CLASSICS January 2022
A CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS MAGAZINE
Explore Our Classics Books Point your smartphone camera at the QR code below or click it to view all our forthcoming, new, and previously published in our Classics subject area.
SCAN ME
In 2018, I became the acquisitions editor for the Classics at Cornell University Press. My responsibility is to not only maintain, but also build this impressive area of our publishing expertise of award-winning scholarship in classical literature, ancient history, philosophy, archaeology, and Egyptology. Our history of publishing in the Classics began in 1887 with the Cornell Studies in Classical Philology series, published jointly with the Cornell University Department of Classics. This collaboration has produced monographs on a wide range of subjects within the field of classical studies, including literature, history, art, and archaeology. The series also publishes versions of the Townsend Lectures presented at Cornell University since 1985, featuring scholars of international reputation in the forefront of current classical research. Their work represents not only a close, analytic reading of texts but also an engagement with current literary discourse and broad interdisciplinary concerns. Continuing the tradition of innovative scholarship published under the first Myth & Poetics series, we launched the Myth and Poetics II series in 2018 with series editors Gregory Nagy and Leonard Muellner, in collaboration with The Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University. This revitalized series encourages books that integrate literary criticism with anthropological approaches to mythology, pay special attention to problems concerning the nexus of ritual and myth, and illuminate diverse literary forms—epic and saga, folklore and poetry—encompassing both oral and written cultures. We have published four exciting titles in the series thus far – the latest being Mythologizing Performance by Richard P. Martin and The Many-Minded Man by Joel Christensen. Several original Myth and Poetics series titles are available as open access titles via the NEH Open Book Initiative: cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open/. Classics at Cornell University Press also addresses ancient and political philosophy. Agora Editions is an exceptional series that publishes translations and annotated editions of classic texts in political philosophy, with the guidance of series editor, Thomas Pangle. Outside of the series, books engage with ancient philosophy through innovative theory and discussion, such as the recently published Platonism and Naturalism by Lloyd P. Gerson and The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy by Donald Phillip Verene. Finally, Cornell University Press Classics extends even further to archaeology and Egyptology, with scholarly monographs, translations, and innovative field analyses in these areas. Most recently, we published important, novel assessments of the history of archaeology and ancient history, including Reclaiming the Past by Jonathan M. Hall and Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt by Julia Troche. In the future, we are approaching current topics such as decolonization, the politics of heritage, and the future of archaeological labor. As noted above, there are a lot of exciting developments with our Classics books, past and present. It has been an exceptional experience building this long-running, award-winning tradition at Cornell University Press, and I hope the snapshot above illustrates the diversity and innovation that these books provide. Please reach out with ideas, questions, and proposals at bethany.wasik@cornell.edu to help carry on the tradition of classical, innovative scholarship, one book at a time. Bethany Wasik, Acquisitions Editor
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The Article
PATRONAGE AND THE RESTORATION OF CHURCHES ON THE ÎLE DE LA CITÉ by Gregory I. Halfond In the year AD 585, workmen in Paris discovered lodged within a clogged drain two metallic figurines: a snake and a dormouse. Once removed, for purportedly the first time in its history the city experienced not only infestations of vermin, but also devastating fire. Indeed, not long thereafter, a fire broke out which burned many private residences, and threatened to spread to public buildings as well, including an oratory dedicated to St. Martin, which stood at the north gate on the Île de la Cité. According to Bishop Gregory of Tours, writing not long after these events, the oratory and other nearby churches were miraculously spared. These buildings included the church of the bishop of Paris, dedicated to St. Stephen, and located on the southeastern corner of the Île de la Cité, the same part of the island where over 1400 years later another cathedral nearly succumbed to flames. The fire that spread through the cathedral of Notre-Dame on April 15, 2019, was extinguished before bringing down the entire structure, but as the New York Times reported in July 2019, the cathedral actually came precariously close to experiencing this very fate, which would have been a near-incalculable cultural, historical, and symbolic loss. Speaking not long after the fire had been put out, French president Emmanuel Macron called for the cathedral to be rebuilt within five years, observing, “In the course of our history, we’ve built “In the course of our histocities, ports, churches. Many have burned or were ry, we’ve built cities, ports, destroyed in wars, revolutions, or by man’s mischurches. Many have burned takes. Each time, each time, we’ve rebuilt them.”
or were destroyed in wars, revolutions, or by man’s mistakes. Each time, each time, we’ve rebuilt them.”
Macron’s speech was a necessary reminder of the illusion of permanency that surrounds cultural landmarks such as Notre Dame. So closely are they associated with a particular location or culture that it seems impossible that there ever was a time in which they did not stand. But on the Île de la Cité alone churches have been built, destroyed, rebuilt, and expanded many times over the centuries. The oratory of St. Martin, which had been spared by the fire of 585, for example, did not stand long, although there is no evidence to suggest that it suffered a premature demise.
Conversely, in Gregory of Tours’ own diocese, during the tenure of his predecessor Eufronius a fire raged throughout the city, destroying all of its churches, and requiring the bishop to sponsor a major restoration effort. Bishops in Eufronius’ time participated in a culture of patronage, in which ecclesiastical and secular elites alike carefully managed the flow of resources to client individuals and institutions. Similar to those corporate and individual donors who Macron’s speech was a necesto date have pledged millions of dollars towards the restoration of Notre Dame, early medieval elites were sary reminder of the illusion cognizant of the societal and personal benefits deriv- of permanency that surrounds ing from their generosity. Patrons of the churches of cultural landmarks such as the Frankish Kingdom anticipated in return for their Notre Dame. support prayers, personal prestige, strategic alliances with influential recipients, and even divine favor. However, as I discuss in my book, Bishop and the Politics of Patronage in Merovingian Gaul, the unequal distribution of patronage could have the unintended consequence of undermining social cohesion and alliances. This problem, of course, remains true today. Newspaper reports have emerged in recent months regarding backlash against wealthy donors to the Notre Dame rebuilding project on the grounds that this money might have been better spent on addressing social inequalities. Even in light of such criticisms, elite patronage has proven a remarkably durable socio-economic instrument. In Paris alone, it quite literally provided the foundations for the many churches whose illusionary permanency has helped to define the identity of the city since antiquity.
THE EXCERPT
Introduction Who Owns the Past?
