. ⁵⁸ Clay 2003, 123–4.

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78  :    the crucial role that divine gifts play in the Iliad. Among the gifts that humans receive from the gods in the Iliad are not only beautiful artefacts created by Hephaestus, such as the shield of Achilles, but also the beauty of the human body:⁵⁹ as Paris stresses in Iliad 3, humans have no choice but to accept divine gifts no matter what they are (Il. 3.65–6 οὔ τοι ἀπόβλητ᾿ ἐστὶ θεῶν ἐρικυδέα δῶρα, / ὅσσα κεν αὐτοὶ δῶσιν, ἑκὼν δ᾿ οὐκ ἄν τις ἕλοιτο)—even if, like the gift of Helen’s beauty that he had himself received from Aphrodite, they lead to disaster.⁶⁰ The Pandora of the Works and Days is an epitome of the Homeric notion of a divine gift. Offered as a gift to Epimetheus, she is both a divine artefact crafted by Hephaestus and a living human body endowed by Aphrodite with irresistible attractiveness (Hes. Op. 60–85) no less treacherous than Helen’s:⁶¹ as Helen causes the Trojan War, so Pandora comes into the world with her infamous jar, from which she scatters all kinds of evils (Hes. Op. 94–105), helping Zeus to enact his determination to hide from the humans the “sources of livelihood” (Hes. Op. 42–4) and thereby to force them to work for a living.⁶² Addressed to Perses, the moral of this story is exceedingly clear. Prometheus warning his brother Epimetheus against accepting the “all-gift” of Pandora forms a transparent analogy to Hesiod urging his brother to abandon his plan to bribe the “gift-devouring” kings in the hope of enriching himself at someone else’s cost rather than by doing honest work.⁶³ Unlike Paris, but like Epimetheus, Perses has a choice between accepting and rejecting what he seems to take for an attractive “divine gift.” The goal of Hesiod’s rhetoric is to allow him to make the right choice.⁶⁴ With her dazzling surface concealing a sinister interior, Pandora is not only an epitome of semantic “crookedness” in general but also spells out the danger inherent in succumbing to the irresistible promises that the kings make to Perses.⁶⁵ For Perses, the Pandora-like ⁵⁹ On gifts in the Iliad in general, see Finley 1954; Donlan 1982 and 1997; Scheid-Tissiner 1994; Seaford 1994, 1–29; Scodel 2008, 33–48. The divine realm is in the Iliad the domain of beauty par excellence, and gods can also enhance the beauty of humans: e.g. Il. 3.390–4 (Aphrodite snatching Paris from the battlefield and making him look κάλλεί τε στίλβων καὶ εἵμασι); Il. 5.1–8 (Athena making Diomedes look like a god; cf. 5.184–7). ⁶⁰ Cf. Il. 3.156–60. See Felson—Slatkin 2004, esp. 94–5. ⁶¹ Cf. Brown 1997. On Pandora as an artefact, see Wickkiser 2010. ⁶² Byrne 1988, Blümer 2001 (vol. 2), 179–200; Clay 2003, 117–25; Zarecki 2007. For a brief summary of different interpretations of the possible contents of Pandora’s jar, see Canevaro 2015, 187–8. The significance of “hope” (Hes. Op. 96 Ἐλπίς) in the context of the Pandora episode is one of the most contested issues of Hesiodic scholarship: Clay 2009, 77–8. For the possibility of the jar containing goods rather than evils, see Beall 1989; Musäus 2004; Krajczynski—Rösler 2006; Wolkow 2007. ⁶³ Cf. Jensen 1966,15–16; Walcot 1966, 62, 81; Brown 1997. ⁶⁴ On the rhetorical function of the Pandora myth in the Works and Days, see Clay 2003, 117–25; Zarecki 2007. ⁶⁵ Cf. Nelson 1998, 65–6.

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promises of the kings would be not only treacherous but also preposterous: by being firmly associated both with heroic epic and with the aristocratic privilege enjoyed by the “gift-devouring” kings, Pandora, like the bad Eris, is revealed to be an empty cipher in a world in which everybody has to work to avoid hunger.⁶⁶ The absurdity of Perses’ embracing the semantic “crookedness” associated with Pandora is further underscored by the fact that, as an aetiology of the unconditional necessity to work, the gift of Pandora reveals that the choice between a life of “gift-guzzling” and a life of productive labour is illusory anyway. The myth of the races tells a different story to convey the same message. Hesiod introduces this episode as an alternative explanation of the necessity to work epitomized by Pandora (Hes. Op. 106–7).⁶⁷ What the three metal races (gold, silver, and bronze), followed by the race of the heroes, have in common is that none of them had to worry about food. The paradisiacal conditions enjoyed by the god-like Golden Race (Hes. Op. 112 ὥστε θεοί), for whom the earth provided an unlimited abundance of food (Hes. Op. 117–18), do not seem to have deteriorated all that much for the Silver Race (Hes. Op. 127–42),⁶⁸ and although life must have become more difficult for the warcrazed Bronze Race, they continued to enjoy a reasonably comfortable life because, like the gods in the Iliad, they did not eat bread (Hes. Op. 146–7 οὐδέ τι σῖτον / ἤσθιον, cf. Il. 5.341 οὐ γὰρ σῖτον ἔδουσ᾿) and, therefore, did not have to work to obtain food. Finally, the heroes are after death transposed to the Isles of the Blest to enjoy a carefree existence comparable in nutritional terms to that of the Golden Race (Hes. Op. 172–3).⁶⁹ All four races are thus ontologically different from us—the Iron Race suffering from the dire necessity to work for a living (Hes. Op. 174–201, esp. 176–8). But even this tough life of ours has its share of benefits (Hes. Op. 179) in comparison to what is to come afterwards: the growing moral decay heralds the imminent end of our race, too, which Zeus is bound to destroy like all of its predecessors (Hes. Op. 180).⁷⁰ The main function of this passage is not so much to express nostalgia for an idealized past as to contribute to the rhetorical strategy whereby Hesiod seeks to lead his addressee away from the “crookedness” of the kings and towards ⁶⁶ On the “economic” aspect of Hesiod’s Pandora, see Zeitlin 1995a. ⁶⁷ See van Noorden 2014, 43–88. Cf. Golla 2016, 163–216. ⁶⁸ Brown 1998, 388–9. The Silver Race is characterized as μάκαρες (Hes. Op. 122), which clearly puts them in the same category as the Homeric gods: West 1978, 193: “μάκαρες unqualified in the poetic language almost always means ‘the gods’.” ⁶⁹ Cf. Brown 1998; van Noorden 2014, 33–9. Besides, the Heroic Race is θεῖον, consists of ἡμίθεοι (Hes. Op. 159–60): Hamilton 1989, 69. ⁷⁰ Cf. Schmidt 1986, 110–18.

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80  :    the “straightness” of divine justice.⁷¹ The ages preceding ours—notwithstanding the decreasing value of the three metals and the gradual decrease in honour allotted to each of the metal races after death—do not easily lend themselves for squeezing into the pattern of a steady moral decline.⁷² The indolent and virtuous Golden Race (Hes. Op. 112–24), which disappears for no explicitly named reason,⁷³ gives way to the Silver Race that, while similarly indolent (they spend most of their lives as children, never really growing up), is anything but virtuous so that its extinction becomes a just punishment for the defiance that they show by refusing to worship the gods (Hes. Op. 130–9). The Bronze Race is as godless as their immediate precursors (the only god they do worship is Ares),⁷⁴ but they outgrow the childlike idleness of the Silver Race and, caring for nothing but war, end up exterminating themselves with no intervention on the part of the gods (Hes. Op. 145–6 and 152–3). Finally, the Race of the Heroes is as warlike as the Bronze Race, but they are marked by a much greater propensity for virtue and justice,⁷⁵ which accounts for the fact that the post-mortem existence they earn for themselves by their valour is barely distinguishable from the life of the Golden Race. From our Iron-Race perspective, the entire cycle of the extinct races is not only completely separated from us in temporal and spatial terms (they are forever hidden either under the earth or, like the heroes, on the Isles of the Blest at the very edge of the earth: Hes. Op. 121, 140, 153, 168), but is also marked as belonging to the ontologically unattainable realm of mythical fantasy fundamentally different from the material reality inhabited by us. As a consequence, the only moral lesson one can learn from this mythical vision seems to be, quite simply, that we are not them—that for us neither mythical indolence nor mythical belligerence are viable options and that, if we nonetheless do embrace those outlandish notions, as Perses is inclined to do, we are similarly doomed to extinction. Hesiod’s addressee is thus once again confronted with the same choice as in the parable of the two Erides and in the Pandora myth—a choice between a life of productive labour, which constitutes the only way ⁷¹ Most scholars see the progression of the five ages a parable of steady decline. See e.g. Zanker 2013, with references. On the difficulties involved in reading the Hesiodic myth in these terms, see e.g. Most 1997. ⁷² On the patterning within the myth of the races, see e.g. Vernant 1966; Gatz 1967, 28–33; Nagy 1979, 151–73; Querbach 1985; Sihvola 1989; Most 1997; Nelson 1998, 68–76; van Noorden 2014, 75–82. ⁷³ The reason for their disappearance is of course not anything they do but Zeus, who puts an end to the reign of Cronus: Brown 1998, 388. ⁷⁴ Cf. Nelson 1998, 71: “[By] any traditional standards, the earlier Silver Age, which honours neither the right nor the gods, is far worse than the Bronze.” ⁷⁵ The race of the heroes is δικαιότερον καὶ ἄρειον (158), yet they vanish because of their belligerence (Hes. Op. 161–2).

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to preserve at least a modicum of benefits allotted to the Iron Race, and a “crooked” imitation of a self-evident cultural fantasy, which bodes an inevitable self-destruction. As I mentioned above, the fable of the hawk and the nightingale (Hes. Op. 202–12), which Hesiod tells right after the myth of the races, portrays the kings as proponents of the right of the stronger—a moral attitude worthy of wild beasts rather than humans. Hesiod’s comparison of kings to hunting animals clearly evokes the world of Homeric similes,⁷⁶ in which birds of prey, along with other predators, serve to emphasize the superiority of different gods and heroes over their weaker enemies, who are in turn compared to doves and hares.⁷⁷ In Hesiod, however, the imagery that Homer uses to inspire awe and admiration becomes a means of characterizing the kings’ behaviour as literally subhuman. Turning again to Perses, Hesiod describes the political system dominated by “the gift-guzzling men” (Hes. Op. 220–1 ἄνδρες . . . δωροφάγοι) as a city that has exiled justice (Hes. Op. 214–24). Hesiod’s image of the Unjust City punished by Zeus with hunger, plague, and death for the “crooked judgments” of its rulers (Hes. Op. 221 σκολιῇς δὲ δίκῃς κρίνωσι θέμιστας) echoes a passage from the Iliad in which Zeus punishes men “who settle crooked judgments at the agora with violence and who have driven justice away” (Il. 16.384–92, esp. 387–8 οἳ βίῃ εἰν ἀγορῇ σκολιὰς κρίνωσι θέμιστας, / ἐκ δὲ δίκην ἐλάσωσιν),⁷⁸ and the list of punishments that Hesiod threatens Zeus will inflict on the unjust culminates in what is distinctly reminiscent of the outcome of the Trojan War—the destruction of a great army, a city wall, and a fleet (Hes. Op. 246–7). By contrast, a city that unconditionally embraces the “straight judgments” of divine justice (Hes. Op. 225–6 δίκας . . . ἰθείας) is portrayed as enjoying a life of peace, prosperity, procreative security, and nutritional abundance comparable to the life of the Golden Race (Hes. Op. 225–37, cf. 115–18).⁷⁹ Once again, Hesiod drives home the same message as he has already conveyed three times: by portraying the behaviour of the kings in ⁷⁶ Cf. von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff 1928, 64: “Es ist eigentlich keine Tierfabel, sondern nur ein Gleichnis.” See also Erbse 1993, 12–13. ⁷⁷ e.g. Il. 13.62–5. Cf. Il. 15.236–8 and 690–3. See also Il.17.673–82 (Menelaos is like an eagle preparing to attack a hare); 21.252–3 (Achilles is like an eagle); 21.494–5 (Artemis flees from Hera like a dove fleeing from a falcon). On similes as a means of characterization in the Iliad, see Ready 2011. On the system of similes in Homer, see Minchin 2001, 132–60; Ready 2011. For a different approach to the possible Homeric background of this fable, see Steiner 2007, 178–88. On the fable’s intertextual links with the Theogony, see Mordine 2006. ⁷⁸ Kullmann 1985, 9–10; Yamagata 1994, 61–92. ⁷⁹ On parallels between the Just City and the myth of the races, see van Noorden 2014, 66–7. On Dike in the Works and Days, see Gagarin 1973; Schmidt 1986, 125–35. Cf. Gagarin 1992.

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82  :    epic terms, he exposes it as a mere poetic fantasy—one not only counterproductive (for the epic arrogance of the unjust inevitably results in epic punishments) but also patently foolish (for the unjust act like animals)—and presents the adoption of the “straight judgments” sanctioned by Zeus as the only way to live a genuinely good life in the “real” world. One of the manifestations of the profound injustice of the kings is that Zeus does not punish them directly.⁸⁰ Instead, the cities governed by them have to suffer vicariously for the transgressions of their unjust rulers (Hes. Op. 240–1, cf. 260–2). Granted, the kings may indirectly harm themselves by harming their subjects (Hes. Op. 265–6). And yet the impunity that they know they enjoy makes it rather unlikely that the supernatural imagery that Hesiod employs to threaten them—Zeus’ invisible “guardians” (Hes. Op. 253 Ζηνὸς φύλακες) and the goddess of justice herself (Hes. Op. 256 Δίκη) reporting Zeus about the dealings of the unjust (Hes. Op. 259–60)—will succeed in forcing them to “straighten their pronouncements” (Hes. Op. 263 ἰθύνετε μύθους):⁸¹ no matter how much one hopes that Zeus will prevent injustice from prevailing (Hes. Op. 273), it remains a fact for Hesiod that, in the political world ruled over by the kings, it simply does not pay off to be just (Hes. Op. 270–2). But there is a tiny glimpse of hope. Although the Just City described by Hesiod will probably never become reality, it is possible for an individual to live a life of justice. There is after all no compulsion to act in accordance with the kings’ conviction that the stronger are allowed to “eat” the weaker (cf. Hes. Op. 209). As Hesiod now stresses again, the right of the stronger practised by the kings is only at home in the animal realm (Hes. Op. 277–8 ἰχθύσι μὲν καὶ θηρσὶ καὶ οἰωνοῖς πετεηνοῖς / ἔσθειν ἀλλήλους). Humans, by contrast, are expected to live in harmony with the principles of justice dictated by Zeus (Hes. Op. 279 ἀνθρώποισι δ᾿ ἔδωκε δίκην), for they will sooner or later incur severe punishments if they diverge from those principles (Hes. Op. 282–5). In contrast to the kings, who are unlikely to ever “straighten” their “crooked judgments,” people like Hesiod and Perses have a choice between the “easy road of malice” (Hes. Op. 287–8) and the “arduous path of righteousness” (Hes. Op. 289–91). Hesiod makes it clear that justice never comes naturally: it is indeed much easier to be unjust. But justice is possible, and although its attainment involves hard work, this work will eventually pay off, turning

⁸⁰ Cf. Clay 2003, 149, who notes that “[t]he certainty of his [sc. Zeus’] capacity to reward, but, more especially, to punish the wicked . . . diminishes as the poem progresses.” ⁸¹ On Dike in the Works and Days, see Gagarin 1973; Schmidt 1986, 125–35. Cf. Gagarin 1992.

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justice into one’s second nature (Hes. Op. 292 ῥηιδίη δὴ ἔπειτα πέλει, χαλεπή περ ἐοῦσα). Up to this point, Hesiod has tirelessly gone in circles, communicating the same idea to his addressee no less than five times (in the parable of the two Erides, the myth of Pandora, the myth of the race, the comparison between the just and the unjust city, and the contrast between the path of malice and the path of virtue)—the idea that the “crooked judgments” of the kings are not a viable option for someone who, like Perses or Hesiod, cannot rely on aristocratic privilege and that the only humanly possible way to combine prosperity with justice is to do one’s work as best as one can, be it the work of a farmer or the work a poet. Now that the “crookedness” of the kings has been confined to the realm of cultural fantasy, Hesiod proceeds to formulate the simple ethical principles that his myths and parables have prepared his addressee to accept as true—the unconditional necessity to work to avoid hunger and the sense of security that inheres in possessions that one has acquired by one’s own productive labour rather than by violence and deceit (Hes. Op. 294–326). By effectively eliminating the kings from his ethical universe, Hesiod constructs an ideal reality in which one can only possess so much as one has produced oneself and in which there is no danger of losing one’s property in an unjust lawsuit.⁸² Since no institutionalized state control exists in this imaginary ideal world, the social status of its inhabitants depends only on the extent to which they obey the universal principles of justice—treating their family and neighbours with respect, worshipping the gods (Hes. Op. 327–41), and, most importantly, working as hard as they can. Those who follow these principles are guaranteed to prosper and to enjoy a high degree of authority, while those who fail to do so are automatically reduced to poverty (Hes. Op. 342–67), spending their lives begging at the doors of their more successful neighbours (cf. Hes. Op. 392–7).⁸³ Since prosperity gained by productive labour constitutes the only token of authority in this ideal world, social interactions among its inhabitants are determined exclusively by concerns with reciprocity and self-sufficiency:⁸⁴ one should only be nice to those who are nice to one (Hes. Op. 342 τὸν φιλέοντ᾿ ἐπὶ δαῖτα καλεῖν, τὸν δ᾿ ἐχθρὸν ἐᾶσαι) and only give to those from whom one has received gifts in the past (Hes. Op. 353–60), always making sure that one can “draw on what one has” rather than “needing what is not there” (Hes. Op. 366–7 ἐσθλὸν μὲν παρεόντος ἑλέσθαι, ⁸² See Edwards 2013, on Hesiod’s “ethical geography.” ⁸³ Cf. Millett 1984, 91–2; Marsilio 2000, 5–7; Edwards 2004, 80–126; Canevaro 2015, 26–7. ⁸⁴ On reciprocity, see Millett 1984, 100–2; Edwards 2004, 89–91. On self-sufficiency, see Tandy 1997, 214–27; Canevaro 2015, esp. 83–142.

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84  :    πῆμα δὲ θυμῷ / χρηίζειν ἀπεόντος) and linking every vital decision that one makes (e.g. how many sons to beget or how many slaves to own) to the question of whether or not it will contribute to the self-sufficiency of one’s household (Hes. Op. 376–82).⁸⁵ Constructed in opposition to the “crookedness” of the “gift-devouring” kings, whose wealth has been produced by others and whose words do not mean what they appear to mean on the surface, Hesiod’s ideal world transforms the tangible materiality of the products of one’s labour into an incontrovertible proof (into a non-arbitrary, indexical, sign) of one’s adherence to the principles of justice. The agricultural calendar that Hesiod now proceeds to explicate at length corroborates the “truthfulness” of this system by grounding it in the immutable structure of the cosmos.

The Art of Truth-Making The main leitmotif of the second half of the poem (Hes. Op. 383–828) is that, in order to live a genuinely happy life (Hes. Op. 826 εὐδαίμων τε καὶ ὄλβιος), one has to do everything at exactly the right time (e.g. Hes. Op. 422 ὥρια ἔργα).⁸⁶ The life of a farmer, whose success in producing a sufficient amount of food depends on the extent to which he synchronizes his work with the cycles of nature, functions as a metonymy (as well as a vivid illustration) of the central significance of the “right moment” for every single aspect of human life (cf. Hes. Op. 694 καιρὸς δ᾿ ἐπὶ πᾶσιν ἄριστος).⁸⁷ Hesiod’s schematic presentation of the solar calendar (Hes. Op. 383–617) casts agriculture as a semiotic system in which the success of the farmer’s productive labour functions as a non-arbitrary index of a life lived in harmony with the visible signs of nature.⁸⁸ One should begin to harvest when the Pleiades rise and to plough when they set (Hes. Op. 382–4), for one will be reduced to poverty (Hes. Op. 394–5) unless one does everything at exactly the ⁸⁵ Edwards 2004, 84. Cf. Goldhill 2010, 124. ⁸⁶ Cf. Jones 1984; Lardinois 1998, 328–9; Nelson 1998, 48–58. On the structure of the second half of the Works and Days, see West 1978, 52–9; Hamilton 1989, 67–87; Beall 2001; Canevaro 2015, 72–82; Golla 2016, 217–31. ⁸⁷ On the notion of kairos in the Works and Days, see Jones 1984; Lardinois 1998, 324–5, with references to earlier literature. See also Grene 1991, 158. ⁸⁸ Hesiod’s principles are emphatically universal and ahistorical. See West 1978, 3–25, on fully unrelated strands of “wisdom literature”—from ancient Mesopotamia to the much more recent traditions in Siberia, Africa, and Oceania—all of them overlapping with Hesiod to a remarkable degree. Cf. Schmitz 2004. On the Near Eastern parallels in particular, see e.g. Walcot 1966, 80–103; West 1978, 3–25; Rutherford 2009, 17–19. For a valuable comparison between Hesiod and contemporary Greek peasants, see Walcot 1970. Cf. Nelson 1998, 36–7.

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right time (Hes. Op. 392 ὥρια). The rise of Sirius is the best time to cut wood and to make a plough, for the wood is then dry and not infested by woodworm (Hes. Op. 417–22). When one hears the voice of the crane, which happens around the same time every year (Hes. Op. 448–9 γεράνου φωνήν . . . ἐνιαύσια κεκληγυίης), one should feed the oxen and begin to plow (Hes. Op. 450–2), for plowing and sowing at the right moment (Hes. Op. 460 ἀρόων ἀρότοιο καθ᾿ ὥρην) is essential for producing abundant crops (Hes. Op. 473–8) while any divergence from the ploughing schedule (Hes. Op. 479–84) puts one’s success at the mercy of the weather conditions in spring—a risk that one should by all means try to avoid (Hes. Op. 485–92). After Arcturus rises but immediately before the swallow returns, one should prune the vines (Hes. Op. 564–7). And when snails begin to climb up plants (Hes. Op. 571 ὁπότ᾿ ἂν φερέοικος ἀπὸ χθονὸς ἂμ φυτὰ βαίνῃ), one should get ready for harvest (Hes. Op. 575).⁸⁹ The only moments when one is granted a temporary relief are the coldest time of winter and the warmest time of summer (Hes. Op. 504–35 and 582–96).⁹⁰ During these brief spells of inactivity, one also remains thoroughly at one with nature: in perfect harmony with the weather, one is urged either to seek shelter from the icy cold⁹¹ or, in the summer heat, to drink wine in the shade of the trees that resonate with the monotonous chirping of cicadas.⁹² But at all other times, there is no excuse for idleness, and there is a task suitable for every season. The winter months should generally be spent making metal implements, warm clothes, and shoes (cf. Hes. Op. 493–503, 536–63). And once one can venture outside, there are always other things that one has to do to avoid poverty and hunger (Hes. Op. 496–7).⁹³ Unless one is prepared to accept the risk that all of one’s efforts will remain in vain (cf. Hes. Op. 411 οὐ γὰρ ἐτωσιεργὸς ἀνὴρ πίμπλησι καλιήν),⁹⁴ one has to begin to work before sunrise during the harvest period, to get one’s slaves to winnow the grain when Orion first appears (Hes. Op. 597–608), and then, “when Orion and Sirius are in mid-heaven,” to cut grapes for winemaking (Hes. Op. 609–14). With the setting of the Pleiades, the Hyades, and Orion, the year has finally come full

⁸⁹ Note the constant emphasis on the synchronization between one’s activities and the signs provided by nature throughout this section: e.g. Hes. Op. 576 τημοῦτος, 582–5 ἦμος . . . τῆμος, 609–11 εὖτ᾿ . . . τότε. ⁹⁰ Cf. West 1978, 54. ⁹¹ On the winter scene, see Hamilton 1989, 70–1. ⁹² For a detailed study of the “midsummer festival,” see Petropoulos 1994, with references. ⁹³ Cf. Edwards 2004, 50–4. ⁹⁴ Cf. Hamilton 1989, 70. The opposite of Hesiod’s ideal farmer is a thief who is absolutely “out of synch” with natural cycles because he sleeps during the day (Hes. Op. 605 μή ποτέ σ᾿ ἡμερόκοιτος ἀνὴρ ἀπὸ χρήμαθ᾿ ἕληται).

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86  :    circle: we are back in the ploughing season, and another year begins which will proceed in exactly the same manner as the previous one (Hes. Op. 615–17).⁹⁵ Needless to say, Hesiod’s agricultural calendar is not a manual of farming written by an expert: there is no doubt that no incipient farmer would have ever acquired any useful knowledge from listening to Hesiod’s perfectly selfevident precepts.⁹⁶ The section on seafaring, which comes next (Hes. Op. 618–94), makes it obvious that what Hesiod is primarily interested in is not teaching a particular practical skill but communicating the concept of “timeliness” as such.⁹⁷ Predictably, the only specific information that Hesiod imparts about seafaring concerns time: in autumn, one should avoid sailing altogether (Hes. Op. 618–29); it is best to start a voyage “fifty days after the solstice” (Hes. Op. 663–4) and to return before the beginning of the autumn rains (Hes. Op. 673–7); and it is permissible, but much more hazardous, to sail in spring when the leaves have just sprouted on a fig tree (Hes. Op. 678–87). On the surface, seafaring seems to resemble farming in being an illustration of the general necessity to do everything at the right moment (cf. Hes. Op. 694 καιρὸς δ᾿ ἐπὶ πᾶσιν ἄριστος). But not only is the precarious pursuit of seafaring declared to be an acquisitive activity by far inferior to the security provided by farming (Hes. Op. 618–23, cf. 646–8)⁹⁸ but its status as an emblem of “timeliness” also emerges as rather problematic in comparison to agriculture. Hesiod mentions his own father as someone who sailed exactly at the right time (cf. Hes. Op. 630 ὡραῖον . . . πλοῖον): driven by poverty, he left Aeolian Cyme and, after a safe passage, settled down in the Boeotian village of Ascra near the Helicon (Hes. Op. 631–40).⁹⁹ In the context of a poem so preeminently concerned with drawing distinctions between good and bad times (and especially in the context of a section on seafaring where observing the right moment is described as a matter of life and death), it is rather striking that it is plainly impossible to draw such a distinction in Ascra: the place is “bad in winter, painful in summer, and never good” (Hes. Op. 640 Ἄσκρῃ, χεῖμα κακῇ, θέρει ἀργαλέῃ, οὐδέ ποτ᾿ ἐσθλῇ).¹⁰⁰ By mentioning the ⁹⁵ Cf. Nelson 1998, 51–7. ⁹⁶ Nelson 1998, 50. On the occasionally self-contradictory nature of Hesiod’s precepts, see West 1978, 52. Cf. Heath 1985; Beall 2004. ⁹⁷ Nelson 1998, 57 and 2005, 337–40. ⁹⁸ On the status of trade in the Works and Days, see Edwards 2004, 51–4. On Hesiod’s view “from the periphery” (from what appears to be a deliberately archaizing viewpoint in comparison with the rapidly developing contemporary Greek world) as a reaction to the emergence of a “globalized” trade economy, see Tandy 1997, 194–228. ⁹⁹ On Hesiod’s seafaring father, see e.g. Griffith 1983, 61–2; Marsilio 2000, 37; Canevaro 2015, 90–1. ¹⁰⁰ On Hesiod’s Ascra, see Millett 1984; Edwards 2004, esp. 1–29, on attempts to historicize Hesiod’s Ascra.

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paradigmatic sea voyage of Greek epic—the departure of the Achaeans from Aulis to Troy—, Hesiod also draws attention to the fact that practising seafaring may generally amount to jumping from the frying pan into the fire: the Achaeans had to spend a stormy winter in Aulis before they could depart (Hes. Op. 652 μείναντες χειμῶνα), but their long-awaited sea voyage famously resulted not only in the capture of “the city of beautiful women” (Hes. Op. 653 Τροίην . . . καλλιγύναικα) but also in the countless deaths among the Achaeans themselves as well as in the survivors’ homecoming journeys aborted, or infinitely delayed, by the troubled seas.¹⁰¹ Hesiod, by contrast, who now takes it upon himself to teach his brother the principles of seafaring (Hes. Op. 648), openly admits to having no personal experience with it (Hes. Op. 649 οὔτε τι ναυτιλίης σεσοφισμένος οὔτε τι νηῶν) and reports that the only time that he ever took a boat was to sail from Aulis to Chalcis to attend a poetic contest at which his hymn won the first prize¹⁰²—a tripod that he promptly dedicated to the Heliconian Muses, from whom, as he now reminds us, he had originally learnt the art of song (Hes. Op. 654–9, cf. Th. 22–35). Of course, a trip over the Euripus strait, which belongs to the narrowest natural straits in the world (only forty metres at the narrowest spot), would hardly qualify as a sea voyage. The main reason why Hesiod mentions a journey to a poetic contest seems to consist in transforming the entire section on seafaring into a reflection on his own poetry. The two crossings of the Aegean (his father’s and the Achaeans’) reveal seafaring as a pursuit ridden with self-contradiction, a pursuit in which it is absolutely vital to observe the right moment but which at the same time brings one to places where observing the right moment becomes a thing of impossibility—the “never-good” Ascra or the uncontrollable contingency of the Trojan War. Hesiod, by contrast, not only vindicates his father’s sea voyage by positioning his own poetry as the only “good” activity in which one can engage in the “always bad” Ascra, turning it from a “timeless” place that thwarts all human efforts into a locus of “timeliness” where the poet’s apprenticeship to the Heliconian Muses bears fruit,¹⁰³ but also overwrites the sea voyage that had led to the catastrophe of the Trojan War with a report of a sure poetic victory that involved no casualties ¹⁰¹ Cf. Rosen 1990. ¹⁰² On the connections of this scene with the Certamen tradition, see Graziosi 2002, 168–77; Nagy 2009. On the Certamen tradition in general, see Koning 2010, 245–68. ¹⁰³ Cf. Clay 2003, 181, who draws attention to the so-called Herodotean Life of Homer, which derives Homer’s origins from Aeolian Cyme: “Hesiod’s supposedly autobiographical reference may then contain a metaphorical rather than a literal significance, suggesting a common origin for both poets, but also differentiating their poetic paths and careers. At any rate, as he tells us, Hesiod did not make the heroic journey to Troy, but his father, whether real or fictive, crossed the seas to miserable Ascra, so that his son might encounter the Muses at the foot of Helicon.”

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88  :    and which was neither preceded nor followed by sea storms. This report effectively replaces the “bad Eris” of epic warfare with the “good Eris” that enables Hesiod to outdo his poetic competitors.¹⁰⁴ Hesiod’s remark that all he knows about seafaring comes from the Muses rather than from first-hand experience (Hes. Op. 662 Μοῦσαι γάρ μ᾿ ἐδίδαξαν ἀθέσφατον ὕμνον ἀείδειν) suggests that the same may be true of his knowledge of farming—i.e. that for Hesiod farming, too, may first and foremost be a selfreferential metaphor.¹⁰⁵ But if the uncertainty of seafaring serves as a contrastive foil to Hesiod’s life as a poet, the “timeliness” of agriculture provides a formative model of how Hesiod “does things with words.” The straightforward correlation between the farmer’s productivity and his compliance with the cycles of nature serves as an analogy to how Hesiod envisages the pragmatics of his own poetic language. The signs of nature with which the farmer is expected to synchronize his works in order to increase the yield are both performative and true: the rise of the Pleiades and the song of the crane prompt one to start ploughing, the rise of Sirius signals the best time for woodcutting, snails climbing up plants urge one no longer to delay the harvest, and the “felicity” of all these signs (i.e. the farmer’s heeding the call and doing what they encourage him to do) simultaneously becomes a “natural” index of their truthfulness—an incontrovertible proof that manifests itself in the tangible materiality of the food that the farmer produces as a result of obeying them. The inherent truthfulness of these signs is further confirmed by the fact that any failure to comply with them results in all of one’s efforts becoming in vain (cf. Hes. Op. 411 ἐτωσιεργὸς ἀνήρ). This image of agricultural production helps Hesiod to enhance the impact of his protreptic rhetoric: both performative and true, the signs of nature provide a corroborative analogy to Hesiod’s claim that his moral exhortations are straightforward expressions of the divine truth; an obvious instance of material success derived from living in harmony with the signs of nature, the life of a farmer serves to conceptualize Hesiod’s claim that it is better for an individual to embrace the “straightness” of divine justice; and the image of a bad farmer “toiling in vain” as he neglects the transparent performativity of nature elucidates the disastrous consequences that Hesiod ascribes to imitating the “crookedness” of the kings. Hesiod’s text stages a process whereby the poet’s voice gradually gains an authority comparable to the unassailable authority that he himself ascribes to

¹⁰⁴ Dougherty 2001, 20–3; Koning 2010, 269–95; Hunter 2014, 86–8 and 302–15; van Noorden 2014, 5–7. ¹⁰⁵ Cf. Murnaghan 2006; Hunter 2014, 52–4.

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the signs of nature. After repeatedly drawing a contrast between the “crookedness” of the kings and the “straightness” of divine justice and after using the agricultural calendar to establish an analogy between the principles of justice and the undeniable “truth” of agricultural production, Hesiod proceeds to impart general precepts concerning marriage, social etiquette, and ritual purity (with numerous lines dedicated to the correct manner of making water)— precepts that, in contrast to most of the poem’s previous passages, are based neither on the prestige of poetic tradition nor on the visible signs of nature but solely on the poet’s own authority (Hes. Op. 695–764). What is more, when in the concluding section of the poem he categorizes the days of the lunar month into favourable and unfavourable, he does so without appealing to any authority other than his own recondite knowledge of the truth—knowledge accessible to very few (Hes. Op. 813 παῦροι δ᾿ αὖτε ἴσασι, 818 παῦροι δέ τ᾿ ἀληθέα κικλήσκουσι, 820 παῦροι δ᾿ αὖτε, 824 παῦροι δὲ ἴσασιν) but indispensable for leading a truly happy life (Hes. Op. 826 εὐδαίμων τε καὶ ὄλβιος).¹⁰⁶ The seemingly arbitrary exactitude with which Hesiod authoritatively assigns a certain value to a certain day¹⁰⁷ completes the trajectory begun with his praise of Zeus in the proem as someone who can “easily” determine the fate of men—making them “famed or unfamed,” “sung or unsung,” “strong or weak,” “high or low,” as well as “straightening the crooked” and “smiting the haughty” (Hes. Op. 3–7).¹⁰⁸ In contrast to Zeus’, the poet’s authority is not a natural given that can be taken for granted. Like every other human, the poet has to work hard to establish and to solidify his authority. This is precisely what Hesiod does in the course of the poem— patiently telling one parable after another in order to “straighten” his addressee’s judgment and then aligning his own poetic work with the work of a conscientious farmer. The self-assured tone with which Hesiod concludes the Works and Days suggests that his work has not been in vain: if one has followed the poet thus far, one’s judgment must by now be so “straightened” as to enable one to accept that the poet’s language communicates a truth ¹⁰⁶ On the structure of the Days section, see e.g. Hamilton 1989, 78–84. Cf. West 1978, 346. The authenticity of the Days section has, however, been questioned by, among others, Wilamowitz and Solmsen, who bracketed it in their editions. Cf. Lardinois 1998. ¹⁰⁷ Not all of the attributions are arbitrary. Occasional references to the “divine calendar” establish a fairly comprehensible symbolic rationale for assigning a particular value to a particular day: Hes. Op. 771 τῇ γὰρ Ἀπόλλωνα χρυσάορα γείνατο Λητώ. Cf. Hes. Th. 918; Il. 1.9, 12.495; Od. 6.100, 11.318, hHom. Ap. 12: Ercolani 2010, 418–19. See also West 1978, 347: “It is noticeable that the good days are mostly concentrated in the first half of the month, when the waxing moon proclaims growth.” ¹⁰⁸ Note, too, that some of the days are “from Zeus” (Hes. Op. 765 ἤματα δ᾿ ἐκ Διόθεν): Hamilton 1989, 79. See also Lardinois 1998, esp. 333, on the “Days” section accentuating the poem’s main message that “[t]o work the land day by day is justice . . . and the best way to ensure the blessing of the gods.”

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90  :    whose veracity is as undisputed as that of the signs of nature and as tangible as the products of agricultural labour. The reason why Hesiod can plausibly cast his own poetic language as a straightforward expression of divine truths (Hes. Op. 10 ἐτήτυμα) is that, unlike the merely symbolic, “worthless words” associated with the kings (cf. Hes. Op. 402–3 σὺ δ᾿ ἐτώσια πόλλ᾿ ἀγορεύσεις, / ἀχρεῖος δ᾿ ἔσται ἐπέων νομός), its relationship to its content is as non-arbitrary as the relationship between the materiality of agricultural production and the regularities of nature. But while the non-arbitrariness of agricultural production is indexical (it functions as a “natural symptom” of the farmer’s synchronizing his actions with natural cycles), the non-arbitrariness of Hesiod’s language is iconic (it forms an analogy to its content—the productive labour of a farmer). The universal, truly ahistorical, aspect of Hesiod’s precepts derives from the tendency—indispensable for the survival of any traditional agricultural community—to synchronize human existence with the observable cycles of nature, wilfully erasing anything that may appear culturally contingent. In keeping with this tendency, the material world—both the natural signs that determine the course of human life and the fruits of the earth produced by human effort—constitutes in Hesiod’s moral universe a visible and tangible (“indexical”) foundation of ethics, while any form of “symbolic currency,” such as words or empty hopes, automatically raises the suspicion of scheming deception or naïve self-deception.¹⁰⁹ Characterized as δωροφάγοι, Hesiod’s kings can be seen not only as “greedy for bribes” but also as “eating for free”—their fundamental “crookedness” connoted as consumption of what they have not produced themselves. While in the Theogony Hesiod defends himself against the mocking charges of being a “mere belly” (Hes. Th. 26) and apologetically pleads for poetry’s usefulness in promoting the prestige of royal power (Hes. Th. 80–103), he now effectively turns the established power structure upside down by drawing an iconic analogy between himself and a farmer who produces his own food, by teaching his recipients how to lead a self-sufficient life independent of the kings, and by describing the kings as eating only what others give them. The impact produced by Hesiod’s distancing himself from the kings is similar to that of Achilles’ withdrawal from battle. I showed at the beginning of Chapter 1 that the Iliad portrays Agamemnon as a practitioner of the political art of substitution (his use of symbolic tokens of authority to obfuscate his true intentions going hand in hand with his anxiety that he may be ¹⁰⁹ For “empty hopes” (κενεὴν . . . ἐλπίδα, ἐλπὶς . . . οὐκ ἀγαθή), see Op. 498–501. On the ambiguities of hope in the Works and Days, see Byrne 1988; Edwards 2004, 111–18.

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replaced by someone else) and Achilles as an instance of indexical essentialism (all of his actions serving as non-arbitrary indices of his heroic nature). When Agamemnon breaches the contract according to which the commander-inchief has to respect the property rights of his subordinates, Achilles’ refusal to fight exposes the emptiness of Agamemnon’s arguments from authority and the inability of the Achaean army to combat the enemy. Like Agamemnon, whom Achilles calls a “people-devouring king” (Il. 1.231 δημοβόρος βασιλεύς), Hesiod’s kings are eager to appropriate other people’s property (they are δωροφάγοι).¹¹⁰ Like Agamemnon’s rhetoric, their “crooked words” are words whose surface meanings do not coincide with the goals that they strive to achieve. Like Agamemnon, they violate the property rights of a person crucial for the stability of their own power and thereby deprive themselves of moral authority. And just as Agamemnon’s overblown pretence serves to highlight Achilles’ essentialism, so the all-encompassing “crookedness” of Hesiod’s kings, too, provides an illuminating contrast to the inherent “truth” (Hes. Op. 10 ἐτήτυμα) of Hesiod’s poetic speech. What Hesiod promises his recipients as a reward for embracing his poetic truth is a life as devoid of unpleasant surprises as the life of a farmer tilling his land in accordance with the signs of nature—a life fully immune to contingency and consisting only of intentional actions over whose outcome one can exercise unlimited control. The absolute “felicity” of the ideal world conjured up by Hesiod, i.e. the notion that, as long as one follows his precepts, every action performed in it will automatically produce the intended result, is also reminiscent of the conceptual structure of the heroic ideal personified in the Iliad by Achilles. As I showed in Chapter 1, the Iliad constructs Achilles as an epitome of essentialism synonymous with unfailing intentionality—his “heroic essence” enabling him to be always victorious in battle and transforming war from an unpredictable series of contingent events into a single intentional action that he can entirely control himself. Hesiod’s ideal farmer achieves a similar effect by synchronizing his life with the circularity of nature and by securely bringing under his control the cause-and-effect structure of any action he performs. But there is an important difference between the notions of the ideal propounded by Homer and Hesiod: while the Homeric image of Achilles’ essentialism provides a conceptual foundation for aristocratic culture, Hesiod’s iconic analogy between agricultural production and the production of meaning transposes the locus of the ideal away from political power and to the sovereign power of poetic language. ¹¹⁰ Canevaro 2015, 51; Brown 2016, 139–41.

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Conclusion We saw in Chapter 1 that the heroic ideal propagated in the Homeric epics can be perceived as a conceptual tool of mastering the geopolitical space of archaic Greece. Devoid of a hegemonic political centre, the dispersed network of independent aristocratic city-states was endowed with a sense of purposeful structure by the unattainable ideal to which the aristocratic elites were encouraged to live up by competing with each other. Success in that competition served to translate their power from an arbitrary aristocratic privilege into a non-arbitrary (indexical) sign of a “naturally” superior essence. While Iliad 23 provides a model for future epinician poetry by singling out athletic contests as the social setting in which the heroic ideal evolved into the virtual centre of the decentred space of archaic Greece, the Odyssey does the same thing by portraying the homecoming of an epic hero as a paradigm of poetry itself securing the rulers’ status as embodiments of the heroic ideal. In Chapter 2, I showed that, more explicitly than the Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony, too, insists that poetry constitutes an instrumental factor in converting myth into royal power and that, cast in the Iliad as a virtual object of emulation for the inhabitants of the geographically dispersed Greek world, the ideal of heroic essentialism morphs in Hesiod’s Works and Days into the ideal of poetic language as a transmitter of metaphysical certainties. The notional equivalence drawn by Hesiod between his poetic language and the transcendental truths can be seen as the earliest instance in European literary culture of what Jacques Derrida has called “the metaphysics of presence”¹¹¹—a theory of meaning that has proven to be so tenacious in Western thought that, at the end of the twentieth century, Richard Rorty still deemed it necessary to polemicize against it by arguing for the fundamental contingency of all human meanings.¹¹² What Hesiod’s Works and Days reveals, however, is that, in ancient Greece, the idea of language providing access to metaphysical truths was not a default assumption but a contingent product of competition between poetry and an inherently competitive aristocratic culture in which all meanings were inherently contested.

¹¹¹ Derrida 1976.

¹¹² Rorty 1989.

Greek Literature and the Ideal: The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age. Alexander Kirichenko, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Kirichenko 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866707.003.0005

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PART II

CLASSICAL ATHENS Ideology and Dialogue

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Introduction By the second half of the fifth century, the idea that the Athenians differed from all other Greeks in being an autochthonous people had become an integral part of the way they perceived themselves.¹ In Herodotus, the claim that the Athenians have lived in Attica from time immemorial is cited in passing as a self-evident proof of their superiority over all other Greeks (Hdt. 7.161),² while occasional references to Athenian autochthony in Aristophanes reveal it as a virtual synonym of Athenianness: in the Wasps, the chorus of old men take it for granted that their victory in the Persian Wars was predetermined by their autochthonous origins (Ar. V. 1071–8), and the sex-deprived ithyphallic men of the Lysistrata are casually referred to as “these autochthons” (Ar. Ly. 1082 τούσδε τοὺς αὐτόχθονας). Linked in fifth-century sources to the aetiological myth of the common descent of the Athenians from the earth-born king Erechtheus (cf. Pi. P. 7.9–12, I. 2.19–20; S. Aj. 202; E. Med. 824–6),³ the extension of the autochthonous status from a handful of aristocratic families to the entire Athenian citizen body was in fact a relatively recent development that went hand in hand with the formation of both democracy and empire.⁴ The inclusive notion of autochthony not only conceived of the democratic equality among the Athenians as a function of their notional status as children of the Attic soil, but also provided a plausible account of the hierarchical distinction between the Athenian citizens and the ever-growing population of resident aliens.⁵ The pure Hellenicity of the Athenians, predicated upon their “natural” bond with the native soil, was also used to explain their valour in defeating the barbarian ¹ See e.g. Rosivach 1987; Cohen 2000, 91–3; Blok 2009a, 251–4. ² Pelling 2009; Leião 2012, 139; Grethlein 2010, 158–87; Steinbock 2013, 57–8. ³ Nimis 2007; Scodel 2006, 65–73; Barbato 2020, 84–6. On the transformation of Erechtheus (originally a serpentine deity) into the common ancestor of the Athenians in the fifth century, see Rosivach 1987, 294–5. On the conflation between αὐτόχθων (“always occupying the same land”) and γηγενής, or χθόνιος (“earth-born”) in fifth-century Athens, see Rosivach 1987, esp. 297–301. Cf. Blok 2009a, 257–8. On the development of the Athenian autochthony myth, see Loraux 1993, 37–71 and Loraux 2000; Montanari 1981; Cohen 2000, 79–103. See also Shapiro 1998, on the autochthony myths (Erechtheus and Cecrops) in the Athenian visual art of the classical period. For the Athenian myth in the context of other Greek myths of earth-born origins, see Zacharia 2003, 56–65. ⁴ Loraux 1986, 219–78; Thomas 1989, 207–21; Cohen 2000, 94–5; Blok 2009a, esp. 263–72. ⁵ Blok 2009b, 148–50. See also Cohen 2000, 49–78; Kasimis 2018.

Greek Literature and the Ideal: The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age. Alexander Kirichenko, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Kirichenko 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866707.003.0006

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96  :    invaders and, by extension, the claim they laid upon the imperial domination over their Greek “allies” whom they had liberated from the Persian threat.⁶ And the contrast between the autochthonous Athenians and the Spartan kings, who traced their ancestry to the immigrant Heraclidae, provided a plausible explanation for the inherent superiority of the Athenians over their Dorian enemies in the Peloponnesian War.⁷ As the crisscrossing storylines of Greek mythology produced a mental map of the geographically vast, decentralized world of archaic Greece, so the autochthony discourse constituted a similarly schematic simulacrum of the Athenian empire—with the ideal state of Athens located at its conceptual centre. This ideological construct conceived of the Athenian people as a kind of collective hero whose conceptual make-up mirrored that of the heroic ideal embodied in the Iliad by Achilles: just as Achilles’ indexical essentialism is considered to be synonymous with unfailing intentionality, so the Athenian citizens’ identity with their native soil, too, is declared to be the basis of their unrivalled superiority over others.⁸ In Part I, I drew a link between the Homeric ideal of heroic essentialism and Hesiod’s notion of poetic language as a transmitter of metaphysical truths. In the next two chapters, I will trace a similar trajectory from the ideology of Athenian exceptionalism to what can be termed as Plato’s “ideal state of philosophy.”

⁶ Rosivach 1987, 303–5; Leião 2012, 137. ⁷ Rosivach 1987, 296–7; Shapiro 1998, 131; Hall 2002, 204; Zacharia 2003, 44–8. ⁸ Cf. Loraux 1986, 45–75; Barbato 2020, 82–114.

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3 The Ideal State of Athens The Collective Hero of Attic Tragedy Focusing on the conjunction between the autochthony myth and the institution of the Athenian state funeral, Nicole Loraux famously stressed that the discourse of the “earth-born” origins of the Athenian men completely excludes the Athenian women, whose role as reproductive agents becomes inessential for the functioning of the ideological construct.⁹ This is doubtless true if one focuses only on the structural implications of the myth itself, which casts the Attic soil as the figurative mother of all Athenians.¹⁰ Seen in its historical context, however, this myth becomes indicative not only of the political marginalization of the Athenian women but also of their crucial role in the civic ideology. It is universally acknowledged that the formation of the Athenian autochthony discourse is inseparably linked to the Periclean citizenship law of 451/0 , which entitled to the status of Athenian citizens only those whose parents were both native-born Athenians.¹¹ While Athenian citizenship could previously be conferred by patrilineal descent,¹² the effect of the Periclean citizenship law consisted in establishing a virtual identity between the Athenian women and the Attic soil: by linking the right to participate in the democratic institutions to the biological descent from an Athenian woman, the law transformed the political agency of the Athenian men from an arbitrary exercise of power into a non-arbitrary index of their Athenianness conceived of as a product of female reproductive nature.¹³ It is in tragedy that one can best trace the gradual development of the notion of the Attic soil as a conceptual basis of Athens as an ideal state where, as in the heroic ideal epitomized by Achilles, indexical essentialism accounts for ⁹ Loraux 1986, esp. 283–4. See also Saxonhouse 1986, esp. 258. ¹⁰ Cf. Pelling 2009, 473. ¹¹ See Blok 2009b, 142–6 and 150–4, with references, on the connections between the Periclean citizenship law and the Athenian autochthony discourse. See also Lape 2010, 19–25; Leião 2012, 137–41. Cf. Loraux 1986, who sees the Periclean law as a culmination of the development of the Athenian autochthony myth. See also Ogden 1996, 166–88, on the intricate conjunction between the Periclean citizenship law and the Athenian democratic ideology. ¹² Blok 2009b, 158; Leião 2012, 135. Cf. Henry 1995, 12. ¹³ Cf. Cohen 2000, 30–49, on the status of the Athenian politides.

Greek Literature and the Ideal: The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age. Alexander Kirichenko, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Kirichenko 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866707.003.0007

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98  :    unfailing intentional agency. In a similar manner as the Iliad draws a contrast between Achilles’ indexical essentialism and Agamemnon’s symbolic interactionism, some of the surviving tragedies explicitly construct democratic Athens as an ideal state where political power is in perfect harmony with physical nature by contrasting that state with other, tyrannically ruled, polities (barbarian and Greek alike) riven by insoluble conflicts between the two.¹⁴ Within this conceptual framework, what differentiates Athens from its multiple “others” is that it proves to be the only place where the tension between male politics and female nature can never occur or, if it does occur elsewhere, can reliably achieve a harmonious resolution.¹⁵ The opposition between the self-identity of Athens and the “split personality” of a foreign tyranny is fully graspable as early as in Aeschylus’ Persians. The Greek victory over Xerxes is presented here as a just punishment meted out to a barbarian tyrant for overstepping natural boundaries. The ghost of Darius interprets the destruction of the Persian army as a consequence of Xerxes’ eroticized desire (A. Pers. 826 ἄλλων ἐρασθείς) to possess more than his due. The fatal “unnaturalness” of this desire is additionally underscored by the fact that, in order to satisfy it, Xerxes has to “enslave the sea” by building a bridge over the Hellespont (A. Pers. 739–52).¹⁶ The imperial expansion of Persia is figured in the play as a violent enforcement of male power over the female earth—Asia and Greece appearing in the queen Atossa’s dream as two women whom Xerxes seeks to subjugate (A. Pers. 192–6).¹⁷ The contrast between slavish Asia, readily submitting to the king’s rule, and freedomloving Athens, physically incapable of yielding to a foreign yoke, is conceptually linked to the image of the Athenian army consisting of free citizens, who are “slaves of no man” (A. Pers. 242 οὔτινος δοῦλοι κέκληνται φωτὸς οὐδ᾿ ὑπήκοοι) and who, therefore, effortlessly crush the army of the tyrannically ruled Persians.¹⁸ What additionally enhances this contrast is that, unlike the imperial power of Persia, the strength of the Athenians is not predicated upon violently exploiting conquered territories but derives exclusively from their ¹⁴ Hall 1997, 100–3. Cf. Loraux 1981; Hall 1989, 160–200. ¹⁵ The most widespread manner in which tragic myths resolve conflicts originating elsewhere is by granting tragic heroes asylum in Athens, e.g. in Aeschylus’ Eumenides (as well as, indirectly, in the Suppliants, where Argos can be perceived as a projection of democratic Athens, cf. Grethlein 2003, 97–107), Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Euripides’ Heracles, Heraclidae, Medea, and Suppliants: Gödde 2000. On the centrality of this theme for the construction of the collective identity of Athens, see Zeitlin 1986, esp. 116–23; Seaford 1994, 123–39; Mills 1997; Grethlein 2003; Tzanetou 2012. See also Kowalzig 2006, on connections between the “Athenianization” of hero-cults in tragedy (i.e. bringing non-Athenian tragic myths to a ritual closure in Athens) and the imperial claims of Athens. ¹⁶ Garvie 2009, 295–6. ¹⁷ Sommerstein 1996, 76–7; Föllinger 2003, 277–9; Garvie 2009, 101–2, with references. ¹⁸ See Hall 1989, 56–100. Cf. Hall 1989, 69–100.

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native soil—from the “treasure of the earth” provided by the silver mines (A. Pers. 238 ἀργύρου πήγη τις αὐτοῖς ἐστι, θησαυρὸς χθονός).¹⁹ As a result, the defeat of Persia emerges in the play as a predictable consequence of the king’s tyrannical exercise of male power over the female earth, while the Athenian victory becomes a “natural” outcome of the city’s “indexical essentialism”—a complete fusion between the free citizens and their native soil. Aeschylus’ Oresteia not only establishes a conceptual link between the Attic soil and female reproductive nature but also provides a mythical aetiology of Athens as a unique place where the tragic tension between male and female can be replaced by harmony. Argos is cast in the trilogy as an inherently disjointed place—a place where political power and biological reproduction are utterly antagonistic to each other.²⁰ In the Agamemnon, the king is punished for a blatant violation of the law of nature: while Clytemnestra kills her husband to avenge the death of her daughter, her lover Aegisthus is happy to see his cousin punished for a similarly heinous crime committed in the previous generation by Agamemnon’s father Atreus, who had served to Aegisthus’ father Thyestes the cooked limbs of his sons (cf. A. A. 1577–1611).²¹ The conflict between political power and reproductive nature continues in the next generation: by killing his mother in the Libation Bearers, Orestes acts as an uncompromising agent of Apollo’s law, which requires that the king’s murderer be punished by death, but, while doing so, he surpasses his father’s transgression against the law of nature.²² It is only in Athens that this irreconcilable antagonism can attain a peaceable resolution. In his defence of Orestes in the Eumenides, Apollo presents motherhood as an inessential accidental: he famously identifies woman with the soil into which man plants his seed (A. Eu. 658–61)²³ and conceives of marriage as an inviolable contract—a contract whose breach by Clytemnestra makes her death appear fully justified (A. Eu. 217–21). By contrast, the Erinyes are implacable proponents of the “blood and soil” nature of motherhood, whose violation by Orestes constitutes the worst conceivable crime (cf. A. Eu. 604–8).²⁴ This conflict can only be adjudicated by androgynous Athena, who casts her vote for Orestes (i.e. seemingly in favour of Apollo’s male law) while

¹⁹ Cf. Pelling 2009, 472. ²⁰ Euben 1990, 68–72. Cf. Gagné 2013, 396. ²¹ Föllinger 2003, 57–60; Gagné 2013, 404–6. On the similarities and differences between Clytemnestra’s and Aegisthus’ motivations for committing the crime, see Foley 2001, 204–7. On Clytemnestra as “a shrewd, intelligent rebel against the masculine regime,” see Zeitlin 1996, 89–90. Cf. Euben 1990, 73–5. ²² Foley 2001, 222–3. Cf. Föllinger 2003, 105–10. ²³ Zeitlin 1996, 107–12. ²⁴ See also A. Eu. 64–6, 174, 225, and 244–53: Foley 2001, 222–3. On the Erinyes in tragedy (and in Greek mythology in general), see Sewell-Rutter 2007, 78–109. Cf. Föllinger 2003, 105–10.

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100  :    simultaneously honouring the Erinyes with the establishment of their cult at the very heart of Athens.²⁵ By transforming themselves from the implacable chthonic agents of blood revenge into benevolent law-abiding goddesses residing under the Attic soil (A. Eu. 1007), the pacified Erinyes/Eumenides provide a mythical aetiology of Athens as a unique site of justice—justice conceived of as a conjunction between male political power and female reproductive nature, which emerges in the play as the very essence of what distinguishes Athens from the inherently self-contradictory tyrannical world of Argos.²⁶ What is more, it is only thanks to Athens that Argos, too, can now finally entertain a better hope: exonerated by the Athenian court, Orestes swears to turn his hometown into Athens’ faithful ally, thereby bringing it closer to the political ideal exemplified by Athens itself (A. Eu. 754–77). Of all the non-Athenian settings in Attic tragedy it is doubtless Thebes that provides the most striking contrast to the Athenian ideal of the fusion between politics and nature.²⁷ The earliest mythical pre-history of Thebes ideally lends itself as a thought-provoking foil to the emerging self-image of Athens as a site of natural politics. The founder of Thebes is a barbarian, the Phoenician immigrant Cadmus, who sows the earth-born dragon’s teeth to produce the city’s first autochthonous population, the spartoi.²⁸ These autochthonous Thebans are all male, they appear from the earth fully armed, and those of them who do not immediately kill each other in battle become progenitors of Theban aristocratic families.²⁹ This foundation myth effectively equates autochthony with an aristocratic privilege congenitally imbued with a propensity for civil strife. The fact that Thebes is from the very beginning cast as a place where descendants of a barbarian king govern a population of autochthonous aristocrats creates an unbridgeable gap between the rulers and the ruled, turning Thebes into a flawed polity inherently predisposed to chaos and tyranny—a place where no intentional action can ever result in the indented outcome and where even the most sensible plans are bound to end in disaster.³⁰ ²⁵ Cf. Euben 1990, 76–7; Zeitlin 1996, 112–19; Sourvinou-Inwood 2003, 238–9; Widzisz 2012, 192–8. ²⁶ Euben 1990, 77–91. On Argos in the Oresteia as a corrupt polis, see Dodds 1960. On the encomiastic image of Athens in the Eumenides, see Grethlein 2003, 228–53. Cf. Sommerstein 1996, 255–73. ²⁷ Zeitlin 1986; Berman 2015, 75–121. See Steinbock 2013, 100–54, on Thebes’ “medizing” during the Persian Wars as one of the main reasons why the city was consistently portrayed, in the fifth and fourth centuries, as “Athens’ counterimage.” ²⁸ On foreignness and autochthony in the Theban foundation legend, see Buxton 1994, 184–93. Cf. Vian 1963. ²⁹ Apollod. 3.4.1; Eu. Ba. 996. Vian 1963, 158–76; Gantz 1993, 467–73. See also Zeitlin 1986, 102. ³⁰ Zeitlin 1986, 113 and 121–2.

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That this systemic disjunction is synonymous with the incompatibility between political power and reproductive nature becomes apparent in the fate of Cadmus’ descendants. Apollo’s prophecy that, by siring children, Laius will destroy his royal power reveals Thebes as a place where the political law of patrilineal succession is inherently antagonistic to the natural law of biological reproduction.³¹ Oedipus’ marriage to Jocasta can be viewed as a distorted image of the perverse scenario of the Theban autochthony myth—a scenario that features an immigrant creating autochthonous offspring keen on internecine war. For while taken for a “resident alien,” Oedipus is in fact “autochthonous” in too literal a sense (cf. S. OT. 452–3 ξένος λόγῳ μέτοικος εἶτα δ᾿ ἐγγενὴς / φανήσεται Θηβαῖος), so that, by fathering children with his own mother, he in effect “plants” self-destructive “seeds” in the “soil” that had produced him (cf. A. Th. 752–4 Οἰδιπόδαν, ὅστε ματρὸς ἁγνὰν / σπείρας ἄρουραν ἵν᾿ ἐτράφη / ῥίζαν αἱματόεσσαν / ἔτλα), thereby completely collapsing the semiotic distinctions indispensable for the proper functioning of politics and nature.³² In the Seven against Thebes, Aeschylus explicitly presents the war between Eteocles and Polynices as a consequence of the curse cast by their incestuous birth (A. Th. 926–31).³³ Some of the seven generals appointed by Eteocles to protect the “seven-gated city” are descendants of the original autochthonous spartoi (A. Th. 412–14, 474).³⁴ But while the autochthonous Thebans are victorious, the confrontation between the two “commonly sown” (A. Th. 932 ὁμόσποροι) brothers leads to their killing each other.³⁵ The civil war that destroys the city is simultaneously conceived of as an antagonism between male and female: Polynices’ military campaign against his native city is said to be an act of violence against his figurative mother (A. Th. 584–6), war as such is viewed by women as a kind of murderous rape (a barbarian iron sword dividing the warriors’ native soil into burial plots: A. Th. 730–3),³⁶ and ³¹ Cf. Zeitlin 1986, 106–11, for a comparison between the Labdakids in Aeschylus and Sophocles and Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae (a descendant of earth-born Echion, one of the spartoi) as icons of the fundamental disjunctions of tragic Thebes (including the disjunction between male and female). ³² On the analogy between autochthony and incest in the construction of tragic Thebes, see Zeitlin 1982, 15–19 and 1986, 113–16. See also Zeitlin 1986, 103–6, esp. 105: “Thus Oedipus is only perhaps the crystallization in purest form of the city of Thebes itself.” Cf. Euben 1990, 96–129. ³³ Föllinger 2003, 154–60; Gagné 2013, 351–62. ³⁴ For a detailed discussion of the “shield scene,” see Zeitlin 1982, 33–119. Cf. Poli Palladini 2016, 113–36. ³⁵ Although, in the extant plays, Aeschylus never uses the adjective αὐτόχθων (αὐτόχθονος at A. Ag. 536 means “land and all”: Rosivach 1987, 299–300), the juxtaposition between the autochthonous σπαρτοί and the ὁμόσποροι brothers dying ἐκ χερῶν αὐτοκτόνων (A. Th. 805) seems strikingly significant. On the contrast between autochthony and incestuous murder in the Seven, see Zeitlin 1986, 121. ³⁶ Cf. Poli Palladini 2016, 201–9.

