Apollo's Kithara and Poseidon's Crash Test
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Apollo’s Kithara and Poseidon’s Crash Test Ritual and Contest in the Evolution of Greek Aesthetics Richard P. Martin, Stanford University The title of our session unites two concepts of overwhelming importance in the history of Western culture: logos and tekhnê. As with so many other notions in the history of ideas, these owe their fundamental formulation to the work of ancient Greeks—not just to a few high- profile thinkers (although Heraclitus and Gorgias, Plato and Aristotle immediately come to mind), but to generations of anonymous men and women who practiced verbal and material crafts, from the humble arts of cloth-weaving to the intricate skills of rhetoric and poetry. But even my choice of adjectives just now fails to do justice to the real situation, in a misapplication that may be instructive. “Humble” and “intricate” apply to weaving and wordcraft, respectively, only if we are adopting a modern perspective. To use them in this way is a post-Enlightenment distortion. Our perspective has to be adjusted if we are to see more clearly how the concepts of logos and tekhnê are related in the ancient Greek world, and how that relationship played a major role in subsequent history. It has, among other things, shaped the way in which we understand aesthetics and performance, as well as the aesthetics of performances. Some important features in the early Greek development of this intellectual matrix form the core of my paper. In what follows I examine two specific examples in order to highlight the close relationship that binds together craft, art, ritual, and performances (verbal as well as other) in the ancient Greek imagination. What in turn unites the mythopoetic examples is the presence of the contest (agôn) and the crucial notion, arising from this quintessential Greek idea, of krisis, which we can translate “judgment under pressure.”1 As an indication of their enduring importance as well as the high stakes involved in these concepts, we should take note of the semantic shading of their English derivatives: agony and crisis. It seems, in other words, that making an impact through logos and tekhnê is potentially fraught with dangers, rendering the outcomes—expressions and arts of all types—all the more precious. This attitude toward verbal 1 Fundamental for the discussion of agôn is Nagy 1990:385–387, also 118–122; for krisis 61–63; in relation to agôn 402–403. 2 and material craft, arising from a specific context of rituals and festivals, may be said to mark the classical tradition in literature and art for all of subsequent Western culture. Starting from the modern prejudice—encapsulated in our ordinary usage of “humble” craft versus “intricate” art—how can we get around an attitude fostered by industrialization, technology (a word I will return to), elitist education, post-Enlightenment privileging of the “rational,” and the closely related Romantic equating of “traditional” with “primitive”? The philologist’s instinct is to delve into the earliest texts and pay attention to the nuances of usage and diction regarding logos and tekhnê. This is not the place for a full-scale book-length analysis.2 Instead, let me observe that the most striking result of such investigations, in terms of the cultural attitudes they indicate, is that in the Greek tradition, material and verbal skills (those which we can tentatively assign, respectively, to tekhnê and logos) are not in a relationship of subordination (one low and the other higher). Weaving, carpentry, metalworking, painting, sculpture, embroidery—all of these tekhnai (plural of tekhnê) are by no means humble. They are quite literally divine. From our earliest sources, in the archaic Greek of Mycenaean times, it is obvious that such crafts and their practitioners are not only of the highest value to the palace economies of Pylos, Knossos, Thebes, and Chania. They are also intimately tied to the religious rituals of the Mycenaean kings. Weaving women and shining cloth; well-shaped chariots; their wheels, poles, and chassis, subject to collection and redistribution by the central palaces, are not only the prerogatives of the elite but are integral to the display of power and control. And that display, in turn, is crucial for the mediating role of Mycenaean kings between the gods and their subjects.3 Of course, the bureaucratic texts written in Mycenaean Greek, such as we have them preserved on thousands of accidentally baked clay tablets in “Linear B” script, narrowly represent an entire culture that flourished between 1600 and 1200 BC. They offer evidence for the organization and transfer of people and objects, but can tell us nothing of what the elite and their subjects thought about crafts. For the latter, the historian of ideas must rely on the testimony of a later era: the hexameter poetry of the archaic period (c. 750–500 BC) which is 2 For debates concerning the developing notions of logos, see the essays in Buxton 1999. 