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Metaphor & Empire 30 Mobility of Classics 41 Introduction: Reassessing Greece & Rome 5 Rome Greece & Reassessing Introduction: of the Present 20 in the Crosshairs Tragedy Translation, Literature: Roman Studies: The Cultural Reception Homer’s Iliad 50 On Translating Memory, Commemoration & Identity Commemoration Memory, in an Ancient City 88 of Fall The Environmental Empire 101 the Roman What is Ancient History? 113 122 Classics: Curriculum & Profession Greco-Roman Studies in a Digital Age 127 Poem” by Sappho 40 The New “Brothers Catullus 68 Explicating c Study of Antiquity 112 The Scientifi Philosophy & Its Classical Past 59 & Its Classical Past Philosophy The Matter of Classical Art History 69 79 Materializing Ancient Documents Walter Scheidel Walter

& Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences American Academy Journal of the Spring 2016 Dædalus Brooke Holmes Brooke Shadi Bartsch Emily Greenwood Alexander Caroline Angelos Chaniotis Harper Kyle Ian Morris Gregory Crane with contributions by Hadas Rachel Putnam Michael C. J. Malcolm H. Wiener Phillip Mitsis Platt Verity Bagnall S. Roger Matthew S. Santirocco Santirocco Matthew S. Peter T. Struck Peter T. What’s What’s The Old New About New About

Dædalus Spring 2016: What’s New About the Old @americanacad coming up in Dædalus: coming Huskey, Eugene Keohane, O. Nannerl Elgie, Robert Archie Brown, Haslam & Stephen D. Kellerman, Alexander Stepan, Barbara Alfred King and Anthony Michele Swers, Eric Posner, Reicher, Fidler, David Michael Horowitz, Sagan, Michael Walzer, Scott D. Lloyd Axworthy Sagan, & Lewis & Scott D. Jeffrey Kehler, Robert and Benjamin Leaning, Valentino Dorn, Jennifer Walter Felter & Jacob N. Witt, Joseph Fabian & John Savarese Ford Laura Mark Martins Fazal, Tanisha Welsh, Jennifer Allen Weiner, Shapiro, Janne Seth Lazar, Keith Krause, Leslie Vinjamuri, & Jacob Bronsther, Sagan and Scott D. Paul Wise, & Antonia Chayes, Nolan Elena Bunce, Valerie Colton, George Breslauer & Timothy Henry Fiona Greene, Chebankova, Keith Darden, Samuel Hale, Markus, Maria Hill, Stephen Kotkin, Marlene Laruelle, Stanislav Popova, and Brian Taylor Democracy; The American and Limits of Deliberative plus Prospects International and Indian: Obstacles and Opportunities; Civil Wars Order &c & War Ethics,

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Inside front cover: Romare Bearden, The Siren’s Song, 1977. Art © Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by vaga, New York, ny. The artwork is cropped; a thumbnail of the full piece is in the lower left corner. Matthew S. Santirocco, Guest Editor Phyllis S. Bendell, Managing Editor and Director of Publications Peter Walton, Assistant Editor Nora N. Khan, Senior Editorial Associate

Committee on Studies and Publications John Mark Hansen and Jerrold Meinwald, Cochairs; Gerald Early, Carol Gluck, Linda Greenhouse, John Hildebrand, Jerome Kagan, Philip Khoury, Arthur Kleinman, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Steven Marcus, Rose McDermott, Jonathan F. Fanton (ex of½cio), Don M. Randel (ex of½cio), Diane P. Wood (ex of½cio)

Dædalus is designed by Alvin Eisenman. Dædalus

Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Design for the hedge maze is by Johan Vredeman de Vries, from Hortorum viridariorumque elegantes & multiplices formae: ad architectonicae artis normam affabre delineatae (Cologne, 1615).

Dædalus was founded in 1955 and established as a quarterly in 1958. The journal’s namesake was renowned in ancient Greece as an inventor, scientist, and unriddler of riddles. Its emblem, a maze seen from above, symbolizes the aspiration of its founders to “lift each of us above his cell in the labyrinth of learning in order that he may see the entire structure as if from above, where each separate part loses its comfortable separateness.” The American Academy of Arts & Sciences, like its journal, brings together distinguished individuals from every ½eld of human endeavor. It was char- tered in 1780 as a forum “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honour, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.” Now in its third century, the Academy, with its more than ½ve thousand members, continues to provide intellectual leadership to meet the critical challenges facing our world. Dædalus Spring 2016 Subscription rates: Electronic only for non- Issued as Volume 145, Number 2 member individuals–$48; institutions–$133. Canadians add 5% gst. Print and electronic © 2016 by the American Academy for nonmember individuals–$54; institutions– of Arts & Sciences $148. Canadians add 5% gst. Outside the United The New “Brothers Poem” by Sappho States and Canada add $23 for postage and han- © 2016 by Rachel Hadas dling. Prices subject to change without notice. On Translating Homer’s Iliad Institutional subscriptions are on a volume-year © 2016 by Caroline Alexander basis. All other subscriptions begin with the next Materializing Ancient Documents available issue. © 2016 by Roger S. Bagnall The Environmental Fall of the Roman Empire Single issues: $14 for individuals; $37 for insti- © 2016 by Kyle Harper tutions. Outside the United States and Canada Greco-Roman Studies in a Digital Age add $6 per issue for postage and handling. Prices © 2016 by Gregory Crane subject to change without notice. Published under a Creative Commons Claims for missing issues will be honored free cc-by license of charge if made within three months of the Editorial of½ces: Dædalus, American Academy of publication date of the issue. Claims may be Arts & Sciences, 136 Irving Street, Cambridge ma submitted to [email protected]. Members of 02138. Phone: 617 576 5085. Fax: 617 576 5088. the American Academy please direct all ques- Email: [email protected]. tions and claims to [email protected]. Library of Congress Catalog No. 12-30299. Advertising and mailing-list inquiries may be addressed to Marketing Department, mit Press Dædalus publishes by invitation only and assumes Journals, One Rogers Street, Cambridge ma no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts. 02142-1209. Phone: 617 253 2866. Fax: 617 253 1709. The views expressed are those of the author(s) of Email: [email protected]. each article, and not necessarily of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. To request permission to photocopy or reproduce content from Dædalus, please complete the Dædalus ( 0011-5266; 1548-6192) is issn e-issn online request form at http://www.mitpress published quarterly (winter, spring, summer, fall) journals.org/page/permissionsForm.jsp, or con- by The mit Press, One Rogers Street, Cambridge tact the Permissions Manager at mit Press Jour ma 02142-1209, for the American Academy of nals, One Rogers Street, Cambridge ma 02142- Arts & Sciences. An electronic full-text version 1209. Fax: 617 253 1709. Email: journals-rights@ of Dædalus is available from The Press. mit mit.edu. Subscription and address changes should be ad dressed to mit Press Journals Customer Service, Corporations and academic institutions with One Rogers Street, Cambridge ma 02142-1209. valid photocopying and/or digital licenses with Phone: 617 253 2889; U.S./Canada 800 207 8354. the Copyright Clearance Center (ccc) may re Fax: 617 577 1545. Email: [email protected]. produce content from Dædalus under the terms of their license. Please go to www.copyright.com; Printed in the United States by The Sheridan ccc, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers ma 01923. Press, 450 Fame Avenue, Hanover pa 17331. The typeface is Cycles, designed by Sumner Newsstand distribution by Ingram Periodicals Stone at the Stone Type Foundry of Guinda ca. Inc., 18 Ingram Blvd., La Vergne 37086. tn Each size of Cycles has been separately designed Postmaster: Send address changes to Dædalus, in the tradition of metal types. One Rogers Street, Cambridge ma 02142-1209. Periodicals postage paid at Boston ma and at additional mailing of½ces. Introduction: Reassessing Greece & Rome

Matthew S. Santirocco

The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively. We must concede the ancients their place. . . . But their place is not simply back there, in a separate and foreign country; it is assimilated in ourselves, and resurrected into an ever-changing present. –David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country1

It is difficult to square the rhetoric about the current “crisis” in the humanities with the abundant, if anecdotal, evidence that Greco-Roman antiquity continues to thrive in the popular imagination. As I am writing this, Mary Beard’s new history of Rome is flying off the shelves; general interest magazines publish articles on Greek papyri; the first transla- MATTHEW S. SANTIROCCO, a tion of Homer’s Iliad by a woman has appeared to Fellow of the American Academy wide acclaim; the challenge of teaching ancient since 2009, is Professor of Clas- Greek made it to the op-ed pages of The New York sics, Angelo J. Ranieri Director of Times; a remake of the filmBen-Hur is scheduled for Ancient Studies, and Senior Vice release this summer; a traveling exhibition of large- Provost for Academic Affairs at scale Hellenistic bronzes has become a “must see” New York University. His numer- show of the season; productions of Greek tragedies ous publications include Unity and Design in Horace’s Odes (1986), and and their adaptations continue to be a staple of pro- the edited volumes Latinitas: The fessional and amateur theater; and television pro- Tradition and Teaching of Latin (1987), grams abound on ancient topics ranging from Cleo- Recovering Horace (1994), and Saving patra to the Colosseum.2 Of course, this preoccupa- the City: Destruction, Loss, and Recov- tion with the past has a negative side as well, since ery in the Ancient World (2003). A past even the modern attempt to mythologize Zenobia editor of the apa monograph se- as an Arab queen who resisted Roman power was ries, American Classical Studies (1989 – 1992), and the journal Classical not enough to save her city Palymra from those in World (1993–2012), he currently Syria who were hell-bent on erasing any signs of edits the Palgrave Macmillan se- what they deemed to be unorthodox. But even such ries The New Antiquity. wanton acts of destruction, which seek to obliter-

5 Reassessing ate history, only provide further proof that est pipeline into the profession, as some of Greece & the past is still very much alive in the pres- those latecomers to the field, upon gradu- Rome ent.3 ation, make up for gaps in their linguistic That said, there are different ways to as- training by enrolling in post-baccalaureate sess the health of a field than by measuring programs, yet another creative adaptation popular interest in the objects of its study.4 by which the field prepares students for These signs of robust interest–of a fasci- entry into doctoral programs and scholar- nation fueled perhaps by the way in which ly and teaching careers. Greek and Roman culture is simultaneous- The visibility of antiquity in the curric- ly familiar and foreign to us–do not tell the ulum testifies to the resilience of the field whole story. If we turn instead to data use- in the face of “crisis”–or, rather, “cri- fully amassed by the Humanities Indica- ses.” Greco-Roman studies has long been tors of the American Academy of Arts and recognized as the canary in the coal mine Sciences, and by other professional sourc- of the humanities, having faced early on es, we get a somewhat different picture at some of the pressures that the other hu- the institutional level–small (though rela- manities would encounter only later. In tively steady) numbers of students major- the late nineteenth and early twentieth ing in classics, respectable enrollments in centuries, the field lost its curricular hege- Greek and Latin (though modest by com- mony, as American colleges and universi- parison with many modern languages), ties jettisoned Latin as a requirement for and some retrenchment in faculty hiring admission or graduation. Then, as private (though it is not across-the-board and is schools, particularly Catholic ones, made offset by hiring in other schools and col- Latin optional or dropped it altogether, leges).5 one important pipeline for college majors Even more striking, and encouraging, is dried up. Later, as the quintessential home the fact that, as the number of individuals of “dead white males,” the field was at the specializing in the field has shrunk, more epicenter of the culture wars.6 And, now, students than ever before are encounter- in a climate of economic anxiety, vocation- ing Greece and Rome through courses on alism, and concern with financial return “classics in translation.” A staple of un- on educational investment, it is again vul- dergraduate general education programs nerable. Rather than circling the wagons, (whether distributional or core require- the field has confronted these challenges in ments) and popular as electives, these creative ways. The curricular engagement courses explore such topics as “Classical noted above was one of these strategies. In Mythology,” “Women in Antiquity,” “Sport fact, in a reversal of the usual model where- and Spectacle in the Ancient World,” “An- by research influences what is taught in the cient Religion,” “Greek and Roman Dra- classroom, this curriculum also became a ma,” and “Cinema and the Classics”– powerful driver (though by no means the to name just a few. Rather than “dumb- only one) of exciting new research agendas ing down” the field, as some critics have that focus on contemporary issues where claimed, and being harbingers of further the past has something to teach us. decline, these courses have succeeded in And so, if ancient Greco-Roman culture educating a whole new generation of citi- is alive and well in the popular imagination zens, hardly an unworthy goal. They have and in the general curriculum, the most im- also helped to recruit new majors who had portant evidence of its vitality must never- not encountered this material before col- theless be sought in the quality of current lege. And they have even supplied a mod- research. While the past several decades

6 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences may have seen no grand paradigm shift,7 it any one person could read in many life- Matthew S. is clear that our understanding of the past times. But new material regularly turns up, Santirocco has been dramatically enhanced–and in whether in a manuscript miscatalogued in some cases radically altered–by new ev- a monastic library, or in a “quotation frag- idence, new methods, and new questions. ment” (the work of one author cited by an- As befits a scholarly field whose history be- other), or, more commonly, on a scrap of gan to be written even in antiquity, it is not papyrus recovered from the dry and pre- surprising that there are periodic moments servative sands of Egypt.11 Indeed, one of taking stock. The year 2000 occasioned scholar estimates that “Over the last hun- several, including Classics in Progress, a vol- dred years, one literary papyrus has been ume of essays by British scholars that was published, on average, every ten days; the published for our sister society, the Brit- agglomeration provides, for Greek liter- ish Academy.8 This special issue of Dæda- ature at least, a small new renaissance.”12 lus was inspired by a different sort of mile- (For a recent discovery that has attracted stone, the important work of the American much attention, see the elegant translation Academy’s Commission on the Human- by Rachel Hadas of the so-called “Brothers ities and Social Sciences. The idea for this Poem” by Sappho in the box on page 40.)13 issue started to come into view at the same These discoveries not only enlarge our time that the Commission was preparing store of ancient literature, but also enable its report, The Heart of the Matter; and the us to restore what we already have, to rec- appearance of this issue coincides roughly ognize previously unknown connections with the publication of the Commission’s among works, and, on occasion, to rewrite follow-up report, which documents the ex- history, literary or otherwise. Meanwhile, tensive activities that have taken place over extant texts regularly require philological the past two years.9 There could be no bet- attention. To take just one example: new ter time to focus on the oldest of the hu- editions of authors are needed not only manities fields, Greco-Roman studies, and to incorporate the new discoveries noted to assess (in the words of this volume’s ti- above, but also to take into account sever- tle) “what is new about the old.”10 al phenomena, only recently understood. One is contaminatio, the fact that most fam- Taken together, the essays in this vol- ily trees of manuscripts (stemmata codicum) ume exemplify some of the most impor- are complicated by horizontal transmis- tant recent developments in Greco-Roman sion (the cross-fertilization of distinct tra- studies. Here I would single out only four. ditions, when a copyist relying mainly on The first is, paradoxically, the persistence one manuscript nevertheless incorporates of the old amidst the new–the continued readings from another with a different lin- focus on the text, whether literary or doc- eage). Another is even more basic: the re- umentary, and hence the continued im- alization that in an oral culture, where texts portance of philology and the traditional were often records of, or scripts for, per- specialisms necessary for recovering and formance, variance existed from the out- recuperating this category of evidence, set. In other words, there may be no one such as palaeography, textual criticism, “right” reading. And just as new editions and linguistics. It is sometimes assumed refresh the texts, new commentaries and that the vagaries of transmission have left critical studies provide exegetical support, us all that we will ever have of ancient lit- elucidating their linguistic, literary, archae- erature–a minute percentage of the to- ological, historical, and sociological con- tal production, to be sure, but more than texts on the basis of the latest research.

145 (2) Spring 2016 7 Reassessing In fact, a “new philology” is developing, ary scholars, historians, and art histori- Greece & which considers not just the words upon ans began to be informed by the method Rome a page, but also the materiality of the text, ological approaches and theoretical con- including the format of the ancient book cerns of those larger disciplines. (For an (the papyrus scroll and later parchment elegant example, see the box on page 68, codex) and its implications not only for where Michael Putnam’s explication of textual criticism, but also for ancient read- a famous passage from Catullus displays ing practices.14 traditional philological rigor, while also A second noteworthy development in being informed by contemporary literary the field–and perhaps the most conse- approaches such as intertextuality, fem- quential so far, since it has been underway inism, and genre studies.) And none of for over four decades–is how Greco-Ro- this was a one-way street, since scholars man studies has opened up dramatically of the ancient world engaged in dialogue in terms of its methodological approach- with their larger disciplines and made no- es and theoretical underpinnings. This is table contributions to them, particularly sometimes explained as the influence of in such areas as the history of religion, gen- other disciplines. But this model, which der, and sexuality. In an even more con- emphasizes the role of exogenous forces, sequential move, scholars who were now oversimplifies a more complicated pro- operating within these larger disciplinary cess. Greco-Roman studies had always tents began also to acquire as individuals been multidisciplinary: even to this day, disciplinary cross-competencies, the sort classics departments, unlike their coun- of inter- (and trans-) disciplinary expertise terparts in the other humanities, com- that had previously resided in the multi- monly include not only scholars of lan- disciplinary collective of their departments guage and literature but also ancient his- or the profession as a whole.16 Thus, liter- torians, archaeologists, art historians, and ary scholars “materialized” the texts they philosophers. In fact, most of these hu- were studying, ancient history and art his- manistic disciplines trace their origins to tory took a “linguistic turn,” and so forth. the study of antiquity, specifically philolo- At the same time, these scholars also drew gy. In the mid-nineteenth century and ear- upon other disciplines that had their ori- ly twentieth century, however, these dis- gins outside of the field, such as structur- ciplines became divorced from their roots al anthropology, psychology, psychoanal- and started to develop along different tra- ysis, and (most recently) cognitive sci- jectories. The result was that scholars of ence and neuroaesthetics. And through Greco-Roman antiquity remained togeth- them, they began to participate in larger as a discipline unto themselves and, er theoretical discourses, such as Marx- over time, became more isolated from ist theory and feminist theory (the latter developments in the larger disciplines that having had a particularly profound and they had spawned, but that had moved salutary role in the recent development in different directions.15 of the field). That changed several decades ago as a In all of this scholarly activity, no one gradual, if unspoken, realization set in that theoretical outlook or methodology has Greco-Roman studies was not so much dominated, even for a time, and a com- a single discipline as a multidisciplinary fortable catholicity of approaches pre- field, and individual scholars started to take vails. The end result has been that a field out “dual citizenship” with their larger seen by some as resistant to–or, more ac- disciplines. Thus, the work of ancient liter- curately, innocent of–theory has become

8 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences much more self-reflective. Scholars have Not unrelated to these scientific devel- Matthew S. gained an awareness of the historical con- opments is the important role played by Santirocco tingencies at work in the very formation digital technology. Perhaps because Gre- of the field. This has led them to approach co-Roman studies has always been preoc- the ancient material and older (and some- cupied with technologies of communica- times triumphalist) interpretations with tion,18 beginning with the shift from oral- a critical eye and a healthy dose of skepti- ity to literacy, and then from the scroll to cism. It has also led them to question the the codex, the field was an early (perhaps cultural assumptions that not only past the earliest) adopter of what has come scholars but also they themselves bring to be known as digital humanities, and it to the evidence they study and the ques- has been a major contributor to that field tions they ask. Finally, there is increasing ever since. At one level, technology has in- appreciation of the constructed nature of creased access to evidence, as the digitiza- antiquity–even in antiquity. tion of texts and images has made possible The third development in Greco-Roman research on a scale previously unimagined studies is the most recent and perhaps the and has thereby opened up whole new ar- most exciting: the new science of antiqui- eas of inquiry. But at another level, tech- ty. A true instance of interdisciplinary col- nology offers not only access to evidence laboration, this offers the potential for ex- but also powerful heuristic tools for ana- ponential growth in our knowledge of the lyzing it, ranging from geospatial mapping past. Certain scientific techniques, such of archaeological sites to the treebanking as radiocarbon dating, dendrochronolo- of Greek and Latin texts (the systemat- gy, and glaciology have been around for a ic linguistic analysis of every word in a long time. But these techniques have now text).19 been joined by other powerful tools. Mul- The fourth and final development worth tispectral imaging, for example, is making noting is the expansiveness of the field. legible papyri from Herculaneum that had The canon, for example, has been dramat- been carbonized in the eruption of Vesuvi- ically enlarged, not just by new finds, but us; 3D laser scanning, or lidar, is enabling also as a result of the new approaches not- us to reconstruct ancient landscapes and ed above. Thus, Greek and Roman medical structures; and the techniques of bioar- writings, once at the periphery of scholar- chaeology, such as dna sequencing and ship, are now taking center stage because isotope analysis, allow us to study human, of their potential to illuminate aspects of animal, and plant specimens, and thereby ancient thinking and understanding of the reconstruct ancient ecosystems, diet, cli- self.20 Ancient technical writings (on such mate, disease, migration patterns, and cul- topics as science, mathematics, engineer- tural interaction. (See Malcolm Wiener’s ing, architecture, agriculture, law, war- summary of some of these techniques and fare, magic, and divination) are also grad- their application in the box on page 112.) ually being mainstreamed. And now that Scientific techniques are now deployed the literature of the Hellenistic period is not just to date objects or events but to tell firmly in the canon, scholars are turning a larger story. The data recovered in this their attention elsewhere, to the classiciz- way constitute an ever-growing physical ing Second Sophistic, the neglected Greek archive that makes it possible, even nec- literature of the Roman empire, and the essary, to reopen old subjects, to question literature of early Christianity. settled opinion, and to rewrite historical As the canon expands, so too do the accounts.17 temporal and geographical horizons of

145 (2) Spring 2016 9 Reassessing the field. Older notions of periodization, ies into the public square and using tech- Greece & for example, are under review, as tradi- nology to democratize the production of Rome tional divisions and categories (such as ar- knowledge, to disseminate discovery, and chaic, classical, and post-classical) are seen to demonstrate how the past is relevant to to be artificial, privileging rupture over our own contemporary experience.24 continuity, and implying models of rise and decline that do not comport with the The persistence of philology, the open- evidence. Similarly, the older focus on ness to new methods and theoretical per- Greece and Rome has given way to broad- spectives, the new science of antiquity, er studies of the Mediterranean basin and and the expanding horizons of research– the ancient Near East that recognize the these four developments in Greco-Roman interconnectedness of their cultures at dif- studies over the past several decades are ferent periods. And even where there is lit- on full display in the essays that follow. tle evidence of direct connection, compar- At this point, a few editorial observations ative history allows for those who work in are in order. Having just argued for the ex- the Greco-Roman field to explore larger pansiveness of the field, I must now note problems that transcend one particular that many important subjects are missing culture or period. The current interest in from this volume. But, given constraints of “big history” or “world history” is an ex- space and time, topical coverage was never pression of this impulse,21 as is the emer- the goal, nor could it be, and the contribu- gence of a new field, ancient studies, which tors were given the freedom, within broad takes as its project precisely this sort of parameters, to address their subjects as crossing of boundaries of time, space, and they saw fit. For the same reason, these es- discipline.22 says are not general surveys or overviews Finally, Greco-Roman studies is being of the state of research. While most con- increasingly subsumed under the larger tributors situated their work in the context rubric of reception. Just as the “meaning” of recent scholarship, they intended their of a text or material artifact is now under- essays to be exhibits, original case studies stood to be a function not only of the his- that display new approaches in action and, torical and social contexts in which it was in some cases, point in new directions. produced and used, but also of how other Finally, the organizing principle here is and later communities have interpreted it, straightforward: this volume moves from so too the study of the Greco-Roman world literature to philosophy, visual and materi- in all its aspects is no longer just the study al culture, ancient history, and, finally, the of the past. As Mary Beard and John Hen- institutional contexts in which Greco-Ro- derson have put it: “Classics is a subject that man studies are conducted. Of course, this exists in that gap between us and the world arrangement necessarily oversimplifies the of the Greeks and Romans. The questions interrelationship among these categories raised by Classics are the questions raised and also among the essays themselves, by our distance from ‘their’ world, and at which display a significant degree of meth- the same time by our closeness to it, and by odological and theoretical overlap. This is its familiarity to us. . . . The aim of Classics all the more remarkable, since the contrib- is not only to discover or uncover the ancient utors did not share drafts with one another world. . . . Its aim is also to define and de- or collaborate in other ways. But this fea- bate our relationship to that world.”23 And ture only serves to demonstrate the main to do that entails one additional expan- theses of this volume, as noted above–the sive gesture, moving Greco-Roman stud- interconnectedness of the field, the cross-