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102  :    Eteocles’ interactions with the female chorus for the most part consist of his attempts to silence the female voice altogether (A. Th. 223–86, esp. 232 σὸνδ᾿ αὖ τὸ σιγᾶν καὶ μένειν εἴσω δόμων and 282 σίγησον, ὦ τάλαινα).³⁷ The tragedy ends in an insoluble impasse between male politics and female nature. While the city issues an edict declaring that, of the two brothers, only Eteocles may be buried in his native soil, their sister Antigone, unable to divide her kin into friends and foes, is determined to bury Polynices as well (A. Th. 1005–78).³⁸ By doing so, she in fact offers the only conceivable prospect of closure to the never-ending disintegration of the city—except that this closure can by no means be achieved in the inherently disjointed tragic world of Thebes where actions are intrinsically incapable of producing intended results. Sophocles’ Antigone, too, portrays Thebes as a place where reconciliation between male politics and female nature is plainly impossible and where, for that reason, intentional agency is always doomed to failure. What Aeschylus presents in the conclusion of the Seven against Thebes as a tension between Antigone’s loyalty to her kin and the collective male power of the city is transformed in Sophocles into a fully fledged antagonism between the “divine law” of nature, embodied by Antigone, and the tyrannical rule of Creon, who sentences Antigone to death for her determination to bury Polynices.³⁹ Creon is fully convinced that he is acting in the interest of the city, and he takes it for granted that his actions agree both with the will of the citizens and with the will of the gods (S. Ant. 182–4 cf. 288–9).⁴⁰ But as he does so, his rule emerges as a tyranny as “unnatural” as it is godless—a tyranny in which what for Antigone is an act of natural piety towards her blood relatives becomes a capital offence (cf. S. Ant. 453–7).⁴¹ It is, therefore, hardly surprising that Creon depreciates his son Haemon’s attachment to Antigone by echoing the paradigmatic male voice of Apollo who in Aeschylus’ Eumenides depicts woman as a perfectly interchangeable “soil”—a passive receptacle of the

³⁷ Zeitlin 1986, 108–9. ³⁸ Although the communis opinio (Hutchinson 1985, 209–11, cf. Poli Palladini 2016, 49, for a brief list of dissenters) regards the finale as spurious, the question is anything but settled. See e.g. Judet de La Combe 2011, who accepts the arguments against the authenticity of the passage, but then, in his own interpretation, shows that the author (whom he sees as critically distancing himself from Sophocles’ Antigone and Euripides’ Phoenissae) produced an ending thoroughly in tune with the Aeschylean poetics of the Seven. Similar arguments could be used to defend the passage’s Aeschylean authorship. ³⁹ Goldhill 1986, 88–106; Segal 1995, 119–23; Foley 2001, 173–200. ⁴⁰ By putting state above family, Creon clearly evokes the Athenian democratic ideology: Nussbaum 1986, 58–9; Blundell 1989, 117–20; Foley 2001, 183–4. But at the same time, the law that he imposes on the city (cf. 213) is conspicuously based on nothing but his own (tyrannical) will (cf. 207). Cf. S. Ant. 60. Blundell 1989, 126–9. ⁴¹ On the collapse of Creon’s “rationality,” see Nussbaum 1986, 54–63. Cf. Ahrensdorf 2009, 113–26.

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male seed (S. Ant. 569 ἀρώσιμοι γὰρ χἀτέρων εἰσὶν γύαι, cf. A. Eu. 658–61).⁴² But this conception of woman as a passive matter devoid of subjectivity is completely invalidated by Haemon himself, for whom Antigone is unique and irreplaceable.⁴³ As a consequence, the incompatibility between Creon’s infatuation with his own power and Haemon’s love for Antigone, the embodiment of the “divine law of nature,” inexorably leads to the ruin of both the father and the son (cf. S. Ant. 781–805).⁴⁴ For when Creon is at last convinced by the chorus to “yield to the woman,” it is too late: Antigone is dead, and Haemon, too, kills himself before his father’s eyes, reducing Creon’s unlimited political power to utter meaninglessness.⁴⁵ In the Antigone itself, there are no explicit references to Athens. It is only in the Oedipus at Colonus that Sophocles draws a contrast between Thebes as a site of tragic disjunction and Athens as a place where intentional actions produce anticipated results—as the only place where Antigone can help her father to bring his tragically incongruous life to a satisfactory closure.⁴⁶ In an alternative version of the myth of the Seven against Thebes, the role of Antigone is taken up by Athens itself, which recovers the bodies of the fallen in order to bury them in Eleusis, thereby putting an end to the never-ending tragic collision engendered by the inherently flawed world of Thebes.⁴⁷ That this denouement only becomes possible thanks to Athens, and takes place in Attica, once again casts the Attic soil as a quintessential icon of natural politics—the ideal of politics in which indexical essentialism results in an unfailing intentional agency. Read next to these encomiastic references to Athens, Antigone in her eponymous tragedy emerges as a figure futilely longing for the ideal that the Athenians are privileged enough to be able to take for granted.⁴⁸

⁴² On this formula echoing the language of the Athenian marriage contract, see Nussbaum 1986, 56–7. ⁴³ Nussbaum 1986, 61; Foley 2001, 186–187. ⁴⁴ On Creon’s obsession with power, see Blundell 1989, 130–2. ⁴⁵ Zeitlin 1986, 120 and 123–6; Segal 1995, 131–3. On the one-sidedness of both Creon and Antigone as a cause of the collapse of the play’s tragic world, see Nussbaum 1986, 63–7. Cf. Ahrensdorf 2009, 126–50. ⁴⁶ Zeitlin 1986, 128–41; Mills 1997, 160–85. For a similar opposition in Euripides’ Phoenissae 852–7, see Zeitlin 1986, 116. ⁴⁷ In Aeschylus’ lost Eleusinians, Theseus persuades the Thebans to surrender the bodies, which are then buried in Eleusis (cf. Plut. Thes. 29.4–5): Mills 1997, 229–34. In Euripides’ Suppliants, Theseus wages a war against Thebes, and the Seven are cremated in Eleusis (1207) to be later buried in Argos: Mills 1997, 87–131. For the development of the myth and its different versions, see Steinbock 2013, 155–210. On Athenian patriotic myths in tragedy and their afterlife in fourth-century oratory, see Hanink 2013, with references (esp. 302–8, on the burial of the Seven). ⁴⁸ On Antigone embodying the ideal of Athens praised in the funeral orations, see Bannett—Tyrell 1990; Segal 1995, 122–3. Cf. Hanink 2013, 308–11.

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104  :    It is in Euripides’ Erechtheus that Athens is explicitly cast as an incarnation of the absolute identity between power and nature for which Antigone futilely longs in Sophocles’ Thebes. This ideal is said to manifest itself in the autochthonous origins of all citizens, which explicitly reveals the Attic soil as the conceptual foundation of the Athenians’ “indexical essentialism.” In this play, the Delphic oracle demands a typically tragic infringement on female reproductive nature by prophesying that the Athenians would only win the war if Erechtheus sacrificed one of his daughters. But while in non-Athenian contexts such a demand would, as a rule, be symptomatic of the unbridgeable gap between the arbitrariness of male power and the inviolability of the divine law of nature (one only needs to think of the treatments in tragedy of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia), in Athens it serves to demonstrate the inextricable fusion between the two.⁴⁹ Tellingly, it is not Erechtheus himself but his wife Praxithea, who declares that by sacrificing her own daughter she would fulfil her self-evident duty as a citizen of Athens—a city where the autochthony of all citizens (cf. E. Erechth. fr. 360.8 αὐτόχθονες δ ᾿ἔφυμεν) turns citizenship from a legal convention, which it is everywhere else (E. Erechth. fr. 360.13 λόγῳ πολίτης ἐστί, τοῖς δ᾿ ἔργοισιν οὔ), into a fact of nature⁵⁰ and equates the citizens’ collective love for their native soil with a love for their own mother (E. Erechth. fr. 358 ἐρᾶτε μητρός, παῖδες).⁵¹ In the absence of sons, whom she would otherwise unflinchingly send to battle, the sacrifice of a daughter proves for Praxithea to be the only way she can fulfil her patriotic duty: for by being sacrificed, her daughter, too, fights for the safety of her native soil on a par with men (E. Erechth. fr. 360.22–7).⁵² Unsurprisingly, then, this heroic spirit is displayed not only by the daughter herself, who enthusiastically embraces the crucial role allotted to her in saving the city, but also by her two sisters, who follow her by committing suicide:⁵³ like heroic male warriors fallen in battle, Erechtheus’ three daughters are buried in a common grave, thereby providing a kind of mythical aetiology of the δημόσιον σῆμα, the

⁴⁹ In Euripides (Iphigenia at Aulis, Phoenissae, Hecuba), the heroism of a voluntary self-sacrifice (sometimes implicitly associated with the Athenian civic ethos) is contrasted with the fundamental disjointedness that characterizes non-Athenian tragic worlds: Wilkins 1990, 186 and 189–90. See also Wilkins 1990, 179–84 and Calame 2011, 16. There is an illuminating parallel in Euripides’ Heraclidae: Wilkins 1990, 185–8. See also Grethlein 2003, 381–428. ⁵⁰ Ogden 1996, 170; Blok 2009b, 153. ⁵¹ Calame 2011, 15–16. ⁵² See Wilkins 1990, 180; Sourvinou-Inwood 2003, 26–7; Calame 2011, 5–8. For a list of other female mythical figures sacrificing themselves for the safety of Athens, see Wilkins 1990, 187. ⁵³ As Athena stresses in her ex machina appearance at the end of the tragedy, the three sisters will be transformed into stars and, like their father, worshipped in cult: E. Erechth. fr. 370.71–4. Praxithea is to become a priestess of Athena herself: fr. 370.95–7. See Cf. Montanari 1981, 135–45; Calame 2011, 8–11.

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site of the Athenian state funeral and an icon of the Athenians’ identity as autochthonous citizens (E. Erechth. fr. 370.67–70, cf. fr. 360.32–3).⁵⁴ The ideological construct propounded in Euripides’ Erechtheus presents Athens as an ideal state where the conceptual disjunctions responsible for the collapse of society in non-Athenian settings are thoroughly replaced with a transparent semiotic system conducive to universal justice and social accord. It is only in Euripides’ autochthonous Athens—a place where political notions are not arbitrary symbols (cf. E. Erechth. fr. 360.13) but non-arbitrary indices referring to the transcendental signified of the Athenian “soil” and where intentional actions reliably result in intended outcomes because the innermost desires of each citizen (men and women alike) are indistinguishable from the needs of the state—that political language becomes a language of truth, which, like Hesiod’s ideal of language in the Works and Days, is based on an absolute identity between words and deeds.

Imperial Athens as a Tragic City Fifth-century Athenian drama did not remain blind to the significance of the autochthony discourse as an ideological construct promoting the imperial domination of Athens over its “allies.” Euripides’ Ion, for instance, links the anxiety of illegitimacy, deeply ingrained in the Athenian autochthony discourse,⁵⁵ with the city’s imperial anxiety at the time around, or immediately after, the Sicilian expedition.⁵⁶ The confirmation of Ion’s status as a legitimate autochthonous ruler of Athens is synonymous in the tragedy with overcoming a threat posed to the ideology of Athenian autochthony by the outside world— a threat epitomized by the fact that Creusa, a daughter of the earth-born Erechtheus, is forced to marry a non-Athenian husband, whose name, Xuthus, may have evoked Sicilian associations to Euripides’ original audience.⁵⁷ But the play ends on what seems to be a cautiously optimistic note in that it shows ⁵⁴ See Sonnino 2010, 36–42. Cf. Thuc. 2.34: Loraux 1986, 49–54. On Euripides’ Erechtheus as a mythical aetiology of the Athenian autochthony discourse, see Calame 2011. Cf. Sourvinou-Inwood 2003, 25–30. ⁵⁵ Scafuro 1990; Loraux 1993, 184–236; Ogden 1996, 166–88; Omitowoju 2002, 21–6; Lape 2010, 129–36. On the autochthony theme in Euripides’ Ion, see Loraux 1981, 197–235; Zeitlin 1996, 331–8; Zacharia 2003, 44–102; Westra 2006. ⁵⁶ For the dating of the Ion close to the time of the Sicilian expedition, see Zacharia 2003, 3–7 (with arguments for dating it to 412 ); Swift 2008, 28–30 (towards the middle of the period between 420 and 410). ⁵⁷ For the evidence on Xuthus, a king of Sicilian Xuthia, and the possibility that Euripides’ Thessalian Xuthus would have reminded the contemporary Athenian audience of the Sicilian

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106  :    Xuthus to be so successfully tricked by divine providence into promoting Athenian geopolitical interests that he effectively emerges as a wishful emblem of the non-Athenian world caught unawares by the inventiveness with which Athens, against all odds, maintains its congenital autochthonous superiority over the rest of Greece:⁵⁸ Ion, the son of Creusa and Apollo, is predestined not only to rule over Athens (E. Ion 1575–6 ἐκ γὰρ τῶν Ἐρεχθέως γεγὼς, / δίκαιος ἄρχειν τῆς ἐμῆς ὅδε χθονός)⁵⁹ but also to become the eponymous progenitor of the Ionian population of the Aegean, dominated in the fifth century by the Athenian empire (E. Ion 1575–88),⁶⁰ while the fact that mixed-race Dorus and Achaeus (the sons that Creusa and Xuthus will be allowed to have now that an autochthonous heir has been installed in Athens) will become mythical ancestors of the Dorians and the Achaeans serves as an aetiology of the subordinate status of all other Greeks in comparison to the purebred autochthonous Athenians (E. Ion 1589–94).⁶¹ Aristophanes’ Birds offers a more sarcastic perspective on the use of Athenian autochthony to justify the city’s imperial superiority. What impels Peisetaerus and Euelpides to migrate from Athens into the radically “other” world of the birds is their rejection of the oppressive institutions of Athenian democracy.⁶² Ironically, however, the city that they found in the sky quickly evolves into an overblown version of the contemporary Athenian empire— with Peisetaerus himself as a divinized monarch, who, in a possible reference to the Athenians’ attempt to cut off the Peloponnese from its allies during the Sicilian expedition, imperiously controls the passageways between the humans and the gods (Ar. Av. 1537–1765).⁶³ Concomitantly, the ideological underpinnings on which Peisetaerus relies in order to spur the birds’ imperial ambitions look like a magnified image of the combination of autochthony and imperialism in contemporary Athenian culture: while, in the Ion, Euripides derives the Athenians’ right to possess an empire from their earthborn origins, Peisetaerus ups the ante and links the birds’ claims for a universal expedition, see Smith 2012, esp. 115–36. On Xuthus’ Thessalian origin encoding features incompatible with the Athenian ideal, see Montanari 1981, 165–6. On the “metic discourse” in the Ion, see Kasimis 2018, 26–48. ⁵⁸ Swift 2008, 80–5. Cf. Saxonhouse 1986; Zacharia 2003, 70–6. ⁵⁹ Euripides takes pains to reconcile Creusa’s descent from Erechtheus with the myth, told in the Erechtheus, of his daughters’ self-sacrifice: E. Ion 277–80. In contrast to the Erechtheus, where the earthborn king dies leaving no offspring, the royal line is continued in the Ion through matrilineal descent: Zacharia 2003, 64–5. ⁶⁰ Zacharia 2003, 48–55. Cf. Loraux 1986, 127; Hall 2002, 204. ⁶¹ See Montanari 1981, 191–7; Seaford 1990, 156–8; Zacharia 2003, 155. ⁶² Zimmermann 1983, 66–8; Konstan 1995, 35; Rothwell 2007, 152–5. ⁶³ Arrowsmith 1973. See also Zimmermann 1983, 69–72; Konstan 1997. For other possible references to contemporary events (e.g. the mutilation of the herms), see e.g. Hubbard 1991, 160–1.

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empire to the ante-terrestrial antiquity of their race (Ar. Av. 469–70). This aetiological myth proves to be not only exceedingly attractive to the birds themselves, who immediately elaborate it into a full-blown theogony (Ar. Av. 685–736),⁶⁴ but also to the rest of the world, which immediately begins to worship the birds in lieu of the Olympian gods (Ar. Av. 1058–71). But the price that the birds have to pay for their newly acquired divinity turns out to be an enslavement to the sophistic(ated) tyranny of Peisetaerus who, without any further ado, kills and grills those birds that dare to rebel against what he describes as the “rule of the people” (Ar. Av. 1583–5).⁶⁵ The Birds thus appears to draw a link between the sense of autochthonous superiority to which Athens appeals in justifying her tyrannical rule over the “allies” and one of the primordial anxieties of Athenian democracy—the anxiety of the return of tyranny from within democracy itself.⁶⁶ Nowhere else does the anxiety arising from the transformation of the belief in imperial superiority into a self-destructive arrogance become more tangible than in Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War. In contrast to Aristophanes, who, in his hyperbolical parody, lays bare the self-destructive consequences of deriving imperial claims from autochthony, Thucydides reveals the intrinsic self-contradictions of an imperial ideology that suppresses the notion of autochthony and appeals only to the tangible reality of imperial domination itself. The only time Thucydides uses the term “autochthonous” is in his account of the Athenian preparations for the Sicilian expedition in Book 6, and he does so in order to debunk the concept as utterly untenable: although the Sicanians claim to be autochthonous inhabitants of Sicily (αὐτόχθονες), there can be no doubt that they had in fact migrated there from Spain (Th. 6.2.2).⁶⁷ The beginning of Thucydides’ History, too, reveals the meaninglessness of autochthony as a term of political discourse.⁶⁸ Thucydides describes the earliest history of Greece as an endless series of forced migrations—with stronger tribes constantly ousting weaker ones from their territories (Th. 1.2). The main

⁶⁴ Konstan 1995, 40–1; Rothwell 2007, 155–6. ⁶⁵ Peisetaerus is explicitly referred to as a tyrant e.g. at 1708. Cf. Bowie 1993, 166–77; Rothwell 2007, 176–80. Predictably, modern reactions to Peisetaerus eating his political opponents vary greatly. Thomas Hubbard, for instance, sees in Birds “a classical precursor of Orwell’s Animal Farm” (Hubbard 1997, 36; cf. Romer 1997), while Niall Slater (2002, 230) ascribes such assessments to “modern sentimentality.” On the image of a politician as a “lover of the people” in Plato’s Gorgias, see Ober 1998, 197–206; Wohl 2002, 82. ⁶⁶ Raaflaub 2003. Cf. Henderson 2003. See also Monoson 2000, 21–50, on the role of the cult of the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton in strengthening the democratic self-awareness of Athens. ⁶⁷ Cf. Pelling 2009, 476. ⁶⁸ Cohen 2000, 91–2.

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108  :    incentive for these prehistoric conquests is for Thucydides the fertility of soils, so that such fertile areas as Thessaly, Boeotia, and most of the Peloponnese emerge as particularly attractive objects of invasion (Th. 1.2.3).⁶⁹ The reason why the original population of Attica has never been displaced by foreign invaders is, consequently, the poverty of the Attic soil (Th. 1.2.5).⁷⁰ It is furthermore the unattractiveness of its soil that, according to Thucydides, accounts for the fact that Attica had evolved into a safe haven for immigrants from other countries. In the end, so many foreigners, forced to emigrate by war and chaos in their native lands, became Athenian citizens that the excess population had to leave to colonize Ionia (Th. 1.2.6). This vision of the earliest past of Attica inverts the standard fifth-century notion of Athenian citizenship: the image of democratic equality based on common autochthonous origins yields to the image of “the most powerful” (οἱ δυνατώτατοι) foreigners swelling up the Athenian citizen body (πολῖται γιγνόμενοι).⁷¹ Thucydides casts the Attic soil as the main factor responsible for the ethnic diversity of early Athens—an image radically opposed to the Attic soil as an icon of ethnic purity in the fifth-century autochthony discourse. While reducing to its socioeconomic barebones the mythical self-perception of Athens as a city whose autochthonous population (cf. Thuc. 1.2.5–6) has always been hospitable to foreign refugees,⁷² Thucydides reveals that the “blood and soil” ideology of Athenian citizenship is nothing but a self-congratulatory fiction: for the origins of the “earth-born” Athenians turn out in fact to be no less mixed than those of the motley Sicilians. Thucydides’ version of Pericles’ funeral oration provides a striking illustration of what happens when the ideology of Athenian exceptionalism abandons its “autochthonous origins” and becomes translated into unapologetically imperial terms. The Athenian institution of the state funeral, in which the war-dead were buried together without any distinction made as to their social status, was doubtless the most eloquent expression of the ideology of Athenian autochthony: it celebrated the collective heroism of the Athenian citizens who sacrificed their lives while defending their native soil and who were posthumously reunited with their notional common mother.⁷³ Euripides’ description in the Erechtheus of the common funeral accorded the Athenian “autochthons” fallen in battle for their native soil (cf. E. Erechth. fr. 370.67–70) ⁶⁹ Ober 1998, 63; Pelling 2009, 476; Jaffe 2017, 144. ⁷⁰ Crane 1998, 136–7; Foster 2010, 12–14. ⁷¹ Cf. Ober 1998, 70–2. ⁷² On the tension between autochthony and hospitality to foreigners in the Athenian self-definition, see Cohen 2000. Cf. Grethlein 2003. ⁷³ Loraux 1986, 45–75; Barbato 2020, 57–81.

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provides a mythical aetiology of the state funeral, and, as I will show in the next section, the funeral orations surviving from the fourth century unanimously testify that that institution, is indeed inseparable from the autochthony myth.⁷⁴ It is, therefore, all the more revealing that Thucydides’ Pericles intimates at the beginning of his speech that what his listeners are about to hear will differ greatly from the funeral orations to which they are accustomed (Th. 2.35.1). The difference must indeed have been quite striking.⁷⁵ Although Pericles gestures towards the notion of autochthony by stressing that Athens has always been inhabited by the same people (Th. 2.36.1 τὴν γὰρ χώραν οἱ αὐτοὶ αἰεὶ οἰκοῦντες), the continuity that he establishes between the contemporary Athenians and their ancestors is based not on their shared links to the native soil but on the valour that they have displayed by bringing foreign territories under Athenian control (Th. 2.36.2–3).⁷⁶ While Euripides’ Erechtheus derives the status of Athenian political language as a collection of self-evidently truthful, indexical, signs from the Athenian citizens’ notional identity with their native soil (cf. E. Erechth. fr. 360.13), for Pericles the very existence of the empire makes political language utterly superfluous, since the material tokens of Athenian imperialism, visible everywhere on land and sea, eloquently speak for themselves (Th. 2.41.4).⁷⁷ What is more, when, in his praise of the Athenian constitution, Pericles derives democratic equality from the citizens’ cultured individualism regulated only by a self-imposed obligation to obey the laws (Th. 2.37.1–2),⁷⁸ rather than from their common autochthonous origins, and when he stresses that, in their expeditions abroad, the Athenians always easily subdue those who fight to protect their native soil (Th. 2.39.2),⁷⁹ he reveals that what accounts for the superiority of the Athenians is their voluntary adherence to what is a merely symbolic (arbitrary) system of legal conventions. As a result, Athenian exceptionalism stops being a product of physical nature and becomes instead a skilful work of political art: Athens emerges as a polity whose greatness is not inherent in its postulated essence but can only be judged a posteriori by the success of its imperial expansion and its universal appeal abroad. Unsurprisingly, then, Pericles conceives of the collective burial of the Athenian war-dead not as a return into their native soil but as a ⁷⁴ On the formulaic character of the fourth-century funeral orations, see Thomas 1989, 200; Steinbock 2013, 50. ⁷⁵ On the contrast between the πάτριος νόμος of the state funeral and the imperialistic content of the speech, see Foster 2010, 191–3. Cf. Flashar 1989. See also Todd 2007, 153, on Thucydides’ funeral oration as “the most deviant of all” the extant Athenian funeral orations. ⁷⁶ Cohen 2000, 96–7; Price 2001, 178–86; Blok 2009a, 255; Luginbill 2011, 160–3. ⁷⁷ Foster 2010, 196. ⁷⁸ Wohl 2002, 43–55; Foster 2010, 202–4. ⁷⁹ Foster 2010, 194–5.

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110  :    construction, in his own speech, of a metaphorical memorial (cf. Th. 2.35.1), which makes coextensive with the entire world (Th. 2.43.2 ἀνδρῶν γὰρ ἐπιφανῶν πᾶσα γῆ τάφος) the eternal glory attained by those who have died promoting the city’s imperial power.⁸⁰ In Aristophanes’ Knights, Paphlagon/ Cleon, seduces the Athenian people by declaring them worthy of a tyrannical power over all of Greece (Ar. Eq. 797 ἵνα γ᾿ Ἑλλήνων ἄρξῃ πάντων, cf. 1114 ἄνδρα τύραννον) and by promising to erect a monument to their courage (Ar. Eq. 267–8 δίκαιον ἐν πόλει / ἑστάναι μνημεῖον ὑμῶν ἐστιν ἀνδρείας χάριν). When Pericles urges the survivors to imitate the war-dead by “contemplating the power of the city in action day by day and becoming lovers of that power” (Th. 2.43.1 ἀλλὰ μᾶλλον τὴν τῆς πόλεως δύναμιν καθ᾿ ἡμέραν ἔργῳ θεωμένους καὶ ἐραστὰς γιγνομένους αὐτῆς), it becomes apparent that his metaphorical monument, too, is meant to produce a seductive effect on the audience.⁸¹ In contrast to Praxithea’s speech in Euripides’ Erechtheus, which strengthens the Athenians’ patriotic duty to protect their native land, Pericles’ speech makes the audience envisage a common object of desire whose enticing remoteness serves to enhance their enthusiasm for imperial expansion.⁸² While the rhetoric of autochthony fosters a sense of absolute self-identity by defining Athenian citizenship as a non-arbitrary index of the Attic soil, the rhetoric of empire effectively turns the city into a symbol of the ever-absent imperial signified—a polity characterized by a radical non-coincidence with itself. But Pericles’ imperial vision can only retain its persuasive force as long as the postulated ideological construct shows no noticeable cracks.⁸³ These cracks appear in Thucydides immediately after Pericles’ speech when, with the outbreak of the plague, the inspiring image of Athens as a lover longing for imperial domination gives way to the dispiriting reality of a city absorbed in its own physical dissolution (Th. 2.52.4).⁸⁴ This discrepancy between ideology and nature draws attention to the fact that, from beginning to end, Thucydides’ Athens is marked by a fundamental split between “words” and “deeds.”⁸⁵

⁸⁰ Foster 2010, 197–8; Nichols 2015, 36–7. ⁸¹ On the “erotics” of Pericles’ funeral oration, see Monoson 2000, 67–74; Ludwig 2002, 153–69; Wohl 2002, 30–72; Scholtz 2007, 31–42. ⁸² See Wohl 2002, 55–62, on the Athenians “falling in love with Pericles’ version of them.” On the erotics of empire in Thucydides’ History in general, see Wohl 2002, 171–214. ⁸³ Cf. Ober 1998, 89. ⁸⁴ Ferrar 1988, 136–7; Ober 1998, 68–9; Foster 2010, 204–10; Luginbill 2011, 196–202. ⁸⁵ Thucydides’ remarks on the dissolution of language in the aftermath of the stasis on Corcyra at 3.82 would also apply to his vision of the pervasive corruption undergone by Athens during the Peloponnesian War: Euben 1990, 167–201, esp. 189–90; Price 2001, esp. 6–78; Lebow 2003, 146–7.

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Pericles’ notion of Athens as an object of universal admiration has little in common with the reality portrayed in Thucydides’ narrative. One of the explanations that Thucydides gives for the conflict between the Peloponnese and Athens is the irreconcilable antagonism between the inward-looking essentialism of the Dorians, who are above all concerned with the security of their own territories and the protection of their kinsmen,⁸⁶ and the Athenians’ tyrannical rule over the empire which they justify by appealing to the “natural” right of the stronger to dominate the weaker (cf. Th. 1.76.2).⁸⁷ In the eyes of the Peloponnesians, Athens becomes an incarnation of injustice and an aggressor posing the same threat to the stability of the Hellenic world as the Persians did a few decades earlier.⁸⁸ In the course of the war, the tyrannical character of the Athenian rule becomes increasingly more obvious. In the aftermath of the Mytilenean revolt, Cleon motivates his proposal to execute the entire male population of Mytilene by stressing that Athens cannot efficiently control its allies unless it acknowledges that the empire can only be managed as a coercive tyranny (Th. 3.37.1–2).⁸⁹ While in the Mytilenean debate in Book 3 more moderate forces prevail, limiting the punishment to the execution of those who had directly participated in the revolt (Th. 3.49–50), these forces lose momentum as the war progresses. The Melian dialogue in Book 5 is the most blatant expression of the Athenians equating justice with the right of the stronger: the only choice that they offer the population of the neutral island of Melus is one between becoming slaves of the Athenian empire and being completely exterminated (Th. 5.84–113).⁹⁰ Since they refuse to yield to the Athenian demands, the Melians end up suffering the fate only narrowly avoided by the Mytileneans—with all men executed and all women and children sold into slavery (Th. 5.116.4).⁹¹

⁸⁶ See esp. the opposition between Athens and Sparta at Th. 1.68–86. Cf. Th. 1.120–4. Ober 1998, 65–7; Foster 2010, 82–6. On Spartan traditionalism in Thucydides, see Crane 1998, 187–95; Jaffe 2017, 59–117. ⁸⁷ Ober 1998, 72–9; Fisher—Hoekstra 2017, 381–5; Jaffe 2017, 86–98. ⁸⁸ See esp. the Corinthians’ speeches at Th. 1.68–71 and 120–4, in which they urge the Dorians to unite against the tyranny of Athens (e.g. 124.3 πόλιν τύραννον) and to liberate those enslaved by Athens (69.1 ὁ δεδουλωσάμενος . . . ἐλευθερῶν τὴν Ἑλλάδα, 124.3 τοὺς νῦν δεδουλωμένους Ἕλληνας ἐλευθερώσωμεν). Cf. Th. 2.8.4–5. See Price 2001, 127–61; Jaffe 2017, 63–6. ⁸⁹ Euben 1990, 177–83; Crane 1998, 183–7; Ober 1998, 94–104; Wohl 2002, 172. For Cleon’s equation of justice with expediency as a model of the Athenian conception of justice in Thucydides, see Price 2001, 89–103. ⁹⁰ See e.g. Bosworth 1993; Crane 1998, 237–57; Price 2001, 195–204; Nichols 2015, 114–20. Cf. Ober 1998, 104–5; Lebow 2003, 147–8. ⁹¹ See Steinbock 2013, 293–4, for a list of other similar atrocities perpetrated by the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War as well as on the Dorian proposal, motivated by the desire to avenge those atrocities, to raze Athens after its capitulation in 404 .

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112  :    Although Thucydides emphasizes that the main reason for the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War was that later politicians diverged from Pericles’ injunction to curb the Athenian appetite for imperial expansion (Th. 2.65.7, cf. 1.144.1–2),⁹² he makes clear that the problem is in fact deeply rooted in Pericles’ own conception of both internal and international politics. Not only does Thucydides portray Pericles as an ardent proponent of imperial values, who instigates a war with Sparta by citing the self-evident superiority of Athens (Th. 1.140–4),⁹³ but he also explicitly describes the Periclean rule over Athens itself as “a democracy only in name,” but in reality an autocratic “rule of the strongest man” (Th. 2.65.9–10 ἐγίνετό τε λόγῳ μὲν δημοκρατία, ἔργῳ δὲ ὑπὸ τοῦ πρώτου ἀνδρὸς ἀρχή, cf. Th. 2.37.1).⁹⁴ The same is true of Thucydides’ image of the Athenian empire—a voluntary alliance in name, but a brutal tyranny in reality (cf. Th. 1.75.1–2). As a result, Athens itself evolves from a free state into a slave of the empire on which she is now completely dependent (cf. Th. 2.63.2 ἧς οὐδ᾿ ἐκστῆναι ἔτι ὑμῖν ἔστιν).⁹⁵ After Pericles’ death, the tension between democracy and empire cannot be convincingly concealed anymore and eventually leads to the collapse of the entire conceptual system. The unbridled struggle for autocratic power among the democratic leaders, which Thucydides attests in the post-Periclean period, is on the one hand a symptom of the assimilation of Athenian internal politics to the autocratic manner in which Athens rules over its “allies.”⁹⁶ But on the other, it is precisely the internal strife endemic to democratic politics that completely rules out the possibility of an efficient management of the empire.⁹⁷ As a result, Pericles’ inspiring ideal of the Athenian citizens obeying the rule of law and united by the collective “love for the city’s power” yields to the selfserving lawlessness of Alcibiades⁹⁸ who infects the Athenians with a “fatal love for the absent” (Th. 6.13.1 δυσέρωτας τῶν ἀπόντων, cf. 6.24.3)—a selfdestructive obsession with imperial expansion that results in the disaster of the Sicilian expedition and, ultimately, in Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War.⁹⁹ I showed above that Attic tragedy contributes to the formation of the ideology of Athenian exceptionalism by drawing a contrast between Athens ⁹² Foster 2010, 210–18; Nichols 2015, 41–7; Jaffe 2017, 180–92. ⁹³ See e.g. Ober 1998, 81–3; Price 2001, 174–8; Foster 2010, 138–50; Luginbill 2011, 149–56. ⁹⁴ See Ober 1998, 86–7, on the fundamental division, in Thucydides’ view of democracy, into “the few” and “the many”—a division leading to the instability of the system. Cf. Wohl 2002, 69–71. ⁹⁵ Cf. Luginbill 2011, 56–9 and 165–8. ⁹⁶ Ober 1998, 69. ⁹⁷ On stasis (internal strife) as the main reason of Athens’ defeat, see Price 2001, 274–329. ⁹⁸ Nichols 2015, 125. ⁹⁹ See e.g. Ober 1998, 107–21; Gribble 1999, 169–88; Wohl 2002, 124–70; Nichols 2015, 107–37.

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as a unique place whose unfailing intentionality is inextricably linked to a political language based on a “natural” (indexical) link between the signifier and the signified and such internally split polities as Argos or Thebes where political language is in permanent flux and where, for that reason, no intentional action can ever result in the intended outcome. Thucydides, by contrast, lays bare Athenian autochthony as a self-congratulatory ideological fiction and has his Pericles depict an alternative version of the “ideal state of Athens,” a version thoroughly informed by the city’s inherent non-coincidence with itself: the conceptual foundation of Pericles’ Athens is not the essentialist nature of its citizens but their willing embrace of the symbolic system of the constitution, and that symbolic system, in turn, serves to account for the city’s success in expanding imperial boundaries—a process figured as an erotic longing for ever more power. While the rhetoric of autochthony is marked by a “natural” fusion between the signifier and the signified, the fundamental split between “words” and “deeds” (a split inherent in the perpetually expanding city never being identical to what it is at any given moment) is indispensable for the pragmatic effect that Pericles’ imperial rhetoric seeks to exercise on the Athenian audience—an effect that consists in turning them from selfidentical autochthons into insatiable “lovers of the empire.” And it is precisely this irreducible discrepancy between “words” and “deeds” that, as Thucydides seems to suggest, is inevitably bound to transform Athens itself from what tragedy occasionally portrays as an ideal place where all insoluble conflicts automatically reach a harmonious closure into a tragic city par excellence—a city that, like Argos or Thebes, is doomed to self-destruction by the semiotic instability of its political language.¹⁰⁰

Living on the Isles of the Blest As early as in Aristophanes’ Frogs, a comedy staged a year after the death of both Sophocles and Euripides and a year before the capitulation of Athens,¹⁰¹ the only rescue that can still be imagined for the city is declared to be the return of tragedy (Ar. Ra. 1419 ἵν᾿ ἡ πόλις σωθεῖσα τοὺς χοροὺς ἄγῃ, 1501 σῷζε

¹⁰⁰ On Thucydides’ indebtedness to tragedy in general, see e.g. Cornford 1907; Finley 1967, 1–54; Euben 1990, 167–201; Lebow 2003, 115–67; de Romilly 2012, 42–70. On the tragic overtones of Thucydides’ portrayal of Athens’ imperial eros (cf. A. A. 341–2; E. Hipp. 181–5 and 191–4), see Joho 2017, 602–3. On the Trojan and Persian Wars (not only epic/historical, but also tragic plots) as foils to Thucydides’ portrayal of the Sicilian expeditions, see Grethlein 2010, 257–68. Cf. Nichols 2015, 107–8. ¹⁰¹ Dover 1993, 6–9.

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114  :    πόλιν τὴν ἡμετέραν).¹⁰² Tragedy plays in the Frogs the same role as utopian fantasies do in Aristophanes’ other comedies—as a remedy of all social ills and as an object of an eroticized desire comparable in intensity to ravishing hunger (Dionysus explicitly draws a parallel between his “yearning after Euripides” and Heracles’ proverbial craving for food: Ar. Ra. 66–7 τοιουτοσὶ τοίνυν με δαρδάπτει πόθος / Εὐριπίδου). That in the end Dionysus picks Aeschylus as the poet whom he brings back from the underworld doubtless has to do not only with the uncompromising stance of the older tragedian’s civic ethics, opposed to Euripides’ moral equivocations, but also with the greater temporal distance that separates the ideal city enshrined in Aeschylus’ tragedies from what Aristophanes depicts as the more recent corruption of Athens portrayed by Euripides.¹⁰³ Although the ideal city of tragedy cannot literally be saved, it survives in virtually unchanged form in fourth-century Attic oratory.¹⁰⁴ The notion of autochthony as the conceptual source of both democracy and martial valour infuses the rhetoric of Athenian self-praise from the beginning of the century until the city loses its independence to Macedon—most notably in the funeral orations composed by Lysias (392/391 ),¹⁰⁵ Demosthenes (338 ), and Hyperides (322 ),¹⁰⁶ as well as in Isocrates’ Panegyric (380 ) and Lycurgus’ Against Leocrates (330 ).¹⁰⁷ In all these speeches, the rhetoric of autochthony enacts the same semiotic and pragmatic principles as Praxithea’s speech in Euripides’ Erechtheus, which portrays Athens as a unique place where political language functions as a non-arbitrary index of the citizens’ autochthonous nature. In these speeches, too, the status of the Attic soil as a figurative mother of all Athenians turns the entire citizen body into a unified entity devoid of any internal differences and predisposed by nature to heroic valour (see esp. Hyp. 6.7);¹⁰⁸ their autochthonous origins make the Athenians superior to all other Greeks, who, by contrast, can only claim to be adopted, rather than biological, children of their native cities (Lys. 2.17, cf. Isoc. 4.24–5);¹⁰⁹ and as a notional brotherhood of citizens, autochthony also constitutes the basis of democratic equality presented as self-evidently preferable

¹⁰² MacDowell 1995, 293–7; Ruffell 2014, 212–13. ¹⁰³ Cf. Dover 1993, 19–24. ¹⁰⁴ Hanink 2013 and 2015. See also Sansone 2020, 1–11. ¹⁰⁵ On the date of Lysias’ epitaphios, see Grethlein 2010, 107, with references. ¹⁰⁶ On the historical background and the rhetorical strategies of Demosthenes’ and Hyperides’ funeral orations, see Herrman 2009, 3–26. ¹⁰⁷ Loraux 1986. Cf. Steinbock 2013, 49–58. ¹⁰⁸ Cohen 2000, 98–100. ¹⁰⁹ Cf. Loraux 1986, 210–11.

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to the inner strife promoted by autocratic and oligarchic regimes (Lys. 2.18–19; D. 60.26).¹¹⁰ As in tragedy, this construct is emphatically timeless.¹¹¹ Fourth-century orators unanimously stress that the Athenians have habitually demonstrated its validity from time immemorial when they defended their native soil against the Amazons (Ly. 2.4–6; Isoc. 4.68–70; D. 60.8) and the Thracian army of Eumolpus (Isoc. 4.68–70, D. 60.8),¹¹² the latter myth most prominently singled out by Lycurgus who quotes in its entirety Praxithea’s monologue from Euripides’ Erechtheus (Lycurg. c. Leocr. 100–1 = E. Erechth. fr. 360).¹¹³ Moreover, the “natural justice” born from their native soil becomes in Attic oratory a universal principle that the Athenians unstintingly share with others. The catalogue of the mythical deeds illustrating the Athenians’ innate willingness to risk their lives to defend the universal ideal of justice includes the two “tragic” myths central to the self-definition of fifth-century Athens—the burial by the Athenians of the seven against Thebes (Ly. 2.7–10, D. 60.8; Isoc. 4.55) and the asylum granted in Athens to the children of Heracles (Ly. 2.11–16; Isoc. 4.56–65; D. 60.8, cf. Hdt. 9.27).¹¹⁴ Finally, the selfless readiness of the Athenians to confront mortal danger while protecting the weaker, a propensity linked both to the autochthonous purity of their ethnic origins and to their inborn love of freedom, most clearly manifests itself in the Persian Wars, in which, as the fourth-century orators never tire of stressing, Athens alone was responsible for saving all of Greece from the imminent enslavement by the barbarian hordes (Lys. 2.20–47, D. 60.9–10).¹¹⁵ A few decades before Lycurgus’ Against Leocrates and closer in date to Lysias’ funeral oration and Isocrates’ Panegyric, Plato’s Menexenus¹¹⁶ lays bare the cliché-ridden nature of the Athenian autochthony discourse.¹¹⁷ When ¹¹⁰ Note, too, that Hyperides (6.39) compares the war dead of democratic Athens to the Tyrannicides. ¹¹¹ Loraux 1986, passim, esp. 34–42 and 171–217. See also Grethlein 2010, 113–17; Barbato 2020, 62–6. ¹¹² Steinbock 2013, 52–5. ¹¹³ On Lycurgus’ use of Euripides, see Hanink 2014, 31–9. ¹¹⁴ On the standard mythical catalogues of Athenian patriotic rhetoric, see Kierdorf 1966, 83–97; Rosivach 1987, 303; Proietti 2015. On connections between fifth-century tragedy and fourth-century oratory in their treatments of these mythical catalogues, see Hanink 2013. More specifically on the burial of the Seven in fourth-century oratory, see also Steinbock 2013, 156–8. ¹¹⁵ Steinbock 2013, 55–8. ¹¹⁶ The King’s Peace of 386  explicitly mentioned in the dialogue (Pl. Mx. 245d–e) is the obvious terminus post quem. On speculative attempts in scholarship to assign a more precise date to the Menexenus, see Tsitsiridis 1998, 41–52. ¹¹⁷ Dodds 1959, 24; Pownall 2004, 38–64, esp. 58. In fact, the funeral oration emerges in the Menexenus as an epitome of the falsehood characteristic of encomium in general, for the Athenians are praised collectively, regardless of their individual standing and achievements: Pl. Mx. 234c4 καὶ ἐπαίνου αὖ ἔτυχεν, καὶ ἐὰν φαῦλος ᾖ. Cf. Pl. Smp. 198d3–e1. See Kerch 2008; Trivigno 2009, 45–8. Cf. Clavaud 1980; Loraux 1986, 333–9; Coventry 1989.

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116  :    Menexenus complains to Socrates that the Assembly has been so slow in selecting the speaker for the upcoming state funeral that the one selected would now have to improvise on the spot, Socrates counters that nothing could in fact be easier than to praise Athens before an Athenian audience and corroborates this view by extemporizing an entire funeral oration complete with all standard clichés of the genre (Pl. Mx. 234c6–e2).¹¹⁸ What Socrates does in this speech is not only to reduce some of those clichés to absurdity, but also to point to the glaring discrepancy between the ideal city, which fourthcentury rhetoric has inherited from fifth century tragedy, and the real city inhabited by the listeners. On the one hand, Socrates, unlike the authors of the other funeral orations,¹¹⁹ purports to take the earth-born origins of the Athenians as literally as possible: not only is the state funeral itself depicted in his speech as a literal return of the war-dead into the soil that had given them birth (Pl. Mx. 237c1–3), but the Attic mother-earth itself, which, in contrast to all other lands, is said to have engendered only such superior offspring as humans, wheat plants, and olive trees (Pl. Mx. 237c5–238b6),¹²⁰ is also declared to be the primordial prototype of motherhood (Pl. Mx. 238a4 οὐ γὰρ γῆ γυναῖκα μεμίμηται κυήσει καὶ γεννήσει, ἀλλὰ γυνὴ γῆν).¹²¹ A similar literal-mindedness, which this time does find close parallels in fourth-century oratory, informs Socrates’ “historical” excursus where autochthony gradually morphs into a blunt image of racial purity—an image that uniquely qualifies the purebred Athenians, rather than any of the other, mixed-race, Greeks, as natural advocates of the deeply ingrained Greek hatred against all non-Greeks (Pl. Mx. 245 c6–d2, cf. Isocr. 12. 124). This literal-mindedness forms a contrast to Socrates’ admission of the purely conventional nature of such a crucial political term as democracy: although Socrates follows the other funeral orations in invoking autochthony as a source of democratic equality (Pl. Mx. 238e1–239a3, cf. Lys. 2.17; Dem.

¹¹⁸ Despite the growing scholarly consensus that Socrates’ speech in the Menexenus can best be understood as a parody of the clichés of the funeral orations (see Tsitsiridis 1998, 63–92, for a detailed critical overview of the discussion), many have invested the speech with a serious intent, most recently Pappas—Zelcer 2015 and Petrucci 2017. See also Engels 2012, who purports to solve what he sees as a tension between the (undeniable) irony of the framing dialogue and the (alleged) seriousness of the funeral oration by postulating a conflation between two originally independent texts. ¹¹⁹ Cohen 2000, 96. ¹²⁰ Tsitsiridis 1998, 204–5: “Das Lob der Erde als Mutter findet in den anderen Epitaphien keine Entsprechung.” ¹²¹ Henry 1995, 37–9. Note, too, the contrast between Socrates’ image of the Attic mother-earth providing her children with all they need and Thucydides’ emphasis on the poverty of the Attic soil (Th. 1.2) and on Athens’ dependence on imports (Th. 2.38.2): Cohen 2000, 101.

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60.26; Lycurg. c. Leocr. 79),¹²² he more or less in the same breath echoes Thucydides’ image of the de facto autocratic rule of Pericles by presenting the Athenian constitution as a democracy only in name, but in reality a meritocratic aristocracy dominated by elected “kings” (Pl. Mx. 238c7–d3, cf. Th. 2.65.9–10).¹²³ Similarly, Socrates’ catalogue of the Athenian martial exploits is marked by a similarly striking discrepancy between “words” and “deeds.” Predictably, he begins with the standard list used in the other fourth-century funeral orations to showcase Athens as a site of impeccable valour and selfless justice (Eumolpus, the Amazons, the Seven against Thebes, the Heraclidae, and the Persian Wars: Pl. Mx. 239b3–241e5).¹²⁴ And like the other funeral orations, Socrates’ speech can only continue to project this image onto the Peloponnesian War and beyond either by omitting inglorious episodes or by making them appear like confirmations of the timeless ideal.¹²⁵ As a result, the Peloponnesian War turns out to be caused by the other Greeks’ envy towards the unmatched glory of Athens (Pl. Mx. 242a2–4).¹²⁶ The Sicilian disaster of 413 , although acknowledged as such, is blamed only on the distance between Athens and Sicily and gives occasion to praise the initial success of the campaign (Pl. Mx. 242e6–243a5).¹²⁷ Although Socrates does mention the failure to retrieve the bodies of those shipwrecked after the battle of Arginusae in 406 —a blatant violation of the very raison d’être of the funeral oration (the unconditional obligation to bury the war dead in the Attic soil)¹²⁸—, it does not prevent him from stating that their bodies “lie here” as well (Pl. Mx. 243c6–7 οὐκ ἀναιρεθέντες ἐκ τῆς θαλάττης κεῖνται ἐνθάδε, cf. X. HG 1.6–7 and Pl. Ap. 32a9–c3).¹²⁹ The defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War becomes a proof of Athenian invincibility (for, as it strangely turns out, no one can defeat Athens

¹²² Rosivach 1987, 303–4. See also Loraux 1986, 43–117. ¹²³ Coventry 1989, 11–14; Cohen 2000, 100–1; Todd 2007, 154; Trivigno 2009, 36–7. Cf. Kahn 1963, 222. ¹²⁴ Loraux 1986, 189–217; Pownall 2004, 40–1 and 50–2. ¹²⁵ Bloedow 1975; M. Henderson 1975; Clavaud 1980, 127–67; Salkever 1993, 138–40; Pownall 2004, 38–64; Trivigno 2009. ¹²⁶ Pownall 2004, 57. ¹²⁷ Loraux 1986, 201; Pownall 2004, 54. Cf. Tsitsiridis 1998, ad loc., who draws attention to the fact that Athens, contrary to Socrates’ assertion, did (twice) send extra troops to Sicily during the campaign. Cf. Th. 7.16.1 and 7.20.2. ¹²⁸ The Athenian custom to bury the remains of the war dead in the city (cf. Th. 2.34) forms a contrast to the other Greek cities burying their warriors in the vicinity of the battlefield. For evidence, see Jacoby 1944, 42–3. The fact that Thucydides stresses that there was only one exception to this rule (after the battle of Marathon: 2.34.5, but see Jacoby 1944, 55, for other exceptions) illustrates the importance of this custom. Cf. Loraux 1986, 45–75. ¹²⁹ For an overview of the attempts to explain (or emend) this oxymoronic phrase, see Tsitsiridis 1998, ad loc. His solution (“Der Sinn is also: da sie unglücklicherweise aus dem Meer nicht gezogen

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118  :    but Athens itself: Pl. Mx. 243d5–7),¹³⁰ while the civil war that erupted in its aftermath (the embarrassing episode of the tyranny of the Thirty remains unmentioned) is interpreted as an illustration of the natural ease with which the notional family of the autochthonous Athenians can resolve their internal conflicts (Pl. Mx. 243d7–244a3).¹³¹ And finally, the King’s Peace of 386 , which in reality forced Athens to accept the continuing Spartan domination and the growing Persian influence over Greece (X. HG 5.1.25 and 31),¹³² is presented not only as a seamless continuation of the habitual resistance of Athens to the Spartan threat to enslave the Greeks but also as an archetypal display of Athenian clemency, which Athens now extends even to its Persian archenemies (Pl. Mx. 244b3–246a4).¹³³ Similarly, Socrates’ dialogue with Menexenus that precedes the funeral oration serves to lay bare the intellectual inanity of patriotic rhetoric. Socrates’ sarcastic remark that Menexenus’ interest in the planning of the state funeral must be a sign of his maturity echoes the notion propounded by Callicles in the Gorgias of philosophy as a frivolous pursuit appropriate only for adolescents, which in adulthood should yield to the practice of rhetoric (Pl. Mx. 234a4–5 and Grg. 484c–486c).¹³⁴ By contrast, Socrates apologizes for what is in fact an exemplary funeral oration¹³⁵ by calling it a childish joke unworthy of an old man like himself (Pl. Mx. 236c8–9 ἀλλ᾿ ἴσως μου καταγελάσῃ, ἄν σοι δόξω πρεσβύτης ὢν ἔτι παίζειν). The ease with which, in the oration itself, Socrates recycles, and reduces to absurdity, the standard clichés of Athenian

werden konnten, gibt es für sie hier ein Kenotaph”) finds no basis in the text. Sansone 2020, ad loc. regards the phrase as “an erroneuous explanatory gloss.” To my mind, accepting the jarring contradiction would much better accord with the speech’s overall tendency to adapt any event of Athenian history (no matter how dishonourable) to the laudatory conventions of the funeral oration—just as all Athenian war dead are praised as heroes, regardless of their individual worth: Pl. Mx. 234c4. Cf. Pownall 2004, 54. ¹³⁰ This view of Athens’ invincibility is based on taking at face value Thucydides’ more nuanced notion (Th. 2.65.12, echoed in Lys. 2.65) that internal strife had so weakened Athens as to cause its defeat: Coventry 1989, 8. ¹³¹ Loraux 1986, 199; Henry 1995, 39; Tsitsiridis 1998, ad loc. See also Pownall 2004, 43–4, for parallels in fourth-century rhetoric. On Socrates’ failure to mention the tyranny of the Thirty as being in tune with the fourth-century tendency to repress the memory of the recent non-democratic episodes of Athenian history, see Shear 2011, 304. ¹³² On the King’s Peace, see Badian 1991. Cf. Todd 2007, 155–6, who sees in Plato’s account of the civil war a parody of Ly. 2.61–5. ¹³³ See Pownall 2004, 55–7, on the absurdities of Socrates’ description of the Corinthian War and the King’s Peace. ¹³⁴ Dodds 1959, 24; Coventry 1989, 1; Sansone 2020, 18–20. ¹³⁵ The Menexenus was regarded as a standard model of the funeral oration in ancient rhetorical theory: D.H. Dem. 1027. See Tsitsiridis 1998, 58–63. According to Cicero (Orat. 151), Plato’s epitaphios was recited at a yearly festival in Hellenistic Athens: Thomas 1989, 210; Cohen 2000, 102.

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patriotic rhetoric serves to demonstrate the triviality of “gluing together” commonly available intertextual snippets.¹³⁶ Socrates underlines the unbridgeable gap between “words” and “deeds,” characteristic of political rhetoric in general, by attributing his praise of the racial purity of the Athenian men to a foreign-born woman. Socrates’ image of Aspasia as a teacher of rhetoric is perfectly in line with his view of rhetoric as a discourse that has nothing to do with the truth.¹³⁷ By naming Aspasia, a native of Miletus and Pericles’ life-long partner, the actual author of the two funeral orations, Pericles’ and his own,¹³⁸ Socrates points to the glaring contradictions inherent in the fifth-century ideological construct of Athens as both a city of autochthonous citizens and an empire animated by an eroticized desire for foreign conquests: as an object of Pericles’ “imperial desire” and a foreigner banned from marriage in Athens by the strictures of the citizenship law passed by the father of her own son,¹³⁹ Aspasia is indeed the most eloquent symbol of the fundamental “falsity” of the Athenian autochthony discourse. Moreover, Aspasia as an icon of a complete disjunction between speech, speaker, and context becomes synonymous with what Socrates presents as the inability of patriotic rhetoric to produce anything but fictitious phantoms: after listening to the praises of Athens, the audiences of funeral orations remain for a few days under the impression that they live in a fantastic world—on the Isles of the Blest, the abode of the Hesiodic Race of the Heroes (Pl. Mx. 235c4–5 οἶμαι μόνον οὐκ ἐν μακάρων νήσοις οἰκεῖν, cf. Hes. Op. 167–73).¹⁴⁰ The pragmatic effect produced by patriotic rhetoric consists in a fleeting illusion of living in a utopia that has nothing to do with the political reality to which one is forced to return once the spell is dissipated (Pl. Mx. 235c1–3).¹⁴¹ Needless to say, Socrates’ funeral oration differs drastically from Thucydides’: while Socrates dutifully recycles the clichés of the Athenian ¹³⁶ This is how Socrates describes Aspasia composing the speech, now recited by Socrates, out of leftovers of Pericles’ epitaphios (also authored by her): Pl. Mx. 236b6 περιλείμματ᾿ ἄττα ἐξ ἐκείνου συγκολλῶσα. Cf. Long 2003, 50. Thus, not a single word of his funeral oration comes from Socrates himself: Pl. Mx. 236a8 αὐτὸς μὲν παρ᾿ ἐμαυτοῦ ἴσως οὐδέν. Cf. Coventry 1989, 5–8; Henry 1995, 34–34, who interprets Plato’s Aspasia as an icon of the fundamental interchangeability that characterizes the genre of funeral oratory. ¹³⁷ Cf. Henry 1995, 34. ¹³⁸ On the portrayal of Aspasia in Greek literature, see Henry 1995, esp. 32–40, on Aspasia in the Menexenus. For different views on the connections between Pericles’ funeral oration in Thucydides and Aspasia’s funeral oration in Plato, see e.g. Coventry 1989; Salkever 1993; Monoson 2000, 182–9; Long 2003; Pownall 2004, 60–1; Pappas—Zelcer 2015. ¹³⁹ On Aspasia’s status as a metic under the Periclean citizenship law and the legal status of her male offspring, see Henry 1995, 13–15. ¹⁴⁰ Demosthenes compares the war dead to the heroes residing on the Isles of the Blest (60.34). For Plato’s Socrates, this is where the funeral oration transposes the entire city of Athens. ¹⁴¹ Cf. Loraux 1986, 333–6.

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120  :    autochthony discourse, Thucydides suppresses the notion of autochthony and conceives of imperial expansion as the conceptual basis of his version of the “ideal state of Athens.” It is, therefore, all the more striking that Aspasia is presented in the Menexenus not only as the actual author of both of these orations (Pl. Mx. 236a8–b6) but also as an inexhaustible fount of all kinds of “pretty political speeches” that Socrates assures Menexenus he could endlessly recite to him (Pl. Mx. 249e3–5 ἵνα καὶ αὖθις σοι πολλοὺς καὶ καλοὺς λόγους παρ᾿ αὐτῆς πολιτικοὺς ἀπαγγέλλω). In other words, Socrates sees Aspasia as what can be compared to a data cloud from which one can easily download readymade political speeches suitable to any occasion. From Socrates’ perspective, differences among those speeches—such as the obvious differences between the “ideal states of Athens” depicted in Pericles’ and his own funeral orations—are absolutely inconsequential. By complaining that Aspasia threatens to beat up her students unless they memorize her speeches verbatim (Pl. Mx. 236b8–c1 ἐμάνθανόν γέ τοι παρ᾿ αὐτῆς, καὶ ὀλίγου πληγὰς ἔλαβον ὅτ᾿ ἐπελανθανόμην), Socrates indicates that the very existence of the ideal state of Athens is predicated upon its status as a series of marginally different copies of the utopian image in which the Athenians have been trained by orators to recognize themselves.¹⁴² The fact that, in the Menexenus, Socrates returns from the dead more than thirteen years after his death in order to dismantle the idea of Athens as an ideal state draws attention to the fact that one of the crucial functions of Plato’s dialogues consists in offering philosophy as a antidote to the seductive certainties of ideological constructs.¹⁴³ In the next chapter, I will show that an important pragmatic effect that Plato strives to obtain in his dialogic writing consists in enabling his contemporary readers to subject the competing versions of “the ideal state of Athens” (i.e. a state of self-identical autochthonous siblings and a state of law-abiding “imperial lovers”) to a dialectical analysis and to replace those empty ideological constructs with what can be termed as “the ideal state of philosophy.”

¹⁴² Cf. Coventry 1989, 6; Sansone 2020, 26–8. ¹⁴³ See Dodds 1959, 24; Pownall 2004, 58–9. The latest event mentioned in the Menexenus is the King’s Peace of 386 . On the Menexenus reproducing the fifth-century ideal of Athens, see Hanink 2015, 291–2, with references. Unsurprisingly, this anachronism was occasionally invoked in the nineteenth century as one of the key arguments against the Platonic authorship of the Menexenus. For overviews of the scholarly debate, see Tsitsirides 1998, 21–42, esp. 22–5; Sansone 2020, 14–17. For stimulating attempts to interpret this anachronism, see e.g. Coventry 1989; Rosenstock 1994; Trivigno 2009.

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4 Plato’s Ideal State of Philosophy Socrates and Athens In the Crito, Socrates explains the meaning of his philosophical pursuit by staging what amounts to a conflation between two versions of the “ideal state of Athens”—the Periclean city of law-abiding citizens and the city of notional siblings propagated by the autochthony discourse. To enable his interlocutor to understand why he prefers to die rather than to go into exile, Socrates imagines a dialogue with the personified Athenian laws. By presenting themselves as the Athenians’ common progenitors whose ordinances are more authoritative than the commands of their biological parents (Pl. Cri. 50d1–51e5),¹ the laws effectively usurp the role played in patriotic rhetoric by the Attic soil. To drive this message home, Socrates compares a death sentence imposed by the laws to the cornerstone of the Athenian autochthony discourse—the Athenian citizens’ duty to die when summoned to defend their native soil (Pl. Cri. 51b5–6 ἐάντε εἰς πόλεμον ἄγῃ τρωθησόμενον ἢ ἀποθανούμενον). Thus, following Thucydides’ Pericles (cf. Th. 2.37.1–2), Socrates effectively translates the notion of social cohesion based on common biological origins into legalistic terms—into the notion of the citizens’ voluntary obedience to the laws.² But just as Thucydides exposes an unbridgeable gap between Pericles’ legalistic ideal and the reality of Alcibiades’ lawlessness, so the ideal city postulated in Socrates’ dialogue with the laws, too, proves to be infinitely remote from the real city in which Socrates has been unjustly sentenced to death.³ And by analogy with Socrates’ appeal to the Athenian autochthony discourse, which allows him to make his interlocutor envisage the possibility of a city governed by the rule of law, he uses the idea of an unconditional obedience to the Athenian laws in order to conceptualize the role that dialectic plays in his own “politics.”⁴ In the Gorgias, Socrates famously describes ¹ Ober 1998, 181–3; Weiss 1998, 84–133; Vasiliou 2008, 79–84. ² Cf. Ober 2011, 151–2. ³ Note that in the Laws, too, the model (παράδειγμα) of the absolutely law-abiding city could only be fully put into practice if it were to be inhabited by gods or by children of gods: Pl. Lg. 739d–e. ⁴ Weiss 1998, 169. Cf. Harte 2005.

