Transcultural Chorality Iphigenia in Tauris and Athenian Imperial Economics in a Polytheistic World Barbara Kowalzig
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Tr i m : 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.774 mm Gutter: 18.98 mm CUUK2183-08 CUUK2183/GagneISBN:´ 978 1 107 03328 3 January 18, 2013 10:20 chapter 8 Transcultural chorality Iphigenia in Tauris and Athenian imperial economics in a polytheistic world Barbara Kowalzig 1. Introduction ‘The most distinctive feature of Greek tragedy is . the chorus’ writes Simon Goldhill emphatically in his short introduction to the staging of Greek tragedy.1 That the chorus is something very characteristically Greek is a widespread, unspoken assumption within the discipline of Classics and beyond. As so often, this view has been conceptualised, and brought into focus, for us by the writers of the Second Sophistic. Ewen Bowie, in a recent discussion on imperial perceptions of classical chorality, calls the chorus ‘a cultural form perceived as essentially Hellenic’: ‘Choroi were perceived as an important component of being Greek, ...displayingaGreekintwo capacities that distinguished him or her from barbaroi: as an orderly and participatory member of a Greek polis, and as a worshipper of Greek gods’.2 The chorus features as an emblem of, and medium for communicating, Hellenicity, here defined firstly by civic identity, and secondly by religious practice. I shall attempt to argue quite a different case in this paper: I shall look at the chorus as mediating between cultures, and at the tragic chorus in particular as mediating between different religious traditions in the wider Mediterranean – in other words, at the tragic chorus operating in a world of interactive polytheisms. I draw attention to the plural -s in the word polytheism, for the ancient Mediterranean consists of a set of interconnected polytheistic systems, with very significant overlaps, and This essay is slightly revised from versions delivered fully or in parts at Barcelona, Northwestern University, NYU, Brown, London and Abu-Dhabi. I am indebted to the many suggestions and ideas from these audiences. In particular, I thank Philomen Probert, Tim Rood, Ian Rutherford, Oliver Taplin and Froma Zeitlin for their comments on earlier drafts, and David Braund for his guidance on the Russian and Ukrainian bibliography. I am pursuing separately the two broader topics touched upon here, of interacting Mediterranean choralities and of religion and cross-cultural trade in antiquity, and am grateful to the editors for making possible this initial foray into both by treating them jointly here. 1 2 Goldhill 2007: 45, italics mine. Bowie 2006: 65. 178 Tr i m : 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.774 mm Gutter: 18.98 mm CUUK2183-08 CUUK2183/GagneISBN:´ 978 1 107 03328 3 January 18, 2013 10:20 Transcultural chorality 179 ultimately elusive boundaries between them. The ‘power’ of chorality lies in its ability to integrate diversity, to pool into the common dance, people and values that are not normally the same. The tragic chorus peculiarly floats between fiction and reality, past and present, myth and ritual, spectacle and audience, the local and the Panhellenic. It is in this constant mediation between discrete cultural reference systems that the special experience of Greek drama, often assimilated to ritual, lies.3 My test case for this study of the chorus in the world of transcultural religions will be Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris. Conventionally dated to 414 bc, the play’s mythic storyline builds up to a transfer of TaurianArtemis and her choral rites from the Crimea on the Black Sea to Attica. My central point is that this play’s chorus mediates, and ultimately integrates, discrete cultic traditions into religious hybridity, which constitutes a highly profitable, cultural middle ground in which religious imagination and contemporary economic interests of the Athenian Empire in the Black Sea converge. Recent research into the mechanisms of cross-cultural trade engages with the interdependence between the organisation of trade and cultural beliefs as a basis for a relationship of trust and obligation between business partners.4 I argue that the IT and the way it relates mythical narrative to the contemporary cultic world were central to the cognitive processes underly- ing the establishment of economic ties to the Pontos in the context of the late fifth-century Athenian empire. The play, and perhaps classical tragedy at large, played a key role in the conceptualisation of the transcultural economic encounter between Greeks and others. Local Greek song-culture such as that of the slightly earlier Pindar, Bacchylides or Simonides had an active share in social and historical processes within and between the cities of archaic and classical Greece;5 we shall see that tragedy may be understood as its imperial successor. Here, chorality operates as an integrating power not just within Greece but on a ‘global’ level and in a system of interacting polytheisms – hence ‘transcultural chorality’. Tomake this case I shall first look briefly at the associations that chorality held for the Greeks, especially in the context of other Mediterranean cul- tures (section 2); then I shall unravel how the IT’s plot construes a maritime Artemis concerned with travel, trade and the cross-cultural encounter by sea (section 3); in a further part I investigate the figure and cult of Artemis 3 For the relationship of drama and ritual see the contributions in Csapo and Miller 2007. 