Myth and Society in Ancient Greece

Myth and Society in Ancient Greece . ZONE BOOKS · NEW YORK �e.(\ t::l � ZONE BOOKS 611 Broadway, Suite 608 "l-� New York, NY 10012 t ,(�1-\�___ .•_ . All rights reserved· . \�� Fi rst Paperback Edition, Revised . ... .. .. _. ihi�rPrindnBj 996>" No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any ·mearis;iricluding eleCtronic, mechariical;·photocopying, microfilming, recording, or"otherwise (except fo r that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public p�ess) without written permission from·the Publisher. © 1980 The Harvester Press Limited Originally published in France as M)'theet socic!te en Crece ancienne © 1974 by Librarie Franyois Maspero. Published 1988 by Editions la Decouverte. Printed in the United States ofAmerica Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Vernant,Jean-Pierre. [My the et societe en Grece ancienne. English] . Myth �nd sOcieryi�� i��t·Greec�'/ ',,, .' • Jean-Pierre Vernant;translated by Janet Lloyd. p. cm. Translation of: Mythe et societe en Grece ,!-ncienne. Bibliography: p. (pbk.) ISBN 0-942299-17-5 1. Greece-Social life and customs. 2. Greece-Social conditions-To 146 B.C. 3.Mythology, Greek. I. Title. DF78.V4713 1988 87-33786 938-dc19 CIP \ 't \ ., 2 1 -09 - 2000 � 0 n ten t s II l\(fri'lDI-1f:.,\�� '\�� Introduction 7 The Class Struggle 11 : .... � ",,:. " ' ...; . .. - , .. II City-StateWa ifare 29 III Marriage 55 IV Social Historyand the Evolution of Ideas in China and Greece from the Sixth to the Second Centuries B.C. (with Jacques Gemet) 79 V Th e Society of th e Gods 10 1 � VI The Pure and the Impure _12 1 � VII Between the Beasts and the Gods 143 VIII The My th of Prometheus in Hesiod 183 .IX. The Reason of Myth 203 Notes 261··· BOGAZ:i:l;i ONIvERSITESi KOTOPHANESi 1111111 IIII It 1111 II 416051 In troduction Following .Myth and Th ought and .Myth and Tragedy, here is a col lection of studies under the title of .Myth and Society, the most recent of which have never been published before. The reader has _ . every right to que.stioIl tl1i5._tIjp1.t:!.cQl!pl!!lg Qf ITlythvvith some.-�o, ... thing else, all the more so since in French (and in English) the "copular" and can carry more than one meaning and may infer not simply juxtaposition but also association or contrast. While I was writing .Myth and Thought I had in my mind one of Henri Delacroix's fine bqoks, entitled Language and Thought, which appeared when I was a young man. His title conveyed not only that language already contains thought, .that language is thought, but also that thought consists of more than just language: It is never completely contained by its linguistic expression. The papers I had collected in that volume [.Myth and Thought] seemed to me to lend themselve.s, in a similar way, to a double reading. On the one hand, hvas trying to reveal the intelJectual code pecu liar to myth and to distinguish the mental aspects of myths con cerned with, for instance, memory, time, and Hermes and Hestia, but on the other hand, I also wanted to indicate how far Greek . i:htjught� <ii" it dev'doped historically, broke aWayfrom the language of myth. In .Myth and Tragedy the problem was quite similar. Pierre Vidal-Naquet and I aimed to throw some light upon the inter connections between legendary traditions and certain new forms of thought-·in particular in law and politics - in fifth-century 7 MYTH AND SOCIETY Athens. The works of the tragedians seemed to us to offer a par- . ticularly favorable field in which the texts themselves allowed us to seize upon this confrontation, this constant tension as expressed 'in a literary genre which used the great themes oflegend but treated them in accordance with its own specific demands so that the myths are both present and, at the same time, challenged. 'Our . desire to respect the equivocal and ambiguous character of the relationship between myth and tragedy was no doubt affected by the double methodological orientation of our. studi�s:cWe used a structural analysis of the texts -.:. th� works themselves'- to detect the system of thought within them, but, ' at the same tiI1:l�' follow�d a. method.of historical inqu�ry, . as this alone could explain the. changes, innovations, and restructuring that took place within any system. With this third volume one might be tempted to suppose the connection between myth and society to be a looser, more acci dental, and less Significant one, and to suspect that this time I have simply juxtaposed a number of studies on the subject· of Greek society and its institutions alongside a number of others on the subject of myth. And in factthis book does open with three articles on the subject of the class struggle, war, and marriage, and closes with the'mythology of spices, the myth of PronH�theus, and some general reflections on the problems of myth as they appear to Greek scholars of tqd� ' ��91!1�: c,��t��IYIl: � y!ha t Y . :?