Following a wave of protests in 2020, dozens of Confederate monuments, statues, and memorials across the southern United States were damaged or removed, including a statue of Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Virginia and one of Robert E. Lee in Montgomery, Alabama. Yet, the 2020 assault on Confederate monuments was hardly unprecedented—many had already been removed following the 2015 Charleston mass shooting and 2017 demonstrations in Charlottesville. The damage, defacement, and removals in turn provoked fierce reactions, including some from President Trump, who complained that “they have no idea what they are ripping down” and “you don’t want to take away our heritage or our history.”1 Regrettably, the president did not specify exactly whose heritage or history he had in mind but, to judge from the differential employment of pronouns, an inclusive definition was not intended. It was not only monuments commemorating the Confederacy that were targeted. Across the United States, statues of Christopher Columbus were vandalized or removed, including in Chicago’s Grant Park, and (Woodrow) Wilson College at Princeton University was renamed after Mellody Hobson, a prominent black alumna, on account of the twenty-eighth president’s racist and segregationist policies. Abroad, the United Kingdom addressed similar concerns, as the governors of Oriel College, Oxford, voted to remove a statue of
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Cecil Rhodes, on the grounds that he represented imperialist values that were no longer acceptable, while demonstrators in Bristol toppled a statue of the merchant, politician, and slave-trader Edward Colston. The events described above illustrate more than that the meaning of monuments changes over time. Were that the case, their conservation could perhaps be justified in part with the rather flimsy defense that it is unethical to practice selective memorialization and occlude the historical record or, more importantly, as a continuous rejection of outmoded attitudes and ideologies, as has sometimes been argued for the preservation of Fascist architecture in Rome. Rather, the point is that, throughout their life histories, monuments mean different things to different people. There are numerous examples of monuments to which multiple and diverse “stakeholders” lay claim, including the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, contested by Muslims and Jews, or Ayodhya in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh where, in 1992, Hindu activists demolished the Babri Mosque, triggering riots in which more than 2,000 lost their lives.2 Of course, contestation can also take less violent forms. In her polyphonic analysis of the Athenian Acropolis, Eleana Yalouri explores how the “Sacred Rock” is simultaneously a global and a national symbol. (Actually, when set alongside other regional monuments like Thessaloniki’s White Tower, the Acropolis also becomes a local Athenian landmark.) Much of the time, these competing claims are in tension with one another, and the profession that certain monuments are part of “world heritage”—an argument that the British Museum has often employed to justify its custody of the Parthenon Marbles—can easily be exposed as yet another iteration of Western colonialism. On the other hand, as Yalouri explains, national recognition of the Acropolis’s global significance proves to be advantageous in establishing a debt that Greece is owed by the West.3 It has become common in recent scholarship to regard monuments and landscapes as lieux de mémoire, a term employed by the historian Pierre Nora to denote sites, whether material or nonmaterial, that function as the “ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness.”4 In fact, the idea had already been anticipated by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who argued that the truth claim of a group memory “needs to be presented in the concrete form of an event, of a personality, or of a locality.”5 In an analysis of how different ages constructed the topography of the Holy Land, Halbwachs demonstrates persuasively that landscapes and monuments can change their signification over time, but his Durkheimian analytical framework is less attentive to synchronic contestations over meaning. That, instead, the physical vestiges of the past do evince multivocal interpretations on the part of diverse
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stakeholders can be illustrated by the history and cultural heritage of modern Argos in Greece, as is evident in the following case study.
the Battle for the Barracks On March 9, 2017, the Byzantine Museum of the Argolid finally opened its doors to the public after a twelve-year remodeling project. Its realization drew to a close a contentious and, at times, bitter strug gle that had divided opinion in the town of Argos for forty years. The building in which the museum is housed had originally been built in 1828–1829, to the design of the Ithakan architect Lambros Zavos and on the orders of Greece’s first governor, Ioannis Kapodistrias, in order to house two squadrons of the Greek cavalry (figure 1). The barracks flank the southern side of the market square at Argos—a location that had previously been occupied by a hospital during the Second Venetian Occupation (1686–1715) and subsequently by the Turkish Bezesteni (covered market). Over the course of almost 150 years, the barracks had accommodated not only the cavalry but also the infantry, the Sixth Artillery Regiment, and a mounted detachment of the town’s gendarmerie. For a brief period in 1893–1894 the building served as the town’s high school, after the roof of the school building collapsed; during the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 it housed Turkish prisoners of war and, in 1922, it provided shelter to refugees from Asia Minor. Originally a quadrilateral building ranged around a large open courtyard, the north wing was demolished in 1938. In 1968, the Greek Ministry of Defense agreed the sale of the building to the municipality of Argos for the token price of 8,214,000 drachmas (a little over 24,000 euros), after which it quickly fell into disrepair. On March 5, 1977, the municipal council—with the enthusiastic backing of the then mayor, Dimitrios Bonis—voted to demolish the structure with a view to developing the site. Among the suggestions for its use were a park, government offices, a multistory car park, and a bus station. Within a few months, a “preservationist” movement had arisen, spearheaded by the archaeologists of the Ministry of Culture’s Fourth Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities, who proposed in September 1977 that the barracks should instead be converted into a cultural center. The preservationist cause was strengthened further at the end of the year with the foundation of the Cultural Association of Argos (Politistikos Omilos Argous, POA), though the association never counted more than 180 subscribing members. On the side of the “demolitionists” were developers and contractors, the majority of the municipal council, the parliamentary
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Figure 1. The Kapodistrian barracks.
deputies for the region (most—though by no means all—from the conservative New Democracy party), and some local journalists, including Georgios Thomopoulos, former mayor and editor of the Argiakon Vima newspaper. Locals, however, were not the only stakeholders. Kapodistrias had been controversial in his own lifetime and his legacy would turn out to be no less contentious, but his short term in office coincided with the foundation of a free Greek nation. As a consequence, buildings associated with his regime were endowed with a national significance in addition to any local meanings. Indeed, the issue of the barracks soon drew in the Athenian press and prominent public intellectuals, such as the architectural historian Charalambos Bouras and the archaeologist Manolis Andronikos, as well as senior government figures—most of whom sided with the preservationists. For example, the Greek minister of defense, Evangelos Averoff, announced that he was willing to forgive the municipality the final payment instalment of 400,000 drachmas if it would restore the building and use it as a museum, a cultural center, or something similar. On January 24, 1978, after consultation with the Central Archaeological Council, the minister of culture, Georgios Plytas, declared the building a historical monument and, in April, the Ministry of Culture approved a plan to convert it into a cultural center, for which twenty million
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drachmas were set aside. An architectural commission, under the presidency of Solon Kydoniatis, was appointed to draw up plans for the cultural center, which were submitted to the Ministry of Culture in March 1979. Almost immediately after the Ministry of Culture’s resolution to list the barracks as a historical monument, the municipal council filed a request with the Council of State in Athens to annul the decision. The Council of State would eventually reject that request in December 1978, but while the matter was awaiting a judicial decision, bitter divisions persisted. In October, Bonis lost the municipal elections and was replaced as mayor by Georgios Pirounis, who proved to be no less adamant in his determination to demolish the barracks. Pirounis defended the demolitionists, arguing that they were not—as the Athenian press had portrayed them—uneducated rustics who desired to replace historical monuments with tenement blocks and cement but included intellectuals, lawyers, civil engineers, public officials, and even historians. He also claimed—though without presenting any evidence—that a team of experts had consulted historical sources and determined that there was no connection between the barracks and Kapodistrias. A further complication arose from the support that foreign archaeologists of the École Française d’Athènes (French School of Archaeology), who had been working periodically at Argos for almost a century, had lent to the side of the preservationists. One of them, Pierre Aupert, was denounced to the French ambassador for interfering in internal Greek affairs. In a similar vein, Argiakon Vima on December 13, 1981, accused the École Française of intervening in matters that were of concern only to citizens of Argos. Matters were not helped by inertia at the Ministry of Culture, where Georgios Plytas had been replaced by Dimitrios Nianias. August 1980 saw the swearing in of yet another minister of culture, Andreas Andrianopoulos, who decided that he needed to refer the matter of the barracks back to the Central Archaeological Council. The council unanimously reaffirmed its earlier verdict in favor of preservation and, on October 16, the president of Greece, Konstantinos Karamanlis, even signed off on a decree that again designated the barracks as a listed building. On the other side, however, the demolitionists secured the tacit support of the New Democracy prime minister, Georgios Rallis, and the issue again ground to a standstill. Nor did a swift resolution to the situation occur after the national elections of October 1981, when Andreas Papandreou’s socialist PASOK party was swept to power and the actor-turnedpolitician Melina Mercouri was appointed minister of culture. In March 1984, Mercouri finally approved a plan to convert the barracks into a cultural center that would also house a Byzantine and folk museum but the Ministry of Planning, Settlement, and the Environment delayed the work further by deciding