10 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences ing of boundaries of various sorts (chrono- study Greek tragedy, the genre in which Matthew S. logical, geographical, disciplinary), and the the tension between these two approaches Santirocco breadth of intellectual horizon. The short is perhaps most evident, Holmes propos- summaries that follow are intended to do es a philosophy of the tragic that can ac- something that the abstracts attached to commodate both approaches. She locates the individual articles could not do, namely Greek tragedy at a historical moment, the to point out some of these connections and fifth century, when questions of agency also to demonstrate a larger thematic con- and responsibility were especially urgent, silience, since these essays, when read con- while also arguing for the resonances of secutively, come close to providing a coher- tragedy’s responses to these questions in ent narrative about “what is new about the contemporary contexts. “Tragedy is about old.” suffering . . . but it is also . . . about the mysteries and fallout of agency, understood as Given that the emphasis on texts is con- the ambiguous power to act in the world as stitutive of the field, the first four essays in well as ambiguous openness to the world this volume address literature. Over the that under extraordinary circumstances past several decades, various approaches impels one to act in ways that are difficult have left their mark on literary interpre- to own.” tation, including (but not limited to) the The next essay, by Shadi Bartsch, focuses “New Criticism,” reader response, struc- on Latin literature, specifically its complex turalism, deconstruction, and the “new relationship with its Greek precursor texts, historicism” or cultural poetics. In addi- the literature of a people whom Rome had tion to offering sophisticated readings of conquered. The nature of this relationship individual texts, current scholarship also and the Romans’ understanding of it has explores a wide variety of larger topics, in- been a staple of scholarship. But older no- cluding the materiality of the text (as not- tions of imitatio have given way to an ap- ed above) and, simultaneously, its perfor- preciation of the creative processes of ae- mative aspects (such as the largely oral/ mulatio (competitive emulation) that were aural dimension of ancient literature); the at work in “carrying over” one literature to social and political contexts in which texts another. Bartsch takes this revaluation fur- were produced and functioned (such as lit- ther by showing how linguistic usage sheds eracy, ideology, and patronage); and more light on Roman anxieties about their own overtly “literary” questions of canonicity, cultural imperialism. Offering a case study intertextuality, and reception–to name of how the word translatio could refer both just a few. to linguistic translation (of Greek texts Focusing on Greek literature, Brooke into Latin) and metaphorical transforma- Holmes demonstrates how both that cat- tion (of Romans, whose taste for Greek egory and its scholarly study have been culture corrupted them, turning them into “blown open,” as the traditional canon has “Greeks”), she demonstrates that “Trans- itself expanded under the impact of some lation could be represented as a control of these different approaches. To take one exerted over an alien text, but it may ulti- example: cultural poetics attempts to lo- mately have pointed to the uncontrollabil- cate texts within their immediate social ity of any ‘import from afar.’” and cultural contexts; on the other hand, These two essays demonstrate in differ- reception studies looks to the afterlives ent ways how the reception of texts has of texts and raises questions about their moved into the center of Greco-Roman transhistorical value. Taking as her case studies. The third contribution, by Emily

145 (2) Spring 2016 11 Reassessing Greenwood, addresses this topic head-on. tween the study of ancient philosophy and Greece & Focusing on the “cultural mobility” of the the way that philosophy is now practiced, Rome Greek and Roman classics, she describes that is, between historical or “continen- the recent shift away from a “classical tra- tal” philosophers and modern “analytic” dition” model that posits a fixed canon philosophy, with its largely presentist fo- whose lineage can be traced through Eu- cus, its powerful logical tools, its interest ropean culture. Rather, by characteriz- in scientific method, and its linguistic par- ing the ancient texts as “omni-local,” she adigm. Mitsis reviews attempts to bridge substitutes for this vertical and hierarchi- the divide, noting that ancient arguments cal conception a horizontal two-way re- often adumbrate modern positions, and lationship, one in which these texts are that ancient philosophers seem “new” in themselves “cultural composites that re- the way they take on real moral dilemmas sult from successive readers and audi- that have fallen out of contemporary theo- ences encountering and making sense of rizing. And there are recent signs of poten- these works.” As a case study she focuses tial rapprochement: the “linguistic turn” on Sophocles’s Antigone, and on two dif- may be loosening its hold on the field, ferent African responses to it, in which the philosophy of mind may be more hospi- receiving community shapes the meaning table to ancient paradigms, and, at a time of the classic work, in this case making it a of high specialization, some philosophers vehicle of political resistance.25 are discovering that “the texts of the past Closing this set of essays on literature, offer a place where one can again think Caroline Alexander turns to one specific about some of the traditional central is- type of reception, translation. Whereas sues of philosophy in a more synthetic Bartsch had explored aspects of the idea way. . . . In ancient texts one can again try in Roman antiquity, Alexander’s interest to see the forest for the trees.” A case study is in the contemporary practice of transla- is the philosophy of death, where there tion, which has made Greco-Roman texts has been a creative engagement between accessible to countless students and the the old and the new. The topic was a cen- larger public. While translation studies tral one in antiquity (where most philos- has emerged recently as its own academic ophers took the view that death is not an discipline, her focus is not on theory or crit- evil), and contemporary philosophers are icism, but rather on making, as befits one now perforce rediscovering and grappling who has just published her own translation with arguments that go back to Epicurus. of the Iliad. Offering not so much a schol- Mitsis concludes by expressing the hope arly analysis as a “reflective essay,” Alex- that the ancient philosophers will contin- ander revisits Matthew Arnold’s essay (it- ue to help us meet the moral challenges we self a “classic”), “On Translating Homer,” face, and that they will also teach contem- and demonstrates the continuing relevance porary philosophers to speak to those is- of the principles that are set forth there in sues, and in ways that we can understand. light of her own experience of translating. The next two essays shift our attention From literature, the volume makes a nat- from ancient literature and ideas to visual ural transition to philosophy (still more and material culture, though certain con- natural in antiquity than might seem the cerns persist. In a way that is familiar from case today). Taking as his topic the relation Mitsis’s discussion of ancient philosophy, of the discipline to its classical past, Phil- Verity Platt notes how the study of Greco- lip Mitsis describes the current divorce be- Roman art has been sidelined within the

12 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences larger discipline of art history, which fo- writing itself have come to support inqui- Matthew S. cuses increasingly on the modern and ry into the entire social dimension of the Santirocco non-Western. Similarly, she notes how technology of writing in ancient society.” classical art history has struggled also to The second materializing revolution, a define its relationship to classical philol- collaboration between papyrologists and ogy and the close engagement with texts. archaeologists, focuses on the contexts in Recent responses to these challenges are which the written artifacts were buried familiar from the discussions of litera- and what that reveals about different stag- ture earlier in this volume. One is to focus es in their use and reuse. Bagnall notes that on reception, on “the dynamic and shift- the two revolutions are connected, coming ways in which Greco-Roman art has plicating the notion that text and archaeol- been–and continues to be–desired and ogy are separate domains. This material fo- destroyed, restored and manipulated, col- cus represents a shift in papyrology itself, lected and displayed.” Another looks to from the predominantly literary and phil- historicizing the objects, locating them in ological approaches of a generation ago their original cultural contexts; this is an toward history in a broad sense: “We have enterprise, Platt notes, in which “the kinds moved from being interested only in the of questions posed by contemporary art text of a new fragment of Sappho to want- history–with their focus on historically ing to know who was copying and reading constituted forms of visuality and, increas- Sappho. . . . Interest has undeniably shift- ingly, materiality–have an important role ed in the direction of the broader cultural to play.” Finally, there is growing atten- horizons of the ancient world in their em- tiveness to the relationship between art bodied form, and away from disembodied and text, which is analogous to the “ma- canonical texts. This neither is, nor should terial turn” in literary studies. Thus, Platt be, the end of philology. But if it were the closes by analyzing a provocative passage end of an isolated philology, that would be from Pliny the Elder, which raises ques- no bad thing.” tions about the artist’s relationship with his materials, models of perception, and The next three essays turn our attention “the slippage between medium and repre- to ancient history. In recent years, schol- sentation.” arship has expanded beyond traditional The next essay, by Roger Bagnall, also fo- political, administrative, and military his- cuses on material objects and texts, but of tory to include also social, intellectual, cul- a different sort, the written artifacts that tural, and (recently) environmental his- constitute an increasingly important doc- tory. Interest has shifted from elite actors umentary source for historical research. in big narratives to the smaller stories of These include texts on stone and metal (in- ordinary, marginalized, and “silent” peo- cluding coins), ostraca (potsherds), wood- ple, including women, children, slaves, en tablets, and papyri. Drawing most of his and “the other,” and to such topics as de- examples from papyrology, he describes mography, public health, religion, gender two “materializing revolutions.” The first is and sexuality, identity, and emotion. a new interest in how these artifacts were Angelos Chaniotis focuses on one of produced. Digitized texts and high-reso- these topics, the formation of identity, lution images of them now make it possi- both individual and collective. Drawing ble, within limits, to reconstruct the “eco- on the sort of documentary evidence that system of writing” whereby “the materi- Bagnall has discussed, he takes as his al characteristics of writing materials and case study the city of Aphrodisias in Tur-

145 (2) Spring 2016 13 Reassessing key, which persisted for a long time and idence, that climate also contributed, spe- Greece & has yielded unusually rich archaeological cifically that the Mediterranean “patch- Rome finds. He explores how different sorts of work of microclimates” had been hospita- identity (civic, social, political, and reli- ble for much of the imperial period. In the gious) overlapped and competed with one ad 160s, however, the Antonine Plague, another throughout the centuries; how which science has identified as smallpox, they were constantly being shaped and was introduced through the Red Sea trade reshaped by language, custom, practices, “along the very networks that held the and myths; and how they were expressed empire together.” At same time, volcanic in various media, especially inscriptions, eruptions in ad 169 ended the period of which were key to the construction and stable climate, anticipating the later onset transmission of collective and cultural of what science has identified as a “late memory. Not only the original use of this antique little ice age.” Next, in ad 244 material, but even its reuse tells a story, and again in ad 246, the Nile failed to rise, as when an honorific inscription is repur- causing a food crisis in Egypt that had re- posed centuries later as a building block, percussions across the empire. And then, its original role in preserving memory a second pandemic, the Plague of Cypri- having by then become obsolete. It is in- an, started in Alexandria in ad 249 and teresting that debates about identity did spread across the Roman world over the not undermine the city’s cohesion–un- next twenty years. The crisis of the third til late antiquity, when Christians, Jews, century was underway, not as the result of and polytheists competed and religious any one event, but instead due to a cascade identity trumped all other forms of self- of environmental disasters that was relat- representation. Since names constitute the ed to climate change and disease and that most basic expression of identity, the ul- was, in a sense, “the revenge of the giant timate outcome of this competition is re- imperial ecology.” These disasters, finally, flected in a name, the rechristening of the “pushed the imperial system beyond the “City of Aphrodite” as Stauropolis, the threshold of resilience.” “City of the Cross.” After two essays that explore specific The next essay, by Kyle Harper, uses a problems in ancient history, Ian Morris very different category of evidence, not and Walter Scheidel reflect on the nature just textual and archaeological but also sci- of the enterprise itself. They review two entific data. Revisiting a “classic” problem different versions of ancient history–the of ancient history, the (so-called) fall of classical model that regards Greece and Rome, he explores environmental factors Rome as the beginning that matters, since that had not figured prominently in past they were turning points in world histo- accounts. Harper notes that Rome was an ry, and the evolutionary model, which agrarian tributary empire, and its econo- is global in its outlook and goes back to my was remarkably resilient because of the origins of humanity. The approach- a variety of risk-management strategies, es have competed and coexisted for two from technological improvements in ag- hundred and fifty years, with the evolu- riculture to the network of roads and sea tionary model taking hold in the social lanes that facilitated the movement of sciences and the classical dominating the foodstuffs and other goods. But if “trade humanities. But as evidence and methods and technology let the Romans outrun the are changing faster than ever before, the Malthusian reaper for no short season,” evolutionary is in the ascendant: “Now, we now know, on the basis of scientific ev- the origin story that seems to matter most

14 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences began not in first-millennium-bce Greece its privileged position in nineteenth-cen- Matthew S. and Rome, but with the invention of agri- tury American education as, in part, the Santirocco culture in the Middle East more than ten result of the expansion of universities at thousand years ago, or the evolution in that time, including the creation of pub- Africa of modern humans more than one lic land-grant institutions whose pragmat- hundred thousand years ago, or of the ge- ic mission differed from earlier colleges’ nus Homo nearly three million years ago.” goal of “acculturation into an aristocracy But if the classical model ignores most of of the learned.” Struck sees an interesting the world’s history, the evolutionary mod- parallel to contemporary higher educa- el has its own “flyover zone,” neglecting tion, where more Americans have a B.A. much of what transpired between the agri- than ever before, and where undergradu- cultural revolution and the industrial rev- ates increasingly pursue vocational stud- olution, that is, much of recorded history. ies. He makes a case for the classics in this The authors propose an alternative way of environment by noting that the breadth of doing ancient history, which is compara- the field, the way it encompasses different tive and can combine classical and evolu- styles of thinking (literary, historical, phil- tionary thinking. Their first case study is osophical, and so on), is analogous to the the Axial Age, the middle of the first mil- liberal arts as a whole. But because these lennium bce, when “an explosion of mor- different methods are housed in one cur- al thinking” occurred at roughly the same riculum, “we move beyond the paratactic time in different cultures–Chinese, Indi- aggregation of skills, and contribute to the an, Iranian, Israelite, and Greek–without development of a different intellectual ap- much evidence of diffusion. The second titude.” Now that the liberal arts are fac- topic is the study of political organiza- ing the same challenges that classics faced tion. Both Rome and China, for example, decades ago, Struck argues that the liber- built empires; but they had very different al arts should make the case for pure re- trajectories, and their divergence can be search by disseminating knowledge of the explained only by systematic compara- past through popular media and online tive analysis. The Axial Age and the fate of courses, which can reach a broader pub- empires are, then, two areas for research lic and make our teaching a public good.26 in which both evolutionary and classi- Gregory Crane is also committed to hav- cal historians can work together. But to ing Greco-Roman studies supported as a do this, classical historians “will need to public good. But his starting point is the . . . master new evidence, methods, and transformative power of technology– questions, and recognize that the ancient not how specialist research and teaching world was much bigger–and ancient his- can be enhanced by technology (a top- tory much longer–than our predecessors ic touched upon earlier in this introduc- made them seem.” tion), but rather “the extent to which the shift from print to a digital space changes The last two essays in this volume return how our particular fields can contribute to to a topic that was discussed briefly at the society as a whole.” Data from the Acade- beginning of this introduction: the institu- my’s Humanities Indicators demonstrate tional and professional context of Greco- that making the humanities accessible to Roman studies. But the focus, now, is on the general public is not considered essen- the future. Turning his attention to cur- tial by scholars in this and other major hu- riculum and pedagogy, Peter Struck ex- manities fields. But this leaves the human- plains the displacement of classics from ities exposed (as figures for the National

145 (2) Spring 2016 15 Reassessing Endowment for the Humanities’ support gether” is akin to the sort of comparative Greece & of research show). Crane suggests ways to ancient history that Morris and Scheidel Rome counter this “intellectual scholasticism.” envision and is consistent with the larg- One is to expand open access, which is “a er opening out of the field noted earlier. necessary, though by no means sufficient, While not all readers may agree about the condition for reaching beyond this closed advisability or feasibility of some of these academic network.” Even more impor recommendations, Crane’s final exhorta- tant is to come up with “a new theoretical tion can serve not only as a conclusion to foundation for Greco-Roman studies in a this introduction27 but also as a prelude to digital age,” one which does not prioritize the essays that follow: the “idealized expert” with full control of Those of us who have the privilege to earn the scholarship, but extends to non-spe- a living as students of the Greco-Roman cialists, including specialists in other dis- world have a decision before us about the ciplines. Technology makes it possible for field we want to build. . . . We can contin- such “citizen scholars” to develop requi- ue writing and teaching in much the same site skills and make real contributions to way we always have, exploiting new dig- knowledge. His final point is that Greco- ital methods as ancillary tools by which Roman studies in a digital age needs to we compose more traditional articles and open up not only to different audienc- books, rather than asking ourselves what es and practitioners but also to “a global the purpose of our research and teaching network of historical languages and cul- should be and then exploring new forms of tures.” One traditional name for the field, intellectual activity and production. . . . De- “classics,” ignores the fact that there are viating from any of these paths will be diffi- many other “classical” languages and cult: it entails redefining our field and thus cultures than those of Greece and Rome. inevitably challenges established structures He suggests institutional reorganization, of authority and institutional power. But the forming partnerships with scholars of potential benefits are immense and there non-European cultures and making use of will be opportunities for anyone in the field, communications technology to work with at whatever level of seniority, to contribute colleagues around the globe. His vision of to and flourish within the world we collec- “students in Tehran and Texas reading tively fashion. classical Greek and classical Persian to-

endnotes 1 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 412. 2 Mary Beard, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (New York and London: Liveright, 2015); John Seabrook, “The Invisible Library: Can Digital Technology Make the Herculaneum Scrolls Leg- ible After Two Thousand Years?” The New Yorker, November 16, 2015; Caroline Alexander, trans., The Iliad: A New Translation by Caroline Alexander (New York: HarperCollins, 2015); James Romm, “Beginning Greek, Again and Again,” The New York Times, January 3, 2016, sr 10; “Jack Huston: The ‘Ben-Hur’ Remake Was an Epic Undertaking,” The New York Times, February 10, 2016; Jens M. Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin, eds., Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Helle- nistic World (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2015).

16 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 3 This sort of destructive preoccupation with the past can be countered by technology, since we Matthew S. are able to digitize detailed images of archaeological remains that are in harm’s way, and to Santirocco visit and study them, even after they are gone, through virtual reality–a new type of “salvage archaeology.” 4 Throughout this introduction and the essays that follow, various names are used interchange- ably for the field. Each is fraught. “Classics,” for example, has a Eurocentric bias in that it ignores the existence of other “classic” cultures; “Greco-Roman studies” avoids that hegemonic trap but falls into another, blurring distinctions between Greece and Rome and implying a tighter cultural unity than existed (in the same way that references to a unified “Ju- daeo-Christian” culture also mislead). Discussion of nomenclature figures in several of the essays in this volume, such as those by Emily Greenwood and Gregory Crane. 5 More worrisome for all humanities fields is the move from a full-time faculty (whether on tenure track or on contract) to an adjunct academic workforce. 6 See Phyllis Culham and Lowell Edmunds, eds., Classics: A Discipline and Profession in Crisis (Lan- ham, Md.: University Press of America, 1989). For an example of the conservative critique of the field in the climate of the culture wars, see Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath, Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (New York: The Free Press, 1998); for a rejoinder to the conservative critique, see Page DuBois, Trojan Horses: Saving the Classics from Conservatives (New York: New York University Press, 2001). 7 “There are no ‘paradigm-shifts’ in the Classics. That is the simple truth with which this survey of the field at the end of the twentieth century must begin.” See Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., “Clas- sics at the Millennium: An Outsider’s Survey of a Discipline,” Soundings 82 (1–2) (1999): 242. 8 T. P. Wiseman, ed., Classics in Progress: Essays on Greece and Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). This volume explores changes in the field in Britain over the past half-century, since the publication of an earlier overview on the occasion of the Classical Association’s Jubi- lee, namely, Maurice Platnauer, ed., Fifty Years of Classical Scholarship (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954). For another millennial assessment of the field, see Carolina Ponce-Hernández and Lourdes Rojas Álvarez, eds., Estudios Clásicos en América en el Tercer Milenio (Mexico City: Facultad de Filo- sofía y Letras, unam, 2006), which contains essays on Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Co- lombia, Cuba, Mexico, the United States, and Venezuela. The excellent overview of classics in the United States by David Konstan, on pages 159–175 of that volume, can be read profitably alongside my introduction to this issue of Dædalus. 9 American Academy of Arts & Sciences, The Heart of the Matter: The Humanities and Social Sciences, for a Vibrant, Competitive, and Secure Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts & Sci- ences, 2013); and American Academy of Arts & Sciences, The Heart of the Matter: Around the Coun- try (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2015). These reports are also available online at http://www.amacad.org and http://www.humanitiescommission.org. 10 The original plan for this issue had been to survey a wide spectrum of ancient cultures, not just Greece and Rome. But the impossibility of the task in the time and space allowed soon became evident; indeed, even the current, more narrow focus of this volume entailed a great deal of selection. Finally, although the field is international, the essays here are by scholars at work in American institutions. It is worth noting, though, that while distinct national “styles” of scholarship persist in certain subfields, these distinctions have increasingly fallen away in the En- glish-speaking world and beyond. 11 Not all texts are recovered from papyri. One of the most famous of recent finds, documents from Vindolanda, a Roman frontier settlement near Hadrian’s Wall, were preserved on wooden tablets, and many other fragments, including some of Sappho, survive on ostraca (potsherds). 12 See Peter Parsons, “New Texts and Old Theories,” in Classics in Progress: Essays on Greece and Rome, ed. Wiseman, 42.

145 (2) Spring 2016 17 Reassessing 13 The poem refers to two individuals, Charaxos and Larichos, who are mentioned by later au- Greece & thors as Sappho’s brothers, but whose names did not until now appear in her surviving works. Rome The context may be a sister’s prayer for the safe return of the former, a merchant sailor, and the growth to maturity of the latter, who will bring joy to his family. This was one of two fragments of Sappho recently found on a papyrus. For a popular discussion by the scholar who discovered them, see Dirk Obbink, “New Poems of Sappho,” Times Literary Supplement, Feb- ruary 5, 2014; for the scholarly publication that followed, see Simon Burris, Jeffrey Fish, and Dirk Obbink, “New Fragments of Book 1 of Sappho,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 189 (2014): 32–49. 14 On the “new philology,” which originated in medieval studies, see the seminal essays in Specu- lum 65 (1) (1990), a special issue edited by Stephen G. Nichols. See also the conclusion of Roger Bagnall’s essay later in this volume on the need for a new, “less isolated” philology. 15 See James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 2014), especially pages 231–235, for a succinct overview of how, in the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, philology fragmented and spawned most of the humanities disciplines (except philosophy, whose roots were not in philology). For different approaches to the disciplinization of the field, see the essays in Glenn W. Most, ed., Disciplin- ing Classics–Altertumswissenschaft als Beruf, Aporemata 6 (Göttingen: Vandehoeck and Ruprecht, 2002). Finally, on the return to philology in the humanistic disciplines generally, see Geof- frey Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 43–79. 16 Of course, there had always been scholars who were able to bring the insights of several disciplines to bear on the subject in the service of a holistic Altertumswissenschaft. But this crossing of disciplinary boundaries is now increasingly common, at least as a goal. Working in multidisciplinary teams is another way of achieving this goal; but it isn’t particularly common in the field, except among archaeologists. 17 See Kyle Harper’s essay later in this volume, which uses scientific evidence to offer a radical reassessment of the fall of Rome. 18 For a thoughtful overview of the impact of technologies of communication from antiquity to the present, see James J. O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 19 For early uses of digital technology in the field, see John Solomon, ed., Accessing Antiquity: The Com- puterization of Classical Studies (Tucson and London: University of Arizona Press, 1993); see, also, the essays on “Computing in the Classics,” in Classical World 91 (6) (1998): 457–568. For an overview of how quickly and how far the field has progressed, see Alison Babeu, “Rome Wasn’t Digitized in a Day”: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classics (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and In- formation Resources, 2011), available online at http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub150abst .html. 20 See the essay by Brooke Holmes later in this volume for discussion of the relevance of medical and legal materials to an understanding of Greek tragedy. 21 For comparative ancient history, see the essay by Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel later in this volume. There may be a parallel here to the way that “world literature” is emerging as a scholarly field, either distinct from or as part of comparative literature. 22 A good example of this approach is New York University’s Institute for the Study of the An- cient World (isaw), which offers doctoral training, post-doctoral research opportunities, and scholarly outreach. According to its website, isaw “aims to encourage particularly the study of the economic, religious, political, and cultural connections between ancient civilizations. . . . [B]oth historical connections and patterns, as well as socially illuminating comparisons, will always be central to its mission.” 23 See Mary Beard and John Henderson, Classics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1995), 6–7; see, also, page 116: “Classics must also include the study of Classics.”

18 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 24 This is a theme in several essays in this volume, including those by Peter Struck and Gregory Matthew S. Crane. Santirocco 25 The illustrations on the two inside covers of this issue of Dædalus exemplify, from the visual arts, precisely this sort of reception. The image on the inside front cover, The Siren’s Song (1977), is from Romare Bearden’s “Odyssey Series,” collages and watercolors that use Homer’s epic about a hero’s torturous homecoming to reflect on the African-American experience of displacement and journey, from the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Great Migration. On the inside back cover, Picasso’s late work, Rape of the Sabine Women (1963), was inspired by the Cu- ban missile crisis and uses the violent Roman foundation myth to express, in the tradition of Guernica, the brutality of war in terms of the horrors it visits upon women and children. 26 See Matthew S. Santirocco, Nicholas Lemann, Kevin Guthrie, and Daphne Koller, “The Evolv- ing Role of Technology in Higher Education,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences lxix (2) (Winter 2016): 31–41. 27 I am grateful to the American Academy’s Committee on Studies and Publications, and to Les- lie Berlowitz, for very helpful suggestions on the shape and content of this issue; to Phyllis Bendell and her colleagues at the Academy, Nora Khan and Peter Walton, for the profession- alism and care with which they shepherded this issue, and its guest editor, through the publication process; to the Corporation of Yaddo for the residency that enabled me to reflect and write; to the contributors to this issue for numerous stimulating conversations; to Kevin Da- vis, for advice and assistance on editorial and technical matters; and to David Konstan, who read and improved my introduction and whose own wide-ranging and forward-looking scholarship has been an inspiration to me, and many others working in this field.