Greek Literature and the Ideal: The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age. Alexander Kirichenko, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Kirichenko 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866707.003.0008

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122  :    himself as the only true politician in all of Athens (Pl. Grg. 521d6–8). His “politics,” however, has nothing to do with governing in the literal sense of the term (in fact, he admits that he would feel utterly helpless if he were to hold a political office: Pl. Grg. 473e6–474a1) but consists in improving individual citizens by instilling in them a desire to live in accordance with dialectically examined truths (Pl. Grg. 502b1–d1).⁵ The notion of justice as an agreement between the actions performed by an individual moral agent and the truths established by dialectic (cf. Pl. Grg. 526d5–e1) makes it perfectly self-evident to Socrates that committing injustice is worse than suffering it (Pl. Cri. 53c4–8):⁶ the mythical conclusion of the Gorgias, which pictures the souls of the dead divested of all protective layers that they have accrued during lifetime and forced to appear naked before the judges of the underworld, corroborates Socrates’ acceptance of an unjustly suffered death—provided that it follows upon a life in which there has been no discrepancy between moral actions and philosophical convictions (Pl. Grg. 523a1–527e7).⁷ In the Crito, Socrates’ unconditional acceptance of the unjust death sentence is linked to the fact that, having spent his entire life trying to improve his fellow citizens by dialectically examining their flawed opinions, he is physically inseparable from Athens: even if ever given a chance to emigrate to such well-governed countries as Sparta or Crete, both of which he greatly admires, he would have preferred to stay in Athens (Pl. Cri. 52e5–6, cf. 52b1–c3).⁸ The death of Socrates can thus be seen as a dialectical event that effectively dismantles both versions of the “ideal state of Athens”—the one based on the citizens’ autochthonous origins and the one based on their obedience to the Athenian laws: the fact that he both lives and dies in accordance with his philosophical notion of justice urges the survivors to discern the intellectual vacuity of those ideological constructs and to acknowledge that Socrates’ “ideal state of philosophy” constitutes the only political ideal built on solid conceptual foundations. The Apology stages a dismantlement of the two versions of the ideal state of Athens by pitting them against each other in what is in effect a tragic conflict. In his speech, Socrates explains his life-long rejection of public politics by stressing that, had he been more politically active in the past, he would

⁵ Kahn 1983; Carone 2004. ⁶ Weiss 1998, 39–56. ⁷ Benardete 1991, 98–102; Fussi 2006, 75–128; Stauffer 2006, 167–76; Sedley 2009; Edmunds 2012; Rowe 2012. ⁸ Weiss 1998, 24–7. Given Socrates’ admiration for Crete, it is hardly surprising that Magnesia, the ideal state of the Laws, is to be located on Crete. On the connections between the ideal states of the Republic and the Laws, see Prauscello 2014, 21–101.

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doubtless have been sentenced to death much earlier (Pl. Ap. 31d6–8).⁹ To support this assumption, he cites the only two examples of his previous political engagement—one dating from the recently abolished tyranny of the Thirty, the other taking place a few years earlier under the democratic constitution. To Socrates as an uncompromising advocate of the truth, both tyranny and democracy turn out to be life threatening in equal measure. But while the dehumanizing oppression of tyranny is perfectly obvious to both the rulers and the ruled (for the tyrants openly resort to violence in order to implicate as many of their subjects as possible in their own crimes: Pl. Ap. 32c3–e1, esp. c7–8 βουλόμενοι ὡς πλείστους ἀναπλῆσαι αἰτιῶν),¹⁰ the threat that the Athenian democracy poses to an innocent defendant arises from its inability to reconcile the contradiction in its own idealized self-image between a notional family of blood-related autochthons and a society of law-abiding citizens—a contradiction of which the Athenians themselves are so unwilling to take cognizance that they prefer to eliminate anyone irksome enough to expose it. As Socrates reminds his listeners, the only time he held a political office in democratic Athens was when he served as a prytanis at the trial of the generals after the naval battle of Arginusae in 406  (Pl. Ap. 32a4–c3). The Athenian fleet had won that battle. But due to a raging storm, the shipwrecked could not be rescued, nor could the bodies of the war dead be retrieved from the water to be brought to Athens for a state funeral.¹¹ The eight generals leading the expedition moved on to conduct military operations elsewhere, putting two trierarchs in charge of the rescue efforts (X. HG 1.6.35), so that, legally, only those two could be accused of reneging on their duty. But in a blatant violation of the law, the council voted to try both the eight generals and the two trierarchs collectively (Pl. Ap. 32b2–5).¹² In his detailed account of the events, Xenophon (X. HG 1.7) tells that the jurors were at first inclined to acquit the generals, accepting their testimony, supported by numerous eyewitnesses, that the storm had rendered the rescue operation impossible (X. HG 1.7.6). But the proceedings had to be interrupted for the festival of Apaturia (X. HG 1.7.8)—a festival of the Athenian phratries

⁹ Cf. Weiss 1998, 13–15; Griswold 2011, 337. ¹⁰ On the historical background, see Slings 1994, 163–6. Cf. Ober 2011, 167–9. ¹¹ While Xenophon (X. HG 1.7) only emphasizes the failure of the rescue operation in general (e.g. 1.7.4), Diodorus Siculus insists that the generals’ crime consisted in leaving the dead unburied: Diod. 13.101, esp. 1. ¹² On the confusing numbers (eight generals in Xenophon, only six of them put on trial, and ten generals in Plato, actually two generals and two trierarchs), see Slings 1994, 162.

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124  :    and a celebration of common origins and blood ties—,¹³ where the absence of those fallen in the battle of Arginusae, even their dead bodies unavailable for burial, had infused their surviving relatives (X. HG 1.7.8 συγγενεῖς ὄντες τῶν ἀπολωλότων) with such a strong desire to take revenge on those deemed responsible for the disaster that on the next day the council voted to execute the accused generals en masse without making any distinction as to their individual culpability (X. HG 1.7.8–34). A little later, however, the Athenians regretted their unconstitutional decision and this time voted to execute those who had “deceived” them into making that decision in the first place (X. HG 1.7.35 οἵτινες τὸν δῆμον ἐξηπάτησαν). What this episode demonstrates with a vengeance is the sense of confusion that arises from the contradiction between the two versions of the ideal state of Athens—between the image of Athens as a notional family of autochthonous siblings and the Periclean notion of Athens as a polity governed by the rule of law. It is precisely this confusion that, for Socrates, deprives the Athenian political institutions of the ability to make reasonable, self-consistent decisions. Socrates’ adamant resistance to the council’s lawlessness is an attempt to clear that confusion (cf. Pl. Ap. 32b5 and X. HG 1.7.15–16). His vote against the illegal proposal to try the generals collectively is driven by the same love for the truth that animates his conversations with his individual fellow citizens, so that his uncompromising stance amounts to an instance of dialectic translated into political action (cf. Pl. Ap. 32c1–2).¹⁴ But what works in a one-on-one dialogue, in which the opponents can only fight with words, is bound to fail in a confrontation with an angry mob that easily prevails by resorting to brute force. As a result, when the orators threaten to impeach and arrest Socrates (Pl. Ap. 32b7–8) for defending the truth that diverges from the opinion shared by all, the Athenian democracy emerges to be no less oppressive than a brutal tyranny.¹⁵ The trial of Socrates enacts the same incompatibility between Socrates’ unflinching adherence to the truth and the council’s malleable opinions driven by emotion. Just as in the trial of the generals he aims to keep the council from succumbing to the emotional appeal of blood ties, so in his own trial, too, Socrates refrains from bringing his children to court to stir up the judges’ emotions (Pl. Ap. 34b6–35d8). Instead, he presents his readiness to die for the truth as a quintessential manifestation of the Athenian patriotic ideal. Socrates

¹³ On the Apaturia, see Deubner 1932, 232–4; Parke 1977, 88–92; Schmitt Pantel 1992, 81–90 and 131–5. ¹⁴ Vasiliou 2008, 51–6. ¹⁵ Ober 1998, 174–5.

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emphasizes that, by tirelessly exposing their misconceptions and by urging them to live up to the city’s true greatness, he treats all of his fellow citizens as members of his own family (Pl. Ap. 31b4–5 ἰδίᾳ ἑκάστῳ προσιόντα ὥσπερ πατέρα ἢ ἀδελφὸν πρεσβύτερον πείθοντα ἐπιμελεῖσθαι ἀρετῆς, cf. 36b5–d4)¹⁶— an image distinctly reminiscent of the portrayal of all Athenians as blood relatives in the autochthony discourse. He further draws an analogy between his divinely imposed philosophical duty and the Athenian citizens’ duty, repeatedly stressed in the funeral orations, to sacrifice their lives in battle in compliance with the commands of the city’s rulers (Pl. Ap. 28d10–29a1),¹⁷ so that the “good death” that now awaits Socrates becomes comparable to the image of heroic death in battle painted in the funeral orations (Pl. Ap. 38e2–39b8).¹⁸ And finally, he asks those who had voted for his acquittal to take good care of his sons after his death, treating them the same way as Socrates himself had treated his fellow Athenians and making sure that they, too, value virtue above all else (Pl. Ap. 41e2–42a2, cf. Cri. 54a6–7). This injunction is vividly reminiscent of one of the standard motifs of the funeral orations—the obligation taken upon themselves by the notional family of the Athenian citizens not only to raise the children of the war dead at public cost but also to urge them to live up to the glorious example set by their fathers (Th. 2.45–6; Pl. Mx. 248e7–249c3; Lys. 2.75; Hyp. 6.42).¹⁹ As a result, Socrates conceives of his life and death as a radical transformation of the ideal of Athens enshrined in the autochthony discourse: Socrates’ ideal state replaces the mythologized notion of the Athenians’ shared origins from the Attic soil with an unconditional faithfulness to the truth. By laying bare an insolvable contradiction at the core of Athens’ selfperception as an ideal state, Plato’s Socrates evokes Thucydides’ portrayal of Athens as a paradigmatically tragic city where the intrinsic discrepancy between “words” and “deeds” is bound to lead to the implosion of the entire conceptual system. But while Thucydides’ devastating analysis of the ideology of Athenian exceptionalism envisages no positive alternative, Plato stages the death of Socrates as an event that not only reveals the contradictions inherent in the existing political discourses but also offers a new discourse in their stead. In this respect, Plato’s image of the death of Socrates has more in common ¹⁶ Ober 2011, 153–8. ¹⁷ Weiss 1998, 8–15. ¹⁸ On this ideal in the funeral orations, see Loraux 1986, 145–71. Note, too, that Socrates draws an analogy between himself and Achilles (Pl. Ap. 28b3–d5: Euben 1990, 219–26; Vasiliou 2008, 24–7)—the paradigm of heroic death par excellence, which thoroughly informs what, according to Loraux, is the essentially aristocratic ethos of the Athenian funeral oration: Loraux 1986, 76–94 and 219–78. Cf. Thomas 1989, 213–21. ¹⁹ Loraux 1986, 55–8; Grethlein 2010, 108–9.

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126  :    with Attic tragedy than it does with Thucydides’ tragic account of Athenian history. The Athens in which Socrates is sentenced to death for what he understands to be an act of patriotic piety is torn by a tragic contradiction reminiscent of the one that turns the Thebes of Sophocles’ Antigone into an irreparably flawed polity—a place where Creon’s tyrannical power cannot be reconciled with the primacy of blood ties advocated by Antigone. At the same time, Thebes functions as a foil to the ideal of Athens as a site of “natural” harmony between political power and reproductive nature—an ideal that Antigone futilely strives to implement in Thebes and for which she willingly sacrifices her life.²⁰ As a tragically split polity, Plato’s Athens is similar to Sophocles’ Thebes.²¹ The main difference between them is that the contradiction that mars Plato’s Athens is not one between power and nature but one between power and truth. The unjust death of Socrates is the clearest symptom of that contradiction: just as in the Antigone the ideal state of Athens, in which political power is rooted in nature, implicitly emerges as the only viable alternative to the unnaturalness of Thebes, so in Plato, too, the ideal state of philosophy, in which power is identical with truth, becomes the only viable alternative to the lawlessness of Athens.²² And just as Attic tragedy in general enacts the ideal image of Athens as a locus of “natural justice” by pitting it against inherently corrupt non-Athenian others, so Plato, too, propounds Socrates’ ideal state of philosophy by opposing it to the ideological phantom of the ideal state of Athens. But while laying bare the illusoriness of the ideal Athens of tragedy, Plato’s Socrates effectively replicates the semiotic structure of that ideal: just as, in tragedy, Athens is a place where language is based on a non-arbitrary (indexical) link between the signifier and its “natural” signified, so Socrates’ ideal state of philosophy, too, is a place where language is based on a similarly non-arbitrary link between words and dialectically examined truths. In the Symposium, too, Plato stages a dismantlement of the same two versions of the ideal state of Athens—the Periclean city of law-abiding citizens and the autochthonous city of tragedy. Pausanias’ speech in the Symposium can be read as a heavily personalized spin-off of the Periclean ideology of

²⁰ Cf. Segal 1995, 122–3. ²¹ Note that both Antigone and Socrates are willing to die a “good death”: S. Ant. 96–7 (cf. 460–70) and Pl. Ap. 40b7–8. The same motivation informs the scenes of voluntary self-sacrifice in Euripides, esp. E. Heracl. 525–6: Wilkins 1990. ²² Another striking similarity between Antigone and Socrates is that both claim that their strikingly outlandish ideas are in fact shared by all: S. Ant. 508–9 and Pl. Grg. 474b2–5. See also Euben 1990, 126–9, for illuminating remarks on the similarities between Plato’s Apology and Crito and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus.

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Athenian exceptionalism. His account of love relegates to the domain of “Vulgar Eros” all types of sexuality socially accepted in Athens, not only relationships between men and women but also pederasty (Pl. Smp. 181d7–e1), and equates “Heavenly Eros” with his own relationship with Agathon—a permanent union between two grown-up men, which he characterizes as a love for the soul rather than for the body (Pl. Smp. 181c2–183d9).²³ Pausanias implicitly identifies his own life as a characteristic manifestation of the political and cultural superiority of Athens (Pl. Smp. 182a7–185c2).²⁴ Since, as Pausanias emphasizes, tyranny was overthrown in Athens by an archetypal “gay couple,” the tyrant slayers Harmodius and Aristogeiton, his own relationship with Agathon can be viewed as a manifestation of the quintessentially Athenian lifestyle, in which the Periclean ideal of the rule of law is inseparable from the intellectual refinement promoted by the virile love of wisdom (Pl. Smp. 182c5–7 and 184c7–d3, cf. Th. 2.40.1–2 φιλοσοφοῦμεν ἄνευ μαλακίας).²⁵ But while Pausanias portrays Agathon and himself as upholders of the tradition established by the tyrannicides, Plato casually reminds his readers that the couple’s democratic allegiances were in fact rather tenuous—for they eventually fled democratic Athens and settled down at the court of the Macedonian king Archelaus (Pl. Smp. 172c 3–4; cf. Ar. Ra. 83–5), whom the Gorgias (Pl. Grg. 471a) describes as an epitome of the worst evils of tyranny.²⁶ It is doubtless this blatant discrepancy between “words” and “deeds” that explains why Aristophanes is suddenly seized by a hiccupping fit in reaction to Pausanias’ speech (Pl. Smp. 185c4–e5). In Aristophanes’ comedies, physiological phenomena—such as Demos’ premature aging in the Knights,²⁷ Blepyrus’ chronic constipation in the Assemblywomen,²⁸ or the Athenian men’s priapism in the Lysistrata²⁹—are habitually used to communicate subtle political meanings. In Plato, too, the violent “arrhythmia” that takes hold of Aristophanes’ entire body³⁰ could be seen as a typically Aristophanic reaction to the cognitive dissonance between the “Periclean” veneer of his predecessor’s

²³ Belfiore 2012, 125–7. ²⁴ Ludwig 2002, 59–60; Davidson 2007, 418–23. ²⁵ Monoson 2000, 21–50. ²⁶ Stauffer 2006, 60–2. ²⁷ Cf. Ludwig 2002, 141–53; Wohl 2002, 144–58. ²⁸ Leitao 2012, 146–81. Blepyrus’ main concern seems to be (Ar. Ec. 359–60) ἀλλ᾿ ὅταν φάγω, / ὅποι βαδιεῖταί μοι τὸ λοιπὸν ἡ κόπρος: Henderson 1975, 102–3. On Aristophanes’ scatological humor in general, see Henderson 1975, 187–203. ²⁹ Cf. Bowie 1993, 201–4; McGlew 2002, 162–3. ³⁰ Note that Aristophanes is ultimately “healed” by the speech of the physician Eryximachus, who identifies Eros with the correct “rhythm” imposed by the skilled doctor on the antagonistic forces reigning over the human body (Pl. Smp. 185e6–188e4, esp. 187b7 ῥυθμός): Hunter 2004, 53–9; Belfiore 2012, 127–31; Weber 2012; Levin 2014, 73–109.

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128  :    speech and what Aristophanes himself proceeds to uncover as its tyrannical essence. On the surface, Aristophanes’ mythological narrative is an aetiology of sexual orientation—the three sexes of the original double-bodied humans accounting for the fact that “the other half” to which one is drawn can be either male or female.³¹ But in fact, the speech has more interesting things to say about the intrinsic contradictions of the ideology of Athenian exceptionalism than it does about erotic preferences. Although we know practically nothing about the activities of historical Pausanias,³² the fact that in his fictional speech he so emphatically links his own lifestyle with the Periclean notion of the Athenian rule of law invites us to assume that he may in fact have been a politically active legal expert.³³ It is, therefore, revealing that it is only to professional politicians that Aristophanes ascribes the exclusive predilection for “manly love” (cf. Pl. Smp. 192a2 ἅτε ἀνδρειότατοι ὄντες φύσει) so proudly advocated by Pausanias (Pl. Smp. 192a6–7):³⁴ the virtual identity established by Platonic Aristophanes between homoeroticism and politics effectively places Pausanias in the same category as the Paphlagon/Cleon of Aristophanes’ Knights—a typical democratic politician whose obsessive “love for the people” functions as a transparent cipher for his aspirations to what is in fact a tyrannical power over his beloved.³⁵ There is another subtle hint in Aristophanes’ speech that reveals Pausanias as an epitome of the tyrannical undercurrent of Athenian democratic politics. While earlier in his speech Aristophanes has stressed that the satisfaction of erotic desire is indispensable for human survival and happiness (Pl. Smp. 191c4–8), he now states that the only reason why same-sex couples like Pausanias and Agathon spend their entire lives together is not the physiological satisfaction of the sexual urge but an insatiable longing for the primordial spherical shape (Pl. Smp. 192c7–e9)—a longing that vividly evokes Pausanias’ exclusion of the “love for the body” from his notion of “Heavenly Eros” (Pl. Smp. 181c2–183d9). It is rather striking in this connection that what, according to Aristophanes, caused the original spherical humans to be cut in two was in fact their “Heavenly Eros”—a desire to ascend to the sky in order to put an end to the rule of the gods (Pl. Smp. 190b5–9). Eros as a desire for ³¹ Cf. Belfiore 2012, 131–3. ³² Brisson 2006, 237. ³³ See also Hunter 2004, 43, on Pausanias’ role in the Symposium as a nomothetes. ³⁴ Cf. Ludwig 2002, 27–121. ³⁵ Braund 2005, 94–5; Sidwell 2009, 155. For politicians as “lovers of the Athenian people,” see also Ar. Ach. 142–4. On the erotic imagery in the Knights, see Wohl 2002, 91–3; Scholtz 2007, 43–70; Yates 2005. On Cleon in Knights, see also Halliwell 1984; Lind 1990; Atkinson 1992; McGlew 2002, 87–111; Zumbrunnen 2012, 83–6.

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wholeness is thus inseparable in Aristophanes’ speech from a desire for universal domination, which turns Pausanias’ “heavenly love” into a virtual synonym of the “heavenly tyranny” established by Peisetaerus in the Birds. When Aristophanes disingenuously remarks that the spherical humans were born from the earth like grasshoppers (Pl. Smp. 191b7–c1), he in effect uncovers the intrinsic affinity between Pausanias’ self-perception as a “heavenly” lover and the Athenians’ self-perception as an earth-born people predisposed by nature to rule over everybody else. The fact that he concludes his speech by reminding his listeners of the necessity to honour the gods (that is, unless they want to be split again turning into flat, relief-like creatures: Pl. Smp. 193a3–7) can, therefore, be read not only as another caustic jibe at the glaring contradiction in Pausanias’ speech between “words” and “deeds” (between his professed adherence to democracy and his barely hidden tyrannical leanings) but also as a warning against the self-destructive consequences of any attempt to behave like earth-born creatures striving for universal rule— a warning that, as Plato’s original readers who had experienced the collapse of the Athenian empire would have known all too well, was not to be heeded by the Athenians. While Aristophanes’ speech reveals both the Periclean praise of the rule of law and the Athenian autochthony discourse as respectable façades that serve to conceal an unapologetic desire for tyranny and imperial domination, Socrates’ interactions with Agathon and Alcibiades stage a process whereby different aspect of the Athenian “political Eros”—both the Aristophanic politicians’ “love for the people” and the Periclean notion of Athens as a collective “lover of the empire”—can be converted into the “philosophical Eros” of Socratic dialectic.³⁶ Agathon’s praise of Eros is a paradigmatic piece of epideictic rhetoric, which, by portraying the laudandus as an ideal eromenos devoid of any desiring subjectivity of his own,³⁷ evokes the familiar image of the politicians as “lovers of the people” who use rhetoric to flatter their beloved into submission. Tellingly, Socrates compares Agathon’s Gorgianic rhetoric to the head of Gorgo Medusa (or, as he puts it, “the head of Gorgias”: Γοργίου κεφαλήν), ³⁶ Cf. Sedley 2006, for an illuminating comparison between the dialectical improvements undergone by Agathon in his conversation with Socrates and by Socrates in his conversation with Diotima. ³⁷ The image of Eros as an ideal eromenos (cf. Pl. Smp. 195a5–196b2 καλός, νέος, ἁπαλός, μαλακός, ὑγρός) is indebted to the pictorial representations of Eros in Attic pottery. See Stafford 2013, esp. 182: “The earliest images of Eros in red-figure . . . present him in a homoerotic light. He is characterized as the ideal eromenos not only by his general appearance as a youth of appropriate age, but often also by the fact that he is holding typical paederastic love-gifts or playing with a hoop in the manner of Ganymede.”

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130  :    which, by transforming the beholders into stones, completely deprives them of the ability to think and to speak (Pl. Smp. 198c2–5).³⁸ To replace Agathon’s encomiastic image of Eros with a dialectically examined truth, Socrates begins by posing what sounds like an innocent syntactical question: don’t we normally say “desire [eros] for someone or something”—with a genitive, the way we say “someone’s father, mother, or brother” (Pl. Smp. 199d1–e8)? Yes, we do. And wouldn’t one say that one doesn’t have what one desires (for to say that one desires what one already has would amount to saying that one wants to keep it, which is obviously not the same as to desire it)? Of course (Pl. Smp. 200a1–201a1). But don’t we desire beautiful things rather than ugly things? Yes, we do. Can Eros then possess boundless beauty, as Agathon claimed in this speech? No, he can’t (Pl. Smp. 201a2–b12). And isn’t beautiful also good? It certainly is. Can Eros then possess boundless goodness, as Agathon claimed in his speech? No, he can’t (Pl. Smp. 201c1–9). It is amusing to see that all Socrates needs to do to make Agathon repudiate his encomiastic image of Eros as a self-contained perfection in need of no object of desire is to remind him of the obvious fact that the Greek noun eros tends to take a grammatical object. But the point of this exemplary Socratic elenchus does not seem to be whether or not its argument is logically sound.³⁹ The point is rather that, by persistently enacting a pun between Eros and ἐρωτᾶν (“ask”: Pl. Smp. 199c1 ἀλλ᾿ ἐρώτα, 199d1–3 Ἔρως . . . ἐρωτῶ . . . τὸ ἐρώτημα εἰ Ἔρως ἐστὶν ἔρως . . . , cf. Pl. Crt. 398c5–e5), Socrates foregrounds the process whereby Agathon himself—even if only for the duration of this short conversation—experiences a notional transformation from a passive eromenos self-contently basking in admiration into an erastes willing to join Socrates in asking philosophical questions.⁴⁰ Rather than being unequivocally defined, Socrates’ philosophical Eros becomes reality through the process of dialectical (erot(et)ic) questioning.⁴¹ Socrates reflects on this process in the subsequent fictional account of his encounter with Diotima (Pl. Smp.

³⁸ Karadimas 2008, 58–65; Belfiore 2012, 137–9. ³⁹ Cf. Landy 2013, 95–123. ⁴⁰ On Agathon as an eromenos, see Hunter 2004, 76; Brisson 2006, 245. ⁴¹ Gonzalez 1998, 273: “That the negative process of refutation should have this positive outcome is made possible by the fact that the truth, rather than being merely external to this process, is instantiated by it.” A similar conjunction between love and the Socratic dialectic is also enacted in the Lysis— another one of Plato’s so-called “erotic dialogues”—, where, as in the Symposium, the “erot(et)ics” of dialogue is demonstrated to be “erotically” much more efficient than encomiastic praise: Nightingale 1995, 107–10; Penner—Rowe 2005; Reeve 2006, 133–6; Belfiore 2012, 68–108. See also Gordon 2003, on a similar process of “erotic seduction” staged in Plato’s Alcibiades I.

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201d1–212c3),⁴² in which Eros is equated not only with a philosophical quest for absolute beauty in general but also, more specifically, with Socrates’ “maieutic” life—a life spent incessantly “questioning” beautiful young men like Agathon and sharing with them his own desire to “engender” virtue and truth (cf. Pl. Smp. 206c1–e3 and 212a1–7).⁴³ While Socrates’ conversation with Agathon dramatizes a hypothetical case of a paradigmatic Athenian eromenos (i.e. someone comparable to Aristophanes’ portrayal in the Knights of the Athenian people as a passive consumer of manipulative rhetoric) becoming a philosophical lover, his interaction with Alcibiades stages a similar process for the quintessential Athenian “lover of the empire,” whom Thucydides famously describes as the main source of the Athenians’ “fatal desire for the absent” (Th. 6.13.1 δυσέρωτας τῶν ἀπόντων).⁴⁴ Alcibiades’ description of his futile attempt, at a tender young age, to seduce a much older Socrates (Pl. Smp. 216c4–219d2) is clearly cast as a failure of “political Eros”—a failure that he links to a transformative effect produced by Socrates’ dialectic.⁴⁵ Just as, from underneath Socrates’ appearance as an “insolent satyr” (cf. Pl. Smp. 221e4 σατύρου δή τινα ὑβριστοῦ δοράν), there emerges a truly divine essence, so his manner of speaking, too, with all its talk of pack-asses, smiths, shoemakers, and tanners and with all its seemingly endless repetitions of the same things over and over again (Pl. Smp. 221e4–7), cannot help but strike one as utterly ridiculous—until its true meaning suddenly transpires, filling with shame even such an unlikely convert to philosophy as Alcibiades, who feels crushed as he finds himself unable to live in accordance with the truths that Socratic dialectic has forced him to admit (Pl. Smp. 216a2–c3).⁴⁶ It is this uncanny transformation that makes Alcibiades compare the Socratic discourse to the (Russian-nesting-doll-like) statues of grotesque looking satyrs that contain inside beautiful statues of Olympian gods (Pl. Smp. 215a6–217a2 and 221d7–222a7).⁴⁷ ⁴² Diotima’s speech has always been presumed to constitute the philosophical core of the dialogue and has therefore attracted a far greater attention than any other portion of the dialogue from both philosophers and classicists. The literature on the Diotima speech is predictably immense. See e.g. Sier 1997; Hunter 2004, 81–98; Sheffield 2006, 40–182, with references. ⁴³ On the image of the ‘pregnant philosopher’ in the Symposium and in Plato in general, esp. in the Theaetetus (Pl. Tht. 148e–151d), see Hobbs 2006; Leitao 2012, 182–270. For the concept of philosophical midwifery (‘maieutics’) in the Theaetetus, see Sedley 2004. ⁴⁴ Cf. Plutarch’s claim that Alcibiades carried a golden shield with a (Zeus-like?) figure of Eros brandishing a thunderbolt (Plut. Alc. 16.1–2): Wohl 1999; Sheffield 2006, 201–2. ⁴⁵ On the seduction scene, see Sheffield 2006, 201–6; Destrée 2012b, 194–201. See also Halperin 1986. ⁴⁶ Cf. Tarnopolsky 2010, 60. ⁴⁷ Dover 1980, 166: “No examples have survived, nor are there any references to such a type of statue except in late passages dependent on this one.” See also North 1994; Reeve 2006; Sheffield 2006, 189–91; Belfiore 2012, 161–8. On reflections on the “fullness” and “emptiness” of statues in Greek

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132  :    What is particularly ironic about Alcibiades’ comparison of Socrates to a satyr is that it is in fact based on a mistaken self-recognition: it is after all Alcibiades himself whom Plato portrays in the Symposium as a satyr-like figure—an embodiment of Dionysiac licentiousness who attempts to seduce an older man and turns a sober intellectual discussion into an uninhibited drunken revelry.⁴⁸ The transformative effect that Alcibiades ascribes to Socrates is thus a result of his discovery of the striking discrepancy between this familiar-looking “satyric” surface and the radically different essence underneath.⁴⁹ Even if, for Alcibiades himself, that experience is only transitory and even if his account of it is framed in the text as a drunken confession,⁵⁰ his description of being startled into a state of philosophical desire by a suddenly transpiring gap between the patently banal “surface” and the “divine” essence amounts to a strikingly novel semiotic/pragmatic model—a model that effectively merges into one the conceptual structures that underlie the Athenian discourses of imperial expansion and autochthonous self-identity. Athenian imperial Eros (Pericles’ love for the city’s ever-growing power and Alcibiades “fatal love for the absent”) is synonymous with one’s fundamental noncoincidence with oneself: it is conceived of as an insatiable longing for a perpetually retreating object of desire that, according both to Thucydides and to Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium, is doomed to end in a selfdestruction of the desiring subject. The autochthony discourse, by contrast, casts Athens as an epitome of essentialism and, as I argued above, provides a formative analogy to Socrates’ ideal of speaking (and living) strictly in accordance with dialectically examined truths. The transformation of “political Eros” into “philosophical Eros” is staged in the Symposium as Alcibiades’ startling realization that what he finds when he succumbs to his “imperial” desire for Socrates is not a perpetually retreating object but a transcendental realm of self-identical things—a realm whose reality is corroborated by the undeniable fact that Socrates himself lives by the improbable principles dictated by his dialectical reasoning. The Phaedo indirectly raises the question of whether this transformative process can take place in the absence of Socrates. While to Socrates himself death is nothing but a long-awaited migration into the world of self-identical forms with which he has striven to merge all his life, to his friends it constitutes culture, see Steiner 2001, 120–34, esp. 132–4, on this passage. See also Steiner 1996. Cf. Destrée 2012b, 202–4. On Aristophanes’ portrayal of Socrates in the Clouds as the major influence on Plato’s image of Socrates as Silenus, see Capra 2018. ⁴⁸ Sheffield 2006, 185–6, with references. ⁴⁹ Cf. Belfiore 2012, 187–96. ⁵⁰ Cf. Tarnopolsky 2010, 60.

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an unbearable loss comparable to the loss of a father (Pl. Phd. 116a2–7). The conversation about the immortality of the soul, which they conduct with Socrates in the last hours of his life, is their last chance to experience the revelatory effect of Socratic dialectic (cf. Pl. Phd. 107a3–6). But even though by the end of the discussion everyone present seems to agree that Socrates’ approaching death will be a migration to a better place, seeing Socrates drink poison catches all of them off guard—their inconsolable tears (Pl. Phd. 117c1–d6) revealing that no amount of rational argumentation in favour of the immortality of the soul can undo the pain caused by the death of the only person who has ever been able to allay their own fear of death. While the narrators of the Phaedo and the Symposium stage the process of remembering Socrates (Pl. Phd. 58d5 τὸ μεμνῆσθαι Σωκράτους, cf. Pl. Smp. 172a1–174a2) as an act of reproducing as faithfully as possible every minute detail of the conversations that he conducted during lifetime (cf. Pl. Phd. 58d8–9 ἀκριβέστατα διελθεῖν πάντα),⁵¹ Plato himself lays no claims to factual truth. Phaedo’s emphasis that Plato did not witness Socrates’ death (Pl. Phd. 59b10 Πλάτων δὲ οἶμαι ἠσθένει, cf. Pl. Ti. 17a4–5)⁵² draws attention to the status of Plato’s writing as a product of literary imagination whose goal is not to preserve a mimetic simulacrum of historical Socrates, the way the Egyptians embalm dead bodies (cf. Pl. Phd. 80c8–9 ὥσπερ οἱ ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ ταριχευθέντες) but, rather, to emulate the erot(et)ic effect produced by Socrates’ oral conversations. In his analysis of the Phaedrus, Jacques Derrida famously declared Plato to be chiefly responsible for the “logocentrism” of Western philosophical tradition—a tradition that combines the idealization of oral speech as an unobstructed channel of truth with a fundamental distrust of writing.⁵³ In Chapter 2, I showed that, if one were hard-pressed to point to the Greek origins of the idea of language as a transmitter of transcendental truths, it is rather Hesiod’s Works and Days that would qualify for that distinction. In what follows, I will argue that, rather than advocating a sweeping rejection of writing, Plato’s Phaedrus reflects on its potential as a medium conducive to dialectic—a medium that, in contrast to Hesiod’s monologic discourse, does not seek to communicate transcendental truths known only to the author but, by “iconically” imitating what Alcibiades describes in the Symposium as a fundamental non-coincidence between “surface” and “essence” in the figure of Socrates himself, encourages the reader to undertake a dialectical quest of her own. ⁵¹ Hunter 2004, 20–9; Belfiore 2012, 110–16; Sheffield 2006, 8–11. ⁵³ Derrida 1976, 3–26; Derrida 1989.

⁵² Johnson 1998, 578–81.

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Socrates Leaving the City Reluctant to leave Athens to avoid execution, Socrates notionally travels abroad after death as his disciples spread their memories of him all over Greece. Set in the Peloponnesian town of Phlius, the framing dialogue of the Phaedo is a conversation between a local resident named Echecrates and Phaedo of Elis, who offers what he describes as a faithful eyewitness report (cf. Pl. Phd. 58d2–6) of the philosophical discussion in which Socrates engaged with two Thebans, Simmias and Cebes, immediately before his death (Pl. Phd. 57a1–59c7).⁵⁴ In the Theaetetus, the process of remembering Socrates is taken one step further in that it becomes explicitly associated with writing: having written down Socrates’ own oral report of a conversation he had once conducted with Theaetetus, a Megaran citizen named Euclides has that book read aloud to a friend years after Socrates’ death (Pl. Tht. 142d6–143c5).⁵⁵ If the non-Athenian dramatic settings of the Phaedo and the Theaetetus dramatize the process whereby the reminiscences of Socrates’ followers (cf. Pl. Phd. 58d5–6 καὶ γὰρ τὸ μεμνῆσθαι Σωκράτους καὶ αὐτὸν λέγοντα καὶ ἄλλου ἀκούοντα ἔμοιγε ἀεὶ πάντων ἥδιστον) secure his post-mortem existence, the imaginary trip that Socrates takes outside the city walls of Athens in the Phaedrus can be construed as a reflection on the suitability of writing as a means of immortalizing not his disciples’ memories but the unique pragmatic effect produced by his oral conversations. From the very start, the relationship between Socrates and the nonAthenian world is marked in the Phaedrus as rather uneasy—a relationship in which an intrinsic incompatibility is strangely mixed with an irresistible attraction. Socrates presents Athens as his natural habitat—the only place where he can make dialectical progress by engaging in oral dialogues with other people (Pl. Phdr. 230d5 οἱ δ᾿ ἐν ἄστει ἄνθρωποι). But what now induces him to leave the city for the domain of “uninstructive fields and trees” (Pl. Phdr. 230d4 τὰ μὲν χωρία καὶ τὰ δένδρα οὐδέν μ᾿ ἐθέλει διδάσκειν) is his curiosity for what is in fact antagonistic to his entire philosophical existence—the prospect of listening to a written monologue composed by Lysias, the best of contemporary writers (Pl. Phdr. 228a1–2 δεινότατος ὢν τῶν νῦν γράφειν).⁵⁶ Socrates even intimates that his desire for written speeches could lure him into traveling much further afield—beyond the borders of Attica (Pl. Phdr. 227d2–5). ⁵⁴ Bailey 2018, 1–23. ⁵⁵ Finkelberg 2019, 97–100. ⁵⁶ Derrida 1989, 265–6; Nightingale 1995, 12; Werner 2012, 21–3.

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The analogy between the exotic domain of nature and the strange attraction of Lysias’ monologic writing is additionally underscored by the fact that Socrates is enthralled by the simplest elements of the idyllic landscape of Attica (the plane tree, the river, the cicadas) as if he had never seen them before (Pl. Phdr. 230b2–d2) while, at the same time, implicitly perceiving that landscape as an archetypal site of monologue and writing. The myth of Oreithyia’s abduction by Boreas is framed in the Phaedrus as a metonymy of an entire body of aetiological myths that are, as it were, physically “inscribed” in the landscape itself in the form of commemorative monuments (Pl. Phdr. 229c2–3) or other material signs (Pl. Phdr. 229d1–2), thereby turning nature into a kind of text—a passive carrier of monologic narratives, which can be “read” at leisure by idle strollers like Socrates and Phaedrus. Enjoyable as they are, the only question that such mythical tales can elicit from an inquisitive mind is the question of their factual truth (Pl. Phdr. 229c5 σὺ τοῦτο τὸ μυθολόγημα πείθῃ ἀληθὲς εἶναι;)—a question that, when answered, automatically eliminates the need for any further questions. To underscore the intellectual inanity of this question, Socrates shows that the only “truth” that one could extract from such a myth would be a banal physical allegory (Pl. Phdr. 229c6–d2),⁵⁷ as dialectically jejune as the “uninstructive fields and trees”: myths “inscribed” in nature fail to produce the only cognitive effect that matters to Socrates himself, i.e. to set in motion a dialectical process conducive to fulfilling the injunction of the Delphic oracle to “know thyself” (Pl. Phdr. 229e5–7).⁵⁸ Thus, the countryside outside the city walls of Athens emerges in the introductory passages of the Phaedrus as a paradoxical metaphorical space—a quintessential locus of monologue and writing, which, despite being inherently incompatible with Socrates, proves to be the only place where he can go if he is ever to leave the oral/dialogic space of the city. Socrates’ excursion into this patently non-Socratic world is staged in the text as an act of endowing it with a philosophical potential. As we shall see, Socrates’ reinterpretation of the cicadas, from incessantly chirping creatures lulling into sleep those who take a nap in the soothing shade of the plane tree into messengers of the Muses so enamoured of music as to survive without food and drink (Pl. Phdr. 259b5–d8),⁵⁹ not only foregrounds his own transformation of nature from a locus of idle mythological erudition into a stimulus for philosophical reflection but also draws attention to Plato’s transformation ⁵⁷ Ferrari 1987, 9–12; Trabattoni 2012, 308–11; Werner 2012, 27–35. ⁵⁸ Griswold 1986, 36–44; Derrida 1989, 262–5; Werner 2012, 35–43. ⁵⁹ For a detailed discussion of the myth of the cicadas and its interpretations in previous scholarship, see Werner 2012, 133–52.

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136  :    of writing from a passive physical object irrelevant to the beholder’s selfknowledge into a medium that can affect the soul with the erot(et)ic intensity of Socrates’ oral speech. What triggers the conversation is Phaedrus’ enthusiasm for Lysias’ oration—a sophistic jeu d’esprit that defends the paradoxical thesis that it is better for a beloved to please a non-lover than a lover (Pl. Phdr. 230e6–234c5). The speech is a first-person monologue spoken by a non-lover, who strives to convince a non-beloved of the advantages of lovelessness over love: while the lover is depicted as an obsessive madman, prepared to go to any lengths to impose his tyrannical will on the beloved and then abandoning him when the love subsides, the relationship with a non-lover is praised as harbouring no unpleasant surprises to the boy’s freedom, reputation, and emotional poise.⁶⁰ Lysias’ speech is presented in the dialogue as a piece of writing that affects Phaedrus’ soul as little as Socrates claims the “silent” landscape affects his. The speech, which Phaedrus so greatly admires for its cleverness and skill, is absolutely incapable of leaving any durable traces on his soul: although he has spent an entire day trying to learn it by heart, he can only reproduce it to Socrates by reading it aloud from a manuscript that he is shamefully hiding underneath his garment (Pl. Phdr. 228a5–e5). In his subsequent discussion of rhetoric,⁶¹ Socrates implicitly links the “pragmatic impotence” of Lysias’ speech to the fact that it is loveless in more than one way. The lack of desire that it extolls is reflected not only in its mind-numbing repetitiveness (cf. Pl. Phdr. 235a6–8) but also in the ostentatious indifference with which it connects individual statements into a seemingly never-ending paratactic stream, so that its meaning would not change a bit if one were to rearrange the sentences in random order (Pl. Phdr. 264e1 ὅτι δ᾿ οὐδὲν διαφέρει αὐτοῦ πρῶτον ἢ ὕστατόν τι λέγεσθαι). The language of the speech is, in other words, expressive of as little “desire” for its potential recipient as its speaker feels for his addressee. This inherently “loveless” language not only accounts for the fact that it fails to produce any lasting impact of Phaedrus’ soul but also underscores the blatant contradiction in terms inherent in the dramatic situation: while the main task of rhetoric is persuasion and while persuasion cannot take place unless the speaker is animated by what both Aristophanes and Plato describe as a “love” for the audience, Lysias’ non-lover, who not only praises but also, in his own ⁶⁰ Ferrari 1987, 50–1; Belfiore 2012, 211–15. ⁶¹ The scholarship on the Phaedrus is dominated by the question of the dialogue’s unity (i.e. connections between love and rhetoric). See e.g. Griswold 1986; Ferrari 1987; Heath 1989, 12–27; Benardete 1991, 103–93; Belfiore 2012, 211–46; Werner 2012.

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manner of speaking, embodies a complete lack of love, produces a rhetorically ornate chunk of language whose main raison d’être seems to consist in communicating to the addressee the speaker’s indifference as to whether or not he will be able to persuade him.⁶² Thus, the status of Lysias’ speech as a piece of writing is explicitly linked in the text to the fact that it eliminates what constitutes the indispensable precondition of the pragmatic effect traditionally obtained by rhetoric—i.e. the speaker’s metaphorical eros for the audience. In a later passage, Socrates compares writing to a pictorial image of a living creature that looks real but remains silent when spoken to (Pl. Phdr. 275d4–e5). Like such a lifeless image, a written text is “erotically” indifferent—incapable, in the absence of its “progenitor,” either of freely choosing its addressees or of persuading them to accept its meaning in response to their objections.⁶³ From this perspective, Lysias speech, which, as Seth Benardete appositely remarks, “is spoken by anyone to anyone”,⁶⁴ encapsulates the very essence of what Plato casts here as the pragmatic impotence of writing. The fact that the non-lover concludes his appeal to his non-beloved by urging him not to hesitate to “ask” any questions if he so “desires” (Pl. Phdr. 234c5 εἰ δ᾿ ἔτι τι ποθεῖς, ἡγούμενος παραλελεῖφθαι, ἐρώτα) shows that Plato frames Lysias’ witty paradox as a sophisticated joke about the difficult relationship between dialectic and writing.⁶⁵ While in the Symposium the pun between “love” and “questioning” (ἔρωτα-ἐρώτα, cf. Pl. Smp. 199c1–d3) serves to capture the erot(et)ic mechanism of the Socratic elenchus, the same pun in Lysias’ loveless speech draws attention to its inability to raise any meaningful questions or to prompt any intellectual or emotional response—apart, perhaps, from causing one to admire the speaker’s skill to say the same thing over and over again in an endless variety of ways (cf. Pl. Phdr. 234c6–7 and e2–4). Cast as a quintessential written text, Lysias’ speech serves to characterize ⁶² This is often misunderstood. See e.g. White 1993, 24–5 and Werner 2012, 76, who refer to Lysias’ speaker as a lover posing as a non-lover. The desire to “normalize” the speech act performed in Lysias’ speech is perfectly understandable, since, as it is, it simply makes no sense (cf. Griswold 1986, 45: “Lysias’ speech represents a singularly odd effort by a nonlover to seduce a young boy”). But it is precisely this paradox that is the point here. While the speaker of Socrates’ first speech is explicitly presented as a lover pretending to be a non-lover (Pl. Phdr. 237b2–5), it is absolutely crucial for our understanding of Lysias’ speech to keep in mind that its speaker not only praises lovelessness but is also emphatically said to be a non-lover himself. Lysias’ speaker does not even recommend himself as a partner in a loveless relationship: he explicitly stresses that the boy can choose from countless nonlovers (231d6–e2), and, being a non-lover himself, he certainly doesn’t care all that much whom the boy would eventually choose. ⁶³ Cf. Pl. Prt. 329a, Ep. 7 343a: Rutherford 1995, 268–71; Morgan 2000, 239–41; Werner 2012, 209–15. See also Derrida 1989, 344–52, for an analysis of both writing and painting as instances of mimesis. ⁶⁴ Benardete 1991, 116. ⁶⁵ Ferrari 1987, 45–59.

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138  :    writing as a medium profoundly inferior to both rhetoric and dialectic—a medium capable neither of persuading nor of provoking intellectual activity. Socrates’ own two speeches serve to corroborate that impression. As oral improvisations (cf. Pl. Phdr. 236d5 αὐτοσχεδιάζων), they are explicitly contrasted with Lysias’ written speech. In the first speech, Socrates rectifies the logical impossibility of Lysias’ “loveless” speaker by engaging in an act of double mimesis: to underline that he is playing a role, he speaks with his head covered (Pl. Phdr. 237a4 ἐγκαλυψάμενος ἐρῶ) as he impersonates a lover who desires to win over a beloved by feigning the lack of desire (Pl. Phdr. 237b2–5).⁶⁶ The desire to persuade foregrounded by Socrates is reflected in his replacing Lysias’ loveless parataxis with a transparently structured argumentation in which each statement is made rhetorically compelling by being deduced from what precedes.⁶⁷ As a consequence, while deprecating the lover as a predator subjecting the beloved to his selfish tyranny (cf. Pl. Phdr. 241d1 ὡς λύκοι ἄρνας ἀγαπῶσιν, ὣς παῖδα φιλοῦσιν ἐρασταί), the self-proclaimed non-lover in fact acts like a particularly treacherous predator, who hides his true intentions behind manipulative rhetoric.⁶⁸ In contrast to the failure of rhetoric embodied in Lysias’ writing, the rhetorical subterfuge enacted by Socrates turns it into a paragon of political rhetoric as it is described in the Gorgias—imitative, deceptive, flattering, and motivated by the speaker’s tyrannical “love” for the audience (cf. Pl. Grg. 466b11–c2 and 502b1–d1).⁶⁹ Since Socrates’ second speech, a “recantation” (Pl. Phdr. 243b2 παλινῳδίαν) of Lysias’ original thesis, serves to conceptualize the transformative, erot(et)ic, effect that dialectic produces on the soul,⁷⁰ it is hardly surprising that Socrates delivers it in his own person, without trying to conceal the meaning that he intends to get across (Pl. Phdr. 243b6–7 γυμνῇ τῇ κεφαλῇ καὶ οὐχ ὥσπερ τότε ὑπ᾿ αἰσχύνης ἐγκεκαλλυμμένος). While, in the first (“political”) speech, persuasion was a function of mimesis and concealment, the paradigmatic Platonic myth of the second speech serves to demonstrate that philosophical rhetoric can achieve an even more powerful pragmatic effect by relying on inspiring poetic imagery:⁷¹ for Socrates’ praise of philosophical Eros turns out to be so effective as to convince Phaedrus not only that Lysias’ written praise of ⁶⁶ Cf. Griswold 1986, 57–8. ⁶⁷ Benardete 1991, 120–6 and 134–6. Cf. White 1993, 35–63; Rhodes 2003, 460–97. ⁶⁸ The reason why he is so adept at deceiving the addressee is that he cannot be deceived himself: Pl. Phdr. 262a5–7. Cf. Griswold 1986, 57–69. ⁶⁹ Rhodes 2003, 445–59. ⁷⁰ Cf. Werner 2012, 108–32. ⁷¹ Socrates’ myth of the lover’s soul as a charioteer driving a winged chariot dragged by two horses is “a merely human account” (246a5–6)—a series of plausible images (cf. 246a6–7) that go back to archaic erotic poetry (235c3–4 Σαπφοῦς τῆς καλῆς ἢ Ἀνακρέοντος τοῦ σοφοῦ, cf. e.g. Anacr. fr. 360 and fr. 378)

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lovelessness is by far inferior to it but also that writing in general must be considered a “shameful” pursuit (Pl. Phdr. 257d5–8).⁷² The progression of the three speeches—from the inversion of the fundamental mechanism of rhetorical communication in Lysias’ written text via Socrates’ masterful imitation of that mechanism to his rhetorical praise of dialectic—seems to indicate that, when performed by Socrates, not only dialogue but also rhetoric is bound to produce a much more powerful impact on the soul than the writing of the best contemporary writer (Pl. Phdr. 228a1–2 δεινότατος ὢν τῶν νῦν γράφειν). Although Socrates himself denies that, being indispensable for attaining eternal fame (Pl. Phdr. 257d9–258d5),⁷³ writing should be regarded as a bad thing per se, he seems to confirm Phaedrus’ sweeping rejection of writing when he turns to its status as a potential vehicle of philosophical instruction. In the “Egyptian myth,” Theuth praises his invention of writing as a unique “drug” for memory and wisdom (Pl. Phdr. 274e6–7).⁷⁴ To the Egyptian king Thamus, however, writing is likely to foster nothing but forgetfulness— providing a “drug” for reminding rather than memory (Pl. Phdr. 275a5–6), creating a mere semblance of wisdom (Pl. Phdr. 275a6), and turning readers cut off from the immediate contact with a philosophical teacher (Pl. Phdr. 275a7) into arrogant (and ignorant) pseudo-philosophers (Pl. Phdr. 275b2). Socrates’ subsequent comparison of written texts to static and silent pictorial images as well as to sterile “Adonis gardens,” which wither even faster than they grow (Pl. Phdr. 276b1–8),⁷⁵ seems to underscore the inherent inferiority of any form of writing (Pl. Phdr. 275d4–e5).⁷⁶ But next to writing that functions as a mere aide-mémoire, Socrates postulates a theoretical possibility of “good” writing—writing that constitutes an image of “the living and animate speech of someone knowledgeable” (Pl. Phdr. 276a8–9). In fact, Socrates envisages a hierarchy that consists of three different

and that serve to make more graspable Socrates’ philosophical proof of the immortality of the soul (cf. 245c5–246a2): Griswold 1986, 86–137; Trabattoni 2012, 315–16; Werner 2012, 51–65. See also Werner 2012, 100–2, for a critique of what he calls “the yogic view of Platonic myth”—a widespread view of myth as “Plato’s method of expressing (or perhaps accomplishing) something that transcends reason or that lies beyond the capabilities of rational argument.” On Platonic myth as a self-evident phantasma expressive of a philosophical truth, see Collobert 2012. ⁷² Cf. Benardete 1991, 155–6. ⁷³ Cf. Moore 2012, 279–80. ⁷⁴ For a detailed analysis of the elusive connotations of Plato’s φάρμακον, see Derrida 1989. See also Ferrari 1987, 204–32; Werner 2012, 181–235. ⁷⁵ Cf. Werner 2012, 198–202; Reitzammer 2016, 90–117. ⁷⁶ Many scholars regard the rejection of writing in the Theuth myth as expressing Plato’s awareness of the limits of his own writing. See e.g. Rutherford 1995, 268–71; Morgan 2000, 239–41; Werner 2012, 209–15. Cf. Ferrari 1987, 204–32. See also Derrida 1989, 344–52, for an analysis of both writing and painting in the Phaedrus as instances of mimesis.

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140  :    kinds of writing—(1) the Adonis-garden-like writing, which, like Lysias’ written text or the writing invented by Theuth, leaves no imprint on the soul (Pl. Phdr. 276b1–8); (2) the written “tales about justice and other things” (Pl. Phdr. 276e2–3 δικαισύνης τε καὶ ἄλλων ὧν λέγεις πέρι), which seem to correspond to Platonic myths like the one that Socrates tells in his second speech and which he now characterizes as “gardens of letters” (Pl. Phdr. 276d1 τοὺς μὲν ἐν γράμμασι κήπους) that “produce a tender growth” in the soul (Pl. Phdr. 276d5 φυομένους ἁπαλούς); and (3) the by far superior discourse informed by dialectic, which can be sowed, take root, and bear fruit in the soul (Pl. Phdr. 276e4–277a4). Although Socrates does not specify whether that ideal discourse is oral or written, the fact that he mentions it in the context of his discussion of writing suggests that it can be both (cf. Pl. Phdr. 277e5–278b4). Socrates stresses that, in order to succeed, the good kind of writing (like any other kind), has to be conscious not only of its fundamentally playful nature (Pl. Phdr. 277e5 παιδιάν . . . πολλήν) but also of the fact that the best thing that a written text can achieve is to remind one of what one already knows (Pl. Phdr. 277e9–278a1 ἀλλὰ τῷ ὄντι αὐτῶν τοὺς βελτίστους εἰδότων ὑπόμνησιν γεγονέναι). This statement may sound like a mere reiteration of Ammon’s disparagement of writing as a frivolous instrument of reminding rather than memory (Pl. Phdr. 275a5–6 οὔκουν μνήμης ἀλλὰ ὑπομνήσεως φάρμακον ηὗρες).⁷⁷ And indeed, when applied to Lysias’ speech, the notion of writing as a means of reminding vividly evokes Phaedrus’ inability to memorize that elegant piece of empty verbiage, which he can only reproduce with the help of a written text: Lysias’ writing indeed fosters only forgetfulness (cf. Pl. Phdr. 275a2 λήθην), making Phaedrus incapable of recollecting things from within himself (cf. Pl. Phdr. 275a4–5 ἔνδοθεν αὐτοὺς ὑφ᾿ αὑτῶν ἀναμιμνῃσκομένους). But in the case of the good kind of writing envisaged by Socrates, “writing as reminding” would mean a completely different thing. For now that the possibility of the good kind of writing informed by dialectic has been acknowledged, the “recollective” effect (ὑπόμνησις) that it is expected to produce on the reader turns out to be similar to the effect produced on the interlocutors by Socrates’ dialectic itself—an effect that famously consists in a revelatory experience of “being reminded” (ἀνάμνησις) of the truth that one has known all along despite its being hidden under layers of misconception (cf. Pl. Men. 81e4; Phd. 72e5–6; Phdr. 249c1–4).⁷⁸ This kind of writing would indeed serve ⁷⁷ This impression is strengthened by the fact that this passage follows upon Phaedrus’ request that Socrates “remind” him (277b4 ὑπόμνησον) of the agreement reached in the previous discussion: Heitsch 1987, 44; White 1993, 266. ⁷⁸ Trabattoni 2012, 313–14; Werner 2012, 102–7. Cf. Thiel 1993, esp. 51–122.

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not to store information (cf. μνήμης . . . φάρμακον) but to foster dialectical “recollection.” The reason why Socrates, so effusive on the topic of speeches, does not cite a single example of the good kind of writing is doubtless that for him it is nothing but a theoretical possibility. It is only for Plato that this kind of writing can become reality. The discussion of writing in the Phaedrus seems to indicate that Plato expects his readers to recognize that, by writing his dialogues, he strives to live up to the ideal of writing whose purpose is not to imitate Theuth’s Egyptian script capable only of creating static copies of the past but to immortalize the transformative effect of Socrates’ oral discourse by exploring different ways of “planting the seed” of dialectic (i.e. the seed of Socrates’ “living and animate speech”) in the readers’ souls.⁷⁹ By venturing outside the city walls of Athens Socrates turns the uninstructive domain of physical nature into the abode of “the divine cicadas” that urge everyone to become a devotee of the Muses (Pl. Phdr. 259c2–6). In a similar manner, Plato, too, postulates the possibility of transforming writing from a dead image of the living word into a medium of dialectical instruction that can infuse every receptive soul with a Socratic love of wisdom. The Phaedrus itself is a text in which, as we have seen, (dis-)analogies between different levels of meaning prove to be no less revelatory than the non-coincidence between “surface” and “essence” in the satyr-like image that Alcibiades paints of Socrates in the Symposium. The experience of reading this text is, therefore, equivalent to transforming a reader endowed with the right kind of soul (cf. Pl. Phdr. 276e6 ψυχὴν προσήκουσαν) into an aspiring dialectician—into what Socrates himself calls “a lover of divisions and collections” (Pl. Phdr. 266b3–4 ἐραστής τῶν διαιρέσεων καὶ συναγωγῶν).⁸⁰ In the rest of this chapter, I will show that, read together, the Republic and the Timaeus/Critias, too, can be construed to enact the process of turning Socratic dialectic into the kind of writing envisaged in the Phaedrus. I will ⁷⁹ Szlezák 1985, esp. 20: “Hier ist es gut, sich daran zu erinnern, daß der geschriebene λόγος nach den Worten Platons ein Abbild der lebendigen Rede des Wissenden, und daß die Dialoge ein Bild des wahren Philosophen bereithalten.” Cf. Burger 1980, 108–9; Griswold 1986, 219–26; White 1993, 266–8; Clay 2000, 106–15; Rowe 2007, 266–72. For a stimulating discussion of writing in the Phaedrus as a paradigm of reading that Plato encourages us to apply to his dialogues, see Cotton 2014, 3–31. On the possibility of reading the entire Platonic corpus as a gradual process of the philosophical education of the reader (the succession of the so-called “early,” “middle,” and “late” dialogues emulating the increasingly more subtle effects that the Socratic conversations produce onto the interlocutors), see Cotton 2014, 52–7, with further references. Cf. Gordon 1999, 43–62. For the scholarly controversy surrounding Plato’s self-referentiality in the Phaedrus (a critique of writing located within a written text), see Werner 2012, 209–15, with copious references. ⁸⁰ Kahn 1996, 292–328; Gonzalez 1998; Roochnik 2003, 133–52. On the emotional impact of dialectic on Socrates’ interlocutors, see Gordon 1999, 19–42.

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142  :    argue that Plato’s dialogic writing “iconically” emulates the pragmatic effect that Plato ascribes to the Socratic dialectic—an effect that, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, arises both from dismantling the two incompatible versions of the ideal state of Athens (i.e. as an inward-looking autochthonous family and as an insatiably acquisitive empire) and from merging into one the basic semiotic models on which those ideological constructs are based.

Plato’s Dialogic Writing Like the Phaedrus, the Republic places Socrates outside his natural habitat. This time, he takes a walk to the port of Piraeus—a liminal space between Athens and the rest of the world, a home to resident aliens, and a venue of the new festival of the Thracian goddess Bendis (Pl. R. 327a1–328b1).⁸¹ To underscore the incompatibility between this location and Socratic dialectic, the conversation takes place at the house of Cephalus—the father of Lysias, whose writing serves in the Phaedrus as a contrastive foil to Socrates’ philosophical discourse.⁸² Tellingly, Cephalus needs no dialectic to lead a perfectly happy life: he regrets nothing about the past, fears nothing about the future, devotes much of his present to religious duties (cf. Pl. R. 329e6–331b7),⁸³ is perfectly content with conventional wisdom supplied by poets (Pindar and Sophocles), and possesses a solid understanding of justice (being able to pay one’s debts, Pl. R. 331b1–5) that allows him to face death with acquiescence. When Socrates attempts to engage Cephalus in a dialectical elenchus (Pl. R. 331c1–9),⁸⁴ his interlocutor immediately loses interest: not only does he know that his “poetic” notion of justice (universally valid or not) works best for him but he also has much more important things to do—i.e. to sacrifice to the gods (Pl. R. 331d7)—than engaging in dialectical hair-splitting. Thus, like the idyllic landscape of the Phaedrus, Piraeus is cast in the Republic as a singularly nonSocratic space—a space entirely woven out of the monologic discourses of poetry and religion. And like the Phaedrus, the Republic proceeds to “Socratize” that metaphorical space. It is only when Cephalus departs that Socrates can finally practice dialectic. In the beginning, he quickly dismantles Polemarchus’ attempt to appeal to the ⁸¹ Blondell 2002, 165–8. On the significance of the fact that the Republic is set in a “metic space,” see Kasimis 2018, 49–141. ⁸² For information on the historical Cephalus, see a speech by his son Lysias: Lys. 12. On Cephalus as ‘the ideal fifth-century metic’, see Whitehead 1977, 160. ⁸³ Blondell 2002, 166–70; Dorter 2006, 24–5. ⁸⁴ Stauffer 2001, 21–6.

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poetic authority of Simonides in order to defend Cephalus’ definition of justice as giving back what one owes (Pl. R. 331e1–2 τὸ τὰ ὀφειλόμενα ἑκάστῳ ἀποδιδόναι δίκαιόν ἐστι) and replaces that conventional notion with the main postulate of his own ethics according to which it is always better to suffer than to commit injustice.⁸⁵ And although his interaction with Thrasymachus, who defines justice as the advantage of the stronger (Pl. R. 338c2–4), is staged as an intellectually and emotionally complex drama,⁸⁶ in the end Socrates succeeds in “taming” his opponent by dialectic (Pl. R. 350c12–d8, cf. 354a12–13 ἐπειδή μοι πρᾷος ἐγένου καὶ χαλεπαίνων ἐπαύσου) like a magician charming a snake (Pl. R. 358b3 ὥσπερ ὄφις κηληθῆναι).⁸⁷ That from a self-contained demonstration of Socrates’ elenctic dexterity Book 1 turns into a proem to a much larger work (Pl. R. 357a2 προοίμιον) has to do with the fact that two members of the audience—Plato’s own brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus—are eager to see Socrates do more than humiliate an opponent and reach a state of aporia.⁸⁸ By asking Socrates to prove beyond any doubt that justice is a good desirable both for itself and for the consequences that it brings, they in fact urge him to perform something profoundly non-Socratic—not a dialogic elenchus of a dialectically unexamined notion of justice but a monologic encomium of the idea of justice in and of itself (Pl. R. 358d1–2 βούλομαι δὲ αὐτὸ καθ᾿ αὑτὸ ἐγκωμιαζόμενον ἀκοῦσαι). Although, in the course of the conversation, Socrates occasionally asks his interlocutors for approval, the outcome is indeed a largely monologic discourse shaped not by questions that Socrates poses to them but by questions that they pose to him: it is in response to the audience’s dissatisfaction with his original elenctic performance that Socrates begins to construct an imaginary city in which justice in and of itself is a self-evidently good thing, and the ideal city continues to take shape as he responds to questions and objections raised by his interlocutors. The non-Socratic form of the discourse can thus be perceived as a demonstration of the “erot(et)ic” efficacy of the Socratic elenchus—the intellectual irritation that it causes in the audience engendering in them a desire to ask questions of their own.⁸⁹ But the fact that Socrates refrains from subjecting the opinions of his interlocutors to a dialectical elenchus by no means implies that the discourse of Republic 2–10 is not dialectical. In Book 1, Socrates intimates that, to him, justice is not a social phenomenon but an inner quality—the inherent ⁸⁵ Stauffer 2001, 26–55; Dorter 2006, 26–32. ⁸⁶ Cf. Altman 2012, 87–101. ⁸⁷ On Plato’s Thrasymachus, see also Blondell 2002, 180–5; Crotty 2016, 1–26, with references. See also Stauffer 2001, 62–8; Dorter 2006, 32–42; Arruzza 2019, 102–6. ⁸⁸ Moors 1981. Cf. Weiss 2012, 3–8. ⁸⁹ Reeve 1988, 22–6.

