The Center for Hellenic Studies (CHS)

This posting, written 2019.04.19, picks up from where I left off in Classical Inquiries 2019.03.22, rewritten 2019.04.17. In the last paragraph of that posting, I focused on a myth that told about a defeat of the Centaurs, beastly hominoids who were half horse, half man. Such a mythological event is pictured in the sculptures of the west pediment of the temple of Zeus in Olympia, created around the middle of the fifth century BCE. And I have a basic question to ask about the picturing of this event: in our own reading, as it were, of the pedimental sculptures, who exactly were the mythological characters who defeated the Centaurs? In other words, how are we to imagine this primal event?

Homeric poetry, at a pivotal moment where it represents the making of Homeric poetry itself, pictures a blind singer of tales in the act of starting his song. The singer is shown in the act of ‘starting from a thread [oimē] that had at that time a fame [kleos] reaching all the way up to the wide sky’. That is how I translate line 74 in Rhapsody 8 of the Homeric Odyssey: οἴμης, τῆς τότ’ ἄρα κλέος οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἵκανε. The song that the singer of tales is singing here is pictured as a world-wide web of song, reaching all the way up to an unlimited celestial expanse. And the threading or oimē that becomes the song is being made by a master weaver who starts weaving his web with a heading band, as weavers call it. Ancient Greek weavers called it the exastis (ἔξαστις), and we see it pictured in the drawing that I show as the illustration for the cover of this essay. The drawing originates from Elizabeth Barber, who is not only a renowned expert in ancient textiles but also a deft weaver in her own right. And such a heading band, as pictured in this drawing, makes for a perfect start of Homeric song as sung by the singer of tales. There is a primal metaphor at work here. If a weaver makes a perfect start, then the web that is woven by the weaver can lead to a perfect finish. Comparably, a perfect start for Homeric singing leads to a perfect song, that is, to a marvel of unified poetry.

At the very beginning of my Introduction to The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours, at 00§1, where I talk about the “great books” of Greek literature that I will be analyzing, I say that I will also be showing pictures, taken mostly from ancient Greek vase paintings. As I now look back at the pictures in that book, first published online in 2013, I keep thinking of other relevant pictures I could have shown—but which I had already had a chance to show in another book of mine, Homer the Classic, first published online in 2009. In this essay, I highlight the relevance of one such picture. It is a scene of litigation between two heroes, pictured on the Bronze Doors of the Supreme Court. And this scene, which is part of set of eight scenes picturing the Rule of Law as it evolved through the ages, was inspired by a scene described in the Homeric Iliad. That Homeric scene, as we will see, was all about an all-powerful idea: human life is priceless. That is, you cannot put a price on human life. Such an idea, endangered once again in our own time, is at stake already in the world of Achilles.

The goddess Aphrodite is linked with a variety of birds and flowers. In this essay, I ask myself: what is it that links her with her birds and her flowers in Song 1 of Sappho? I can answer with one word, magic. I mean, the magic of love charms, of enchantments. When it comes to flowers, I can already say this much, from the start: the enchanting beauty of flowers, together with the pleasure that their beauty gives, is apparent, and it is in fact made apparent, as we will see, even in the first word of Sappho’s song. When it comes to birds, however, appearances can be deceiving. The picture I have chosen for the cover of this essay illustrates the point I have just made about deceptive appearances. It is an ancient painting of a songbird, most probably a nightingale, whose drabness in color is most deceptive in hiding the radiant coloratura of a beautiful singing voice that matches the brilliant colors of the equally beautiful roses that surround her. But how will such a picture help us understand the flowery magic of birdsong in Song 1 of Sappho? That magic is hidden, as we will see, in the first word of her song.

I have long admired what I would call the anthropological insights of Euripides into aetiologies, that is, into myths referring directly to rituals that frame these myths. Of course the very idea of linking anthropology with the poetry of Euripides is quite inaccurate in its anachronism, but the actual insights of this poet into the interweavings of myth and ritual—as anthropologists today tend to use these two terms—are I think quite accurate. A case in point, as I argued in “Hour 20” of the book The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours (Nagy 2013, second edition 2020; hereafter abbreviated H24H), is the myth about Hippolytus and Phaedra as transmitted in the ancient Greek city-state of Troizen, where the local population worshipped these two mythological figures as cult heroes linked with a ritual of female initiation. This localized ritual in Troizen was aetiologized in a localized myth telling about the unrequited love of Phaedra for Hippolytus, and Euripides, in a drama named after Hippolytus, actually poeticized this aetiology, as I argued in the book I cited (H24H 20§39 = pp. 481–482 of the second edition). What I now add to that argument is that this aetiology is linked by Euripides to the way he reads the actual feelings of female initiands as they relate in ritual to the prototypical feelings of Phaedra herself in myth. In the poetics of Euripides, the “wandering mind” of the lovesick Phaedra in myth is linked to personal anxieties experienced by girls who are about to be initiated into womanhood. Their troubled thoughts, as we will see, are pictured as a musical continuation of an archetypal woman’s own way of thinking about the sorrows of love