145 (2) Spring 2016 19 Tragedy in the Crosshairs of the Present

Brooke Holmes

Abstract: A number of developments in the study of Greek literature over the past few decades have broken down boundaries of canon and genre, opening up a wide range of texts once deemed degenerate or unavailable to literary analysis, expanding the networks within which literary texts are interpreted, and bringing renewed attention to the reception of ancient texts in later periods up to the present. The rise of reception studies, in particular, raises new questions about how our own position within specific present moments not only imposes constraints on the interpretation of ancient texts but also enables it. In this essay, I survey these developments using Greek tragedy, the most canonical of genres, as a case study. I argue that we need to develop strategies of interpretation more attuned to resonances between contemporary quandaries and our extant tragedies while remaining committed to forms of social and historical difference. I pay particular attention to the problems of agency that tragedy raises at the juncture of the human and the nonhuman worlds.

The category of “Greek literature” has been nothing if not contestable for some decades now. The challenges have come largely from a cluster of approaches usually referred to as “cultural poetics” or “cultural history,” whose driving assumption is that determining the meaning of any ancient text requires that we embed it within a larger network of power and a broader field of signs (Athenian democracy, for example, or archaic song culture, or pan-Hellenic politics). The impact of cultural poetics has been enormous. As canonical “literary” texts BROOKE HOLMES is Professor of have been released into a wider cultural stream, Classics in the Department of Clas- once-marginal texts have become newly privileged sics at Princeton University. She objects of attention. The study of texts produced is the author of The Symptom and after the fall of classical Athens in Ptolemaic Al- the Subject: The Emergence of the Phys- exandria and under the Roman Empire, texts long ical Body in Ancient Greece (2010) dismissed as imitative and degenerate, has been and Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy (2012). She is currently at work on booming since the mid-1990s. Decades of ground- her next book, The Tissue of the breaking work on gender and sexuality have also World: Sympathy and the Nature of helped to broaden the corpus of texts, encouraging Nature in Greco-Roman Antiquity. a shift of attention toward medical and other tech-

20 nical texts, in particular. Alongside these oppose. Historicism has its limits. For bet- Brooke developments we have witnessed the rap- ter or for worse, “the Greeks” still haunt Holmes id ascent of a subfield usually called “re- the Western imagination, as they have for ception studies,” roughly the study of clas- millennia. Though we did not need recep- sical antiquity in post-antique societies and tion studies to tell us that, a flood of recent the history of classical scholarship. The work has driven the point home. And like field of Greek literature, in short, has been the humanities more generally, classics is blown open. Its boundaries–generic, geo- always facing challenges to its relevance. graphical, chronological–are no longer It is easy enough to let the sheer impact easily locatable. of “the Greeks” or “the ancients” on West- Yet if these trends have worked togeth- ern civilization legitimate by default the er to transform what gets studied under study of whatever fits under the big tent the heading of Greek literature, they also of Greek literature. The strategy is at some pull in different directions. The potential level unavoidable under current condi- for tension is most evident in the relation- tions. But I do worry that it feeds off a cer- ship between approaches that locate texts tain defensiveness about the field in an age in their social and cultural contexts and of budget cuts and stem-envy, and I wor- those that look to their many and varied ry even more that it falls back uncritically afterlives. One strategy tries to figure out on standard classicizing presumptions of what the texts meant in their immediate value. The harder task is a serious reckon- contexts; the other looks to a series of en- ing with the legacies of classicism and anti counters in a range of places and times, classicism as the conditions under which including some close to home. Reception anyone comes to the Greeks as if they do studies is often practiced with a primarily and should matter. This reckoning would historicist outlook. But reception studies start by taking up the inherited category of by nature, tracking as it does antiquity’s “Greek literature” and its canon not only long tail, raises questions about the trans as a historical construct but also as the dy- historical value of ancient texts and the namic terrain for the staging of arguments meaning of these texts today. These kinds about the value of ancient Greek texts and of questions can be tough for classicists. demands that we attend to them. In the rest Indeed, anxieties about presentism are of this essay, I flesh out these more general virtually constitutive of modern classical arguments by looking at the specific case scholarship, founded as the model science of that most canonical of genres, Greek in the nineteenth century on techniques tragedy. for accessing the historical truth of the past and reconstituting its texts.1 In the twen- There may be no other genre in which tieth century, fascist appropriations of an the tensions I have just sketched are so evi- idealized antiquity came to haunt uses of dent, precisely because of tragedy’s tena- the classical past for present-day ends. Tri- cious prestige value. Tragedy already ex- umphalist classicism has been turned on uded power and status during its efflores- its head by a political tide that has been in cence in fifth-centurybce Athens. But from ascendancy since the late 1960s, and out of our vantage point, the genre’s power is un- which the best strands of cultural poetics thinkable without its reimagination as the have emerged. Yet while the conservative philosophy of the tragic most closely as- attempt to turn back that tide is undoubt- sociated with the German idealists in the edly misguided, forms of anticlassicism al- late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen- ways risk being constrained by what they tury. Reborn in a philosophical mode and

145 (2) Spring 2016 21 Tragedy buoyed by highly influential readings of a meaning has produced a renewed interest in the handful of plays (Antigone, The Bacchae, Oe- in the plays’ formal elements, without jet- Crosshairs of the dipus Tyrannus) by Hegel, Nietzsche, and tisoning the hope of observing tragedy as Present Freud, tragedy has remained central to a thoroughly political genre in its original twentieth- and twenty-first-century conti habitat.2 Even more energy has been chan- nental philosophy, political theory, psycho- neled into approaching tragedy via recep- analysis, feminism, and literary theory, tion studies. Greek tragedy has given rise to while also enjoying a robust performance a substantial and thriving subfield devoted tradition. There is arguably no tragedy in to the study of reperformance and adapta- modernity without a philosophy of the tion not only in all corners of the modern tragic. world but in antiquity as well. Although Unsurprisingly, in light of my remarks less attention has been paid, at least under above about historicist trends in the field, the auspices of reception studies, to phil- the modern legacy of the tragic has been osophical constructions of the tragic, the a problem for scholars of Greek tragedy past couple years have welcomed a trio of over the past four decades. Much effort smart new books published by classicists has gone into making sense of what trag- on the history of tragedy and the tragic in edy meant not as an idea but as a genre in continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, the context of fifth-century Athenian pol- and political theory.3 The idealist tradition itics, culture, and performance traditions. is fast becoming less of a threat and more Most scholars would in fact deny that an object of study in its own right within anything like a “tragic” outlook on life or the disciplinary parameters of classics, pa- worldview is embodied by tragedy in its rameters already expanded by reception’s prime, cordoning off Aristotle as well as generous outlook on the temporal and geo- Hegel from the phenomenon of lived per- graphical scope of Greek tragedy itself. formance. The commitment to a histori- It will not escape readers that reception cist program can be explained not only by studies thus described looks like histori- the discipline’s own formation as a “sci- cism by other means. They will not be mis- ence of antiquity” (Altertumswissenschaft), taken. Rather than being trained on the which I mentioned above, but also by the fifth century, the historian’s gaze is now fo- wide-ranging influence of the French Hel- cused on key moments in the nineteenth lenist Jean-Pierre Vernant, who critiqued or the twentieth. The twist is that, taken to the universalizing claims of psychoanal- its logical outcome, the work of historiciz- ysis and structuralism in order to situate ing interpretation–indeed, of historiciz- Greek tragedy more firmly within the co- ing the very dominance of historicism in ordinates of democratic Athens. In this recent waves of scholarship on tragedy– critical climate, the pressures of moderni- poses with renewed urgency the question ty’s impassioned appropriation of tragedy of what it means to read, stage, or watch have been seen as amplifying the pressures Greek tragedy now. The methodological of the present more broadly construed. If implications of reception studies can be we are going to rescue Greek tragedy from spun out in at least two ways. the tragic, the thinking goes, we need to On the one hand, we can frame histor- cut through the interference. ical self-consciousness as a necessary at- But pendulums swing. Approaches that tempt to know thyself. As such, it entails were once dynamic ossify. The turn away becoming aware of the spectral presence of from the democratic context of our extant past readings, judgments, and critical tools tragedies understood as the key to their that inform your own interpretations. The

22 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences process is necessarily aporetic or, to put it value of “the classical” is at once obvious Brooke more constructively, recursive. You have to and guaranteed by centuries of prior val- Holmes stop historicizing at some point and trust idation. whatever tools you have (philology, say, But this reflective mode also means not or critical theory) to interpret what a text rejecting out of hand the logic of classici- means. Nevertheless, by trying to under- zation in order to insist on the otherness of stand why we ask the questions we do of a the Greeks and the particularity of their text and perhaps why we find the answers world. Although the latter approach may we do, we free ourselves up to ask differ- seem to sidestep questions of value or to ent questions and arrive at unexpected an- locate value in cultural difference alone, swers. Such an outcome, anyways, is the the situation is more complex. For an at- hope of any method that aspires to what tachment to the strangeness and the dis- Michel Foucault called “genealogy.” tance of the Greeks shapes the contours of On the other hand, the work of engag- classical antiquity in the modern period as ing the rich tradition of modern and con- much as figures of intimacy and continuity temporary readings of tragedy can be seen do. The case of tragedy is exemplary here as license and inspiration for strategies of insofar as one of the fundamental ques- interpretation that invest tragedy with the tions posed by philosophies of the tragic is power to shed light on the human condi- whether ancient tragedy is even still possi- tion, or some historically inflected version ble in the modern world. We can speculate, of it (modern, postmodern, post-postmod- then, that classicists are attached to his- ern). An approach of this kind hardly pre- toricizing antiquity not just because they cludes critical self-awareness of one’s place objectively recognize a rupture between in an interpretive tradition. It may actually past and present. The recognition of rup- be a precondition of enabling Greek trag- ture, rather, is a precondition of the opera- edy to tell us something we do not already tion to heal rupture by making the ancients know. But this second approach frames the available to the present in their difference, a payoff of historical self-consciousness dif- desire often motivated by the implicit be- ferently. The reader’s larger commitments lief that antiquity is no ordinary anthropo- and interests within the present function logical other, but occupies a privileged po- not so much as a distorting lens to be some- sition as a distant parent or lost model. In how corrected; rather, they are now seen its reparative mode, historicism comes full as the very condition of saying something circle to meet forms of universalism that meaningful about ancient tragedy, precise- see ancient tragedy as valuable because it ly because they shape a conviction that an- taps into timeless truths–in other words, tiquity matters to us at all. the ancients are available to the present in The shift marked by the second perspec- their sameness–without always being ex- tive may seem minor. But it has significant plicit about its own logic of value. implications for how classicists negoti- I am suggesting, then, that classical val- ate their relationship to the present more ue is still too often assumed as an inher- generally. For it asks them to reflect more itance easily mistaken for an elite birth- openly on–and thereby take responsi- right. In challenges to conventional classi- bility for–the values that motivate their cism, value is either suppressed or defined readings and the worlds that they hope via an ethics of alterity broadly under- these readings will sustain or help to cre- stood. Neither option feels adequate to ate. Taking responsibility in this sense the complexity of contemporary encoun- means refusing the default mode that the ters with tragedy. What if instead Greek

145 (2) Spring 2016 23 Tragedy tragedy were actively imagined as an ob- respect. The extant plays’ speeds and in the ject of what we might call, after the Sto- rhythms are structured by the eruption Crosshairs of the ics, elective sympathy? The aim of chang- and modulation of pain. This highly for- Present ing our terms would be to force a greater mal and complex scripting of tragic suffer- recognition of the ways in which tragedy ing is largely unfamiliar to contemporary provokes a sense, at once historically con- American and Western European culture, ditioned and deeply embodied, of the ten- making it one of the least assimilable as- sions involved in being human (being pects of the genre for audiences and readers mortal, being assigned a gender, being in (and a perennial challenge for performers). a family, being in a city, being embedded This is not to say that performances of in a field of nonhuman powers) while, in Greek tragedy cannot be raw and intense. its impossible strangeness, resisting ap- But its very unrelenting intensity, together propriation. The language of elective sym- with the absence of contemporary reference pathy invites us to think harder about how points for its form, can obscure the fine- sameness and difference work together in grained workings of the law that Aeschylus specific ratios to make Greek tragedy mat- calls “the learning through suffering.” ter to us now, where both “us” and “now” Pain in Greek tragedy always demands refer to diverse communities living out the work of making sense. This is true de- temporalities irreducible to the present spite the fact that sense-making always alone. It offers a way of seeing modernity’s falls short, leaving a remainder of senseless philosophies of the tragic as constitutive of harm that, depending on your theories or the vocabularies we use to locate ourselves your experience of the genre’s therapeu- in relationship to Greek tragedy without tic effects, may or may not be metabolized determining the sense that we make of through spectatorship itself. Like other re- the texts. mainders, the kernel of senseless harm tes- With the term elective sympathy, then, tifies to the failure of a peculiarly human I am trying to foreground our agency in capacity to understand and, through un- establishing the terms of our investment derstanding, to master the unknown. It in tragedy alongside the power that these testifies, too, to the very doggedness of the texts still exercise over us. Agency, on this drive toward epistemic mastery. The fa- account, is not radical freedom, whatev- mous “Ode to Man” in Sophocles’s Antigone er that means. It is, rather, the thoughtful names this kernel “death.” Many of the sur- and creative negotiation of legacies an- viving tragedies suggest there are even cient and modern, in the interest of living worse things that can happen to you. more fully in this world by not being ful- There are a range of different ways that ly of this world. Under these conditions, characters in a given play come to knowl- what might be the claims of Greek trage- edge or the limits of knowledge in the face dy on our attention now? of pain, their own and that of others. These manifold ways of knowing explain In Greek tragedy, not being fully of the a good deal of the formal complexity of world in which one finds oneself most tragedy (variations of meter and syntax; commonly leads to living it more fully changes from solo speech to choral song to through pain. The majority of surviving variants of dialogue, including the rapid- plays are about the suffering of outsized fire back-and-forth called “stichomythia”; human beings: trauma, violence, carnage, matched odes; and the combative quasi- grief. Fragments from others suggest that legal speeches of the contest or “agon”). the texts we have are not unusual in this We sometimes see characters in the grip

24 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences of intense pain: consider Heracles writh- A symptom requires an interpretation of Brooke ing under a cloak doused with flesh-eat- what is happening, what will happen, and Holmes ing poison at the end of the Trachiniae or who or what is causing it. Those who wit- Philoctetes being seized by spasms of ag- ness or experience it usually want to know, ony when his festering snakebite flares in particular, which god is responsible. up in Sophocles’s Philoctetes. Sometimes The recourse to the gods as explanatory we see them coming to know the terri- principles, however, is never clear-cut. Even ble things they have done in a state of if you know which god is behind the suffer- madness (Heracles and Ajax in the epon- ing, you need to know why he or she is an- ymous plays by Euripides and Sophocles, gry. At times in Euripides, characters won- respectively, or Agave at the end of The der in desperation what kind of creatures Bacchae). We see other characters trying would dream up such horrors. Moreover, to figure out why someone is suffering the very fact that gods wreak havoc in and or else situating a fresh trauma within an through human beings always implicates intergenerational narrative of misfortune the vehicles of divine and daemonic pow- (Euripides’s Hippolytus and Orestes in Or- er in the harm that they and others suf- estes; Prometheus in the Prometheus Bound, fer. Even the case of the red-handed killer probably written by Aeschylus). The role turns out to be murky. When Clytemnes- of explaining suffering is often taken up by tra stands at last over the bodies of Agam- the chorus, who spend a lot of time cycling emnon and Cassandra, after many scenes through myths like a lawyer “searching of subterfuge, she boldly claims the mur- for a precedent,” as Anne Carson’s chor- ders as her own acts. But she also claims to us puts it in Antigonick.4 Sometimes gods be an avenging daemon. A corpse, too, can show up ex machina to give an explanation thus be a tragic symptom. It, too, marks in- whose very neatness magnifies the gulf controvertible evidence of damage to hu- between the arid logic of immortals and man life together with an impetus to make the lived experience of mortals (that gulf sense that always overshoots the mark (too is one of the great challenges of staging the many agents: god, human, ancestral) and Medea for modern audiences). always falls short (no account can translate The intimate relationship between trag- pain completely into meaning). ic suffering and the work of making sense Tragedy is about suffering, then, but it can be clarified by thinking about the sort is also, over and again, about the mysteries of violence tragedy shows. It is a generic and the fallout of agency, understood as convention that direct, human-on-human the ambiguous power to act in the world violence happens offstage and gets report- as well as the ambiguous openness to the ed in speech, typically by messengers. What world that under extraordinary circum- we see onstage is god-on-human violence: stances impels one to act in ways that are characters struck by diseases, especially difficult to own. The standard definition madness, that manifest themselves via of hamartia as “fatal flaw” fails to get at the symptoms, or running into disaster (atē) force and the complexity of what is going with a recklessness that provokes more on here. It is too complacent about the sober observers to diagnose the interfer- boundaries of the individual to whom the ence of daemonic agents. But who can be flaw is thought to belong. It is too caught sure? What distinguishes god-on-human up in Christian notions of original sin, violence is the open-ended status of a with its attendant certainty about guilt. It symptom when compared, say, to a corpse is just too blunt an instrument. It can be whose murderer accompanies it onstage. downright maddening to watch scholars

145 (2) Spring 2016 25 Tragedy argue about whether Oedipus in Soph- are not done with tragic agency. Not even in the ocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus is guilty or in- close. Crosshairs of the nocent of killing his father and sleeping What tragedy does not do is provide easy Present with his mother. But there is also a risk answers to the darkest puzzles of agency. of discounting the problem of agency as But its refusal to do so does not mean it a belated philosophical imposition, at the necessarily yields what Bonnie Honig has hands of either Aristotle or the German recently diagnosed as “mortalist human- idealists. The problem of agency matters ism,” that is, a quiescent politics bred out a lot in the tragedies themselves. of the indulgence of lament and the posit- It is of course the case that the conver- ing of a universal community stitched to- gence of philosophy and politics makes gether by finitude.5 Rather, Greek tragedy the question of agency newly urgent in carves out spaces for dwelling with vulner- Germany at the end of the eighteenth cen- ability and damage via a rich spectrum of tury. But it is precisely by recognizing the epistemic and emotional modalities. We creative force of the idealists’ urgency that need aesthetic and communal spaces to we can be more strategic about drawing work through the suffering we undergo out the resonances of tragic agency in the and witness that cannot be made sense of early twenty-first century. For once again by the poles of guilt and innocence alone– philosophy and politics are converging on the moral, ethical, political, and emotional the conundrum of agency, and in many complexity that surrounds damage to hu- spaces at once. The examples can be mul- man life. Rather than inducing paralysis, tiplied: thinking about and through the the experience of tragedy may condition scope, limits, and uneven distribution of more discerning, nimble, and compas- human agency on scales both cosmic and sionate forms of thought and action in the local in the era of the Anthropocene; the world beyond its boundaries. The possibil- implications of research in cognitive sci- ity that it might do so does not exhaust its ence and medicine for taxonomies of value. But nor can such potenial be written mind, intention, and responsibility; con- off as instrumentalization. cerns about the capacity of courts to do the In contemporary American culture, we political and emotional work of defining have a deep and desperate need not to see harm and blame and assigning damag- suffering: to fix it with technology or laws, es; the rapid growth of technological ex- to ignore it or blame it on someone else. pansions of agency that magnify the pow- Tragedy does not replace medicine or law er to harm and the power to help, there- or politics. But it does have the capacity to by shifting our thinking about mortality flesh out the human sciences by transpos- and our control over life; the tenacity of ing them into worlds where their mech- forces of oppression that continue to work anisms get jammed. Its provocation is to through individuals and communities and ask whether and how suffering itself can institutions with devastating consequenc- be creative. If tragedy seen in these terms es; the ever-fuzzier boundary between hu- bears the residues of the idealist tradition, man and nonhuman actants in the various idealism’s traces bear witness to the urgen- new materialisms and the causal traffic be- cy and power of its readings of the texts tween human and nonhuman communi- themselves. We court narcissism in believ- ties and networks; wars that inflict vio- ing that sophisticated problems of subjects lence by drone but still send home soldiers and objects, of necessity and what is “up damaged by the awful intimacy of com- to us,” of the human and nonhuman are bat. The list goes on. Suffice to say that we uniquely modern. I want to close by look-

26 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences ing very briefly at three versions of these dition of Oedipus’s life, what defines it as Brooke problems, loosely allied with law, medi- his own even as he disclaims ownership Holmes cine, and politics, as endemic to the histor- of the actions that create it. His hands are ical moment of tragedy. My aim in doing not stained and yet without the stain (mi- so, in an essay ostensibly about the “now,” asma)–and the ongoing work of making is to enlarge the autonomy of tragedy as sense of the stain–he does not exist. The the condition of its viability in this present. law is little help here. What about medicine? A number of Sophocles’s Oedipus is a cipher from the scholars have noticed a spike in “medical” start. In the Oedipus at Colonus (performed vocabulary and depictions of disease in approximately two decades after the Oedi- tragedy toward the end of the fifth century. pus Tyrannus), Sophocles scripts two modes These developments are usually chalked of making sense of what has happened to up to a vague “realism” and sometimes Oedipus that meet but do not merge. When secularization, particularly in Euripides. Oedipus, blind and nearing the end of his I have elsewhere argued that they can be life, first has his infamous name pried out more productively understood as part of of him by the chorus of elderly Colonians, the larger story about tragic agency. More he slips into a rhetorically polished speech specifically, they stand at the heart of new of self-defense. I am a man, he says, whose ways of thinking about human nature, vul- deeds were suffered more than acted, who nerability, and agency stimulated by the went unknowingly along the path he trav- emergence of a concept of the physical eled.6 Midway through the play, he revisits body under the aegis of naturalizing medi- this language of ignorance and blameless- cine and the larger “inquiry into nature.”9 ness in a blistering rebuke to Creon, who What makes these developments so pow- has stirred up old slurs to goad Oedipus’s erful for tragedy is the fact that the open- newfound protectors into expelling him ended structure of the symptom allows from their city.7 the eruption of pain and violence to sus- Oedipus here is very much the master tain different kinds of narratives of cause, of the legal vocabularies that had been re- some attached to gods, others to generic fined over the course of the fifth century. or named diseases. In the last decades of The appropriation of legal vocabulary by the fifth century, Greek tragedy is working the tragedians is the main reason why Ver- out the implications of different kinds of nant put so much emphasis on the evolu- stories that can be attached to the symp- tion of legal thought as a condition for the tom. By emphasizing gods, tragedy fig- historical development of Athenian trag- ures the human being as a vehicle of dae- edy, which he located at the juncture of monic power, as we saw above. This figu- older religious paradigms of blame and ration is always problematic. But the spike punishment and fifth-century legal insti- in the language of disease, together with tutions.8 But the mode of the law-court in- an increased use of medical language and teracts with others. Once the chorus has imagery, radically expands the space ac- agreed to let Oedipus wait for their king corded to the human as an incubator of Theseus, they return to the story of his life, harm to self and others in accordance with now told through song and punctuated by the contemporary conceptualization of the lament. Oedipus does not give up the lan- corporeal interior as the space of disease guage of blindness and innocence here. and the origin of the symptom. The body But as another kind of sense-making surg- on this model comes to figure the strange- es up around it, suffering becomes the con- ness of what is both not self–for what is

145 (2) Spring 2016 27 Tragedy new about the physical body and its na- encompass a broad range of relations be- in the ture is its status as an object–and con- tween people: kin, armies, slaves, and oth- Crosshairs of the stitutive of self. It thereby enlarges and er subject populations (who are favored Present sharpens tragedy’s conceptual resources members of the chorus). for problematizing agency. Euripides’s Or- The web of kin relations, in particular, estes maps a very different world by turn- is notoriously sticky in Greek tragedy. The ing the Furies, who appear onstage in the legacy of the family can be seen to enable final play of Aeschylus’sOresteia , into the forms of agency. Antigone, in Sophocles’s unseen hallucinations of an Orestes now eponymous play, demands that Ismene described with the language of disease as prove that she is the offspring of noble par- a man capable of murder without divine ents by assisting in the illicit burial of their sanction. The disease motifs of the same renegade brother Polyneices. More often, playwright’s Hippolytus magnify the ethi- though, what is transmitted from one gen- cal conundrum of Phaedra’s desire. The eration is the curse (as Antigone herself stakes of disease-language often go unrec- suggests at other moments in the play), ognized by scholars of tragedy. But as we which ensnares later generations in an- wade deeper and deeper into the complex- cestral crimes and misfortunes. In Aeschy- ities of subjectivities formed through bio- lus’s Oresteia, the city and its law-courts politics and biotechnology, perhaps we appear to arrest the potentially intermina- are ourselves at a historical moment to ap- ble chain of harm. But by the time we get preciate more fully the shock of the phys to the Orestes, Euripides’s wildly perverse ical body as a concept, one that upends sequel staged in the last decade of the fifth what it means to be a subject and an agent century, the city no longer appears as a in ways as powerful as the democratic insti- ready savior. tutionalization of the law. From this van- The curse binds one generation to anoth- tage point, the drama of the symptom and er, but it also entangles humans in a world the medicalization of tragic agency acquire of nonhuman judges and avengers. Non- new depths. human agents sometimes resolve into clear The trust we place in medicine and law forms, such as the Erinyes of the Orest- to deal with questions of harm and blame es myth or Olympian gods. But deified can make tragic agency especially power- force also spreads more diffusely in our ful and disturbing. Our own attachment extant tragedies to animate and disrupt to the idea of the individual, however, is what we would call the natural world, sometimes said to distort the way we in- perhaps most memorably in the Bacchae, terpret ancient tragedy. The chorus, on with its flows of milk, its uncannily tame this line, is the perennial problem of mo- animals, the eerie quiet of the forest be- dernity. There is a risk here of overcor- fore Pentheus is destroyed. In so doing, recting a fixation on the isolated hero and intensities of power seem to become un- losing sight of the shifting coordinates– moored from the gods’ intentions and legal and medical but also political–for the narratives they support. The circula- imagining the tragic subject in the fifth tion of power through the natural world century. But if we remember that part of can also give rise to heterodox forms of the problem of tragic agency has to do with human and nonhuman community (as in boundaries, then it becomes clear that the Philoctetes). The fluid movement of pow- tragedy is also a site for thinking about the er thus works against the arrest of cause re- distribution of agency within networks quired for responsibility and explanation that extend widely over space and time and at the level of not only humans but also

28 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences nonhumans. The inscrutability of a cos- not offer to fix a broken world. Instead it Brooke mos unpredictably implicated in what demands that we attend to the complexity Holmes we do and suffer and marked by ancestral of embodied and earthbound life through damage signals another facet of Greek attempts to make sense of suffering and tragedy newly visible in light of our pres- its causes. In an age of quick fixes, this is ent ecological predicament. Tragedy does a lot. endnotes 1 On philology as a model science, see Lorraine Daston and Glenn W. Most, “History of Sci- ence and History of Philologies,” Isis 106 (2) (2015): 378–390. 2 See, for example, Simon Goldhill, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Victoria Wohl, Euripides and the Politics of Form (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015). 3 Joshua Billings, The Genealogy of the Tragic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014); Miriam Leonard, Tragic Modernities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015); and Joshua Billings and Miriam Leonard, Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2015). This is not entirely new ground for classicists; for example, see M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); M. S. Silk, ed., Tragedy and the Tragic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and James I. Porter, The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on The Birth of Tragedy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). 4 Anne Carson, Antigonick (Sophokles) (New York: New Directions, 2012). 5 Bonnie Honig, Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 6 Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus 258–291. 7 Ibid. 960–1013. 8 See Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 25–28. 9 Brooke Holmes, “Euripides’ Heracles in the Flesh,” Classical Antiquity 28 (2) (2008): 231–281; and Brooke Holmes, The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 228–274.