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144  :    goodness and the best possible state of the soul, which can only be achieved by means of dialectic (cf. Pl. R. 352e7–8).⁹⁰ As we shall see, however, the questions that his interlocutors pose to him in Republic 2–10 betray that, although they are eager to adopt Socrates’ philosophical outlook, they themselves can only think of justice as an attribute of an absolutely just city. At the beginning of this chapter, I argued that, in the Crito and the Apology, Plato stages the death of Socrates as a dialectical event that serves to dismantle the conventional self-perceptions of Athens as an embodiment of justice and to replace them with Socrates’ notion of justice as a harmony between the actions of an individual moral agent and the truths established by dialectic. To achieve a similar effect in the Republic, i.e. to explain the meaning of “justice in the soul” to those who can only conceive of “justice in the city,” Socrates postulates a patently strained analogy between the city and the soul—an analogy based on the demonstrably false premise that the only difference between the two is that the former is larger and, therefore, easier to analyze (Pl. R. 368e2–369a3).⁹¹ My contention in what follows is that this disanalogy results in a notional elenchus of the very idea of a perfectly just city deeply ingrained in Greek literature and culture: rather than explicitly subjecting the cultural misconceptions of his interlocutors to a dialectical examination, Socrates’ construction of the ideal state unobtrusively dismantles the conventional notion of “justice in the city” inherent in their questions and lets his own idea of “justice in the soul,” as it were, take root in their souls. In his speech at the beginning of Republic 2, Glaucon states that what is commonly meant by justice is a social compromise designed to put a curb on the tyrannical desire shared by most people to enjoy the reputation of justice in spite of being unjust (Pl. R. 360e6–362c8).⁹² Glaucon’s focus on justice as a political notion implies that his demand for an encomium of justice in and of itself in fact equals a demand for an encomium of an absolutely just city. Socrates complies with his request by imagining an ideal city whose basic parameters hark back to the most famous models of that kind of encomium in Greek literature—Hesiod’s praise of the City of the Just in the Works and Days and the just cities put onstage in Aristophanes’ comedies. Although Socrates’ ⁹⁰ Cf. Stauffer 2001, 128–31; Szlezák 2004, 1–43. ⁹¹ Annas 1981, 305: “Plato’s insistence that city and individual person are just and unjust in exactly the same way not only does not help, but actually hinders, his argument.” For a detailed discussion of this (dis-)analogy, see Blößner 1997, 152–231. On the fundamental dissimilarities between the city and the soul in Socrates’ analogy, see also Crotty 2016, 154–6. Cf. Dawson 1992, 66: “Socrates’ version of ‘justice in the city’ does not seem to have much relation to ‘justice in the citizen’ in the ordinary sense.” On the difficulties involved in understanding this analogy, see also Ferrari 2003, 35–54. ⁹² Reeve 1988, 25–8.

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remark that farmers should never make their own ploughs (Pl. R. 370c8–9 ὁ γὰρ γεωργός, ὡς ἔοικεν, οὐκ αὐτὸς ποιήσεται ἑαυτῷ τὸ ἄροτρον) may make his ideal society appear like the opposite of Hesiod’s ideal farm where farmers are expected to do just that (Hes. Op. 413–47), his stipulation that the ideal city as a whole constitute a self-sufficient entity and that its citizens only practice a single trade each (what is sometimes referred to as “the unique aptitude doctrine”)⁹³ can be viewed as an extension of Hesiod’s exhortation that the ideal farmer be self-sufficient and not engage in any activity unrelated to tilling his own plot of land.⁹⁴ The “unique aptitude doctrine” is also broadly compatible with the image painted in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata of an ideal society as a metaphorical tapestry whose threads represent individual citizens doing their specialized duty for the benefit of the commonwealth (Ar. Ly. 574–85, cf. 1128–34).⁹⁵ The essentially Hesiodic/Aristophanic character of the ideal city becomes more apparent still when Socrates describes its citizens enjoying modest fare, drinking wine, engaging in sex, singing hymns to the gods, and reclining on simple carpets (Pl. R. 372a5–d3)—an image that evokes both the perfect contentment enjoyed by the inhabitants of Hesiod’s City of the Just (Hes. Op. 225–37, cf. 582–96) and the ideal life enacted onstage by such Aristophanic heroes as the Dicaeopolis of the Acharnians, “Mr. Just City” personified.⁹⁶ By constructing a city that, in broad terms, resembles the imaginary ideal societies of Hesiod’s Works and Days and Aristophanes’ comedies, Socrates reminds Glaucon that to compose an encomium of absolute justice amounts in Greek culture to imagining a world of utopian primitivism maximally removed from the complexities of real society. On the basis of the available cultural models, there is nothing else one could add to the discussion of “justice in the city.” The reason why the discussion continues is that Glaucon is dissatisfied with its outcome—complaining that the primitive diet that Socrates has offered the inhabitants of his ideal city is only suitable for pigs (Pl. R. 372d4 ὑῶν πόλιν) and asking Socrates to imagine a city that is not only unconditionally just but also lives up to the high material standards of contemporary Greek civilization. That in Glaucon’s request for a luxurious ⁹³ Pl. R. 375b6–10, 370a7–b2, 423c6–d6, 433a4–6, 443b7–c7, 453b2–6: Reeve 1988, 172–6; Crotty 2016, 40–83. ⁹⁴ On the self-sufficiency of Hesiod’s farm, see Tandy 1997, 214–27; Canevaro 2015, esp. 83–142. On the discourse of justice in the Republic as a “Hesiodic project,” see van Noorden 2010. ⁹⁵ Tellingly, this image is almost literally echoed by Plato in an alternative version of the ideal state that he offers in the Statesman (Pl. Pol. 279a–281b, 308d–311c): Vetter 2005, 33–128. On the image of weaving in the Statesman, see also Blondell 2005. ⁹⁶ Cf. Bowie 1993, 18–27; McGlew 2002, 58–66.

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146  :    city (Pl. R. 372e3 τρυφῶσαν πόλιν) Socrates recognizes a request for a city similar to Athens becomes apparent when, in his response, he proposes to introduce a “noble lie”—a foundation myth that effectively merges the Hesiodic myth of the metal races with the myth of Athenian autochthony:⁹⁷ if the luxurious city is to retain the absolute justice of the Hesiodic/ Aristophanic “city of pigs,” its inhabitants must be made to believe that their distribution into three classes (kings, guardians, and producers) derives from the three races of humankind (gold, silver, and bronze/iron) engendered by the Earth herself (Pl. R. 414d6–415a7).⁹⁸ In contrast to the utopian primitivism of the “city of pigs,” where the absolute justice of the “unique aptitude doctrine” automatically translates itself into a state of universal contentment, the only way this kind of justice can be enforced in a modern “luxurious city” is by declaring its constitution to be a product of physical nature—an ideological construct that, irrespective of the “nobility” of the lawgivers’ motives, must of necessity be a lie. Socrates’ noble lie of the earth-born naturalness of the constitution of the ideal state gives lie not only to the ideology of Athenian autochthony but also to any ideological construct that declares political language to consist of nonarbitrary (“indexical”) signs of physical nature. But while laying bare the notion of absolute “justice in the city” as a self-evident lie, Socrates uses the class system that the “unique aptitude doctrine” has prompted him to postulate for the “luxurious city” as a structural template for advancing his actual philosophical agenda. The tripartite division of society sanctioned by the “noble lie” provides a convenient analogy to what serves as the basis of Socrates’ notion of “justice in the soul”—the soul’s tripartite hierarchical structure that needs to be postulated in order to account for its ability to ascend to the higher realms of being by means of dialectic.⁹⁹ The fact that, in the “erotic” context of the Phaedrus, Socrates communicates the same idea by telling a myth of a lover reminded by the beloved’s beauty of the absolute beauty of the realm of the forms (Pl. Phdr. 243e9–257b6) indicates that in the Republic, too, the construction of the ideal city is not an end in itself but a heuristic metaphor that allows Socrates to formulate a fundamental aspect of

⁹⁷ On the “Hesiodic resonances” of the “noble lie,” see Schofield 2009, 105–9. See also Altman 2012, 348–58. ⁹⁸ Dorter 2006, 99–102. This is doubtless one of the most scandalous passages of the Republic: Schofield 2007, 139: “The noble lie seems an affront to human dignity, and something that undermines the human capacity for self-determination in particular.” ⁹⁹ On the tripartite division of the soul in the Republic, see e.g. Reeve 1988, 118–31; Pappas 1995, 83–101; Dorter 2006, 111–23; Brown 2012; Crotty 2016, 137–205.

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his own philosophical outlook by using the terminology supplied by the context of the on-going conversation. In a similar way, Socrates’ focus on literature in his discussion of the ideal state can be viewed as a response to a concern raised by his other interlocutor, Glaucon’s brother Adeimantus. In his speech in Republic 2, Adeimantus points out that, like other aspects of Greek culture (such as religion and rhetoric), literary education bears a heavy share of blame for the prevalent misconception of justice—with Homer, Hesiod, Archilochus, and Pindar univocally teaching the importance of valuing the appearance of justice rather than justice itself (Pl. R. 363a7–c2, 363e5–366b2).¹⁰⁰ Given Adeimantus’ view of Greek literature as a guide to how to imitate appearances, it is hardly surprising that, in Book 3, Socrates resolutely bans all mimetic literature (especially epic and tragedy) from his ideal state, retaining only those poetic genres that foster the guardians’ sense of absolute identity with themselves,¹⁰¹ and that, in Book 10, the ban on poetry in the ideal state becomes synonymous with drawing a distinction between poetry reproducing appearances and dialectic revealing the realm of the forms.¹⁰² The vital importance of dialectic is corroborated in the myth of Er with which the Republic concludes and according to which only the souls of those who have had access to dialectic during lifetime prove to be, at least to a limited extent, capable of judiciously choosing their next reincarnations.¹⁰³ Once again, Socrates begins by focusing on what one of his interlocutors blames for thwarting the possibility of absolute “justice in the city” and uses that imagery as a foil to what he sees as the only viable concept of absolute justice—“justice in the soul.” As the discussion progresses, the status of the guardians as a homogeneous class devoid of individual distinctions engulfs all aspects of their lives (Pl. R. 415d1–423b2), resulting in communal property and dining, gender equality, and the dissolution of the nuclear family (Pl. R. 416d3–417b9, 423e4–424a2).

¹⁰⁰ Naddaff 2002, 18–19; Dorter 2006, 59–61; Altman 2012, 105–9. ¹⁰¹ Halliwell 2002, 48–61; Lear 2011. On the education of the guardians in general, see e.g. Reeve 1988, 178–86; Ober 1998, 223–32; Dorter 2006, 73–98. ¹⁰² It is in this sense that one should probably understand Socrates’ famous remark on the “old strife between poetry and philosophy”: Pl. R. 607b5–6 παλαιὰ μέν τις διαφορὰ φιλοσοφίᾳ τε καὶ ποιητικῇ. See Gould 1990; Levin 2001. Note, too, that poetry should not be admitted into the ideal city only insofar as it is mimetic: Pl. R. 595a5. Most revealingly, the main reason why, if it accidentally does happen to be admitted, it should by no means be taken literally is the fear for the philosopher’s “state within”: Pl. R. 608b1 περὶ τῆς ἐν αὑτῷ πολιτείας δεδιότι. On mimetic poetry in Republic 10, see Halliwell 2002, 98–117; Naddaff 2002, 67–91; Crotty 2009, 107–37. ¹⁰³ Gonzalez 2012, 278: “From the perspective of the myth of Er, the project of the Republic is thus revealed to be a utopian ideal, i.e. only an exhortation to care for what continually sinks into carelessness, to bring to knowledge what continually retreats into oblivion.” See also Naddaff 2002, 121–34; Halliwell 2007; Ferrari 2009; Destrée 2012a, 120–4; Larivée 2012.

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148  :    At the beginning of Book 5, it turns out that, of all the questions heretofore discussed by Socrates, Polemarchus has only been interested in the specifics of the sexual mores of the emerging utopian society (Pl. R. 449c2–450a2). The fact that all other participants of the conversation, too, turn out to share Polemarchus’ prurient interest in sexual communism is probably due to the familiarity of Plato’s readers with the recent treatment of this topic onstage in Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen.¹⁰⁴ Unsurprisingly, then, Socrates interprets Polemarchus’ question as an invitation to indulge in comic phantasy: in his response, he warns the listeners that his account will strike them as utterly ridiculous (Pl. R. 450e2–451a4) and proceeds to describe what is in effect an inversion of the sexual communism of the Assemblywomen—a society in which the legal obligation imposed in Aristophanes on the most attractive to fulfil the sexual needs of the ugliest (Ar. Ec. 616–17) is replaced with a still more disturbing institution of matching the best men with the best women and getting rid of the progeny unlawfully produced by everybody else (Pl. R. 458c6–461e9).¹⁰⁵ That this institution is not only shockingly misanthropic in itself but also based on a ritualized system of falsehood that makes the “noble lie” pale by comparison (cf. Pl. R. 459c8–d1) serves as a yet more urgent reminder of the fundamental incompatibility between political ideology and philosophical truth.¹⁰⁶ And once again, Socrates not only reveals the disturbing consequences that would ensue if one were to take the notion of absolute “justice in the city” at face value but also uses the misguided idea brought up by his interlocutor as a steppingstone for communicating a philosophically more enlightened meaning: for the dissolution of the family among the guardians results in their coalescing into a homogenous group devoid of individual distinctions (Pl. R. 466e1–471c3) and identified with Hesiod’s Golden Race (cf. Pl. R. 469a1–2 = Hes. Op. 122–3). The guardians stop being an assemblage of discrete entities and coalesce into a purified idea. ¹⁰⁴ On the link between Aristophanes’ and Plato’s communist utopias, see Strauss 1964, 61–2; David 1984, 20–9; Dawson 1992, 37; Nightingale 1995, 177–8, with references. The unwillingness of many scholars to accept that Plato may in fact be alluding to Aristophanes doubtless has to do with their own preconceived notion of Plato’s “seriousness.” But even those who assume that Plato does in fact refer to Aristophanes interpret this reference in a rather “serious” vein. Cf. Nightingale 1995, 178: “Plato did, then, ‘include’ the Ecclesiazousae in Book 5, but this inclusion is complicated by the fact that it is Aristophanes’ mockery of the ideas, rather than the ideas themselves, which Plato sets out to challenge. Plato in fact disentangles the communistic ideas from their comic rendering by making Socrates suggest that this material is ‘serious’ and not ‘ridiculous’.” On my reading, Plato, like Aristophanes, takes the “communistic ideas themselves” for what they are—namely the stuff of comedy—, but, unlike Aristophanes, he uses them for the serious purpose of philosophical instruction. ¹⁰⁵ Rosen 2005, 188. ¹⁰⁶ Cf. Rowe 1999, 268: “[H]owever low an opinion of Plato we may hold, we can scarcely suppose him to be deaf to the irony of the suggestion that the ‘quickest and easiest’ way of achieving a ‘happy’ city is to get rid of the majority of its original inhabitants.”

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By postulating the absolute absence of individuation within the class of guardians, Socrates prompts Glaucon to ask the question of whether the ideal city could ever become reality (Pl. R. 471c4–7, cf. 499c2–d6).¹⁰⁷ Given that, in Athenian culture, the question of the possibility of a utopian society is most closely associated with the plots of Aristophanes’ comedies,¹⁰⁸ it hardly comes as a surprise that Socrates emphasizes that the only answer he can give to that question (yes, but only if philosophers become kings: Pl. R. 473c11–474e5) will be no less ridiculous than the (Aristophanic) idea of sexual communism (Pl. R. 473c7–8)¹⁰⁹—an assessment that Glaucon confirms by stating that most people will find it not just laughable but infuriatingly so (Pl. R. 473e6–474a4). To understand why both Socrates and Glaucon have no doubts that, taken literally, “philosophers as kings” is the stuff of comedy, one only needs to think of Aristophanes’ Clouds where a typical Athenian everyman begins by admiring Socrates for lording it over forces of nature but then becomes so infuriated with Socrates’ failure to satisfy his own patently utopian expectations that he burns down his school.¹¹⁰ But once again, Socrates turns his interlocutor’s misguided question into a heuristically illuminating analogy that allows him to communicate such crucial aspects of his own philosophical pursuit as the notion of philosophical Eros as longing for the good as such (Pl. R. 474d3–480a13, Pl. R. 502c9–506a, esp. 505a2 ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα)¹¹¹ and the intimate conjunction between philosophical cognition and moral agency—a conjunction illustrated by the famous allegories of the sun, the line, and the cave (Pl. R. 506d11–521b1).¹¹² The life of Socrates’ philosopher-king, who returns into “the cave” to enlighten his fellow citizens by sharing with them the insights he has obtained in the upper world, turns out to have nothing in common with governing in the literal sense of the term but resembles the life of Socrates, who famously describes himself in the Gorgias as the only true politician in all of Athens (Pl. Grg. 521d6–8). It is thus the comic notion of “philosophers as kings” that, at long last, enables Glaucon and Adeimantus to understand (Pl. R. 592a10–12) that the only state in which the philosopher will ¹⁰⁷ Dawson 1992, 53–110; Rosen 2005, 201–26; Morrison 2007, with further references. See also Altman 2012, 54–65. ¹⁰⁸ Hubbard 1997; Konstan 1997; Ruffell 2014. ¹⁰⁹ Reeve 1988, 191–5; Ferrari 2003, 100–9; Crotty 2016, 87–109. ¹¹⁰ Hubbard 1991, 111–12; Clay 2000, 142–3; Revermann 2006, 194–6; Konstan 2011. Cf. Annas 1999, 82, n. 25: “One reason that the Republic has stayed in so many versions of the ‘canon’ of Western thought may well be that if read literally as a political work, it provides an easy target; even the dullest student can see what is wrong with the idea that philosophers should be kings.” ¹¹¹ On desire in the Republic, see Ludwig 2007. On the idea of the Good, see e.g. contributions in Cairns et al. 2007. Cf. Clay 2000, 219; Weiss 2012, 11–48. ¹¹² Ferber 1984; Gonzalez 1998, 209–44; Dorter 2006, 181–208; Sedley 2007, 262–71; Destrée 2012a, 117–20.

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150  :    be willing to play a “political” role is not a physical city to be found anywhere on earth but is identical with philosophy itself—“a city of words” (τῇ ἐν λόγοις κειμένῃ) located, beyond any doubt, within the philosopher himself (Pl. R. 591e1 τὴν ἐν αὑτῷ πολιτείαν). The dialectical process whereby, for Glaucon and Adeimantus, dialectic gradually emerges from underneath their utopian misconception of “justice in the city” is reminiscent of Alcibiades’ description in the Symposium of the transformative effect that Socrates produces on his interlocutors—an effect that he compares to an unexpected revelation of beautiful divine images from underneath the grotesque appearance of a satyr (Pl. Smp. 215a6–217a2 and 221d7–222a7). The grotesque utopian city—with its totalitarian laws and its ban on any form of poetic imagination, a city from which, were it to exist “on earth,” the Republic would surely be exiled sooner than Homer, Hesiod, and tragedy—, that city turns out in the end to be nothing but the “hide of an insolent satyr” (cf. Pl. Smp. 221e4 σατύρου δή τινα ὑβριστοῦ δοράν), which Socrates dons only in order to accommodate the conceptual apparatus underlying the questions posed to him by his interlocutors. It is only when they realize that there is a glaring discrepancy between their own utopian aspirations and Socrates’ understanding of what constitutes a genuinely good life that the foundations of the ideal city of philosophy can finally be laid in their souls as well. The Symposium not only describes the unique cognitive and emotional impact produced by Socrates on his contemporaries but also reflects on its own ability as a written text to communicate that impact to the reader. The dialogue ends with Socrates persuading the comedian Aristophanes and the tragedian Agathon that “he for whom the composition of tragedies is really an art has at the same time to be an author of comedies” (Pl. Smp. 223d5–6 τὸν τέχνῃ τραγῳδοποιὸν ὄντα καὶ κομῳδοποιὸν εἶναι).¹¹³ This remark can be interpreted as a metaliterary reference to the written text of the Symposium itself, which, by letting what, in the Laws, Plato calls “the truest tragedy” (Pl. Lg. 7.817b6 τραγῳδίαν τὴν ἀληθεστάτην), i.e. a drama informed by dialectic,¹¹⁴ emerge from underneath its grotesque satyr-play-like surface (cf. Pl. Smp. 221d7–222a7),¹¹⁵ makes it possible for the reader, however partially, to experience the striking revelation that Alcibiades claims to have experienced firsthand.¹¹⁶ In a different way, the written text of the Republic, too, seeks to achieve a similar effect. ¹¹³ Clay 1975; Wardy 2002; Nails 2006. ¹¹⁴ See Prauscello 2014, 120–8. ¹¹⁵ See e.g. Sheffield 2006, 185–96; Riegel 2016. ¹¹⁶ Cf. Belfiore 2012, 196.

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Staged in the Republic is a progression from an elenctic dialogue in which Socrates eliminates his interlocutors’ misconceptions by subjecting them to dialectical questioning to a largely monologic “encomium of justice” in which Socrates makes them experience the basic mechanisms of his philosophical pursuit by dialectically dismantling the ill-informed questions posed by those who are impatient to go beyond the aporetic indeterminacy of the elenchus. Given this sophisticated reflection on the dialectical potential of monologue, it is surely not coincidental that not only does the conversation take place in Piraeus, which, as I mentioned above, is marked in the text as a place inherently hostile to dialectic, but that the text of the Republic is also framed as a first-person monologue narrated by Socrates himself: starting with the famous “yesterday I went to Piraeus” (Pl. R. 327a1 κατέβην χθὲς εἰς Πειραιᾶ), the entire dialogue is recounted by Socrates in indirect speech. The communicative structure of the Republic drastically differs from some of Plato’s other “monologic” texts: while such dialogues as the Symposium and the Phaedo feature first-person narrators embedded in specific dramatic contexts, who, within those contexts, are intent on transmitting to others their personal memories of Socrates, Socrates as the narrator of the Republic speaks in a void and addresses no one in particular. By doing so, he enacts the mechanism of communication attributed in the Phaedrus to writing—a static image of the living voice detached from its progenitor and unable to choose its addressee (Pl. Phdr. 275d5–6). The only addressee of Socrates’ first-person account in the Republic is the reader, who, in contrast to Glaucon, Adeimantus, and Polemarchus, is deprived of the possibility to interrupt the flow of Socrates’ monologue by raising objections or asking questions.¹¹⁷ Thus, while testing the dialectical potential of a largely monologic oral discourse, the Republic in fact goes one step further in that it casts itself as a paradigmatic written text that seeks to enable an absent reader to benefit from that dialectical potential. This reflection on writing as a medium conducive to dialectic is taken further still in the Timaeus/Critias. The conversation about the ideal state in the Timaeus/Critias is presented as a continuation of the discussion that took place “yesterday” (Pl. Ti. 17a2 χθές). What at first sounds like an evocation of the dramatic setting of the Republic must refer to a different occasion: not only were none of Socrates’ interlocutors in the Timaeus/Critias—Timaeus of South Italian Locri, Critias of Athens, and ¹¹⁷ Plato experiments with this narrative form elsewhere: Socrates is the first-person narrator of the Charmides and the Lysis, and in the Parmenides, the first-person narrator named Cephalus reports to the reader a veritable palimpsest of faithfully transmitted oral reports (with Antiphon and Pythodorus as “intermediary witnesses”): Finkelberg 2019, 27–46.

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152  :    Hermocrates of Syracuse—present during the conversation reported in the Republic,¹¹⁸ but Socrates’ mention that his listeners asked him to “recount in detail the things concerning the state” (Pl. Ti. 20b1–2 ὑμῶν δεομένων τὰ περὶ τῆς πολιτείας διελθεῖν) also seems to suggest that what they wanted to hear was a more detailed account of the subject matter of the Republic with which they were already familiar in general terms. The ideal state is thus cast in the Timaeus/Critias as an accomplished entity that can be invoked and replicated in its entirety: while the Republic stages a collaborative act of constructing the ideal state on the basis of questions asked by Socrates’ interlocutors, the discourse witnessed by Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates “yesterday” must have been a monologue performed by Socrates alone—a monologue similar to the written text of the Republic in which Socrates presents a first-person account of what had occurred on a yet earlier “yesterday” (cf. Pl. R. 327a1 κατέβην χθὲς εἰς Πειραιᾶ). Given Socrates’ habitual association between monologue and lifeless staticity, it is hardly surprising that, after offering a brief monologic summary of his praise of the “constitution” of the ideal state,¹¹⁹ he claims that the result, like the paradigmatic written text in the Phaedrus (Pl. Phdr. 275d5–6), looks like an immobile silent picture (Pl. Ti. 19b4–7) and asks his interlocutors to set that picture in motion (Pl. Ti. 19c2–8).¹²⁰ In the Phaedrus, in order for a written text to function as an autonomous, potentially immortal, living creature—i.e. to live on as “an image of the animate word of someone knowledgeable” (Pl. Phdr. 276a8–9)—, its “seed” has to be “planted” in the recipient’s “soul” so as to bear new fruit there (Pl. Phdr. 276e4–277a4). In the Timaeus, Socrates conceptualizes the afterlife of the Republic by using sympotic, rather than agricultural, imagery.¹²¹ And yet, when he asks his interlocutors, who on the previous day had absorbed his monologic account of the ideal state, to reciprocate his “feast of words” (cf. Pl. Ti. 20c1 ἀνταποδώσειν τὰ τῶν λόγων ξένια) by imagining what that immobile image would look like in action, he in effect prompts them to perform the procedure envisaged in the

¹¹⁸ For a concise summary of the scholarly debate on the connections between the dramatic settings of the Republic and the Timaeus/Critias, see Nesselrath 2006, 55–7. Cf. Reydams-Schils 2011, 349; Broadie 2012, 117–18. On the identities of the interlocutors in the Timaeus/Critias, see Nesselrath 2006, 41–54. See also Clay 1997, 50–1, for further differences between the Republic and the ideal state in the prologue to the Timaeus. ¹¹⁹ On the “match” between the Republic and Socrates’ summary of it in the Timaeus, see Gill 1977. ¹²⁰ This passage has been also linked to Plato’s condemnation of painting in R. 596a–598c (e.g. Schmitt 2001; Reydams-Schils 2011, 350–1) as well as to the comparison of the ideal state to a painting of the most beautiful human being in Pl. R. 472d4–e5 (Johansen 2004, 26–7). ¹²¹ On the sympotic reciprocity in the Timaeus and its literary pedigree, see Regali 2012, 13–27.

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Phaedrus—to show him the “fruit” that the “seed” of the Republic had produced in their souls. This move serves to demonstrate the consequences of the cognitive process enacted in the Republic. Staged in Republic 2–10 is an intellectually stimulating (“erot(et)ic”) process whereby the Socratic elenchus inspires the listeners to ask questions of their own—questions that Socrates reveals to be misguided but which nevertheless allow him to communicate the basic mechanisms underlying his dialectical thinking. The Timaeus/Critias focuses on the “erot(et)ic” potential of the text of the Republic itself: by juxtaposing two strikingly divergent reactions provoked by the ideal state, the text attributes to the text of the Republic the same capacity to incite intellectual activity as the Republic attributes to the Socratic elenchus. Timaeus displays a typically South Italian, vaguely Pythagorean or, more generally, “Pre-Socratic,” interest in the origin, structure, and functioning of the physical world¹²²—a topic in which Socrates himself, as he repeatedly stresses elsewhere in Plato, is not in the slightest interested (Pl. Ap. 19c and Phd. 97b–99a, cf. Ap. 26d6–e4).¹²³ Unsurprisingly, then, Timaeus’ monologue responds to the philosophical core of the Republic—i.e. to the differentiation between the realms of being and becoming, between the eternal Forms as the only objects accessible to knowledge and their evanescent images in the material world about which one can only form opinions of varying degrees of plausibility.¹²⁴ What Timaeus produces on the basis of this differentiation is a hybrid of “Presocratic” physics and Socratic dialectic—a novel account of the physical universe conceived of as a projection onto irrational matter of the rational realm of the Forms.¹²⁵ Critias, by contrast, is portrayed as a typical fifth-century Athenian politician obsessed with the mythical glory of Athens. Unlike Timaeus, he pays no heed to the philosophical dimension of Socrates’ ideal state, focusing only on its “political” aspects, and his response to the “constitution” of the ideal state consists in a veritable explosion of mythological fantasy about the origins of the Athenian state. Since, by urging his interlocutors to bring the immobile image of the ideal state to life, Socrates indirectly evokes his discussion of writing in the Phaedrus, it is all the more revealing that Critias, too, accounts

¹²² On the debate as to whether Timaeus is a historical or a fictional figure (inspired by the Pythagorean Archytas), see Nesselrath 2006, 41–3; Regali 2012, 61–2. On the indebtedness of Timaeus’ account to the Presocratic περὶ φύσεως tradition, see Naddaff 1997. ¹²³ On Socrates and natural philosophy, see Müller 2018, with references. ¹²⁴ Cf. Johansen 2004, 48–68; Brisson 2012; Grasso 2012. ¹²⁵ Ostenfeld 1997; Runia 1997, 111–16; Broadie 2012; Kahn 2013, 176–213.

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154  :    for the genesis of his mythical narrative by ambiguously locating it between what the Phaedrus identifies as two kinds of writing—the “Egyptian writing” invented by Theuth to preserve forever memories of the past and the hypothetical case of “good writing,” which, by “planting” dialectic in the reader’s soul, should be able to set in motion the process of “remembering” the truth.¹²⁶ Critias presents his narrative as a faithful reproduction of an Egyptian written chronicle, according to which Athens, before it was destroyed by the universal flood, was the most ancient and the best governed city on earth (Pl. Ti. 23c3–d1). It was Solon who, according to Critias, had learnt that chronicle by heart from Egyptian priests,¹²⁷ and it was only because he was too busy that he did not turn his memory into an epic poem, which, had it been written, would have vied in fame with Homer and Hesiod (Pl. Ti. 21d1–3).¹²⁸ But although the antediluvian history of Athens was not written down but orally transmitted from generation to generation (Pl. Ti. 20d7–21a3), Critias asserts that it has reached him in absolutely unchanged form—as if it had been burnt into his mind like an indelible piece of writing (Pl. Ti. 26c2–3 ὥστε οἷον ἐγκαύματα ἀνεκπλύτου γραφῆς ἔμμονά μοι γέγονεν). The fact that Critias claims to have memorized Solon’s account as a child at the festival of Apaturia (a festival that, as a celebration of the formal acceptance of the ephebes as full members of their phratries, served to elide the distinction between physical and cultural continuity: Pl. Ti. 21b2)¹²⁹ additionally underscores the affinity of his myth to the “Egyptian writing” of the Phaedrus—writing designed for the sole purpose of “mummifying” the past (cf. Pl. Phd. 80c8–9). At the same time, the affinity between Critias’ Egyptian myth and the Phaedrus’ image of Egyptian writing as a means of preserving factual information can be taken for a token of the narrative’s self-evident fictionality. After hearing the myth of Theuth, which Socrates describes as a “true story” that he had heard from “men of old” (Pl. Phdr. 274c1–2 ἀκοήν γ᾿ ἔχω λέγειν τῶν προτέρων, τὸ δ᾿ ἀληθὲς αὐτοὶ ἴσασιν), Phaedrus admires the ease with which Socrates invents fictional narratives set in Egypt or other places (Pl. Phdr. 275b3–4 ῥᾳδίως σὺ Αἰγυπτίους καὶ ὁποδαποὺς ἂν ἐθέλῃς λόγους ¹²⁶ Cf. Johansen 2004, 41–2. ¹²⁷ On the significance, in the fourth-century context, of Solon, the paradigmatic Athenian lawgiver, as an authority on the primordial Athenian constitution, see Morgan 1998, 108–14. On the Herodotean background of Critias’ Egyptian account, see Pradeau 1997, 156–79. On Critias presenting his myth as a factual truth (cf. Pl. Ti. 26e4–5 μὴ πλασθέντα μῦθον ἀλλ᾿ ἀληθινὸν λόγον), see Pradeau 1997, 22–54; Morgan 1998, 102–4. Cf. Thomas 1989, 95–154, on orally transmitted family traditions in classical Athens. ¹²⁸ On the epic overtones of Critias’ account, see Regali 2012, 27–31 and 79–98. ¹²⁹ On the Athenian festival of Apaturia, see Deubner 1932, 232–4; Parke 1977, 88–92; Schmitt Pantel 1992, 81–90 and 131–5.

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ποιεῖς).¹³⁰ In the Timaeus, too, the Egyptian origins of the myth serve to undermine its claims to factual veracity. As a country that eternally preserves written records of the past, Egypt is presented in the Timaeus as radically opposed to countries like Greece, where natural catastrophes regularly destroy artefacts of human civilization, leaving its inhabitants with no other possibility to make up for their lost cultural memories than by resorting to mythical fantasy (Pl. Ti. 22b6–23b3). Like the myth of Theuth, Critias’ account is a piece of such Greek mythical fantasy—a typical Platonic myth in which a selfevidently fictional authentication mechanism serves to draw attention to the narrative’s status as a condensed image of a conceptual, rather than factual, truth.¹³¹ To underscore its status as a Platonic myth, Critias presents his story as an outcome of what can be seen as an instance of dialectical “remembering”: listening to Socrates’ account of the ideal state, Critias claims to be reminded of Solon’s Egyptian chronicle (Pl. Ti. 25e3 ἀναμιμνῃσκόμενος), and the more he thinks of Solon’s Egyptian chronicle the more he feels reminded of Socrates’ ideal state (Pl. Ti. 25d7–26e1). Socrates’ ideal state emerges as a “reminder” of what Critias claims to have known all along, a reminder that sheds new light on old knowledge, producing a recollective/revelatory effect similar to the one that, in the Phaedrus, Plato attributes both to dialectic and to the good kind of writing (Pl. Phdr. 249c1–4; cf. Men. 81e4, Phd. 72e5–6). Thus, Critias frames his myth both as an exact copy of an “Egyptian” written text and as an instance of Plato’s dialectical mythopoesis, which, by staging a notional dialogue between the ideal state of Athens and the ideal state of the Republic, aims to make both of these static “texts” come alive. In what follows, I will contend that this ambiguity marks not only Critias’ introductory remarks on the origins of his narrative but also the contents of the narrative itself, which can be read both as a straightforward eulogy of the “true nature” of Athens preserved intact from time immemorial (cf. Pl. Ti. 23b6–c2)¹³² and as another instance of the dialectical dismantlement of the ideal state of Athens, which, as I argued above, constitutes one of the principal leitmotifs of Plato’s philosophical writing in general.

¹³⁰ Moore 2012, 284–8. ¹³¹ On the Platonic art of myth-making, see e.g. essays in Partenie 2009 and Collobert—Destrée— Gonzalez 2012, esp. Collobert 2012, 97–8: “[W]hat distinguishes a philosophic phantasma from a poetic and sophistic phantasma is that the former is shaped out of knowledge and after a philosophical model, which is a representation of truth.” Cf. Gill 1993. On Critias’ account as a specimen of Platonic μῦθος, see Gill 1977 and 1979; Erler 1997; Rowe 1999; Reydams-Schils 2011, 355. Cf. Vidal-Naquet 2006, 23–43. On the self-conscious fictionality of Critias’ account, see also Johansen 2004, 35–47; Broadie 2012, 129–34. See also Görgemanns 2000. ¹³² Cf. Rowe 1999, 272–3.

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156  :    Critias presents the ideal proto-Athens as a wholesale projection of Socrates’ ideal state onto the “antediluvian” landscape of Attica (Pl. Ti. 21b2, cf. Criti. 110d3–4).¹³³ Within this mythical landscape, Socrates’ “noble lie” of the earthborn origins of the citizens of the ideal state (Pl. R. 414b8–c2)¹³⁴ morphs into the myth of Athena and Hephaestus literally creating the autochthonous inhabitants of Attica from the earth (Pl. Ti. 23e1–2 and Criti. 109d1–2 ἄνδρας δὲ ἀγαθοὺς ἐμποιήσαντες αὐτόχθονας),¹³⁵ while the equality between men and women among the guardians is explained as an imitation of the founding goddess herself—the androgynous Athena, the lover of wisdom and war alike (Pl. Ti. 24c8–d1, cf. Criti. 110b5–7).¹³⁶ As a result, Athens becomes a unique society whose political system can be regarded as an extension of the divine law of nature—a paragon of self-sufficiency and justice, which not only exercises a “natural” authority over all other Greeks but also protects them from the barbarians seeking to enslave them and liberates those already enslaved (Pl. Ti. 25c1–6, cf. Criti. 112e3).¹³⁷ Unlike Timaeus, Critias interprets Socrates’ wish to see the ideal state in action (Pl. Ti. 19c2–5) with a singular literal-mindedness and depicts a military confrontation between Athens and another state—the imaginary empire of Atlantis, which before the flood had stretched from its original core on a huge island in the Ocean to the borders of Egypt and Etruria (Pl. Ti. 25a7–b2). Atlantis, too, starts off as an ideal state, its origins as autochthonous and as divine as those of Athens. But it soon becomes apparent that the ideological implications of the two autochthony myths are diametrically opposed to each other. In Critias’ Athens, Athena and Hephaestus create from the earth the entire class of guardians, whose collective identification with their native soil turns political language into a system of non-arbitrary indices of nature and leaves no room for conflict between the individual and the state. In Atlantis, too, Poseidon sires children with a mortal woman, who stems from the original earth-born humans (Pl. Criti. 113c2–d2). But their ten sons (one of them significantly named Autochthon: Pl. Criti. 114c1) symbolize aristocratic privilege rather than democratic egalitarianism: as absolute monarchs of their respective realms, they punish and kill their subjects as they see fit and possessively cling to their power by transmitting it in patrilineal

¹³³ Johansen 2004, 36–7; Broadie 2012, 140–6. ¹³⁴ Schofield 2007. ¹³⁵ Pradeau 1997, 183–5. On the Athenian myth of Hephaestus, attempting to rape Athena, ejaculating on the earth and fathering Erechtheus/Erichthonius, see Loraux 1993, 37–71. ¹³⁶ Cf. Broadie 2012, 160. ¹³⁷ The “naturalness” of the political system of Critias’ Athens is additionally underscored by the similarities between Timaeus’ natural philosophy and Critias’ political theory: Pradeau 1997, 122–49.

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succession (Pl. Criti. 114d2–3 and 119c2–5).¹³⁸ In contrast to the Athenian guardians, who are equal among themselves and identify only with their native soil, the army of Atlantis consists of bodyguards (δορυφόροι, cf. Pl. Criti. 117d1), whose privileges increase with the degree of loyalty that they show their royal masters (Pl. Criti. 117d1–4).¹³⁹ As a consequence, there emerges a profound sense of distrust not only between the rulers and their subjects but also among the autochthonous kings themselves who, whenever they deal with each other, have to perform a complex oath ritual in which they spill sacrificial blood on the written law code composed by Poseidon himself (Pl. Criti. 119c5–120d5)¹⁴⁰—its symbolic (conventional, arbitrary) nature being a far cry from the Athenian guardians living in “natural” harmony by virtue of being earth-born brothers and sisters. The landscape of Atlantis, too, is characterized by an increasing discrepancy between power and nature. In stark contrast to the naturalness of Athens, Poseidon fashions Atlantis as an artificial landscape by encircling the central mountain on which he had first cohabited with his mortal wife by a system of wide canals alternating with stretches of dry land (Pl. Criti. 113d3–e1).¹⁴¹ The subsequent generations of kings, too, vie with each other in using both imported goods and the island’s rich natural resources in order to cover the original landscape with increasingly more stunning artificial features: they build bridges, towers, roads, canals, shipyards, palaces, and temples decorated with precious materials (Pl. Criti. 114d8–117e8) whose use is justified only by aesthetic pleasure rather than expediency (Pl. Criti. 116b4 παιδιᾶς χάριν).¹⁴² The growing hubris of the kings increases the gap between their earth-born/ divine origins and their all-too-human inebriation with absolute power to such an extent that the superficial beauty of their realm cannot conceal anymore the deep moral corruption underneath (Pl. Crιti. 120e1–121b7). The war between the inherently flawed empire of Atlantis and the ideal state of Athens is presented as a realization of the divine plan to punish Atlantis for its arrogance and to exhort it to return to its primordial beginnings (Pl. Criti. 121b7–c2). Although Critias never gets around to telling the details of that

¹³⁸ Brisson 1970, 421–4; Pradeau 1997, 160–1. ¹³⁹ Cf. Nesselrath 2006, 355. ¹⁴⁰ On the oath of the kings of Atlantis, see Herter 1966; Desclos 1996. ¹⁴¹ On the contrast between the natural landscape of Athens and the artificial landscape of Atlantis, see Herter 1953, 3–6; Desclos 1996, 321; Johansen 2004, 21–2. Cf. Vidal-Naquet 1964; Brisson 1970; Pradeau 1997, 55–102. ¹⁴² Significantly enough, there is something “barbaric” about the luxury of Atlantis: Pl. Criti. 116d2 εἶδος δέ τι βαρβαρικὸν ἔχοντος. On Herodotus as the ultimate source of the “orientalism” of Plato’s Atlantis, see Nesselrath 2006, 309–27, with copious references.

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158  :    epic battle,¹⁴³ his description of Athens as a complete antipode of Atlantis (the two cities conceived of along the lines of the oppositions between purity and corruption, equality and oppression, self-sufficiency and rapacity, and natural justice and tyranny) leaves no doubts that the only cause of the Athenian victory is the fact that, in keeping with the literary conventions by which the heroic ideal has been represented from Homer to tragedy, the indexical essentialism epitomized by the city automatically translates itself into unfailing intentional agency.¹⁴⁴ By letting Critias recognize in Socrates’ ideal state the contents of a fictitious Egyptian chronicle, Plato in fact stages a close encounter between the Callipolis of the Republic and the conventional image of the ideal state of Athens attested in tragedy and patriotic rhetoric. Critias’ narrative of the war between Athens and Atlantis recycles a variety of motifs reminiscent of Athenian patriotic propaganda. The Atlantis myth reproduces a typically “tragic” construction of reality, in which the ideal state of Athens is established by being opposed to a corrupt other: just as in tragedy Athens can only be portrayed as a harmonious fusion between politics and nature by being contrasted to such inherently disjointed polities as Argus and Thebes, so Critias’ myth, too, pits the essentialist Athens against the inverted world of Atlantis doomed to destruction by the irreconcilable self-contradictions of its symbolic system.¹⁴⁵ Furthermore, Critias’ notion that Athens saved the rest of Greece from the tyranny of barbarian Atlantis evokes the Athenian claim, ceaselessly repeated in official patriotic rhetoric, that it was the racially pure Athens that protected all the other, mixed-race, Greeks from the enslavement by the Persians.¹⁴⁶ More specifically, Critias’ account of the war between the autochthonous Athenians and the barbarian city of Poseidon evokes the conflict between the earth-born Athenian king and the barbarian army led by Poseidon’s son in Euripides’ Erechtheus—this parallel corroborated by the fact that, like Erechtheus in Euripides’ play (E. Erechth. fr. 370, 59–60), Critias’ Athenian army is in the end swallowed up by the earth (Pl. Ti. 25c6–d2). In addition, Critias’ narrative indicates that the more disturbing aspects of Socrates’ Callipolis, too, would have made perfect sense to Athenians

¹⁴³ On the scholarly debate as to whether the Critias was from the beginning designed as a fragment by Plato himself, left unfinished by the author, or mutilated in the process of transmission, see Nesselrath 2006, 34–41. ¹⁴⁴ Cf. Welliwer 1977, 40; Otto 1997, 74–7; Nesselrath 2006, 32–3. ¹⁴⁵ The most obvious parallels are of course between Atlantis and Persia: Vidal-Naquet 1964, 427; Morgan 1998, 114. ¹⁴⁶ For connections between the Atlantis myth and the fourth-century epideictic praises of Athens (including the funeral orations), see Morgan 1998, 104–8.

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accustomed to seeing themselves through the lens of the autochthony myth: Socrates’ insistence on the dissolution of the nuclear family among the guardians (Pl. R. 466e1–471c3) would have appeared to be stripping away the mythological veneer from the standard notion of the Athenians as a “family” of “earth-born” citizens; the professional army of the guardians in Socrates’ ideal state would have looked like an institutionalization of the patriotic duty of the Athenian citizens to sacrifice their lives for their native soil; and Socrates’ stipulation that women must fight in battle alongside with men would have made perfect sense as a logical thinking-through of Euripides’ image in the Erechtheus of the women’s indispensable contribution to the success of the Athenian army (cf. E. Erechth. fr. 360.22–7).¹⁴⁷ I argued above that the Republic enacts a dialectical dismantlement not only of the ideological construct of Athens as a preeminent site of justice but also of the notion that absolute justice as such can ever be found “in the city” rather than “in the soul.” The Critias reverses that process by imagining a fifthcentury Athenian to use the Republic as a basis for a reinforced version of the ideology of Athenian exceptionalism. This reversal would doubtless have produced a poignant impression on Plato’s original fourth-century readers. Although there seems to be no certainty among modern scholars as to the identity of Plato’s fictionalized Critias,¹⁴⁸ there is no doubt that Plato’s first readers would have primarily thought of the most famous historical Critias— the notorious leader of the Thirty tyrants, who began their rule after the defeat of the Athenian empire with a promise of universal justice but ended up by conducting sweeping purges that decimated the Athenian population almost to the extent that Socrates deems necessary in the Republic for securing the purity of the utopian Callipolis (cf. X. HG 2.3.12–21; Arist. Ath. 35).¹⁴⁹ To contemporary readers, the fact that Plato’s Critias identifies the utopian regime of the Republic with the “true nature” of Athens to which he encourages the city to live up (cf. Pl. Ti. 23b6–c2) would have surely brought back memories of the failure of the utopian/dystopian experiment instigated by historical Critias in an attempt to erase the flawed historical reality.

¹⁴⁷ On the Athenian autochthony myth as an important conceptual background of Plato’s ideal state, see Loraux 1986, 296–312; Monoson 1998, 505–8. ¹⁴⁸ For a summary of the debate on the identity of Plato’s Critias (the younger Critias, the leader of the Thirty tyrants, his grandfather, and Plato’s own great-grandfather, or deliberately ambiguous?), see Nesselrath 2006, 43–50, with references. ¹⁴⁹ On Critias and the Thirty, see e.g. Németh 2006. Cf. Centanni 1997; Arruzza 2019, 72–87. For a reconstruction of Critias’ political views, see Bultrighini 1999.

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160  :    Thus, from the fourth-century perspective, Critias’ seemingly seamless blend between the ideal state of official propaganda and Socrates’ Callipolis would have contained a disconcerting fissure. That fissure would have been further deepened by the fact that, while Critias’ Athens evokes the ideal Athens of tragedy and patriotic rhetoric, his Atlantis, too, bears an eerie resemblance to Athens. The ten regions of Atlantis, some of them named after their first rulers, are reminiscent of the ten tribes of Attica named after their eponymous heroes (Pl. Criti. 114a4–c4).¹⁵⁰ The lavish appearance of Atlantis, with its golden statues and stunning buildings of multi-coloured stones, is recognizable as an overblown image of Periclean Athens.¹⁵¹ And the imperial expanse of Atlantis, which includes many islands and sizable chunks of mainland extending all the way to the borders of Egypt and Etruria (Pl. Ti. 25a7–b2), is comparable to the composition of the Athenian maritime empire, whose appetites reached as far afield as Egypt and Sicily (cf. Th. 1.104 and 6.8–52). Furthermore, viewed through the lens of what Plato’s contemporary reader would have known all too well, Critias’ narrative of the defeat of Atlantis exhibits striking parallels with Thucydides’ account of the defeat of the Athenian empire in the Peloponnesian War.¹⁵² Like Thucydides, Plato traces a trajectory from the autochthonous Atlantans’ sense of cultural superiority over others to an insatiable desire for imperial conquest and tyrannical domination—a desire that goes hand in hand with a growing split between “words” and “deeds” and which ultimately leads to the collapse of their empire.¹⁵³ Plato’s account of the implosion of the Atlantan empire would doubtless have struck his original fourth-century readers, who remembered both the defeat of Athens and the narrowly avoided threat of the city’s complete destruction in the aftermath of its capitulation, as all the more poignant.¹⁵⁴

¹⁵⁰ Vidal-Naquet 1964, 357; Desclos 1996, 324; Pradeau 1997, 107. For the ten Cleisthenic tribes, see Hdt. 5.66.2–67.1 and 5.69.1–2. See Stanton 1990, 145–65, for further sources. For a catalogue of the eponymous heroes, see Dem. 60.27–31. ¹⁵¹ Hurwit 1999, 248. See also Vidal-Naquet 1964, 358, who notes that the temple of Poseidon in Atlantis “évoque de façon saissisante le Parthénon.” ¹⁵² Cf. Pradeau 1997, 185–9. On connections between Atlantis and imperial Athens, see VidalNaquet 1964; Brisson 1970; Welliwer 1977, 41–4; Pradeau 1997, 102–10. See also Clay 1997, 53–4, on Hermocrates of Sicily, Socrates’ third interlocutor in the Timaeus/Critias, opposing Athenian imperialism in Thucydides 6 (33–4 and 76–7). Cf. Otto 1997, 78–9; Johansen 2004, 11–13; Nesselrath 2006, 50–4. ¹⁵³ Note, too, that Critias stresses the exceptional fertility of the proto-Athenian soils (esp. Pl. Criti. 111b7–c8), comparing the rocky ground of contemporary (post-deluvian) Attica to mere “bones of a sick body” (111b5 πρὸς τὰ τότε τὰ νῦν οἷον νοσήσαντος σώματος ὀστᾶ), which evokes Thucydides’ emphasis on the poverty of the Attic soil at Th. 1.2. ¹⁵⁴ Cf. Vidal-Naquet 1964, 349; Pradeau 1997, 107; Bultrighini 1999, 262. On the enduring trauma of the proposal to raze the city to the ground in the aftermath of its defeat, see Steinbock 2013, 280–341. For the possible resonances that the Atlantis myth could have had in the fourth century (giving

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Finally, the victory of the ideal Athens of tragedy over the tragic Athens of history in the Atlantis myth would have reminded Plato’s contemporary readers of the fact that the fifth-century ideological construct had survived the implosion of the Athenian empire virtually intact by being endlessly reproduced in what Plato ridicules in the Menexenus as the utopian wishful thinking of the fourth-century patriotic rhetoric.¹⁵⁵ What Plato encourages his readers to recognize in Critias’ myth is thus a profound split between what that myth would have meant as an oral monologue delivered in the heyday of the fifth-century Athenian empire and as a written text read in the fourth century by someone aware both of the empire’s bitter end and of the pitiable contemporary attempts to keep the former glory alive. Transposed into the post-war period, the Atlantis myth changes from what Critias parades as a philosophically informed reformulation of the ideal state of Athens propagated in tragedy and patriotic rhetoric into a ruthlessly ironic account of a notional civil war between that ideal state and Thucydides’ tragically self-destructive Athenian empire—a war in which, as in the paradigmatic tragic plot of the Seven against Thebes, neither side has any chance of surviving. Enacted in the Atlantis myth is a transformation of what is intended as a piece of monologic praise into a piece of inherently dialogic writing— writing that gives no easy answers but urges the reader to grapple with exceedingly uncomfortable questions. Plato is acutely aware of the fundamental impossibility to determine how this written text will affect its reader, and it is precisely this impossibility that seems, for him, to turn writing into an ideal instrument of philosophical instruction. In the Phaedrus, Socrates argues that the main difference between oral conversations and written texts—even those that can count as images of “the living and animate speech of someone knowledgeable” (Pl. Phdr. 276a8–9)—is that the latter cannot overcome the physical limitations that they share with silent and static pictures and which make them incapable of defending their meaning in the absence of their originators (Pl. Phdr. 275d4– e5). The Timaeus/Critias shows that it is precisely the notional “muteness” of writing (its adamant refusal to provide an unequivocal account of its meaning) that endows it with an ability to enact an “iconic” analogy with the erot(et)ic

expression to the anxiety caused by the rising maritime ambitions of Athens that would eventually lead to the establishment of the “second Athenian empire”), see Pradeau 1997, 206–29; Morgan 1998, 114–18. Cf. Dušanić 2002; Nesselrath 2002, 33–8. ¹⁵⁵ For connections between the Atlantis myth and the fourth-century epideictic praises of Athens, see Morgan 1998, 104–8.

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162  :    effect produced by the Socratic elenchus—by plunging the reader into a state of aporia and by prompting her to ask philosophical questions of her own.¹⁵⁶ Thus, the Republic and the Timaeus/Critias conceive of Socrates’ ideal state along the lines of a paradigmatic written text as it is defined in the Phaedrus—a text uttered in a void, addressed to no one in particular, quotable in its entirety, and essentially lifeless until it comes to life by causing an intellectual/emotional response in a human recipient. As I pointed out above, when, in the Symposium, Alcibiades sees Socrates as an “insolent satyr,” he in fact “misrecognizes” his own “satyric” image. Likewise, when Timaeus sees in the Republic an account of natural philosophy and Critias an account of the mythical history of Athens, they effectively “misrecognize” their own intellectual leanings in Socrates’ “text.” The dialectical processes set in motion in the Timaeus/ Critias when Socrates’ Callipolis enters a dialogue with Pre-Socratic physics and Athenian ideology, result, in other words, in blatant misreadings of the original text—misreadings that reveal that text to be unable to defend itself against being “misused” either for the sake of a non-Socratic inquiry into the “nature of things” or for the sake of an even less Socratic validation of a discredited ideological construct. Plato’s Laws, where the “Athenian guest” relies on the Republic to construct the constitution of an ideal state located not in the philosopher’s soul but in a specific location on Crete, can be perceived as another such “misreading” of Socrates’ Callipolis.¹⁵⁷ But it is, Plato seems to suggest, only by analysing such “misreadings” and, in the process, producing new “misreadings” of her own that the reader can be transformed into an aspiring dialectician—into what, in the Phaedrus, Socrates calls “a lover of divisions and collections” (Pl. Phdr. 266b3–4 ἐραστὴς τῶν διαιρέσεων καὶ συναγωγῶν). For the reader, this perpetual experience of (mis-)reading would then be akin to the revelatory effect that Alcibiades ascribes to the startling emergence of what he takes (or mistakes?) for divine truths from underneath Socrates’ “satyric” surface. Seen this way, writing’s susceptibility to being misread stops being a handicap and becomes a necessary precondition for its successful functioning as a medium conducive to dialectic. Adopting the terms that Derrida uses to portray Plato as one of the chief proponents of Western philosophy’s fundamental rejection of writing,¹⁵⁸ one could in fact

¹⁵⁶ Cf. Reeve 1988, 23; Altman 2012, 171; Bailey 2018, x–xiii. See also Weiss 2012 and Landy 2013, 95–123. On the significance of reaching an aporia in Plato, see e.g. Matthews 1999; Politis 2006; Cotton 2014, 67–84. ¹⁵⁷ On the links between the Laws and the Republic, see Prauscello 2014, with copious references. ¹⁵⁸ Cf. Derrida 1976, 3–26.

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modify his claims and assert that, rather than suppressing writing in order to advance the “logocentric” claims of the “metaphysics of presence,” Plato turns the différance of writing (its irreducible non-coincidence with itself) into a crucial tool of philosophical cognition, thereby making possible what philosophy has been ever since—“a kind of writing” intrinsically prone to being misread and, for that reason, productive of ever more writing.¹⁵⁹

¹⁵⁹ See Richard Rorty’s essay entitled “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing”: Rorty 1978.

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Conclusion The conclusion that I reached in Part I was that the ideal of poetic language as a transmitter of divine truths, which Hesiod propounds in the Works and Days, can be viewed as a by-product of the pragmatics of space enacted in the Homeric poems—a process whereby the heroic ideal, in which indexical essentialism is equated with unfailing intentionality, is positioned at the conceptual centre of the geographically dispersed Greek world. I have now attempted to demonstrate that, in a similar manner, Plato’s philosophical writing can be considered a by-product of the characteristically Athenian pragmatics of space—i.e. a reaction to the competing versions of the “ideal state of Athens” as a city that, unlike the rest of the Greek poleis founded by traveling mythical figures and harbouring immigrant populations, is fully identical to itself and as a polity motivated by an insatiable longing for an ever-elusive empire notionally coextensive with the whole world. As I have shown, Plato not only dismantles both of these ideological constructs but also constructs his own “ideal state” by effectively merging into one their basic conceptual structures and conceiving of philosophy as an insatiable longing for the realm of self-identical things. By doing so, Plato creates a radically new mode of meaning making. In contrast to Hesiod’s poetic language, the meaning of Plato’s writing is figured not as an object that the text transmits intact to the reader but as a dialectical process with an unpredictable outcome, which the text performs on the reader and which the reader in turn is urged to perform in her interaction with the text. It is writing’s fundamental noncoincidence with itself that, for Plato, turns it into a site of dialogue—an essentially Bakhtinian dialogue whose ultimate goal is to make the reader immune to the monologic temptations of ideology.¹⁶⁰ Both aspects of the “ideal state of Athens”—as an ideological construct and as a paradigmatic site of philosophy—underwent surprising changes and had an eventful afterlife in the Hellenistic period. Susan Lape has shown that the marriage plots of Menander’s comedies could be read as products of the transformation that the Athenian autochthony discourse underwent under the humiliating political conditions of Macedonian rule, where the marriage between two autochthonous citizens and the production of yet more ¹⁶⁰ Bakhtin 1981. Cf. Nightingale 1995, 169–70.

Greek Literature and the Ideal: The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age. Alexander Kirichenko, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Kirichenko 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866707.003.0009

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autochthonous citizens remained the only meaningful patriotic act still available to the Athenians.¹⁶¹ What allowed Menander to turn the singularly unpromising subject matter of “the Periclean citizenship law in action”¹⁶² into an inexhaustible source of dramatic plots is the intrusion of erotic desire into the drab reality of the standardized legal framework.¹⁶³ Time after time, Menander dramatizes a conjunction between the spontaneity of an individual male’s sexual urge and the constraints of autochthonous marriage—a conjunction so unlikely that it can often be only brought about by a divine intervention.¹⁶⁴ As a result, Menander’s comedies convey the comforting image of Athens as an ideal place where no unresolvable conflicts between personal desire and patriotic duty can ever occur—a place where acting upon one’s potentially anti-social intentions miraculously turns out to be synonymous with strengthening the prospects of society’s continued existence. “However local comedy’s associations had once been,” Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter remind us, “it was to become a kind of Panhellenic lingua franca.”¹⁶⁵ One of the main reasons why this was the case was surely the fact that Menander’s message of a possibility to combine personal fulfilment with patriotic pride must have fallen on receptive ears not only in Athens but also in all other Greek cities similarly subordinate either to one of the great Hellenistic kingdoms or to the steadily expanding Roman empire. Originating from the classical discourse of Athenian exceptionalism, Menander’s marriage plots turned autochthonous Athens into a synecdoche of the Greek world, thereby projecting a reassuring image of Hellenistic Greece as a network of politically dependent, yet culturally sovereign communities. In a similar way, the second major contribution of Hellenistic Athens to the formation of the classical canon—the vast corpus of philosophical writings—transformed the Platonic notion of Athens as a quintessential locus of philosophy.¹⁶⁶ I argued above that Plato conceives of philosophy as an alternative for the discredited ideological construct of Athens as an ideal state and that he does so by parading his own writing as a discourse capable of turning the ideal from a laughable utopian fantasy into an intellectually productive contemplation of a higher-level reality. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the philosophical schools located in Athens let the politically insignificant city appear virtually synonymous with the conceptual mastery of the world—a mastery that the circulation of philosophical writings could

¹⁶¹ Lape 2004. ¹⁶² Lape 2004, 71. ¹⁶³ Cf. Lape 2004, 91–5. ¹⁶⁴ Vogt-Spira 1992; Zagagi 1994, 142–68. ¹⁶⁵ Fantuzzi—Hunter 2004, 404. Cf. Nervegna 2013. ¹⁶⁶ Cf. Netz 2020, 322–48.

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166  :    impart to any reader regardless of her physical whereabouts.¹⁶⁷ One can see this mechanism at work in Lucretius’ description of the transformative effect produced on the reader by the works of Epicurus.¹⁶⁸ Lucretius declares Epicurus’ discovery of a radically new conception of human life (Lucr. 5 9 qui princeps vitae rationem invenit) to be the best thing to have ever originated from Athens (by far superior to such discoveries attributed to Athens in myth as agriculture and jurisprudence, Lucr. 6.1–42)¹⁶⁹ and draws an implicit comparison between Alexander the Great’s imperial conquests and Epicurus’ philosophical conquest of the universe (Lucr. 1.62–79).¹⁷⁰ Deprived of political influence, Epicurus’ Athens emerges not only as the conceptual centre of a truly universal empire but also as a paradigm of unlimited sovereignty that every reader of Epicurus’ writings can now exercise over her own life.¹⁷¹ While the literature produced in Hellenistic Athens continued to capitalize on the modes of spatial pragmatics that went back to the classical period by adopting them to the changed historical condititions, the rest of this book will show that Ptolemaic Alexandria gave rise to literary discourses that, despite their profound indebtedness to the literary tradition, instantiated radically novel patterns of meaning-making.

¹⁶⁷ Cf. White 2010. ¹⁶⁸ On Lucretius as an Epicurean “fundamentalist,” untouched by any later developments of Epicurean thought and drawing exclusively on the master’s writings, see Sedley 1998. ¹⁶⁹ Cf. Gale 1994, 191–207. ¹⁷⁰ On this notion as a product of Hellenistic Athens rather than Lucretius’ poetic invention, see Buchheit 1971. ¹⁷¹ Cf. Kennedy 2013.

