[1] ELS 313: Greek and Roman Literatures Course Materials

ELS 313: Greek and Roman Literatures Course Materials Course Leader: Professor Amechi N. Akwanya (ORCID: 0000-0002-5331-6899) Contents 1. Introduction 2. Homer, The Iliad, chapter 1 3. Homer, The Odyssey, chapter 1 4. Vergil, The Aeneid, chapter 1 5. Aristophanes, Birds 6. Euripides, The Suppliants 7. Vergil, Eclogue IV 8. Horace, Satire I Introduction Man everywhere makes things, of which Martin Heidegger distinguishes two kinds: ‘equipment’ and ‘works’ (Poetry, Language, Thought 28). The first are use objects – made to serve one purpose or another, and are, as he would say, most themselves when they are serving that purpose. An art work, on the other hand, shares with things like boulderstone, ‘things by way of nature’, that is, ‘the character of having taken shape by itself…. and is self-contained’ (28). Creativity is expressed in the making of things, but in a special way, in art, the making of things capable of self-presenting as having taken shape by themselves. And these kinds of things are found, in simple and complex forms, wherever man settles his existence. According to Heidegger, knowing about these kinds of made things is essential, if it is to be ‘decided [] who man is and where [and perhaps also how] he is settling his existence’ (Existence and Being 312). We are concerned with one of these kinds of made things produced by the Greeks and Romans, namely literature. A major presupposition in this course is that the concept literature is the same, whether it is spoken of Greek or Roman productions or those of the Africans or the English. A historical exploration of the concept going back as far as possible is therefore needed to ensure that there is no equivocation in meaning. The Greeks are a natural starting point since as far as documentation goes, they were the first to treat literature as a serious object of study to which the rigour of philosophical thought could be brought to bear. Their greatest philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, devoted much intellectual labour to it. Mimesis is the central conception of the Greeks about art, but it did not quite mean the same thing to all the intellectuals who discussed it. For some it denoted a model depicting an aspect of reality; for some it was a mirror which reflected an aspect of reality. Plato himself used it in several different ways. Stephen Halliwell lists such uses as image-making, likeness-making, and semblance-making. Aristotle devoted a whole book to the problem; and so his account is more detailed and reflects a very high regard for literature, which endures in the philosophical tradition to the present. His focus is mainly on tragic drama, but in doing so, he had to situate tragedy within drama, and poetry, and art, showing that what unites all the arts is mimesis, tragic poetry being a mimesis of action of a serious kind, with language for its medium. There is an arrangement of incidents with a beginning, middle, and end, one thing leading to another so that a total action or a muthos emerges. This is what the poet does which gives him the name of a maker – a myth- maker. He characterizes poetry further as dealing with the universal (tou katholou), and unlike history (historia) which deals with kathekaston (the particular), poetry is concerned with to eikos [1] (the probable); accordingly, poetry is ‘of greater ethical import (by philosophical standards)’ than history (Poetics, Halliwell’s translation 59n). By Aristotle’s rule in the Poetics whereby artistic mimesis takes place by means of one specific medium or a combination of two or more of these (colour, shape, rhythm, melody, language), dancing is included among the arts, but not architecture, although it is listed in this philosopher’s Nicomachean Ethics. On the other hand, by Heidegger’s rule of self-presentation as ‘having taken shape by itself’, it seems rather hard to justify dancing. At all events, it does not appear in G.W.F. Hegel’s list, where there are only architecture, sculpting, painting, music and poetry. ‘These five arts’, he writes, ‘make up the inherently determinate and articulated system of what art actually is in both essence and reality. It is true that outside them there are other imperfect arts, such as gardening, dancing, etc., which however we can only mention in passing’ (627). Poetry has both a specific medium, language, and ‘the character of having taken shape by itself’, and accordingly self-contained. Hence discussing Romantic literature, Paul Coates writes that works of ‘”inspiration” tend to be “difficult”; once the trance of composition has passed, the poet finds himself in the position of a literary critic attempting to comprehend a work that appears to have been conceived by another person’ (1). Sophistication in art may have another possible cause apart from ‘inspiration’, namely long practice. Aristotle suggests that such long practice had a role in the evolution of tragedy, with the process ceasing when the pattern of change reached its state of perfection. We read, for instance: Now to examine the question whether or not even tragedy fulfils our basic principles well enough - something to be judged both in itself and with relation to the state of the theatre - that is matter for another discussion. In any case, tragedy did come out of improvisational beginnings (and comedy [too]: the first [i.e. tragedy] growing out of those who used to lead off the dithyramb, the second [i.e. comedy] out of those who led the phallic songs that still persist in many of our cities even now); and it grew little by little by developing each of its aspects as they came to light; and when it had gone through many changes tragedy stopped when it had realised (attained) its integral nature. (Poetics, Whalley’s translation 61) It would appear that Greek drama and epic had attained their integral natures by the time Aristotle was writing about them. And so Aristotle was to infer about the nature of art and these various forms from existing productions that were already in a fully developed state. Other cultures may have achieved such full artistic development in their own different contexts. For instance, notwithstanding that it is seen purely as religious Scripture, the Old Testament reflects high perfection in narrative and lyrical poetry, without necessarily learning from the Greeks nor apparently from anyone else. Some of the Old Testament may even be older than Homer. The Greek and Roman literatures we are focusing on in this course are treated as exclusively secular literature. But as Aristotle relates above, it is from the dithyramb, the ecstatic religious hymn that tragedy evolved. Hegel elucidates as follows: In their religious ceremonies the Greeks did not long acquiesce in such mere exclamations and invocations but proceeded to interrupt such outpourings by the relation of specific mythical situations and actions. These descriptions, intercalated between the lyrical outbursts, then gradually became the chief thing, and, by presenting a living and complete action explicitly in the form of an action, developed into drama which for its part incorporated the lyrics of the chorus again as an integral part of itself. (Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art 1139) While recognizing this process of internal change out of which tragic drama evolved, he gives much greater prominence to another kind of history which traces a movement from the material and heavy art forms towards the spiritual and transcendent forms. In the process of progressive spiritualization, architecture comes first, and is followed by sculpting, each presumably with [2] ample room to evolve to its highest level of perfection. He next groups ‘together into a final ensemble the arts whose mission it is to give shape to the inner side of personal life’ (625), commenting about ‘the third art after painting and music’, namely ‘the art of speech, poetry in general, [that it is] the absolute and true art of the spirit and its expression as spirit, since everything that consciousness conceives and shapes spiritually within its own inner being speech alone can adopt, express, and bring before our imagination’ (626). Heidegger was to put a certain accent on this history of succession articulated by Hegel. It is not just that poetry is the last to emerge, but that it was what all the arts were aiming at: to become poetry. If they succeed, and since ‘all art is in essence poetry, then the arts of architecture, painting, sculpture, and music must be traced back to poesy’ (Poetry, Language, Thought 70). Poetry is the defining function in art: poiesis – a making. Although there are references to Biblical and other traditions in Hegel’s Aesthetics, Greek and Roman productions, particularly the former, comprise a main pillar in his account of art history. In his account, the Greeks and the Romans appear to have pursued all these arts to the highest level; and a good few of their works have survived to the present, the survival rate much higher among the Romans. In the specific area of our concern, Greek poetry probably suffered more loss than most – the word poetry here used in the sense in which the philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger use it, namely the art in which mimesis is made by means of language alone (monon tois logois). There are several of these which are known only because of their being mentioned in Aristotle’s Poetics. But the works that did survive provide us great examples of great poetry; and these have been read and discussed for two and a half thousand years or more, still having the capacity ‘always to spring back to life’ (Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor 223).

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