145 (2) Spring 2016 29 Roman Literature: Translation, Metaphor & Empire

Shadi Bartsch

Abstract: The Romans understood that translation entails transformation. The Roman term “translatio” stood not only literally for a carrying-across (as by boat) of material from one country to another, but also (metaphorically) for both linguistic translation and metaphorical transformation. These shared usages provide a lens on Roman anxieties about their relationship to Greece, from which they both transferred and translated a literature to call their own. Despite the problematic association of the Greeks with pleasure, rhetoric, and poetic language, the Roman elite argued for the possibility of translation and transformation of Greek texts into a distinctly Roman and authoritative mode of expression. Cicero’s hope was that eventually translated Latin texts would replace the Greek originals altogether. In the end, however, the Romans seem to have felt that effeminacy had the last laugh.

Recent work on Roman literature has turned to the act of translation as a fundamental and defining feature of the Roman literary corpus. The focus on translation is not new, per se; both the Romans and the scholars who have written about them acknowledge that Roman literature originated in the appropriation and translation of Greek texts. Roman literature was thus already “secondary,” “belated,” “imitative,” even as the Romans mused on the paradox SHADI BARTSCH is the Helen A. of taking to their collective bosom the literature of a Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics and the Pro- conquered empire. What is novel about the current gram in Gender Studies at the Uni- approach is the understanding that Roman discourse versity of Chicago. She is the au- on the origins of their literature entailed a compli- thor of (inter alia) Persius: A Study cated ideological battle fraught with implications for in Food, Philosophy, and the Figural their social, cultural, and political thought. Recent (2015) and The Mirror of the Self: Sex scholarship has focused, inter alia, on literary produc- uality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in tion as a tool for elite self-definition; on the creative the Early Roman Empire (2006). She is also the editor of The Cambridge nature of what the Romans loosely called “transla- Companion to Seneca (with Alessan tion”; on Roman epigraphy and how Greek source- 1 dro Schiesaro, 2015) and Seneca and texts are treated in Roman inscriptions. What is al- the Self (with David Wray, 2009). ready clear is that the notions of “imitation,” “transla-

30 tion,” and “transmittal” that were so basic metaphor and translatio as translation Shadi to the old denigration of Roman literature sheds light on the connections between Bartsch actually involved creative processes that metaphor, translation, and Roman anxi- laid down a challenge to their source-texts, eties about the influence of a subject em- provided grounds for competitive claims pire: the Greeks.6 within Roman culture, and ultimately fed The Romans lacked an indigenous liter- into a broad nexus of concerns about for- ary and philosophical tradition, and self- eign influence, native character, and the consciously inherited the Greek tradition dangers of empire. to fill the void. Their direct contact with In this essay, I offer a specific case study Greek learning through the conquest and of one feature of Roman translation that annexation of the Greek mainland in the has remained unexplored in the flourish- second century bce provided the condi- ing of translation studies. This is the curi- tions in which translatio, the noun mean ous overlap of the Roman terminology for ing “carrying across,” came to hold anoth translation with the Roman terminology er extended meaning: that of translating. for metaphor.2 While we moderns under- From the conquered territories, the Ro- stand that to translate is always to trans- mans acquired not only booty, but also form, our lexicon does not trace the two Greek texts; the latter were “carried processes back to identical literal mean- across” from abroad and also “translated” ings with different figural extensions. In from Greek into Latin, hence solving the Latin, however, to translate is to “turn” poverty of native Roman literature, which one text into another or to “transfer” a the Romans themselves figured as a lack text from one language to another (ver- (inopia) in their culture.7 Translation and tere, transferre; the past participle transla- the acquisition of Greek volumes were tum). At the same time, to “turn” a phrase thus mutually linked; Terence, for exam or “transfer” a term also means to create ple, describes himself as “transferring” ma a metaphor.3 In other words, both trans- terials from Menander’s plays, and we lation and metaphor developed from the know that he physically traveled to Greece basic language of turning, changing, or to fetch them.8 All this is unsurprising, but transferring. Of course, the Romans un the fact that ancient discussions of met derstood that signifiers romf one language aphor likewise relied on the vocabulary cannot be mapped onto exactly the same of lack, substitution, and transferal from meaning in another, and that translation a foreign venue provides a striking parallel thus involved a transformation of sorts.4 that demands more explanation.9 The an- But unlike contemporary theorists who cients generally took a substitution view posit that a translation is itself a meta- of metaphor (the replacement of one phorical rendition of an original,5 the lit- word by another),10 defining the trope as erary and rhetorical writers of the ancient an “ornament” that provides immediacy, world never compared translation and clarity, and a foreign quality.11 Cicero in- metaphor–never even put them side by structs speakers to use metaphor “via si- side–as if there was a deep gulf between militude” when a proper word is lacking the ways they could be understood. This (inopia, again) or when they can introduce was the case even though (as I demon- sweetness (suavitas), the latter being a fun- strate below) the very metaphors they used damental feature of the trope and one rea- to talk about metaphor and translation son why its effect on the reader is pleasur- were largely the same. In the end, this able.12 As we know, the literal meaning of shared Roman vocabulary of translatio as the verb transferre is “to carry across,” and

145 (2) Spring 2016 31 Roman in Greek and Latin, metaphor is viewed which Vergil took his model spoke more Literature: as dependent on the foreign quality of the boldly of “deeds of love,” and a bed (Ver- Translation, Metaphor “new” term. But the Roman treatises em- gil Aeneid 8.404–406). Vergil, then, is be- & Empire phasize geographical and spatial charac- ing praised for describing a sex-act in very teristics in their definitions, as if meta- oblique (read: “pure and honorable”) lan- phors were foreign texts. Where Aristotle guage. But does Gellius mean that Vergil’s speaks in terms of a transfer between ge- polite “embrace” is a metaphor for sex, or nus and species (Aristotle Poetics 1457b), a translation of Homer’s passage? All we for Cicero, metaphor’s vehicle is seen can discern is that it is a translatio, a trans- as specifically fetched or imported from feral, from the too-frank original.16 This a distant place to carry out a local act of and similar passages from Gellius are al- signification.13 Thus, he notes, “Everyone ready revelatory in their combination of takes more delight in carried-over [trans- a number of considerations: the notion of latis] and foreign [alienis] words than in transformation, the use of metaphor to the proper ones that belong to them” (Ci- suggest modesty, and the competition be- cero De Oratore 3.39.159), and offers as tween Roman and Greek versions (Vergil one explanation that “it’s a mark of tal- improving on Homer, or not). As Vergil’s ent to skip over what is at your feet and to mastery in translation is praised, so is his seize foreign words sought at a great dis- correct use of metaphor.17 tance” (3.40.169).14 With the same idea in In fact, modesty played a role in the mind, he cautions elsewhere that one’s evaluation of both successful translations source shouldn’t be too far away (46.163)– and successful metaphors. Cicero, we saw and that the metaphorical vehicle should above, calls for metaphor to be modest, to seem to have immigrated to, but not in- seem invited into the text rather than to vaded, its new home (Cicero Brutus 274).15 have forced its way in. The author of the The first-century philosopher and rheto- Rhetorica ad Herennium also wants met- rician Seneca sees the reader as doing the aphor to be modest, lest it seem to have traveling instead: metaphor, on which we “rashly and libidinously” (!) run across to lean like a pair of crutches, “brings us to a dissimilar term (Rhetorica ad Herennium the literal spot” where we can see what we 4.34).18 Such “libidinous” (uncontrolled or need to (Seneca Epistles 59.6). In either case, far-fetched) metaphors were tied to literally there is some ground that has to be crossed. libidinous practices in their creators and Translation and metaphor shared other were roundly criticized. Seneca condemns basic features. Both, for example, were dis- eras in which metaphors were used “im- cussed in terms of the improvements they modestly” (Seneca Epistles 114.1) and then could bring to a given sentence or passag e. goes on to characterize the frequent or un- Aulus Gellius, the second-century Latin usual use of metaphor in terms of excessive grammarian, notes that Vergil won praise luxury and deviant sexuality: it springs for translating a risqué passage in Homer from the pen of writers that are “effemi- into tamer Latin; as Gellius puts it, us- nate,” marked by mollitia (softness), full ing “a modest translatio of words, even as of license (114.3–4). Such were Maece- [Vergil] showed and made clear [the orig- nas and others like him, who wore color- inal text], he covered it. He used pure and ful cloaks or transparent togas and who honorable words.” Gellius is referring to were not considered by Seneca “manly Vergil’s lines in the Aeneid that describe men” in the other realms of life as well.19 Jupiter seeking the “desired embrace” of What is a libidinous metaphor, or a lux Juno’s arms; the Homeric passage from urious one? The parallels in Roman treat-

32 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences ments of translation help us understand overcome and made Roman.24 When Ver- Shadi Greek literature–like the culture in which gil famously contrasted Greek statuary Bartsch it was embedded–posed the same per- and oratory to the Roman “art” of war- ceived threats of excess sweetness and fare, the divide between these national effeminacy. Translators into Latin were qualities was as much prescriptive as de- well aware of the need to make it appro- scriptive: the Romans wanted to contrast priate for the sturdily no-nonsense Ro- themselves to the conquered Greeks in mans, as they thought of themselves. In- this particular way. But lest we think met- deed, Valerius Maximus, the great Ro- aphor and translation can be lumped to- man collector of edifying moral stories, gether in Roman thought as simple cas- characterizes the Greek language itself as es of the incorporation of “pleasant but “sweet” (Maximus Nine Books of Memo- risky things from afar,” we should look to rable Deeds and Sayings 2.2.2).20 As a cor- their perceived differences to see why the relate, we find that translators are praised Romans declined to lump them together for modifying or eliminating what is ei- –to see, that is, how one process was per- ther too sexual or pleasurable in the orig- ceived as safe for the Roman character, inal; so, for example, Gellius praises Ver- while the other remained fraught. gil, again, for “prudently omitting what To start with, the connotations of ef was very sweet in the Greek” when trans- feminacy and excess with which the Ro- lating Theocritus.21 An extreme expres- mans tarred the Greeks generally did not sion of this xenophobia comes courte- attach to Greek literature in translation. sy of Cato the Elder, who warned his son If questions of modesty, self-control, and not to learn Greek literature too deeply: it excess were sources of concern for those would corrupt everything Roman (Greek writing prescriptions for the use of met- doctors were banned from his home, too) aphor, translation, on the other hand, (Pliny the Elder Natural History 29.7.14). was almost always figured as a successful- And if too much metaphor ran the risk of ly accomplished exercise of control and effeminizing the author, all of Greek cul- mastery over a foreign text, an operation ture represented the dangers of unmanly that “Romanized” it enough to make it softness for the Roman elite, who repeat- all right for consumption. This was pos- edly figured Greece as the source of all sible because the Romans had little inter- things luxurious and unmanning, includ- est in producing translations that were ing statuary, clothing, philosophy, even identical to their source texts. Instead, pederasty.22 from the early days of combining different Greek comedies to produce a single What are we to make of these allianc- Roman one, to the more sophisticated es between Roman translation and meta- translations produced by the Roman elite phor: the terminology, the idea of trans- in the late Republic and beyond, the Ro- formation, the distance traveled by the man translator not only made available text or the metaphorical vehicle, the care an originally Greek text, but also demon- taken with sweet or sexual qualities, the strated his control over the source materi- potential taint of effeminacy?23 They tell al and recontextualized its content, all to us much about the Roman view of both show that he was no self-effacing imita- Greek literature and rhetorical figure as tor, but a manipulator of Greek originals potential sources of an active and almost in his own right.25 And since most elites contagious anti-Romanness that had to tended to know both languages, they did be carefully regulated–or better still, not need a literal crib; no one complained

145 (2) Spring 2016 33 Roman that Roman texts were too different from display not only one’s virtuosity, but also Literature: the works that inspired their creation.26 the general superiority of the Roman ver- Translation, Metaphor There are numerous attestations to this sion over the Greek original, and indeed, & Empire way of thinking. The poet Horace’s famous of Romans over Greeks.29 The relation- lines showering scorn on the servile herd ship between source text and destination of literary imitators probably refer to his text could even descend to metaphors of disdain for poets trying to imitate his own violence: as Siobhán McElduff put it, “Ro- accomplishments, not Greek originals, but man literary translation, as a general rule, he himself points out that he treads un dismembered a Greek text and scattered trodden turf as he takes on Greek lyric it within a larger work.”30 Translatio was (Horace Epistles 1.19). In his programmat the outcome of conquering, of enacting a ic poem, the Ars Poetica, he mocks the idea translation of empire (translatio imperii) of the faithful translator, and the narrow as well as a translation of literary culture space in which he works (Horace Ars Poet- (translatio studiorum). Indeed, Cicero’s hope ica 133ff ). The epistolary writer Pliny the was that, eventually, translated Latin texts Younger urges us to translate for fun, but would replace the Greek originals alto- also to be ashamed if our versions do not gether (2.6) much like a metaphor in which sometimes outdo the original (Pliny the the literal term trumped the imported ve- Younger Epistulae 7.9). And as Aulus Gellius hicle, thus turning the whole process of reminds us, “Whenever we have to trans- transfer on its head!31 late and imitate famous passages from the If literary translation could and should Greek poets, people always say we should be free, and represented Roman mastery not try to translate every single word in over Greek originals, it in this respect dif- the original. Many things lose their charm fered greatly from metaphor. 32 Metaphor if transferred too violently, as if unwilling had to be closely controlled: in the treatis- and reluctant” (Aulus Gellius Noctes At- es, the need to avoid overstepping certain ticae 9.9.1–2). Roman authors produced bounds when creating tropes very much not one but five versions of Aratus’s dif- comes to the fore. We have seen the fre- ficult didactic poem on astronomy, the quent invocation of the language of modes- Phaenomena; as Glenn Most writes, the ty and restraint.33 There were injunctions fact that it was translated into Latin so of- about modest choices, control of the lev- ten “is a testimony not only to the impor- el of dissimilarity, avoidance of base vehi- tance of astronomy in the ancient world, cles, avoidance of excess, avoidance of ef- but above all to the necessity Latin poets feminacy. These attempts at control stand felt to sharpen their instruments on the in sharp contrast to the confident stance of most intractable of materials (and, along the translators and their freedom to change the way, to display their virtuosity).”27 the original, to “illuminate” (inlustrare, or In justifying his decision to translate “light up”) the obscurities of the Greeks Greek philosophical works, Cicero claims in the Latin tongue.34 When these rules that the Romans are wiser than the Greeks were ignored, the results were all but di- and had improved upon what they inher- sastrous. Well might Seneca lament Mae- ited from them; the Greeks surpassed the cenas’s cloying metaphors, or Cicero limit Romans in literature, to be sure, but “vic- their usage, or Quintilian decry metaphors tory was easy where there was no contest” that involved lowly and improper vehicles (Cicero Tusculanae Disputationes 1.2 and 4.1 such as sewers (Quintilian Institutio Orato- –2). 28 The term “victory” is no accident. ria 8.6.15). In the end, of course, the pro- Modifying the source text was a chance to duction of metaphors was up to individu-

34 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences al authors; neither their production, nor success was double-edged; the satirist Ju- Shadi their interpretation, could be controlled. venal took Horace one further in remark- Bartsch ing that “Luxury has settled down on us, This must be part of the reason why avenging the world we’ve conquered” these two forms of “translation” had lit- (Juvenal Satires 6.294); Pliny the Youn tle in common in the Roman imagination. ger speaks of Roman zeal for work trans- Since metaphor by definition “produced formed (translatum) to zeal for pleasure pleasure” and risked causing effeminacy, it (Pliny the Younger Panegyricus 13.5).36 ran conceptually in parallel to the other im- Translation could be represented as a ports from the empire that the Romans ac- control exerted over an alien text, but it quired: not the literary texts brought back, may ultimately have pointed to the un- but the booty, slaves, wealth, and statuary controllability of any “import from afar.” transferred from the conquered peoples In the Roman imagination, at least, the fi- to Rome.35 A swarm of late Republican nal translatio was that of sturdy Romans and early imperial laments linked the con- into luxury-loving slaves to pleasure and quest of Greece to the destruction of Ro- foreign importations–and this was no act man character. Pliny the Elder felt such ex- of mastery in translation, but, metaphor- travagances justified calling a man Venus ically, of surrender to the joint threats of (Pliny the Elder Natural History 36.3.7–8); translatio from Greece and translatio as met Horace’s other famous dictum, “Greece, aphor. What metaphor pointed to, in the once captured, captured her fierce con- end, is the instability of the conqueror’s queror and brought the arts into rustic position and the instability of any text, Latium” (Horace Epistles 2.1.155–156), re- “conquered” by translation or not. minded the Romans that their military

endnotes 1 For examples of these approaches, see Bernard Bertolussi, Madeleine Keller, Sophie Minon, and Lyliane Sznajder, eds., Traduire, Transposer, Transmettre dans l’Antiquité gréco-romaine (Paris: Éditions Picard, 2009); Maurizio Bettini, Vertere: un’antropologia della traduzione nella cultura antica (Turin: Einaudi, 2012); Alessandro Garcea, “Aulu-Gelle, Probus et le problème de la traduction des textes poétiques,” in Traduire, Transposer, Transmettre dans l’Antiquité gréco-romaine, ed. Bertolussi et al., 17–26; John Glucker and Charles Burnett, eds., Greek into Latin from Antiquity Until the Nineteenth Century (London: The Warburg Institute, 2012); Bernard Kytzler, “Fidus interpres: The Theory and Practice of Translation in Classical Antiquity,” Antichthon 23 (1989): 42–50; Siobhán McElduff and Enrica Sciarrino, eds., Complicating the History of Western Transla- tion: The Ancient Mediterranean in Perspective (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2011); Siobhán McElduff, Roman Theories of Translation: Surpassing the Source (New York: Routledge, 2013); Christian Nicolas, “La note de traducteur antique et le niveau méta de la traduction, ou Quand la patte du traducteur se prend dans le fil du texte,” in Traduire, Transposer, Transmettre dans l’Antiquité gréco-romaine, ed. Bertolussi et al., 61–89; Frederick M. Rener, Interpretatio: Language and Translation from Cicero to Tytler (Amsterdam: Rodopi,1989); Diana Spencer, “Horace and the Con/straints of Translation,” in Complicating the History of Western Translation, ed. McElduff and Sciarrino, 101–116; Astrid Seele, Römische Übersetzer, Nöte, Freiheiten, Absichten: Verfahren des literarischen Übersetzens in der griechisch-römischen Antike (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchge- sellschaft, 1995); Anna Svenbro, “Théoriser la traduction à la fin de l’Antiquité et au début du Moyen Âge: Quelques glissements sémantiques,” in Traduire, Transposer, Transmettre dans l’Antiq- uité gréco-romaine, ed. Bertolussi et al., 9–16; Alfonso Traina,“Le traduzioni,” in Lo spazio letter-

145 (2) Spring 2016 35 Roman ario di Roma antica, Volume II, La circolazione del testo, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, Paolo Fedeli, Andrea Literature: Giardina (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1989), 93–123; Thomas N. Habinek, The Politics of Latin Lit- Translation, erature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, Metaphor 1998); and Sophia G. Papaioannou, “The Translation Politics of a Political Translation: The & Empire Case of Augustus’ Res Gestae,” in Complicating the History of Western Translation, ed. McElduff and Sciarrino, 62–74. 2 The Roman vocabulary for metaphor is derived from that of the Greek, but the parallels between translation and metaphor are only Roman. (Indeed, the Greeks translated little from other languages into Greek.) 3 Translatio or tralatio–though verbal forms–are, in both cases, more common than nominal ones. A rare example of metapherein, meaning “change into another language,” occurs in Plato’s Critias 113a; more common would be metaphrazein. 4 See Clifford Ando, “Interpretatio Romana,” Classical Philology 100 (1) (2005): 41–51. On page 43, Ando discusses several examples of such Roman awareness and relates the famous story of the idiom dari spondes, which was said to be untranslatable by Gaius (Gai Institutiones: or, Insti- tutes of Roman Law 3.93). On the understanding that translation is always an interpretation, “as shown by the connection of terms with the synonymic values interpretari, vertere, and transferre,” see Glenn W. Most, “Violets in Crucibles: Translating, Traducing, Transmuting,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 133 (2) (2003): 381–390. See also Douglas Robinson, The Translator’s Turn (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); and Nicholas Round, “Translation and its Metaphors: the (n+1) Wise Men and the Elephant,” Skase Journal of Trans- lation and Interpretation 1 (2005): 47–69. 5 For discussion, see Alfred J. MacAdam, “Translation as Metaphor: Three Versions of Borg- es,” Modern Language Notes 90 (6) (1975): 747–754; Robinson, The Translator’s Turn, 127–193; and Round, “Translation and its Metaphors,” which also discusses metaphors of translation. The bibliography in Round’s article serves as an introduction to the field of translation theory in general, which is not, however, within the scope of these pages. 6 On the value of the metaphors with which a culture thinks about such matters as metaphor and translation, see Bettini, Vertere: un’antropologia della traduzione nella cultura antica, xiii. Bettini includes an interesting discussion of the metaphorical implications of vertere as transforming the source text. 7 On the lack of literary or philosophical texts, or even a Latin vocabulary for philosophical terms, see Cicero De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum 1.3.80; Cicero De Oratore 3.24.95; Lucretius De Rerum Natura 1.832; and Seneca Epistles 58.1. Cicero disputes the stereotype in De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum 1.10. For a full treatment of the theme in Lucretius, Cicero, Quintilian, and Aulus Gellius, see Thorsten Fögen, Patrii sermonis egestas. Einstellungen lateinischer Autoren zu ihrer Mutter- sprache (Beiträge zur Altertumskunde Band 150) (München-Leipzig: K.G. Saur Verlag, 2000). 8 As Terence writes in Andria, lines 13–14, “The playwright admits that he transferred what was suitable from the Perinthia into the Andria.” See McElduff, Roman Translation, 87ff, for discussion of Terence’s practices. Poor Terence died, in fact, while returning to Rome from Greece with 108 new plays–or so his biographer Suetonius tells us, in Vita Terenti sec. 5.1. 9 For more on translatio as translation (a less common version than its verbal form, transferre), see Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 1.4.18; Jerome Letters 99; and Servius 1.223.7. For material on translatio as metaphor, see Cicero De Oratore 3.38.156, 3.41.165; Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.34.45; and Quin- tilian Institutio Oratoria 1.5.2, 8.6.4. For material on the verb transferre, meaning “to translate,” see Cicero Letters to Atticus 6.2.3; Cicero De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum 1.3.7; Quintilian Institutio Ora- toria 1.6.3, 2.1.4, 2.15.21, 7.4.4, 7.4.7; Seneca Dialogue 11.11.5; Pliny the Elder Natural History 6.111; Pliny the Younger Epistulae 7.9.2; and Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae 9.9.2. For notes on meaning to create a metaphor, see Cicero De Oratore 3.37.149; Cicero Orator 19.65; Cicero De Optimo Genere Oratorum 4; Cicero De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum 2.10; and Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 12.10.34. There is also an appendix containing a list of the verbs for translation in McElduff, Roman The- ories of Translation.