4 Greif 2006; refined by Trivellato 2008; both build on earlier work by Curtin 1984 and approaches of New Institutional Economics made popular by North 1990. For the concept of the ‘middle ground’ see White 1991, put to work by Malkin 2011,ch.5;indexs.v. 5 Kowalzig 2007b. Tr i m : 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.774 mm Gutter: 18.98 mm CUUK2183-08 CUUK2183/GagneISBN:´ 978 1 107 03328 3 January 18, 2013 10:20 180 Barbara Kowalzig Tauropolos in particular, proposing ‘transcultural integration’ as her spe- cial power (section 4). The final section (5) will show how Artemis’ chorus over the course of the play deploys her powers of transcultural mediation in drawing together ritual and contemporary patterns of trade with the Euxine. 2. The Greek chorus in a Mediterranean context What are the choruses’ qualities, as perceived by the Greeks? ‘Citizenship’ and ‘worshipping Greek gods’ were the two things singled out by Ewen Bowie as associated with them by writers of the Second Sophistic. It is certainly true that dancing in the chorus marked you as a citizen of a given polis; chorality and civic community were close associates, topped by civic cohesion and integration. Chorality and civilisation is another popular pair of mutual associations: we find the link from Plato’s trenchant assertion that choral training and culture of the Athenian citizen are deeply intertwined, to Polybius’ remarks about the environmental determinism of the Arkadians, who turned from rustic highlanders into an integrated society through choral education. Strikingly perhaps, Alexander the Great, among the more conspicuous enthusiasts of Greek civilisation, celebrates his triumphs in the choral voice: on his return from the East Alexander was feasting with sacrifice, procession, choral contests (kyklioi choroi)and tragedy. Or, pointedly, when re-enacting Dionysos’ mythical journey on the way to conquering India he supposedly exclaimed ‘I want victorious Greeks to dance (again) in India’. Alexander’s trip to the East is of course the reverse journey of Dionysos’ himself returning – ex oriente lux – from the East to ‘civilise’ the Greeks with his choruses; represented not only in Euripides’ Bacchae but in many other local aetiologies of Dionysiac cult: with dance comes civilisation.6 So chorality is in good company with its several civic associates – even and perhaps particularly, in transcultural contexts, for the example of Alexander already hints that it is not clear in which direction the civilising goes. The second assertion, that choral dancing ‘displays a Greek as a worship- per of’ specifically ‘Greek gods’, is much more difficult to pin down in the 6 Chorality and its civic associates: citizenship – community – cohesion – civilisation: e.g. Pl. Leg. 654a: oÉkoÓn ¾ mn pa©deutov c»reutov ¡m±n stai, t¼n d pepaideumnon ¬kanäv kecoreuk»ta qeton; ‘Shall we assume that the uneducated man is without chorus-training and the educated man fully chorus-trained?’; ‘no chorus no culture’ is Goldhill’s shorthand soundbite (2007: 48). Polyb. 4.20–1: rustic Arkadian highlanders turn into civilians through choral education. Alexander the Great: Plut. Alex. 29.1–2 (cf. 67.7–8); De Alex. Fort. 1.332b. Tr i m : 228mm × 152mm Top: 11.774 mm Gutter: 18.98 mm CUUK2183-08 CUUK2183/GagneISBN:´ 978 1 107 03328 3 January 18, 2013 10:20 Transcultural chorality 181 world of polytheisms that I invoked above. For a start, the Greeks were not the only choralised ancient Mediterranean culture. Choruses were standard in ancient ritual and worship in Bronze Age and Iron Age civilisations, in Minoan and Mycenaean religion, among the Phoenicians and in Anatolia and Egypt. The Hittites, for example, known for a high degree of precision and detail in their documentary religious records, had differentiated ritu- als featuring closely circumscribed forms of choral dance. Some festivals featured multilingual rituals, in Hattic, Hittite, Luwian, suggesting that liturgical cosmopolitanism was the norm and not the exception in these multicultural societies. Iconographically, we know quite a bit about the Egyptians, for whom choreographic hieroglyphs survive.7 Though the wider world of Mediterranean chorality has barely been researched, it is still worth pointing out that the Greeks’ notion that there was something special about their civic choral culture is not entirely a construct of the Second Sophistic. In a curious, well-known passage, Herodotus, discussing the rituals for an Egyptian Dionysos, talking about phalloi and all kinds of other things familiar to the Greek religious historian, also says (Hdt. 2.48.5): Tn d llhn ngousi ¾rtn t DionÅs o¬ A«gÅptioi pln corän kat taÉt sced¼n pnta íEllhsi.