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to commission yet another study of the surrounding area. Meanwhile, in a last-ditch attempt to downgrade the property and devalue its status as a national monument, Mayor Pirounis installed sheds in the courtyard of the barracks. It was only with the elections of October 1986 and the appointment of a new mayor, Dimitrios Papanikolaou, that the deadlock was finally broken and the green light given for restoration, though formal approval was not given until 1992.6
cultural Heritage(s) The “battle for the barracks” illustrates some of the key issues that are explored in this book: the often irresolvable tension between conservation and development; the clash between perspectives focused on the past and those oriented toward the future; the potential symbolic—and sometimes economic—capital that accrues to the physical remnants of the past; and the involvement of outsiders and foreigners who undeniably demonstrate a commitment to the past, but often to a past that is quite different from that envisioned by local residents. To be sure, most of the movable and immovable antiquities that are discussed in this book pre-date the Kapodistrian cavalry barracks by at least seventeen centuries. Yet, since 1975, when “neoclassical” buildings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came under the official protection of the Greek state, all can be considered part of what we might call the “cultural heritage” of Argos.7 Articles 1 and 2 of the comprehensive legislation (Law 3028/2002) concerning the protection of antiquities, passed by the Greek parliament on June 28, 2002, define cultural heritage as “the evidence for the existence of individual and collective human activity,” from antiquity to today, which is found “within the boundaries of the Greek state, including territorial waters and other maritime zones in which Greece exercises the relevant jurisdiction under international law.” The definition includes “intangible” as well as “tangible” goods but also applies to “cultural goods that originate from the Greek state, whenever they were removed,” and those that are “connected historically with Greece, no matter where they are found.”8 This nationally enacted legislation clearly articulates the principle that cultural heritage “encapsulates, materializes and preserves the experience and historical memory of the national community,”9 and what gives it this efficacy is its ability to give “tangible and physical representation to intangible concepts and notions of cultural, social or historical identity, such as a sense of place, community or belonging.”10 But, as the example of the Kapodistrian barracks shows, cultural heritage can also
Three Questions with JULIA TROCHE
author of Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egpyt 1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book? While preparing a course I was co-teaching with my colleague Dr. Brinkman that took place, in part, in the British Museum, I came upon the False Door of Ptahshepses (EA682) which features notably in a philological discussion in my book. The stela’s inscription evinces the apotheosis of a deceased man named Djedi. I spend pages analyzing particular epithets and spellings in its inscription, but this false door, which stands over twelve feet tall, completely overwhelmed me with its physicality. Teaching from this artifact was transformative. It compounded for me its materiality and experiential nature, and brought this esoteric evidence alive.
“I came upon the False Door of Ptahshepses (EA682), which features notably in a philological discussion in my book.”
2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now? This is my first book, so I approached the publication process with such trepidation. I realize this experience may be different for others, of course, but for me the process was so incredibly supportive and critical and instructive. My editor was patient and knowledgeable. My peer reviewers went above and beyond offering truly constructive feedback. And everyone else—the copy editors, typesetters, marketing team, etc.—were similarly encouraging and brilliant. Next time, I definitely will not be so tentative starting the process.
3. How do you wish you could change your field of study? I wish I could change our field to be quicker to embrace compassion, change, and inclusion. My book considers how power was constructed and maintained, systemically, and how it was transgressed and negotiated through individual and group action. Our field is in a moment of power negotiation, both in terms of systemic issues (racism, lack of TT jobs, closing programs) and in terms of new ways of “doing” ancient history (e.g. digital). Instead of fighting over limited, traditional resources, we can choose to be mentors, advocates, and accomplices, finding new resources and metrics by which to lift up our fields.
INVITE A CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS AUTHOR TO SPEAK TO YOUR CLASS Learn more at cornellpress.cornell.edu/guest-lecturers/classics/
an interview with author of
Joel Christensen
The Many-Minded Man,
hosted by Jonathan
Hall
1869
The Cornell University Press Podcast
the transcript
Jonathan
Joel Jonathan
Joel
Welcome to 1869, the Cornell University Press Podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall. This episode we speak with Joel Christensen, author of The Many-Minded Man: The Odyssey, Psychology and the Therapy of Epic. Joel Christensen is Associate Professor and Chair of Classical Studies at Brandeis University. He is co-author of A Beginner’s Guide to Homer and Homer’s Thebes. We spoke to Joel about how the Greek epic tradition was not based on the written word, but on large scale performances, in which ancient audiences experienced the stories as ways to think about their own lives, how the Odyssey in particular offered audiences a form of folk psychology, and what lessons modern cognitive psychology can learn from Homer. Hello, Joel, welcome to the podcast. Hi, thanks for having me, Jonathan. Oh, it’s our pleasure. Well, I want to give you a congratulations on your new book, The Many-Minded Man: The Odyssey, Psychology and the Therapy of Epic, it sounds like a very exciting book. And I think it’s interesting that I’m talking from Ithaca, I’m located in Ithaca and that’s the island home of Odysseus, obviously, not in the Greek Archipelago, but named after that. So tell us what inspired you to write a book on the Odyssey? I think the primary thing that probably inspired me to write a book on the Odyssey was teaching the Odyssey year in and year out. I did my early work and graduate school and my dissertation on the Iliad. And, you know, the story I usually tell, which doesn’t make it untrue, that I tell them all the time, is that we’re, you know, what we work on and what we get attracted to is based in part in our experience. So I started graduate school about a month before 911, I moved to New York City, and I was in New York City for 9/11. And over the years that I worked in graduate school, I kept going back to the Iliad, because it is a poem of war and a poem of rhetoric and politics. And when I left graduate school and started teaching at the University of Texas in San Antonio, what I found frustratingly, is that the Iliad didn’t seem to get students to respond to it. On the other hand, they kept going back to the Odyssey, so I teach my most thrilling and exciting classes on the Odyssey—a poem, I didn’t know as well, and that I didn’t think I understood or even respected as much. So part of what really pushed me was trying to understand why students were getting such fulfilling experiences from reading the Odyssey when I didn’t. So, the real sort of key moment for me, happened in around 2011—my dad died suddenly. And I found myself returning to the Odyssey in class and thinking about the ways in which it forces us to think about the way that other people in your life create your identity for you. So for people who may not remember the Odyssey, Odysseus returns
home after 20 years, and he’s not fully home until after a series of reunions—first with a son who never really knew, his wife, and then this problematic part in book 24 of the Odyssey, when Odysseus shows up in disguise still, and he tricks his father Laertes and father cries. And then he immediately relents, and says, “No, no, I’m your son Odysseus, I’m here.” And his father doesn’t believe him. And he has to prove it to him by showing him his scar that he got from when he was a young man on a hunting trip. And then they go through this orchard, and name the trees that their fathers and grandfathers planted, and they took care of when Odysseus was young. And one day I was teaching that and just completely undone by it because it made me remember my father. And the way he bought five acres of land in the middle of the woods in Maine, when I was in third grade, and we spent the rest of his life trying to turn that into like lawn and gardens. Right. By the time I was in sixth grade, I had to stop the lawn mower and refuel in the process of mowing this ridiculous lawn. So I think what I started to understand from the Odyssey, is how much rereading and growing with a narrative repays you, but also how much your place in life dictates or shapes the way you receive a narrative. So again, you know, I responded to the Iliad as a younger man, in a time of war living in New York City, seeing the anti-war protests, debating with friends about the War on Terror. And when I returned to the Odyssey and taught it, I saw my students responding, but I also was a father. We had two children and you know, 16 months, and I’d lost a father. So I started to see the Odyssey in a way as a poem about what it means to choose to live. And what you need to do in order to survive. And the sort of the next part of this was the psychology angle. And the psychology angle is this—we’re born without a manual on how to use the human mind, right? And I’ve always been interested in how the what poetry does in the world, how it shifts people, how it changes them, and how narratives shape you over time. And as I watched students respond to the Odyssey, what I saw them responding to was the building of character, identity, and really emotional responses. So my question started to be, how does the Odyssey anticipate the way its audience’s minds work? And how does it reflect the way minds work together in the world, right, both both emotionally, and, and intellectually. So first step, I’ll pause after this, the first sort of critical step out of that day where I was thinking Odysseus, and his father and the trees, I read a short article in The New York Times, it was an op-ed about a concept called learned helplessness. And that’s a basic concept that’s been around since like 1900 or so. It says that when we experience failure, we’re less likely to try after repeated failure. And we’re also it turns out, liable to succeed less when we try, because we get habituated to the idea that we won’t succeed. And we sort of both lose skill-sets, right? But you also lose an extent to the belief that you can do something to change your surroundings. So this has been this has been, you know, used to describe depression, cycles of poverty, responses to racism and trauma.