36 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 10 On ancient metaphor, see Andrew Barker, “Shifting Frontiers in Ancient Theories of Meta- Shadi phor,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 45 (2000): 1–16; G. R. Boys-Stones, ed., Bartsch Metaphor, Allegory, and the Classical Tradition: Ancient Thought and Modern Revisions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Doreen Innes, “Cicero on Tropes,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 6 (3) (1988): 307–325; Doreen Innes, “Metaphor, Simile, and Allegory as Ornaments of Style,” in Metaphor, Allegory, and the Classical Tradition, ed. Boys-Stones, 7–27; John Thomas Kirby, “Aristotle on Metaphor,” American Journal of Philology 118 (4) (1997): 517–554; G. E. R. Lloyd, “The Metaphors of metaphora,” in Aristotelian Explorations (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1996), 205–222; Stephen Nimis, “Aristotle’s Analogical Metaphor,” Arethusa 21 (2) (1988): 215–226; Michael Silk, “Metaphor and Metonymy: Aristotle, Jakobson, Ricouer, and Others,” in Metaphor, Allegory, and the Classical Tradition, ed. Boys-Stones, 115–147; Bruce M. Psaty, “Cicero’s Literal Metaphor and Propriety,” Central States Speech Journal 29 (2) (1978): 107–117; and Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Mean- ing in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). 11 Aristotle Rhetoric 1405a, 1411b; Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.34; Cicero Orator 25, 39; Cicero De Or- atore 39.157–59; and Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 8.6.4. 12 “Translata dico, ut saepe iam, quae per similitudinem ab alia re aut suavitatis aut inopiae cau- sa transferuntur,” from Cicero Orator 27.92. See also Cicero De Oratore 3.38.155–156, 3.43.211; and Cicero Partitiones Oratoriae 17. For material on metaphor in general, see Cicero Orator 27.92; Cicero De Oratore 3.29.134, 3.38.155; and Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 8.6.4. 13 For other definitions that emphasize the distance that a metaphoric term must cross, see Ci- cero De Oratore 3.37.149. For definitions that emphasize the vividness a metaphoric term must have, see Cicero Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.34; and Cicero De Oratore 3.40.161. 14 On why we find metaphor sweet, Cicero offers four reasons in total in De Oratore 3.159–161: metaphor is a mark of natural talent; it stimulates intellectually; it can embed a comparison in a single word; and it offers both sensual and visual stimulation. 15 One might contrast this form with metonymy, which draws on words that are “nearby” or “bordering” the noun to be replaced. See Cicero Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.43. 16 Another critic, or so Gellius tells us in Noctes Atticae 9.10, found this very same translatio not, in fact, so pure and honorable. Here we speak of metaphor, since Cornutus criticized the presence of the word “limbs” in the Vergilian translatio as “indiscreet” in a work entitled “On Figural Language.” 17 Gellius, however, cites other pundits of the age who criticized him as an immodest user of metaphor in Vergil’s translation of Pindar’s passage on Aetna. See Vergil Aeneid 3.570ff. 18 The Roman terms are pudens or verecunda. 19 Similarly, Persius complains about poetry chock-full of luxuriant imagery and Bacchic content and claims these transgressions would not take place if the Romans kept a shred of their ancestral spine. See Persius Satires 1.103–104. Cicero reminds us that orators have to watch their use of ornament, lest they cross over into Asiatic-style floweriness. See Cicero De Oratore 3.52.201; and Cicero Brutus 325–326. 20 On risks to the translator in navigating all this sweet and sexual material, see Elizabeth M. Young, “Sappho Under My Skin: Catullus and the Translation of Erotic Lyric at Rome,” in Complicating the History of Western Translation, ed. McElduff and Sciarrino, 25–36. 21 Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae 9.9.4. 22 Other figures are shared between metaphor and translation. Once rendered into being, both could be characterized as a garb or protective “covering” for the literal or original text. Thus, to use Latin for a Greek original might be called exchanging the pallium for the toga. See Sene- ca the Elder Controversiae 9.3.13; and Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus Divus Augustus 98–99. Over- use of figures, in Quintilian’s view, was like wearing over-luxurious clothing. See Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 8 proem 20. Cicero compares the use of metaphor to the human adoption of clothing: just as the former was originally used to repel the cold, but later became decorative,

145 (2) Spring 2016 37 Roman metaphor also came about originally due to lack, but now is used to create pleasure. See Ci- Literature: cero De Oratore 3.38.155. Translation, Metaphor 23 Few modern authors have commented on this alliance, either. Bettini in Veretere devotes one & Empire sentence to the correlation; McElduff does not have an index entry for metaphor in her interesting book on translation; and MacAdam, who is not writing about antiquity, finds it a “happy coincidence” in “Translation as Metaphor: Three Versions of Borges,” 747. 24 Rhetoric itself was characterized as a Greek art. In 161 bce and again in 92 bce, edicts were issued expelling the rhetores. See Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus 25.2. 25 See discussion in McElduff, Roman Theories of Translation, 10ff and passim. See also Hans Bal- tussen, “Cicero’s Translation of Greek Philosophy: Personal Mission or Public Service?” in Complicating the History of Western Translation, ed. McElduff and Sciarrino, 37–47; on page 46, Baltussen quotes David Sedley on Cicero avoiding transliteration of Greek terms in translations of Greek philosophy as a “rare resort” that “savours of defeat.” On the translation of particular Greek terms, see Seele, Römische Übersetzer, Nöte, Freiheiten, Absichten, 23–50. 26 See Cicero Academica 1.4–5; and Aulus Gellius Noctes Atticae 11.16, with further discussion in chapters 5 and 6 in McElduff, Roman Theories of Translation. 27 See Most, “Violets in Crucibles,” 288. Christian Nicolas, in “La note de traducteur antique et le niveau méta de la traduction,” is excellent in his discussion of the way Roman translators inserted themselves into the texts they translated. 28 Baltussen, “Cicero’s Translation of Greek Philosophy,” 37–47. 29 Quintilian, too, in Institutio Oratoria 10.98, thinks in terms of challenge. Cicero is more lauda- tory of Greek culture in Tusculanae Disputationes 2.26; he suggests that Greek texts even figure as “ornaments” to the Latin language. 30 See McElduff, Roman Theories of Translation, 10. Conquest literally brought translation in its wake. Even Pompey’s defeat of Mithridates resulted in the collection and translation of medical texts Mithridates had compiled (their language is not clear). See Pliny the Elder Natural His- tory 25.7. Jennifer Larson points out that the politically dominant language (Latin) precedes the Greek in a majority of private inscriptions, even when it is not the language of the majority or of the inscriber. See Jennifer Larson, “Bilingual Inscriptions and Translation in the Ancient Mediterranean World,” in Complicating the History of Western Translation, ed. McElduff and Sciarrino, 52. Other political considerations emerge from Papaioannou, “The Translation Politics of a Political Translation.” 31 Even in the early translators’ work, “corrections” to the Greek are visible. Plautus changes names to make Latin puns in which nomen works as omen; this sort of greater fidelity to reality offers another venue for claims to superiority. Likewise, Gellius uses etymology to defend propriety of a Latin translation in Noctes Atticae 2.6.5–6. This is a return to closer meaning, not a movement away from it, or a metaphorical change. Failure to make the Latin text “more real” or “better” than the Greek offered an opportunity for criticism; see Nicolas, “La note de traducteur antique et le niveau méta de la traduction,” 71–76. 32 By contrast, from the start of the literary tradition, close translation was largely the province of a few non-Romans and ex-slaves. On their socioeconomic status, see Enrica Sciarri- no, “The Introduction of Epic in Rome: Cultural Thefts and Social Contests,” Arethusa 39 (3) (2006): 451–452. Unfortunately, the fragments of the early Roman writers of Greek-based tragedy and dactylic epic do not offer a lot of further information. We do know that later poet Attius Labeo was lambasted for his crude literal translation of the Iliad (compare with the scholia to Persius Satires 1.4). Outside the world of letters, the close translator was the interpres, the military translator summoned to help at meetings of foreign generals. Cicero claimed precisely to have worked “not as an interpres but as an orator”–that is, he neither translated literally, nor like one of lower station. See his De optimo genere oratorum 4.14. He would only do

38 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences so if “he did not want to be himself.” See Cicero De legibus 2.17. On the interpres, see McElduff, Shadi Roman Theories of Translation, 24–30, 144–145, and 201–202. Bartsch 33 Aristotle Rhetoric 1405a; Rhetorica ad Herennium 34; Cicero De Oratore 3.41.165; Cicero Epistulae ad Familiares 16.17; Longinus De Sublimitate 32.2; Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 8.3.37; and Seneca Epis- tles 114.10. 34 See Lucretius’s claim in De Rerum Natura 1.136–140; and Cicero’s claims in both Academica 1.3 and Tusculanae Disputationes 1.5. Both are talking about translating Greek philosophy into Latin. 35 The corrupting effect of such goods was linked by Roman authors to the conquest of Asia and Greece, in particular, and most often dated to 146 bce, the year in which both Corinth and Carthage were destroyed; 187 bce is another candidate. On Hellenism as an agent of moral corruption, see Sallust Bellum Catilinae 10.6; and Pliny the Younger Epistulae 4.22. On luxury and pleasure as imports from Greece, see Cicero In Verrum 2.2.7; Cicero Pro Flacco 71.10; Cice- ro In Pisonem 42.6; Valerius Maximus Factorum ac Dictorum Memorabilium Libri IX 9.1.5; Velleius Paterculus Historiae 2.1.1; Pliny the Elder Natural History 33.150, Livy Ab Urbe Condita 7.38.5; and Lucan Bellum Civile 1.16–70. Horace suggests that the Romans only valued things that came from faraway lands or had been made extinct by the passage of time, but also corrupted them, like both metaphorical vehicles and luxury items. See Horace Epistles 2.1.21–22. 36 For discussion, see Rhiannon Evans, “Learning to be Decadent: Roman Identity and the Lux- uries of Others,” in ASCS XXXII Selected Proceedings, ed. Anne Mackay (Auckland: Australasian Society for Classical Studies, 2011), 1–7.

145 (2) Spring 2016 39 The New "Brothers Poem" by Sappho

Translated by Rachel Hadas

Chatter, rumors: Ooh, Charaxos has come safe, ship laden—he is back at home! If you ask me, that is the gods’ concern. Don’t think about it.

Better send me to pour out a stream of supplications; tell me to pray to Queen Hera: May Charaxos steer safely home. And may he ﬁ nd us

safe and well. And let us please leave all the rest to heaven. Out of a stormy squall a divine calm suddenly can prevail, if that is how

the king of heaven wills it. Some power may from rough waters steer us skillfully toward blessings and prosperity. As for our family,

if Larichos would only lift his head, leave his childhood, grow to a man instead, then we from this weight of depression would ﬁ nally be free.

RACHEL HADAS, a Fellow of the American Academy since 1995, is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey–Newark.

This translation, reprinted with permission of the Times Literary Supplement, was ﬁ rst published in the May 2, 2014, issue of the Times Literary Supplement.

For a brief discussion of the “Brothers Poem” by Sappho, see the introduction to this issue, page 17, endnote 13.

40 Reception Studies: The Cultural Mobility of Classics

Emily Greenwood

Abstract: In spite of connotations of classics and the classical as an established tradition based around a stable canon, Greek and Roman classical antiquity has never been a fixed object of study. It has changed as our knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome has grown and shifted, and as a function of history, intellectual movements, and taste. Classicists have turned to classical reception studies in an attempt to chart some of the different encounters that various historical audiences have had with Greek and Roman classics, and this wave of research poses interdisciplinary questions about the relation of Greek and Roman classics to world literatures and cultures. The emphasis on classical reception studies offers fresh ways of thinking about the cultural mobility of the classics without appealing to discredited, old-fashioned notions of “timeless importance” or “universal value.” This debate is explored here via a Malawian reception of Sophocles’s Antigone.

By its very name, the term classics proclaims that a select body of works from antiquity is perpetually new. Here I am thinking less of Ezra Pound’s dictum in ABC of Reading that “literature is news that stays new,” and instead of a remark made by Plutarch, a polymath from Boeotia in central Greece and a subject of the Roman empire.1 In his Life of Pericles, written early in the second century ce, Plutarch writes admiringly of the architecture of the buildings on the Athenian Acropolis, built in the third quarter of the fifth centurybce . For Plutarch, the striking quality of these buildings was that, at the time of EMILY GREENWOOD is Profes- construction, they were instantly antique, and yet in sor of Classics in the Department Plutarch’s day (over five hundred years later) they of Classics at Yale University. She remained fresh and new. is the author of Afro-Greeks: Dia- logues Between Anglophone Caribbean Each one of them, in its beauty, was even then and Literature and Classics in the Twentieth at once antique [archaios]; but in the freshness of its Century (2010) and Thucydides and vigour it is, even to the present day, recent [prosphatos] the Shaping of History (2006). and newly wrought [neourgos]. Such is the bloom of per-

41 Reception petual newness [kainotēs], as it were, upon distrust in universals in contemporary lib- Studies: these works of his, which makes them ever eral thought. The Cultural Mobility to look untouched by time, as though the un- For much of the research and teaching of Classics faltering breath of an ageless spirit had been transacted within departments of classics, infused into them.2 the ideological overtones of classics and the (Plutarch Life of Pericles 13.3, classical are an extraneous concern; classi- trans. Bernadotte Perrin) cists know what they study (the languages, history, literature, art, archaeology, and All of us in the academy would like to thought–including philosophy and sci- claim the bloom of perpetual newness for ence–of ancient Greece, Rome, and con- our disciplines. In the case of classics, this tiguous civilizations in the ancient Medi- old-newness is written into our self-nam- terranean) and are not interested in claiming, with classics and the classical shorthand ing universal relevance or reach for their for a complex process of classicization that subject. On the contrary, the palaeograph- has gone into defining the transcultural ical, linguistic, philological, historical, and and transhistorical value of works from archaeological skills that are at the core of Greek and Roman antiquity. research and pedagogy in classics are deep- As a heavily freighted value system, clas- ly historicizing and pull against a univer- sics is not always an ideal vehicle for en- salizing impulse. But academic disciplines suring the continued study of the cultures do not always get to define themselves and of ancient Greece and Rome. Instead, be- are subject to something of a time-lag as far cause of the antiquity of the works that as external perceptions go. In recent years, it signifies, its perceived entwinement classicists have responded by tackling any with formations such as “Western Civili- image problems head-on: the 2009 cre- zation,” “Europe,” or “Eurochronology,” ation in the United Kingdom of a flour- and because of the elitism written into ishing charity entitled “Classics for All” its very nomenclature, from the outside, counters the assumption that classics is the classics strikes many across the globe as preserve of a narrow elite; meanwhile, the at best moribund and at worst a bastion erstwhile American Philological Associa- of European cultural chauvinism. What tion, founded in 1869, changed its name in is classical is what is judged first-rate, and 2014 to the more accessible “Society for this judgment presupposes a single scale Classical Studies.”3 of value, since works can only be ranked in terms of excellence and lasting value if These outreach efforts have been accom- they are all measured on the same scale. panied by the growth of classical reception And if the classics of ancient Greece and studies. Classicists have long studied the Rome have a prior monopoly on what is afterlives of Greek and Roman authors, as classical, then classics appears to impose have scholars in other disciplines, but the its canon on all other areas of study and emergence of a concerted program study- artistic endeavour. The fact that canon is a ing the contextualized reception of clas- Greek noun in origin (kanōn: a rod, rule, sics and the history of classical scholar- standard), attested in ancient Greek liter- ship marks a shift away from a fixed and ary criticism to refer to authors who are hierarchical classical tradition, which em- exemplary and judged worthy of study phasized a single lineage traced through and preservation, does not help the case European culture to the present day, to an for classics in the academy, where the im- unruly, uncanonical, and unpredictable se- plicit universalism of classics falls foul of a ries of encounters and responses to Greek

42 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and Roman classics in diverse cultures and version of Antigone is local in the sense that Emily contexts. This development has in turn it adapted a body of myth, which had both Greenwood sparked new debates, revolving around local and trans-local dimensions, for an the question of how to study the far-reach- Athenian audience, at an Athenian dramat- ing cultural mobility of Greek and Roman ic festival in a specific historical, cultural, classics, which increasingly circulate in the political, and religious context.6 This lo- works of writers who do not identify them- cal drama then went on to have a very rich selves with “the classical tradition,” “the supra-local life in re-performance. West,” “European civilization,” or “clas- Critics of cosmopolitanism have object- sical humanism” without appealing to dis- ed that championing cosmopolitanism in credited universals.4 literature and art downgrades the regional Latterly I have begun to use the com- and the local, instead elevating works with pound adjective omni-local, modeled on Al- a Western-oriented and “cosmopolitan” bert Murray’s term omni-American, to dis- literary reach that secures them transna- cuss the translatability, adaptability, and tional mobility. Along similar lines, ca- relationality of classics in different con- nonical literature and local literature are temporary cultures. As coined by Murray, frequently treated as mutually exclusive. the term omni-American referred to the Commenting on the experience of teach- “irrevocably composite” nature of mod- ing Sophocles’s Antigone alongside the Ar- ern American culture.5 In proposing the gentinean playwright Griselda Gambaro’s category of omni-local for Greek and Ro- Antígona furiosa (1985–1986) in a world lit- man classical texts that circulate widely in erature class, Jane Newman has remarked different historical and cultural contexts, I that her students were struck by the gulf want to evoke the idea that these “classics” between critical responses to the two are cultural composites that result from works: “canonical works are often read, successive readers and audiences encoun- well, canonically, as articulating universals, tering and making sense of these works. as opposed to how their successors are of- But the concept of omni-local classics ten read and perhaps also taught–that is, has other useful resonances. The omni-lo- as only local works.”7 Approaching a work cal substitutes a horizontal, two-way rela- like Sophocles’s Antigone as an omni-local tionship in place of a vertical, hierarchical classic obviates the traditional hierarchy tradition. In the context of classical recep- between the canonical and the local by tion studies, the focus on the local dimen- emphasizing the local embedded in the sions of classical adaptation applies equal- classical. ly to the classical “source” text, and re- One possible objection to this concept is minds us that in their original contexts the that a version of cosmopolitanism or uni- classics were themselves “local,” insofar as versalism is being reintroduced through they worked with, read, and received exist- the prefixomni , from the Latin adjective ing myths and other works. This is particu- omnis (all, every). After all, isn’t labeling larly clear in the case of “classical” ancient something “local to all” (one way of con- Greek epics such as the Iliad and Odyssey, struing omni-local) the same as labeling it which grew out of the oral circulation of universal, or timeless (to shift from a spa- epic poems, and for extant Greek trage- tial to a temporal metaphor)? Or, respond- dies, which rework and supplement exist- ing to a recent challenge to an overly flu- ing versions of myths and sometimes pri- id and fluent model of world literature, or dramatic works that are based on these doesn’t the omni-local rest on naive as- myths. So Sophocles’s interpretation and sumptions about cultural equivalence and

145 (2) Spring 2016 43 Reception translatability and ignore the stubborn and other languages from different geo- Studies: untranslatability of many classic works?8 graphical locations (including Rome, Gaul, The Cultural Mobility Here the focus on reception is crucial, since Spain, Syria, Egypt, Tunisia), and often trav- of Classics the receiving community makes or shapes eling between these locations and switch- the meaning of the classic being received. ing between cultures.11 The omni-local model recognizes the fact that while a classic might circulate virtually Sophocles’s Antigone is one of the most among very different interpretative com- mobile classics to have survived from an- munities, as soon as it gets taken up and cient Greece, and it has garnered an im- adapted it becomes specific and local, mensely rich reception history that spans opening an inevitable translation gap be- the disciplines of classics, theater and per- tween the adapted text and the adapta- formance studies, comparative literature, tion. The idea that a text is inert without modern languages, and political thought.12 readers to give it meaning is a given in re- According to Erin Mee and Helene Foley, ception studies, specifically the reader-re- editors of a recent collection of essays ana- sponse theory exemplified by the work of lyzing the presence of Antigone in contem- Wolfgang Iser, who argued that “the con- porary global theater, Antigone is the most vergence of text and reader brings the liter- widely performed play in the world tout ary work into existence.”9 To label a clas- court.13 The essays in their collection dis- sic omni-local is to acknowledge its local, cuss performances and adaptations from historical origins, some of which are un- Argentina, Burkina Faso, Canada, Egypt, translatable, while simultaneously credit- Finland, France, the Republic of Georgia, ing it with a strong degree of cross-cultural Greece, Haiti, Ireland, India (specifically adaptability that is virtual and indetermi- Manipur), Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Poland, nate–to be determined by the receiving Turkey, and the United States. reader and audiences. As a case study, I am going to focus on a One of the explanations for the cultural single, short response to Sophocles’s Anti- mobility and versatility of Greek and Ro- gone by the Malawian academic, poet, and man classics is the fact that, although they- writer Jack Mapanje, comparing it to the have been grafted into multiple national best-known response to Antigone from the literatures in the modern world to serve ar- continent of Africa: the play The Island guments surrounding national sovereign- (1973) by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and ty, empire, and anti-colonial resistance, nei- Winston Ntshona.14 I have chosen Mapan- ther ancient Greek nor Roman literature je’s poem because it illustrates the vital, re- was or is a national literature.10 This is true calcitrant energy of Sophocles’s play and both in the weak sense that the various po- its traction within a particular, local con- litical communities encompassed by an- text where it was mobilized as a counter- cient Greece and Rome predated the emer- text to a brutal hegemonic regime that had gence of the modern nation-state, and in claimed Greek and Roman classics for rath- the stronger sense that the literature that er different ends. survives from Greek and Roman antiquity Some brief context first: Jack Mapanje has its own local affinities, both under the was head of the English department at heterogeneous Greek city-states and con- Chancellor College (the University of Ma- tiguous centers of Greek culture dotted lawi) when he was arrested and impris- around the ancient Mediterranean, and al- oned without charge in September 1987, so under the Roman empire with educat- apparently because he had been critical in ed Roman citizens writing in Latin, Greek, his poetry of the country’s autocratic “Life

44 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences President,” Ngwazi Dr. Hastings Kamuzu der of the dissident Malawian mp Aaron Emily Banda (1898–1997).15 He was kept in Mi- Gadama, who in May 1983 was assassi- Greenwood kuyu prison for a total of three years, seven nated by Banda’s regime along with three months, and sixteen days. One of the many other mps. The four men were clubbed to poems that Mapanje composed in prison death and then bundled into a car that was addresses Banda in the guise of Creon, ty- subsequently crashed, to make it look like rant of Thebes, as depicted in Sophocles’s a road accident.17 In his memoir, Mapan- play. Specifically, Mapanje has chosen the je writes with dark humor of his own fear point at which Creon discovers the suicide that he too might be “accidentalised.”18 of his son Haemon, a suicide precipitated Aaron Gadama was apparently Banda’s by Creon’s effective murder of Antigone, cousin, hence the poem’s stress on the hy- who had been betrothed to marry Haemon. pocrisy of Creon lamenting the death of In order to avoid the pollution that might his own kin, for which he is responsible. result from killing Antigone, Creon had her The quotation that supplies the epigraph walled up in a cave, with food provided, in for Mapanje’s poem is a paraphrase of Anti- a form of live burial (Sophocles Antigone gone. At lines 1029–1030, the prophet Tire- 773–780). As it is, Antigone commits sui- sias urges Creon to “Give way to one who cide by hanging. is dead and don’t keep goading him now he has perished. What strength is there in “No, Creon, There’s No Virtue in Howling” re-killing one who is dead?” (ἀλλ’ εἶκε τῷ ‘It is no glory to kill and kill again.’ θανόντι, μηδ’ ὀλωλότα | κέντει. τίς ἀλκὴ Tiresias, Antigone τὸν θανόντ’ ἐπικτανεῖν;). These lines refer No, Creon, you overstate your image to your to Creon’s dishonouring of the corpse of People. No, there’s no virtue in howling so. Polynices, Antigone’s brother and Creon’s How can you hope to repair Haemon, your own nephew, whose burial he has forbid- Own blood, our only hope for the throne, den on the grounds that Polynices died as a By reproaching his body mangled by your traitor fighting against Thebes. In Mapan- Decree and put to rest without the requiem je’s epigraph, the motif of double-killing Of our master drums? What tangential may allude to the fact that the mps were sentries given a staged, second death, to dissemble Advise you to bemoan the dead by scoffing their prior assassination. In focusing on Them publicly thus? Those accidents your the relationship between Creon and Hae- Flunkies master-stroked, those tortures & mon, the poem hints at Banda’s kinship Exiles fashioned, and the blood you loved relation to Aaron Gadama, as well as Ban- To hear, did we need more lies? Look now, da’s autocratic, paternalistic style of gov- Even the village lads toss their coins for old ernment destroying the household of the Creon’s days. What cowardice, what nation, killing off the “sons” of Malawi. perversity In the circumstances, there is grim iro- Grates life-laden minds on our ny in Mapanje’s recourse to Sophocles. In death-beds?16 1981, Banda founded an eponymous secondary school modeled on the British pub- In Mapanje’s version of this episode lic school system, Kamuzu Academy, at from Sophocles’s play, Haemon represents which all students were required to study the “son” of Malawi killed on Banda’s or- ancient Greek and Latin, and where he lec- ders, or upon the orders of those in his in- tured his students that they could not be ner circle. Among the many victims of truly educated or civilized without knowl- Banda’s rule, the poem alludes to the mur- edge of the classics. He was duly ridiculed

