The List as Treasury in the Greek World By Athena E. Kirk A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Classics in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Leslie V. Kurke, Chair Professor Andrew Garrett Professor Nikolaos Papazarkadas Professor Ronald S. Stroud Fall 2011 Abstract The List as Treasury in the Greek World by Athena E. Kirk Doctor of Philosophy in Classics University of California, Berkeley Professor Leslie V. Kurke, Chair Some of the earliest written records in the greater ancient world are lists of objects: we find catalogues of gods, kings, jewels, archaic vocabulary items, and exotic birds in Sumerian, Egyptian, Akkadian and Hittite, and many scholars surmise that a penchant for this kind of record-keeping fueled the very invention of writing. The Greeks, however, have long been considered distinct from other literate peoples both for their innovations with regard to the writing system they borrowed from the Phoenicians and for their application of that system, as they (a) were the first to denote vowels with stand-alone symbols, and (b) seem to used the alphabet to record poetry, not archival information, before anything else. In fact, it is not until several hundred years after these first ‘literary’ texts that the alphabetic Greeks begin to produce the government inventories, war memorials, or tribute lists akin to those of their Near Eastern and Mycenean predecessors. In this project, I study these kinds of official epigraphic written lists alongside lists from Archaic and Classical Greek literature in an effort to reorient the discourse surrounding the Greeks’ literacy and use of writing, and its purported uniqueness. I work specifically with those lists that enumerate physical objects, beginning from the assertion that we can trace a tradition of listing objects in the Greek world that exists independent of the literacy versus orality binary invoked by most scholarship for the last several decades. By looking at, e.g., a catalogue of gifts in the Iliad alongside an inventory of dedications from an Athenian sanctuary, I suggest that lists themselves are the salient phenomenon to be identified and analyzed, rather than the medium (written or oral) in which we find them. My central thesis is that Greek object-lists in their disparate contexts—oral poetry, narrated prose history, publicly displayed records, performed drama—all share a 1 common function vis-à-vis the objects they represent, namely, that when they are presented to their various audiences, they serve as surrogates for the objects in question and in many cases take on an authority beyond that of any physical collection, which ultimately perishes. In their role as extant text-monuments, I argue, they embody and preserve the details of remote times and spaces. I present four case studies of texts that contain lists from the archaic through the classical period, and one later example of the same tradition. The chronological progression emphasizes how the Greek literary and documentary traditions build upon and interact with one another, and by attending to the two together, I begin to build a more comprehensive portrait of the listmaking meme. 2 C ONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION The Listing Media. .ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. xiv CHAPTER I A Number of Things. 1 CHAPTER 2 A History of Collecting. 35 CHAPTER 3 Stone Treasuries. 69 CHAPTER 4 Performed Inventories. 110 EPILOGUE They Had Been Inscribed. 151 BIBLIOGRAPHY. 165 i I NTRODUCTION THE· LISTING· MEDIA THE· LISTING· MEDIA THE· LISTING· MEDIA THE· LISTING· MEDIA THE· LISTING· MEDIA quam innumerabilia variis artibus et opificiis, in vestibus, calciamentis, vasis et cuiuscemodi fabricationibus, picturis etiam diversisque figmentis atque his usum necessarium atque moderatum et piam significationem longe transgredientibus addiderunt homines ad inlecebras oculorum… Innumerable things of various arts and makes, in clothes, shoes, drinking vessels, and all such products, even pictures and other adornments, all far exceeding their appropriately modest use or their pious purpose—innumerable things have men added to entice the eyes… Augustine Confessions 10.34.53 This study stems from a desire to rethink and reframe some questions about Greek reading and writing. Many have posed and variously answered the first: “For what purpose did the Greeks adapt the alphabet?”1 While that inquiry has produced many fruitful results, without further explicit evidence it can result in no definitive account, and so it now seems equally and perhaps more pertinent to wonder instead why the Greeks wrote down what they did after they had learned letters, however they may 1 Among others: Goody and Watt (1963); Havelock (1982); Guarducci (1987); Harris (1989); Jeffery (revised 1990); Powell (1991); Thomas (1992) chapter 4; Ruijgh (1998). ii have done so. I propose