And I went into class with this idea, and address the problem at the beginning of the Odyssey, which is that Odysseus has been on this island for seven year, right? We see him here and book five of the Odyssey. He’s been in this island, seven years, crying all day at the edge of the sea. And having sex with Calypso at night, even though he doesn’t really want to. And then Hermes comes and says, make a ship, or have him make a raft so he can leave. And we had been talking the day before about why doesn’t he try? Right? Why doesn’t he build a ship until that moment? And there are all sorts of arguments you can make? Oh, well, it’s the gods, he knows he can’t go. But at the basic level. My question was this, can we imagine that the Odyssey is depicting someone who has been broken down by life, who doesn’t believe that he can succeed anymore, and needs something radical to happen to shift him out of it? And how would this shape our reading of the epic, and help us understand what ancient audiences were doing with it? So at a very basic level, like that’s the first observation that I sort of built the research for the book on, and I moved from there to sort of look at a whole series of different ideas of the way human minds work and modern psychology, both clinical and cognitive, to really look at the epic as a whole with a basic question like, what does it do in the world? What does it say about human minds? And why is that an important question to ask now?
Jonathan
Wow, that’s a beautiful and amazing story. You have a first-hand experience of the Odyssey as a therapeutic tool, you see your students responding to it, and seeing that tit helps them compared to the Iliad. So tell us, you have you have a term called folk psychology, tell us how reading, hearing, experiencing the Odyssey is therapeutic.
Joel
So folk psychology is an idea that you’ll see in different in different texts in different way. But the main author I draw on is a guy named Jerome Bruner, we use a cognitive psychologist who used to teach at Harvard. And he has a book named, I think it’s “Possible Worlds, Actual Mind.” So maybe you flip it around. And the idea is that, you know, you can have embedded in a narrative tradition of basic concept of how human minds work and don’t work. And he calls this a folk psychology. And he doesn’t use the word folk in any way to contrast it with say, official or scientific, just that it’s something that doesn’t come out of a clinical environment. And it’s a basic assumption of the way human minds work in the world. So for me, understanding the epic or Greek epic tradition as psychological, oras conveying folk psychology, is based in understanding its performance context and the way people experienced it in the ancient world. So we too typically experience ancient literature as something on the page, we read alone and think about, and then only once or twice, but earlier, I mentioned that the important step of rereading and returning to a narrative as you change in life.
In the ancient world, audiences would have heard sections of Greek epic all the time, and they would have seen it performed in monumental performances, and they would have had it throughout their life, they would have talked about it, they would have reflected on it. And so it has sort of a narrative load, and occupies a cultural space that almost nothing in our modern world does, right? Like maybe if you took like religious texts, added the Marvel Universe, and then threw in some fan-fiction altogether, it might have the cultural space that epic had in the ancient world. And so even before like Aristotle, and philosophers talked about tragedy and the catharsis that happened there, I think that ancient audiences experienced epic, as a way to think about their own lives and their own problems. And it changed over time with them. So part of the performance context is that the epics weren’t written down. They weren’t perfect scripts. They were performed and sung in response to audience interests. And so really what they are are complex narrative engagements, they don’t give solutions to problems, they give ways to think about what it means to be a human. So back to this idea of learned helplessness that I mentioned, the epic, the Odyssey actually presents three different figures who are paralyzed by their inability to have agency in the world. First, we see Telemachus in book one, then we see Odysseus in book five, and throughout, we see Penelope. So the three chief characters in this epic, are sidelined from the action, they can’t make choices, they don’t know how to navigate in the world. And what we get then are different interventions that communicate, how they can re-engage with the world and what they need. Telemachus needs a tutor, he needs someone to show him how to act, and so he needs to hear other stories and different examples of how people work in the world. Odysseus needs something that’s akin to cognitive behavioral therapy—he needs to try and then he needs to fail again. So in book five, when he – people, often forget – when he leaves that lonely island, he almost dies several times— his ship wrecks again, he has to choose to swim to safety, and he has to decide to live. And then the most the central part of the Odyssey, if you ask an average person, what they remember from the Odyssey, nine times out of ten, they’ll remember the part of the story of Odysseus tells himself. So from books nine through twelve, Odysseus tells all the famous stuff from the Odyssey, the bag of the winds, the Cave of the Cyclops going to the underworld Circe changing the men, the Sirens, that’s all his story. And I think the primary lesson we learn in the middle of the epic, is that the way you regain agency in the world, is by getting control of your own story by telling stories about yourself that put you in the center of the action. And I really got this inspiration from the clinical therapy practice of narrative therapy, as written by a man named Michael White, who’s from Australia. And he really emphasizes and this echoes a lot of what happens in clinical therapy, in talk therapy, which is that part of the reason we can’t act in the world, part of the dysfunction we feel is that we believe bad things about ourselves, right? Or we believe that
we didn’t have control of situations, or we did have control of situations where we didn’t. So part of the goal of talking about stories, and to be telling our own stories, is figuring out where our own responsibility stands and where it doesn’t. And I know I’m going on a little longer on this one, but in the beginning of the Odyssey, Zeus says this fabulous thing that I returned to several times in the book—he’s looking down on the mortals and he says mortals, they’re always blaming us for their problems when they make their fate worse than it needs to be because of their own stupidity, right? And the word stupidity is recklessness or blindness. But this is a radical break with the mythical tradition. It’s a break. You know, when people read the Iliad, they’ll say, oh, what’s fate and what’s divine will? In the beginning of the Odyssey Zeus is saying, no. Yeah, some things are gonna be fated, right? But you also have some responsibility for your life. So back to some of your earlier question, what makes the epic therapeutic? It gives you a series of case studies. And a lingering question throughout. And the question is, how are the players in the epic responsible for their own suffering? And how are they not? And I think by going through this process, this narrative process, you learn to ask the question about your own life, right? You learn to think about causality and agency differently, you learn to accept that there are some things you can’t control. But that even within that range, there are some things you could if you just take it into your own hands.
Jonathan
That’s really cool. I like that the quote that you had from Zeus, and that the Odyssey offers in many ways as you said folk psychology or we could say proto-psychology of giving people agency and growing from their experiences. That’s beautiful. So we have this as a form of psychology. What can modern psychology or cognitive science learn from Homer?