145 (2) Spring 2016 45 Reception by many African intellectuals, most nota- conventional version or adaptation of An- Studies: bly Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, for whom such tigone, it has its origins in a convention- The Cultural Mobility statements were a sign of a thoroughly col- al production of Sophocles’s Antigone proof Classics onized mind.19 Detained by the regime of duced by the Serpent Players in 1965, which a leader who had aligned himself with the was based on E. V. Rieu’s translation of the classics, Mapanje offers a counter-reading play.21 Sipho Mguqulwa had been due to of the classics in the form of a lesson drawn play the part of Haemon and Norman Nt- from Athenian tragedy. Echoing Creon’s shinga had been cast in a supporting role, clash with Antigone over whether the laws but both men were arrested while the play of the state should prevail over the unwrit- was in rehearsal. John Kani, the actor who ten customs that applied to honoring the would subsequently play the part of Cre- dead, Banda-as-Creon is depicted over- on in Die Hodoshe Span / The Island, stepped turning the customs of his own people by in to the role of Haemon. In The Island, the denying proper burial rites to his victims, prison production within the play uses clas- as with the four mps assassinated in 1983.20 sical drama as an alibi for on-going resis- And as is the case in Sophocles’s Thebes, tance to the nationalist Afrikaner govern- where civil war spills into fratricide and, ment. The protagonists John and Winston ultimately, domicide, Banda’s making en- use their prison play about Creon’s brutal emies of his own people is represented as punishment of Antigone to deliver a mes- the murder of his own family and prepara- sage of protest to the regime and to those tion for his downfall. whom it oppresses from within its most notorious prison. While Antigone’s clas- Mapanje’s decision to remonstrate with sical credentials get their subversive mes- Banda’s tyrannical rule via Sophocles’s play sages past the prison guards, it is the unrul- was presumably influenced by the adoption iness and complexity of Sophocles’s classic of Antigone in the political theater of Afri- that commended it to the Serpent Play- can playwrights. The obvious parallel is The ers in 1965, and it was this unruliness that Island, a South African adaptation of Anti- commended it to Norman Ntshinga when gone by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Win- he was casting around for a play to produce ston Ntshona. First staged in Cape Town by for the prison concert on Robben Island. the Serpent Players in July 1973 with the ti- The boundary between Sophocles’s play tle Die Hodoshe Span (Hodoshe’s Work Team), and contemporary South Africa, particu- the play revolves around a two-man pro- larly as viewed from the black South Af- duction of Sophocles’s Antigone that was rican perspective, collapses in the fourth performed by two anc (African Nation- scene of The Island, in which John and Win- al Congress) prisoners, Norman Ntshinga ston present and enact “The Trial and Pun- and Sipho Mguqulwa, on Robben Island, as ishment of Antigone.” When Creon sen- part of a prison concert that capped sketch- tences Antigone, her place of incarcera- es at fifteen minutes. Both men were mem- tion is the actual prison in Robben Island bers of the Serpent Players when they were in which the play is set: arrested and they related details of this pro- Take her from where she stands, straight to duction to the troupe in their letters from the Island! Then wall her up in a cell for life, prison; these descriptions inspired Die Ho- with enough food to acquit ourselves of the doshe Span, subsequently retitled The Island taint of her blood.22 (after Robben Island). While The Island is a play about putting Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona mobilized on a production of Antigone, rather than a Antigone as an anti-colonial protest play,

46 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences while Mapanje’s poem–technically a post- of these responses when trying to make Emily colonial poem written by a Malawian poet sense of Sophocles’s play. Greenwood in an independent African nation–used In his scholarly edition and commentary the figure of Creon in Sophocles’s play as of the Greek text of Sophocles’s Antigone, an argument against the president’s mer- Mark Griffith distinguishes between the ciless abuses of power. In both cases, Soph- many different approaches to interpreting ocles’s Antigone offers a supra-local web of the play and those that are convincing to “a reference; it functions both as a source text majority of the ‘competent readers’ who and a hypertext that links works in differ- have weighed the critical alternatives in ent local contexts. the light of their own examination of the text.”23 In this scenario, traditional classical What does any of this have to do with the scholarship nestles within and is a version ways that scholars, students, and the gen- of reception studies, where it is carried eral reader might approach Sophocles’s An- out by an interpretative community with tigone in the twenty-first century? The mod- scholarly expertise in ancient Greek liter- el of classical reception that I have sketched ature, alongside other communities who here, based around the idea of the omni- have read and responded to the text. But local, is emphatically a two-way process in there is no barrier between reading and which later adaptations also become “lo- studying Sophocles’s Antigone as an Athe- cal” and available for the interpretation of nian, ancient Greek text and an omni-local Sophocles’s play. While these readings may text; in fact, the latter is vital if we want to be available, it is up to classicists to choose be part of the broader conversation about whether and how they avail themselves Sophocles’s play in the twenty-first century.

endnotes 1 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading, 2nd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 29. 2 For an astute discussion of this passage, see James Porter, “Feeling Classical: Classicism and Ancient Literary Criticism,” in The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome, ed. James I. Porter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 301–352 (for discussion of the Plutarch passage, see 329–333). 3 See http://www.classicsforall.org.uk; and https://classicalstudies.org. 4 Lorna Hardwick offers a perceptive commentary on this return to a version of the universal in classical reception studies: “One of the effects of the recent association of classical texts with social critique and liberation movements has been to release them from inevitable association with the classes and monuments that appropriated them in the past. . . . [O]ne less expected consequence of this liberation has been the revival of interest in what used to be dismissed as “universalism,” that is explanations of transhistorical (and now also transcultural) force.” See Lorna Hardwick, “Against the Democratic Turn: Counter-Texts; Counter- Contexts; Counter-Arguments,” Classics in the Modern World: A Democratic Turn? ed. Lorna Hardwick and Stephen Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 23. 5 Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy (New York: Outerbridge & Diensfrey, 1970), 22. 6 Alexander Beecroft proposes a helpful explanatory model for understanding the local and supra-local aspects of ancient Greek epic, lyric, and tragedy. Beecroft proposes the terms epichoric (referring to “literature produced within the confines of a local community”) and panchoric (referring to “literary texts and systems of circulation operating across a range of epichoric communities”), and argues that these two orientations–epichoric and panchoric–often

145 (2) Spring 2016 47 Reception interact productively in these archaic and classical Greek genres. See Alexander Beecroft, Studies: “World Literature Without a Hyphen: Towards a Typology of Literary Systems,” New Left The Cultural Review 54 (November–December 2008): 92–93. The term epichoric is borrowed from Greg- Mobility of Classics ory Nagy, Pindar’s Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1990), 66–67. 7 Jane O. Newman, “The Afterlives of the Greeks; or, What Is the Canon of World Literature?” in Teaching World Literature, ed. David Damrosch (New York: Modern Language Association, 2009), 131. 8 On untranslatability, see the arguments in Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013). 9 Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” in The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni- versity Press, 1974), 275. 10 For an analysis of some of the ways in which modern, national cultures have appropriated ancient Greece and Rome and in turn been shaped by Greek and Roman ideas, see Susan A. Stephens and Phiroze Vasunia, eds., Classics in National Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 11 See Tim Whitmarsh, “Thinking Local,” and Greg Woolf, “Afterword: The Local and the Glob- al in the Graeco-Roman East,” in Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World, ed. Tim Whitmarsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–16 and 180–200, respectively. 12 Major studies include George Steiner, Antigones: The Antigone Myth in Western Literature, Art and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); S. E. Wilmer and Audrone Zukauskaite, eds., Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Bonnie Honig, Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 13 Erin Mee and Helene Foley, “Mobilizing Antigone,” in Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage, ed. Erin Mee and Helene Foley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1. 14 For a discussion of prominent African adaptations of and responses to Sophocles’s Antigone, see Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson, Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dra- mas of the African Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 15 On May 2, 1988, “Banda” wrote a reply to academics at the University of Edinburgh (his alma mater) who had written asking him to release Jack Mapanje. The letter (probably written by a member of Banda’s inner circle) states that Jack Mapanje had been detained because he had been “using the classroom as a forum for subversive politics”; a copy of this letter is reprinted on page 4 of Peter H. Marsden and Geoffrey V. Davis, eds., Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Human Rights in a ‘Post’-Colonial World (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2004). In the same collection, James Gibbs offers a careful analysis and chronology of the events leading up to Mapanje’s arrest; see James Gibbs, “The Back-Seat Critic and the Front-Line Poet: The Case of Jack Mapanje, Scholar, Teacher, Poet, Detainee, Exile,” 29–50. 16 See Jack Mapanje, From the Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison (London: Heinemann, 1993), 12. 17 The three other mps were Dick Matenje, Twaibu Sangala, and David Chiwanga. 18 Jack Mapanje, And Crocodiles are Hungry at Night, a memoir by Jack Mapanje (Banbury: Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2011), 19 and 29. 19 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: Heinemann, 1986), 19. 20 See Mapanje, From the Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison, 205: “When the mps’ mangled bodies were dumped at their homes, the security officers who brought them ordered the families to bury them at gunpoint. The expected traditional or church burial rites for them were not allowed.” As Francis Moto explains in his discussion of this poem, the reference to “our master drums” in line 7 is to the drumming customarily performed for the dead in the Che-

48 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences wa ceremony of the gule wamkulu (“big dance”); see Francis Moto, The Context and Language Emily of Jack Mapanje’s Poetry (Cape Town: Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society, 2008), Greenwood 102. 21 For the background to all three productions, see Athol Fugard, “Antigone in Africa,” in Amid Our Troubles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy, ed. Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton (London: Methuen, 2002), 128–147. 22 Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, The Island (1972) in Athol Fugard, The Town- ship Plays, ed. Dennis Walder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 227. 23 Sophocles, Antigone, ed. Mark Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 25–26.

145 (2) Spring 2016 49 On Translating Homer’s Iliad

Caroline Alexander

Abstract: This reflective essay explores the considerations facing a translator of Homer’s work; in particular, the considerations famously detailed by the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, which remain the gold standard by which any Homeric translation is measured today. I attempt to walk the reader through the process of rendering a modern translation in accordance with Arnold’s principles.

“I t has more than once been suggested to me that I should translate Homer. That is a task for which I have neither the time nor the courage.”1 So begins Matthew Arnold’s classic essay “On Translating Ho- mer,” the North Star by which all subsequent translators of Homer have steered, and the gold standard by which all translations of Homer are judged. A reader will find Arnold’s principles referenced, directly or indirectly, in the introduction to most modern translations–Richmond Lattimore’s, Rob- ert Fagles’s, Robert Fitzgerald’s, and more recently Peter Green’s. Additionally, Arnold’s discussion of these principles serves as a primer of sorts for poets and writers of any stripe, not only those audacious enough to translate Homer. While the title of his essay implies that it is about translating the works of Homer, Arnold has little to CAROLINE ALEXANDER is the author of The War That Killed Achil- say about the Odyssey, and he dedicates his attention les: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad to the Iliad. The greater and more profound of Ho- and the Trojan War (2009), and the mer’s two epics, the Iliad relates the events of a few international best-sellers The Boun- weeks in the tenth and final year of the long, stale- ty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the mated Trojan War, and by doing so evokes the ten- Bounty (2004) and The Endurance: uousness of human life and the blighting tragedy Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Ex- of all war. At the time of Arnold’s writing in 1861, pedition (1998). She has written for The New Yorker, National Geographic, eighteen complete translations of the Iliad had been and Granta. The Iliad: A New Trans- published in the English language–a remarkably lation by Caroline Alexander was pub- small number given that the Iliad, the oldest of Ho- lished in 2015 by Ecco Press. mer’s two epics, is believed to have been composed

50 around 730–700 bc. Since then, and de- forts that have failed, “On Translating Ho- Caroline spite Arnold’s observation that at the time mer” is nonetheless a master class in such Alexander of his essay the “study of classical litera- poetic essentials as tone, pace, syntax, and ture is probably on the decline,”2 sixty- vocabulary. five new translations have appeared, a fig- Arnold’s assumption–not shared by ev- ure that does not take into account many eryone–is that a translation of Homer’s partial translations and adaptations. work should sound as much as possi- The most recent of those translations is ble like Homer. Arnold, then, precludes my own. And while I concur with Arnold the inspired interpretive approach taken that this effort required much time, I make by Christopher Logue, whose War Music no claim to courage. A better attribute and other works riff off portions of the Il- might be, to use a very Iliadic word, alkês, iad. While I am a great admirer of Logue’s which has connotations of “courage,” but work, as also of Alice Oswald’s more re- is more about “strength as displayed in ac- cent Memorial, which weaves an original tion,” to quote Liddell and Scott’s indis- elegiac poem out of the Iliad’s many de- pensable Greek-English Lexicon–in other scriptions of dying heroes, I concur with words, “fighting-spirit.”3 Undertaking a Arnold: the offering of a complete trans- translation of either of the Homeric poems, lation of the Iliad should strive to replicate but especially the Iliad, which at 15,693 lines the Greek original in as many ways as the of verse is some 3,000 lines longer than English language allows, as Arnold states, the Odyssey, is a lot like swimming a mon- “to reproduce the general effect of Homer.”5 ster workout: lap by lap one toils away, A successful translation, according to Ar- back and forth, and suddenly the end of nold, must uphold four principles, which the workout arrives and thousands of me- are best quoted in full as he declared them: ters–or verses–lie behind. [T]he translator of Homer should above all Matthew Arnold was not only a critic be penetrated by a sense of four qualities and accomplished classicist, but also a ma- of his author:–that he is eminently rapid; jor poet of his own age. He is the author of that he is eminently plain and direct both in such celebrated poems as The Scholar Gypsy, the evolution of his thought and in the ex- Dover Beach, and Balder Dead, the latter of- pression of it, that is, both in his syntax and fering a hint of what an Iliad translation by in his words; that he is eminently plain and him might have sounded like: direct in the substance of his thought, that So on the floor lay Balder dead; and round is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally, that Lay thickly strewn swords, axes, darts, and he is eminently noble.6 spears, Which all the Gods in sport had idly Having stated at the outset that he would thrown . . .4 not translate Homer, Arnold was in the enviable position of being able both to laud Yet as Arnold never did translate Homer, Homeric qualities and to launch wither- we have instead only his essay, which lays ing critiques at those translators who had out the rules for doing the job properly. The failed to realize them, without, so to speak, essay was originally delivered as a series of setting foot on the Trojan field of battle. three separate lectures, a fact that perhaps To revisit Arnold’s principles after having accounts for its easy-going, conversation- made an actual translation is a somewhat al readability. Arnold is not infallible; but more awkward business. But, as Arnold im- in its penetrating insights into what makes plied, translators of Homer are lion-heart- Homer sing and its fearless citation of ef- ed, and I will therefore attempt to explain

145 (2) Spring 2016 51 On Arnold’s principles in the shadow of my Then rose a sound of dread, such as startles Translating own efforts. the sleeping encampments Homer’s Iliad Far in the western prairies or forests that Rapid: The swiftness of the Homeric skirt the Nebraska, line of verse is principally due to the ep- When the wild horses affrighted sweep by ic’s meter–its rhythm–the dactylic hex- with the speed of the whirlwind, ameter: an ancient meter believed to de- Or the loud bellowing herds of buffaloes scend from Indo-European heroic poetic rush to the river.8 7 tradition. The Greek word dactyl means Even in what should be a fast-paced ac- “finger,” and like a finger, the poetic dac- tion scene, the English hexameter moves tyl has one long and two short units: in at a stately pace. Although Arnold advo- this case, syllables. The quantity of a syl- cated the dactylic hexameter as being, in lable, whether it is long or short, is deter- theory, the best meter for translation, he mined by the duration it takes to sound it. was able to find in the whole of English A long-short-short phrase, then, is much literature only one actual example that he like a phrase of whole-half-half notes in commended: the translation of a scant few music. Hex is Greek for “six,” and the dac- lines from book 3 of the Iliad by the Pro- tylic hexameter line accordingly consists vost of Eton, which to the modern ear, at of six such metrical units. In theory, that is, least, ring very flat: since the meter allows substitution of two longs (a spondee) for a dactyl, and the last Known to me well are the faces of all: their unit always has a two-beat ending, usually names I remember; a spondee, but on occasion a trochee (which Two, only two remain, whom I see not is long-short). Because individual lines of among the commanders, verse can obviously take a wide variety of Castor fleet in the car–Polydeukes brave 9 metrical shapes, these substitutions allow with the cestus (Homer Iliad 3.235–237) for great flexibility; this variety saves the In short, while the Iliad’s specific meter Iliad from sing-song monotony. greatly accounts for its epic swiftness, its In Greek, this meter moves very swiftly, literal replication does not work well in as can be discerned even in transliteration English. As a consequence, many metrical of the Iliad’s opening lines: patterns have been attempted by English- Menin a-eide thea, Pele-i-ado Achille-os speaking translators. In modern times, oulomenen, he muri Achai-ois alg’ etheken, Richmond Lattimore used a free six-beat pollas d’iphthimous psukas A-i-di pro-i-apsen line in his fine translation: Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son English metrical patterns, on the oth- Achilleus er hand, are not determined by whether a and its devastation, which put pains syllable is long or short, but by whether it thousandfold upon the Achaians, is stressed or unstressed. The word WON- hurled in their multitude to the house of derful, for example, is a natural dactyl, as is Hades strong souls Po-et-ry. Thus, when the hexameter is rep- of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the licated in English–something infrequent- delicate feasting ly done–it does not produce the same ef- of dogs, of all birds. . . .10 (1.1–5) fect as the Greek, as can be seen in the most commonly cited example of English dac- Robert Fagles, in the introduction to his tylic hexameter, Longfellow’s Evangeline. translation, gives a good account of his

52 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences choice of a loose five- or six-beat line, ex- example the very simple Greek word, much Caroline panded at times to seven beats, and even at used in the Iliad, and my personal neme- Alexander times contracted to three beats,11 a choice sis: therapon. This noun, according to Lid- that mirrors the flexible variety of Homer’s dell and Scott, means “henchman, atten- Greek: dant, companion in arms, squire.” A ther- Rage–Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son apon might be a warrior’s charioteer; he Achilles, attends the warrior and stands below him murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans in rank, but is unquestionably “noble.” countless losses, Translating the word as “attendant” works hurling down to the House of Death so fairly well in a number of situations, but it many sturdy souls, does not work at all for the most signifi- great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies cant of all therapons–Patroclus, who is the carrion, therapon and companion of Achilles (also feasts for the dogs and birds. . . .12 (1.1–5) called Aeacides, or “descendant of Aea- cus”). This is seen in book 17, when the In the footsteps of Fagles, I similarly Achaeans wage a desperate fight over the chose a varied beat, allowing the English body of Patroclus, who has been slain by to contract or surge as occasion and nat- Hector: ural wording demands, but, like Fagles, But for the others the great strife of hard always with an eye on where the stressed contention rose beats fall: the whole day long; and always, relentlessly, Wrath–sing, goddess, the ruinous wrath of the sweat of toil Peleus’ son Achilles, stained the knees and shins and feet of that inflicted woes without number upon each man under him, the Achaeans, and the hands and eyes of those who hurled forth to Hades many strong souls of fought warriors about the noble therapon of swift-footed and rendered their bodies prey for the dogs, Aeacides. (17.384–388) for all birds. . . .13 (1.1–5) About the noble attendant of swift-footed Meter is not the only feature determin- Aeacides? In this momentous context the ing how rapidly a line flows. The sound word is lightweight and inconsequential. and very meaning of a word are also con- Comrade in arms is a mouthful, and also, siderations. Take, for example, Athena’s strictly speaking, not quite correct. Lieuten- dash to Earth from Olympus in book 4: ant? But this introduces a modern military As when the son of devious Cronus hurls sensibility that is not balanced by compa- forth a star, rable military-like terminology elsewhere a glittering portent to sailors or vast army in the poem. Squire is the exact and appro- of men, priate term. But to drop this word–more from which shards of fire stream in evocative of Camelot–into the Bronze Age multitude (4.75–77) battle would produce the dragging sea- anchor effect. The line would slow because Swift words like hurls and streams, even the reader would do a double-take to ac- shards, help speed the lines in this flashing commodate it. Eventually I settled for hench- scene. man (as did Lattimore; Fagles used aide-in- Conversely, however, a single word can arms), recognizing it as a tough, muscular also drag a line like a sea-anchor. Take for word, that conjures a right-hand man, and

145 (2) Spring 2016 53 On not a servant. The primary meaning of [A]s flakes of snow pour down in drifts Translating henchman, according to the oed, is “a on a winter’s day, when all-devising Zeus Homer’s Iliad faithful supporter or assistant,” while its begins secondary meaning is “squire or page at- to snow, showing to mankind these the tending a prince or nobleman.” The neg- shafts of his artillery, ative aspect of this term is, of course, that and hushing the winds to sleep, he heaps it has acquired connotations of being “a the snow steadily, so that it shrouds faithful supporter” in “criminal or dis- the heights of high mountains and peaks honest activities.”14 But, as I rationalized, of cliffs, few warriors in this war had clean hands. and blossoming lowlands and the rich worked-lands of men; Plain and direct: Homer, Arnold states, and the snow drifts the bays and beaches is plain and direct in syntax and choice of of the gray salt sea, words; and plain and direct in his matter and the sea swell splashing it is stilled; and and ideas. These principles are well dem- all else onstrated by an example that is neither is cloaked from above, when the snows of plain nor direct, Pindar’s First Olympian Zeus weigh down; Ode, composed in 476 bc: just so did the stones fly thick from both Water is best, sides. (Homer Iliad 12.278–287) while gold gleams like blazing fire in the Like Pindar, Homer deploys a cascade of night, images, but in his case each is like a brush- brightest amid a rich man’s wealth; stroke applied to the great panoramic scene. but, my heart, if it is of the games that you The cumulative result is a scene of great wish to sing, power, but evoked through plain, uncon- look no further than the sun: as there is no voluted words and phrases. star Arnold, a master of disparagement, fur- that shines with more warmth by day from ther illustrated Homer’s plain and straight- a clear sky, forward style by dissecting a translation so we can speak of no greater contest than that failed to honor these traits: namely, Olympia.15 (Pindar Olympian I 1–7) Alexander Pope’s celebrated translation of the Iliad, published between 1715 and 1720, The marvelous tumble of ideas, the lur- rendered in heroic rhymed couplet (and ing-in of the reader through a cascade of famously assessed by the classicist Rich- images to we know not where, is charac- ard Bentley as “a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, teristic of modern, stream-of-conscious but you must not call it Homer”).16 De- poetry. Dazzling and sophisticated, Pin- claring it “very far from my wish to hold dar is neither simple nor direct in either Pope up to ridicule,” Arnold nonetheless style or ideas. cited for condemnation a famous passage By contrast, the language of Homer, even from book 8, in which the watch-fires of in his most high-flying similes, is straight- the Trojan enemy appear like stars on the forward; and it is with plain vocabulary dark plain: and clean, driving phrases that he conjures what appear to be closely observed scenes. The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight, Consider book 12, in which the barrage Eye the blue vault, and bless the useful light. of stones thrown by the opposing Greek So many flames before proud Ilion blaze, and Trojan armies are compared to heavy And lighten glimmering Xanthus with snowfall: their rays.