to examine the Greeks’ application of the alphabetic system as a consequence of, not a motivation for, technological advancement. Another problem that has dominated the subfield concerns the number of literates in a given social group. In this case too, the general lack of quantitative evidence has yielded a surplus of accounts based on a diverse range of sources (inscriptions, epic poetry, papyri, vase painting, among others). Those who advocate early widespread literacy often find proponents of late orality fanciful, while the latter only occasionally engage with the technical, object-oriented work of the former.2 The study of literacy could stand to benefit from more approaches that lay aside quantitative issues and concentrate instead on the fact that undoubtedly the majority of inhabitants of the Greek world, from prolific prose-writer to unlettered slave, interacted with written texts in some way or other. Moreover, as we may also agree that anyone spending time in public places would have come in contact with a great deal of writing, it seems all the more worthwhile to consider the range of reactions different viewers had to a given text. T HEORETICAL B ASES These problems fall under the general rubric of representation and into the general domain of human memory. Writing, in turn, is characterized as one of many tools that organize sense perceptions.3 We might invoke the well-rehearsed discussion of signans and signatum4 as a model of the relationship between sound and meaning or language and writing, but Plato provides a contemporary meditation which is just as useful at Cratylus 432d: !"#$%& !$'(, ) *+&,-#", ./0 ,1( 2($µ3,4( /35$6 7( 89"%(& :( 2(;µ&,3 8<,6( ,= 2(;µ&,&, "> /3(,& /&(,&?@ 2 A primary criticism of studies such as, e.g., Thomas (1992). 3 The hero of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (460-461) mentions writing in his list of inventions, all of which allowed ignorant mankind to make full use of his senses (442-444): !"# $%&!&'( )* +,µ-!- | ".&/0-1’, 2( 03-( #4+5&6( 7#!-( !8 +%9# | :##&6( :14.- .-9 3%;#<# =+4$>?&6(. Compare here Aristotle’s hierarchy of the levels of perception, where certain living things are capable of -@0140A( but not µ#,µ4, such that they cannot engage in 3%>#Aµ- (Metaphysics A 980a-b). 4 Jakobson (1984/1959) especially makes several useful revisions to Saussure’s scheme, among which two are most applicable to this study: (1) far from being arbitrary, symbols and their interpretation are heavily dependent on context (28-29), and (2) “the signans must necessarily be perceptible whereas the signatum is translatable” (30). iii !"#$%& 'µ$()*+,-. .(##/ 0/1 23 4$5 463#! 073$(#$, 8!9 $"8 :3 ;<$( !"#=3 +>4+%3 <$".+9&> $".7#+1$3 '4?#+1?3 @A#( #B µC3 !"#?, #B .C D3$µ!. Then those things of which names are the names would suffer absurdities at the hands of their names if they were completely the same as them. For they would all be doubles, I suppose, and no one would be able to tell which one was on the one hand the thing itself, and which was, on the other, the name. Jowett streamlines the rather cumbersome prose: “But then how ridiculous would be the effect of names on things, if they were exactly the same with them! For they would be the doubles of them, and no one would be able to determine which were the names and which were the realities.” In his struggle to define objects using names, Socrates points us to a central tension between the physical world and the attempt to describe it verbally. Though his discussion remains fairly abstract, the passage serves as a useful point of departure for studying how the Greek world represents physical objects using words. In Socrates’ formulation, there exists a one-to-one correlation between concepts (or nameable things) and names, but the object and the label are distinct entities and separable. The label can in turn be manifested at a second level of representation—as text. The studies here work with the text both as a representation of the object and, subsequently, as an object to behold itself. F OCUS With a view to studying the connections between words and things, I take as my topic ancient lists of objects. While studies of ancient literacy unfailingly turn to a wide variety of texts to inform their analyses, they pause far less often to reflect on the genre, content, and purpose of that material. I maintain that a more focused corpus, chosen specifically on typological grounds, could reorient the discussion; thus I will include lists from varying historical periods, preserved in diverse media. Lists pertain to literacy not only on an analogical level. It is common knowledge that they tend to be one of the first applications of writing in early literate societies, yet no one has fully iv treated their relationship to oral and written culture in Greece.5 In particular, catalogues of objects deserve special attention for a few reasons.