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PART III

PTOLEMAIC ALEXANDRIA Memory and Make-Believe

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Introduction The longest extant portion of Callimachus’ Hecale (Call. Hec. frr. 69–74) contains remains of a conversation between two birds—a crow and (probably) an owl—,¹ a conversation that reads almost like an animal fable that would be more at home in one of Callimachus’ Iambi than in an epic poem.² The aetiological tale told by the wizened crow (yes, Callimachus wants us to picture a bird with “wrinkled skin”: Call. Hec. fr. 74.9–10 H τὸ ῥικνόν / σῦφαρ) explains the black colour of her feathers.³ Eight human generations ago, not only was she white as snow but, now banished from the Acropolis, she was what the owl is now—Athena’s favourite bird (cf. Call. Hec. fr. 73 and fr. 74.15–17).⁴ It was the crow’s excessive loquacity that led to her undoing. After noticing that the three daughters of Cecrops, whom Athena had entrusted with the task of guarding Erichthonius (the paradigmatic Athenian autochthon born from the semen that Hephaestus, in a failed attempt to rape Athena, spilled onto the earth),⁵ had violated the goddess’s prohibition to look at the half-serpentine creature, the crow immediately reported the incident to her divine patroness. Athena repaid the talkative bird’s overzealousness with an outburst of divine ire, changing the crow’s colour from white to black and exiling her from the Acropolis (Call. Hec. fr. 73 H, esp. 12 βαρὺς χόλος αἰὲν Ἀθήνης).⁶ This grotesque interlude provides a surprising perspective on what, in Athens itself, served as a mythical foundation of the Athenians’ collective self-perception as an earth-born race naturally superior to everybody else: to the crow, the story of the earth-born Erichthonius is not an aetiology of the autochthonous origins of the Athenian citizens but the reason why her feathers had changed their colour. But the crow does not simply forget to mention Athenian autochthony. Rather, her account inadvertently reduces to

¹ Moscadi 2003. ² Cf. the conversation between two birds in Ia. 4: Scodel 2011, 378. ³ Like the Hecale myth itself, this story, too, goes back to an Atthidographer (Amelesagoras: FGH 330 F 1): Hollis 2009, 231–2; Benedetto 2011, 351. For a comparison between the old crow and Hecale, see Hutchinson 1988, 60. ⁴ For the sense of the preserved scraps, see Hollis 2009, ad loc. ⁵ On Callimachus’ treatment of the myth of the birth of Erichthonius, see Hollis 2009, 226–31. Cf. Skempis 2008. ⁶ For the meaning the rest of this badly mutilated fragment, see Hollis 2009, ad loc.

Greek Literature and the Ideal: The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age. Alexander Kirichenko, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Kirichenko 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866707.003.0010

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170  :   - absurdity the very idea of deriving meaning from shared biological origins. The only form of autochthony envisaged by the crow is the accidental birth from the earth of a single monstrous creature—an incident so embarrassing to Athena that its outcome has to be concealed from public view. Doubts as to whether autochthony may have any significance beyond this awkward episode become all the more palpable when Callimachus narrates that the encounter between the loquacious crow and the irate Athena took place near the gymnasium of the Lycean Apollo and that it occurred just as Athena was returning from Chalcidice, carrying on her mighty shoulders a huge rock that was to become Mount Lycabettus (Call. Hec. fr. 70.12 H and fr. 71.2–3).⁷ The foundation of the Lyceum apparently predates in this passage the emergence of one of the defining features of the physical landscape of Attica.⁸ To Callimachus, even the Attic soil itself is not all that “autochthonous” after all—with one of its major chunks imported from as far afield as Thrace. By contrast, the Lyceum, one of the cultural institutions that distinguish Athens from the rest of the world, emerges in the poem as a much more solid foundation of Athenian identity than the Attic soil. The significance of this episode is underscored by the fact that there is a parallel between the crow and the poem’s mythical protagonist Theseus. Exiled from the Acropolis by Athena, the crow survives on the food that Hecale—an unremarkable old woman whose sole claim to distinction is that she treats strangers as if they were her own family (cf. Call. Hec. fr. 2 H)—had dutifully sacrificed to the gods (Call. Hec. fr. 74.1–5 H).⁹ As a son of Poseidon and a Peloponnesian mother, Theseus problematizes the notion of Athenian autochthony more seriously than the chatty crow concerned only with the colour of her feathers.¹⁰ The tenuousness of Theseus’ “blood-ties” to the Attic soil becomes apparent when, upon his arrival in Attica, he is welcomed at his human father’s palace on the Acropolis with deadly poison (Call. Hec. frr. 3–11 H). The fact that a perfect stranger proves to be the only person in Attica from whom he experiences unstinting hospitality emerges as a prefiguration of the ideal that Theseus himself comes to embody in Attic tragedy (Euripides’ ⁷ Hollis 2009, ad loc. ⁸ Hollis 2009, 239. ⁹ Hutchinson 1988, 60; Hollis 2009, 243. ¹⁰ See Calame 1990, 94–8; Walker 1995, 84–92, esp. 85: “Poseidon is, therefore, more than an alternative father; he introduces into the story of Theseus an account of human birth that denies autochthony completely.” The earliest surviving poems telling the myth of Theseus—Bacchylides 17 and 18—portray him as an outsider. Bacchylides 17 casually refers to him as Πανδίονος / ἔκγονον (15–16) only to let him at a later point visit the marine home of his real, divine, father Poseidon (33–6): Segal 1979. The perception of Theseus by native Athenians as a foreign usurper replacing their ancestral customs with a centralized state is one of the leitmotifs of Plutarch’s Life of Theseus: e.g. 32, where Plutarch explicitly refers to Theseus as δεσπότην ἔπηλυν. See also Thuc. 2.15, the canonical account of Theseus’ synoecism: Calame 1990, 221–2; Goušchin 1999.

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Heracles, Heraclidae, and Suppliants, as well as in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus)¹¹—the ideal of Athens as a city welcoming strangers, which, in contrast to the ideology of the racial purity of the Athenians, possesses a truly universal appeal. But the transition accomplished in the Hecale away from shared biology and towards shared cultural values is probably not intended to glorify Athens. Rather, it seems to be in tune with the overall poetic programme pursued both by Callimachus himself and by his fellow Alexandrian poets—a programme that consisted in promoting Ptolemaic Alexandria as an ideal locus of Panhellenism, which, by attracting immigrants from all over the Greek world, seeks to replace the enduring cultural appeal of classical Athens with a radically new system of cultural coordinates.¹² I showed in Part II that tragedy and patriotic rhetoric conceived of Athens as a collective embodiment of the heroic ideal—as a people whose “natural” essentialism (i.e. their postulated identity with their native earth) resulted in their unfailing intentionality (i.e. the unrivalled superiority of the Athenians over all other Greeks)—and that the pragmatic effect produced by Plato’s philosophical writing is crucially informed by that ideological construct. In the next two chapters, I will argue that the ideal image of the third-century Alexandria constructed by Callimachus and Theocritus is based on the notion of cultural essentialism (i.e. the “Greekness” of the city’s immigrant population) automatically translating itself into an unprecedented degree of social harmony and personal happiness and that the innovative poetic discourses that arise in this cultural context are intimately linked to its geopolitical make-up.

¹¹ Mills 1997; Grethlein 2003; Tzanetou 2012.

¹² Cf. Acosta-Hughes—Stephens 2012, 200–2.

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5 Memory and Desire in Callimachus The City of the Muses The aetiological myths told in Callimachus’ Aetia¹³ not only account for an uninterrupted temporal continuity from mythical past to ritual present but also create the sense of the Greek world as an intricately interconnected cultural network within which every single place, no matter how glorious or how obscure, occupies a respectable position.¹⁴ A great number of the poem’s narratives are written, as it were, on the margins of various Panhellenic myths of itinerant heroes, connecting obscure local foundation legends with the episodes of the epic cycle or the myths of Heracles and the Argonauts.¹⁵ In addition, there is a constant emphasis in the Aetia on religious and social mobility, exemplified by pilgrimages to foreign lands, the adoption of foreign cultic practices, or marriages between members of different communities.¹⁶ Although this random selection of narratives may strike one as a synecdoche of the crisscrossing storylines that constitute Greek mythology and which I briefly discussed in the General Introduction, Callimachus in fact creates a radically new kind of a mental map of the Greek world. In stark contrast to the

¹³ Selden 1998, 323–9, esp. 324: “In the four books of Aetia, Callimachus compiles divarications through which diverse heterotopic details have been lifted out of their proper setting and transferred to another context: an observance, a name, a festival, an institution.” Cf. Asper 2011. ¹⁴ Harder 2012, vol. 1, 2–21. Most references below are to this new edition of the fragments. See also Hutchinson 1988, 40–8; Fantuzzi—Hunter 2004, 42–88. On Callimachus’ “geopoetics” in the Aetia, see Asper 2011. Cf. Acosta-Hughes—Stephens 2012, 170–3. ¹⁵ e.g. frr. 3–7 (the wreathless sacrifice to the Charites on Paros commemorates the death of Minos’ son Androgeos), 7c–21d (an obscene ritual on the island of Anaphe is traced back to the Argonauts’ rescue from the Colchians), 22–23c (the fact that, on Lindos, the sacrifices to Heracles are accompanied by curses re-enacts the curses of the Lindian farmer whose bull was eaten by Heracles), 76b–77d (the marriage ritual at Elis commemorating Heracles destroying the city), frr. 108–109a (the anchor of the Argo left on Cyzicus). On multiple Panhellenic “mythological frames” in the Aetia, see AcostaHughes—Stephens 2012, 177–93. Cf. Harder 2003, 296–302. ¹⁶ Frr. 43b–c (the festival of Theodaesia celebrated both on Crete and in Boeotian Haliartus), frr. 67–75a (the marriage between Acontius of Ceos and Cydippe of Naxos as a paradigm of intermarriage), frr. 80–83b (the peace between Miletus and Myos is traced back to the Milesian king Phrygius falling in love with Pieria of Myos at an Artemis festival). In some stories, connections between individual communities are conceived of in terms of hostility: e.g. frr. 31cg (the statue of Artemis at Leucas wearing a mortar on her head is a reminder of Epirus invading Leucas), frr. 78–78d (the Ionians banning the inhabitants of Isindos from their religious festivals). Cf. Harder 2003, 294–5.

Greek Literature and the Ideal: The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age. Alexander Kirichenko, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Kirichenko 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866707.003.0011

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174  :   - dispersed, multi-nodal structure of Greek mythology, local aetiologies are perceived in the Aetia from Callimachus’ own privileged external viewpoint equidistant to all of them and emphatically detached from the original “material” features that his aetiologies set out to explain.¹⁷ As a result, instead of a plurality of physical places loosely tied into a network of shared cultural memories, we have to do with a materialized centre from which individual physical places can only be accessed as objects of memory. This centre is cast in the Aetia not simply as a notional Mouseion conjured up by Callimachus’ conversation with the Muses in the poem’s first two books—a place where the scholar-poet pedantically stores obscure local myths for the intellectual pleasure of other cognoscenti.¹⁸ Rather, this centre is constituted by Alexandria itself—a newly founded Panhellenic city that has no tangible Greek past of its own and whose past and cultural identity can only be constructed as a sum total of the cultural memories of its Greek inhabitants.¹⁹ The scene in which Callimachus portrays himself as a guest at a banquet organized by an Athenian immigrant effectively dramatizes the emergence of a new cultural reality in Alexandria (Call. Aet. 178 Pf.). One of the most striking things about this episode is the contrast between the attitudes that Callimachus displays to different sets of aetiological lore—the matter-of-fact, “been-there-done-that,” tone with which he briefly mentions the well-known aetiological background of the Athenian festivals of Anthesteria and/or Aiora celebrated by Pollis at his private house²⁰ and the enthusiasm with which he literally jumps on Theogenes, a guest from the utterly insignificant island of Icus off the coast of Thessaly, in order to learn from him the mythical origins of a bizarre ritual celebrated there (Call. Aet. 178.21–2).²¹ Callimachus emerges in this fragment as an indiscriminate hunter for all kinds of Greek aetiological lore, and he presents cosmopolitan Alexandria, where one can meet people from all over the Greek world, as an ideal hunting ground: the fact

¹⁷ On “the Libya-centric geography” of the Aetia (Alexandria, strictly speaking, being a part of Libya: Stephens 2003, 181–2), see Acosta-Hughes—Stephens 2012, 171–3. Cf. Asper 2013, 69–77. ¹⁸ On Callimachus’ “learnedness,” see e.g. Schmitz 1999. More generally, on the “learnedness” of Alexandrian poetry, see Bing 1988. On the literary activities at the Mouseion, see also Bagnall 2002. ¹⁹ Selden 1998; Asper 2001 and 2011, esp. 176–7, on the “Ptolemaic measures to unify the heterogeneous Greek population in Egypt.” Cf. Acosta-Hughes and Stephens 2012, 202–3. See also McInerney 2017. ²⁰ The allusive tone in which Callimachus lists the typical characteristics of Pithoigia, Choes, and Aiora (cf. Call. Aet. 178.1–4) shows how familiar—from literature rather than from autopsy—he expects those festivals to be to his readers. For the literary texts explicating the aetiological details alluded to by Callimachus, see Habash 1995, 567–74 (E. IT 947–60 and Ar. Ach. 960–1234) and Rosokoki 1995 (Eratosthenes’ Erigone). ²¹ The ritual commemorated Peleus’ shipwreck at Icus and involved a young girl carrying an onion: Call. Aet. 178.25, Harder 2012, vol. 2, 953.

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that he explicitly stresses that, unlike the Ician guest, he is unfamiliar with seafaring serves to highlight that there is indeed no need for him to leave the city to come across the aetiological information that he is so eager to collect (Call. Aet. fr. 178.32–3).²² By staging an encounter between Callimachus of Cyrene, Pollis of Athens, and Theogenes of Icus, this fragment shows Alexandria as a place where not only is every Greek a priori a foreigner, but where each Greek’s cultural heritage is equally valuable, irrespective of whether they come from a great cultural metropolis or from a barely known tiny island. In addition, Callimachus depicts the banquet at Pollis’ as a setting that effortlessly combines cultural protocols that, in their original contexts, would have been incompatible with each other. Since in his description of the banquet Callimachus mentions the speedy silent drinking of undiluted wine (Cal. Aet. fr. 178.11–12), the day on which he attends the celebration at Pollis’ house must be the Choes. According to Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, the matricidal Orestes, having arrived in Athens during a public symposium, was not allowed to take part in communal drinking but, to preserve the Athenians from pollution, had to drink wine in silence from his own jug served to him at a separate table (E. IT 947–60).²³ To commemorate that occasion, the festival of Choes consisted in a drinking contest, in which both citizens and slaves were allowed to participate (cf. Call. Aet. fr. 178.1–2 δούλοις / ἦμαρ . . . λευκὸν), drinking unmixed wine from three-litre jugs (choes) “without taking a breath” (Ar. Ach. 1229 ἄμυστιν; cf. Call. Aet. fr. 178.11–12 χανδὸν ἄμυστιν / ζωροποτεῖν).²⁴ Obviously, the Anthesterian wine-drinking contest forms a contrast to the ideal of sympotic commensality—the leisurely consumption of wine diluted with water and poured from a common crater.²⁵ The banquet at Pollis’ stages an impossible mixture of these two modes of wine drinking. Some of Pollis’ guests are said to be gulping down huge quantities of undiluted wine—something that Callimachus regards as a barbaric and distasteful

²² Hunter 1996, 19. See also Burton 1995, 31–3. ²³ Burkert 1985, 237–42. See also Wecowski 2014, 103–7. ²⁴ For a detailed discussion of both literary and archaeological sources on the Athenian Anthesteria, see Hamilton 1992. See also Burkert 1983, 213–47; Maurizio 2001. ²⁵ Fantuzzi—Hunter 2004, 79. See also Corner 2010, on the symposium as a microcosm of the “middling” ideology of the polis, Maurizio 2001, on the Anthesteria enacting a carnivalesque “hysteria” that serves to transcend and destabilize civic identity, and Wecowski 2014, 103–8, on the drinking contest at the Anthesteria as a form of an “anti-symposion.” On the traditional Greek symposium, see Murray 1990; Schmitt Pantel 1992; Hobden 2013, esp. 22–65; Wecowski 2014, 27–55. For a discussion of sympotic, not only elegiac, poetry as evidence for the archaic symposium as a model of social cohesion within the polis, see Corner 2010. See esp. Anacr. fr. 356. Cf. Wecowski 2014, 65–78.

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176  :   - custom (Call. Aet. 178.11–12, cf. Anacr. fr. 356; Pl. Lg. 637d5–e7).²⁶ Callimachus himself and his new best friend from Icus, by contrast, behave like civilized sympotic guests: they drink wine mixed with water while engaging in a table talk (Call. Aet. 178.15–16).²⁷ At Pollis’ house the Anthesterian drinking is thus superimposed onto a private symposium—so that, in the end, every guest can find a niche that suits his personal inclinations. The only kind of “like-mindedness” that can be attributed to Pollis’ guests (cf. Call. Aet. 178.5: ἐς δαίτην ἐκάλεσσεν ὁμηθέας)—or, by extension, to the Greeks in Alexandria in general—seems to consist in their readiness, if not to embrace, then at least to tolerate their mutual differences.²⁸ But Callimachus’ portrayal of Alexandria goes beyond the construction of a “politically correct” multicultural space. The two framing poems of Books 3 and 4 of the Aetia (the Victoria Berenices and the Coma Berenices) enact the process of fusion of the cultural memories of Alexandria’s Greek immigrants into something approaching an unobtrusively imposed common identity. In the Victoria Berenices, Callimachus draws an indirect analogy between three different narratives—Heracles’ victory over the Nemean lion (the aetiology of the foundation of the Nemean games: Cal. Aet. fr. 54e), Molorcus’ victory over domestic mice that plague his tiny hut (Cal. Aet. fr. 54c), and Berenice’s victory in the Nemean games (Cal. Aet. fr. 54). This parallelism establishes what amounts to an isomorphism between the banal domesticity of a private household and the self-aggrandizing image of the Ptolemaic royal family. To strengthen this isomorphism, the text draws a parallel between the return of Berenice from Nemea (in the vicinity of Argos) and the myth of Io (the daughter of the Argive river god Inachus), who was transformed by Zeus into a cow and wandered around the world until she reached Egypt, became an alias of the Egyptian goddess Isis, and gave birth to Epaphus, a mythical ancestor of countless Greek heroes responsible for the proliferation of aetiological myths throughout the Greek world (cf. Call. Aet. fr. 54.4 Δαναοῦ γῆς ἀπὸ βουγενέος).²⁹ One of the effects achieved by this parallel is that it makes Ptolemaic Egypt appear not like a foreign place anymore but like a common ²⁶ On the importance of the opposition between the symposium Greek and foreign drinking practices in archaic and classical Greek culture, see Hobden 2013, 66–116. ²⁷ On the indebtedness of the Pollis episode to the traditions of Greek sympotic poetry, see Fantuzzi—Hunter 2004, 76–83. Note, too, that Callimachus emphatically contrasts the solitary drinking of the Choes with the sympotic custom of the common cup “going around”: 13–14 περιστείχοντος ἀλείσου / τὸ τρίτον. On the importance of this custom, as well as on the characteristic mixture of wine and civilized entertainment at the Greek symposium, see most recently Wecowski 2014, esp. 85–97. ²⁸ For the heterogeneity/“otherness” of the Greek population of Alexandria, see Selden 1998; Asper 2001. ²⁹ Acosta-Hughes—Stephens 2012, 168–70.

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source of “Hellenicity” to which all Greeks are now, as it were, invited to “return.” If the Victoria Berenices implicitly urges the Greeks to identify with Ptolemaic Egypt by positioning it at the very centre of the conceptual space of Greek culture, the Coma Berenices foregrounds the centrality of Alexandria in terms of aetiological time.³⁰ The “discovery” by the court astronomer Conon that a lock of the queen’s hair has been transformed into a constellation is presented in the poem as the basis of a new cult to be celebrated (at least according to Catullus’ Latin translation of the poem) by every woman on her wedding night (Cat. 66.79–86).³¹ The narrative is based on the same mythand-ritual pattern as the local aetiologies told in the rest of the Aetia.³² But it is the difference between the Coma Berenices and traditional aetiologies that is particularly revealing. In this poem, the aetiological miracle takes place not in an immemorial mythical past but in the here and now of contemporary Alexandria; the object whose origin it purports to explain is not a quirkylooking statue but a phenomenon of universal proportions visible to the entire world from now and for all eternity; and what it does is not to validate a local custom by appealing to the common Panhellenic past but to imagine a (somewhat grotesque) mechanism whereby the Ptolemaic royal cult can penetrate into the privacy of every single bedroom, potentially around the whole world.³³ To all those Greeks whose local cultural memories constitute the bulk of the Aetia, this ideological construct would make the contemporary reality of Ptolemaic Alexandria appear like a new time of origins on a par with the mythical time of gods and heroes. As a result, the partial analogy between the structure of local aetiologies and the structure of Ptolemaic ideology effectively turns the Aetia into an account of the “causes” of Alexandria itself—an account that begins by constructing the city’s Panhellenic identity from a mixture of the local cultural memories of its Greek inhabitants and then engulfs those memories into a single totalizing vision projected by the royal cult.

³⁰ Cf. Gutzwiller 1992. On the shift in aetiological time in the Coma Berenices (“the present as the past of the future”), see Harder 2003, 302–4. ³¹ For a discussion of the connection between Callimachus’ and Catullus’ versions of the poem, see Harder 2012, vol. 2, 793–5. See also Gutzwiller 1992, 381, following Pfeiffer: “[T]he suggestion that Catullus invented the αἴτιον is unconvincing, because the ritual is just the sort of cult practice we would expect the Euergetai to establish in order to perpetuate the myth of their romantic marriage.” Cf. Hollis 1992; Jackson 2001; Clayman 2011, 240–2. ³² Harder 2003, 303. ³³ Cf. Prioux 2011, 207. On the Egyptian background of the catasterism, see Koenen 1993, 105–8; Selden 1998, 326–54.

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178  :   - Thus, the Aetia emerges as a compendium of the cultural past of Greece, which projects an encomiastic image of Alexandria as an ideal Panhellenic place—a place where people from all over the Greek world can live in harmony while celebrating their local cultural identities. In the cities that the Greeks have left behind, the sense of belonging is determined primarily by whether or not one is allowed to participate in the ancestral customs, whose mythical foundation stories are collected in the Aetia. Fostering identification with the postulated cultural origins, this mechanism of social cohesion is based on a sharp differentiation between “us” and “them.” By contrast, the Greek world of Callimachus’ Alexandria is constructed as a place where social harmony is achieved not through an interplay of identification and exclusion but through a balance between two kinds of distance—between the Greek immigrants’ distance both from each other and from their own ancestral customs, accessible now only as objects of cultural memory, and their distance from the ideological centre of the new world that they inhabit, i.e. from the royal couple, who ultimately prove to be as remote from their subjects as the dim light shed by the constellation of the Lock of Berenice. Conon’s discovery of the Lock of Berenice serves as the ultimate source of authentication of Callimachus’ adaptation of aetiological reasoning to royal ideology, so that the combination of Conon’s astronomical wisdom and ideological inventiveness may in fact be regarded as conceptually coextensive with Callimachus’ own erudite and experimental poetry.³⁴ It is first and foremost in the prologue to the Aetia that Callimachus reflects on the ideological reverberations of his poetic experiment.³⁵ In the prologue, Callimachus defends himself against the polemical attacks of the Telchines (Call. Aet. 1.1 πολλάκ]ι μοι Τελχῖνες ἐπιτρύζουσιν ἀοιδῇ)—the primordial mythical smiths who stand for the lack of aesthetic refinement and who accuse the poet of writing a collection of short poems rather than a single continuous song about kings and heroes (Call. Aet. 1.3 ἓν ἄεισμα διηνεκές).³⁶ According to the standard reading, Callimachus defends his elegiac poetry against the proponents of traditional (Homeric-style) epic³⁷—an interpretation indirectly buttressed by the countless imitations of the Aetia prologue by the Augustan poets, who indeed do couch their preference for short poems ³⁴ On the ideological ingenuity of Conon’s ‘discovery’, see Gutzwiller 1992, 362–73. ³⁵ For the enormous bibliography on the prologue, see ad loc. notes in Harder 2012, v. ii, 6–93. ³⁶ For the sources on the Telchines, see Harder 2012, v. ii, 13–14. ³⁷ See e.g. Asper 1997, 209–34, with references. This widespread understanding of the prologue is supported by the biographical tradition of the quarrel between Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes. On the fictitious nature of the ancient lives of Apollonius, see Lefkowitz 1981, 1–19. See also Klooster 2011, 121–7.

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as a refusal (recusatio) to compose a heroic epic about the deeds of Augustus.³⁸ Against this prevalent orthodoxy, Alan Cameron argued in his 1995 monograph that the bone of contention between Callimachus and his critics is not archaic epic but contemporary elegy composed in the spirit of Antimachus’ Lyde, a lengthy (cyclic-poem-like) catalogue of mythical love stories arranged in a strictly chronological order.³⁹ In a similar vein, Silvia Barbantani speculated more recently that the contrast that Callimachus draws in the prologue could be between his own elegiac experiment and (long but inelegant) contemporary encomiastic poems in elegiac couplets.⁴⁰ I agree that it is more sensible to see in Callimachus’ prologue a comparison between two different kinds of elegy rather than between elegy and epic.⁴¹ But I think it would be more sensible still to read the prologue not as an abstract polemic about subjective preferences pertaining to form, length, and aesthetic refinement, but as a programmatic statement about the appropriateness of the particular form chosen by Callimachus to the content of this particular poem⁴²—a poem that, as I have shown, conceptualizes the “origins” of Alexandria from the individual cultural memories of its Greek inhabitants. As Ewan Bowie has shown in an influential article, there were two basic forms of archaic elegy—short thematically diverse pieces recited at symposia and longer, chronologically continuous poems (cf. Call. Aet. 1.3 ἓν ἄεισμα διηνεκές) probably designed for public festivals, which recounted local foundation legends and which, needless to say, included tales of “kings and heroes” so greatly admired by the Telchines of the Aetia prologue (cf. Call. Aet. 1.3–5).⁴³ In his response to the Telchines, Callimachus seems to be drawing a contrast between precisely these two types of elegies—between the short elegant poems by Mimnermus and Philitas and their long ktistic poems on the ³⁸ Wimmel 1960; Thomas 1993; Cameron 1995, 454–83; Hunter 2006. ³⁹ Cameron 1995, esp. 303–61. See also Klooster 2011, 135–7. Cf. Call. fr. 398 Pf. Λύδη καὶ παχὺ γράμμα καὶ οὐ τορόν. ⁴⁰ Barbantani 2002–3. As an example of this kind of poetry, she adduces SH 958 (P. Hamb. 312, inv. 381). ⁴¹ For a similar view of the literary polemics in Callimachus’ Hymn to Apollo (traditionally interpreted, like the polemics in the prologue to the Aetia, as an opposition between long epic poetry and Callimachus’ own short poem), see Kirichenko 2010b, where I show that Phthonos’ disappointment with Callimachus’ short hymn arises from his having expected a hymn of an appropriate length along the lines of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. ⁴² Cf. Morrison 2007, 178–82. On the prologue as a “paratext,” see Asper 2001, 85–9. ⁴³ Bowie 1986, esp. 15–21 (on the symposium, pace West 1974, as the only context securely attested for the performance of short elegiac poems irrespective of their content—sympotic, erotic, or martial/ exhortatory) and 27–34 (on the performance at public festivals of long, 1,000 lines and longer, ktistic/ historical elegies, such as Mimnermus’ Smyrneis (a history of the city of Smyrna, which took its name from an Amazon), Tyrtaeus’ Politeia/Eunomia, Semonides of Amorgos’ Archaeologia, Xenophanes’ poem on the foundation of Colophon and the colonization of Elea, Panyassis’ Ionian History, and, possibly, Ion’s Ktisis of Chios). See also Dougherty 1994; Sider 2006.

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180  :   - histories of Smyrna and Cos (Call. Aet. fr. 1.9–12).⁴⁴ In this connection, the criticism of the Telchines may indeed be construed as a reaction to the discrepancy between the poem’s title and its form. Primordial traditionalists that they are, the Telchines seem to expect from an elegiac poem entitled The Causes and written by a poet based in Alexandria to be a continuous account of the city’s origins.⁴⁵ But what they get instead is a collection of short “sympotic” pieces, whose indebtedness to the archaic tradition of sympotic poetry becomes apparent not only in the episode of the banquet at Pollis’ but also because Callimachus’ conversation with the Muses in the first two books also seems to be conceived as a kind of figurative table talk (Call. Aet. fr. 43, esp. 12–17).⁴⁶ What escapes the Telchines, however, is that it is precisely the form chosen by Callimachus—a formally unified collection of short aetiological poems—that is ideally suited to account for the origins of the Panhellenic metropolis of Alexandria as a fusion of the local cultural memories of its Greek immigrants.⁴⁷ What also escapes the Telchines is that there is a conspicuous analogy between the mechanism of meaning production typical of mythical aetiologies and the manner in which Callimachus bases the literary texture of his own poem on an iconic analogy with the new cultural reality of Alexandria. In the aetiological myths that Callimachus tells in the Aetia, both myth and ritual serve to make sense of observable social reality, and they do so in close conjunction—by being linked to each other by a peculiar self-authenticating mechanism: while myth purports to explain the true origins and the ideological rationale of ritual, ritual effectively serves to authenticate the veracity of myth by making it, as it were, experientially tangible in the social here and ⁴⁴ For Mimnermus, see Bowie 1986, 28: “It is difficult not to conclude that Nanno is the title of one book [sc. of Mimnermus], Smyrneis of the other, and West made a strong case for Nanno being a collection of short poems. In that case, Callimachus’ contrast between αἱ κατὰ λεπτον [ῥήσιες] and ἡ μεγάλη γυνή . . . will have been between Nanno and the Smyrneis,” and 29–30, on the Smyrneis as a poem treating the foundation of Smyrna. For the evidence on Philitas’ poem on Cos, see Sbardella 2000, 28–41, esp. 39 on the possibility of this poem being “non dissimile, sotto l’aspetto tematico, dai poemi di fondazione o ktiseis.” ⁴⁵ It is highly significant in this connection that Apollonius of Rhodes was the author of a number of ktistic poems, one of them being Alexandreias ktisis, in all probability ἓν ποίημα διηνεκές. For the scanty evidence on these poems, see Sistakou 2008; Barbantani 2014. ⁴⁶ For a thorough discussion of frr. 178 and 43 as framing the “second book of the Aetia as a sympotic discourse,” see Acosta-Hughes and Stephens 2012, 140–5. See also Cameron 1995, 133–7; Fantuzzi—Hunter 2004, 80–1; Harder 2012, v. II, 955–6. A great portion of fr. 43 (vv. 46–92) is a catalogue of ktiseis (foundations of Sicilian cities) leading up to Clio’s detailed narrative of the foundation of Zancle. ⁴⁷ Cf. Selden 1998, 325, who describes the world conjured up in the Aetia as “an uncircumscribed series of discrete sites each of which marks in turn an intersection of diverse itineraries and is hence constituted as a set of historic and geographic alibis. The text itself here functions as the mastersite for their collocation.”

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now.⁴⁸ In the Aetia, Callimachus not only repeatedly shows this mechanism at work in that he tells myths that explain the origins of rituals and describes rituals that keep myths alive by re-enacting them. He also uses a similar circular mechanism in his poetic construct of Alexandria. On the one hand, Alexandria (a place where the unobtrusive authority of the royal couple imposes a sense of social cohesion onto the city’s culturally diverse Greek population) can be seen as a formal template for Callimachus’ poem itself—a poem in which the poet’s “recollection” of the Greek cultural tradition (the process variously staged in the Aetia as a conversation with the Muses, a perusal of obscure historical sources, or an intertextual dialogue with poetic predecessors) is arranged into something new by his own imperious, yet ironically detached, voice.⁴⁹ But on the other hand, it is precisely Callimachus’ poetic text (a loose collection of cultural memories of Alexandria’s Greek immigrants) that, by enacting an “iconic” analogy to this virtual “city of the Muses,” makes that city experientially tangible not to a tightly knit group of local worshippers but, potentially, to countless solitary readers anywhere in the Greek-speaking world.

In and Out of Alexandria Callimachus’ Iambi, too, serve to conceptualize the new cultural reality of Alexandria. That they do so in a different way has to do with the fact that they reanimate a different genre of archaic Greek poetry. Like archaic elegy, archaic iambus is likely to have been a predominantly sympotic genre.⁵⁰ And like elegy, iambic poetry is primarily concerned with fostering the cultural values epitomized by the symposium itself—a ritualized microcosm of the male world of the polis, in which communal drinking served to negotiate the uneasy tension between individualism and social cohesion.⁵¹ But while elegy highlights different ways of maintaining harmony among the symposiasts by urging them to exercise moderation and self-restraint,⁵² iambus tends to promote the sense of social cohesion by channelling the in-group’s collective

⁴⁸ Cf. Asper 2013. ⁴⁹ Cf. Bing 1988. On the narrator’s voice in the Aetia, see Morrison 2007, 182–99. ⁵⁰ On the symposium as one of the possible performance contexts of archaic iambos, see Pellizer 1990; Vetta 1992; Kantzios 2005, 12–20; Rotstein 2010, esp. 253–6, on the performance of iambic poetry in “the context of ritualized commensality or conviviality.” ⁵¹ Schmitt Pantel 1992; Hammer 2004; Corner 2010; Hobden 2013, esp. 25–34. ⁵² Aloni 2009, 171–3 and 174–5, with references. Cf. Corner 2010, 358–61.

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182  :   - aggression into an invective against those who are excluded from that group.⁵³ Accordingly, while Callimachus relies on archaic elegy in order to conjure up the ideal image of Alexandria as a harmonious multicultural society, he uses archaic iambus to sharpen the contours of this virtual “city of the Muses” by opposing it to the rest of the world. Callimachus frames his revival of archaic iambus by casting Hipponax as a revenant from the dead and by letting him address an audience that consists of Alexandrian philologists (Dieg. VI.1).⁵⁴ Although the resurrected Hipponax still expresses himself in a recognizably iambic idiom, he has otherwise changed almost beyond recognition: instead of urging his listeners to join him in attacking a scapegoat excluded from the tightly knit in-group,⁵⁵ he urges the Alexandrian philologists to put an end to their endless squabbles (Dieg. VI.1 ἥκουσι δ᾿ αὐτοῖς κατ᾿ εἴλας ἀπαγορεύει φθονεῖν ἀλλήλοις).⁵⁶ Transposed from his original Ionian setting into the new world populated by Alexandrian philologists, Hipponax is transformed into something entirely new. Some of the Iambi seem to illustrate the dysfunctional communication among the Alexandrian scholar-poets, which Hipponax attempts to combat in Iambus 1. In Iambus 2, Callimachus tells a fable about the origins of human language.⁵⁷ According to this fable, the creatures endowed with speech were originally not humans but animals. Their eloquence made them so selfconfident, however, that they began to demand immortality from the gods and to complain about the injustice of Zeus’s rule (Dieg. VI.22). To punish them, Zeus took language away from them and transferred it to the humans. As a result, different people (since, among them, Callimachus explicitly singles out the tragedians, the personal names of the unknown individuals that he lists in the extant portion of the poem may also belong to poets) speak as if they were different kinds of animals—dogs, donkeys, parrots, and even fish (Call. Ia. 2, fr. 192 Pf., esp. 12–13 οἱ τραγῳδοὶ τῶν θάλασσαν οἰ[κεύντων / ἔχο[υ]σι φωνήν).⁵⁸ The “moral” of this fable is often seen to consist in a straightforward ⁵³ On invective as a dominant feature of archaic iambic poetry, see Rotstein 2010, 281–346. ⁵⁴ On the literary antecedents of Hipponax’s anabasis, see Kerkhecker 1999, 11–18. ⁵⁵ Callimachus’ Hipponax will not sing of the quarrel with Bupalos (Call. Ia. 1.3–4)—one of the main targets of real Hipponax’s poetic invective (cf. frr. 12.2, 15, 115, 117, 118, 128W). For a concise overview of the scholarly debate on Callimachus’ transformation of Hipponax, see Lelli 2004, 9–10. On Bupalos in Callimachus, see Acosta-Hughes 2002, 32–5. On the programmatic significance of Iambus 1, see Hunter 1997. ⁵⁶ Lelli 2004, 7–22. ⁵⁷ Van Dijk 1997, 230–7; Kerkhecker 1999, 49–63; Acosta-Hughes 2002, 170–82; Scodel 2011. ⁵⁸ Cf. Acosta-Hughes 2002, 182–90; Lelli 2004, 35–47, with a detailed overview of previous scholarship. On the poetic antecedents of the fable in Ia. 2, see Steiner 2010.

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ridicule of the excessive loquacity of contemporary Alexandrian poets.⁵⁹ But the image that the fable conventions allow Callimachus to conjure up is much more complex: on the one hand, the language spoken by his fellow scholarpoets emerges as a projection of the primordial language that existed before the humans could speak at all, but on the other this language is a tool of division rather than communication—a language that makes a mutual understanding among the humans as impossible as between the dogs and the fish.⁶⁰ The fable told in Iambus 4 not only provides an epitome of the solipsism endemic to the Alexandrian scholar-poets (according to the diegesis, the fable serves to illustrate a quarrel between two poets: Dieg. VII.1),⁶¹ but also reveals that their self-absorbed individualism may indeed be essential to what they do. The two poets are portrayed in the fable as two quarrelling trees—an olive and a laurel—, which go out of their way to assert their superiority over each other by appealing to the their stereotypical portrayals in Greek cultural tradition (Call. Ia. 2, fr. 194.6ff. Pf.). These two instances of self-praise are as erudite as they are pointless: the two speakers are not engaged in a dialogue, but, unimpressed by each other’s arguments, continue to talk at cross-purposes in the hopes of stifling the opponent by their own superior knowledge.⁶² But when a bramble bush growing nearby asks them to stop their ridiculous fight, one of them immediately lashes out at the unwelcome intruder: “You disgraceful creature, you obviously seem to think that you are one of us!” (Call. Ia. 4, fr. 194 Pf. 102–3 ὦ κακὴ λώβη, / ὡς δὴ μί᾿ ἡμέων καὶ σύ;).⁶³ This iambic outburst draws a sharp line between the hermetically closed literary society of Alexandria and the rest of the world. As the bramble bush appositely remarks, the fight between the two overblown literary egos is likely to strike any unsympathetic observer as utterly preposterous (Call. Ia. 4, fr. 194 Pf. 98–9). But the two opponents, who visibly enjoy parading their literary erudition in

⁵⁹ Kerkhecker 1999, 58–9; Morrison 2007, 203–4. ⁶⁰ For a summary of the scholarly discussion of the question of what Callimachus may have intended by describing the tragedians as speaking like the “dwellers of the sea,” see Kerkhecker 1999, 54–6. ⁶¹ Payne 2011, 501–5. There is no need, however, to follow Emanuele Lelli’s (2004, 47–82) allegorical reading of the poem as an illustration of the (apocryphal) quarrel between Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes. For a study of Callimachus’ innovations on the fable tradition in Ia. 4, see Edmunds 2001. ⁶² Call. Ia. 4, fr. 194 Pf. 15–42 (the laurel highlighting its links to Delos and Delphi) and 47–92 (the olive tree pointing to its role in the Olympic games, its creation by Athena, etc.). Kerkhecker 1999, 90–108. On the two trees’ erudition alluding to Callimachus’ own poetic texts, see also Acosta-Hughes 2002, 190–204. ⁶³ On the Aesopic antecedent of Callimachus’ fable (213 Perry), see Acosta-Hughes 2002, 196–9.

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184  :   - front of each other, are not in the slightest interested in the opinions either of hypothetical outsiders or of any wannabe members of the inner circle.⁶⁴ Some of the other Iambi provide illustrations of the topics about which the Alexandrian philologists summoned by Hipponax in Iambus 1 would have doubtless enjoyed quarreling with each other. The subject matter of Iambi 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 would have been perfectly at home in Callimachus’ Aetia.⁶⁵ Iambi 7 and 9 explain the origins and the peculiar appearance of two different statues of Hermes.⁶⁶ Iambus 8 is an epinician for a winner in local athletic games celebrated on Aegina, which links the origins of the games to an episode of the Argonauts’ saga.⁶⁷ Iambus 10 tells an aetiological myth that explains the origins of a strange sacrificial ritual in an obscure little town in Pamphylia.⁶⁸ And finally, Iambus 11 corrects the wrong version of an otherwise unknown proverb (here, an echo of a philological dispute becomes more distinct than in the other poems) and, to explain the origins of the correct version, tells a bizarre story about the death of a brothel-keeper from the Sicilian town of Selinus.⁶⁹ Thus, the Alexandrian philologists of Callimachus’ Iambi live in a world of recondite cultural memories both spatially and temporally remote from the place that they physically inhabit. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the only thing that can make them step outside that world is a literary memory too—the shade of Hipponax who in Iambus 1 summons them to gather at the Sarapis temple outside the city walls of Alexandria (Call. Ia. 1.10 ἐς τὸ πρὸ τείχευς ἱρόν). It is of course rather ironic that Hipponax, an archetypal symbol of iambic aggression, is transformed in this poem into a proponent of harmony. But the harmony advocated by Callimachus’ Hipponax has very little in common with the ideal of social cohesion advocated in archaic sympotic poetry. To get his point across, Hipponax, too, tells a fable, or rather a parable, which transposes his Alexandrian audience into archaic Greece.⁷⁰ On his deathbed, Bathycles, a rich Arcadian, bequeaths a valuable golden chalice to the best of the seven wise men.⁷¹ Bathycles’ eldest son travels to Miletus to award the prize to Thales, who, however, rejects the honour and sends the ⁶⁴ Cf. Kerkhecker 1999, 111–15. ⁶⁵ Kerkhecker 1999, 197–217; Acosta-Hughes 2002, 174. ⁶⁶ Kerkhecker 1999, 182–96 and 204–7; Acosta-Hughes 2002, 294–303. ⁶⁷ Fuhrer 1992, 205–17. ⁶⁸ Kerkhecker 1999, 207–13. ⁶⁹ Kerkhecker 1999, 213–17. ⁷⁰ Kerkhecker 1999, 32–44. On the intermingling on the archaic (the Hipponactean) and the contemporary (the Callimachean) in Hipponax’s voice in Iambus 1, see Acosta-Hughes 2002, 36–59. On connections between the parable in Iambus 1 and the fables in the rest of the collection, see Hutchinson 1988, 48–54. ⁷¹ On different versions of this story, see Busine 2002, 60–4.

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vessel to Bias. This scenario repeats itself again and again, until the chalice, travelling all over Greece from Bias to Periander to Solon to Chilon to Pittacus to Cleobulus, returns to Thales, who then dedicates it to Apollo (Call. Ia. 1, fr. 191 Pf. 32–77).⁷² The analogy established in this parable between the seven wise men and the Alexandrian philologists is highly revealing: like the seven wise men, the Alexandrian philologists emerge not as a socially cohesive, polislike, collective addressed in archaic sympotic poetry (a collective within which it would indeed make sense to struggle for supremacy), but as a projection of the spatially disjointed network of Greek culture—as discreet individuals perfectly independent of each other and perfectly equal in worth, with Apollo as the only figure superior to all of them.⁷³ Like the harmony of the cosmopolitan society of Alexandria described in the Aetia, the harmony that Hipponax urges the Alexandrian philologists to embrace in Iambus 1 is predicated upon two kinds of distance—their distance from each other and their distance from the divine authority that rules over them. Within this system, quarrels are as inevitable as they are incapable of undermining that harmony: after all, philological disputes can always be construed as evidence of the scholars’ service to Apollo and the Muses (cf. Call. Ia. 13, fr. 203 Pf. 1 Μοῦσαι καλαὶ κἄπολλον, οἷς ἐγὼ σπένδω). Unlike in the Aetia, however, where the culturally diverse Greeks of Alexandria converge into a new society by being encouraged to recognize analogies between their own cultural memories and the structure of the royal cult, the Alexandrian philologists of Iambus 1 can only recognize their distinctive common identity by stepping outside the city walls and by adopting an external perspective on themselves. Thus, despite his awareness that he has little to do with his former iambic self, Callimachus’ resurrected Hipponax performs an essentially iambic gesture in that he draws a sharp difference between inside and outside—between the “city of the Muses” inhabited by the Alexandrian philologists and the rest of the world. Some of the Iambi allow us to recognize this difference as the primal difference between the world of the cultural imaginary and the world of physical objects. Projecting this opposition onto different conceptual domains, the Iambi stage what amounts to a metaliterary reflection on the role played by Callimachus’ poetry itself in conceptualizing the ideal image of Ptolemaic Alexandria as the “city of the Muses.” ⁷² Acosta-Hughes 2002, 143–51, who also refers to possible parallels in Hipponax: frr. 63 and 123W. ⁷³ On the sympotic imagery in this poem, see Gagné 2016, 209–12. Note, however, that the travelling sympotic vessel turns the seven wise men into an anti-social (emphatically anti-sympotic) group whose members never experience any direct physical contact with one another.

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186  :   - Iambi 3 and 5, for instance, draw a distinction between an ethical ideal and a debased material reality. The speaker of Iambus 3 opposes the idealized past in which Apollo and the Muses enjoyed the highest honour to the corrupt present in which money rules the world and in which an attractive youth prefers to have a rich lover rather than to respond to the poor poet’s enamoured pleas (Call. Ia. 3, fr. 193 Pf.).⁷⁴ The addressee of Iambus 5, a lowly grammar teacher who uses his position to sexually abuse his pupils, can also be taken for a typical representative of the debased material world in which the raw physicality of sex eclipses the ideal of the men of letters as “servants of Apollo” (Call. Ia. 5, fr. 195 Pf.).⁷⁵ In some of the other Iambi, a similar opposition between the physical world and the world of imagination is projected onto the domain of cultural geography. Addressing someone who is about to undertake a journey to Olympia, the speaker of Iambus 6 describes Phidias’ statue of Olympian Zeus in such a way as to reduce it completely to its physical characteristics—the size, the materials used, and the cost of production (Call. Ia. 6, fr. 196 Pf.).⁷⁶ The speaker’s tone is strikingly reminiscent of Herodotus’ descriptions of exotic countries (most notably Egypt), whose architectural marvels are often similarly reduced to their numerical dimensions.⁷⁷ Callimachus’ perception of Olympia from the vantage point of Ptolemaic Egypt effectively transforms that paradigmatic centre of Greek culture into an exotic place (as exotic as Egypt would have been to the Greeks of the classical period)—physically stunning but fairly meaningless otherwise.⁷⁸ The view of Phidias’ statue as nothing but an impressive physical object forms a stark contrast to the statue description of Iambus 7, where what at first looks like an unwrought piece of wood is revealed to be a work of Epeius, the ⁷⁴ Kerkhecker 1999, 64–82; Acosta-Hughes 2002, 221–51. On the motif of poeta pauper in this poem, its pedigree, and Nachleben, see Lelli 2005, 88–110. ⁷⁵ Kerkhecker 1999, 123–46; Acosta-Hughes 2002, 251–64. ⁷⁶ Kerkhecker 1999, 147–81; Acosta-Hughes 2002, 288–94. ⁷⁷ On Herodotus’ “number orgies” in his account of Egypt (especially with regard to the stunning dimensions of the pyramids), see most recently Sergueenkova 2016, with references. Callimachus’ Iambus 6 is a Herodotean “number orgy” too (Call. Ia. 6, fr. 196 Pf. 25 πέντε τε[τ]ρ[άκι]ν, 27 τετράδωρα, 31 τρὶς ἐς τὸ μακρὸν . . . δέκα, 37 πέντ[ε], 39 δὶς δυ.[). Cf. Hunter 2011, 255–6. As far as one can judge from the extant fragments, Callimachus follows the general pattern of Herodotus’ description of Cheops’ pyramid and its causeway at Hdt. 2.124–5—starting with the measurements (cf. Hdt. 2.124.4–5 τῆς γὰρ μῆκος μέν εἰσι πέντε στάδιοι, κτλ. and Call. fr. 196 Pf. 25–38) and then proceeding to the costs (cf. Hdt. 2.125.6–7, a reference to the exact cost of food for the workers, followed by a speculation as to other kinds of expenses, and Call. fr. 196 Pf. 45–8). Tellingly, ἀναισίσωμα (expense) at Call. fr. 196 Pf. 45 is a recognizably Herodotean term: Hdt. 5.31.2. ⁷⁸ There is an illuminating contrast between Callimachus’ description and Pausanias’ criticism (Paus. 5.11.9), a few centuries later, of those who have undertaken precise measurements of the statue of Olympian Zeus (perhaps a reference to Callimachus: Kerkhecker 1999, 164–7). To Pausanias, nothing can compare to the experience of seeing the divine image itself.

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creator of the Trojan horse (Call. Ia. 7, fr. 197 Pf., Dieg. VII 32).⁷⁹ To conjure up the unique sense of numinosity that he ascribes to this aniconic xoanon of Hermes miraculously carried by the sea from the Troad to an insignificant place in Thrace (Aenus), Callimachus does not need to have ever seen it in situ: all he has to do is to “remember” the aetiological myth of the statue’s recovery and to make the statue itself share this “memory” with Callimachus’ readers in a first-person monologue.⁸⁰ In contrast to the moving and speaking statue of Iambus 7, the Olympian Zeus of Iambus 6 is both static and mute, so that the autopsy of Phidias’ statue would doubtless contribute nothing whatsoever to a better understanding of the role that that image, which “was notoriously made out of Homer,”⁸¹ played in Greek culture: if one were to visit Olympia, one would see nothing but an overwhelming amount of precious materials. What one is thus encouraged to learn from Callimachus’ statue poems is that the best way to learn something meaningful about Greek culture is not to go to Olympia, or any other place for that matter, but to stay in Alexandria, where, paradoxically enough, all of Greece turns out to be so much closer at hand than anywhere else in the Greek world.⁸² Iambus 12 draws a similar contrast between the physical world and the world of imagination by opposing to each other the material presents with which the other gods greet the new-born Hebe and Apollo’s gift of poetry, more durable than the most precious physical objects (Call. Ia. 12, fr. 202 Pf., esp. 68–70).⁸³ Finally, in Iambus 13 this contrast is directly applied to Callimachus’ own poetry. The poem is a response to a critic who accuses the poet of madness because he writes Hipponactean iambs, although he has never been to Ephesus, and of incompetence because, in his version of iambic poetry, he mixes with each other the Ionic and the Doric dialects as well as different poetic genres (Call. Ia. 13, fr. 203 Pf., 10–22, esp. 11–12 [. οὔτ᾿] Ἴωσι συμμείξας / οὔτ᾿ Ἔφεσον ἐλθών and 18 Ἰαστὶ καὶ Δωριστὶ καὶ τὸ σύμμεικτον).⁸⁴ Callimachus’ response that, in order to bring iambic poetry back to life, he needs neither to travel to the physical source of the genre’s origins nor to copy the original to the letter has been fully anticipated in the preceding poems of ⁷⁹ Kerkhecker 1999, 182–96. ⁸⁰ Cf. Steiner 2001, 83, on this statue “belying its internal reality.” Cf. Acosta-Hughes 2002, 294–300; Petrovic 2010, 212; Payne 2011, 499–501. ⁸¹ Payne 2011, 499, referring to Strabo 8.3.30. See also Petrovic 2006, 31–6, for an allegorical reading of the poem, identifying Zeus with Homer and the speaker with one of the Telchines of the Aetia prologue (cf. Prioux 2007, 114–21). In a similar vein, she reads Iambus 7 as an allegory of archaic iambic poetry resuscitated by Callimachus: Petrovic 2010. ⁸² Cf. Acosta-Hughes 2002, 289–90. ⁸³ Kerkhecker 1999, 218–49; Acosta-Hughes 2002, 120–43: Morrison 2007, 209–10. ⁸⁴ Kerkhecker 1999, 250–70; Acosta-Hughes 2002, 74–81; Lelli 2004, 123–34.

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188  :   - the collection (Call. Ia. 13, fr. 203 Pf., 24–66).⁸⁵ Like Olympia in Iambus 6, Ephesus is after all nothing but another element of the meaningless physical world.⁸⁶ It is only Alexandria itself that can produce a reincarnation of Hipponax—the author of a new, self-consciously eclectic iambic poetry best suited to make sense of the city’s new cosmopolitan culture.⁸⁷ Just as Callimachus’ response to the Telchines in the prologue to the Aetia casts his innovative version of archaic elegy as the best way to conceptualize the “origins of Alexandria,” so his response to the critic in Iambus 13, too, shows his version of archaic iambus as the best way to define the distinctive identity of this “city of the Muses.” On a few occasions in his extant oeuvre, Callimachus contrasts his understanding of culture as a domain of immaterial mental representations with the cultural theory of Euhemerus’ Sacred History, according to which the Olympian gods were prehistoric kings posthumously deified for their civilizing deeds. Most famously, Euhemerus claimed that Zeus had once ruled over the exotic island of Panchaea (Diod. 5.46) and that his grave could still be visited on Crete (Lact. Div. inst. 1.11.44–8).⁸⁸ In Iambus 12, Callimachus explicitly opposes Euhemerus’ notion of Zeus’ Cretan grave (Call. Ia. 12, fr. 202 Pf. 16–17 καὶ τάφο[ν τὸ]ν Κ[ρ]ῆτα γινώσκειν κενόν / φησὶ καὶ πατρῷ[ο]ν οὐ κτείνει Δία) to the immortalizing function of his own poetry (Call. Ia. 12, fr. 202 Pf., esp. 68–70). And in the Hymn to Zeus, he uses the same Euhemerist notion as a foil to what the poem itself parades as immortality granted by poetic language (Call. Jov. 8–9 καὶ γὰρ τάφον, ὦ ἄνα, σεῖο / Κρῆτες ἐτεκνήναντο. σὺ δ᾿ οὐ θάνες, ἐσσὶ γὰρ αἰεί).⁸⁹ Since, in the Hymn to Zeus, Callimachus sees his task in providing an account more plausible than the Euhemerist “lies of the Cretans” (Call. Jov. 8 Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται), he goes on to distance himself from the standard Hesiodic myth of the birth of Zeus on Crete (cf. Hes. Th. 453–500).⁹⁰ In the account that he provides instead, Zeus’ alternative birthplace, Arcadia, emerges as a landscape entirely shaped by the poetic event of the god’s birth: now so famous for its abundance of water, the country did not possess a single river before Zeus was born (Call. Jov. 18–27), and it is only after Rhea had asked the Earth to “give birth too” (Call. Jov. 29 Γαῖα φίλη, τέκε καὶ σύ) that ⁸⁵ Acosta-Hughes 2002, 81–9. ⁸⁶ Cf. Acosta-Hughes 2002, 289–90. ⁸⁷ Acosta-Hughes—Stephens 2012, 166: “The reason that Callimachus does not need to go to Ephesus is that (de facto) Ephesus has come to him.” Cf. Morrison 2007, 212–15, on the Iambi as a literary “quasi-biography” of Callimachus. ⁸⁸ For a detailed discussion of the ancient testimonies on Euhemerus’ Sacred History, see most recently Winniarczyk 2013. For the sophistic predecessors of Euhemerism, see Henrichs 1984. ⁸⁹ Stephens 2003, 89–91. Cf. Cuypers 2004, 102–5. ⁹⁰ Kirichenko 2012, 182.

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water first appeared in Arcadia. By calling the waterless Arcadia A-zen-is (Call. Jov. 19–20 ἔτι δ᾿ ἄβροχος ἦεν ἅπασα / Ἀζηνίς: “all of the ‘Zeus-less country’ was still unmoistened”), Callimachus etymologically derives the absence of water from the absence of Zeus⁹¹ and, contrary to the standard allegorical practice of deriving divine names from physical processes,⁹² implies that the very vocabulary of flowing (ῥεῖν, ῥοή) is secondary to the name of Zeus’ mother (Ῥέα): while other sources postulate that the name of Rhea comes from ῥεῖν (e.g. Chrysippus SVF 2.1084 Χρύσιππος δὲ λέγει τὴν γῆν Ῥέαν κεκλῆσθαι, ἐπειδὴ ἀπ᾿ αὐτῆς ῥεῖ ὕδατα, cf. Pherecydus of Syrus, DK 7 B7 and Pl. Crt. 402a8–c3), in Callimachus “flowing” (ῥόος) first comes into being when Rhea begins to search (Call. Jov. 16 δί-ζη-το ῥόον ὕδατος) for water after giving birth to Zeus (Ζήν, cf. Cal. Jov. 1).⁹³ According to Callimachus’ aetiological logic, it is the language of mythical narrative that determines the properties of nature, rather than vice versa. The rest of Callimachus’ account of the birth of Zeus, too, continues to subordinate nature to language in that it reads the landscape of Greece as a mythical text that bears witness to the individual stations of Zeus’ progress from Arcadia to Crete.⁹⁴ The subsequent account of Zeus’ rise to power is also framed as a choice between two narratives—between Homer’s myth of the three sons of Cronus drawing lots to divide the universe and Hesiod’s version according to which Zeus becomes the supreme ruler of the world because of his unquestionable superiority over his brothers (Call. Jov. 61 and 66–7, cf. Il. 15.186–93 and Hes. Th. 881–5).⁹⁵ Again the choice is dictated by concern with plausibility. This time Callimachus motivates his preference not by calling one of the two myths a self-evident lie (cf. Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται) but by explicitly stressing that the only thing he can do is pick the less improbable of the two self-evident lies (Call. Jov. 65 ψευδοίμην, ἀίοντος ἅ κεν πεπίθοιεν ἀκουήν).⁹⁶ Since, by making this blatant admission, Callimachus implicitly adopts Hesiod’s notion of poetry as a collection of plausible lies (Hes. Th. 27 ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα), it is hardly surprising that he finds Hesiod’s version of the myth more plausible, that his main argument for choosing Hesiod over Homer is a verbatim quotation from Hesiod himself (“kings are from Zeus,” Call. Jov. 79 ἐκ δὲ Διός βασιλῆες = Hes. Th. 96), and that his portrayal of Zeus almost

⁹¹ Depew 1993, 75–6; Stephens 2003, 96–102. ⁹² Whitman 1987, 20–31; Long 1992. ⁹³ Hopkinson 1984, 141–2; Stephens 2003, 97. ⁹⁴ Call. Jov. 30–54: the river Neda is named after the nymph who brought Zeus to Crete, and the Omphalion plain is named after Zeus’ umbilical cord (44 τουτάκι τοι πέσε, δαῖμον, ἄπ᾿ ὄμφαλος). Stephens 2003, 91–6. ⁹⁵ Hunter 2011, 247–8. See also Henrichs 1993, esp. 140–1. ⁹⁶ Stephens 2003, 113–14.

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190  :   - entirely consists of Hesiodic reminiscences.⁹⁷ When in the next step he describes Ptolemy as an ideal Zeus-like king, who, like the rulers of the City of the Just in Hesiod’s Works and Days, is richly rewarded for his “straight judgments” (Call. Jov. 82–4, cf. Hes. Op. 281–92), it begins to transpire that what makes the Hesiodic account more plausible than the Homeric one is the ease with which it can be adapted to the quintessentially Hesiodic task of praising the king’s rule as both a projection and an authentication of the divine power of Zeus. I showed in Chapter 2 that, for Hesiod, Zeus provides a model for conceptualizing the power of contemporary kings (cf. Hes. Th. 96) and that, in turn, the material reality of the kings makes the myth of Zeus’ divine power appear factually true. Likewise, Callimachus both uses the image of Zeus to lend a quasi-divine authority to Ptolemy and invokes Ptolemy’s power and wealth to support the plausibility of his portrayal of the king of the gods (Call. Jov. 85–6 ἔοικε δέ τεκμήρασθαι / ἡμετέρῳ μεδέοντι).⁹⁸ The intricate link between royalty and divinity in the second half of the hymn puts Callimachus’ polemic against Euhemerus into sharp relief. What in Euhemerus’ eyes testifies to the reality of the Olympian gods is the physical existence of their graves, and, once this logic is accepted, it makes the notion of a contemporary monarch posthumously enjoying divine honours fairly plausible too.⁹⁹ Euhemerism, in other words, promotes the ideology of emerging royal cults not by attributing a superhuman status to deceased human monarchs but by making the gods of traditional mythology appear indistinguishable from human kings. Like Euhemerus, Callimachus uses the divinity of Zeus as a conceptual model for the divinity of a contemporary monarch (cf. Call. Jov. 79 ἐκ δὲ Διός βασιλῆες). But in contrast to Euhemerus’ emphasis on the materiality of the deified monarchs’ post-mortem existence, Callimachus conceives of divinity, both Zeus’ and Ptolemy’s, as an imaginative construct that can only become “reality” by being propounded in poetry. The immortality of Callimachus’ Ptolemy becomes reality because, by aligning him with the Hesiodic portrayal of Zeus, Callimachus inscribes him into the intertextual matrix of Greek poetry where he can now live on forever next to the eternal gods of mythology.

⁹⁷ See Reinsch-Werner 1976, 58–67, for a list of parallels. See also Kirichenko 2012, 182–3. ⁹⁸ On the conceptual overlap between the god, the monarch, and the poet in this hymn, see Stephens 2003, 77–114; Depew 2004, 120–1. See also Fuhrer—Hunter 2001, 164–75, on the poem’s combination of encomium and “ludic wit.” For a more straightforward assessment, see Haslam 1993, 116: “It may fool Zeus, but it doesn’t fool us, or shouldn’t.” For connections between Callimachus’ Hymn to Zeus and Theocritus’ Encomium for Ptolemy (Idyll 17), see Stephens 2003, 148–51. ⁹⁹ Cf. Henrichs 1984.