� . �� _ . my choice of this or thatt heme hasoft�n been affected by the . various circumstances, requests, or opportunities that are bound to arise in the course of one's research. However, when I consider the question closely it seems to me that here, .as elsewhere, chance has another, 'hidden side to it, and that the digressions made in the course of a work can oftenbe accounted for by a kind of inter nal necessity. I do not think that the careful reader will have any difficulty in picking out the thread thatlinks together �hese var . ious studies and also links this book to those that preceded if: ', I shall therefore make only a few brief preliminary remarks. The framework of my firstarticle is a debate within Marxism. In 8 INTRODUCTION examining the validity of the concepts of a slave-based mode of production, of class, and of the class struggle When applied to ancient Greece, I wanted, by returning to the ancient texts, to give Marx his due for his acute sense of historical reality and his understanding of the specific characteristics of different types of social forms. In emphasizing what was - in many respects ,- the decisive role of the city's institUtions and poHtical life in the nmc tioning of the social system, I also intended to make the point that economic factors and relationships do not, in the context o h e ___________________ _�------------------� o�f� t� ��an� �i�en� have the same effects as they�d� �in�t� �a�t�o�f _________________ h� c t �olis, modem capitalist societies. In order to present the economic facts accurately it is necessary to take account of the attitudes and behavior of the social agents, for these show that the religion and economics of the society are still very closely interconnected� In ilifsrespeCt the starting p6iritand backgr<:hlfid"orthis"paper IS Louis Gernet's study, "La Notion mythique de la valeur en Grece."l "City-State Warfare" was written as the introduction to a col lective work, Problems of Wa ifare in Greece. It is no mere chance that so much of this preliminary study is devoted to the recipro cal relations that can be established between the religious and the military spheres. They were bound together by complex and, once again, equivocal relationships whose development can be traced through time. The study of marriage and the transformations it underwent between the archaic and classical.periods was specifically under taken to solve a problem which had been posed by a particular work of mythological analysis. When Marcel Detienne studied the corpus of texts relevant to Adonis and widened its scope to embrace the whole of the mythology of spices, he turned up a . new problem: how to account for the manifest disparity between the picture myth gives us, in which the wife is diametrically opposed to the concubine, and the much more vaguely defined institutions of fifth- and fourth-century Athens. To my mind, the historical study of the customs of marriage and the inquiry into the structural analysis of the corpus of myth collected by Detienne 9 MYTH AND SOCIETY are two aspects of a single piece of research. The aim of this dou- .. ble approach is to distinguish more clearly the reciprocal effects' of society and myth and to define both. the �iinilarities, and, at the same time., the divergences between these.. twoJevels thaL...... ....... illuminate one another and now reinforce, ri�wcheck . andcbun';' terbalance one another. ' .' '. Our remarks on the Greek gods consider the pantheon from two points of view: first, as a divine society with its 9wn·hierar- chy, i'n which each god enjoys his own particularattributes and� ..... privileges, bearing a more or less close, more or less direct relation to the structure of human society; and second; as a classifi catory system, � syrnb�lic langUage with its own intellectual ends. In "The Pur� and the Impure," an examin�tion of the thesis of Louis Moulinier, we attempt to show that while this author has su.ccessfully discovered what these concepts mean in psycho logical and social terms, theycan only be fully understood through their relation to a coherent body of religious representations. Then there are the last two studies: "The Myth of Prometheus in Hesiod" and "The Reason of Myth." They seem to us to. speak for themselves, and both refer so clearly to the book's central theme that there is no need to labor the point: to what extent and in what forms is myth present iIi a society and a society presentin its myths? In fact, expressed in this way, the question is perhaps �oo .�iIJ;rel��I.� f �o�k�, originally published by my friend: t,l1is�et() .

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