In the book Sein und Zeit (1927) and in other works by Martin Heidegger, the etymology of the Greek word alētheia ‘truth’ is explained as a negativizing of the element lēth-, attested as the verb lanthanein, which is used primarily in the sense of ‘escape the notice of’ in ancient Greek texts. Accordingly, Heidegger interpreted the basic meaning of alētheia as ‘unconcealedness’—to cite a commonly used English translation of his German term Unverborgenheit. I propose here to highlight a less-well-known interpretation of alētheia, which I think deserves its own place in the sun. This alternative is to be found in a book by Marcel Detienne, originally published in 1967; a second edition appeared in 1994, and an English translation by Janet Lloyd followed in 1996. In the first edition, Detienne was already fiercely critical of Heidegger’s interpretation, using philosophical, philological, and historical arguments in developing his own interpretation. In the second edition, Detienne added linguistic arguments in taking his interpretation even further. In adding those new arguments, Detienne cited, with approval, my own work on the etymology of alētheia. In this brief essay, I concentrate on the linguistic arguments.

My essay here concentrates on myths about two Greek goddesses and on their roles as mothers or would-be mothers: (A) The first goddess is Hērā in her role as mother or would-be mother of a serpentine Titan by the name of Typhon, alternatively called Typhoeus, who is destined to become a most dangerous threat to the sovereignty of Zeus. (B) The second goddess is Athena in her role as would-be mother of a serpentine human by the name of Erikhthonios, alternatively called Erekhtheus, who is destined to become the ancestor of all Greeks native to the city of Athens. The ancient image that I choose as the lead-off illustration shows another goddess, Gaia/Ge or Mother Earth herself, who is seen emerging from underground and presenting her very own baby boy to the goddess Athena, who receives the child. Athena will raise the baby in her role as mother of a son she “never” had. Looking on, in the same image, is a figure whose upper half is human while his lower half is serpentine. He isknown as Kekrops to the people of Athens. In this version of the many surviving visual representations of such a scene, the baby boy is not marked by any overtly serpentine features. In other versions, however, as we will see, the baby too, like Kekrops, is pictured as half-human, half-serpent.

In this posting, I start by showing a sketch of a picture carved into a gold signet ring originating from the palace at Knossos in Crete and dating from the Late Minoan era. The sketch, in line with conventions followed nowadays by archaeologists, flips the right-to-left orientation pictured on the signet ring itself, so as to show the picture that the ring would make when it was used for stamping impressions on clay sealings, where the orientation, as intended for viewers, would be left-to-right. This picture that I show here in the first illustration matches in its orientation a picture that I showed as the first illustration in the previous posting, 2020.05.22, where we saw a sketch of a picture stamped by a signet ring that is likewise dated to the Late Minoan era. In that case, the ring has not survived, and the orientation of the sketch already matches what was pictured on the clay sealings stamped by the lost signet ring. I need to emphasize here, from the start, the parallel orientations of the pictures represented in these two sketches, since I will be comparing the scenes visualized in these two pictures from the perspective of their parallelism in left-to-right orientation. And my comparison of the two scenes, both of which visualize what experts in Minoan archaeology tend to view as some kind of epiphany, are relevant, I think, to a myth as retold by Pausanias in the second century CE.