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While Iambus 12 and the Hymn to Zeus allude to Euhemerus’ theory of Zeus as a mortal king buried on Crete, Iambus 1 explicitly refers to Euhemerus himself: at the beginning of the poem, Hipponax summons the Alexandrian philologists to gather at the temple of Sarapis “outside the city walls, where the garrulous old man who invented the ancient Panchaen Zeus scratches his blasphemous books” (Call. Ia. 1 Pf. 9–11 ἐς τὸ πρὸ τείχους ἱρὸν ἁλέες δεῦτε, / οὗ τὸν πάλαι Πάγχαιον ὁ πλάσας Ζᾶνα / γέρων λαλάζων ἄδικα βιβλία ψήχει).¹⁰⁰ There are insoluble difficulties involved in trying to interpret this statement literally: while Euhemerus is known to have lived at the court of the Macedonian king Cassander, no other extant source links him to Alexandria, let alone to a specific location outside Alexandria’s city walls.¹⁰¹ But in the context of this relentlessly metaliterary poem, in which Hipponax’s fantastic return from the dead symbolizes the reinvention in Alexandria of a genre of archaic Greek poetry, such literal-mindedness would certainly be out of place. Instead, the trip taken by Alexandrian philologists into the domain of Euhemerism could be explained as part of the poem’s overall metaliterary scenery. I argued above that, by luring Alexandrian philologists to a place outside the city limits, Hipponax performs a recognizably iambic gesture whereby he urges them to recognize a fundamental difference between the “city of the Muses” that they inhabit and the rest of the world where culture can only be authenticated by material tokens. Given that elsewhere Callimachus goes out of his way to draw a sharp demarcating line between the imaginative constructs of his own poetry and Euhemerus’ “blasphemous” materialism, it is hardly surprising that, in Iambus 1, the place where “the city of the Muses” ends is marked as a place where Euhemerism begins. Seen as a metaliterary gesture, the Alexandrian philologists’ trip outside the city limits of Alexandria evokes similar trips that Socrates takes in Plato’s Phaedrus and Republic. I argued in Chapter 4 that Socrates draws a contrast between Athens as a locus of oral dialogue and the non-Athenian world as a space opposed to dialectic—as a passive carrier of monologic tales that contribute nothing to dialectical progress. Iambus 1 draws attention to the fact that, throughout his oeuvre, Callimachus enacts a similar contrast. Like Socrates’ Athens, Callimachus’ Alexandria is figured as a site of memory: just as Socrates conceives of Athens as the only place where he can dismantle the conventional “truths” of ideology and enable his interlocutors to ¹⁰⁰ Kerkhecker 1999, 23–5; Stephens 2003, 37–9; Acosta-Hughes—Stephens 2012, 166–7. ¹⁰¹ For the theory that Callimachus is talking about a statue of Euhemerus, see Rees 1961. For ancient evidence on Euhemerus’ life, see Winniarczyk 2013, 5–8: Callimachus is the only source that draws a connection between Euhemerus and Alexandria.

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192  :   - “remember” the extra-cultural truths located in the realm of the forms, so Callimachus, too, portrays Alexandria as the only place where cultural meanings are not inscribed in physical nature but can only be accessed as immaterial objects of memory. Furthermore, Callimachus’ portrayal of the rest of the Greek world, which, in the Aetia, in the Iambi, and in the Hymn to Zeus, is cast as a domain of aetiological myths linked to specific geographical locations, is in turn reminiscent of Socrates’ description of the landscape outside the city walls of Athens as an assemblage of material traces left behind by aetiological myths—such as the myth of Oreithyia’s abduction by Boreas (Pl. Phdr. 229c2– d2). Finally, like the world outside Socrates’ Athens, the world outside Callimachus’ Alexandria is associated with writing: not only is Euhemerus portrayed in Iambus 1 as “scribbling blasphemous books” (Call. Ia. 1 Pf. 11 ἄδικα βιβλία ψήχει), but the conceptual structure of the theory propounded by those “blasphemous books”—the notion of a grave on Crete as the only thing that proves that Zeus has ever existed—also evokes Socrates’ characterization of writing in the Phaedrus as a dead (static and mute) copy of what once was a living word (Pl. Phdr. 275d4–e5). In Chapter 4, I showed that, by having Socrates leave the city, Plato not only stresses the fundamental distinction between dialectic and writing but also casts his own philosophical oeuvre as a medium that seeks to spread in space and to preserve in time the fleeting effect produced by Socrates’ oral conversations. In a similar way, the Alexandrian philologists’ excursion into the world of Euhemerus’ “blasphemous writings” can be read as an account of the genesis of Callimachus’ aetiological poetry. Throughout his oeuvre, Callimachus draws a contrast between Alexandria as the “city of the Muses” where cultural memories are divorced from their material origins and the rest of the Greek world as a place where mythical past is forever preserved in the physical traces it has left behind. By forming an “iconic” analogy with this immaterial “city of the Muses,” Callimachus’ aetiological poetry emerges as a means of lending it material presence. The outcome of this process is that the memories of Alexandria’s culturally diverse Greek inhabitants, the petty quarrels of its intellectual elite, and the nearly divine images of its rulers become inserted into the existing library of Greek literature where they can continue to exist forever—and anywhere in the Greek-speaking world. But the similarity between Socrates’ and Callimachus’ excursions into suburban landscapes underscores a fundamental difference between the discourses that they serve to conceptualize. Platonic writing seeks to immortalize the process of dialectic “recollection” (ἀνάμνησις) enacted in Socrates’ oral dialogues—to enable the readers to “forget” monologic constructs of ideology

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and to “remember” the extra-cultural truths located “outside the text” in the transcendental realm of the forms. For Callimachus, by contrast, the process of remembering the cultural past becomes a model for transforming contemporary ideology into an object of literary memory: for him, not only is there “nothing outside the text”¹⁰² but it is precisely the act of making something “part of the text” by integrating it into the Greek cultural imaginary that constitutes the main goal of poetic discourse. Memory is not the only figure of absence that informs both Platonic writing and Callimachean poetry. As we have seen, “remembrance” of the forms is inseparably linked in Plato to “philosophical Eros”—a desire for the absolute enacted both in Socrates’ dialectical elenchus and in Plato’s dialogic writing (cf. Pl. Phdr. 249c1–4; cf. Men. 81e4, Phd. 72e5–6). In what follows, I will show that, on the one hand, Callimachus echoes Plato in conceiving of writing as a site of desire but that, on the other, Callimachean desire differs from its Platonic counterpart no less drastically than Callimachean memory.

Desire and Writing Anacreon’s statement that boys love him more because of his poems (Anacr. fr. 402c1 ἐμὲ γὰρ λόγων εἵνεκα παῖδες ἂν φιλέοιεν) underscores the utilitarian aspect of Greek love poetry. Archaic erotic poetry (both lyric and elegy) is emphatically performative—not only in the sense that it is orally performed at the symposium but also in the sense that it consists of performative speech acts, whose goal is either to seduce the beloved or to give vent to the pain of rejection.¹⁰³ Despite the Hellenistic epigrammatists’ awareness of the status of their erotic poems as epigrammatic (= written) texts rather than oral utterances,¹⁰⁴ they echo their archaic predecessors in that they, too, conceive of the attainment of physical intimacy with a beloved as the only thing that infuses with meaning both poetry and life: they never tire of reminding the objects of their desire of the necessity to yield to love while they are still young,¹⁰⁵ lament their chronic unfaithfulness (e.g. Ascl. 4 Gow-Page, Poseid. 125 and 130

¹⁰² Cf. Derrida 1976, 163. ¹⁰³ Pellizer 1990; Vetta 1996; Stehle 1997, 213–61; Calame 1999, 36–8; Davidson 2007, 169–200; Carey 2009, 32–8. On the symposium in Theognidean elegy, see Selle 2008, 353–7; Colesanti 2011, 16–33. ¹⁰⁴ On Hellenistic erotic epigram’s awareness of its inscriptional pedigree, see Tueller 2008, 117–31. On the conceptualization of the act of writing in Hellenistic epigram in general, see Meyer 2007. ¹⁰⁵ On this motif in Hellenistic sympotic epigram and its connection to the genre of sepulchral epigram, see Sens 2016.

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194  :   - Austin-Bastianini), and patiently sing plaintive serenades at their closed doors (e.g. Ascl. 11, 12, 14 Gow-Page).¹⁰⁶ Callimachus’ erotic epigrams differ from the entire tradition of Greek love poetry no less than Callimachus’ elegies, iambics, and hymns differ from their archaic counterparts. Just as in his aetiological poems Callimachus emphatically rejects the literalism with which both traditional mythical aetiologies and contemporary Euhemerism authenticate cultural memories by appealing to material presences, so in his erotic epigrams, too, he distances himself from the performative rhetoric that traditionally casts love poetry as an instrument of physical seduction. Like the objects of cultural memory in his aetiological poetry, the objects of desire in his epigrams, too, are always already unattainable, and his poems rarely position themselves as speech acts that aim to persuade the addressee to succumb to the speaker’s will. And just as his aetiological poems serve to reify their own unbridgeable distance from the physical locales whose cultural memories they preserve, so his erotic poems, too, are cast as sites of perpetual deferral of desire—as written texts in which writing encodes not only the fundamental impossibility of a direct, oral, contact with the beloved but also the paradoxical inevitability of sharing with others (i.e. with readers) what the lover so desperately wants to keep to himself. In Ep. 31 Pf., Callimachus compares a lover to a hunter who loses interest in his prey the moment he finds it within reach: Ὡγρευτής, Ἐπίκυδες, ἐν οὔρεσι πάντα λαγωόν διφᾷ καὶ πάσης ἴχνια δορκαλίδος στίβῃ καὶ νιφετῷ κεχρημένος ἢν δέ τις εἴπῃ “τῆ, τόδε βέβληται θηρίον,” οὐκ ἔλαβεν. χοὐμὸς ἔρως τοιόσδε τὰ μὲν φεύγοντα διώκειν οἶδε, τὰ δ᾿ ἐν μέσσῳ κείμενα παρπέταται. Up and down the hillsides, on the track of every rabbit, every deer— that’s your hunter, Epicydes, braving frost and snow. But if someone says, “There it is, wounded!,” he leaves it alone. My passion is like his: expert at chasing what runs away, it passes by what doesn’t. (tr. F. Nisetich).

¹⁰⁶ On the erotic komos in Hellenistic erotic epigram, see Cairns 2016, 353–66.

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Like other Greek erotic poets, Callimachus elsewhere describes love as a painful disease that one should do one’s best not to contract (Call. Ep. 44 Pf.) because it results in the physical wasting of the lover’s body (Call. Ep. 30 and 43 Pf.).¹⁰⁷ But in this poem, his comparison between a lover and a hunter who only enjoys the chase, not the kill, turns lovesickness from an incurable disease into a pleasurable condition whose duration the speaker does his best to extend indefinitely by actively refraining from taking possession of the object of his desire. In Ep. 52 Pf., a motif that traditionally serves to parade the lover’s sure command of the standard rituals of courtship is inadvertently transformed into a gesture bound to keep the object of the speaker’s desire forever out of reach. When he asks Zeus for help by appealing to the god’s experience as Ganymede’s lover (3 ναίχι πρὸς εὐχαίτεω Γανυμήδεος, οὐράνιε Ζεῦ), he resorts to a poetic cliché familiar from the late archaic period onwards (cf. Theogn. 1345–6).¹⁰⁸ But while doing so, the speaker seems to be blissfully oblivious to the fact that, by asking Zeus to love the handsome Ganymede-like Theocritus if the boy returns the speaker’s affection (2 εἰ δὲ φιλεῖ, φιλέοις), he is inviting the competition of the greatest erastes of Greek mythology. The fact that Theocritus is notionally “transformed” into Ganymede, who in line 3 appears in the same metrical position as the speaker’s beloved does in line 1, additionally underscores the self-defeating futility of this prayer. The speaker of Ep. 32 Pf., by contrast, seems to have acquiesced to the fact that his modest financial means (1 οἶδ᾿ ὅτι μευ πλούτου κενεαὶ χέρες) turn his desire for handsome Menippus into an a priori hopeless pursuit.¹⁰⁹ It is only when Menippus says it out loud that the erotic charm is irreparably shattered (3–4 ἀλγέω τὴν διὰ παντὸς ἔπος τόδε πικρὸν ἀκούων / ναί, φίλε, τῶν παρὰ σεῦ τοῦτ᾿ ἀνεραστότατον).¹¹⁰ What spoils it is not the beloved’s refusal to gratify the lover’s desire but the crudeness with which he voices this truism, which, as long as it was left unsaid, had allowed the lover to live in an erotic dream world. What matters to the speaker is thus not so much the hope of physical intimacy as the possibility to take the beloved for an unattainable object of desire rather than for a pretty body that one could easily buy if one had enough spare cash.

¹⁰⁷ Fantuzzi—Hunter 2004, 238–9; Gutzwiller 2007, 323; Tueller 2008, 129; Cairns 2016, 370–3. Cf. Calame 1992, 19–23. ¹⁰⁸ Davidson 2007, 169–200. ¹⁰⁹ Lelli 2004, 95–6; Cairns 2016 379–80. ¹¹⁰ Gutzwiller 1998, 215–16 and 2007, 325.

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196  :   - While praising the Homeric Cyclops Polyphemus as a mythical “first inventor” of the use of poetry as a cure for lovesickness in Ep. 46 Pf., Callimachus in fact foregrounds his own poetry as an instrument of enhancing the sublimity of chasing an ever-elusive object of desire:¹¹¹ Ὡς ἀγαθὰν Πολύφαμος ἀνεύρατο τὰν ἐπαοιδάν τὠραμένῳ ναὶ Γᾶν, οὐκ ἀμαθὴς ὁ Κύκλωψ. αἱ Μοῖσαι τὸν ἔρωτα κατισχναίνοντι, Φίλιππε ἦ πανακὲς πάντως φάρμακον ἁ σοφία. τοῦτο, δοκέω, χἁ λιμὸς ἔχει μόνον ἐς τὰ πονηρά τὠγαθόν ἐκκόπτει τὸν φιλόπαιδα νόσον. ἔσθ᾿ ἁμῖν [? χἄκαστα ?] ἀφειδέα ποττὸν Ἔρωτα τοῦτ᾿ εἶπαι, “κείρευ τὰ πτερά, παιδάριον οὐδ᾿ ὅσον ἀττάραγόν τυ δεδοίκαμες, αἱ γὰρ ἐπῳδαί οἴκοι τῶ χαλεπῶ τραύματος ἀμφότεραι.” How fine a lover’s charm Polyphemus hit on! By god, that Cyclops knew his stuff. Poetry, Philip, shrinks a lover’s swelling, poetry’s a drug for every ill. Only hunger—good for nothing else—is as good at rooting out the craze for boys. When Eros comes on strong, I let him have it: “You might as well clip your wings, sonny! I’m not afraid of you. I have at home both charms against your cruel wounds.” (tr. F. Nisetich).

Callimachus’ poetic therapy of desire consists not in alleviating the symptoms but in eclipsing them with similar symptoms of higher intensity, for he explicitly compares the impact of poetry to that of the strongest physiological need—the need for food. The reason why hunger “roots out the craze for boys” is that erotic desire is understood as a form of insatiable lack, which can only be subdued by a yet stronger craving. To be similar to the therapeutic effect of hunger, the mechanism whereby poetry heals the obsession with boys must also be based on a similar “homoeopathic” principle—on the ability of poetry to replace erotic desire with a desire that is at least as intense and as urgent. Among Callimachus’ erotic epigrams, there are a few poems that can be adduced as illustrations of how that “homoeopathic” healing works.

¹¹¹ The story goes back to a lost dithyramb by the fifth-century poet Philoxenus of Cythera. Gow 1952, 208–9; Gutzwiller 1991, 64–5; Stephens 2006, 104–6.

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Ep. 42 Pf. alludes to one of the most widespread topoi of Hellenistic erotic epigrams—the noisy performance of love songs (komos) in front of the beloved’s closed doors:¹¹² εἰ μὲν ἑκών, Ἀρχῖν᾿, ἐπεκώμασα, μυρία μέμφου, εἰ δ᾿ ἄκων ἥκω, τὴν προπέτειαν ἔα. ἄκρητος καὶ ἔρως μ᾿ ἠνάγκασαν, ὧν ὁ μὲν αὐτῶν εἷλκεν, ὁ δ᾿ οὐκ εἴα τὴν προπέτειαν ἐᾶν ἐλθὼν δ᾿ οὐκ ἐβόησα, τίς ἢ τίνος, ἀλλ᾿ ἐφίλησα τὴν φλιήν, εἰ τοῦτ᾿ ἐστ᾿ ἀδίκημ᾿, ἀδικέω. (Call. Ep. 42 Pf.) If, Archinus, my komos at your door was on purpose, be mad at me all you want; but if I couldn’t help it, forgive my intrusiveness. Unmixed wine and love are to blame, the one for dragging me here, the other for not letting me let go of my intrusiveness. But when I came here, I didn’t shout “It’s so-and-so son of so-and-so,” but kissed the doorpost: if that’s a crime, I’m guilty. (tr. F. Nisetich, adapted)

A silent paraclausithyron is an obvious contradiction in terms, which transforms a courting ritual that typically constitutes a crucial step towards the consummation of sexual desire into a paradigm of poetic indirection. Similarly, a kiss imprinted on a doorpost, rather than shared with the boy, is an epitome of ephemeralness and futility—something that leaves no trace and produces no emotional effect. But read against the backdrop of Callimachus’ notion of a lover as a hunter keen on indefinitely postponing the moment he catches the prey, these counterproductive acts can be interpreted as expressions of the speaker’s desire to keep up the intensity of erotic longing by keeping its object forever out of reach. Even though the speaker appears to be addressing his beloved (1 Ἀρχῖν᾿), the fact that he describes a silent kiss on the boy’s doorpost as an act of “intrusiveness” (2, 4 προπέτειαν)¹¹³ suggests that the much more intrusive act of directly conversing with the boy would have been downright inconceivable and that, therefore, the poem is not an exercise in fingierte Mündlichkeit but precisely what it appears to be to us as readers— an instance of silence committed to writing. The only witness to the song that the speaker has never sung before his beloved’s door, the (silent) written text of

¹¹² Cairns 2016, 353–88. ¹¹³ Fantuzzi—Hunter 2004, 345–6; Gutzwiller 1998, 217–18 and 2007, 324–5.

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198  :   - the poem emerges as an icon of the unbridgeable distance that, by his silence, the speaker himself painstakingly maintains in order for Archinus to remain forever an unattainable object of his desire (cf. 31.5–6 τὰ μὲν φεύγοντα διώκειν). Epigram 29 Pf. can also be read as a reflection on Callimachus’ writing as an instrument of deferral: ἔγχει καὶ πάλιν εἰπὲ “Διοκλέος”· οὐδ᾿ Ἀχελῷος κείνου τῶν ἱερῶν αἰσθάνεται κυάθων. καλὸς ὁ παῖς, Ἀχελῷε, λίην καλός, εἰ δέ τις οὐχί φησίν, ἐπισταίμην μοῦνος ἐγὼ τὰ καλά. Fill the cup and say again “To Diocles.” And no, Achelous knows nothing about the sacred cups I raise to him. The boy is handsome, Achelous, all too handsome. And if anyone says he’s not, let me be the only one who knows what beauty is. (tr. F. Nisetich, adapted)

In the erotically charged atmosphere of the symposium, the image of Achelous is highly suggestive: as the greatest Greek river, he is a poetic metonymy of water (cf. S. fr. 5; E. Ba. 625; Ar. fr.351),¹¹⁴ and, as Heracles’ competitor in the fight for Dianira (cf. S. Tr. 9–27), he is an epitome of a violent erotic rival. The absence of this richly metaphorical Achelous from the speaker’s “sacred cups” seems to imply not only that, contrary to the sympotic norm, the lover is getting drunk on undiluted wine but also that he is probably trying to do his best to keep his private fantasizing about Diocles secret from potential rivals. But then he addresses Achelous himself (3 Ἀχελῷε)—praising to him Diocles’ beauty in a standard inscriptional formula found on countless late archaic and classical Attic vases (3 καλὸς ὁ παῖς: “the boy is handsome”).¹¹⁵ Inscribed on solid objects visible both to the beloved and to the other symposiasts, καλός-inscriptions are straightforward expressions of erotic desire that not only aim to enable the lover to attain his goal but also jeopardize the success of his quest by attracting everyone’s attention to the beloved’s beauty.¹¹⁶ In Callimachus’ writing, this standard written formula becomes another instantiation of erotic deferral enacted in the speaker’s private toast to Diocles. When addressed to Achelous, a καλός-inscription is equivalent not only to recommending the beloved to a banquet hall full of potential rivals but

¹¹⁴ Fantuzzi—Hunter 2004, 347.

¹¹⁵ Slater 1999; Haworth 2018.

¹¹⁶ Slater 1999, 158.

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also to something as ineffectual as writing on water—one of the images that Plato uses in the Phaedrus to illustrate the ephemeral “playfulness” of writing in general (Pl. Phrd. 276c6 οὐκ ἄρα σπουδῇ ἐν ὕδατι γράψει μέλανι). In Callimachus, this self-defeating “writing” becomes not only a reflection on the inscriptional pedigree of his erotic epigrams¹¹⁷ but also an allegory of his writing as a locus of erotic deferral—as a guarantee that the beloved, whose beauty the speaker so desperately wants to keep to himself (4 ἐπισταίμην μοῦνος ἐγὼ τὰ καλά), will always belong to others, remaining forever out of reach. Callimachus evokes a καλός-inscription in Ep. 28 Pf. as well: Ἐχθαίρω τὸ ποίημα τὸ κυκλικὸν οὐδὲ κελεύθῳ χαίρω, τίς πολλοὺς ὧδε καὶ ὧδε φέρει μισέω καὶ περίφοιτον ἐρώμενον, οὐδ᾿ ἀπὸ κρήνης πίνω· σικχαίνω πάντα τὰ δημόσια. Λυσανίη, σὺ δὲ ναίχι καλὸς καλός–ἀλλὰ πρὶν εἰπεῖν τοῦτο σαφῶς, ἠχώ φησί τις “ἄλλος ἔχει.” (Call. Ep. 28 Pf.) I hate recycled poetry, and get no pleasure from a road crowded with travelers this way and that. I can’t stand a boy who sleeps around and don’t drink at public fountains. I loathe all common things. But you, Lysanias, are handsome, so handsome . . . . But before I’ve said it clearly, Echo’s “and some . . . one else’s” cuts me off. (tr. F. Nisetich, adapted).

The speaker’s “hatred for all common things”—“cyclic poetry,” public roads, fountains, and promiscuous boys (1–4)—is often taken for a straightforward expression of Callimachus’ own aesthetic credo, which supposedly consists in a wholesale rejection of whatever enjoys popular success in favour of the recondite, the novel, and the recherché.¹¹⁸ But isn’t it striking that, struck by Lysanias’ beauty, this sophisticated detester of triviality can only express himself by spontaneously recycling a tag found practically on every drinking vessel and on the walls of every public banquet hall (5 σὺ δὲ ναίχι καλὸς καλός: “but you are handsome, so handsome”)?¹¹⁹ Granted, he seems to realize what kind of bottomless banality he is about to utter and checks himself

¹¹⁷ Pace Cairns 2016, 351: “They were alien to the epigraphic tradition.” Attempts to connect erotic epigrams with the epigraphic tradition normally invoke parallels with dedicatory and sepulchral inscriptions: Gutzwiller 1998, 125–9 and 2007, 315–20; Tueller 2008, 118–31. I think that, for Callimachus’ erotic epigrams, καλός-inscriptions constitute the most important point of reference. ¹¹⁸ Schwinge 1986, esp. 5–9; Gutzwiller 1998, 218–22. ¹¹⁹ Cf. Lissarrague 1999, 359–62; Steiner 2002.

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200  :   - just in time—before it has even become fully audible (5–6 πρὶν εἰπεῖν / τοῦτο σαφῶς). But even half-whispered, the hackneyed inscriptional formula of recognizing beauty for what it is immediately reverberates as a forceful confirmation of the insight into the nature of erotic writing expressed in the Diocles epigram. That the echo turns the inscriptional formula ναίχι καλός (“so handsome”) into a synonym of ἄλλος ἔχει (6 “and some . . . one else’s”) does not mean that a handsome boy must of necessity be “a boy who sleeps around” (3 περίφοιτος ἐρώμενος). What it does mean is that, entrusted to writing, beauty automatically becomes public property—like a road or a fountain. These examples illustrate what Callimachus may have had in mind when in Ep. 46 Pf. he praised Polyphemus for using poetry to cure lovesickness and compared the therapeutic effect of poetry to that of hunger: Callimachus himself does his best to make the “craze for boys” (5 τὸν φιλόπαιδα νόσον) more bearable by “overwriting” it with love poems whose very writtenness constitutes an epitome of desire for the unattainable. There is doubtless a sense in which Callimachean desire resembles Plato’s notion of philosophical Eros as an insatiable lack—a fundamental impossibility to possess what one desires (cf. Pl. Smp. 209e5–212a7). But in fact, Callimachean desire is of a drastically different kind: while Plato’s erotic imagery serves to conceptualize the ways in which both Socratic dialectic and Platonic writing induce in the recipient a desire for the transcendental signified (the extra-textual reality of the forms), the only object of desire in Callimachus’ epigrams is the never-ending bittersweet sensation engendered by desire itself—with writing figured as an instrument of forever postponing the climax. I argued in Chapter 4 that, in causing the reader to experience an insatiable desire for the domain of self-identical things, Platonic writing ehoes, and seeks to replace, the idealized images of Athens as a locus of autochthonous selfidentity and an insatiably acquisitive empire. There appears to be a similar isomorphism between Callimachus’ notion of writing as a site of longing for an ever-retreating object and his idealized image of Alexandria as a Panhellenic site woven out of its inhabitants’ cultural memories of the spatially remote Greek world that they had left behind. In the next chapter, I will show that Theocritus, the most famous among Callimachus’ fellow Alexandrian poets, creates a radically new poetic discourse by constructing an ideal reality from which the Callimachean desire for the absent is banished into a fictional realm of mimetic representation and that, as a consequence, Theocritus’ ideal Alexandria, in contrast to Callimachus’, becomes a locus of absolute material presence that leaves nothing to be desired.

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6 Theocritus’ Poetic Landscapes The Bucolic Therapy of Desire Addressed to a physician, Idyll 11 begins with what is doubtless Theocritus’ most cogent description of poetry as a remedy of unrequited love (1–6):¹ Οὐδὲν ποττὸν ἔρωτα πεφύκει φάρμακον ἄλλο, Νικία, οὔτ᾿ ἔγχριστον, ἐμὶν δοκεῖ, οὔτ᾿ ἐπίπαστον, ἢ ταὶ Πιερίδες. κοῦφον δέ τι τοῦτο καὶ ἁδύ γίνετ᾿ ἐπ᾿ ἀνθρώποις, εὑρεῖν δ᾿ οὐ ῥᾴδιόν ἐστι. γινώσκειν δ᾿ οἶμαί τυ καλῶς ἰατρὸν ἐόντα καὶ ταῖς ἐννέα δὴ πεφιλημένον ἔξοχα Μοίσαις. There is no other remedy for love, Nicias, neither unguent, I think, nor salve, except for the Muses; and this remedy is painless for mortals and pleasant, but hard to find—as you surely know quite well, as you are both a physician and loved exceedingly by the nine Muses.

The fact that, like Callimachus in Ep. 46 Pf., Theocritus presents Homeric Polyphemus (7 ὁ Κύκλωψ ὁ παρ᾿ ἁμῖν) as the inventor of that remedy underscores the fundamental difference between the healing mechanism that Theocritus ascribes to poetry and the “homoeopathic” therapy of desire administered by Callimachus. Theocritus’ emphasis that, as a medicine against unrequited love, poetry is more efficient than unguents and salves (Theocr. Id. 11.1–2) suggests that its therapeutic effect consists in alleviating the symptoms rather than in replacing an insatiable desire with a yet more insatiable one.² As an obvious adynaton, Polyphemus’ love for Galatea, a sea nymph separated from him by an impenetrable divide between two physical elements

¹ On Nicias (the addressee of Idyll 13 as well), see Gow 1952, 208. ² Cf. Erbse 1965; Manuwald 1990; Goldhill 1991, 255–61; Köhnken 1996, 181–3; Hunter 1999, 220–3 (esp. 222–3, where he reads Callimachus’ epigram as a reaction to Theocritus’ Idyll); Faraone 2006; Payne 2007, 68–82.

Greek Literature and the Ideal: The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age. Alexander Kirichenko, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Kirichenko 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866707.003.0012

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202  :   - (cf. 54–62), is an epitome of the characteristically Callimachean longing for an ever-elusive object of desire. Like the speakers of Callimachus’ epigrams, Polyphemus reacts to the sudden onslaught of this impossible desire by composing a song.³ But in contrast to Callimachus’ speakers, who only feel alive when they are chasing what is impossible to catch (cf. Call. Ep. 31), Polyphemus is fully at one with the material presence of the world he inhabits—a world where there are countless sheep and cows to milk (20–1, 34), an endless profusion of cheese to eat (20, 35–6), flowers to gather (26–7), fawns and bear cubs to play with (40–1), a cosy cave to live in (44), shady trees to sit under during midday heat (45–6), and ice-cold water to drink (47–8).⁴ Polyphemus is so content with this world that he finds it genuinely puzzling that Galatea hesitates to join him there leaving behind “the sea and the waves” (49 τίς κα τῶνδε θάλλασσαν ἔχειν καὶ κύμαθ᾿ ἕλοιτο;). A desire for what one cannot possess, Callimachean love is thus no less out of place in Polyphemus’ world than hunger (cf. Call. Ep. 46 Pf.).⁵ Accordingly, the healing effect that singing produces on Polyphemus differs drastically from the function that poetry fulfils in Callimachus: while Callimachus’ poems enable one to endure the intensity of erotic desire by casting poetic writing itself as a more excruciating form or erotic deferral, Polyphemus’ song lays bare the unattainable object of his desire as an empty cipher, which allows him to return to the material presence of his own world—a world that, with its abundance of milk, cheese, and girls more easily accessible than the everelusive Galatea, indeed leaves nothing to be desired. It is highly revealing that the motto that marks Polyphemus’ return from his marine erotic fantasy to the dry land of “reality” combines a pastoral version of the Hesiodic injunction “to draw on what one has” (cf. 75 τὰν παρεοῖσαν ἄμελγε⁶ and Hes. Op. 366 ἐσθλὸν μὲν παρεόντος ἑλέσθαι) and a downright rejection of Callimachus’ notion of erotic poetry as a means of maintaining the intensity of desire for the absent (cf. 75 τί τὸν φεύγοντα διώκεις; and Call. Ep. 31 Pf. 5–6 τὰ μὲν φεύγοντα διώκειν / οἶδε, τὰ δ᾿ ἐν μέσσῳ κείμενα παρπέταται). Thus, the healing effect of poetry consists for Polyphemus not in perpetuating desire in a sublimated form but, as it were, in putting desire in its place: Polyphemus’ act of liberating himself from Galatea becomes in Theocritus synonymous with completely banishing the Callimachean longing for the unattainable into the realm of poetry. It is ³ Cf. Köhnken 1996, 181–3; Hunter 1999, 220–4. ⁴ Cf. Payne 2007, 79. ⁵ In a similar vein, “hungry love” is ridiculed in Idyll 10 as a pinnacle of absurdity in the world of agriculture (Theoc. Id. 10. 57 λιμηρὸν ἔρωτα): Hutchinson 1988, 173–8; Acosta-Hughes 2006, 32–3; Pretagostini 2006, 55–7. ⁶ Cf. Gow 1952, ad loc: παρεοῖσαν: sc. αἶγα or ὄιν.

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only by drawing a line between poetry and material reality that Polyphemus can again experience his own world, which love had caused to appear deficient and incomplete, as the best place on earth. Idyll 1, which the scholia describe as a façade of the entire corpus of Theocritus’ bucolic poetry (Σ Theoc. Id. 1 arg. b, Wendel 1914, 23), can be read as a paradigmatic model for the construction of that ideal world. An epigram by Theocritus’ older contemporary Asclepiades describes the satisfaction of erotic desire as the “sweetest” thing on earth—sweeter than ice-cold water in summer or the rising of the spring Garland announcing the resumption of navigation (Ascl. Ep. 1 Sens). The obvious similarity in wording and syntax between this epigram and the beginning of Theocritus’ Idyll 1 (cf. Ascl. Ep. 1 ἡδὺ . . . ἡδὺ . . . ἥδιον and Theocr. Id. 1.1–2 ἁδύ . . . ἁδύ, 7 ἅδιον) reveals a striking contrast.⁷ In Asclepiades, the pleasure of erotic fulfilment is “sweeter” than the satisfaction of other existential needs because the sense of lack induced by erotic desire is deemed to be stronger than that associated with thirst or financial loss. In Theocritus, by contrast, sweetness has nothing to do with lack, need, or desire: sweet are only the monotonously soothing sounds of material presences—the lulling whisper of a pine tree and the melodious plashing of a stream. Music played by the herdsmen redoubles those harmonious sounds: it is either as sweet (2–3 ἁδὺ δὲ καὶ τύ / συρίσδες) or sweeter (7 ἅδιον . . . τὸ τέον μέλος) than its natural prototypes.⁸ The juxtaposition between Asclepiades’ epigram and the beginning of Theocritus’ Idyll 1 throws the defining properties of the bucolic world into sharp relief. In contrast to Asclepiades’ “real” world permeated by lack and desire, Theocritus’ artificial world is characterized by the absolute absence of any existential needs—such as thirst, the necessity to strive for material gain, or erotic longing. With its shady pine trees, cold springs, and well-fed goats and lambs, this world is always already as sweet as it gets. What makes it sweeter still is that it is supplemented through mimetic representation—the goatherd’s piping echoing the whispering of the pine tree and the shepherd’s song surpassing in beauty the sound of the plashing stream. Mimetic representation proves to be the only object of desire that can possibly exist in this ideal world otherwise untouched by desire. By praising each other’s musical artistry, Thyrsis and the goatherd express a mutual desire to exchange the aesthetic pleasure generated by their music. But while Theocritus can “quote” Thyrsis’ song verbatim, the sound of the goatherd’s pipe cannot be reproduced in a written text. To compensate for this limitation, ⁷ Sens 2011, 3.

⁸ Cf. Schmidt 1987, 29–30; Gutzwiller 1991, 84–5.

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204  :   - Theocritus devises a clever dramatic trick: the goatherd cites his fear to disturb Pan’s midday sleep as the reason for his refusal to play the pipe (16–18) and, in exchange for Thyrsis’ song, offers instead an object of representation that can be more easily accommodated in a verbal artefact—a wooden cup decorated with mimetic images, which the goatherd proceeds to describe in detail. The cup is adorned with three scenes—two young men vying for a young woman’s attention, an old fisherman flexing his muscles as he draws his nets from the sea, and a boy who, while guarding a vineyard, is too busy plaiting a grasshopper trap to pay attention to two foxes, one stealing the grapes and the other the food that he keeps in his bag for breakfast (Theoc. Id. 1.32–54).⁹ These images are more than a random collection of “realistic” vignettes but form a meaningful continuum. The “fruitless toiling” of the two men in love (38 ἐτώσια μοχθίσδοντι) evokes Hesiod’s “man toiling in vain” (Hes. Op. 411 ἐτωσιεργὸς ἀνήρ)—the opposite of Hesiod’s own ideal of productive work. What is more, the fact the woman is described as “a thing fashioned by the gods” (Theoc. Id. 1.32 τι θεῶν δαίδαλμα) turns her into an incarnation of Hesiodic Pandora, who, in the Theogony, is created by the gods like a kind of statue (Hes. Th. 573–84)¹⁰ and who, in the Works and Days, functions as an aetiology of the necessity to work for a living (Hes. Op. 42–4).¹¹ These Hesiodic touches highlight the contrast between the “fruitless toiling” of love and the fisherman’s productive labour. The boy’s work on the grasshopper trap (52 ἀκριδοθήραν) in turn forms a contrast to the fisherman’s toil in being the opposite of utilitarian labour: it is an instance of playful creativity that makes one completely oblivious to the exigencies of the material world around one.¹² Depicted on the cup is thus a progression from the essentially Callimachean desire for the unattainable via a much more satisfying pursuit, which produces tangible material results, to the boundless sense of fulfilment granted by creating something as impractical as a grasshopper trap for no other reason than the pleasure generated by the process.¹³ Viewed this way, the cup epitomizes the trajectory enacted by Polyphemus in Idyll 11—a path leading away from the incurable pain of erotic desire and towards poetic creation that enhances the pleasure generated by the overabundant material world. The cup is a perfect object to be traded against Thyrsis’ song about the woes of Daphnis—a song that mirrors the process of transformation of erotic desire into aesthetic pleasure represented on the cup. In stark contrast to the bucolic ⁹ Gutzwiller 1991, 90–4; Seiler 1997, 217–25. ¹⁰ Wickkiser 2010. ¹¹ Payne 2007, 31. ¹² For ἀκρίδες kept in cages and admired for their song, see a series of epigrams in the Palatine Anthology: Anth. Pal. 7.189, 190, 192: Hunter 1999, 83–4 and 162–3. ¹³ Cf. Hunter 1999, 82; Fantuzzi—Hunter 2004, 142–5.

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world in which Thyrsis and the goatherd give themselves to calm mimetic pleasures, Daphnis’ world is shattered by the intrusion of erotic desire, which ultimately leads to his death—his “melting” (66 ὅκα Δάφνις ἐτάκετο) equated with a thorough dissolution of natural distinctions (132–6).¹⁴ At first glance, Daphnis may seem to be dying of unrequited love.¹⁵ At least, this is what Hermes—the first god who asks Daphnis about the cause of his suffering— assumes (78 τίνος, ὠγαθέ, τόσσον ἔρασσαι;). But the beauty of the poem is precisely that it never explicitly states why Daphnis is dying.¹⁶ Neither when his fellow herdsmen pose the question point blank (81 πάντες ἀνηρώτευν τί πάθοι κακόν) nor when Priapus ventures a typically Priapic hypothesis (Daphnis is probably just too shy to return the affections of a girl who is openly seeking intimacy with him)¹⁷ does Daphnis deign to say a single word in response (92 τὼς δ᾿ οὐδὲν ποτελέξαθ᾿ ὁ βουκόλος). Then Aphrodite arrives on the scene to proclaim that Daphnis, who wanted to defeat Eros, now lies defeated himself (95–8). But like Hermes’ and Priapus’ remarks, Aphrodite’s observation is just a hypothesis, which Daphnis emphatically rejects by countering that, in contrast to Aphrodite herself, who has been defeated by Eros more than once (105–10), he will continue to fight Eros even in Hades (103 Δάφνις κἠν Ἀίδα κακὸν ἔσσεται ἄλγος Ἔρωτι). The cause of Daphnis’ death is thus not unrequited love but a consciously chosen stance strikingly reminiscent of the speakers of Callimachus’ epigrams—a determination to maintain the intensity of desire by perpetually deferring its fulfilment.¹⁸ Theocritus conceives of Daphnis’ erotic “Callimacheanism” both as a victory over Eros and as an incurable disease that leads to death. As a consequence, the death of Daphnis becomes a kind of aetiological myth that explains the origins of the ideal reality that Theocritus constructs in his bucolic poems. It is worth remembering in this connection that in Idyll 5 the “woes of Daphnis” are casually mentioned as the worst thing that could ever happen to a Theocritean herdsman (Theoc. Id. 5.20 αἴ τοι πιστεύσαιμι, τὰ Δάφνιδος ἄλγε᾿ ἀροίμαν). By sacrificing his life in order that survivors may experience erotic desire as a sublime aesthetic pleasure, Daphnis makes possible the bucolic world inhabited by Thyrsis and the goatherd—a world in which erotic desire

¹⁴ Hunter 1999, 88–9. See also Gow 1952, 1–2; Hunter 1999, 64–8, for an overview of the sources on the Daphnis legend. ¹⁵ Schmidt 1987, 57–70. For an overview of his possible beloveds, see Anagnostou-Laoutides— Konstan 2008. ¹⁶ Hunter 1999, 66–7. Cf. Gutzwiller 1991, 95: “The death of Daphnis—its cause and even the form that it takes—continues to be a source of controversy in Theocritean scholarship.” See also Lawall 1967, 3; Hutchinson 1988, 149; Gutzwiller 1991, 96; Hunter 1999, 67–8. ¹⁷ Hunter 1999, 92. ¹⁸ Cf. Hunter 1999, 63.

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206  :   - can cause no pain because it has been completely banished into the realm of artistic representation, into Thyrsis’ soothingly incantatory song about the woes of Daphnis. Within this poetic construct, the Callimachean poetic sublime becomes an aetiological prehistory of Theocritus’ bucolic poetry— both crucially formative and fully transcended. In his other bucolic Idylls, too, Theocritus dramatizes different attempts (some pathetic, other sublime) to introduce urban erotic poetry, which thrives on longing for the absent, into a countryside hostile to the very idea of absence. Like Idylls 11 and 1, these poems, too, seek to “heal” sophisticated urbanites by gradually habituating them to the possibility of an imaginary world in which the ineffectual longing for the absent is an utterly meaningless concept and in which the only desire that one can possibly experience is the easily satisfiable desire for the formal perfection of poetry and art. Like Polyphemus in Idyll 11, the speaker of Idyll 3 is a herdsman performing a paraklausithyron for his beloved (1 κωμάσδω ποτὶ τὰν Ἀμαρυλλίδα).¹⁹ But while Polyphemus’ song succeeds in dismantling his misguided obsession and bringing him back to the material reality of his own world, the song of Idyll 3 incongruously soars into the rarefied realm of urban love poetry and concludes with a learned mythological catalogue of what the singer mistakenly sees as happily united couples (Hippomenes and Atalanta, Melampus and Peiro, Adonis and Aphrodite, and Endymion and Selene, Theoc. Id. 3.40–51).²⁰ Unsurprisingly, this bizarre tour de force of Alexandrian literary erudition fails to produce any soothing effect on the singer: plagued by an excruciating headache, the goatherd lies down and refuses to budge until “the wolves eat me!” (52–3 ἀλγέω τὰν κεφαλάν . . . / κεισεῦμαι δὲ πεσών, καὶ τοὶ λύκοι ὧδέ μ᾿ ἔδονται). What turns the speaker’s maudlin imitation of erotic poetry’s standard motif of “crying before a closed door” into an epitome of farcical incongruity is that, in contrast to Polyphemus’ impossible beloved separated from him by the impenetrable boundary between dry land and water, Amaryllis is a herdswoman living in what is doubtless a doorless cave (6–7 τί μ᾿ οὐκέτι τοῦτο κατ᾿ ἄντρον / παρκύπτοισα καλεῖς).²¹ The absurdity of longing for the absent in the “absolute presence” of the rural world is also highlighted in Idyll 4. The poem is a dialogue between Battus and the cowherd Corydon. While Corydon is very much at home in the ¹⁹ Goldhill 1991, 247–8; Gutzwiller 1991, 115–23; Stanzel 1995, 191–206; Hunter 1999, 107–10; Payne 2007, 60–7; Cairns 2016, 353–88. ²⁰ Fantuzzi—Hunter 2004, 162: “[I]n virtually every case the ‘happy end’ was followed by wretched fate for one or both partners.” See also Payne 2007, 64–6. ²¹ Dover 1971, 112; Goldhill 1991, 247–8. Cf. Gutzwiller 1991, 119; Payne 2007, 63–4.

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bucolic landscape, Battus’ recognizably Callimachean name (it is identical with the name of Callimachus’ father) and his surprising unfamiliarity with typical Mediterranean vegetation (he doesn’t seem to know that, with all the brambles and thorns growing on the hills, one needs to wear shoes when taking a walk in the country, Theoc. Id. 4.56–7) betrays him as a visitor from the city.²² Like his counterpart in Idyll 3, Battus is longing for Amaryllis. In Idyll 4, however, Amaryllis is already dead (38–9 ὦ χαρίεσσ᾿ Ἀμαρυλλί, μόνας σέθεν οὐδὲ θανοίσας / λασεύμεθ᾿), so that, in contrast to the pathetic whining before an open cave in Idyll 3, Battus’ pining is anything but farcical: it is a longing for what is as unreachable as Galatea is to Polyphemus. The way Battus is healed from his longing is also evocative of Polyphemus. What characterizes the simple bucolic world of Idyll 4 is that, like the world of Polyphemus, it only admits of physical desires that can be easily satisfied—such as a desire for food (cf. Aegon eating eighty loaves of bread all by himself: 33–4) and a desire for sex, which one can effortlessly satisfy well into an advanced age (58–61).²³ When one enters this world, the Callimachean notion of longing for the absent automatically becomes a meaningless concept. This is why Battus’ desire for the dead Amaryllis is as easily alleviated by Corydon’s trivial country lore (“as long as you live, there is hope: now it rains, now there is sunshine again”: 42–3) as is his physical pain, which immediately disappears when a thorn is pulled out of his unshod foot (50–4).²⁴ Idyll 5 translates this healing mechanism into poetic terms—by providing a sample of poetry created from within the bucolic world where to feel a Callimachean longing for the absent would be the height of absurdity. The scene depicted in Idyll 5 must have played out in exactly the same way countless times before: two herdsmen—the goatherd Comatas and the shepherd Lacon—meet at the spring to which they drive their herds every day.²⁵ The only way for them to introduce variety into the mind-numbing monotony of this routine is to resort to theatrical make-believe. “My goats, run away from the shepherd: he stole my goatskin,” says Comatas (1–2). “Keep away from the spring, my lambs: there is Comatas who stole my pipe,” answers Lacon (3–4).

²² While Corydon is said to be herding Aegon’s cows (1–2), there is no mention of animals accompanying Battus: he doesn’t seem to be a herdsmen at all. Cf. Hunter 1999, 138–9. ²³ Cf. Van Sickle 1969, 144–6; Hunter 1999, 143. Pace Gutzwiller 1991, 153, who sees in “this lecherous liaison between an old man and a young beauty” “an adaptation of animal lust to human sexuality.” I can detect no sign of critique of this approach to sexuality in this poem, or anywhere else in Theocritus. ²⁴ On the “thorn incident” and the treatment of this motif in Hellenistic art, see Gutzwiller 1991, 150–2; Hunter 1999, 141–2. Cf. Theocr. Id. 10.3–4. ²⁵ Cf. Ott 1969, 14–31; Crane 1988, 110–13.

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208  :   - For a while, they continue to exchange similar remarks, which mirror each other in both content and form (6–13), until there is no doubt left that neither one of them has stolen anything from the other (14–19) and that it has all along been just a ritualized game, whose only function is to infuse the nonevent of their meeting with a semblance of emotional thrill.²⁶ This innocuous imitation of a real conflict only serves to strengthen the overall sense of stability, symmetry, and balance of the herdsmen’s world. The herdsmen’s poetry fulfils the same function as their feigned altercation. The singing contest between the two is a test of their ability to echo the previous singer’s two-liner, in both content and structure, in such a way as to up the ante without distorting the meaning too much and without overemphasizing the competitive nature of the competition: Comatas’ “The Muses love me” (80–1) is followed by Lacon’s “Apollo loves me” (82–3), “my girl is flirting with me” (84–5, cf. 88–9) by “I’m having sex with my handsome boy” (86–7, cf. 90–1), “briars are worse than roses” (92–3) by “acorns are worse than apples” (94–5), “I will give my girl a dove” (96–7) by “I will give my boy a sheep” (98–9), and “I will give my girl a wooden bowl, a work of Praxiteles” (104–5) by “I will give my boy a wolf-throttling dog” (106–7).²⁷ It could go on like this forever. But then the exchange gets a little more heated. Lacon’s “wolf-throttling dog” in response to Comatas’ “bowl of Praxiteles” has already sounded a discordantly aggressive note. But when in response to Comatas’ “Locusts, don’t do any damage to my fence” (108–9) Lacon sings “I am provoking Comatas the way cicadas provoke reapers” (110–11), he apparently crosses the line by explicitly spelling out what, by the unwritten rules of the bucolic song exchange, must remain unsaid. Comatas tries to save the day by translating the emerging tension into a similar allegorical imagery (112–13 “I hate foxes that steal grapes from the vineyard”). But when Lacon responds with a much more unflattering allegorical image (114–15 “I hate dung beetles that eat figs”), Comatas has no choice but to strike below the belt by abandoning all equivocation and singing (116–17) “Do you remember how I once took you from behind and you really liked it?” It is only when, even after this explicit signal, Lacon fails to back down (118–19 “I have no recollection of that, but I remember a similar thing happening to you!”) that Comatas urges the umpire Morson to watch out for Lacon, who is obviously losing his nerves (120–1). In his subsequent twoliners, Comatas’ strategy consists in numbing Lacon’s alertness by giving him innocuous cues (rivers flowing with milk and goats feeding on luscious plants: ²⁶ Cf. Gutzwiller 1991, 136–7.

²⁷ Manakidou 1993, 91–5.

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124–5, 128–9). But then he throws him off balance again by returning to a more personal terrain and singing “I don’t love my girlfriend anymore, because she didn’t kiss me when I gave her a dove” (132–3). It is when Lacon responds by completely inverting, rather than echoing, Comatas’ last two-liner (134–5 “I do love my boyfriend because he did kiss me when I gave him a syrinx”) that he loses the competition (136–9).²⁸ The poem’s conclusion reveals Lacon’s defeat as a metaliterary event. After winning the singing contest, Comatas threatens to castrate a misbehaving goat by saying “and may I become Melantheus instead of Comatas if I don’t castrate you” (149–50 ἀλλὰ γενοίμαν, / αἰ μή τυ φλάσσαιμι, Μελάνθιος ἀντὶ Κομάτα). The conniving goatherd of the Odyssey, Melantheus attacks the disguised Odysseus in Book 17 (Od. 17.212–32) and, in the aftermath of Odysseus’ killing of the suitors in Book 22, ends up being killed and castrated (Od. 22.475–7).²⁹ The fact that the setting in which Comatas and Lacon meet at the beginning of Idyll 5 (a locus amoenus featuring a spring and a shrine of the Nymphs) is virtually indistinguishable from the place where Melantheus and Odysseus meet in the Odyssey (cf. Od. 17.205–11 and Theoc. Id. 5.3–17) underscores the fundamental difference between the epic and the bucolic worlds.³⁰ Like epic poetry, the bucolic poetry of Idyll 5 features a series of battles. But in contrast to an epic battle, the winner of a bucolic contest is not one who violently overpowers the opponent but one who proves better at maintaining the sense of symmetry and balance. In Comatas’ eyes, to resemble Melantheus is the worst curse that can befall a bucolic singer, while to defeat Lacon is a bucolic equivalent of Odysseus’ victory over the suitors and their henchman.³¹ The reason why Lacon loses the contest is thus that he momentarily forgets the difference between bucolic and epic, thereby turning a singing competition into a parody of an epic scene and himself into a parody of Melantheus. The status of bucolic poetry as a locus of symmetry and balance becomes more obvious still in Idyll 6. Like the singers of Idyll 5, Daphnis and Damoetas sing songs that mirror each other in both content and form. But in contrast to ²⁸ Cf. Gutzwiller 1991, 141–2. The reason for Comatas’ victory is the main problem dominating the scholarly discussion of the poem: Köhnken 1980; Crane 1988; Trachsel 2006, with references. ²⁹ Thalmann 1998, 83–4. ³⁰ On the significance for Theocritus of the Melantheus episode of the Odyssey, see Ott 1969, 147–8; Halperin 1983, 224–7; Goldhill 1991, 227; Gutzwiller 1991, 158, Hunter 1999, 147–8, Payne 2007, 121–3, all of whom go out of their way to read Melantheus into the dramatic setting of Id. 7 but pay no attention to Id. 5 where Melantheus is mentioned explicitly. ³¹ Note, too, that Lacon, like Melantheus, is a goatherd (cf. Hom. Od. 17.213 αἶγας ἄγων and Theoc. Id. 5.1 αἶγες ἐμαί), which makes Comatas’ remark all the more cogent: unlike the defeated Lacon, Comatas himself is definitely not a Melantheus. Cf. Berman 2005, 234–5 and 239.

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210  :   - the snappy two-liners of Idyll 5, their songs are longer compositions. In keeping with their leisurely pace, both songs illustrate the lasting effect of the poetic cure of unrequited love administered in Idyll 11:³² although still interested in having Galatea for a wife, Polyphemus is now anything but madly in love, referring to his former infatuation as an embarrassing episode from the past (29 ὅκ᾿ ἤρων). Daphnis’ song dramatizes Galatea’s reaction to Polyphemus’ extinguished passion: she is transformed from an unattainable object of desire into a combination of the bucolic girl who flirts with the goatherd in one of Comatas’ two-liners in Idyll 5 (cf. 6.6–7 βάλλει τοι, Πολύφαμε, τὸ ποίμνιον ἁ Γαλάτεια / μάλοισιν and 5.88 βάλλει καὶ μάλοισι τὸν αἰπόλον ἁ Κλεαρίστα) and the comic figure of a Callimachean lover who is only attracted to what s/he cannot possess (17 καὶ φεύγει φιλέοντα καὶ οὐ φιλέοντα διώκει, cf. Call. Ep. 31 Pf. 5 τὰ μὲν φεύγοντα διώκειν).³³ Damoetas’ song answers Daphnis’ by supplying Polyphemus’ perspective: clearly seeing Galatea’s efforts to attract his attention (21 εἶδον), Polyphemus ignores them on purpose in order to make her jealous and more eager to pursue him (25–6 οὐ ποθόρημι / ἀλλ᾿ ἄλλαν τινὰ φαμι γυναῖκ᾿ ἔχεν). These two songs not only illustrate two different attitudes to love but also formulate two different concepts of beauty. Like the speakers of Callimachus’ epigrams, Galatea defines beauty as that which cannot be possessed—even if the inaccessible object of desire is as ugly as the one-eyed Polyphemus (18–19 ἦ γὰρ ἔρωτι / πολλάκις, ὦ Πολύφαμε, τὰ μὴ καλὰ καλὰ πέφανται). To Polyphemus, by contrast, beauty is a product of mimesis. Unlike in Idyll 11, water in Idyll 6 is not an impenetrable boundary that forever separates the land-dwelling lover from his marine beloved but a poetic domain par excellence and a reflective surface that makes things appear more beautiful than they are in reality. Reflected in the water, Polyphemus’ unassuming, and perfectly prosaic, shepherd dog effectively enters the world of elevated poetic language—the reflections of both the dog itself (11 εἰς ἅλα δερκομένα) and of its immediate surroundings (12 ἅσυχα καχλάζοντος ἐπ᾿ αἰγιαλοῖο) becoming redolent of epic and lyric poetry (cf. Damoetas’ prosaic ἐς πόντον ἐσέβλεπον at 35).³⁴ And for Polyphemus himself, the sea becomes a mirror that convinces him of his own attractiveness—his beard and his single eye looking quite fetching and his teeth gleaming whiter than Parian marble (34–8).

³² On connections between the two Polyphemus poems, see Köhnken 1996; Hunter 1999, 244–5; Payne 2007, 94–6. ³³ Hunter 1999, 250–2. ³⁴ Gow 1952 and Hunter 1999, ad loc.

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The grotesquery of this image does not diminish its theoretical significance in conceptualizing the poetic reality that Theocritus constructs in this poem. In contrast to Plato’s concept of specular mimesis, what the mimetic reflections in the water produce in Theocritus are not deceptive replicas devoid of substance but images of enhanced beauty that make reality a more beautiful place too. If in Idyll 11 Polyphemus cures his lovesickness by unmasking his marine beloved as an empty fantasy and by contrasting this ephemeral object of desire with the plenitude of the material world he inhabits, in Idyll 6 he transforms the emphatically “poetic” water into a mimetic surface that serves to beautify his already overabundant world. The excruciating longing for the unattainable (Γαλατεία) from which Polyphemus suffers in Idyll 11 is transformed as a result into an emotional calm (35 γαλάνα)³⁵ induced by his newly acquired ability to contemplate himself in that mimetic surface. The dramatic frame of Idyll 6 enacts a similar notion of mimesis as a vehicle of beauty.³⁶ Unlike their counterparts in Idyll 5 who spend more than half of their poem teasing, provoking, and insulting each other, Daphnis and Damoetas display no sign of contentiousness.³⁷ Moreover, in contrast to Idyll 5, the goal of the competition is not the victory of one of the contestants (it is emphatically stressed that both remained undefeated: 45 ἀνήσσατοι δ᾿ ἐγένοντο), but an exchange of poetic pleasure accompanied by an exchange of gifts (a pipe traded for a beautiful flute) and a gleeful dance of the cows, which additionally highlights the perfect reciprocity of the two singers’ mutual admiration for each other (43–6). Concomitantly, the portrayal of the two singers is reduced to the stereotypical schema that, in the Greek homoerotic imagination, defines the visible difference between an erastes and an eromenos—the slightly older Damoetas sporting a newly grown full beard, the younger Daphnis a half-grown one (Theoc. Id. 6.2–3).³⁸ But while in traditional love poetry a homoerotic relationship would typically consist in a lover’s excruciating longing for an ever-elusive beloved, the relationship between Damoetas and Daphnis is characterized by an erotic harmony epitomized by the tender kiss that seals their non-contentious song exchange (42 τόσσ᾿ εἰπὼν τὸν Δάφνιν ὁ Δαμοίτας ἐφίλησε).³⁹ As a result, the poetically ³⁵ Hunter 1999, 257–8. ³⁶ For an analysis of the tension between the dramatic frame and the songs in Idyll 6, see Gutzwiller 1991, 126–33; Bowie 1996, 91–5. See also Stanzel 1995, 177–90; Payne 2007. ³⁷ Lawall 1967, 67–9 and Gutzwiller 1991, 126 read ἔρισδεν at Theoc. Id. 6.5 as an indication that, like Idyll 5, the poem starts with a quarrel between the two singers. It does not—at least not in the conventional sense: Bowie 1996, 92. An invitation to engage in a perfectly non-contentious song exchange is the highest degree of quarrelsomeness that the ideal world of the poem can admit. ³⁸ Cairns 1972, 195–6; Gutzwiller 1991, 125–6; Hunter 1999, 249. ³⁹ Bowie 1996, 92–3.

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212  :   - refined world of Idyll 6 emerges as an analogue of the mimetic surface in which, like Polyphemus in the water, lovers are now invited to recognize the ideal image of themselves and, as a consequence, to experience the soothing effect of poetry’s serene beauty. Theocritus’ poem most frequently discussed in modern scholarship, Idyll 7 not only stages a similar movement away from the unsettling frustration associated with lack, need, and desire and towards the serene calm of aesthetic pleasure but also reveals that the artificial landscape of bucolic poetry may in fact possess something like a Sitz im Leben. The poem stands out from the rest of Theocritus’ bucolic Idylls in a number of crucial ways. It is cast as a personal recollection by a first-person narrator, a poet named Simichidas who probably stands for Theocritus himself,⁴⁰ of an incident that took place not in a generic countryside, timeless and geographically vague, but in a specific place on the map—the island of Cos whose description in the poem thrives on topographical, cultural, and genealogical detail. In contrast to the rest of Theocritus’ bucolic Idylls, Simichidas describes not a sedentary singing match but a walk— one that takes him from the city (2 ἐκ πόλιος) to a farm where his aristocratic patrons, the brothers Phrasidamus and Antigenes, celebrate the Thalysia, a harvest festival of Demeter, which, at the end of the poem, he praises as an epitome of a Golden-Age-like abundance.⁴¹ The beginning of the poem, too, strikes a laudatory note: Simichidas’ reference to Phrasidamus’ and Antigenes’ mythical ancestor responsible for the emergence of a notable feature of the island’s landscape, the spring Burina (Theoc. Id. 7.3–7),⁴² is a typical encomiastic gesture reminiscent of Pindar’s epinicians, where, as I mentioned in the introduction to Part I, the political authority of the laudandi is routinely linked to the deeds of their heroic ancestors.⁴³ But the road from the myth-laden space around the city to the aristocratic paradise of the farm leads through a pristine landscape unburdened by any material tokens of cultural memory or social difference. It is in this cultural no man’s land that Simichidas encounters the poem’s second protagonist Lycidas. Lycidas is a curious figure.⁴⁴ Simichidas describes him as ἐσθλός (12: worthy)—a possible indication of wealth and high social status, which seems to put him in the same social category as the aristocrats Phrasidamus and Antigenes (cf. 4–5 εἴ τί περ ἐσθλόν / χαῶν ἀπὶ ἐπάνωθεν in reference to the two ⁴⁰ Hunter 1999, 146. ⁴¹ Fantuzzi—Hunter 2004, 147. ⁴² Gow 1952 and Hunter 1999, ad loc. Cf. Krevans 1983, 204–10; Gutzwiller 1991, 162; Stephens 2006, 94. ⁴³ Hunter 1999, 192. Cf. Krevans 1983, 209–12. ⁴⁴ Bowie 1985, 68–70; Goldhill 1991, 228–9; Hunter 1999, 147; Clauss 2003, 290–2.

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brothers).⁴⁵ In the rural landscape where the two meet, however, Lycidas possesses no outward insignia of social distinction but wears a goatherd’s garb (13 ἦς δ᾿ αἴπολος). Despite this disguise, Simichidas immediately recognizes that Lycidas is not a goatherd—even though he resembles one so much (14 αἰπόλῳ ἔξοχ᾿ ἐῴκει) that others would never take him for anything else. While the socially inferior Simichidas is content with silently registering the incongruity of Lycidas’ appearance, Lycidas, ἐσθλός as he is, does not restrain himself from ridiculing Simichidas by describing him as a comic parasite, who, despite the scorching midday heat, is speedily walking to a far-off farm in the countryside to attend a party thrown by some rich people who may not even have invited him (21–6, esp. 24 ἄκλητος).⁴⁶ As a man of independent means (ἐσθλός), Lycidas can apparently afford to embrace wholesale the poetic fantasy of a carefree existence of a bucolic singer: at the end of the poem, he confirms this privilege by disappearing into the bucolic landscape (130–1) from which he had emerged in the beginning. As a client poet who is only passing through this landscape on his way to his aristocratic patrons, Simichidas, by contrast, can do nothing to conceal his subordinate status: even his apologetic remark that he is going to attend a harvest festival celebrated by his “comrades” (31–2 ἑταῖροι / ἀνέρες) sounds like a conventional (Pindaric) portrayal of the self-evidently unequal relationship of patronage as a friendship inter pares.⁴⁷ Despite his mimetically credible masquerade, the aristocrat Lycidas is obviously not a goatherd. And just as obviously, Simichidas, like Theocritus himself in Idyll 16, is a poet in need—a poet compelled to seek material support from the affluent (cf. 16.5–12).⁴⁸ This is why, at the end of the poem, Simichidas has no other choice than to leave the bucolic world and to resume the encomium with which he had started the account of his daytrip, describing the farm of his aristocratic patrons as a site of cornucopian abundance, which surpasses the pleasures enjoyed by the mythical figures that play such a prominent role in Theocritus’ own poetry— Heracles and Polyphemus.