Joel
Well, I think one thing you can learn is that it takes a long time to heal the human mind. But even more importantly, there’s a situatedness, right, there’s a community aspect of mental health, that I think often in the West, we get too far away from, right? The whole notion of one of the most powerful lessons that I’ve gained from the Odyssey is that you aren’t who you say you are, you are who other people say you are. And one of the most uncomfortable and painful things in our life, is when other people believe or say things about us that are so that can conflict with what we believe about ourselves, right? And so for me, these are different levels of narrative and story, right? The most honest you can be in life, is if other people know what’s going on in your mind, right? If other people say the same things about you believe them about you, that you do, and the most pain comes from when you have that gap between the two. So I think one thing to learn, and to really focus on for psychologists and for individuals is that a Odysseus doesn’t get to be home until, or he doesn’t get to be Odysseus until he’s embraced by others, right? So our
Joel
Jonathan
identities are comprised of social rules we don’t control. And I think that runs against some of the, you know, popular spirit, especially of American individualism, the idea that you are an individual and that you can exert your will, right? But this goes back, you know, to the old line of poetry that, you know, no man is an island, right, independent of the main. And I think so I think that’s a powerful reminder. But I think it also, it’s a good reminder for modern clinical practitioners, but also theoretical, that, you know, human minds haven’t changed radically, right? I mean, for 2000 years, and that there’s a lot of wisdom in traditional narratives and traditional cultures. That can be I don’t want to say confirmed by but can be explored from the perspective of the scientific side as well. So one of the things that I find particularly troubling, is the notion that, you know, we’re going to solve our all of our problems with science, right? or drugs, when the harder lesson is that some things take time, and some things can’t be fixed. So I think what I found, remarkably and is how many modern concepts are echoed in the Odyssey. Right? Now, part of the problem there, and I think in danger of my approach is that I’ve gone looking for them. But I think the process of conversation between the worlds is incredibly enriching, and can really help us understand the final important thing, which I think psychologists understand but which in the public, we don’t talk about enough, which is the power of story. So one of the things that has been really overwhelming and sad has been while I’ve written this book, is watching how much narrative gets away from people, and how fast it moves online, how much it changes the way we look at the world, and can really pervert our public discourse, right about what we believe our place in the world is and what stories we choose to believe. So this year, as we’ve been in isolation, I’ve been thinking, look, we have social distancing for diseases. Sometimes we need them for bad ideas as well. Right? I don’t know how to do that. But here’s the thing. You talked about you being in Ithaca, NY, and Odysseus going back to to Ithaca—it takes a very long time to get from Ithaca to Troy and back again. Here, now we can move our stories and our identities in the blink of an eye. And we haven’t adapted to that speed of storytelling, and that speed of identity construction. So I think if anything, we need to reflect on the power of story. And really, by the end of the epic, and the end of the book, as I write it, it’s really self-reflected, and reflective in thinking about how dangerous narrative can be, how tales and stories and ideas about identity can move us to places where we harm communities instead of help them. That’s fascinating and refreshing, in that, as you so well said, we live in a very fast paced world, where things are expected to change very rapidly and the news cycle, and the media cycle that we that we are in, doesn’t allow narrative to actually gestate or grow. It’s just a new story, a new story, a new story. And it it is refreshing, that that this ancient tale, this ancient epic, has
so much to offer us, if we just dive into it, there’s a great quote that you have at the very beginning of the book by Heraclitus, “The person who journeys on every road cannot find the limits of the soul by walking. That is how deep its story is.” And are our soul searching, our soul mining requires time, requires depth. And we live in an age of superficiality in many ways, but folks like you are mining, mining the depths of these traditions and bringing this out and we encourage readers to pick up Joel’s new book, The Many-Minded Man: The Odyssey, Psychology and the Therapy of Epic. We’ve only scratched the surface, certainly on what you’ve uncovered with your research. But this has been a fascinating conversation that I’m sure we could go on for hour, there’s so much to talk about. But I so appreciate you coming on to the podcast and sharing what you found.
Joel
Thank you. It’s always great to talk about Homer.
Jonathan
Excellent. Excellent, cool. Well, great talking with you and look forward to talking with you again soon.
Joel
Thank you. All right, take care.
Jonathan
That was Joel Christensen, author of The Many-Minded Man: The Odyssey, Psychology and the Therapy of Epic.
THE EXCERPT
Introduction Opening of Hostilities
Julian is a fascinating subject for historians: a man of ability and drive, who was placed in a position with the potential to afect the course of history. Unfortunately, scholarship on Julian has too often sufered from an excess of either adulation or vitriol. In addition, modern analysis of his less than two-year reign is beset by controversies that range from questions about his sanity to speculations regarding the motives for some of his admittedly more opaque actions. The present inquiry works from the assumption that Julian was both intelligent and rational, and that there was coherent method to his actions. This was tied to his intellectual relationship to the Christianity he rejected; specifically, his appropriating a Christian theological framework and employing within it numerous Christian texts to recraft pagan deities.1 There are any number of facets that conceivably could be construed as related to Julian’s interactions with Christianity: his revisiting of existing laws on a broad scale, the trials at the beginning of his reign of those opposed to him and responsible for past misdeeds, and so on. This work will focus on Julian’s recapitulatory overwriting of Constantine, in terms of both a religious metanarrative and a religious monumental construction, allowing us to see the shape of a deliberate plan unobscured by opportunistic maneuvers or actions of debatable intent. Although the development of the argument in this book happens roughly to follow the chronology of Julian’s reign, readers should note that it was clearer to organize the material thematically, 1
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and therefore the section on “materiality” by necessity doubles back somewhat, chronologically. Julian returned to an earlier theme or tactic in his second Antiochene phase, so following a strict chronology would actually obscure Julian’s actions. I hope this approach will contribute to a new perspective on Julian and ofer a foundation for future close analysis of his writings in light of his response to Christianization. Julian would proceed with his campaign in depth, producing both literary and material narratives of resurgent paganism. He made statements of purpose that indicate deliberation and forethought. He pursued his agenda aggressively, drawing on previous anti-Christian polemicists and tacking with the wind to move his agenda forward, flexibly adapting to changing circumstances. The emperor drew much more heavily from Christianity than has been appreciated, appropriating both Biblical texts and theological concepts. Any improvements in our understanding of Julian must include a review of his formative experiences, so let us begin with the central event of his childhood.