54 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences The long reflections of the distant fires This raises one of the most difficult ques- Caroline Gleam on the walls, and tremble on the tions for a translator: should a translation Alexander spires. reflect this artifice? When Arnold wrote A thousand piles the dusky horrors gild, his essay, Francis Newman, a scholar and And shoot a shady lustre o’er the field. linguist, had recently published a transla- Full fifty guards each flaming pile attend, tion that consciously strove to evoke this Whose umber’d arms, by fits, thick flashes artificiality. Given that “the entire dialect send: of Homer [is] essentially archaic,” New- Loud neigh the coursers o’er their heaps man wrote, “that of a translator ought to be of corn, as much Saxo-Norman as possible.” Con- And ardent warriors wait the rising morn.17 sequently, his translation was prefaced by (8.697–708) a glossary of unfamiliar English terms like 18 Pope, as Arnold puts it, composes with beeve, beknow, gramesome, and sithence. his eye on his style; Homer composes with Is the translator’s duty to Homer’s audi- his eye on the object before him. The ob- ence, or to his own? The truth is we have no jects of Homer’s attention, then, whether idea of how Homer’s audience understood “moral or material,” in Arnold’s words, are the poems, or even who his audience might truly drawn; they are authentic, and their have been. And regardless of who made up effectiveness derives from the fact that one the audience, how much did the language believes them. Here is the same passage of his poem, as opposed to its compel- from book 8, ungilded and rendered with ling cast of characters and story, matter to what I hope Arnold would deem its Homer- them? ic simplicity: The Iliad is highly respectful of the past. The epic describes a number of the tools of and all the stars are seen, and the shepherd’s war–a silver-studded sword, a body-length heart rejoices, shield, a boar-tusk helmet–that archaeol- so between the ships and streams of Xanthos ogy has shown belonged to the Mycenaean in such multitude shone the watchfires of Bronze Age, a period predating the com- the Trojans’ burning, before Ilion. position of the poem by at least five cen- A thousand fires were burning on the turies. Presumably Homer’s audience rel- plain, and by each one ished these descriptions of long-ago heir- sat fifty men in the glow of fire’s loom objects. Did they similarly relish the gleaming, pseudo–Bronze Age language? It seems and the horses munched their white barley reasonable to believe that they did; but it is and their grain unclear where that leaves the modern En- standing beside their chariots as they await- glish translator. Would a twenty-first-cen- ed Dawn on her fair throne. (8.555–565) tury Iliad really be better, be truer to Homer, Because Homer is so straightforward in if it were written in Elizabethan English? thought, in syntax, and in language, his History gives us an example by which to Greek, relative to that of other authors’, judge: George Chapman’s landmark trans- is not difficult to read. This is despite the lation, published between 1603 and 1616, fact that his language is, in fact, highly arti- the first ever in English (and the inspiration ficial, the result of a long oral tradition that for Keats’s sonnet On First Looking into Chap- acrued its diction and syntactical forms man’s Homer). Chapman’s rendering of the from different eras and dialects. No people watch-fire scene of book 8 is as follows: spoke “Homeric Greek”; Homer’s Greek And all the signes in heaven are seene that is a poetic invention. glad the shepheard’s hart;

145 (2) Spring 2016 55 On So many fires disclosede their beames, counterparts, I believe, are those given in Translating made by the Troyan part, a throwaway line in one of Isak Dineson’s Homer’s Iliad Before the face of Ilion and her bright letters, in which she includes Homer with turrets show’d. such phenomena as “the sea, the moun- A thousand courts of guard kept fires, and tains and elephants.”23 Homer, like moun- every guard allow’d tains and elephants, is undoubtedly grand, Fiftie stout men, by whom their horse eate but never grandiose. oates and hard white corne, What Arnold means by nobility seems And all did wishfully expect the silver- to be a fusion of two aspects of the word as throned morne.19 defined, again, by theoed : the possession of “high moral principles,” as well as being My regard for Chapman translation is 24 very high, but I would not recommend it to “impressive” and “magnificent.” All of a modern general reader as the best means this the Iliad certainly is. Yet these “noble” of “hearing” Homer. The distinctive Eliz- attributes entirely skirt the essence of the Il- abethan style and language is, in fact, far iad. The Iliad’s greatness does not rest upon less suited to Homer’s plainspoken direct- such lightweight features as good taste, or ness than is modern English. As Arnold lordly high-mindedness, or the fact, as Ar- noted: “between Chapman and Homer nold cites, that “prosaic subjects” such as there is interposed the mist of fancifulness dressing, feasting, and equipping chariots of the Elizabethan age.”20 Translations, it are rendered in an elevated manner. The Il- turns out, can become dated. A humbling iad is great not because it is noble, but be- thought: translations are for their own cause it is epic, meaning “grand or heroic time, and only Homer is forever. in scale,” like the sea, elephants, and mountains. This sense of epic, of something momentous and profound, burns through Ho- oble: The fact that such “perfect plain- N mer’s rapid, plain, and direct style. Almost ness and directness” can yield an epic poem any random scene will prove this, as when of great nobility is one of the wonders of Achilles, denouncing Agamemnon, with- Homer’s craft, and is, according to Ar- draws from the war: nold, “what makes translators despair.”21 And on this point, and indeed on the qual- But I say openly to you, and I swear a great ity of nobility in general, I respectfully part oath to it– company with Arnold. yes, by this scepter, that never again will put By nobility, Arnold explains, he means forth leaves and shoots that Homer “works as entirely in the when once it has left behind its stump in grand style, he is as grandiose, as Phidias, the mountains, or Dante, or Michael Angelo.”22 Arnold’s nor will it flourish again, since the bronze choice of artists for comparison strikes me axe has stripped it round, as very odd. All, possibly, could be called leaf and bark; and now in turn the sons of noble, but only Michelangelo–and only the Achaeans in some works–could be called Homeric. busy with justice carry it around in their Odder still is the attribute grandiose, if we hands, they who take the word to mean, as the oed states, safeguard the ordinances of Zeus–this “very large or ambitious, especially in a will be my great oath: way which is intended to impress.” Gran- some day a yearning for Achilles will come diose is the opposite of unselfconscious- upon the sons of the Achaeans, ness, a quality that greatly contributes to every man; then nothing will save you, Homer’s plain and direct style. More apt for all your grief,

56 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences when at the hands of man-slaying Hector but the child turned away, back to the Caroline dying men fall in their multitude; and you breast of his fine-belted nurse, Alexander will rip the heart within you, crying, frightened at the sight of his own raging that you paid no honour to the best father, of the Achaeans. (1.233–244) struck with terror seeing the bronze Or when Zeus gives his pledge to Achil- helmet and crest of horsehair, les’s mother Thetis that he will ensure the nodding dreadfully, as he thought, from honor of her son: the topmost of the helmet. They burst out laughing, his dear father “Come, I will bow my head for you, so that and lady mother. you may be convinced; At once shining Hector lifted the helmet for among immortals this is the greatest from his head, testament of my determination; for not re- and placed it, gleaming, on the earth; vocable, nor false, then he rocked his beloved son in his arms nor unfulfilled is anything to which I have and kissed him, bowed my head.” and prayed aloud to Zeus and to the other The son of Cronus spoke, and nodded gods. (6.466–475) with his blue-black brows, the ambrosial mane of the lord god swept Tone is everything. One can dissect the forward disparate elements of Homer’s craft, but from his immortal head; and he shook his genius lies in the unfolding of his story great Olympus. (1.523–529) in the white-hot tone of the inspired speaker, forging simple language into scenes of The epic tone burns through scenes of momentous import so that, like the cries quiet tenderness, as when Hector takes of men on the field of battle, his story his leave, for the last time, from his wife seems to reach to the brazen sky. This, the Andromache and young son: epic voice of Homer, is what transformed So speaking shining Hector reached out for an oft-told tale of a distant war into the his son; sublime and devastating evocation of War, and all its mortal tragedy.

endnotes 1 Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer: Three Lectures Given at Oxford (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861), 1. 2 Ibid. 3 Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958). 4 Matthew Arnold, Balder Dead, opening lines. 5 Arnold, On Translating Homer, Lecture II, 31 6 Ibid., Lecture I, 9f. 7 On the Vedic cognates, see Gregory Nagy, Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 229–261. For a succinct overview of the different theories about the origin of the hexameter, see Richard Janko, The Iliad: A Commentary– Volume IV: Books 13–16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 9.

145 (2) Spring 2016 57 On 8 Henry W. Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (Boston: William Ticknor, 1847), verses Translating 630–633. Homer’s 9 Iliad Arnold, On Translating Homer, Lecture III, 77f. For comparison, my rendering of the verses follows: I see them all now, the rest of the dark-eyed Achaeans, those I know well and could name– but I cannot see the two marshals of the people, Castor, breaker of horses, and the skilful boxer Polydeukes. 10 Richmond Lattimore, trans., The Iliad of Homer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 11 Robert Fagles, trans., Homer: The Iliad (New York: Viking, 1990), xi. 12 Ibid. 13 Unless otherwise noted, this and subsequent translations from Caroline Alexander, trans., The Iliad: A New Translation by Caroline Alexander (New York: Ecco Press, 2015). 14 John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, eds., The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clar- endon Press, 1989). 15 Anthony Verity, trans., Pindar: The Complete Odes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3. 16 Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland: And a Criticism on Their Works (Dublin: Pat. Wogan, Old-Bridge, 1804), 568. 17 Alexander Pope, trans., The Iliad of Homer (London; New York: Cassell and Company, 1909), 167. 18 F. W. Newman, trans., The Iliad of Homer (London: Walton and Maberly, 1856), vi; glossary terms at xxiff. 19 George Chapman, trans., The Iliad (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press: 1998), 180. 20 Arnold, On Translating Homer, Lecture I, 11. 21 Ibid., 29. 22 Ibid. 23 Isak Dinesen, Letters from Africa, 1914–1931, trans. Anne Born, ed. Frans Lasson (Chicago: Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1984). 24 Simpson and Weiner, eds., The Oxford English Dictionary.

58 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Philosophy & Its Classical Past

Phillip Mitsis

Abstract: The notion that philosophers can abandon their history and set their arguments on new foundations has a long history. One strain of recent philosophy that traces its roots to Frege has been particularly confident in this regard, and its rejection of a classical past has had widespread influences on the study of ancient philosophy over the past several decades. With the waning of this recent paradigm, however, the possibility of philosophical engagement between the old and new has again led to significant work in several areas of philosophy. I concentrate on one of these, the philosophy of death, and also ask whether ancient philosophy might furnish models that enable contemporary philosophers to rise above their specialisms and address crucial issues in a public discourse, allowing for both mutual intelligibility and criticism.

If you want a future, darling, why don’t you get a past? –Cole Porter

Back in the 1970s, there was a story in circulation about a newly minted ancient philosopher being introduced to an American philosopher of note, who PHILLIP MITSIS is the Alexander asked what area of philosophy the younger man S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic was interested in. When he replied “ancient philos- Culture and Civilization at New ophy,” the response he reputedly received was “An- York University, Senior Affiliated cient philosophy. Really? You mean like Frege?” Professor of Philosophy and Lit- I have heard so many versions of this story with erature at New York University so many different names attached to its protago- Abu Dhabi, and Academic Director nists that it is hard not to be skeptical about its ve- of the American Institute of Ver- di Studies. He is the editor of Al- racity. Yet, like the opening confrontations of many lusion, Authority, and Truth: Critical a Platonic dialogue, this bit of probable fiction neat- Perspectives on Greek Poetic and Rhetor- ly encapsulates a set of deeper questions. I remem- ical Praxis (with Christos Tsagalis, ber that I had readied my own cheeky retort to such 2010), Word Play and Power Play in barbs, just in case: “Oh God no, nothing so vulner- Roman Poetry (with Ioannis Ziogas, able to a few simple paradoxes as the Grundgesetze. I 2016), and The Oxford Handbook of am interested in difficult and complexPHIL-O-SO- Epicureanism (forthcoming). His recent book L’Éthique d’Épicure (2014) PHERS like Aristotle and Chrysippus,” throwing in offers a detailed discussion of Epi- the latter, instead of the more obvious Plato, because curean views of death and also the it was unlikely that any nonspecialist would know swerve. much about ancient Stoicism; and that would afford

59 Philosophy & me the opportunity to toss around a few tory, especially since most of them were Its Classical choice tidbits about the origins of propo- themselves busy studying and reviving ar- Past sitional logic. But, of course, both the dis- guments from the ancient Epicureans, Sto- ingenuous put-down and my own overly ics, and Skeptics.2 So, too, it often goes un- defensive imaginary retort spoke to an an- noticed that in the Discourse on the Method xiety then present in our field, as well as (1637), Descartes himself characterizes his to a series of more long-standing questions now famous autobiographical tale of soli- about the relation of philosophy to its past. tary, original philosophical discovery as a At the time, our mythical supercilious “fable” that can act as a useful paradigm;3 philosopher, even if a little fuzzy on the pre- a fable that was itself not only rather com- cise historical details, hardly would have monplace at the time, but that also had been alone in his conviction that Frege had been current since at least the days of Ga- set a distinctly new path for philosophy len.4 Moreover, the Cartesian turn toward from which there was no looking back–a epistemology still carried with it the bag- path, it is probably safe to infer, he would gage of a long and complicated philosoph- have thought wound through Bertrand ical prehistory, however dimly felt or un- Russell and G. E. Moore before reaching derstood, that included, at the very least, an early peak in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus the rediscovery of the writings of an an- Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and then con- cient Skeptic, Sextus Empiricus, and the tinuing on to such august contemporaries influence of that great worshipper of an- as Quine, Sellars, and Dummett. However tiquity, Montaigne, with his slogan of Que quaint this kind of story has come to look sais-je? (literally, “what do I know?”). in retrospect, both as history and in its own This time around, however, the threat to right,1 and however parochial, omitting the continued relevance of historical phi- so-called Continental philosophy and the losophers posed by Frege appeared more eclectic nature of most American depart- clear-cut. Not only were many of the pro- ments at the time, a general confidence ponents of the new “analytic” philosophy about casting away the chains of history more untouched by ancient paradigms than and approaching central philosophical Descartes and his contemporaries, but they questions in a way that was utterly con- also were operating with a philosophical temporary was certainly in the air. toolbox far more powerful and systematic Of course, such insouciance toward the than the few rather lacunose methodolog- past was by no means entirely new in the ical procedures that Descartes had sketched history of philosophy, at least in the text- out. New hard-hitting logical tools were book accounts. A long tradition of teach- being developed and applied to language ing a small selection of particular texts in unprecedented ways. Ancient Greek and (or passages) had gradually led to a corre- Roman philosophy, on the other hand, had sponding view of Descartes as an earlier never undergone a corresponding “lin- founder de novo of so-called modern phi- guistic turn” of the sort that was now so losophy: “modern” because of its meth- profoundly transforming the nature of phil- odological and metaphysical turn to- osophical methods and arguments, nor did ward the inner self and the primacy it be- it ever develop something called “the phi- stowed on epistemology. To be sure, none losophy of language” as a significant dis- of Descartes’s contemporaries would ever cipline in its own right. Nor, importantly, have thought that he had done something did philosophers in antiquity believe that so revolutionary that it would relegate an- an inquiry into language could serve as the cient philosophers to the dustbin of his- exclusive point of entry into philosophical

60 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences problems–problems that could find their haps, the very first functionalist–well, Phillip solutions only by reforming ordinary lan- kind of. Mitsis guage or by using tools of logical analysis Perhaps the most visible, articulate, and to clarify its structure. Thus, a radical part- flattering position for the role of ancient ing of the ways between the old and new philosophy, however, was staked out by appeared unavoidable. Bernard Williams. This granted ancient philosophy the considerable advantage of Not surprisingly, one consequence of being defended by someone who in his these larger developments is that, over de- own right was among the most respected cades, it led to much handwringing in our and influential of contemporary philos- field and professional camps were duly ophers. Williams argued that philosophy formed, some of them rather extreme. One not only is not like science, but that it is influential group held that ancient philos- inescapably historical, and that practic- ophers should just crawl back into their ing historical philosophy properly is very scholarly shells, accept the reality that con- much an instance of doing philosophy, of- temporary and ancient philosophy were in- ten of the best sort. The last thing that phi- deed separate enterprises, and be content losophy needs is to recruit more special- to approach Plato and Aristotle in much ized white-coat wannabes unequipped to the same way one might an ancient med- do real science, while losing touch with the ical text. We might all agree, for instance, rest of their discipline, and with their cul- that On the Sacred Disease is a text eminent- ture and history generally. So, for instance, ly worthy of historical study, but surely we in the face of what he took to be the bor- would not go to Hippocrates for technical ing and empty moral theorizing of the day, advice on how to treat a lymphoma of the Williams went about mining deeply rele- spleen. Why then should anyone interested vant philosophical views, even in figures in mind and brain relations be expected to like Homer. This is because, under the in- turn to, say, Plato’s Phaedo? fluence of Nietzsche, he found in the Greeks At Oxford, by way of contrast, philoso- a repository of moral views that reflect the phy had never been a field of study separate way we are likely to think about morality from classics, and some prominent philos- before falling prey to the mutual theoret- ophers, like Gilbert Ryle, duly took note of ical distortions of consequentialism and earlier versions of current concerns that Kant. What was refreshingly new about could be found in the ancients. Accord- old philosophers was their ability to take ingly, despite the fact that the study of phi- on real moral dilemmas and the kinds of losophy at Oxford, as it now proudly pro- fraught questions about friendship, love, claims on its website, progressively freed death, and moral luck that had fallen out itself institutionally from its “clerical and of contemporary moral theorizing. As he classical” roots, some scholars of ancient trenchantly put it, contemporary moral philosophy managed to continue Ryle’s philosophy had found “an original way of tack of isolating ancient arguments that being boring . . . by not discussing moral is- adumbrated modern positions, thereby sues at all.”5 hoping to retain a voice, however muted, Regrettably, however, there was one in current discussions. Here the argument problem that upon his death Williams be- was that if one looks carefully enough at, queathed to those wishing to do the histo- say, Aristotle’s De Anima, one might just ry of philosophy philosophically, at least make out how he, too, was a functionalist by his lights. Imagine that Mozart, after in the philosophy of mind; indeed, per- telling you how boring he finds the music

145 (2) Spring 2016 61 Philosophy & of von Dittersdorf and Mysliveček, hears wrote next to nothing, trounced Wittgen- Its Classical some Bach and exclaims: “Now there is stein and Frege. So I think today’s young Past music from which a man can learn some- ancient philosophers, when introduced to thing.” He then sits down and pens what a supercilious colleague, are in the enviable comes to be known as the Adagio and position of responding: “Frege? No, I am Fugue K. 546, and urges you to study the afraid I have to limit myself to top-five phi- music of Bach because it can be a fruit- losophers. Maybe someday if I have time to ful and inspirational source for your own work my way down the list, I’ll give anoth- compositions. Fine advice, perhaps, if you, er look at my undergraduate notes on the too, are another composer like Mozart. historical influence of theBegriffsschrift .” Fine, too, in the case of ancient philoso- But on a more serious note, there does phy, if you are another philosopher of Wil- seem to be a growing sense, at least among liams’s caliber. At the moment, however, younger colleagues, that they can get on it still remains to be seen whether some fu- with interesting work without having Frege ture Bernard Williams will be able to take looking over their shoulder, and that they up the mantle of doing the kind of history do not necessarily have to formalize an ar- of ancient philosophy that can be regard- gument to clarify it or to say something ed by all, in the first instance, as old phi- philosophically significant. Cynics may at- losophy that is new.6 tribute these changes to a general sense As we bide our time, what are some of that, as in literary studies, many have start- the rest of us von Dittersdorfs doing? At ed to feel that they are losing their way. So a general level, the current study of an- perhaps one reason so many philosophers cient philosophy has moved beyond many have given in to more laissez-faire attitudes of those earlier worries about being intel- is that the love affair with the linguistic lectually shelved with Hippocrates. Wil- turn is slowly going cold. That is, it is not liams’s influence has played a role, but so much that people no longer dismiss his- there also has been a gradual waning of the torical philosophers because they harbor dominance of linguistic paradigms along hopes of discovering new creative philo- with a growing movement toward the sophical possibilities, but only because a primacy of philosophy of mind and oth- general disenchantment has given way to er philosophically productive notions of a certain wistful nostalgia and a longing, mental representation. Many of these are perhaps, for a time when individual philos- more hospitable to ancient arguments. ophers were considered important, even For what it is worth, a recent poll conduct- beyond their professional blogs. ed by Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog– Or it might be that as each specialism the main blog for philosophers–charted becomes more entrenched and develops attitudes toward various specialties. More an increasingly technical and complex ap- than twelve hundred voters rated the his- paratus, the texts of the past offer a place tory of philosophy as more central to the where one can again think about some of study of philosophy than the philosophy of the traditional central issues of philoso- language.7 Of course, the history of philos- phy in a more synthetic way. Ancient phi- ophy is rather broad, and it does not mean losophers typically think in larger systems, that all those voting were thinking of an- and it may be, for example, that Aristotle cient philosophers. But in another Leiter is wrong to believe that he can explain ev- poll ranking the most important philoso- erything in the world, even the soul, by phers of all time, Plato edged out Aristot- means of his form/matter distinction. Yet, le for the top spot, and even Socrates, who it is hard not to admire, even wistfully, his

62 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences intellectual courage and grandness of am- fundamental work of political and moral Phillip bition in comparison with that of the col- philosophy of the last century, John Raw- Mitsis league down the hall who says, “I just do ls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), and compare it metaphysics. I couldn’t possibly have any- to other central texts in the tradition from thing to say about how that relates to the Thucydides to Hobbes, one striking fea- philosophy of mind.” In ancient texts one ture would be how far the subject of death can again try to see the forest for the trees, has dropped out of sight, along with the especially since philosophical forests are notion that trying to understand the na- not always on offer at the moment. ture of death and the fears it can generate is a fundamental requirement for any sys- Whatever the truth of such suppositions, tematic ethical or political theory. Mor- those studying ancient philosophy these al theorists–the sort that Williams char- days do seem, on the one hand, less self- acterized as empty and boring–typically consciously desperate for an interface with discussed topics like rational deliberation contemporary work, yet on the other, more and life plans, and the formation of social likely to fall upon just such a connection, contracts in a way that gave scant notice in part, perhaps, because the movement to the fact that we are mortal and that our away from earlier more narrowly linguis- attitudes toward death may seep into many tic paradigms is again starting to blur the of our moral and political opinions and divide between ancient and contemporary decisions. The entry on death in the Ency- methods and concerns. Rather than trying clopedia of Philosophy (1967), for instance, to catalog these many possibilities, howev- summarized: “Most Anglo-American an- er, it might be more useful to look at one sa- alytic philosophers probably regard the lient case of a major creative engagement paucity of materials on death as evidence between the old and new in greater detail. of the subject’s resistance to serious phil- In so doing, I will pass by important work osophical inquiry,” adding the caveat that that continues to be done in, among oth- the subject may be “more adequately dealt er areas, the philosophy of love and friend- with by psychologists and social scien- ship,8 metaphysical essentialism and an- tists.”13 cient modal logic,9 ancient cosmopolitan- Hobbes, on the other hand, thought that ism,10 aesthetics,11 and, of course, virtue the fear of death was an important topic ethics. The latter probably remains the most for philosophers because it is crucial in the visible area, though there has been consid- formation of societies; unless agents feared erable pushback from scholars about how death, it would be hard to see why they much the ancients actually subscribed to might give up their desire for power over the doctrines about virtue and morality others in exchange for what they want that they have been credited with originat- most of all: their self-preservation. Thucy- ing.12 I want to focus, rather, on the recent dides had a more grim view about the pos- resurgence of contemporary philosophical sibilities of civil society: he thought that work on death, since, by chance, it also af- by falling into factions, individuals would fords the opportunity to raise a more gen- willingly sacrifice not only their interests, eral question about philosophers today and but even their lives on account of shared their audience. hatred, desire for revenge, or partisan po- The notion that old views of death are new litical goals. But, in any case, generations may strike the lay ear as odd; what, after of philosophers had thought it important all, could be new about death? Yet, if one to address this particular disagreement as were to read what is often taken to be the part of “serious philosophical inquiry.”