⁴⁵ For this meaning of ἐσθλός, see e.g. Alc. 49 πένιχρος οὐδεὶς πέλετ᾿ ἔσλος οὐδὲ τίμιος. Cf. Hom. Od. 22.415; S. Ant. 38, Ph. 96; E. Andr. 772. Cf. Payne 2007, 122–3, on the parallel between Lycidas’ “disguised nobility” and the disguise that Odysseus wears when he meets Melantheus at Od. 17.204–16. Hunter (1999, 153 and 156) sees the term as a mere poetic “mannerism” referring to poetic excellence. And so it does at 39, 93, and 100, but not, I think, at 4 and 12: the shift in the meaning of ἐσθλός in Id. 7 seems to me to underscore the process of substituting poetic excellence for social distinction enacted in the poem as a whole. ⁴⁶ On ἄκλητοι (= parasites) in the social dynamics of the symposium, see Fehr 1990. ⁴⁷ Goldhill 1991, 128–66. ⁴⁸ Cf. González 2010.

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214  :   - But in the bucolic landscape located halfway between the city and the farm, the social distinctions between Lycidas and Simichidas are of no importance. Simichidas plays along with Lycidas’ masquerade: by proposing to Lycidas to engage in a bucolic song exchange (36 βουκολιασδώμεσθα), he emphasizes that the social difference between them can indeed only be overwritten by their shared status as poets (30–1 καίτοι κατ᾿ ἐμὸν νόον ἰσοφαρίζειν / ἔλπομαι).⁴⁹ By denying that he may be better than Sicelidas (Asclepiades?) or Philitas (40),⁵⁰ Simichidas explicitly emphasizes that any form of contentiousness would be out of place in this ideal poetic landscape. Lycidas’ subsequent ridicule of those who, like the two lovers competing for a girl in Idyll 1, futilely compete with Homer (7.48 ἐτώσια μοχθίζοντι = 1.38) clearly shows that he approves of Simichidas’ stance.⁵¹ His promise to give him his herdsman’s stick (43 κορύναν δωρύττομαι) does not seem to me to indicate that he recognizes Simichidas’ poetic superiority or that he initiates him into the art of poetry.⁵² Rather, it serves to confirm that they are “on the same page” in recognizing that what matters in poetry is not a poet’s position in a hierarchical ranking but the aesthetic pleasure generated by the poetic game of make-believe. Like the noncontentious encounters in Idylls 1 and 6, the singing match between Lycidas and Simichidas in Idyll 7 is not a competition but an exchange of aesthetic pleasure, whose goal is to underscore the sense of equality that the two can only enjoy in the imaginary world of bucolic poetry. It is hardly surprising then that the theme of both songs is the quintessentially Theocritean motif of transcending erotic desire—the main cause of emotional distress in Theocritus’ world—in favour of calm, symmetry, and balance. Lycidas is not a goatherd: he only looks and smells like one (15–19). By the same token, the “little song” that he has recently composed “on the mountain” (51 ὅτι πρᾶν ἐν ὄρει τὸ μελύδριον ἐξεπόνασα, cf. Hes. Th. 23) is not a song by a “real” bucolic poet—such as Thyrsis in Idyll 1, Comatas in Idyll 5, or Daphnis and Damoetus in Idyll 6, who sing about love without suffering any painful ⁴⁹ Cf. Gutzwiller 1991, 164–5. ⁵⁰ Gow 1952 and Hunter 1999, ad loc. ⁵¹ Gutzwiller 1991, 166–7; Hunter 1999, 165–6 and 2003a, 214. Many scholars see Simichidas as aggressive in comparison with the friendly Lycidas: Ott 1969, 169; Segal 1981, 173–5; Gutzwiller 1991, 169–70; Hunter 1999, 177–8; Payne 2007, 129. But Simichidas’ emphasis that he mentioned his lack of contentiousness “on purpose” (42 ὥς ἐφάμαν ἐπίταδες) does not have to be read as a veiled admission of his aggressiveness, but can be taken at face value—as part of a purposeful strategy to play by the unwritten rules of the non-contentious bucolic song exchange exemplified by Idyll 6, in which Lycidas’ bucolic costume invites him to participate. Cf. Goldhill 1991, 229. Nor is there any contradiction between his pride that his fame has reached “the throne of Zeus” (93) and his refusal to engage in a competition: both Lycidas and Simichidas are perfectly aware of the differences between the ideal landscape of bucolic poetry and the real, political, world, in which poetic success can, for some, be a matter of survival. Cf. Goldhill 1991, 237. ⁵² Cf. Krevans 1983, 202; Seiler 1997, 111–18; Hunter 1999, 148–50; Payne 2007, 117–18.

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erotic longings of their own. Rather, it is a song by someone who futilely longs to possess the ability to replace the storms of erotic desire with the soothing beauty of bucolic poetry. The song begins as an imaginary farewell to a beloved who departs for Mytilene.⁵³ It has often been assumed that Lycidas wishes Ageanax a safe journey on the condition that, prior to departure, he gratifies his erotic desire.⁵⁴ But the idea that, once satisfied, erotic desire can subside is absolutely alien to Greek love poetry, which tends to portray love as an insatiable obsession that grows stronger the more one indulges it.⁵⁵ As Polyphemus demonstrates in Idyll 11, the only way to put an end to this tantalizing torture and to regain inner poise is to let go of the beloved—to send her/him back into the sea where s/he belongs. The hypothetical scenario that Lycidas envisages in his song evokes this characteristically Theocritean therapy of desire. He imagines that his beloved’s departure will cause him no pain but, fading into a pleasant memory (64 μεμνάμενος Ἀγεάνακτος), will allow him to devote himself entirely to the soothing delights of bucolic poetry. He pictures himself as he takes farewell from Ageanax and returns home to enjoy a quiet symposium—with two pipe-playing shepherds and Tityrus, a bucolic singer, as his only companions (71–2). In his imagination, Lycidas hears Tityrus sing of the quintessentially bucolic “woes of Daphnis” as well as of another, unnamed, bucolic singer, who, enclosed by an evil king in a wooden chest, was fed honey by the bees because the Muse had previously poured nectar into his mouth (72–82).⁵⁶ This imaginary song reminds Lycidas of Comatas—one of the bucolic singers of Idyll 5—and infuses him with a desire to hear Comatas’ sweet song firsthand (“I wish you were among the living now!” 86 αἴθ᾿ ἐπ᾿ ἐμεῦ ζωοῖς ἐναρίθμιος ὤφελες ἦμεν), herding his goats while the bucolic singer himself reclines under oaks or pines (87–9).⁵⁷ What Lycidas longs for is thus a hypothetical future in which his burning desire for Ageanax will give way to the calm pleasures of bucolic poetry.⁵⁸ Needless to say, his desire for Ageanax is no less a literary sentiment than his desire for bucolic poetry, for it is couched in terms distinctly reminiscent of archaic lyric and elegy. It is hardly coincidental, therefore, that in his imagination, Lycidas sees Ageanax off to Mytilene. This topographic specificity can be perceived as a suggestive metaliterary gesture—as an act of sending the beloved back to where, within the history of Greek literature, the very notion ⁵³ ⁵⁴ ⁵⁶ ⁵⁷ ⁵⁸

Cairns 1972, 163–4; Hunter 1999, 166–7, with parallels. Cairns 1972, 164; Gutzwiller 1991, 167–8. ⁵⁵ Hunter 1999, 168. See esp. Idd. 12, 13, 29, 30. Gow 1952 and Hunter 1999, ad loc. See also Payne 2007, 125–6. Gutzwiller 1991, 168; Goldhill 1991, 233–6; Seiler 1997, 120–40; Hunter 1999, 176. Cf. Payne 2007, 124–5.

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216  :   - of a consuming erotic desire ultimately comes from, i.e. to the Aeolic lyric of the Lesbian poets Sappho and Alcaeus.⁵⁹ It begins to transpire now why Ageanax can only complete his voyage (back) to Mytilene if “he saves Lycidas from the scorching fire of Aphrodite” (55–6 αἴ κα τὸν Λυκίδαν ὀπτεύμενον ἐξ Ἀφροδίτας / ῥύσηται). It is only by falling out of love, something that he knows he will never be able to do, that Lycidas can let his beloved depart to where he belongs, and this is why this metaliterary voyage, were it ever to take place, would be safe even in the stormiest winter months.⁶⁰ And it is only by taking farewell from his obsessive love that Lycidas can take farewell from erotic poetry and embrace instead the ideal bucolic world—a world in which the pain of insatiable desire yields to the calm of aesthetic pleasure. In his poetic response, Simichidas also adopts the persona of a bucolic singer, alluding to the prologue of Hesiod’s Theogony by saying that the Nymphs taught him his song as he was tending his herd in the mountains (90–5, cf. Hes. Th. 1–25). As is always the case in Theocritus’ bucolic song exchanges, his song echoes Lycidas’ without following it too closely.⁶¹ Like Lycidas’ poem, Simichidas’ song aims to heal lovesickness. But the patient is this time not the speaker himself but a second-person addressee (Aratus enamoured with Philinus)⁶² whom Simichidas claims to be able to cure by reciting his poem. Albeit only a visitor in the bucolic world, Simichidas plays the role of an accomplished bucolic poet: while Lycidas is still futilely longing for the simplicity of the bucolic world, Simichidas purports to have internalized that simplicity to such an extent as to be able to share it with others.⁶³ The iambic rudeness with which Simichidas reduces Aratus’ desire to absurdity is vividly reminiscent of the down-to-earth approach to love exemplified by Idylls 4 and 5—the two Theocritean poems that either equate erotic desire with sexual urge or present it as an emotionally uncomplicated interaction (cf. Id. 5.132–3 “I don’t love her anymore because she didn’t kiss me when I gave her a present”).⁶⁴ Simichidas begins by beseeching the archetypal bucolic god Pan to put Philinus, or if not, any other boy, in Aratus’ arms (105 εἴτε τις ἄλλος: note that there is not a trace of the obsessive exclusivity of Callimachus’

⁵⁹ See Krevans 1983, 213–15, who notes specific parallels between Lycidas’ song and both archaic Aeolic lyric and Theocritus’ own Aeolic paidika (Idd. 29–31). ⁶⁰ Cf. Hunter 1999, 168. Regarding Lycidas’ propemptikon as a meta-literary gesture (i.e. as sending erotic desire back to Lesbos) would eliminate the question of “how Lycidas is to receive the news all the way from Lesbos on the same day as Ageanax arrives”—the question that Hunter 1999, 171 answers by assuming that Lycidas may be divine. I don’t think he is. Rather, he is a love poet doing whatever is humanly possible to live up to the unattainable ideal of a bucolic poet. ⁶¹ Gutzwiller 1991, 168–9. ⁶² Hunter 1999, 243–4. ⁶³ Cf. Hunter 1999, 180; Payne 2007, 129–30. ⁶⁴ Cf. Payne 2007, 130–1.

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erotic poetry here), and threatening the god with painful distress, should he fail to do so.⁶⁵ Soon enough, however, it becomes apparent that Philinus is not really worth pining after anyway: echoing Archilochus, Simichidas declares the boy to be utterly unattractive—past his prime, riper than a pear (cf. Archil. SLG 478.24–31).⁶⁶ It is precisely this realization that, like Polyphemus’ disillusionment with Galatea in Idyll 11, is expected to produce a therapeutic effect on Aratus: from now on, there will be no camping outside the beloved’s closed doors; instead there will be nothing but peace and calm (122–7). This pair of bucolic songs draws attention to the extent to which the world of Lycidas and Simichidas differs from the bucolic world of Idylls 1 and 6, where non-competitive exchanges of aesthetic pleasure reflect the emotional poise enjoyed by the herdsmen themselves who feel no pressing needs or consuming desires. By contrast, Simichidas is a client poet who can enjoy a comfortable life only as long as he praises the mythical genealogy and the cornucopian generosity of his aristocratic patrons, while Lycidas’ life is entirely determined by Eros: all he can do is fantasize about Ageanax’s departure to Mytilene, knowing full well that, no matter how much he yearns after it, his farewell to love will always be in the future. To both Simichidas and Lycidas, the absolute calm of the bucolic world is an unattainable fantasy. The best thing they can do to approximate that fantasy in reality is by playing a mimetic game of make-believe—by donning a goatherd’s garb and by engaging a like-minded fellow poet in a non-competitive exchange of songs that mimetically echo each other in bucolic manner. While laying bare the illusory nature of that mimetic game, Idyll 7 reveals it as a unique source of a very much real pleasure. I mentioned above that both Simichidas and Lycidas conceive of their bucolic personae as allusions to Hesiod—the archetypal singing herdsman of Greek poetry (cf. Theocr. Id. 7.51, 90–5 and Hes. Th. 1–25). In addition, the fact that Idyll 7 is framed as Simichidas’ first-person account of a trip he took “from the city” (1–2 ἦς χρόνος ἁνίκ᾿ . . . / εἵρπομες ἐκ πόλιος) evokes two Platonic passages that I discussed in Chapter 4—Socrates’ first-person account of his visit to Piraeus at the beginning of the Republic (Pl. Rep. 327a1 κατέβην χθὲς εἰς Πειραιᾶ) ⁶⁷ and his excursion into the idyllic countryside outside the

⁶⁵ Hunter 1999, 183–6. He interprets εἴτε τις ἄλλος as a sign of the speaker’s uncertainty as to the beloved’s identity. It is more likely, however, that it is a sign of indifference—the first signal that the speaker’s plan to wean Aratus from his erotic obsession is beginning to work. ⁶⁶ Henrichs 1980. ⁶⁷ Cf. Hunter 1999, 145.

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218  :   - city walls of Athens in the Phaedrus.⁶⁸ These conspicuous parallels invite us to ponder on the nature of Theocritus’ relationship to both Hesiod and Plato. In Parts I and II, I argued that both Hesiod’s countryside and Plato’s suburban landscapes function as rich metaliterary metaphors. I showed in Chapter 2 that, by bringing hexametrical poetry into the countryside, Hesiod performs a two-step act of distancing himself from the world of Homeric epic—that his progression from the Heliconian pastures of the Theogony to the ideal farm of the Works and Days coincides with a progression from the myths of political power, which he identifies with the Odyssean “lies that resemble real things,” to his own poetic language, which he declares to be the only empirically possible approximation of the unattainable Iliadic ideal of heroic essentialism. And in Chapter 4, I maintained that, by having Socrates leave the city in the Phaedrus and the Republic, Plato enacts a transformation of writing from an inherently monologic discourse into a medium conducive to dialectic—a medium that produces an erot(et)ic effect on the reader by urging her to emulate Socrates’ dialectic quest for the absolute. At first glance, Theocritus’ metaliterary countryside seems to have more in common with Hesiod’s than with Plato’s: rather than symbolizing an attempt to instil in the reader a desire for the unattainable, the ideal bucolic landscapes are figured, in Idylls 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6, as realms of absolute presence in which any such attempt would be automatically reduced to absurdity. Moreover, Idyll 7 reveals that, in Theocritus as in Hesiod, to be outside the city means to be outside such traditionally poetic domains as erotic passions and political hierarchies.⁶⁹ Like Hesiod, Theocritus does occasionally contrast his ideal countryside with a misguided desire to imitate Homeric heroism (cf. 5.149–50 and 7.48). More importantly, however, it is to Hesiod that Theocritus appeals when he distances himself from the Callimachean desire for the absent. As I pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, the therapeutic effect of song in Idyll 11—an effect that consists in enabling Polyphemus to reject his Callimachean object of desire (cf. 11.75 and Call. Ep. 31 Pf. 5–6) and to return to the superabundant world of material presence—is linked to the essentially Hesiodic injunction to “draw on what one has” (cf. 11.75 and Hes. Op. 366). Similarly, Idyll 10 offers a distinctly Callimachean definition of love as a form of hunger (10.30–1 and esp. 57 ⁶⁸ On Theocritus’ debt to Plato’s Phaedrus, see Hunter 1999, 14 and 145–6; 2003a, 233–4; Payne 2007, 118–19 and 127–8. ⁶⁹ On Hesiod’s rejection of the aristocratic ideal of the Homeric epics, see Chapter 4. The Pandora myth is the most telling illustration of Hesiod’s view of erotic desire as an annoying, and potentially deleterious, nuisance: Hes. Op. 373–5. See Most 2013, 173–4.

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λιμηρὸν ἔρωτα, cf. Call. Ep. 46 Pf.),⁷⁰ opposes it to the recognizably Hesiodic ban on “longing for the absent” (cf. 10.8–9 οὐδαμά τοι συνέβη ποθέσθαι τινὰ τῶν ἀπεόντων; / οὐδαμά. τίς δὲ πόθος τῶν ἔκτοσθεν ἐργάτᾳ ἀνδρί and Hes. Op. 367 χρηίζειν ἀπεόντος), and declares that the only good thing about poetry is that it provides a rhythm (cf. 10.39 ὡς εὖ τὰν ἰδέαν τᾶς ἁρμονίας ἐμέτρησεν) with which one can synchronize the steps that one takes to replenish the realm of material presence that one inhabits—the content of poetry (a maudlin love song or a miniature version of Hesiod’s Works and Days) being of secondary importance.⁷¹ Thus, like Hesiod, Theocritus presents poetic language as a locus of presence and opposes it to such frustrating pursuits as the imitation of inimitable cultural ideals or the chasing of impossible objects of desire. But this similarity reveals an important difference. In contrast to Hesiod, who, by drawing an analogy between poetic language and productive agricultural labour, casts his poetry as a straightforward transmitter of divine truths, Theocritus uses language not to communicate meaning but to construct a realm of pure form: with their insatiable desires securely banished into the fictional realm of poetry, the inhabitants of Theocritus’ ideal world are free to enjoy a life of aesthetic pleasure—pleasure engendered by the symmetry, harmony, and balance inherent in poetic “rhythm” (cf. 10.39). It is, Theocritus seems to suggest, only as long as one plunges into this elaborately artificial world that, as a sophisticated urbanite, one can hope to become as free from ineffectual desires as the idealized herdsmen and farmers portrayed in his bucolic poems. The Platonic overtones of Idyll 7 draw additional attention to the fact that, in contrast to Hesiod’s concept of poetic language as a transmitter of Zeus’ divine truths, the realm of pure form is something that cannot be taken for granted: just as the world of the Platonic forms can only be glimpsed, briefly and dimly, in the process of dialectical elenchus, so the Theocritean world of pure poetic form, too, must be created, each time anew, by poets exchanging songs and playing a mimetic game of make-believe. Although in Idyll 7 Theocritus draws a contrast between the cultural landscape of around the city of Cos, which calls for a poetic encomium, and the landscape of bucolic poetry, synonymous with the purity of aesthetic pleasure, that ideal landscape, too, is located on Cos—an island that Theocritus himself extols at length in Idyll 17 as the birthplace of the nearly ⁷⁰ On the motif of hunger in Idyll 10, see Hutchinson 1988, 173–8; Acosta-Hughes 2006, 32–3; Pretagostini 2006, 55–7; Grethlein 2012. ⁷¹ On Milo’s song in Idyll 10 as an amalgam of Hesiodic motifs, see e.g. Hunter 1999, 213; Hunt 2009, 404–5.

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220  :   - divine (soon-to-be-deified) king Ptolemy II. Idyll 17 is a conventional panegyric,⁷² which, in addition to praising Ptolemy’s divine/divinized ancestors and his unsurpassed generosity (see esp. 17.112–15 on the patronage of poets), eulogizes two geographical locations central to the laudandus’ life—Cos, compared, as in Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos (Cal. Del. 160–204),⁷³ to the Delos of the Homeric Hymn to Apollo (Theocr. Id. 17.58–76),⁷⁴ and Egypt, described as an epitome of military superiority, good governance, and material prosperity (17.77–120).⁷⁵ In Idyll 7, Cos is praised in a much more subtle manner as an ideal landscape where the reciprocity of poetic patronage (praise exchanged for a comfortable lifestyle) morphs into the reciprocity of a bucolic song exchange, which, like patronage, allows one to experience poetry as a unique instrument of eliminating all existential exigencies and longings. In the rest of this chapter, I will argue that, in Idyll 15, Theocritus portrays Alexandria as an ideal place where, by analogy with the landscapes of bucolic poetry, all existential desires are thoroughly satisfied and where the bittersweet sensation of longing for the absent can only be experienced vicariously by listening to beautiful songs and by seeing beautiful artworks.

Mimesis and Ideology In Idyll 14, unrequited love is presented as a symptom of the general lack, noncoincidence, and displacement that characterizes the entire world of the generic Greek city that serves as its dramatic setting: the rejected lover Aeschines lives in a tiny hut in the country (cf. Theoc. Id. 14.14 ἐν χώρῳ παρ᾿ ἐμίν), while most of the other characters mentioned in the poem are not only similarly poor but also seem to be perpetually on the move—an unnamed Argive, Argis the Thessalian, a mercenary named Cleonicus, and an itinerant Athenian Pythagorean, pale, hungry, and barefoot (Theoc. Id. 14.5–7).⁷⁶ Given the systemic instability of the world depicted in the poem, it is hardly surprising that Alexandria emerges in it as a unique promise of material and emotional fulfilment. Relieved by his lovesick friend’s determination to stop pining for his beloved and to travel abroad, Thyonichus asserts that there is no

⁷² Cairns 1972, 100–24. ⁷³ Bing 1988, 91–143. ⁷⁴ See Theoc. Id. 17.58–76, modelled on the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. On parallels between Theocritus’ Encomium of Ptolemy and hymns to gods (esp. the Homeric Hymn to Apollo and Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos), see Hunter 2003a, 1–8. See also Stephens 2003, 148–51. ⁷⁵ Hunter 2003a; Stephens 2003, 147–70 and 2006, 95–6 and 114–16; Payne 2007, 117. ⁷⁶ Hunter 1996, 112–13.

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better goal for a potential emigrant than Ptolemaic Egypt (Theoc. Id. 14.58–9). In the royal panegyric that follows, Thyonichus casts Alexandria as a figurative object of desire and Ptolemy as a figurative lover wooing a beloved: like a beloved urged to answer his lover’s enamoured pleas before he has lost his youthful attractiveness, Aeschines is encouraged to become Ptolemy’s mercenary before his hair grows grey (Theoc. Id. 14.68–70).⁷⁷ But according to Thyonichus, being employed by Ptolemy is superior to being in love, because, unlike a lover, Ptolemy can always be trusted to reward one’s loyalty: not only is the king described as ἐρωτικός (61)—a clear indication that he will not allow his subjects to slide into the state of erotic frustration to which Aeschines is reduced in his home country—, but he is also said to pay everyone their due, always returning the affections of those who love him (cf. 62 εἰδὼς τὸν φιλέοντα). As a result, the Alexandria of Idyll 14 not only resembles the bucolic landscapes of Idylls 1, 4, 5, and 6 in being a site of material presence, satisfaction, and reciprocity but also fulfils the same function as poetry does in Idyll 11—as the best possible remedy against unrequited love. My contention in the rest of this chapter is that in Idyll 15, too, the ideal world of Alexandria is constructed on the same principles as the ideal world of bucolic poetry. In Idyll 15, the erotic frustration, displacement, and material need of Idyll 14 give way to the stability and prosperity of a married life that two men from Syracuse enjoy in Alexandria. The men of Idyll 15 have already accomplished what Thyonichus encourages Aeschines to do in Idyll 14: they have put themselves in the service of Ptolemy and, as John Whitehorne explains, have as a consequence become “members of the new Greek elite of Ptolemaic Egypt who can well afford to buy (cf. 8 ἔλαβ᾿) a new house in the executive suburbs being developed on the edge of the expanding city to accommodate this important and newly wealthy professional class.”⁷⁸ Since Idyll 15 is a “female mime,” the two men remain offstage.⁷⁹ But the female perspective offered in the poem unequivocally demonstrates that the promise by which Thyonichus entices Aeschines to move to Alexandria in Idyll 14 has been thoroughly fulfilled for these two Syracusan immigrants.

⁷⁷ e.g. Ibycus 286; Alcaeus 38a; Anacreon, fr. 395; Mimnermus, fr. 1; and Theognis, Book 2 (Theognidea), esp. 1299–1304, 1319–22, and 1327–8: Dover 1978, 57–9; Calame 1992, 13–38; Stehle 2009, 66–71. On this motif in Hellenistic sympotic epigram, see Sens 2016. ⁷⁸ Whitehorne 1995, 67. ⁷⁹ On the differentiation between male and female mimes in Sophron, see Hordern 2004, 4–10. On Idylls 14 and 15 as a pair echoing Sophron’s gender specific mimes, see Griffiths 1979, 109. See also Hunter 1996, 118–19; Pausch 2011, 29.

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222  :   - Idyll 15 features two female friends, Gorgo and Praxinoa, who walk together from Praxinoa’s house to the royal palace to attend a festival of Adonis celebrated there by the queen Arsinoe. Typically of the mime genre, the conversation between the two women revolves around trivial topics—children, husbands, housework, shopping, and fashion (Theoc. Id. 15.11–38). The dialogue is dominated by their attempts to outdo each other in complaining about their husbands. Praxinoa calls her husband a dim-witted spiteful brute (8–10 πάραρος . . . φθονερὸν κακόν), who has bought not a house but a “lair” (11 ἰλεόν) “at the edge of the earth” (9 ἐπ᾿ ἔσχατα γᾶς) and who just the other day mistook salt (17 ἅλας) for a bleaching agent and a textile dye, which she had sent him to the marketplace to buy for her weaving (16 νίτρον καὶ φῦκος).⁸⁰ Gorgo counters by criticizing her husband’s deficient shopping skills too: just the other day she sent him to the marketplace to buy some wool, and he squandered a fortune (cf. 18 φθόρος ἀργυρίω) on substandard stuff, which she had to spend hours cleaning in order to turn it into something she could use (19–20).⁸¹ The women’s bickering should not blind us to the fact that it allows them to brag about the lives of extraordinary comfort and prosperity that, thanks to their husbands, they are now leading in Alexandria: Praxinoa’s description of her beautiful house as a “lair” is doubtless nothing but a “boastful understatement,”⁸² and the fact that she stresses her husband’s inability to see the difference between expensive salt and cheap soda clearly serves to underscore the family’s prosperity⁸³—as does Gorgo’s emphasis on the fact that her husband failed to notice that he had paid too much for the wool that she calls mediocre but that she has nevertheless managed to turn into a superior fabric. This impression is confirmed by the subsequent exchange in which Gorgo learns that the amount of money that Praxinoa has spent on the beautiful dress she is wearing by far exceeds what Gorgo has just described as an exorbitant price—two minae vs seven drachmae (34–5).⁸⁴ The women’s complaints emphasize not only the prosperity of their families but also the undivided authority that the traditional division of gender roles allows them to enjoy within their own households. Gorgo and Praxinoa take it for granted that, while their husbands provide for a comfortable lifestyle, they themselves give birth, weave, and cook (cf. 148 πεινᾶντι δὲ μηδὲ ποτένθῃς: “don’t come near him when he is hungry!”). But they also take it for granted ⁸⁰ ⁸² ⁸³ ⁸⁴

Whitehorne 1995, 64–6 and 68–9. ⁸¹ For the calculation, see Whitehorne 1995, 67–8. Whitehorne 1995, 67. For a comparison between salt and soda prices in third-century Egypt, see Whitehorne 1995, 68. Whitehorne 1995, 69–70.

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that they can order their husbands around, sending them to the marketplace to purchase raw materials for their quintessentially female work. As a result, their mock discontents reveal the extent to which they are in fact satisfied with the order and dependability guaranteed by their marriages.⁸⁵ In Idyll 15, marriage is more than a source of personal contentment: it is a formative principle that accounts for the sense of social cohesion in the city as a whole. The rulers of Alexandria are after all a married couple, and Theocritus goes out of his way to emphasize that their joint rule guarantees the sense of cultural belonging to all Greek inhabitants, men and women alike. Ptolemy fulfils the typically male task of securing law and order—protecting his subjects from foreign enemies, resident Egyptians, and xenophobic fellow Greeks—, but in the poem it is women who are singled out as the main beneficiaries of his policies (see esp. 46–8 and 94–5): the presence of the king’s military horses (51–1 τοὶ πολεμισταὶ / ἵπποι τῶ βασιλῆος) confirms the unparalleled safety that, according to Praxinoa, every Greek woman can enjoy on the streets of Alexandria without fearing to be harassed by the abominable locals (46–55),⁸⁶ and when a Greek man standing next to the women at the royal palace complains about their chattering in an unpleasantly sounding variety of the Doric dialect (87–8), Praxinoa silences him by retorting that the only man in Alexandria who is allowed to order them around— them, Syracusans proud of their Corinthian descent and their Peloponnesian language!—is the king Ptolemy himself (95 πλὴν ἑνός).⁸⁷ It is thus to Ptolemy that the women owe their extraordinary life in a culturally diverse microcosm of the Greek world where “the edge of the earth” (cf. 8–9 ἐπ᾿ ἔσχατα γᾶς) is conveniently located within walking distance from the centre of political power, where all Greek immigrants are actively encouraged to maintain their national pride and cultural identity, and where, by making an unprompted reference to the Trojan War (62 ἐς Τροίαν πειρώμενοι ἦνθον Ἀχαιοί), “oracular” (63 χρησμώς) yet immediately understandable to any person of Greek culture, a perfect stranger reminds Gorgo and Praxinoa that ⁸⁵ The disparagement of the two women’s marriages widespread among the scholars (e.g. Griffiths 1981, 253–4 and 257, who sees in it “warfare conducted by other means,” “battle of the sexes,” “battlefield,” and “struggles for domination”; see also Hunter 1996, 117, who speaks of the “lovelessness” of their marriages) betrays a romantic bias that does little justice to Theocritus’ pragmatic view of marriage as a stable arrangement conducive to procreation, physical satisfaction, and material prosperity—an arrangement designed to eliminate the sense of lack and displacement associated with being in love in Idyll 14 (as well as in Idyll 2—Theocritus’ third “urban mime”). ⁸⁶ On the encomiastic purport of this passage, see Goldhill 1991, 274–5; Burton 1995, 129–30. ⁸⁷ Gow 1952, ad loc.; Burton 1995, 56–62. On the linguistic aspect of this altercation (with both participants speaking what, to us, looks like the same version of literary Doric that Theocritus uses elsewhere), see Willi 2012.

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224  :   - they belong to the virtual community of Greek women, who understand each other on an intuitive level because they “know everything—even how Zeus married Hera” (64 πάντα γυναῖκες ἴσαντι, καὶ ὡς Ζεὺς ἀγάγεθ᾿ Ἥραν).⁸⁸ The image of Ptolemaic Alexandria constructed in Idyll 15 is thus identical with Callimachus’ portrayal of the city in the Aetia as an ideal Panhellenic metropolis—a microcosm of the Greek world where all Greek immigrants can enjoy a harmonious coexistence while retaining a sense of their own local cultural identity. In Chapter 5, I argued that the modified version of the Athenian festival of Anthesteria celebrated by Pollis in Callimachus’ fr. 178 Pf. can be viewed as a quintessential manifestation of the new Panhellenic culture taking shape in Alexandria. As I would like to show now, Theocritus’ Idyll 15, too, casts an innovative recreation of an old Greek festival as an arena of merging the culturally diverse Greek population of Alexandria into a new Panhellenic society. The Adonis festival celebrated by Arsinoe at the royal palace crucially contributes to making Gorgo and Praxinoa feel culturally at home in their adoptive country as well as to transforming them into loyal subjects of the Ptolemaic state. As behoves a Greek woman, Arsinoe takes care of the domestic task of celebrating the traditionally female festival of Adonis in what, despite its palatial opulence, is the royal couple’s private home (22–4).⁸⁹ But by welcoming Alexandria’s entire Greek population (not only women but also men) to attend the festival, the queen transforms this domestic celebration into a crucial vehicle of royal ideology designed to strengthen the sense of social cohesion within the city as a whole.⁹⁰ The best way to understand the Adonis festival as it was traditionally celebrated in archaic and classical Greece would perhaps be to see it as a culturally sanctioned occasion that allowed ordinary women to imagine themselves in the role of the goddess of love actively desiring a sexually attractive, non-procreative young beloved—the intensity and the ephemeralness of this vicariously experienced longing forming a marked contrast to the dull daily routine of being a wife and a mother.⁹¹ Rather than being an integral part of the official polis religion, the Adonis festival was celebrated in the archaic and classical periods by private groups of women on the roofs of their own houses.⁹² The status of the Adonis cult as a celebration of female eroticism finds its clearest expression in the figure of Eros that regularly accompanies ⁸⁸ Cf. Burton 1995, 15–18. ⁸⁹ Reed 2000, 320. ⁹⁰ Cf. Burton 1995, 144–54. ⁹¹ Cf. Vernant 1980, 130–67; Griffiths 1981, 254–5; Burton 1995, 116–18. ⁹² For the Adonis myth and the Adonis festival in Greek culture in general, see Baudy 1986; Detienne 1994; Winkler 1990, 188–93; Reitzammer 2016.

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representations of women on the Attic vases depicting the festival.⁹³ The short life of Aphrodite’s young beloved was symbolically represented by the socalled Adonis gardens—fast germinating plants exposed on the housetops in pottery shards and quickly withering in the summer heat. Taking down the dry plants, the celebrants bewailed the death of Adonis as they performed loud ritual dirges in imitation of Aphrodite’s laments.⁹⁴ When in Theocritus’ poem the Adonis festival is celebrated at the Ptolemaic palace, it changes beyond recognition.⁹⁵ While the traditional Adonis festival culminated in a ritualized enactment of the emotional turmoil induced by the erotic longing for an attainable object of desire, there is nothing emotionally unsettling about Arsinoe’s version of the celebration. Granted, it is announced in the poem that the ritual lament for Adonis is to take place on the following day (132–5). But what Gorgo and Praxinoa see at the royal palace during their visit is not an uninhibited display of grief caused by Adonis’ demise but static sculptures of Adonis and Aphrodite frozen in a decorous embrace and surrounded by all manner of other artefacts skilfully wrought from durable precious materials (gold, ebony, and ivory)—even the proverbially transient Adonis gardens sprouting not from pottery shards but from silver baskets (Theoc. Id. 15.112–27).⁹⁶ Likewise, the hymn performed by the “Argive woman’s daughter,” from which we learn all these details, goes out of its way to stress the static nature of the celebration. In marked contrast to the majority of the extant Greek cultic hymns, which tend to foreground the emotionally intense anticipation of divine epiphany,⁹⁷ this hymn describes divine figures that have already displayed themselves to the worshippers and that can now be passively admired by those gathered at the royal palace.⁹⁸ Thus, the original cult’s ecstatic longing for the absent is replaced at the Ptolemaic palace with an awe-inspiring sense of wonder elicited by stunning material artefacts. The static image of Aphrodite embracing Adonis contributes to figuring Arsinoe’s celebration almost as a kind of wedding between Adonis and Aphrodite (cf. Theoc. Id. 15.129 γαμβρός, 131 τὸν αὑτῆς . . . ἄνδρα)—as a promise of the erotically ⁹³ On the representations of the Adonis festival in Attic pottery, see Reitzammer 2016, 30–59 and 123–45 (plates). Cf. Winkler 1990, 191. ⁹⁴ Reitzammer 2016,18–26. ⁹⁵ Reed 2000, 324–34. ⁹⁶ Reed 2000, 321–2. On the pervasive emphasis on materiality in the hymn, see Krevans 2006, 135–6. ⁹⁷ Furley—Bremer 2001, 1–40; Petrovic 2007, 142–81; Platt 2012, esp. 50–72. ⁹⁸ The ekphrastic staticity of the hymn accounts for the unflattering comments on it in modern scholarship, e.g. Dover 1971, 210. Cf. Goldhill 1994, 220–1; Lambert 2001, 93–101. For less disparaging assessments, see Zanker 1987, 13; Hutchinson 1988, 150; Burton 1995, 134–46; Davies 1995; Hunter 1996, 123–38; Männlein-Robert 2007, 291–300.

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226  :   - fulfilling stability of marriage (even if this stability consists in a never-ending cycle of yearly “conjugal visits”) rather than an insatiable longing for an everelusive young beloved.⁹⁹ What Arsinoe advertises as a celebration of Adonis is in fact nothing but a traditional façade that makes more palatable to the worshippers the religious innovations of the royal cult that promotes the divine aspirations of the royal family itself: not only is the lavish enactment of the reunion between Aphrodite and her beloved revealed to be a tribute that Arsinoe pays the goddess for deifying her own mother, the queen Berenice (106–111),¹⁰⁰ but the regularly recurring return of Adonis from the underworld, contrasted with numerous epic heroes whose death is non-negotiable and final (Theoc. Id. 15.136–42),¹⁰¹ is also introduced as an authoritative mythical model for any mortal seeking to attain immortality.¹⁰² The fact that the Ptolemaic royal cult hijacks a pre-existing private festival constitutes a highly subtle (and therefore highly efficient) ideological mechanism—a mechanism whereby official ideology insinuates itself into the very core of the individual subjectivities of the subjects of the Ptolemaic state by parasitically grafting itself onto something that already possesses a profound emotional significance for them. The reason why Gorgo and Praxinoa go to the royal palace in the first place is to see a superior version of what they, like many generations of Greek women before them, are used to regarding as a matter of personal importance. Granted, they describe Arsinoe’s Adonis festival as a “pretty thing” (23 χρῆμα καλόν τι) that the queen has arranged at the palace of the “wealthy king” (22 βασιλῆος ἐς ἀφνειῶ) and, once at the palace, they admire the stunning opulence of the display (80–6) and the no less stunning skill of the female hymnist (145–6). But at the same time, what they see is still very much the same good old Adonis of the traditional private cult: they are happy to greet “thrice-loved Adonis, loved even in death” and declare that they will be as happy to greet “beloved Adon” again, come next year (149). Despite his royal glitter, this Adonis continues to function for Gorgo and Praxinoa as a surrogate object of the Greek women’s impossible collective love for a handsome young beloved. And it is precisely their confrontation with the royal equivalent of what Greek ⁹⁹ Reed 2000, 320, on γαμβρός as an echo of Sappho’s epithalamia. Detienne 1994 analyses the Adonis festival as a symbol of anti-marriage (cf. Winkler 1990, 188–209), which it may very well have been in its original context, but not at Arsinoe’s palace. Some scholars assume that the statue represents dead Adonis: e.g. Griffiths 1981, 249. This does not seem to be the case either. The death of Adonis is to be bewailed on the next day. Today, it is all about celebrating Adonis’s life—and it’s a married life: Hunter 1996, 129–30; Reed 2000, 323. ¹⁰⁰ Reed 2000. Cf. Griffiths 1979, 82–4; Hutchinson 1988, 151; Foster 2006; Hunt 2011. ¹⁰¹ Burton 1995, 139–40. ¹⁰² Griffiths 1979, 65; Hunter 1996, 131–8; Reed 2000, 334–8.

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women have for centuries cherished in private that gradually transforms Gorgo and Praxinoa, unbeknownst to themselves, from enthusiastic devotees of Adonis into loyal worshippers of the royal cult. What Theocritus’ Adonis festival dramatizes is thus the process of merging the individual and the state—a process that consists in injecting state ideology into the most private recesses of individual subjectivity, into a place traditionally reserved for “love.” In contrast to Plato’s Phaedrus where the proverbially short-lived Adonis gardens function as a metaphor for the ephemeralness of writing, which disappears without leaving any trace on the reader’s soul (Pl. Phdr. 276b1–277a4), Theocritus’ Adonis can be regarded as a symbol of state ideology effectively “rewriting” the “souls” of the state’s subjects. The manner in which Theocritus frames the visual display that the two women see at the palace confirms that impression. Since Gorgo and Praxinoa attend a festival of Adonis, it has often been assumed that the tapestry that they see when they first enter the palace must represent Adonis too.¹⁰³ But the text does not support that assumption. Gorgo describes the tapestry as multi-coloured, fine, and pretty (Theocr. 15.78–9 τὰ ποίκιλα πρᾶτον ἄθρησον, / λεπτὰ καὶ ὡς χαρίεντα).¹⁰⁴ Praxinoa follows the cue and goes on to praise the precision (79 τἀκριβέα γράμματ᾿) and the “cleverness” (83 σοφόν τι χρῆμ᾿ ἄνθρωπος) of the artists (81 ζωογράφοι) who wove into this tapestry multiple figures—some static, others in movement (82 ἑστάκαντι, ἐνδινεῦντι)—, which look as if they were alive rather than woven (83 ἔμψυχ᾿, οὐκ ἐνυφαντά).¹⁰⁵ She does not specify who those figures are or what they look like. It is only after admiring the tapestry that Praxinoa notices Adonis, detached in the text from the preceding description by a disjunctive δέ (84 αὐτὸς δ᾿). This Adonis is unlikely to be one of the woven figures previously mentioned by Praxinoa: that he is said to be lying on a silver couch (84–5 ἐπ᾿ ἀργυρέας κατάκειται / κλισμῶ) suggests instead an image of a cult statue.¹⁰⁶ There is furthermore no indication in the text that this reclining statue is different from the statue of Adonis lying next to Aphrodite (128 τὸν μέν Κύπρις ἔχει, τὰν δ᾿ ὁ ῥοδόπαχυς Ἄδωνις)—the statue that, according to the hymn, the lamenting women will carry to the seashore on the next day

¹⁰³ e.g. Gow 1952, 265; Burton 1995, 98. ¹⁰⁴ Gelzer 1985; Burton 1995, 102–4. ¹⁰⁵ See Skinner 2001, 214–16, who reads “the female viewer” in Theocritus 15 as “a surrogate for the trained reader.” ¹⁰⁶ Gow’s objection (1952, ad loc.) that Praxinoa cannot be talking about the Adonis statue here, because otherwise we would “be left with little indication of what the tapestries represented” seems to me to miss the point.

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228  :   - (133 οἰσεῦμες ποτὶ κύματ᾿ ).¹⁰⁷ Tellingly, the bed on which the statues of Adonis and Aphrodite are reclining is covered with a purple tapestry (125 πορφύρεοι δὲ τάπητες and 127 ἔστρωται κλίνα τὠδώνιδι τῷ καλῷ ἄμμιν). Apart from its colour, there is nothing that we learn about this tapestry from the hymn, for, like Praxinoa, the hymnist does not specify what is depicted on it.¹⁰⁸ The absence of a more detailed description suggests that the tapestry constitutes but one of the numerous marginal details that surround the cult image itself (cf. 112–27). Most importantly, the text gives us no reason to assume that the tapestry mentioned in the hymn is different from the one that Gorgo and Praxinoa admire when they enter the palace. Thus, Praxinoa’s comments and the hymnist’s description are fully compatible with each other in that they both conjure up a composite image of a statue of Adonis, a couch, and a tapestry. If we assume that the women comment on the same visual display as the one described in the hymn (and this is indeed the most economical reading of the data provided by the text), the obvious discrepancy between the two descriptions will reveal something crucial both about the two women’s subjectivities and about the ideological mechanism whereby the royal cult manipulates those subjectivities. There is no doubt that the hymn conveys an officially sanctioned mode of viewing, which it encourages the worshippers to adopt. Since the celebration is an act of thanksgiving to Aphrodite for deifying the queen Berenice, it is hardly surprising that the hymn begins with the image of Aphrodite herself (100–1 δέσποιν᾿ . . . Ἀφροδίτα). It is only then that the text mentions that Aphrodite is represented as reunited with Adonis after a twelve-month-long separation (102–3 τὸν Ἀδωνιν . . . μηνὶ δυωδεκάτῳ . . . ). The hymn’s focus is thus entirely on the central cult image, and after explaining the intimate link between the divine couple and the royal family (106–11) and after casting a ¹⁰⁷ Pace Gow 1952, ad loc.: “Praxinoa’s allusion to Adonis’ death [cf. 86 ὁ κἠν Ἀχέροντι φιληθείς] seems out of place if she is now looking at a tableau of his union with Aphrodite.” But Praxinoa’s words do not have to indicate that she is looking at an image of dead Adonis: “loved even in death” is what Adonis is always in cult. Praxinoa’s description of the Adonis image that she sees as a youth “with the first down spreading from the temples” (85 πρᾶτον ἴουλον ἀπὸ κροτάφων καταβάλλων) corresponds exactly to the hymnist’s description: 130 οὐ κεντεῖ τὸ φίλημ᾿ ἔτι οἱ περὶ χείλεα πυρρά. Cf. Schwinge 1986, 57. In his comment on line 128, Gow observes that “in the tableau sketched by the singer, Adonis is placed not on a silver κλισμός but on a κλίνη of which ebony, gold, and ivory are the conspicuous constituents.” But there is no compelling reason to assume that the κλισμός and the κλίνη (both meaning “couch”) refer to two different objects. Since the paratactic catalogue of precious materials at 123–4 (ebony, gold, ivory) is clearly designed not to enable the readers to visualize the exact arrangement of the tableau but to enhance the viewers’ astonishment at the overwhelming opulence of the visual display that they can clearly see with their own eyes, there is no reason to postulate that that catalogue refers to the decorations of the κλίνη rather than to the multiplicity of other objects that surround the cult image. ¹⁰⁸ Manakidou 1993, 83–91; Burton 1995, 137–44.

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cursory glance at the periphery of the visual display (the gifts offered to Adonis), the singer returns to that central image again, this time describing in more detail the statues lying on a couch covered with a tapestry (112–35). The way Gorgo and Praxinoa view the same visual image when they enter the palace is radically different from the hymn’s ideologically charged perspective with which they are not yet familiar: the first thing that they see is the tapestry; then they notice Adonis (84–6); they do not mention Aphrodite at all (their awareness of her presence can only be indirectly surmised from Praxinoa’s remark that Adonis remains “loved even in death,” 86 ὁ κἠν Ἀχέροντι φιληθείς). It has often been assumed that Theocritus’ representation of the women’s reaction to the artworks is meant to be a ridicule of the narrow-mindedness of suburban housewives.¹⁰⁹ But what Theocritus’ staging of the women’s subjective gaze reveals is not the embarrassingly banal sentiment ascribed to him by the (predominantly male) modern scholars—i.e. a sophisticated intellectual’s condescension towards uneducated women—but a simple, yet profound, insight crucial to the ideological rationale of the poem as a whole. This scene illustrates a fundamental mechanism of human cognition whereby new meaning can only be constructed on the basis of the experiences that one has made in the past: when confronted with something one has never seen before, one begins by picking out elements that look familiar or that at least partly accord to the expectations that one has already formed in the past.¹¹⁰ The reason why the women fail to comment on the statue of Aphrodite, who, according to the hymn, is the divinity honoured by Arsinoe, is probably due to the simple fact that what they have come to see is not Aphrodite but Adonis (24 θασόμεναι τὸν Ἄδωνιν)—a royal incarnation of Adonis perhaps, but still the same good old Adonis whom they are used to perceiving as a surrogate object of desire that allows them to imagine for a moment what it feels like to be Aphrodite. An epiphanic statue of Aphrodite kissing their “thrice-beloved Adonis” does not belong to their horizon of expectations and, for that reason, remains at the periphery of their vision. What the text makes more explicit than the reason for the women’s disregard of Aphrodite is why the first thing that they see at the royal palace is not the stunning display of gold, ebony, and ivory, but a piece of weaving, which occupies a relatively subordinate position within the composition of the festive décor. Not only is weaving the activity that Gorgo and Praxinoa, like all other

¹⁰⁹ Zanker 1987, 10; Lambert 2001, with references. ¹¹⁰ Cf. Douglas 1966, 36–50, esp. 46: “We share with other animals a kind of filtering mechanism which at first only lets in sensations we know how to use.”

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230  :   - Greek women, practice day in and day out, but wool-work and weaving also constitute the main topic of their conversation in the first scene of the mime (Theocr. Id. 15.19–20, 34–8).¹¹¹ As their reactions to Arsinoe’s Adonis festival as a whole reproduce the cultural responses that they have inherited from the traditional private festival, so it is hardly surprising that the first thing that catches their attention is something familiar and that, to describe the royal tapestry, Gorgo uses a term almost identical to the one she used to express her admiration for Praxinoa’s dress (cf. Theocr. Id. 15.34 ἐμπερόναμα and 79 θεῶν περονάματα φασεῖς  “a dress that gods would want to wear”).¹¹² The women’s perception is thus presented in the poem as self-evidently subjective: the reason why the first thing that they see is a piece of weaving is simply that they are weavers themselves. There is no doubt that other viewers would have seen the same cult image in different ways. In fact, Gorgo’s and Praxinoa’s is not the only subjective perspective that the poem makes available to its readers: by mentioning, as part of the festive décor, images redolent of Greek homoerotic poetry (Erotes flying from bough to bough and eagles carrying Ganymede to Zeus) and then by describing Adonis as an archetypal adolescent eromenos (128–31, esp. 129–30 ὀκτωκαιδεκετὴς ἢ ἐννεακαίδεχ᾿ ὁ γαμβρός / οὐ κεντεῖ τὸ φίλημ᾿ ),¹¹³ Theocritus leaves little doubt as to the general manner in which another category of viewers—male boy-lovers, the target audience of Theocritus’ erotic poetry—would perceive the same visual display.¹¹⁴ This mode of viewing would certainly be no less divergent from the “official” mode propounded by the hymn. But Theocritus’ poem reveals that what matters for the proper functioning of royal ideology is not that all subjects of the Ptolemaic state view the same cult image in the same way but that different categories of viewers—from the practical-minded housewives to the dreamy male readers of erotic poetry—recognize something of themselves in the images of the royal cult. For it is precisely this joy of “self-recognition,” Theocritus seems to suggest, that guarantees that different groups of Alexandria’s diverse Greek population can enjoy the illusion of autonomy and freedom while, at the same time, acting as a harmonious unity orchestrated by the royal couple. The fact that the women’s reaction to the officially sanctioned hymn (145 σοφώτατον ἁ θήλεια) echoes their spontaneous reaction ¹¹¹ Goldhill 1994, 217; Burton 1995, 102–3; Whitehorne 1995. ¹¹² Burton 1995, 104–5; Whitehorne 1995, 70–2; Skinner 2001, 214–16; Krevans 2006, 142. ¹¹³ Burton 1995, 83–92. Cf. Theoc. Id. 15.120–2 and Id. 29.14–15. ¹¹⁴ See esp. Theocritus’ Aeolic paidika, Idd. 29–30 as well as Idd. 12 and 13. On Theocritus’ paidika as a creative development of the original Aeolic tradition, see Hunter 1996, 171–86. See also AcostaHughes 2006, 25–8 and 2010, 110–13. On Id. 12, see Payne 2007, 100–13. On Id. 13, see Heerink 2015, 53–82.

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to the tapestry (83 σοφόν τι χρῆμ᾿ ἄνθρωπος) serves to demonstrate the effectiveness of this ideological mechanism. One of the reasons why the subjective perspective from which Theocritus chose to portray the Adonis festival in Idyll 15 is that of female weavers is doubtless the unique encomiastic potential of that perspective: by creating a tight nexus between the Adonis festival and the art of weaving Theocritus conjures up an image of a utopian society that would have been familiar to his educated readers. It is surely not a coincidence that the transmitted title of Idyll 15, Adoniazousai (Women at the Adonis Festival), is identical with the alternative title that the scholia attest (and reject) for Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (Σ Ar. Ly. 389 τινὲς δὲ ἐκ τούτου τὸ δρᾶμα Ἀδωνιαζούσας ἐπιγράφουσιν οὐ καλῶς)—a comedy that, like Idyll 15, combines a reference to the Adonis cult with a politically charged image of a tapestry. When an Athenian magistrate confronts the rebellious women, who have occupied the Acropolis to protest their husbands’ never-ending military engagement, the spectacle reminds him of the Adonis lament that was sung by the wife of the orator who, at that very moment, was delivering a speech in favour of deploying the Athenian fleet in Sicily (Ar. Ly. 391–6).¹¹⁵ By presenting Lysistrata’s feminist revolution as a figurative Adonis festival celebrated on the Acropolis, the figurative roof of the city,¹¹⁶ the magistrate effectively captures the conceptual essence of Lysistrata’s utopian vision of an ideal society as a gigantic household ruled over by women.¹¹⁷ In a later passage, Lysistrata explains the difference between this ideal society and the existing social order by conjuring up another characteristically female image—a metaphorical tapestry, into which the best people, regardless of their ethnic origins, are “woven” by the rulers in the same way as women process wool by separating it from dirt and then turning it into a beautiful fabric (Ar. Ly. 574–85). In the context of Athenian democratic politics, Lysistrata’s proposal to replace male institutions with the “woven” harmony of a household can only be understood as striving for tyranny—an attempt that the Athenian men have to prevent by all means (Ar. Ly. 630 ἀλλὰ ταῦθ᾿ ὑφῆναν ἡμῖν, ὦνδρες, ἐπὶ τυραννίδι). But by the end of the play, this dangerous proposal is simply forgotten.¹¹⁸ Instead, the success of the sex strike is framed as a typically Aristophanic victory of physiology over ideology: deprived of sex and made unfit for fighting by their permanent erections, men drop their weapons, ¹¹⁵ Reitzammer 2016, 60–89. ¹¹⁶ Reitzammer 2016, 70–6. Cf. Loraux 1993, 148. ¹¹⁷ Reitzammer 2016, 60–89. ¹¹⁸ On the restoration of male domination at the end of Lysistrata, see Bowie 1993, 191. Cf. Konstan 1995, 53.

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232  :   - conclude a universal peace treaty, and enjoy excessive eating and drinking, which anticipates the sexual pleasures that now await each couple in the privacy of their homes (Ar. Ly. 1225–1320). Rather than a forcibly harmonized society, the alternative that the Lysistrata offers in the end to democratic politics consists, as in the majority of Aristophanes’ other plays, in a private life resistant to any form of collective culture and concerned exclusively with the satisfaction of individual physiological needs. Theocritus’ Alexandria can be seen as a partial realization of the utopian vision that remains unfulfilled in Aristophanes. Like Aristophanes’ metaphorical Adonia, Theocritus’ “real” Adonia is a public version of the originally private festival, which takes place at the very heart of political power—at the royal palace, Alexandria’s equivalent of the Athenian Acropolis. As in the Lysistrata, the Adonis festival in Idyll 15 is a symbol of a harmonious society in which women have an important say. But unlike Aristophanes’ utopian projects (not only the one imagined in the Lysistrata but also the one implemented on stage in Assemblywomen), this is not a society in which women have an exclusive say. The person who celebrates the Adonis festival in Theocritus is after all not an idealistic revolutionary dreaming in vain of overturning male domination but a queen who acts in the interest of the absolute royal power that she shares with her husband. The incorporation of what in Aristophanes’ Athens is marked as an archetypal symbol of female subversion into the very heart of state ideology casts Alexandria as a place where, Theocritus seems to suggest, it would make no sense for women like Gorgo and Praxinoa (or for anyone else for that matter) to rebel against the existing order: for what is there to rebel against in a place where the worst trouble that a woman can possibly experience is seeing her absent-minded, but otherwise perfectly compliant, husband buy inferior wool or salt instead of soda (Theoc. Id. 15.15–20)? Theocritus is not the only contemporary poet who uses the mime genre to construct an image of Alexandria as an ideal place. In Herondas’ Mimiamb 1, too, Alexandria is both a Callimachean “city of the Muses” (Herond. Mim. 1.31 Μουσῇον), where intellectuals (29 φιλόσοφοι) work under the tutelage of quasi-divine monarchs (30 θεῶν ἀδελφῶν τέμενος, ὀ βασιλεὺς χρηστός), and a Theocritean metropolis that promises material (28, 29 πλοῦτος, χρυσίον), emotional (28, 31 παλαίστρη, εὐδίη, δόξα, οἶνος), and erotic (29, 32 νεηνίσκοι, γυναῖκες) fulfilment to every Greek immigrant. The fact that Herondas enumerates all these things in a perfectly random order creates the impression that the list of the city’s attractions could go on forever (cf. 31 ἀγαθὰ πάντ᾿ ὄσ᾿ ἂν

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χρῄζῃ).¹¹⁹ Despite these obvious similarities, Herondas’ image of Alexandria can be seen as a contrastive foil that throws into sharp relief the subtle ideological programme implemented by Theocritus’ in Idyll 15. The worlds of Herondas’ Mimiambs are completely reduced to the physically tangible, providing a cogent illustration of the famous definition of the mime genre as an “imitation of life that comprises both allowed and forbidden things” (Diomedes, Gram. Lat. I 491, 15f. Keil μῖμός ἐστι μίμησις βίου τά τε συγκεχωρημένα καὶ ἀσυγχώρητα περιέχων).¹²⁰ The speaker of Mimiamb 1 is a bibulous old woman who attempts to talk an attractive housewife into an affair with a wealthy suitor.¹²¹ The speaker of Mimiamb 2 is a brothel-keeper demanding material compensation for his stolen property—a prostitute abducted by one of his clients.¹²² In Mimiamb 3, a mother asks a grammar teacher to beat her lazy son in order to make him respect the Muses.¹²³ In Mimiamb 6, the entire female population of the city is portrayed as obsessed with an exceptionally fine leather dildo.¹²⁴ In Mimiamb 7, a group of women visit the dildo-producing shoemaker’s shop.¹²⁵ And the protagonist of Mimiamb 5 punishes her sex-slave for unfaithfulness, treating his body as an accidental appendage to what does not very much differ from a leather dildo, which she, unlike the protagonist of Mimiamb 6, is reluctant to share with others.¹²⁶ Finally, in Mimiamb 4, Herondas offers a metaliterary reflection on the function of his mimes as a means of mimicking absent material presences.¹²⁷ The impossibility to tell apart statues from living creatures leads one of the mime’s characters to surmise that, one day, men will be able to “put life into stone” (33–34 μᾶ, χρόνῳ κοτ᾿ ὤνθρωποι / κἠς τοὺς λίθους ἕξουσι τὴν ζοὴν θεῖναι).¹²⁸ And when another character is suddenly so dumbstruck by the lifelikeness of the static images around her that she herself freezes into the ¹¹⁹ Simon 1991, 52–7; Burton 1995, 20–1; Zanker 2009, 36–9. ¹²⁰ On the possibility that this definition may in fact do back to Theophrastus, see Zanker 1987, 144–5; Hunter 1996, 118. See also Gianotti 1996; Panayotakis 2014. ¹²¹ There is nothing in the text to support the widespread assumption that Metriche as a hetaera (e.g. Cunningham 1971, 57; Hutchinson 1988, 254–6; Zanker 2009, 20; Esposito 2010, 273): Konstan 1994, 166; Burton 1995, 20. ¹²² Zanker, 1987, 158–60; Hutchinson 1988, 242–3; Simon 1991, 83–93; Burton 1995, 22–4. ¹²³ Hutchinson 1988, 248–50; Simon 1991, 93–9; Burton 1995, 75–7. ¹²⁴ Hutchinson 1988, 252–4; Simon 1991, 40–4. On parallels in Old Comedy and elsewhere, see Di Grigorio 2004, 130–1; Zanker 2009, 167–8. On Herondas’ misogyny, see Skinner 2001. ¹²⁵ Di Grigorio 2004, 279–80; Zanker 2009, 214–17. On the close connection between the two mimes, see also Kutzko 2006. See also Simon 1991, 102–11. ¹²⁶ Cf. Konstan 1989; Di Grigorio 2004, 60–6. ¹²⁷ See e.g. Cunningham 1971, 128; Gelzer 1985; Manakidou 1993, 18–39; Goldhill 1994; Burton 1995, 99–102; Di Gregorio 1997, 257–8; Tanner 2006, 231; Ypsilanti 2006, 411–18; Männlein-Robert 2007, 264–82. ¹²⁸ On parallels with Hellenistic epigrams (esp. the cycle on Myron’s cow), see Zanker 1987, 39–54; Gutzwiller 1998, 245–50; Squire 2010.

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234  :   - immobility of a stone statue (41–51, esp. 44 ἔστηκε), it becomes apparent that the only difference between the naturalistic statues and paintings on the one hand and the protagonists of Herondas’ mimes on the other is that the latter can (normally) walk and talk.¹²⁹ By drawing this connection, Herondas encourages his recipients to react to his mimes with the same joy of recognition with which the women of Mimiamb 4 look at lifelike sculptures and paintings.¹³⁰ The conversation between Gorgo and Praxinoa about the tapestry decorated with naturalistically woven figures in Theocritus’ Idyll 15 has often been compared to the discussion of art in Herondas’ Mimiamb 4.¹³¹ Although the similarities between these two scenes are undeniable, the differences are much more revealing. What the women admire in Mimiamb 4 are deceptively lifelike images of people just like themselves doing exactly what they are doing, i.e. sacrificing to Asclepius, and it is the joy of seeing what they take for exact replicas of their own reality (cf. Herond. Mim. 4.26–71) that the text presents as a crucial factor in perpetuating the ideological efficacy of the Asclepius cult.¹³² The fact that the artwork with which the women are so fascinated in Theocritus is neither a statue nor a painting but a tapestry is symptomatic of the difference between Herondas’ and Theocritus’ images of Alexandria as an ideal place. Although, like the women in Herondas’ Mimiamb 4, Theocritus’ women comment on the lifelikeness of the figures represented on the tapestry (83 ἔμψυχ᾿, οὐκ ἐνυφαντά), what fills them with a joy of recognition is not that they think they see an exact replica of the world they inhabit but that they encounter a superior product of the skill they practice—a product that, as I argued above, functions in the text as a reminiscence of Aristophanes’ ideologically charged symbol of a utopian society “woven” by the rulers into a metaphorical tapestry. What happens when Herondas inserts a place that literally possesses “everything that can possibly exist” (Herond. 1.26–7 τὰ γὰρ πάντα, / ὄσσ᾿ ἔστι κου καὶ γίνετ᾿, ἔστ᾿ ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ) into the hyperbolically material world of his Mimiambs is that Alexandria appears to differ from other Greek cities only in possessing an unlimited amount of things that may be in shorter supply elsewhere. Theocritus’ Alexandria, by contrast, is superior to the rest of the world not only in quantitative but also in qualitative terms. We may not know what exactly is represented on the tapestry admired by Gorgo ¹²⁹ Cf. Männlein-Robert 2006, 212–14 and 2007, 279–82. ¹³⁰ Krevans 2006, 124. Cf. Simon 1991, 61–6; Goldhill 1994, 222. ¹³¹ Simon 1991, 59–66; Goldhill 1994; Burton 1995, 96–108; Skinner 2001; Zanker 2009, 85–6; Krevans 2006, 120–6; Ypsilanti 2006; Männlein-Robert 2007, 261–89. ¹³² Zanker 1987, 42–4; Hutchinson 1988, 246–7.