the Purge of 337 Flavius Claudius Julianus was born in Constantinople in 331 or 332 to a life that must have seemed full of promise (Figure 1).2 Although there is some uncertainty about the date, there was nothing uncertain about the boy’s prospects. His mother, Basilina, was of an “old and noble family” in Bithynia and the daughter of the praetorian prefect Julius Julianus.3 She was educated in Greek liter ature by the tutor Mardonius—a Gothic slave owned by her father—who would later tutor her son as well.4 Basilina died not long after Julian was born, in what the timing suggests may have been the result of complications from childbirth. She was apparently a devout Christian and endowed the church at Ephesus with her estates.5 Although Julian chose a markedly diferent religious path, he later honored his mother’s memory by naming a settlement near Nicaea after her.6 His father, Julius Constantius, was the half-brother of the ruler of a great world empire and recently restored to favor with the emperor, complete with a place in government. As the son of Constantius I and his second wife, Theodora, Julius Constantius had fallen foul of interfamily political intrigue. Constantius I’s first wife, Helena, had not favored Julius Constantius and held significant influence with her son Constantine, who would become sole emperor. Constantine had one son, Crispus, already, but after he had a son, Constantinus, with Fausta in 316, the emperor’s younger half-brother was perceived as a liability and, like his own brother Flavius Dalmatius, was sent away to provincial exile in Toulouse and later lived in
o PeNiNG o F H osti L i t i es
Theodora
Basilina
Gallus d. 354
Julius Constantius d. 337
Julian d. 363
Constantius I
Flavius Dalmatius d. 337
Crispus d. 326
Minervina
3
Helena
Constantine I d. 337
Constantine II Constantius II d. 340 d. 361
Fausta
Constans d. 350
Figure 1. The Constantinian dynasty and the imperial succession
Corinth.7 Following the restoration of relations, Julian’s father had not been added to the imperial college, but he had been given the next-highest rank of patricius, was named ordinary consul in 335, and was intended by Constantine to play a role in leading the empire in the succession.8 The good prospects for young Julian evaporated with the death of his uncle Constantine in 337. At that time, with Diocletian’s restructured New Empire in existence for over half a century, the Old Empire existed only in memory, no more a reality than the Roman Republic. Constantine had been in power for over three decades, and many were no doubt anxious that in departing he would take stability with him. Constantine had intended a return to shared rule, with his sons supported by senior advisers in lesser roles. Those additions to the list of successors to Constantine “may be read as a dynastic coup, backed by elements at court,” a perception which would explain the simultaneous execution of Ablabius, the eastern praetorian prefect and a possible instigator of such a move.9 The three sons of Constantine and Fausta, Constantinus, Constantius II, and Constans, benefited from a purge that eliminated all other potential claimants to imperial rule. Constantius II may have deserved better treatment from historians, as most of the accounts of him are from Nicene Christians opposed to his meddling in the church or from pagans opposed to his Christianizing of the empire. These were hotly contested issues, and by the time tempers had cooled enough for a dispassionate assessment, there were no living witnesses. Recent research takes the attribution of responsibility to Constantius II for the murders of his relatives—Julius Constantius and his eldest son, the Caesar Dalmatius and his father, brother, and uncle—and puts it on much firmer ground, using both written history and numismatic evidence.10 While it is possible that Constantius II, at age twenty, may have been swayed by senior military officers, Julian always held him ultimately responsible.11 Soldiers executed the senior men of
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the family, but Julian and his elder half-brother Gallus were apparently spared due to their age and Julian was initially turned over to his mother’s family.12 Julian’s opponent Gregory Nazianzen later wrote that Mark, the bishop of Arethusa, had been instrumental in saving Julian.13 When Julian described the purge years later in an autobiographical myth, he described himself in relation to the sons of Constantine as “cast aside by those who had no care for him.”14 As far as the physical impression the invasion of their home in Constantinople left, consider his vivid description of himself: “as if stricken by smoke, filth, and flame . . . brought forth from the blood and tumult and slaughter of men.”15 Given this background, it is not surprising that Julian would later make use of the Gospel of Matthew’s theme of the righteous ruler miraculously spared from Herod’s purge to portray himself as a parallel to Jesus of Nazareth.16 Both that vivid description and the allusion to the Gospels highlight a difficulty for the historian. We know precious little about Julian’s younger life that does not originate with him.17 Given his readiness elsewhere to distort demonstrable historical fact, we must treat his account of his early years very cautiously when reconstructing the facts. If our aim is to investigate the emperor’s engagement with Christianity, Julian’s account of his youth may be disregarded as primarily propaganda, but its significance lies in his crafting of the account in service to his religious campaign.
education Julian’s education would have begun around the time he was rescued from the purge. Following the murders of his family, Julian had been temporarily taken under the protection of his mother’s distant relation bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia and was being raised by his maternal grandmother on her estate.18 This teaching would have started with letters and syllables until after his seventh year he began his lifelong association with Homer.19 Julian’s education was being supervised by Eusebius, a leading non-Nicene figure, although a more directly influential figure was his Scythian tutor, Mardonius, who was responsible for instilling in him a love for Greek literature.20 When Constantius II deposed bishop Paul of Constantinople and moved Eusebius to replace him, the latter relinquished oversight of Julian’s education.21 Julian’s transfer to the remote Cappadocian estate known as Macellum or “the enclosure” ended that respite with his grandmother. Macellum has been placed seven kilometers south of Caesarea, and while the dating of Julian’s residence there is debated, it was most likely 342–348.22 We know that Julian’s stay in Nicomedia coincided with that of Libanius, who came in 344 and
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departed for Constantinople in 349, which as Julian was only of the age of rhetor training at the end of that period, suggests that Julian’s six years in Cappadocia ran from 342 to 347–348.23 Here, Julian was reunited with his older half-brother Gallus, when he returned from Tralles, which was the most likely moment for him to learn the truth about his family’s fate.24 Realizing that he lived at the suferance of the man likely responsible for murdering his family, a situation that might last only as long as Constantius failed to produce an heir, weighed very heavily on Julian. His tutors attempted to soothe him by repeatedly telling him that Constantius had been deceived and had yielded to the will of the army.25 Julian portrayed his anguish, despair, and possibly a temporary flight from the estate in his autobiographical myth, written years later: “When he understood the great number of the evil deeds, how much had happened to his relatives and cousins, he was so shocked by the depth of the evil that he genuinely wanted to cast himself into the underworld.” Then the reader gets their first hint of divine intervention in Julian’s life. “But then gracious Helios with foreseeing Athena cast him into sleep or a trance and steered him from that thought. When he had been awakened again he was sent into the wilderness.” There are parallels in this wilderness account with Christian literature that will be explored later. For now, we, like Julian’s readers, see him grasping his predicament and the need for purpose in his life. “Then finding there a rock he rested himself briefly and considered how he should escape so many great evils. For the present, all appeared wretched to him, and for the moment, good was nowhere to be found.”26 It would take years from Julian’s youth, but he would find that purpose. In the meantime, he was detained at Macellum, in what he described as a “castle of oblivion,” using the term for remote places to which Persian unfortunates were sent to disappear permanently.27 Julian later blamed their imprisonment for ruining the character of his half-brother Gallus, and indirectly leading to Gallus’s disastrous reign in Antioch.28 Julian’s new tutor was George of Cappadocia, later the bishop of Alexandria, his tutelage all conducted under the authority of Julian’s cousin Constantius II, whose marked Arian sympathies seemed to be one of the few things on which all contemporary observers could agree. Julian later expressed his gratitude for his exposure to philosophy, which he claimed made all the diference, and certainly more than the organized exercise sessions with the household slaves.29 Julian’s theological training came from those solidly on the non-Nicene or “Arian” end of the spectrum, which naturally would influence the way in which Julian engaged Christian theology.30 Julian was obviously aware of Bishop George’s library, as he requisitioned it following the bishop’s death in his new see of Alexandria. This theological awareness was also reflected in the use Constantius II made of Julian as an adult. According
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to Socrates Scholasticus, Julian was made a lector or reader in the church at Nicomedia.31 As Constantius II’s Caesar, Julian appears to have presided over the Synod of Beziers in 356.32 The combination of rigorist non-Nicene theology, imperial manipulation of the church, and willingness to contravene religious principles in the ruthless pursuit of political goals may also be reflected in Julian’s approach to theocratic rule later. The scriptural familiarity Julian developed during this period would serve him well later, allowing him to make allusions to Christological texts in his restructuring of pagan deities. Julian’s scriptural references are primarily drawn from Matthew’s Gospel and the Pentateuch.33 His training in this phase would hold continuing influence mediated by George’s library, as when George died years later, Julian insisted on the retrieval of his books.34 These volumes therefore contributed to Julian’s “mental furniture” in two phases of his life and likely provided the scholarly resources for his later writings against Christianity. In 348, Julian was moved again. Constantius traveled to Macellum and interviewed the youths, following which he took Gallus to the court at Antioch and sent Julian to study in Constantinople. Julian studied rhetoric under the pagan Nicocles and the ostensibly Christian Hecebolius, and was still allowed to visit his grandmother’s estate in Bithynia, later writing fondly of his summer visits to her.35 Libanius suggested that Constantius feared the positive impression that Julian might make “in the great city,” and therefore transferred him to Nicomedia.36 At Nicomedia, Julian sent someone to transcribe the lectures of Libanius and so became his quasi-student, a relationship that the rhetor would play for all it was worth in years to come.37 While Julian did not know Libanius at this time, like most in his circles he would have known of him. Libanius was an accomplished teacher and practitioner of rhetoric, an irrepressible networker, and through his prolific orations and letters one of the modern world’s best sources on late antiquity.38 In March 351, Julian and Gallus were transferred again and given increased responsibility and freedom. As Constantius was distracted by his civil war in the Western Empire, Gallus was elevated to Caesar, was married to Constantius’s sister Constantina, and sent to rule in Antioch.39 Constantina was an embittered veteran of imperial politics and a reportedly negative influence on Gallus.40 She had been married to Hannibalianus for two years before his murder in 337 and was the marital interest of the Western usurper Magnentius, who ofered to wed her in 350.41 Julian appears to have had a close relationship with Himerius, the famous Bithynian sophist, with an association that may extend farther back than most would assume. An oration of Himerius was given at Sirmium on 15 March 351, with oblique references identifying the presence
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SCAN ME
Three Questions with DAVID A. BLOME
author of Greek Warfare beyond the Polis 1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?