3 On Mycenaean palace economies and religious functions, see Lupack 2008. On the redistribution of luxury and other goods, see Killen 2008. 3 attributed to Hesiod, along with the epics attributed to Homer (whom later ages supposed contemporary with Hesiod), and the “Homeric” hymns to various divinities. Once one focuses on notions of craft in this body of verse (something we tend to gloss over while reading for character and plot), an abundance of scenes and connections emerges. Let me mention just a few that can underscore the importance of craftwork to religion, and its “religious” status. We can start with the most obvious, the employment of craftworkers to decorate and amplify the specific performances of worship. A bull to be sacrificed, for instance, could have its horns gilded. The Odyssey, describing how Telemachus is welcomed to a magnificent feast in Nestor’s city of Pylos, takes care to include mention of a khalkeus, or bronze-worker, named Laerkês, who also handles gold (Odyssey 3.432–438): ...ἦλθε δὲ χαλκεὺς ὅπλ’ ἐν χερσὶν ἔχων χαλκήϊα, πείρατα τέχνης, ἄκμονά τε σφῦράν τ’ εὐποίητόν τε πυράγρην, 435 οἷσίν τε χρυσὸν ἐργάζετο· ἦλθε δ’ Ἀθήνη ἱρῶν ἀντιόωσα. γέρων δ’ ἱππηλάτα Νέστωρ χρυσὸν ἔδωχ’· ὁ δ’ ἔπειτα βοὸς κέρασιν περίχευεν ἀσκήσας, ἵν’ ἄγαλμα θεὰ κεχάροιτο ἰδοῦσα. There came the bronze-worker, with bronze tools in his hands, the essentials of his craft (tekhnê),4 anvil and hammer and well-made tongs, with which he worked gold. Athena came also to participate in the rites. The old horseman Nestor gave the gold. And the smith then working it, sheathed the bull’s horns, so that the goddess might take delight seeing the dedication. As the language makes clear, the mediation of a craftsman transforms the natural object into an art-object, an attractive, pleasing dedication (like a cult statue: agalma can also mean this).5 At the same time, the explicit transfer of the precious gold from the king’s palace to the 4 Note that peirata tekhnês can also be honorific: the “ultimate limits” of craft—as if the tools embody his tekhnê. On the complex semantics of peirar see Bergren 1975. 5 For agalma as cult statue see Nagy 1990:364. 4 craftsman makes clear that the success of a pleasing, beneficial ritual for the community depends on the intervention of the royal house. The same passage, with its mention of Athena (who is disguised as Mentor, an older man guiding Telemachus on his journey), should remind us that crafts have divine patronage as well. Athena Erganê, the “worker,” is connected with the arts of cloth-production, especially as they relate to the making of fabrics that are dedicated to gods—like herself.6 At the Panathenaia (depicted on the Parthenon frieze), one such woven article, the peplos for Athena’s great statue on the Acropolis, is carried in dedicatory procession.7 Hephaistos, on the other hand, is connected with the working of metal. It is Athena who is linked further, by her very genealogy, with the kind of thinking characteristic of “craft”: her mother Mêtis, or ‘cunning intelligence’, was a goddess swallowed by Zeus to enable the chief god to control this potentially dangerous and deeply female “way of knowing.” Mêtis as a common noun denotes as well nonlinear, intuitive, on-the-spot, in-a-pinch capacities; the kind of peripheral mental vision and know-how that characterizes the helmsman of a ship and the driver of a chariot.8 The latter is especially relevant to the scenario I shall examine shortly. In all the employments of mêtis, what we discover is that “craft” is a totalizing and honorific concept, inclusive of “art” in the senses that the West has tended to use since the eighteenth century (as in “the fine arts”). “Craft” is at times closer to “craftiness,” at other times to “artfulness.” The key point is that tekhnê—one of our leading terms for this session— does not distinguish those ways of acting that will later be sorted out, contested, at times opposed to one another, as varied and divergent skills. This is a good point at which to remind ourselves that the other term naming our session, logos, is equally rich and broad in ancient usage. Sometimes interpreted as an overarching concept that covers the range represented by the Latin pair of terms ratio and oratio, logos is both mental skill (reason, intelligence—even cunning intelligence) and the product thereof (an account, verbal art). In the latter sense, as becomes clear, it will tend to overlap with tekhnê, rather than be its polar opposite. For the making of well-shaped, appropriate, reasonable 6 On the goddess under her Athenian cult title see Pausanias 1.24.3.