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and Praxinoa. But we can see quite clearly what is represented on the figurative tapestry of Theocritus’ text: it is a schematic ideological construct of an ethnically and culturally heterogeneous Panhellenic society “woven” by the city’s rulers into a robust fabric within which everybody fulfils their own function and within which the royal couple guarantees that there can be no oppression of one group by another nor any antithesis between the individual and the state. The only reason why this tapestry-like society looks “real” is that it is populated by “realistic” characters like Gorgo and Praxinoa, who themselves look “alive, not woven” (cf. 83 ἔμψυχ᾿, οὐκ ἐνυφαντά)—who yell at their slaves, nag about their husbands, speak baby talk to their children, vainly brag about their dresses, are afraid of horses, push their way through a huge crowd as they attempt to get into the royal palace, imperiously silence an obnoxious hater of their Doric dialect, get all excited about pretty artworks and songs, and then hurry back home to cook lunch for their husbands.¹³³ As a result, just as Arsinoe’s Adonis festival as a whole grafts the royal cult onto a traditionally private religious custom, so the tapestry, too, emerges in Idyll 15 as an icon of the intricate interweaving between the ideology of the Ptolemaic state and the subjectivities of its subjects. I began this chapter by pointing out that Idyll 11 foregrounds the status of bucolic poetry as the most efficient remedy of unrequited love and proceeded to argue that Theocritus’ bucolic therapy of desire consists in offering the reader, especially in Idylls 1, 5, and 6, images of an ideal world in which any form of ineffectual desire for the absent has been securely banished into the realm of mimetic representation (such as Idyll 1’s lament for Daphnis) and replaced by a desire for aesthetic pleasure. My reading of the two “urban mimes” has shown not only that Alexandria, in Idyll 14, fulfils the same therapeutic function as poetry does in Idyll 11 but also that, in Idyll 15, the inhabitants of Alexandria lead a modified version of the happy life enjoyed by the bucolic herdsmen. Gorgo and Praxinoa live in an ideal city in which the very notion of longing for the absent has been eliminated by material prosperity and the stability of marriage and in which, as in Idyll 1, the emotional turmoil of lamenting the death of a handsome young man has been channelled into a beautiful song. Concomitantly, the women’s visit to the royal palace produces on them an effect similar to the one that Simichidas experiences in Idyll 7 when an encounter with Lycidas transports him into the domain of pure poetic form—a domain spontaneously created by songs that mirror each other in bucolic manner. By taking a walk to the royal palace, Gorgo and ¹³³ Cf. Hunter 1996, 116–23.

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236  :   - Praxinoa, too, experience their world as an embodiment of reciprocity, symmetry, and balance—this time not between two songs but between the Ptolemaic state and their own lives. Their private worlds consist of weaving, marriage, traditional female religiosity, Panhellenic culture, and pride in Dorian origins. What they discover on their trip to the royal palace are the best piece of weaving they have ever seen, a paradigm of harmonious marriage, a stunningly lavish celebration of a female festival, and a Panhellenic metropolis whose rulers protect the safety and foster the local cultural identities of all Greek immigrants. By creating an enhanced mirror image of their private world, Ptolemy and Arsinoe turn their subjects into willing participants in the ideological power structure over which they preside. And by taking pleasure in the fact that they can recognize themselves in the enhanced mirror image projected by the royal festival culture (cf. Theocr. Id. 15.149), the subjects of the Ptolemaic state contribute to the stability of that power structure. Thus, Theocritus uses the same conceptual structure to create the purest form of l’art pour l’art and to propagate ideology in its purest form. Theocritus’ two ideal realities could be seen as products of an imaginative transformation of what René Girard calls “mimetic desire” (rivalry for the possession of a desired object propelled by the imitation of other subjects’ desire for it)¹³⁴ into a shared pursuit of a delicate equilibrium formed by mutually mimetic constituent parts: just as, in the bucolic poems, singers’ natural desire to outdo each other in a singing contest miraculously morphs into a desire to join forces in producing a formally impeccable artefact, so, in Idyll 15, too, the rulers’ desire for total control causes no resistance but miraculously finds a perfect match in their subjects’ desire for security, prosperity, and order.

¹³⁴ Girard 1961.

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Epilogue I have argued in this book that the emergence of Greek literature in the archaic period was motivated by the need to exercise conceptual control over a geographically vast political space and that its development in classical Athens and Ptolemaic Alexandria reflected the historically conditioned shifts in that space’s geopolitical structure. More specifically, I have shown that both the Homeric ideal of heroic essentialism and Hesiod’s ideal of poetic language as a transmitter of transcendental truths can be viewed as attempts to create a conceptual centre of the decentred world of archaic Greece; that the two interrelated versions of the “ideal state of Athens” propounded in classical Athenian literature (a self-identical polity of autochthonous citizens and an empire driven by an insatiable desire for the absent) not only served to portray Athens as a collective epitome of the heroic ideal but also informed the pragmatic effect that Plato strove to achieve by his dialogic writing—an effect that consists in instilling in the reader an insatiable desire for the domain of self-identical things; and, finally, that Callimachus’ and Theocritus’ innovative literary discourses (discourses in which poetic language is conceived of either as a perpetual gliding from signifier to signifier with no transcendental signified ever in sight or as an imaginary safe space in the midst of the continual flux of signification) are inseparable from their portrayals of Alexandria as an ideal Panhellenic metropolis—as a microcosm of Greek culture located on foreign soil. But the story does not end here. With the formation of the classical literary canon, the idealized images of archaic Greece, classical Athens, and Ptolemaic Alexandria became integral parts of what Reviel Netz calls the “polis of letters”—a parallel universe of literature potentially available to any reader at any time and anywhere in the Greek-speaking world.¹ Detached from its geographical origins, codified in scholarship, and circulating in written form, the network of canonical literary discourses evolved into a cultural koine that held together the increasingly more complex socio-political networks of the Hellenistic period and which, from the third century  onwards, fulfilled a ¹ Netz 2020.

Greek Literature and the Ideal: The Pragmatics of Space from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Age. Alexander Kirichenko, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Kirichenko 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192866707.003.0013

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238      similar function in the Roman world. Denis Feeney links the creation of Roman literature to the process whereby the Roman empire gradually subsumed the entire Hellenized Mediterranean—a process that called for the acquisition of an adequate conceptual toolkit.² Rather than just being a byproduct of Rome’s imperial spoils (cf. Hor. Epist. 2.1.156–7 Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis / intulit agresti Latio), Greek-style literature in Latin was in fact indispensable for the task of conceptually mastering the empire by “reconfiguring the worldwide web,”³ and, in the end, Feeney concludes, Roman “literature . . . fulfilled a function akin to that of the Greeks, in creating links by which an increasingly dispersed language-group were able to maintain a sense of connected identity, especially as more and more different groups were cumulatively added to the set of primary speakers of Latin.”⁴ Correspondingly, the development of Roman literature echoed that of its Greek prototype in that it, too, conjured up ideal realities that both furthered collective ideological ends and enabled each individual reader to find a niche in the vast imperial space. Literature composed in Latin not only brought to Rome idealized images of archaic Greece (e.g. Livius Andronicus’ translation of the Odyssey), classical/ Hellenistic Athens (e.g. the Roman versions of Attic tragedy and New Comedy), and Hellenistic Alexandria (e.g. Catullus’ translation of Callimachus Coma Berenices) but also adapted the underlying patterns of spatial pragmatics to Rome’s ideological needs. By propelling Rome’s imperial expansion, Ennius’ “Homeric” heroes placed Rome itself at the conceptual spot occupied in Homer by the unattainable heroic ideal.⁵ Athenian drama staged in Latin at the Ludi Romani notionally turned Rome, for the duration of the performance, into a locus of the ideal, which the plays themselves tended to place in Athens.⁶ When Lucretius wrote an Epicurean epic in Latin and when Cicero produced an entire corpus of Latin philosophical writings, they effectively created Roman equivalents of Greek philosophy’s “ideal state of Athens”—idealized images of the Roman republic as a harmonious group of philosophically enlightened individuals, contrasted with the civil strife that characterized the reality of late republican politics.⁷ While recognizable as a reminiscence of the ever-elusive beloveds of Callimachus’ erotic epigrams,

² Feeney 2016. ³ Feeney 2016, 237. ⁴ Feeney 2016, 246–7. ⁵ Sciarrino 2006; Feeney 2016, 159–60. ⁶ Cowan 2015. ⁷ For Lucretius, see Fowler 1989, 149: “He is concerned with the state of Rome, but the solution is a personal one: everyone should become an Epicurean.” On Cicero’s “written republic” as a means of conducting politics by other means, see Baraz 2012. More specifically on Cicero’s political writings, De re publica and De legibus, see Atkins 2013.

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Catullus’ Lesbia encoded not only the Callimachean longing for the similarly elusive domain of the Greek cultural imaginary but also the male Roman elite’s insatiable desire for the imperial conquest of the Greek East.⁸ And like its Greek prototype, the new poetic canon that gradually emerged in Augustan Rome was characterized by an irreducible tension between endorsing ideology and employing poetic discourses that, by their very nature, made it impossible to take that ideology at face value: in Virgil, Horace, and Propertius, the process of creating experimental poetry on the basis of multiple archaic and Hellenistic Greek models is virtually synonymous with their portrayals of Octavian/Augustus’ experiment in creating a radically new kind of imperial space (both a protective enclosure for every Roman and a boundless imperium sine fine),⁹ and when in Epistles 2.1 Horace equates the anticipated immortality of Augustus with the canonical status that his own poetry has already attained thanks to imperial patronage, he effectively reveals Augustan poetry itself as the only place where Augustus’ ideal empire has ever existed in the first place and where, for that reason, it can continue to exist forever.¹⁰ A remarkable shift takes place in Ovid. While the absolute power of Augustus propagated by the earlier poets informs the perception of every other aspect of Ovid’s reality (even Amor enslaving Roman lovers is compared to Augustus triumphing over conquered peoples, Ov. Am. 1.2.19–34, 48–52), he casts his poetry as the only place where one can experience a modicum of freedom from the ubiquitous imperial power. One of the reasons why Ovid expects readers living under Augustus’ increasingly autocratic rule to be attracted to his poetry is that they can recognize themselves not only in the erotic adventures depicted in the Amores (Ov. Am. 1.15.38, 2.1.8) but also in the figure of the exiled poet who suffers a turn of fortune comparable to the dehumanizing effect of a mythical metamorphosis (Ov. Tr. 1.1.117–20).¹¹ When, at the end of the Metamorphoses, Ovid describes his own transformation into a poetic oeuvre read in all lands that obey the power of Rome (Ov. Met. 15.871–9), he in effect imagines a transformation of the Roman empire from a close-knit cult of divine Augustus (cf. Ov. Met. 15.861–70) into a virtual community of individuals whose sense of identity is not enforced by a unitary political ideology but correlates with a bewilderingly complex network of poetic myths about the abuse of divine power. As a result, Ovid’s poetry turns the centralized/homogeneous space of empire into something resembling the decentred/fragmented space of archaic Greece—a space that, ⁸ Cf. Kirichenko 2021a, 47. ¹⁰ Cf. Kirichenko 2016b.

⁹ Rimell 2015. Cf. Kirichenko 2013b, 2018, 2022. ¹¹ Cf. Kirichenko 2021b.

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240      this time around, consists of a network of independently thinking readers rather than independent aristocratic poleis. The Ovidian view of Rome as both a unified political entity subservient to the emperor’s autocratic rule and an autonomous network consisting of literary texts and their readers remained instrumental for the development of Roman literature in the first and the early second centuries . But while the imaginary worlds of Ovid’s poetry promise the reader at least a semblance of freedom, the experience of reading Julio-Claudian and Flavian literature tends to enhance one’s sense of being inextricably trapped in a homogeneous imperial culture in which the ubiquity of universal empire goes hand in hand both with a sense of history as an endlessly repeating nightmare and with the totalitarian clutches of the literary canon.¹² At the same time as asserting Nero’s status as a transcendental signified that retrospectively justifies the horrors of the civil wars (Luc. 1.33–45), Lucan lays bare the intrinsic fragility of that ideological construct and encourages his readers to adopt a sombre view of Roman history as a never-ending civil war from which there will be no escape.¹³ Petronius and Persius intimate that the inability of the educated Romans to express themselves without resorting to the intertextual storehouse of the classical canon turns literature itself into a force no less tyrannical than the absolute power of the emperor.¹⁴ By intermingling the most banal aspects of human existence with exuberant praises of Domitian, Martial effectively erases the boundary between his readers’ private lives and the emperor’s virtual omnipresence.¹⁵ To a similar effect, Statius in the Silvae uses more or less the same poetic devices to portray his aristocratic patrons as paragons of cultural sovereignty and philosophical self-possession and to glorify the godlike emperor’s autocratic rule over the totality of the imperial space, which subsumes all private spaces.¹⁶ And when, after Domitian, Tacitus praises Nerva and Trajan for combining such incompatible things as principate and freedom (Tac. Agr. 3, cf. Hist. 1.1), that freedom, for Tacitus himself, ultimately proves to consist in being allowed to portray the Julio-Claudian and Flavian emperors as archetypal tyrants of Attic tragedy.¹⁷ The only escape that the Roman literature of the first and early second centuries  envisages from the tyranny of imperial politics, cyclical history, and the literary canon is, in the works of Seneca, a conversion to Stoic ¹² Cf. Rimell 2015. ¹³ Masters 1992. ¹⁴ Freudenburg 2001, 151–73; Rimell 2002. Cf. Kirichenko 2014. ¹⁵ Cf. Rimell 2009. ¹⁶ Kirichenko 2017a. ¹⁷ On tragedy as one of the main intertexts in Tacitus’ Annals, see Santoro L’Hoir 2006. See also Strunk 2017.

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philosophy: for the task of turning his Roman readers into Stoic proficientes— into philosophers endowing their lives with meaning by proceeding, each at their own pace, towards a transcendental goal—is in fact synonymous in Seneca with an attempt to liberate them from the homogenizing effect of imperial culture.¹⁸ While, set in the world of Greek paideia where, to quote Graham Anderson, Homer found himself “cheek by jowl with Socrates,”¹⁹ the bulk of literature produced in the Second Sophistic uses the classical canon as a means of strengthening the imperial subjects’ sense of cultural sovereignty,²⁰ the only new literary genre that emerged in this period—the novel—resembles Seneca’s literary Stoicism in that it, too, shifts the conceptual centre of empire’s imaginary topography away from imperial Rome and into the transcendental realm. Although the plots of the Greek romances are deeply rooted in the classical canon (like the Odyssey, they depict endless journeys around the vast expanses of the Mediterranean and beyond, and like Menander’s comedies, they tend to end with a wedding),²¹ what entitles their protagonists to become recipients of divine support is not a privileged status sanctioned by literary tradition (such as epic heroism or the purity of ethnic origins) but something as banal as the basic human nature that they share with every imperial reader: the comforting message communicated by these narratives is that the inhabitants of empire’s boundless space need to possess no special distinctions to find themselves under the tutelage of a protective deity ensuring that the uncontrollable plots of their lives culminate in a happy ending.²² A similar message is conveyed in Apuleius’ Golden Ass where a generic Greek aristocrat, for whom the loss of control over his life story manifests itself in losing his human appearance, is unsure as to what he has done to deserve the benevolence of the Egyptian goddess Isis who, at a critical juncture, intervenes to restore his humanity.²³ In stark contrast to the Virgilian imperium sine fine, which subjects the totality of the inhabitable world to the homogenizing power of Rome, the imperial space constructed both in the Greek romances and in Apuleius’ Latin novel is a space inhabited by discrete individuals equal among themselves only in entertaining the hope of being personally protected by a transcendental divine power.²⁴ It is hardly surprising that this imperial space proved to be so receptive to Christianity’s message of personal salvation—a message that, in time, resulted in replacing the authority of the deified Roman emperor with

¹⁸ Kirichenko 2013a, 2017b. ¹⁹ Anderson 1993, 82. ²⁰ Goldhill 2001. ²¹ Tilg 2010, 141–6; Höschele 2014, 735–46. ²² Cf. Dowden 2010. ²³ Kirichenko 2010a. ²⁴ Cf. Connors 2002; Konstan 2002.

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242      the authority of an omnipotent oriental god incarnated as one of the emperor’s lowliest subjects, in creating a Christian alternative to the classical canon, and in replacing the classical patterns of spatial pragmatics with a transcendental civitas Dei erected on the ruins of Roman literature’s idealized images of the Roman Empire.²⁵

²⁵ On Augustine’s De civitate Dei discouraging “the idealizing reading of Roman history inherited from the Latin classics,” see Tornau 2021.

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Index Locorum A A. 341–2 113 n. 100 536 101 n. 33 1577–1611 99 Eu. 217–21 99 604–6 99 658–61 99, 103 754–77 100 1007 100 Pers. 192–6 98 238 99 242 98 739–52 98 826 98 Th. 233–286 102 412–4 101 474 101 584–6 101 730–3 101–2 752–14 101 805 101 n. 33 926–32 101 1005–78 102 A fr. 38a 221 n. 77 fr. 49 213 n. 45 A fr. 356 175 n. 25, 176 fr. 360 138 n. 71 fr. 378 138 n. 71 fr. 395 221 n. 77 fr. 402 193 A SLG 478. 23–31 217 A Ach. 142–4 128 n. 35 960–1234 174 n. 20 1229 175 Av. 469–70 106–7 685–736 107

1058–71 107 1537–1765 106 1583–5 107 Ec. 359–60 127 n. 28 616–17 148 Eq. 267–8 110 797 110 1114 110 Lys. Σ 389 231 391–6 231 574–85 145, 231 630 231 1082 95 1128–34 145 1225–1320 231 Ra. 66–7 114 83–5 127 1419 113–14 1501 113–14 V.1071–8 95 fr. 351 198 A Ath. 35 159 Po.1454b1–2 28 n. 10 A 1 203 4 193–4 11 194 12 194 14 194 B 17 170 n. 10 18 170 n. 10 C Aet. fr. 1 178–81 3–23c 173 n. 15 31c–g 173 n. 16 43 180 43b–c 173 n. 16 54 176–7

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274   C (cont.) 67–75 173 n. 16 76b–77d 173 n. 15 78–78d 173 n. 16 80–83b 173 n. 16 108–109a 173 n. 15 110 177–8 178 174–176, 224 Ep. 28 199–200 29 198–9 31 194–5, 198, 202, 210, 218 32 195 42 197–8 46 196, 200–2, 218–19 52 195 fr. 398 179 n. 39 Hec. frr. 2–11 170 69–74 169–170 Hymns Del. 160–204 220 Jov. 1 189 8–9 188 16–29 188–9 30–54 189 n. 94 61–7 189 79 189–90 82–6 190 Ia. 1 182–192 2 182–3 3 186 4 183–4 5 186 6 186–8 7 184, 186–7 8 184 9 184 10 184 11 184 12 187–8, 191 13 185, 187–8 C 66.79–86 177 C SVF 2.1084 189 C Orat. 151 118 n. 135 Cypria fr. 1 4 n. 16

D 60.8–10 115 60.26 114–15, 116–17 60.34 119 n. 140 D S 5.46 188 13.101 123 n. 11 D Gramm. Lat. 1.491.15–16 231 D  H Dem. 1027 118 n. 135 E Andr. 772 213 n. 45 Ba. 625 198 Erechth. fr. 358 104 fr. 360 115 fr. 360.8 104 fr. 360.13 104–5, 109 fr. 360.22–7 104, 159 fr. 360.32–3 105 fr. 370. 59–60 158 fr. 370.67–70 105, 108–9 fr. 370.71–4 104 n. 53 fr. 370.95–7 104 n. 53 Hipp.181–94 113 n. 100 Ion 277–80 106 n.59 1575–94 106 IT 947–60 174 n. 20, 175 Med. 824–6 95 Ph. 852–7 103 n. 46 Supp.1207 103 n. 47 H 2.124–5 186 n. 77 7.161 95 9.27 115 H Mim. 1 232–5 2 233 3 233 4 233–5 5 233 6 233 7 233 H Th. 1–25 216–17 10–11 66 20 66

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  23 214 23–35 64–6, 87 26 72 27 189 34 70 36–7 66–7 44 67 55 70 66–7 70 71–4 67, 71 80–103 71–3 85–6 74 96 189–90 135 69–70 226–32 76 n. 53 233–6 67 383–403 69 383–452 67 429 69 442–7 69 n. 34 453–500 188 460 67 483–7 67 521–5 69 550–2 68–9 562–7 69 574–84 69, 204 613 68 881–5 68, 189 886–949 69 890–903 68 901–3 70 915–18 70 918 89 n. 107 924–6 68 Op. 1–2 73 3–7 89 1–20 75–6 5–7 69 n. 34, 73 9 74 10 90–1 17–29 77 26 90 29 75 37–40 74 42–4 78, 204 60–85 77–8 80–103 90 94–105 78

106–180 79–81 122–3 148 167–73 119 194 74 202–12 74–5, 81 209 82 219–21 74 220–37 81–2, 145 240–73 82 262–4 74 277–92 82–3 281–92 190 294–397 83–4 366 202, 218 373–5 218 n. 69 383–617 84–6 402–3 90 411 88 413–47 145 498–501 90 n. 109 582–96 145 618–94 86–8 695–764 89 765 89 n. 108 771 89 n. 107 804 76 n. 53 813–26 89 826 84 Cat. frr. 196–204 4 H Il.1.5–8 76 1.9 89 n. 107 1.42–52 11 n. 46 1.62–100 11 n. 46 1.113–15 30–1 1.118–29 30–2 1.131–47 33 1.163–8 30 1.188–223 33 1.225–44 29 1.231 91 1.234–9 32 1.240–4 33–4 1.280–284 31–2 1.281 30 1.287–9 31 1.292–302 38 1.346–92 33 1.458–66 14 n. 55

275

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276   H (cont.) 1.514–27 16 n. 73 2.6 27 2.24 27 2.37–38 27 2.73–6 28 2.100–8 28, 32 2.110–5 17 n. 80 2.110–15 57 n. 135 2.110–54 27–28 2.142–181 28 n. 10 2.190–7 28 2.284–332 71 2.419–20 57 n. 135 2.219–28 31–2 2.225–77 29, 49 2.246–332 42 2.283–332 11 n. 46 2.291–7 29–30 2.299–332 30 2.305–6 14 n. 55 2.334 30 2.348–9 30 2.353 30 2.370–93 30 2.412–18 10 n. 40 2.412–31 15 n. 66 2.419–20 17 n. 80 2.421–9 14 n. 55 2.577–8 30 3.21–37 7 3.65–66 78 3.126–8 7 3.156–60 78 n. 60 3.270–301 8 3.276–91 10 n. 40 3.290–4 78 n. 59 3.298–301 15 3.302 8–9 3.308–9 8 3.212 52 n. 108 3.320–3 8 3.245–301 15 n. 65 3.346–60 7–8 3.361–3 8–9 3.380–2 8–9 3.456–60 8–9 4.64–126 17 n. 80, 57 n. 135 4.75–84 11 n. 46

4.1–103 8–9 4.101–3 10 n. 40 4.303–9 16 n. 72 4.318–25 16 n. 72 4.338–48 16 n. 72 4.370–400 10 n. 38 4.404–10 11 n. 46 4.451 16–17, 35 4.509–13 16 n. 72, 32 5.1–8 78 n. 59 5.184–7 78 n. 59 5.464–92 16 n. 72 5.529–32 16 n. 72 5.633–54 10 n. 38 5.684–8 16 n. 75 5.738–42 12 n. 52 5.787–91 16 n. 72, 33 5.826–34 17 n. 80, 57 n. 135 6.77–101 11 n. 46 6.187 52 n. 108 6.305–10 10 n. 40 6.476–81 10 n. 40 7.47–53 11 n. 46 7.109–19 33 7.123–60 16 n. 72 7.132–57 12 n. 51 7.136–50 13 n. 54 7.202–5 10 n. 40 7.219–23 12 n. 51 7.226–32 33 7.313–22 14 n. 55 7.336–7 32–3 7.450 33 8.75–7 11 n. 46 8.171–3 11 n. 46 8.191–5 12 n. 51, 13 n. 54 8.236–44 17 n. 78 8.245–50 11 n. 46 8.287–91 16 n. 73 8.399–408 16 n.74 8.470–83 33 8.526–8 10 n. 40 9.38–9 32 9.189 56 9.218–20 14 n. 55 9.225–665 33–4, 38 9.262–76 16 n. 73 9.379–87 54 9.409–16 37, 55

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  10.274–82 11 n. 46 10.278–82 10 n. 40 10.378–81 16 n. 75 10.391–99 16 n. 73 10.570–1 16 n. 67 11.32–7 12 n. 52 11.52–5 11 n. 46 11.73 76 11.131–5 16 n. 73 and 75 11.286–90 16 n. 72 11.441–5 16 n. 74 11.465–71 16 n. 72 12.102 12 n. 51 12.164–72 10 n. 40 12.175–81 33 12.269–76 16 n. 72 12.310–38 10 n. 38 12.200–7 11 n. 46 12.469–71 33 12.495 89 n. 107 13.62–5 81 n. 77 13.222–30 16 n. 72 13.446–54 16 n. 74 13.810–32 16 n. 74 14.110–32 10 n. 38 14.131–2 16 n. 72 14.364–7 32 15.14–33 16 n. 74 15.186–93 189 15.206–17 16 n. 74 15.236–8 81 n. 77 15.343–51 16 n. 74 15.352–89 33 15.372–6 10 n. 40 15.690–3 81 n. 77 15.733–41 16 n. 72 16.34–5 34, 64 n. 4 16.40–5 12–13, 35 16.233–48 10 n. 40, 15 n. 66 16.452–507 12 n. 51 16.384–92 81 16.781–3 13 n. 54 16.844–54 13 n. 54 17.59–60 13 n. 54 17.124–7 13 n. 54 17.673–82 81 n. 77 18.324–7 16 n. 73 18.373–89 43 n. 71 18.417–21 43

18.478–608 12 n. 51, 13, 35, 43 18.482 43 n. 71 18.535 76 18.541–9 76 18.550–60 16 n. 67 18.558–60 14 n. 55 19.14–15 12–13 19.18–19 12–13 19.56–73 35 19.96–131 17 n. 78 19.140–1 16 n. 73 19.146–53 35 19.154–237 38 19.163–202 66 19.238–81 35 19.250–65 15 n. 65 19.252–6 14 n. 55 20.48 76 20.83–5 16 n. 73 20.200–58 10 n. 38 20.354–63 16 n. 72 20.490–503 35 20.495–9 76 21.74–119 38 21.140–83 12 n. 51 21.182–3 13 n. 54 21.233–513 35 21.252–3 81 n. 77 21.321–3 16 n. 74 21.405 76 n. 54 21.447 32 21.494–5 81 n. 77 22.167–87 36 22.335–7 36 22.337–66 38 22.338–43 16 n. 75 22.354 36 22.367–9 13 n. 54 22.395–404 36 23.91–92 37 23.166–77 14 n. 55 23.195 16 n. 73 23.243–4 37 23.274–86 37–8 23.306–48 38–9 23.499–515 38 23.536–8 38 23.543–4 38 23.555 38

277

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278   H (cont.) 23.558–62 38 23.560 12 n. 51 23.570–95 38 23.615–23 38 23.629–31 40 23.677–80 40 23.773–84 39 23.791–2 37 23.799–800 12 n. 51 23.804–23 12 n. 51 24.22–14 36 24.486–551 36 24.660–8 16 n. 73 Od.1.1–95 53–4 1.7–9 42 n. 67 1.9 11 1.57 41 1.64–79 42 1.115–17 60 1.132–44 60 1.152 60 1.325–7 60 1.354–5 60 2.106–9 52 3.267–72 59 3.271–2 72 4.17 59 4.235–90 48 4.351–480 43 4.235–89 42–3 4.605–8 53 4.678 52 n. 108 4.739 52 n. 108 5.1–147 43 5.11–12 40–1 5.18–20 41–2 5.34–7 44 n. 73 5.55–148 41 5.135–6 41 5.215–24 41–2 5.228–61 43 5.243–5 43 n. 71 6.4–6 44 n. 73 6.100 89 n. 107 6.239–46 45 6.270–2 44 7.11 44 7.71–2 44 7.84–97 44

7.107–10 44 7.114–28 44 7.159–206 44 7.244–54 41 7.309–15 45 8.74 46 8.92 46 8.159–233 45–6 8.236–55 45 8.246–9 44–5 8.245–5 45 8.489–91 47 8.522–31 46 8.550–4 64 n. 4 8.557–63 46–47 8.564–71 44–5 8.566 46 9.18–20 46–7 9.97 41 9.108 44 9.112–15 44 9.422 52 n. 108 9.524–36 42 10.1–55 42 n. 67 10.221 41 10.236 41–2 10.287 42 10.488–540 42 11.119–37 56, 59 11.318 89 n. 107 11.366–238 47 11.485 41 11.488–503 41, 55 12.260–419 42 n. 67 13.187–216 52 n. 110 13.294–5 50 14.192–359 50 15.390–484 50 16.61–7 48 16.172–307 48–9, 63 17.205–32 209 17.228 63 17.286 63 17.473 63 17.518–50 50 17.559 63 18.2–3 63 18.44 63 18.53–4 63 18.66–71 63

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  18.235–42 53 19.163–202 64 19.203 50, 71 19.221–48 64 19.262–307 64 19.572–81 64 20.82 52, 60 20.85–128 52 21.406 54 21.411 54 22.8–64 53–5 22.344–8 60–1 22.352 72 22.415 213 n. 45 22.475–7 209 23.117–22 57 23.183–204 49 23.266–84 56, 59 24.80–92 56 24.93–4 55 24.426–9 57 24.473–548 57 h. Ap. 12 89 n. 107 30–87 3 n. 11 214–546 3 n. 12 h. Cer. 480 4, n. 13 H Epist. 2.1.156–7 238 H 6.7 114 6.39 115 n. 110 6.42 125 I fr. 282a 5, n. 24 fr. 286 221 n. 77 I 4.24–5 114 4.55–65 115 4.68–70 115 12.124 116 L Div. instr. 1.11.44-8 188 L 1.33–45 240 L 5.9 166 6.1–42 166 1.62–79 166

L c. Leocr. 79 116–17 100–1 115 L 2.4–47 114–15 2.17 116–17 2.61–65 118 n. 132 2.65 118 n. 130 2.75 125 12 142 n. 82 M fr. 1 221 n. 77 O Am. 1.2 239 1.15 239 2.18 239 Met. 15.861–79 239 Tr. 1.1.117–20 239 P 5.11.9 186 n. 78 P DK 7 B7 189 P O. 1 25 n.1 3 25 n.1 6 25 n.2 7 25 n.1 9.10 25 n.1 10.24 25 n.1 P. 2 25 n.1 3 25 n.1 5 25 n.1 7.9–12 95 N. 5 25 n.2 I. 2.19–20 95 7 25 n.1 fr. 33c–d 3 n. 11 P Ap. 19c 153 26d6–e4 153 28b3–d5 125 n. 18 28d10–29a1 125 31b4–5 125 31d6–8 122–3 32a4–c3 123 32a9–c3 117 32b2–5 123–4 32b7–c2 124

279

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280   P (cont.) 32c3–e1 123 34b4–35d8 124 36b5–d4 125 38e2–39b8 125 39d 66 n. 12 40b7–8 126 n. 21 41e2–42a2 125 Crt. 398c5–e5 130 402a8–c3 189 Criti. 109d1–2 156 110b5–7 156 110d3–4 156 111b5–c8 160 n. 153 113c2–d2 156 113d3–e1 157 114a4–c4 160 114c1 156 114d2–117e8 157 119c2–120d5 157 120e1–121c2 157 Cri. 50d1–51e5 121 52b1–c3 122 52e5–6 122 53c4–8 122 54a6–7 125 Ep. 7 343a 137 n. 63 Grg. 466b11–c2 138 471a 127 473e6–474a1 122 484c–486c 118 502b1–d1 122, 138 521d6–8 121–2, 149 523a1–527e7 122 526d5–e1 122 Lg. 637d2–e7 175–6 739d–e 121 n. 3 817b6 150 Mx. 234a4–5 118 234c4 115 n. 117, 118 n. 129 234c6–e2 116 235c1–5 119 236a8–b6 119 n. 136, 120 236b8–c1 120 236c8–9 118 237c5–238b6 116 238e1–239a3 116–17 238c7–d3 117 239b3–241e5 117 242a2–4 117 242e6–243a5 117

243c6–7 117 243d5–244a3 117–18 244b3–246a4 118 245c6–d2 116 245d–e 115 n. 116 248e7–249c3 125 249e3–4 120 Men. 81e4 140, 155, 193 Phd. 57a1–59c7 134 58d2–9 133–4 59b10 133 72e5–6 140, 155, 193 80c8–9 133, 154 97b–99a 153 107a3–6 133 116a2–7 132–3 117c1–d6 133 Phdr. 227d2–5 134 228a1–2 134, 139 228a5–e5 136 229c2–d2 135, 192 229e5–7 135 230b2–d2 135 230d4–5 134 230e6–234c2 136 231d6–e2 137 n. 62 234c5–7 137 234e2–4 137 235c3–4 138 n. 71 236d5 138 237a4 138 237b2–5 137 n. 62, 138 241d1 138 243b2–7 138 243e8–257b6 146 249c1–4 140, 155, 193 257d9–258d5 139 259b6–d8 135 259c2–6 141 262a5–7 138 n. 68 264e1 136 266b3–4 141, 162 274e6–275e5 139–141, 154–5 275b6–c2 66 n. 12 275d4–e5 137, 161, 192 275d5–6 151–2 276a8–9 139, 152, 161 276b1–277a4 140, 152, 227 276e6 141 277b4 140 n. 77 277e5–278b4 140

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  Pol. 279a–281b 145 n. 95 308d–311c 145 n. 95 Prt. 329a 137 n. 63 R. 327a1 151–2, 217–18 327a1–328b1 142 329e6–331b7 142 331d7 142 331e1–3 143 338c2–4 143 350c12–d8 143 352e7–8 144 354a12–13 143 358b3 143 358d1–2 143 360e3–362c8 144 363a7–366b2 147 368e2–369a3 144 370a7–b2 145 n. 93 370c8–9 145 372a5–d4 145 372e3 146 375b6–10 145 n. 93 414d6–415a7 146 415d1–417b9 147 423c6–d6 145 n. 93 423e4–424a2 147 433a4–6 145 n. 93 443b7–c7 145 n. 93 449c2–450a2 148 450e2–451a4 148 453b2–6 145 n. 93 458c6–461e 148 466e1–471c3 148, 159 471c4–7 149 472d4–e5 152 n. 120 473c7–480a13 149 499c2–d6 149 502c9–506a 149 506d11–521b1 149 544d 66 n. 12 591e1 150 592a10–12 149–150 595a5 147 n. 102 596a–598c 152 n. 120 607b5–6 147 n. 102 608b1 147 n. 102 Smp. 172a1–174a2 133 172c3–4 127 181c2–185e5 127–8 185e6–188e4 127 n. 30 190b5–9 128

191b7–c1 129 191c4–8 128 192a2 128 192a6–7 128 192c7–e9 128 193a3–7 129 195a5–196b2 129 n. 37 198c2–5 130 198d3–e1 115 n. 117 199c1–d3 137 199c1–201c9 130 201d1–212c3 130–1 206c1–3 131 209e5–212a7 199 212a1–7 131 215a6–217a2 131, 150 216a2–219d2 131 221d7–222a7 131, 150 223d5–6 150 Tht. 142d6–143c5 134 148e–151d 131 n. 43 Ti. 17a2 151 17a4–5 133 19b4–7 152 19c1–8 152, 156 20b1–2 152, 156 20c1 152 20d7–21b2 154 21d1–3 154 22b6–23b3 155 23b6–c2 155, 159 23c3–d1 154 23e1–2 156 24c8–d1 156 25a7–b2 156, 160 25c1–6 156 25c6–d2 158 25d7–e3 155 26c2–3 154 26e4–5 154 n. 127 P Alc. 16.1–2 131 n. 44 Thes. 29.4–5 103 n. 47 32 170 n. 10 P 125 193–4 130 193–4 S fr. 17 5, n. 23

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282   S Aj. 202 95 Ant. 38 213 n. 45 60 102 n. 40 96–7 126 n. 21 182–4 102 288–9 102 453–7 102 460–70 126 n. 21 569 102–3 781–805 103 OT 452–3 101 Ph. 96 213 n. 45 Tr. 9-27 198 fr. 5 198 S 8.3.30 187 n. 81 Supplementum Hellenisticum fr. 958 (P. Hamb. 312, inv. 381) 179 n. 40 T Agr. 3 240 Hist. 1.1 240 T Id. 1 203–6, 214, 217–18, 221, 235 Σ Theoc. Id. 1 arg. b 203 2 223 n. 85 3 206, 218 4 206–7, 216, 218, 221 5 207–10, 214–16, 218, 221, 235 5.20 205 6 209–12, 217–18, 221, 235 7 212–20 10 218–19 10.3–4 207 n. 24 11 201–20 12 230 n. 114 13 230 n. 114 14 220–1, 235 15 221–36 16.5–12 213 17 219–20 29 230 n. 114 30 230 n. 114

T 1299–1304 221 n. 77 1319–22 221 n. 77 1327–8 221 n. 77 1345–6 195 T 1.2 107–8, 116 n. 121 1.68–86 111 n. 86 and 88 1.76.2 111 1.104 160 1.120–4 111 n. 86 and 88 1.140–4 112 2.8.4–5 111 n. 88 2.15 170 n. 10 2.34 117 n. 128 2.35.1 109–10 2.36.1–3 109 2.37.1–2 109, 112, 121 2.38.2 116 n. 121 2.39.2 109 2.40.1–2 127 2.41.1 109 2.43.1–2 110 2.45–46 125 2.52.4 110 2.63.2 112 2.65.7–10 112, 117 2.65.12 118 n. 130 3.37.1–2 111 3.49–50 111 5.116.4 111 6.2 107 6.8–52 160 6.13.1 112, 131 6.24.3 112 7.16.1 117 n. 127 7.20.2 117 n. 127 X HG 1.6–7 117 1.7 123–4 1.25 118 1.31 118 2.3.13–21 159

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General Index absence 32–3, 40–1, 48–62, 110–12, 131–3, 173–200 Achelous 198–9 Achilles 13, 30–40, 43, 49, 54–8, 64 n. 4, 67, 76, 78, 96–8, 125 n. 18 funeral of, the 56 shield of, the 13, 35, 43, 73, 76 Acontius 173 n. 16 Adeimantus 143–63 Adonis 206, 224–36 Adonis gardens 139–40, 225, 227 Aegina 25 n. 3, 184 Aegisthus 51, 59, 99 Aenus 187 Aeolus 42 Aeschines, character of Theoc. Id. 14 220–1 Aeschylus 98–103, 114 Aesop 183 n. 63 aetiology 25, 40, 79, 95, 99–100, 104–7, 109, 128, 135, 170–93, 204–6 Agamemnon 8, 12, 27–40, 51, 54–5, 57, 59, 72, 75–6, 98–100, 104 Agathon 127–31, 150 Ageanax 215–16 agricultural calendar 84–91 agriculture, as a metapoetic metaphor in Hesiod 88–91 as a philosophical metaphor in Plato 139–140, 152–3 Aiora, the 174–6 Ajax 33, 39 Alcaeus 216, 221 n. 77 Alcibiades 112, 121, 129, 131–2, 141, 150 Alcibiades I, Plato 130 n. 41 Alcinous 45–7, 51 Alexander the Great 166 Alexandria 2, 169–200, 220–236, 238 Alexandrian philologists 182–93 Amaryllis 206–7 Amarynces 40

Amazones, the 115, 117, 179 n. 43 Amelesagoras 169 n. 3 Anacreon 193, 221 n. 77 Anaphe 173 n. 15 Anderson, G. 241 Androgeos 173 n. 15 Anthesteria, the 174–6, 224 Antigenes 212 Antigone 102–3, 126 Antilochus 38–9 Antinous 53, 63–4 Apaturia, the 123–4, 154 Aphrodite 39, 78, 205–6, 216, 224–36 Apollo 3, 11, 71, 99–103, 106, 170, 185–7, 208, 220 Apollonius of Rhodes 178 n. 37, 180 n. 45, 183 n. 61 aporia 143, 151, 162 Apuleius 241 Aratus 216–17 Archelaus 127 Archilochus 5, 147, 217 Arcadia 184, 188–9 Archinus 197–8 Archytas 153 n. 122 Arcturus 85 Ares 39, 80 Arginusae, battle of, the 117, 123–4 Argis 220 Argonauts 4, 173, 184 Argos 98 n. 15, 99–100, 113, 158, 176 Aristogeiton 127 Aristophanes 95, 106–7, 110, 113–14, 127–32, 136, 144–50, 231–4 Arsinoe 224–36 Artemis 81 n. 77, 173 n. 16 Asclepiades 203, 214 Asclepius 234–5 Ascra 86–8 Asia 98–9 Aspasia 119–20

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284   Assemblywomen, Aristophanes 148–50, 232 astronomy 177 asylum, in Athens 98 n. 15, 115, 170–1 Atalanta 206 Athena 8, 25 n. 3, 28 n. 10, 45, 48–62, 68–9, 99–100, 104–5, 156, 169–70 Athenian acropolis, the 169–71, 231–2 Athenian exceptionalism 95–120, 127–9, 153–61 Athens 1–2, 95–171, 218, 238 Atlantis 156–63 Atreus 99 Attica, see Athens Augustine 242 n. 25 Augustus 179, 239–40 Aulis 30, 86–7 Austin, J.L. 5, 16 authority indexical 32–40, 50–3 poetic 58–62, 70–3, 88–91 symbolic 27–32 autochthony, Athenian 95–165, 169–71 Theban 100–3 autocracy 156–7, 239–40 Bacchae, Euripides 101 n. 31 Bacchylides 5, 25, 40 Bakhtin, M. 164 Barbantani, S. 179 Bathycles 184–5 Battus, founder of Cyrene 25 n. 3 character of Theoc. Id. 4 206–7 beauty 11, 77–8, 130–1, 146–7, 198–200, 203, 210–12 Benardete, S. 137 Bendis 142 Berenice 176–7, 226, 228 Bias 185 Blepyrus 127 Boeotia 108 Boreas 135, 199 Bourdieu, P. 28–9 Bowie, E. 179 Briseis 33–4 bucolic poetry 201–20 bucolic masquerade 212–17 Burina 212

Bupalos 182 n. 55 Burkert, W. 2–3 Cadmus 100–1 Calame, C. 4 Callicles 118 Callimachus 169–207, 210, 216–18, 220, 224, 232, 238–9 Calliope 69–70 Callipolis 144–163 Calypso 41–3, 47, 56 Cameron, A. 179 Cassander 191 Catalogue of the Ships 4, 27 Catullus 177, 238–9 Cebes 134 Cecrops 169 Cephalus 142–3 Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi 87 n.102 Ceos 173 n. 16 Chalcidice 170 Chalcis 87 Charites, the 173 n. 15 Charmides, Plato 151 n. 117 Cheops’ pyramid 186 n. 77 Chilon 185 Choes, the 174 n. 20, 175–6 Christianity 241–2 Chryseis 31 Chrysippus 189 cicadas 135–6, 141, 208 Cicero 238 Circe 42 City of the Just, the 81–3, 144–5, 190 civil war 57–8, 101–3, 118, 161, 238–9 Cleobulus 185 Cleon 110–11, 128 Cleonicus 220 Clio 180 n. 46 Clytemnestra 31, 59, 99–100 cognitive linguistics 9–11 colonization 2–4, 53 n. 114, 108, 179 n. 43 Colophon 179 n. 43 Comatas 207–9, 214–15 comedy, new 164–5, 238 old 127–32, 144–53, 231–4 Conon 177

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  contests, athletic 5, 25–6, 37–40, 45–6, 53–4, 61–2, 64, 92, 176–7, 184 poetic 87, 207–17 contingency 7–17, 35, 43–4, 87–92 Corinth 223 Corydon 206–7 Cos 180, 212–20 cosmopolitanism 173–93, 220–36 Creon 102–3, 126 Creusa 105–6 Cretan tales 48–50, 66, 188 Crete 67, 122, 162, 173 n. 16, 188–192 Critias 151–63 Cronus 67–8 Cyclopes 44–5 Cydippe 173 n. 16 Cyme 86 Cyrene 25 n. 3, 175 Cyzicus 173 n. 15 Damoetas 209–11, 214 Daphnis 204–6, 209–11, 214–15, 235 Darius 98–9 deification 188–93, 219–20, 226–7 Delos 3, 5, 183 n. 62, 220 Demosthenes 114–15, 119 n. 140, Delphi 3, 5, 183 n. 62 Delphic oracle, the 104, 135 Demeter 3, 212 democracy 95–120 Demodocus 45–7, 59 δημόσιον σῆμα 104–5 Derrida, J. 92, 133, 162–3 desire, see Eros dialectic/dialogue 121–63, 219 Dianira 198 Dicaeopolis 145 Diocles 198–9 Diomedes 32–3, 38–9 Dionysus 114, 132 Diotima 130–1 discrepancy, between appearance and reality 42, 48–52, 131–2 between words and deeds 74–84, 110–13, 116–20, 125–9 divine intervention 28, 33, 36, 57, 165 Domitian 240

285

Douglas, M. 14 dreams 28–30, 49, 98 Echion 101 n. 31 Egypt 43, 133, 139–40, 154–6, 160, 169–200, 220–236, 241 Egyptian Thebes 34, 54 ekphrasis 204, 225–6 Elea 179 n. 43 elegy 5, 179–81, 193 elenchus, see dialectic Eleusis 3–4, 103 Eleusianians, the lost play by Aeschylus 103 n. 47 Elis 134, 173 n. 15 embodied cognition 11 encomium 99–100, 103, 115–20, 129–30, 143–5, 151, 178–9, 189–91, 212–13, 219–36 Ennius 238 Endymion 206 Epaphus 176 Epeius 186–7 Ephesus 187–8 Epicurus 166, 238 Epicydes 194–5 epigram 193–200 epinician poetry 25–6, 40, 61–2, 176, 184, 212 Epimetheus 78 Epirus 173 n. 16 Er 147 erastes/eromenos 126–31, 193–200, 211–12, 230 Erigone, Eratosthenes 174 n. 20 Erechtheus 95, 104–5, 108–9, 115, 156 n. 135, 158–9 Erichthonius 169 Erinyes, the 99–100 Eris 75–80, 83, 88 Eros 72–3, 110–13, 119, 126–42, 164–5, 193–220, 224–7, 239–40 Eros, pun on ἐρωτᾶν 130–1, 137–8 Eryximachus 127 n. 30 Eteocles 101–3 Etruria 156, 160 Euclides 134 Euelpides 106–7 Euhemerus 188–93

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286   Eumelus 38–9 Eumaeus 48, 50 Eumolpus 115, 117 Euripides 98 n. 15, 101 n. 31, 102 n. 38, 103 n. 46, 103 n. 47, 104–10, 113–15, 126 n. 21, 158–9, 170–1, 175 Euripus, the 87 Euryalus 40 Eurymachus 53–4 fable 3, 74–5, 81, 169, 182–4 Fantuzzi, M. 165 Feeney, D. 238 food 51–5, 63–4, 72, 74, 84–91, 207 funeral oration 103 n. 48, 108–20, 125 Gaia 67–70, 188–9 Galatea 201–4, 206–7, 210–13, 215, 217–18 Ganymede 195, 230 gifts 34–6, 46 n. 84, 54, 74, 77–9, 81, 83–4, 129 n. 37, 187–8, 211–12, 229 Glaucon 143–63 golden maidens 43, 69 n. 30 Gorgias 129–30 Gorgo, character of Theoc. Id. 15 222–36 Gorgo Medusa 12, 129–30 great chain of being, the 9–10 Habermas, J. 5, 16 Hades 41–2, 55–6, 205 Haemon 102–3 Haliartus 173 n. 16 Harmodius 127 Hebe 187 Hecale 169–71 Hecate 69–70 Hector 13, 33–7, 55, 57 Hecuba, Euripides 104 n. 49 Helen 4, 7, 48, 55, 78 Helicon 64, 86, 218 Helios 42 Hellenistic philosophy 165–6 Hellespont, the 56, 98 Hephaestus 12, 28, 43, 69, 78, 156, 169 Hera 5, 28 n. 10, 81 n. 77, 224 Heracles 4, 25, 114, 173, 176, 198, 213 Heracles, Euripides 98 n. 15, 171 Heraclidae, the 96, 98 n. 15, 104 n. 49, 115, 117

Heraclidae, Euripides 98 n. 15, 104 n. 49, 171 Hermes 184, 187, 205 Hermocrates 152 Herodotean Life of Homer, the 87 n. 103 Herodotus 95, 154 n. 127, 157 n. 142, 186 heroic ideal 25–40, 54–62, 95–105 Herondas 232–5 Hesiod 63–93, 144–50, 154, 164, 188–90, 202, 204, 216–19 Hippomenes 206 Hipponax 182–93 Homer 7–17, 27–67, 71, 75–9, 81, 87 n. 103, 91–2, 147, 150, 154, 158, 164, 178, 187, 189–90, 196, 201, 214, 218, 238, 241 Homeric similes 7–10, 12–13, 76, 81 Horace 239 hunger 63–4, 75, 79, 114, 196–7, 200–2, 218–19 Hunter, R. 165 Hyades, the 85 Hymn to Apollo, Callimachus 179 n. 41 hymns 5, 67, 71, 75–6, 87, 145, 179, 188–90, 225–6 Hyperides 114–15 iambus 181–93, 216–17 Ibycus 5, 221 n. 77 icon 19, 89–91, 133, 141–2, 161–2, 177–81, 192–3, 197–8 Icus 174–5 ideal realities 6–22 Idomeneus 33 image-schema 11 immortality 41–62, 132–3, 182, 188–93, 226–7 imperialism 105–13 Inachus 176 index 11–19, 27–40, 49–50, 84, 88, 90, 97–8, 105, 110, 112–13, 126, 158, 164–5 intentionality 5–17, 27–40, 42–3, 51–5, 61, 97–9 intertextuality 63–4, 118–19, 173–93, 215–16, 231–2 invective 181–2 Io 176 Ion, hero 105–6 Ion of Chios 179 n. 43 Ionia 108

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  Iphigenia 99, 104 Iphigenia at Aulis, Euripides 104 n. 49 Irus 53, 63 Isindos 173 n. 16 Isis 176, 241 Isles of the Blest 80, 119–20 Isocrates 114–15 Ithaca 41, 45, 48–62 justice 29–30, 57, 63–91, 97–163 καλός-inscriptions 198–200 King’s Peace, the 118 komos 197–8 ktistic poetry 5, 179–81 Lacon 207–9 Laertes 52, 61 Laius 101 lament 204–6, 224–5 language, co-emergent with ritual 15 n. 63 as an instrument of intentionality 15–17 Lape, S. 164–5 Laws, Plato 122 n. 8, 162 leaving the city, as a metaliterary metaphor 73–84, 134–143, 181–93, 212–20 Leocrates 114–15 Lesbia 239 Lesbos 216 n. 60 Leto 3 Leucas 173 n. 16 lifelikeness 227, 233–5 Libation Bearers, Aeschylus 99 Lindos 173 n. 15 Livius Andronicus 238 Locri 151–2 Loraux, N. 97 Lucan 240 Lucretius 166, 238 Ludi Romani 238 Lycabettus 170 Lyceum, the 170 Lycidas 212–17, 235 Lycurgus 114–15 Lyde, Antimachus 179 lyric 5, 25–6, 193–4, 210, 215–16, 230 n. 114

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Lysanias 199–200 Lysias 114–15, 134–8, 140–2 Lysis, Plato 130 n. 41, 151 n. 117 Lysistrata 231–2 Macedonia 114, 127, 164–5, 191 Magnesia 122 n. 8 maieutics 130–1 Malkin, I. 1–2 marriage 48–62, 97–108, 164–5, 177, 220–36 Martial 240 Medea, Euripides 98 n. 15 Megara 134 Melampus 206 Melantheus 63–4, 209 Melian dialogue, the 111 memory 10, 13, 36, 40–3, 47–8, 55–6, 69–70, 133–4, 173–93, 215 Menander 164–5, 241 Menelaus 7–9, 38–9, 43, 48, 59 mental spaces 9–10, 17–18 Menexenus 115–20 Menippus 195 metamorphosis 42, 49–51, 239 metics 95, 106 n. 57, 119 n. 139, 142 Metis 68 Mey, J. 4–5 migration 2–3, 107–8, 173–81, 220–36 Miletus 119, 173 n. 16, 184 mime 220–36 mimesis 35, 39, 39–44, 47, 50–3, 133, 138–9, 147, 200–36 Mimnermus 179–80, 221 n. 77 Minos 173 n. 15 Mnemosyne 69–70 Molorcus 176 monologue 134–5, 151–63 Mouseion, the 174, 232 Muses, the 64–83, 135–6, 173–81, 185–6, 191, 208, 232 Myos 173 n. 16 Myron 233 n. 128 myth 2–6 and geography 3–4, 27, 40–62, 95–105, 173–81 Platonic 128–9, 139–41, 153–63 of the races 79–81, 119, 146, 148

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288   Mytilene 111, 215–17 Mytilenean revolt, the 111 Nanno, Mimnermus 180 n. 44 Nausicaa 45 Naxos 173 n. 16 Neda, the 189 n. 94 Nemea 176 Nereus 67 Nero 240 Nerva 240 Nestor 16 n. 72, 30, 38–9, 59 Netz, R. 1, 237 Nicias 201 noble lie 146, 148, 156 numbers 30–40, 186 numinosity 187 Nymphs, the 189 n. 94, 201, 209, 216 oath 8–9, 15, 17, 57, 69, 76, 157 oblivion 40–3, 47–8, 55–6, 58 Oceanus 69, 156 Odysseus 8, 11, 28–30, 34, 40–67, 71–2, 75, 209 Odysseus’ bed 48 Odysseus’ raft 43–4 Oedipus 40, 101–3 Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles 98 n. 15, 103, 171 Oenomaus 25 Ogygia 48 Olympic games, the 183 n. 62 Olympia 25, 186–8 omens 30, 49 Omphalian plain, the 189 n. 94 Oreithyia 135, 199 Orestes 51, 99–100, 175 Orion 85 Ovid 239–40 paean 5 Pamphilia 184 Pan 204, 216 Panchaea 188 Pandora 69, 77–80, 83, 204, 218 n. 69 Panhellenism 3–5, 25–7, 40, 48–62, 164–5, 171–93, 220–36 Panyassis 179 n. 43 paraklausithyron 194, 197–8, 201–203, 206

Paris 7–9, 78 Parmenides, Plato 151 n. 117 Paros 173 n. 15 Patroclus 13, 34–40, 53–4, 64 n. 4 funeral games for, the 37–40, 53 Pausanias, fifth-century  Athenian 126–8 second-century  writer 186 n. 78 Peirce, Ch. S. 11–12 Peiro 206 Peisetaerus 106–7, 129 Peleus 36, 174 n. 21 Peloponnesian War, the 96, 107–13, 160 Pelops 25 Penelope 49–66 Pentheus 101 n. 31 Periander 185 Pericles 108–21, 132 Pericles’ funeral oration 108–11 Periclean citizenship law, the 97–8, 108–10, 164–5 Persephone 3 Perses 74–90 Persia 98–9, 118, 158 n. 145 Persian Wars, the 95–100, 111, 113 n. 100, 115–18, 158 Persius 240 Petronius 240 Phaeacians, see Scheria Phaedo 132–4 Phaedrus 134–42 Phemius 60–1, 72 Pherecydus of Syrus 189 Phidias 186 Philinus 216–17 Philitas 179–80, 214 philosopher–kings 149–50 Philoxenus 196 n. 111 physical allegory 135, 188–9 Phoenissae, Euripides 102 n. 38, 104 n. 49 Phoenix 34 Phrasidamus 212 Phrygius 173 n. 16 Phthia 56 pictorial representations 7, 12–13, 137, 152, 161, 204, 227–8 Pieria 173 n. 16 Pindar 5, 25–6, 40, 142, 147, 212–13 Piraeus 142–3, 150, 152, 217

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  Pithoigia, the 174 n. 20 Pittacus 185 plague 31, 110 Plato 66 n. 12, 113–66, 191–3, 199–200, 211, 217–19, 227 Platonic forms 146–7, 153, 200 plausible lie 48–73, 189–90, 218 Pleiades, the 84–6 poetic etymology 41, 77–8, 188–9 poetic patronage 58–62, 72–3, 212–20, 239 poetry, and aesthetic pleasure 45–6, 60, 201–220 and aristocratic power 48–91 banned from the ideal state 147 and cultural memory 173–93 and desire 193–200 as a remedy against oblivion 40–8, 58–62 Polemarchus 142–3, 148, 151 political geography 1–22, 25–7, 40, 61–2, 92, 95–113, 164–6, 170–93, 219–36 Pollis 174–6, 180 Polycrates 5 Polynices 101–3 Polyphemus 42, 44, 196, 201–4, 206–7, 210–13, 215, 217–18 Poseidon 44–5, 156–8, 170 pragmatics 4–6 Praxinoa 222–36 Praxiteles 208 Praxithea 104, 110 prayer 5, 8–9, 15–17, 34, 195 presence 201–36 Priam 8, 36–7, 57 Priapus 205 Prometheus 68–9, 78–9 promise 15–16, 27–8 Propertius 239 prophecy 11, 30, 59, 68, 101, 104 Proteus 41, 43 Ptolemy Philadelphus 190, 220–36 Pythagoreanism 153 recusatio 178–9 Rhea 67, 188–9 rhetoric 34, 38–9, 42, 49, 71–2, 75, 88–9, 91, 114–21, 129–31, 136–140, 149, 158, 160–1 Rhodes 25 n. 3

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ritual 7–18, 25 n. 3, 173–81, 184 as an instrument of intentionality 13–15 romances, Greek 241 Rome 165–6, 238–42 Rorty, R. 92 royal ideology 176–8, 188–93, 220–36 rule of law 108–11, 121–9 Sacred History, Euhemerus 188 sacrifice 8, 13–15, 17, 33–4, 43, 68–9, 104–5, 142, 157, 170, 173 n. 15, 184, 234 Sappho 5, 216, 226 n. 99 Sarapis 184, 191–3 satyr 131–2 satyr-play 150 Scamander 35 sceptre, Achilles’ 32 Agamemnon’s 28–9, 32 Hesiod’s 64 Scheria 44–8 sea, the as a mundus inversus in the Odyssey 40–3 seafaring, as a metapoetic metaphor in Hesiod 86–8 Second Sophistic, the 241 Selene 206 Selinus 184 Semonides of Amorgos 179 n. 43 Seneca 240–1 seven wise men, the 184–5 sexual communism 147–9 sexual orientation 128–9 Sicilian expedition, the 105–6, 112, 117 Sicily 25 n. 3, 117, 160, 231 Simichidas 212–17, 235 Simmias 134 Simoeis 35 Sirens, the 41 Sirius 85 Smyrna 179 n. 43, 180 Smyrneis, Mimnermus 179 n. 43, 180 n. 44 Socrates 115–63, 191–2, 217–19, 241 in Aristophanes’ Clouds 132 n. 47, 149 Solon 154–5

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290   Sophocles 98 n. 15, 102–4, 113, 126, 142, 171 Sophron 221 n. 79 Sparta 4, 59, 108–13, 122 speech–act theory 5, 16–17 statues 25–6, 131, 160, 173 n. 16, 184, 186–7, 191 n. 101, 204, 225–9, 233–4 Stoicism 241 Styx 69–70 suitors, Penelope’s 51–5, 60, 75, 209 Suppliants, Aeschylus 98 n. 15 Suppliants, Euripides 98 n. 15, 103 n. 47, 171 symbol 15–16, 27–33, 36–40, 49, 90, 110–13, 158–9 symposium 152–3, 174–176, 179–82, 193–4, 212–13 Syracuse 152, 221, 223 Tacitus 240 tapestry 7, 145, 227–31, 234–5 Telchines, the 178–81, 187 n. 81, 188 Telemachus 48, 54, 57, 60 Telephus 5 Thales 184–5 Thalysia, the 212–17 Thamus 139–40 Theaetetus 134 Thebes 100–3, 113, 115, 117, 126, 134, 158 Theocritus, addressee of Cal. ep. 52 195 poet 190 n. 98, 201–36 Theogenes 174–5 Theognis 193 n. 103, 195, 221 n. 77 theomachia 35, 39 theoria 5 Thersites 29–30, 49 Theseus 4, 103 n. 47, 169–71 Thessaly 108, 174 Theuth 139–41, 154–5 Thirty tyrants, the 118, 123, 159 Thrace 170, 187 Thrasymachus 143 Thyestes 99 Thyonichus 220–1 Thyrsis 203–6, 214 Timaeus 151–3, 156 timeliness 84–91

Tiresias 56, 59 Titans 66 Tityrus 215 Tlepolemus 25 n. 3 tragedy 97–116, 122–6, 147, 150, 158–161, 170–1, 182, 238 Trajan 240 Trojan horse, the 42–3, 46, 186–7 Trojan War, the 7–17, 27–62, 78, 81, 87–8, 223 Troy 4, 27–40, 55–7, 87 Turner, M. 10–11 tyranny 97–105, 107, 110–12, 118, 123–4, 126–9, 136, 138, 158–60, 231 Tyrtaeus 179 n. 43 unique aptitude doctrine 145–7 Uranus 67–70 utopia 44–8, 83–4, 106–7, 114, 119–20, 143–50, 156–9, 165, 201–20, 231–3 Virgil 239 weapons as instruments of intentionality 7, 12–13 weaving 7, 52, 145, 222–36 West, M. 65 Whitehorne, J. 221 women, in Alexandria 221–36 in Athens 97–105 in Hesiod 68–9 wrath, Achilles’ 34–5, 54–7 Poseidon’s 42–5 writing 134–63, 192–200 Xenophanes 179 n. 43 Xenophon 123–4 Xerxes 98–9 Xuthus 105–6 Zancle 180 n. 46 Zeus 8–9, 25, 27–30, 51, 66–83, 89, 182–3, 186–93, 195, 214 n. 51, 224, 230