3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?
While researching the Spartan army, I came across a saying attributed to the Spartan king Agesilaus: “When someone asked him why Sparta lacked fortification walls, he pointed to the citizens under arms and said: ‘These are the Spartans’ walls.’” The upland Greeks that I study would have known exactly what Agesilaus meant. In fact, they repelled two Spartan invasions during the classical period with almost no assistance from fortifications.
Historians debate each other primarily in writing, whether in conference presentations, book reviews, or introductory chapters, and they’re really good at it. However, I would like to see more public debates between historians, especially on controversial topics. Such debates could potentially lead to broader engagement with historical issues outside of academia.
“My favorite moment was when, as a grad student, my language level reached the point where I could read it for myself.” 2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now? In a phrase: citation management software.
THE EXCERPT
Introduction
The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy
Histories make men wise; poets witty, the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend. Francis Bacon, Of Studies
In the first sentence of the Rhetoric Aristotle addresses the question of the relation of philosophy and rhetoric: “Rhetoric is the antistrophe of dialectic” (1354a1). Dialectic is paired with rhetoric as strophe with antistrophe, as found in the movement of the classical Greek chorus, turning from one side of the orchestra to the other. Strophē is literally “the act of turning.” The antistrophe is the chorus exactly answering to a previous strophe. Rhetoric and dialectic are a pair, corresponding to each other like the parts of a choral ode. In the Topics Aristotle distinguishes dialectical reasoning from demonstrative reasoning. He says: “A syllogism is demonstrative [apodeixis] when it proceeds from premises that are true and primary.” But: “It is dialectical when it reasons from endoxa” and “Endoxa are propositions that seem true to all or to the majority or to the wise” (100a–b). Dialectic is hypothetical reasoning in the sense of assuming as a starting point some commonly held belief or principle. The truth claimed by such argument is dependent on the truth of the opinions elicited. Dialectic is not science. Aristotle says: “Things are true and primary which command belief through themselves and not through anything else; for regarding first principles of science it is unnecessary to ask the further question as to ‘why,’ but each principle should of itself command belief ” (100b).
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INTRODUCTION
Rhetoric is an art (technē ) that persuades by argument. The rhetorician must have a knowledge of dialectic. Aristotle says: “Rhetorical demonstration is an enthymeme, which, generally speaking, is the strongest of rhetorical proofs; and lastly, that the enthymeme is a kind of syllogism” (Rh. 1355a). An enthymeme is a syllogism that omits either the major or minor premise or the conclusion, causing the hearer readily to complete the syllogism. Aristotle says: “It is the function of Dialectic as a whole, or of one of its parts, to consider every kind of syllogism in a similar manner, it is clear that he who is most capable of examining the matter and forms of a syllogism will be in the highest degree a master of rhetorical argument” (Rh. 1355a). The rhetorician and the dialectician construct arguments whose conclusions command probability, not certainty. Aristotle says: “Rhetoric then may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever” (Rh. 1355b). The particular sciences have their own methods and subject matters of investigation. Philosophy, through the principles of logic, may pursue thoughts concerning any subject whatever. Rhetoric, through its principles of persuasion, may speak on any subject whatever. Philosophy and rhetoric are both universal activities of the mind. The middle term between them is poetic, since poetry can imitate anything whatever. Poetry is drawn on by both philosophy and rhetoric because both employ images. Philosophy has no special subject matter. Its subject is what is and the whole of what is. In Plato’s Gorgias Socrates confronts Gorgias, the famous rhetorician and teacher of rhetoric. Socrates asks Gorgias what rhetoric is. Gorgias replies that its purpose is persuasion, such as is needed in speaking in the law courts (453–55). Socrates makes a distinction between “two types of persuasion, one providing conviction without knowledge, the other providing knowledge” (454e). Oratory has the purpose of producing conviction in a certain belief, but belief is not knowledge. We can have true and false belief, but there is no such thing as true and false knowledge. When we possess knowledge of something we do not also need to be persuaded of it. Like poetic, as treated in the tenth book of the Republic, rhetoric can produce a speech on any subject—as poetic can produce an image of anything. The poet can imitate good and bad actions equally. The rhetor can persuade for both sides of an issue. In the Republic, poets can be allowed in the city only if their poetry is used in accordance with justice. Gorgias makes a similar argument, claiming that anyone who does not use skill in oratory rightly “deserves to be hated and expelled and put to death” (Grg. 457c). Socrates holds that rhetoric or oratory is a knack or aptitude, gained simply from experience. It stands to knowledge as cooking does to medicine. In relation
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to the care of the body, cooking is just a knack for preparing food, but medicine is a kind of knowledge. Oratory is a knack for the use of words in any situation. The unexpressed text in the Platonic quarrel with the poets and the rhetoricians is that, like both of them, the philosopher is only a user of words. The poet uses words to imitate what can be seen by the bodily eye—perceptible objects, the visible (to horaton). The philosopher uses words to imitate what can be seen by the mind’s eye—the ideas (eidē ), the intelligible (to noēton). The rhetor uses words to persuade by appealing to common opinions. The philosopher uses words to subject common opinions to dialectic. The poet and the rhetor seem to provide all that is necessary for the conducting of human affairs. Poetry, as in the works of Homer, is a repository of beliefs needed for human conduct. Rhetoric, such as that taught by Gorgias, is what is needed to apply these beliefs to particular situations. Philosophy questions the beliefs themselves in an effort to know the nature of what is and to act in accordance with such knowledge. Philosophy aims at true speech. Cicero, by means of the dialogue he constructs in De oratore, accuses Socrates of having “separated the science of wise thinking from that of elegant speaking, though in reality they are closely linked together” (3.16.60). He says the writings of Plato employing the figure of Socrates are “the source from which has sprung the undoubtedly absurd and unprofitable and reprehensible severance between the tongue and the brain, leading to our having one set of professors to teach us to think and another to teach us to speak” (3.16.61). Cicero says that the Stoics are “the only one of all the schools that has pronounced eloquence to be a virtue and a form of wisdom. But clearly there is something in them that is quite out of keeping with the orator whom we are depicting” (3.17.65). The Stoics, unlike Socrates, withdrew from speaking in the public sphere. Isocrates, who was a pupil of both Gorgias and Socrates, identifies the wisdom the philosopher seeks as present in public discourse. In the Phaedrus Socrates speaks highly of Isocrates, saying that he is an accomplished speaker and of a most noble character, and even more, that “something of philosophy is inborn in his mind” (279a–b). In the Antidosis, Isocrates says that since we are unable to achieve a science that will positively tell us what we should do and say, “I hold that man to be wise who is able by his powers of conjecture to arrive generally at the best course, and I hold that man to be a philosopher who occupies himself with the studies from which he will most quickly gain that kind of insight” (271). The philosopher, taken in this sense, then, is expert in prudence (phronēsis).