It is summer. A young woman and a young man are sitting side by side at a beachfront, looking out toward the vast sea that is facing them. They aim their gaze westward, viewing what seems like an infinite stretch of water that reaches all the way to the darkening horizon where the sea finally meets an infinite sky. As they watch the sun sink slowly into the sea, the young woman starts weeping. Then, suddenly, at the very moment when the glowing orb finally goes under, it gives off a subtle green flash. This is the green ray, which is a literal translation of the French words le rayon vert. The moment I am describing takes place in a film directed by Éric Rohmer, which actually bears the title Le Rayon Vert. It originally appeared in 1986. But Le Rayon-Vert is also the title of a romantic novel by Jules Verne, which appeared over a century earlier, in 1882. The novel was in fact the original inspiration for the film, though the stories differ radically. In the film, the story ends on a seemingly happy note: once she sees the green ray, the young woman who was weeping a moment earlier is now smiling as she cries out: oui ! But the happiness of this moment marked by the outcry of ‘yes!’ is not what interests me the most in this film: rather, I will highlight the earlier moment of weeping.

In this posting for 2015.08.14, I return to an earlier posting, for 2015.07.15, where I concentrated on Poem 66 of Catullus. This poem, as we saw, is a remaking or even a “translation” of a poem of Callimachus known as the Lock of Berenice (Coma Berenices, Callimachus fragment 110 ed. Pfeiffer). These two poems are about an Egyptian queen who dedicated a lock of her hair to Aphrodite, goddess of love and sexuality. Here is the historical background, reconstructed from the poems and from independent sources concerning the Hellenistic era of Egypt.

This essay centers on a scribe working in the Mycenaean palace at Pylos who wrote a Greek-language text about protocols involving rituals. The scribe’s text, written on a tablet of clay in a form of writing known as Linear B, was accidentally preserved because this tablet, along with hundreds of other such tablets, was baked solid by a great fire that destroyed the palace at Pylos around 1200 BCE. Mycenologists know the approximate date of the scribe’s writing for a simple reason: they know the dating of the fire. The text of this particular tablet, which is classified by Mycenologists as Tn 316, is about rituals honoring divinities whom the scribe actually mentions by name, and these divinities include Zeus, Hērā, Poseidon, Hermes—names familiar to anyone today who studies Classical Greek mythology as it evolved in the course of the first millennium BCE. But what about these same gods as we see them named in the rituals recorded by our scribe, who is writing in the second millennium BCE? In the brief essay I present here, I argue that such rituals have something to tell us about the myths that went with the rituals. The scribe himself may have been an ordinary person—just as the ancient Egyptian scribe whom we see in my first illustration for this essay seems ordinary enough. Still, what the scribe writes might seem extraordinary even for such an ordinary bureaucratic mortal—if he is put in charge of writing up various protocols for various prescribed ways of caring for divinities and for things that are sacred to those divinities. Even a worldly bureaucrat, if he is to care about protocols for taking care of gods, could then be thinking otherworldly thoughts that are worthy of those gods. Beyond the Greek-speaking world, a model for such otherworldly thinking is the ancient Egyptian divinity Thoth, god of all scribes. We get a glimpse of this divinity, pictured with the head of an ibis, in my second illustration. There he is, otherworldly scribe, in the act of writing on his own otherworldly tablet.

As I indicated in the previous posting, in Classical Inquiries 2019.07.06 (at II-G5), the aim of the brief follow-up essay that I offer here in the present posting, 2019.07.12, is to connect a myth about the apotheosis of Hēraklēs on Mount Olympus with a myth that credits this same hero with the original founding of the Olympics.

A sampling of comments on the Iliad and Odyssey includes an attempt of mine to analyze a scene in Iliad 14 where Hērā has a sexual encounter with Zeus on the heights of Mount Ida. In my comments on the wording of the goddess at the moment when she initiates her encounter with the god, at verses 200–210, I argue that this wording “derives from genuine theogonic traditions centering on the idea of sacred intercourse as an act of cosmogonic creation.” But I am forced to admit: “From the dramatic standpoint of the immediate narrative context, Hērā is making up what she is saying.” And the goddess is making things up because her ultimate intent here is to deceive the god. How, then, does the intent to deceive square with the cosmic prestige of Zeus and Hērā as the divine married couple who rule the universe of the ancient Greeks? Is their marriage dysfunctional? The question is sharpened when we view a close-up of the painting by James Barry, 1790, “Jupiter and Juno on Mount Ida.” From the looks of it, this couple is surely dysfunctional! But my answer, as I will argue in what follows, is in fact two-sided: yes, the marriage of Zeus and Hērā is surely dysfunctional in the “past” world of myth, but it becomes functional in the “present” world of ritual as a re-enactment of myth. To make this argument, I will focus on another scene in the Iliad where we see Hērā in the act of deceiving Zeus.