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INTRODUCTION
In order to act prudently we must be able to bring a knowledge of various subjects to bear on, and to elicit, the whole of a situation. To do this we must have the ability to express this whole. Isocrates says: “To choose from these elements those which should be employed for each subject, to join them together, to arrange them properly, and also not to miss what the occasion demands but appropriately to adorn the whole speech with striking thoughts and to clothe it in flowing melodious phrase—these things, I hold, require much study and are the task of a vigorous and imaginative mind” (Against the Sophists 16–17). Prudence requires us to put the particular situation into words, to speak from the uniqueness of the situation, and to do so in a striking fashion so that its nature can be grasped. In regard to the proper composition of ideas and effective speech we may add the requirements of Horace’s Ars poetica, that “poets aim either to benefit, or to amuse, or to utter words at once both pleasing and helpful to life” (333–34). To instruct, delight, and move are the proper aims for philosophy as well as for poetry. All great works of philosophy offer the reader these three possibilities. Such works present their audience with knowledge, with the pleasure of forming thoughts, and with a new orientation to the nature of things, a new sense of the self and conduct. Great works of philosophy affect the memory. They cause us to recall in some way what we already know. Education is memory, and memory is the source of imagination. Imagination is the basis of thought, in the sense that the power of ingenuity (ingenium) by which the imagination functions allows us to perceive similarity in dissimilars. This power of similarity in dissimilars allows us to achieve a speech of the whole. The adventure of arriving at the whole brings the peace of mind that is wisdom. To philosophize is to think in a way not open to the particular sciences, and to think in such a way is to speak in a way different from these sciences. As philosophy is the thought of the whole, it is also the complete speech, the speech of the whole. In such speech philosophy achieves eloquence. In his essay “On Literary Composition,” Dionysius of Halicarnassus, delineating the characteristics necessary to proper presentation of a subject, says: “What is in fact most important of all, the subject-matter should be arranged in a manner which is natural to it and appropriate” (12). He calls attention to Homer, Demosthenes, and Herodotus as examples of this principle. Included in the principle of what is natural and appropriate is the use of variety of expression. Variety is the cause of pleasure in a composition. It is crucial to Horace’s requirement of delight. A composition employing only an alignment of abstract words has no appeal to the imagination.
T H E R H E TO R I C A L SE N SE O F P H I LO S O P H Y
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Without imagination the intellect has no beacon of vision. To use words merely to instruct or to convey information is to limit the possibilities that language naturally provides. The composition of the complete speech persuades because it is identical with wisdom. The art of oratory as an art of persuasion presupposes that the rhetor is of good character. The ēthos of those who would persuade is fundamental to rhetorically structured speech or writing. Quintilian, in beginning his Institutio oratoria, insists that the ideal orator “cannot exist except in the person of a good man. We therefore demand of him not only exceptional powers of speech, but all the virtues of character as well.” Furthermore, Quintilian says: “I cannot agree that the principles of upright and honorable living should, as some have held, be left to the philosophers” (1.9–12). Quintilian holds that the citizen cannot simply draw on the wisdom of the philosophers but must also draw on the principles of the orators. The citizen must be able both to think well and to speak well. The polis relies on these two powers to be present in its citizens. To possess wisdom without the ability to persuade others of it is to hold wisdom mute. Thus, in the eyes of Cicero and Quintilian, Socrates is both philosopher and orator. By using the words of ordinary speech, the Platonic Socrates in the agora is able to persuade those who can come to know to become friends of the Forms. The character of Socrates is fundamental to the validity of his elenchos. The chapters of the present work may be thought of as follows. The chapter on philosophical thinking is intended to establish the necessity of philosophy. The chapter on the Muses is intended to establish the connection of philosophy and poetry. Poetry and rhetoric are intertwined as components required for the presentation of philosophical ideas, as mentioned above. The chapter on philosophical eloquence demonstrates the sense in which the rejection of rhetoric by the founders of modern philosophy is untenable. The chapter on philosophical style shows the importance of style in works of speculative philosophy. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 bring forth examples of works from the history of philosophy and show how attention to the rhetorical dimension of these works offer us a new grasp of their meaning. Chapter 5 considers the sense in which self-knowledge is at the heart of philosophy by comparing Descartes, Vico, Montaigne, and Socrates. Chapter 6 addresses the way in which Plato, Anselm, Kant, and Hegel bring their readers to a grasp of what it means to claim that thought can think itself. Chapter 7 analyzes how Hobbes, Vico, and Rousseau employ the frontispieces they include in their works as rhetorical devices or emblems to impress on our memory the ideas they contain.
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INTRODUCTION
The art of the frontispiece was prominent in the founding of modern philosophy but has been lost in later philosophy. The reader will notice that in these chapters some things are said more than once and that some sources for these things are brought forth more than once, although in varying contexts. My purpose in so doing is rhetorical, in the sense of the Muses—that their song is not to be sung only once. It is also my purpose that any chapter may be read out of sequence; the ideas it contains can stand on their own. The reader who wishes to move about in the text may do so with ease. The ideas of the great philosophers occur more than once in the history of philosophy. It is this truth that we learn from Ecclesiastes: “Is there a thing of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? It has already been in the ages before us” (1:10). There is, then, a philosophia perennis, and as such philosophy is a theater of memory. Philosophy’s Muse is Mnemosyne herself. We need Mnemosyne and her daughters to keep us from forgetting, for, as Bacon reminds us, the river Lethe runs above as well as below. The philosopher’s task is to keep us from always living in the present. For this labor to be accomplished the philosopher must go to school with both the poets and the orators. We should keep in mind that words are the medium of seers, poets, orators, and philosophers. Philosophy is a form of literature.
Three Questions with RICHARD P. MARTIN author of Mythologizing Performance 1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?
3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?
Because a number of the chapters of this book began as stand-alone essays over the years, and those, in turn, had their start as papers delivered in various places, what I best remember, leafing through them now, are the trips and audiences, from Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio to Athens and Crete, La Plata (Argentina), Grenoble, Lausanne, and Cambridge, UK. I also remember the pleasures of exploring other literature and media in search of useful analogies. In that regard, getting deeper into
I wish I could get all the various experts in the multifarious subfields of Classics—history, archaeology, philosophy, philology—to try to read one another’s books (or even articles).
“I remember the pleasures of exploring other literature and media in search of useful analogies.” Quentin Tarantino’s movies—Pulp Fiction was the gateway drug and it shows up in an essay on Hesiod, here—was a blast. 2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now? As the writing started with the earliest essay and continued intermittently over the next thirty-five years, I’d have to look back to my twenty-nine year old self, struggling to get hold of books, spend time in libraries, and scribble on legal pads after a toddler had been lulled to sleep. I wish I had known touch-typing (I still don’t, however, so maybe that answer should not count).
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SCAN ME