145 (2) Spring 2016 63 Philosophy & Anyone who reads ancient philosoph- being the case, it is a mistake to think, he in- Its Classical ical texts, and those influenced by them sists, that we can be harmed by death. When Past (like Hobbes), can hardly fail to be struck we are dead we cannot be harmed, since not only by the way that questions about we do not exist. When we are alive, death death are central components of ancient does not harm us, since we are alive. If one philosophical discussions, but also by the thinks that our death causes us harm, the fact that almost all those philosophers (ex- philosophical challenge is to answer the cept, with some qualifications, Aristotle) basic kinds of questions one can ask about think that death is not an evil and that it any harm: Who was harmed? When did should not be feared, since it cannot harm the harm occur? Of what did the harm a good person. Many contemporary phi- consist? This turns out to be extremely losophers who have become interested in difficult. One initially might think, for in- the topic disagree, and this disagreement stance, that I am the one harmed by my has sparked a fruitful debate between the death. But if I do not exist after my death, old and new. how can I be harmed? If I persist in think- Indeed, the philosophy of death has re- ing, however, that I am harmed by my death, cently become an important new area of it may be because I believe that I somehow analysis that cuts across many subdisci- will be deprived of something when I am plines of philosophy, implicated in a host of dead. But how can something that does not questions about personal identity, the na- exist suffer deprivation? And how could a ture of time, and the wrongness of killing deprivation in the future, even if we were to (including capital punishment, abortion, concede that death is a future deprivation, killing animals for food, and warfare). The harm me now without appealing to an un- extent and sophistication of these argu- helpful notion of backward causation? ments about the nature of death and wheth- In a paper that has become a touchstone er it harms us is reflected in a slew of new for subsequent work, Thomas Nagel wran- positions owning precise but forbidding gled with these Epicurean arguments in names: actualist comparativism, eternalism, order to defend his claim that if there were subsequentism, concurrentism, and priorism, to “no limit to the amount of life that it would list a few. In an important sense, these po- be good to have, it may be that a bad end sitions have all been developed in an at- is in store for all of us.”15 On the other tempt to address a few deceptively simple hand, Bernard Williams defended an op- arguments formulated by the ancient Epi- posing Epicurean argument: Lucretius’s cureans, with some defending Epicurus, belief that we should be horrified by the and others thinking him wrong (although idea of immortality as defined by tradi- disagreeing about how exactly he is wrong). tional religion, Plato, and others.16 To Lu- But it is no exaggeration to say that it was cretius, immortality would be unbearably by engaging with these Epicurean argu- tedious. Sure, one might be able to stay ments that an important new area of con- fresh for the first several million years of temporary philosophy has taken root, giv- teaching intro logic, for instance, but eter- ing rise to classes, graduate seminars, and nity is a very long time; it might start to a steady stream of publications.14 get a little stale. Also, our personal identity tends to change a bit over time. I am What are some of these arguments and different from what I was in my junior high why have they been so generative? Epi- days (perhaps not different enough for curus begins with the assumption that up- my wife); but after billions of years, is it on our death we will be annihilated. That plausible to think I will remain recogniz-

64 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences ably myself, and if not, does it then make of it? Very few, I imagine. Many more in- Phillip sense to talk about my immortality? stead will have come across literary critic Mitsis David Hume found consoling, though Stephen Greenblatt’s recent Pulitzer Prize– Nabokov found terrifying, another argu- winning bestseller about Lucretius: The ment from the Epicurean arsenal: the so- Swerve: How the World Became Modern.17 In- called symmetry argument. We normal- deed, many of us obscurely laboring away ly do not spend much time fretting about on Lucretius for the past several decades our prevital existence before we were con- suddenly became noticed with a new received. This is because, we did not yet ex- spect by our comparative literature col- ist. If our future death is a relevantly simi- leagues, and for that puffing up of our lar state of nothingness, why then should chests we owe a debt of thanks. we worry about death any more than we Greenblatt’s book is a gripping histori- worry about our prevital nonexistence? cal thriller populated by brave new intel- Nabokov, however, in Speak, Memory (1951) lectuals who–inspired by the rediscovery describes a young chronophobe looking at and transmission of Lucretius’s De Rerum family movies before his birth and expe- Natura during the Italian Renaissance– riencing panic at the thought that life had try to save the world from pleasure-hating been going on earlier without him. He is monks by means of a heady and modern terrified at seeing in these movies a brand mixture of materialism, sex, and quan- new baby carriage, “with the smug, en- tum mechanics. It is undoubtedly a narra- croaching air of a coffin,” empty on the tive tour de force. Of course, one does not porch, awaiting his birth as if “in the re- have to be Bruno Latour to be vaguely sus- verse course of events, his very bones had picious of a tale in which our modernity disintegrated.” Again, different intuitions depended on a single idea in a single text, can be explained and defended here– especially since anyone familiar with the Nabokov’s chronophobe might not have history of Epicureanism knows that there straight all his thoughts about the meta- were many other avenues of transmission physical grounds of his identity–but again for these ideas, and that even confident our conclusions here will depend on a host Epicureans, like Pierre Gassendi, reject- of intertwining views about personal iden- ed the swerve as nonsensical. So, as much tity, and our attitudes toward past and fu- as I wish it were true, I am afraid I remain ture experiences (and nonexperiences, like unpersuaded that the swerve made the death). To be sure, these Epicurean argu- world “modern,” whatever that means. ments are extractable from their ancient But my purpose here is not to be polem- context as a set of difficult individual puz- ical. I want to conclude with a question zles. But those who, in the spirit of Wil- that Greenblatt’s book and its provoca- liams, are paying closer attention to their tive title raise about the relation of philos- original context are starting to discover a ophy to its audience, old and new. Gide- set of wider implications for our concep- on Rosen, a philosopher at Princeton, has tions of death and the ancient claim that recently made the claim that, despite all philosophy is a form of thanatology. the current soul searching about the humanities, things are actually just fine. The The detailed work surrounding these ques- problem is that humanists naturally have a tions can be fascinating and deeply stimu- tough time reaching a wider public because lating to academics and students alike. Yet, the ideas they deal with are too compli- how many people, even among the readers cated to be encapsulated in the sort of bul- of this journal, are likely to be aware of any let points and simple narratives that the

145 (2) Spring 2016 65 Philosophy & lay person comfortably digests. For Rosen, culture has been of a more general charac- Its Classical the problem is essentially one of bad press ter.”18 Venn, who won a Latin declamation Past coupled with an intellectually inert pub- prize at Caius College, confided in his diary lic. If their lids get heavy when faced with that he wished that he had learned to speak detailed arguments about actualist com- with the clarity of his models. His great parativism, and if they prefer a memora- model, of course, was Cicero, as he had ble but misleading catchphrase about the been for Locke, Hume, and generations of swerve making us modern, that is their philosophers until, as proudly proclaimed fault and not ours. in today’s Oxford, they were able to free I wonder, however, if the problem really themselves from their classical roots. only goes in one direction. Especially with In a way perhaps not untimely, there respect to today’s philosophers, I wonder has been a recent resurgence of interest whether, as they fall further into jargon- (among those working in ancient philos- filled specialisms, they not only are forfeit- ophy) in Roman philosophers, especial- ing an ability to communicate their ideas ly Cicero and Seneca. Scholars are trying to the public, to colleagues in other depart- to understand how Roman philosophers ments, and even to their own colleagues, managed to fashion a public discourse that but also are risking the loss of something was not only far from being “cramped” in essential to philosophy itself. John Venn, Venn’s sense, but that was also able to ad- the greatest English logician before Rus- dress the most pressing challenges of the sell, makes this point in The Logic of Chance day, all the while armed with philosophy’s (1866), a book that philosophers should most technical arguments.19 As we face read not solely, as now happens occasion- our own greatest challenges–the environ- ally, for its importance in the history of the ment, questions of equality and justice, frequency interpretation of probability, but our relations to animals, gender–we can even more for its exemplary clarity and perhaps hold on to the hope that ancient directness of expression, its desire to en- philosophers will not only continue to be gage others, and its genuinely philosophi- of use in presenting us with issues that are cal spirit: “No science can safely be aban- not empty and boring, but also that the doned entirely to its own devotees. Its de- philosophers of old might again teach to- tails of course can only be studied by those day’s tongue-tied philosophers to begin to who make it their special occupation, find a voice that can speak to and, in turn, but its general principles are sure to be be criticized by “those whose main culture cramped if it is not exposed occasionally has been of a more general character.” to the free criticism of those whose main

endnotes Author’s Note: I wish to thank Iakovos Vasiliou, Brad Inwood, Dale Jamieson, Tony Long, David Konstan, Matthew Santirocco, and Kevin Davis for their help. 1 See Carl E. Schorske, “The New Rigorism in the Human Sciences, 1940–1960,” Dædalus 126 (1) (Winter 1997): 289–310. 2 The best account of the Hellenistic philosophers remains A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Sto- ics, Epicureans, Sceptics (New York; London: Gerald Duckworth and Co. and Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974).

66 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 3 Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, eds., Oeuvres de Descartes, vol. 1 (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1897; Phillip reprinted Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1996), 4. Mitsis 4 See Stephen Menn, “The Discourse on the Method and the Tradition of Intellectual Autobiog- raphy,” in Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Jon Miller and Brad Inwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 5 Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 9. 6 See Bernard Williams, The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). 7 Brian Leiter, Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, http://leiterreports.typepad.com. 8 David Konstan, Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 9 Marko Malink, Aristotle’s Modal Syllogistic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013). 10 A. A. Long, “The Concept of the Cosmopolitan in Ancient Greek and Roman Thought, Dæda- lus 137 (3) (Summer 2008): 50–58. 11 David Konstan, Beauty: The Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 12 Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2011); and for impor tant pushback and the best recent book on Plato, see Iakovos Vasiliou, Aiming at Virtue (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 13 Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1972). 14 For a good overview, see Ben Bradley, Fred Feldman, and Jens Johansson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 15 Thomas Nagel, “Death,” Nôus 4 (1) (1970): 73–80. 16 Bernard Williams, “The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” in Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 17 Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011). 18 John Venn, The Logic of Chance (London; Cambridge: Macmillan, 1866), ix. 19 In addition to the many works of Martha Nussbaum, see more particularly Brad Inwood, Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Joy Con- nolly, The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).

145 (2) Spring 2016 67 Explicating Catullus

. . . nec meum respectet, ut ante, amorem, . . . nor let her, as before, watch for my love which qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati through her fault has fallen like a flower at a meadow’s ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam rim, touched by a passing plough. tactus aratro est. –Catullus, poem 11.21–24

At the conclusion of one of Catullus’s most famous poems, the speaker describes the bitter fi nale of his love. His striking analogy draws on the epic past (in Homer’s Iliad, a dead warrior is likened to a garden’s poppy weighted by rain) and also on a lyric of Sappho, who compares a virgin defl owered on her wedding night to a hyacinth trampled by shepherds. Readers have long appreciated these allusions, but recent feminist scholarship and new approaches to intertextuality and to the interplay of genres have helped further illuminate Catullus’s words. Sexual reversals and generic switches enable the poem now to speak to us in new languages that we readily make our own. In comparing his love to a fl ower, the speaker appropriates a feminine image while his “girl” (puella) implicitly claims the masculine “plough.” Inanimate challenges sensate, practical decorative, brutal delicate. The man’s highly charged passion is paradoxically treated as virginal, and the woman’s promiscuity, whose coarseness Catullus has earlier disclosed, corrupts and destroys a physical relationship whose nature the speaker considers spiritual and chaste. In addition to epic and lyric, other literary genres complement and complicate Catullus’s images. Flower and plough bring to mind pastoral and georgic. Pastoral poetry projects a realm of make-believe where graceful liaisons and shepherds’ songs create a precarious arcadia defi ned by remoteness from the exigencies of time and history. By contrast, georgic poetry looks to prac- ticalities, to an existence well symbolized by the farmer’s plough—blunt metal object, here con- juring a lover’s failure that heedlessly fells the vulnerable and sequestered. Finally, to pastoral and georgic we can join two other poetic types. The fi rst is the epithalamium (marriage song). On another occasion, Catullus composed a wedding hymn whose subjects include the bride’s virginity, untouched (intacta) before her marriage. Here, instead, in a mordant caricature of a poem of rejoicing, it is the enigmatically masculine lover who is “touched,” violated by erotic vulgarity. The second type Catullus evokes is a propemptikon, poem of bon voyage. Once again generic expectations are disappointed. In standard examples, the speaker bids goodbye to a departing friend. Here it is the speaker who takes his leave to experience the world. At the start of the poem he asks his travelling companions to impart to his dissipated lover at once a curse (non bona dic- ta) and an ironic adieu: “Let her live and fare well with her adulterers” (cum suis vivat valeatque moechis). Be well, the speaker wishes her, using obscene language that also suggests the chron- ic vigor of her sexual adventures. Just as the images of fl ower and plough reverse our expectations, so also do the riffs on other poetic forms that enhance lyric. This is an epithalamium in which the devirginized male is the bride, implicitly shorn of life and then abandoned. It is also a song of parting in which the object of separation stays in place and those going away are bidding farewell before embarking—we are led to believe—on a new enterprise suggesting the expansiveness of freedom. Here, as everywhere in classical literature, the poet’s imagination speaks afresh to each generation, to our own through deepened appreciation of the complexities of sexuality as well as of the formative friction arising from the miscegenation of poetic forms.

MICHAEL C. J. PUTNAM, a Fellow of the American Academy since 1996, is the W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics and Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Brown University.

Verity Platt

Abstract: Though foundational to the study of art history, Greco-Roman visual culture is often sidelined by the modern, and overshadowed by its own cultural and intellectual reception. Recent scholarship, however, has meticulously unpacked the discipline’s formative narratives, while building on archaeological and literary studies in order to locate its objects of analysis more precisely within the dynamic cultural frameworks that produced them, and that were in turn shaped by them. Focusing on a passage from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (arguably the urtext of classical art history), this paper explores the perennial question of how the material stuff of antiquity can be most effectively yoked to the thinking and sensing bodies that inhabited it, arguing that closer attention to ancient engagements with materialism can alert us to models of image-making and viewing that are both conceptually and physically grounded in Greco- Roman practices of production, sense perception, and interpretation.

One day in the 1940s, the classicist Eric Dodds was viewing the Parthenon sculptures in the British Mu- seum when a young man admitted to him, “I know it’s an awful thing to confess, but this Greek stuff doesn’t move me one bit! It’s all so terribly rational!” For Dodds, it was unsurprising to find this attitude among young people “trained on African and Aztec art, and on the work of such men as Modigli- VERITY PLATT is Associate Pro- ani and Henry Moore.” The encounter prompted his fessor in the Departments of Clas- disciplinary intervention The Greeks and the Irrational, sics and History of Art at Cornell which opened shadowy byways–such as divine pos- University. She is the author of Fac- ing the Gods: Epiphany and Represen- session, dream-visions, and magic–to a generation tation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature seeking a less “rational” antiquity than that illumi- and Religion (2011) and the forth- nated by the cold light of Hellas.1 For all their ram- coming Beyond Ekphrasis: Making paging centaurs, swirling drapery, and heaving di- Objects Matter in Classical Antiquity. vinities, the Parthenon sculptures themselves would She also edited The Frame in Greek not feature in this rediscovery of Greek primitivism, and Roman Art: A Cultural History but remained suspended in the “noble simplicity (with Michael Squire, forthcom- and quiet grandeur” that Johann Joachim Winckel- ing with Cambridge University 2 Press) and has published articles mann first identified in the art of antiquity in 1755. It in Arethusa, RES: Anthropology and would take several decades before the Parthenon, too, Aesthetics, and Art History. found its narrative of irrationality, in Joan Connel-

69 The Matter ly’s controversial suggestion that the cen- is an enduring theme of Greco-Roman lit- of Classical tral scene of its famed frieze depicts not a erature, and is fundamental to the visual Art History joyful civic ritual in honor of the goddess rhetoric of Greek naturalism. As the myths Athena, but a dark origin myth of human of Pygmalion and Narcissus remind us, it sacrifice.3 is at its most recognizably human that the Greek miracle? Tragic drama? Imperial classical provokes its most irrational re- loot? (Inter)national treasure? The Par- sponses. The urge to animate Greco-Roman thenon sculptures continue to provoke an- art also infuses those moments when its xious, conflicting responses, none more so beholders are most keen to reject its influ- than in their current role as poster child for ence; for instance, Constantine’s biogra- the ongoing debate over repatriation and pher Eusebius, when describing the emper- the role of the “world museum.” As aes- or’s rejection of pagan idols in the early thetic, political, and ethical touchstones fourth century, recounted how the statues (in all their marble monumentality), they of the gods were marched through the are invested with a status and identity that streets of Constantinople, like prisoners in tell us far more about contemporary con- a Roman triumph. At Cornell, where I teach cerns over artistic value and cultural own- classics and history of art, much of the ership than the original significance of university’s extensive assemblage of plas- the building they adorned. Classicists of- ter casts was–like many such collections ten point out, in amused frustration, that across Europe and North America–uncer- Pausanias–the travel writer from the sec- emoniously dumped and destroyed in the ond-century ad and our most trusty an- 1970s and 1980s. Amidst the dismembered cient source on the Athenian Acropolis– bodies now strewn through Cornell’s stor- fails to mention the Parthenon’s frieze at age warehouse, the cast of a metope from all. How could a monument that has caused the Olympian Temple of Zeus, depicting such controversy during its Nachleben have Heracles wrestling the Cretan Bull, looms occupied such a blind spot in antiquity? out of the darkness, daubed with the graf- It is an enduring source of frustration that fitoI’M ART (see Figure 1). In such encoun- material objects, with all their physical im- ters, the constraints of classicism–pushed mediacy, hold out the tantalizing prospect to the breaking point by the ersatz replica- of direct contact with our predecessors, tion of its best-known incarnations–are yet do so in silence. Each new generation violently rejected at the very moment that might attempt to give these artifacts voice, its invitation to imaginative projection is but determining how they should speak, most enthusiastically embraced. Mean- and what they should say, entails a per- while, Heracles labors under the weight of petual process of imaginative projection a concept (ART) that one might argue he and creative reinvention. Amidst the ca- was never meant to bear.4 cophony that clamors around the classical, Winckelmann’s sirenic voice has led many Classical art history is thus faced with a a viewer astray on the alluring fragments dilemma. Sidelined by a discipline that has of the antique. Meanwhile, the stones focused its attentions on the modern, the themselves remain stubbornly silent. contemporary, and, increasingly, the non- Nevertheless, it is difficult to suppress Western, it still staggers under the weight of the voice telling us that classical artists de- its subject’s complex reception over time, veloped a powerful set of strategies for rep- haunted by that “dread white army of Greek resenting bodies as if they might speak: the and Roman statuary, risen from the ground idea of the breathing, talking, living object in the sixteenth century and then endless-

70 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Figure 1 Verity Cast of a Metope Depicting Heracles and the Cretan Bull, from the Temple of Zeus, Olympia Platt

Dates from late nineteenth century, with graffito dating to the 1960s or 1970s (original dates circa 460bce ). Source: Cornell University Cast Collection; photo by Lindsay France, Cornell University Photography. ly cloned and imitated.”5 This reception embraced the challenge of a profound en- history has shaped the very origins of the gagement with historiography, exploring discipline in which the classical now strug- the cultural and intellectual climates that gles to find its footing: in the history of art, shaped the discipline’s founding narra- antiquity is at once the grande dame and tives.6 At the same time, they have devel- the awkward guest. oped sophisticated approaches to the dy- In recent years, scholars have handled namic and shifting ways in which Greco- antiquity’s cumbersome role with mount- Roman art has been–and continues to be ing confidence. On the one hand, they have –desired and destroyed, restored and ma-

145 (2) Spring 2016 71 The Matter nipulated, collected and displayed.7 This ative adaptation.10 In the new millennium, of Classical means, for example, acknowledging the this attitude is even being extended to Art History Parthenon’s palimpsestic role not only as nineteenth-century plaster casts, which Athenian temple, ideological symbol, and are slowly limping out of the warehouse as Greek national monument, but also as Byz- genuine “antiques” to be rediscovered by antine church, Ottoman mosque, and Ve- a digital generation entranced by analog netian weapons depot.8 forms of reproduction and less troubled by On the other hand, this enhanced aware- the notion of the “original.” ness of the diverse voices that have shaped our reception of the antique makes it more If we are to historicize notions of the An- possible to listen to the silence of the ob- tique, understanding them as inherited and jects themselves: to push to one side the continually shifting receptions of the ma- anachronisms of Renaissance, Enlighten- terial past, what about the ancients, who, ment, or modernist concepts of the clas- by means of the written word, still speak to sical, and to estrange ourselves from our us across the centuries? Classical art his- old friends as we attempt to relocate them tory has always struggled to define its rela- more precisely within the cultures they tionship to the discipline of classics, the originally inhabited. In particular, this latter traditionally dominated by the tex- means letting go of familiar narratives, tual preoccupations of classical philology. such as that of a teleological drive, in the It is telling that one of the most influential sixth and fifth centuriesbc , toward natu- paradigms for the study of Roman art in the ralism. Recent work on Greek sculpture later twentieth century, which prompted a explores how notions of artistic style are greater interest in material culture amongst deeply embedded in cultural experiences ancient historians, in particular, was Tonio of bodies, spaces, and modes of practice Hölscher’s concept of Bildsprache: a “se- and discourse. Such scholarship also exam- mantic system” or “language of images” ines how, alongside the seductions of clas- that projects a legible order onto the bewil- sical naturalism, there existed a “spectrum dering stylistic eclecticism of Roman visual of iconicity” (to use Milette Gaifman’s culture.11 Although the trend toward inter- phrase), in which schematic, naturalistic, disciplinarity has encouraged sustained at- and even aniconic forms were made and tention to the relationship between “art and experienced side by side, often in com- text” in recent decades, the predominant plex dialogue with each other.9 Moreover, impulse has been to absorb the visual into while the grip of post-Renaissance mod- discourse, to focus on dematerialized “im- els of naturalism on the field has relaxed, ages” rather than physical “objects,” and notions of classicism within antiquity it- further, to prioritize narrative, figural repre- self have expanded to embrace a broader sentation over ornament, abstraction, and range of styles, cultures, and modes of rep- medium. From Homer’s description of resentation (such as Roman appropria- Achilles’s shield to Pompeian frescoes of tions and adaptations of Egyptian art). The the Trojan War, such an interdisciplinary field is witnessing a burgeoning interest in approach has enriched our understanding comparative premodernities, while post- of literary engagements with the visual, and modernism’s enthusiasm for the repli- vice versa. However, this method has attend- ca series has liberated Roman art from its ed less to aspects of art-making and view- reputation as a pale imitation of Greek ge- ing that resist translation into the rational- nius, given that the notion of the “copy” izing and dematerializing language of aca- is now reformulated as emulation or cre- demic hermeneutics.12

72 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Yet just as philologists, fueled by the “ma- text.16 At the same time, the tools with which Verity terial turn” in the humanities at large, are archaeologists date and interpret their ma- Platt increasingly interested in the physical as- terial are often dependent upon techniques pects of the artifacts that have ensured their of stylistic and iconographic analysis that discipline’s survival, so can scholars of clas- facilitate the identification of hands, work- sical art, familiar with antiquity’s creative shops, and places of origin: traditional “art- translations of silent objects into speech, historical” practices of connoisseurship.17 be particularly attuned to the literary na- Liberated from the constraints of dry for- ture of their enterprise.13 As Jaś Elsner malism, however, and treated as an intrins- points out, art history writ large is “a ver- ic aspect of ancient material culture, ob- bal discipline of the visual,” driven by “the jects such as temple metopes, painted ves- belief in (or desire for) the potential trans- sels, and honorific statues are enmeshed figuration of the visual cast in verbal within the dynamic web of social, econom- terms.”14 A schooling in the rhetorically ic, and political relations that constituted brilliant ecphrastic techniques of, say, Ovid the ancient sanctuaries and cities they once or Philostratus, attunes readers to the sub- enhanced. Long-term excavation projects tleties with which ancient authors signal at sites such as the Athenian Agora or the the insufficiency of language’s intermedial city of Aphrodisias in Turkey (whose quar- adventures, while attending to the very qual- ries fed an insatiable demand for marble ities that make art objects so compelling or statuary) have helped to integrate such confusing, and to the ways in which art pro- objects into a thick analysis of the spac- vokes, even desires, language, while elud- es, structures, and activities in which they ing its semantic net.15 Rather than simply were made, used, and viewed.18 In this way, reinforcing the canon, recognizing the crit- the anonymous foot soldiers of antiquity’s ical sensitivity of such texts, and the sophis- “dread white army” have been individuat- tication with which ancient art objects en- ed and resocialized, emerging as strategi- gaged their earliest beholders, can teach an cally employed pieces in the cultural rituals awareness of both art history’s creative po- and high-stakes status games of commu- tential and its rhetorical arbitrariness; it nities and their elites. They can, more- encourages a sense of responsibility to the over, be reimagined in all their technicol- voiceless objects that are in our care. or glory, now better understood through And a sense of responsibility is argu- the painstaking analysis of original poly- ably one of the defining features of classi- chrome surfaces. cal studies. It is most overtly expressed in a rigorous historicism foundational to the One question that lingers, however, is nineteenth-century development of Alter- whether the absorption of “art” into ratio- tumswissenschaft (the “science of antiqui- nalizing histories of material culture can ty”), and typifies the disciplinary terrain fully address either the complex fashioning in which art history and archaeology con- of such highly prized objects, or their en- verge, and where the scholarly stewardship during power to enchant the senses, pre- of the catalog and site report remain critical occupy the mind, and invite dynamic en- to current work. In a rejection of aestheti- gagement and response. Experiments in cism and antiquarianism–in vigorous re- polychromy, for example, though often sistance to the politicoeconomic forces shockingly gaudy to viewers accustomed that encourage the looting of historical to the whiteness of the (neoclassical) an- sites–today’s classical archaeologists tend tique, raise important questions about the to prioritize historical and physical con- ancient phenomenology of color. They de-

145 (2) Spring 2016 73 The Matter mand that we both reassess Greco-Roman forming, and replicating nature that most of Classical formulations of the relationship between preoccupy him, in both a celebration of hu- Art History medium and form, surface and depth, or- man skill and a repudiation of luxuria: the nament and figuration, and address the fetishization of matter for its own sake, as signifying and differentiating potential of opposed to respect for natura as a holistic, specific pigments.19 Would Dodds’s inter- even divine, system. In his account of the locutor have been moved by the Parthenon meticulously precise Greek painter Proto- sculptures if he had seen them finished in genes, Pliny relates his multiple attempts paints such as intense Egyptian blue (a form to depict a panting dog. Protogenes, frus- of cuprorivaite recently detected using in- trated because “the foam appeared to be frared light), which simultaneously dis- painted, not to be the natural product of solved their marble monumentality and em- the animal’s mouth,” then phasized their mass, projecting them be- 20 fell into a rage with his art because it was fore his eyes in a riot of color? Or might perceptible, and threw a sponge against the they have seemed even more alien, their offending spot in the picture. And the sponge strong tones and dramatic contrasts de- restored the colors he had removed, just as signed for viewers with quite different con- his diligence had desired, and chance pro- ceptualizations of color and perception, and duced nature in the picture.23 for whom the Parthenon was still part of a living network of spaces and structures sa- Here, the supreme act of painterly depic- cred to the gods? The question of how the tion is generated not by human skill, but material stuff of antiquity can be most ef- by a serendipitous impression, in a manner fectively yoked to the thinking and sensing that satisfies the artist, yet warns against the bodies that inhabited it is an enduringly hubristic assumptions that drive human problematic one, but if we believe that ob- feats of mimesis (such as those of none oth- jects mattered, then the kinds of questions er than Dædalus!). Sponges, as Pliny ob- posed by contemporary art history–with serves earlier in Natural History, are them- their focus on historically constituted forms selves living beings that engage dynami- of visuality and, increasingly, materiality– cally with their environment and “possess have an important role to play in a rigorous- intellect,” occupying an interstitial cate- ly historicizing study of the ancient world.21 gory between plant and animal.24 Centu- Take, for example, an anecdote passed ries before Yves Klein’s reliefs-éponges, the down to us by Pliny the Elder in his ency- sponge’s “raw living matter” proves to be clopedic Natural History. It is notable that the purest vehicle for paint as a medium, the sections Pliny devotes to sculpture, offering an alternative model of (literal) painting, and gems–which have been tra- absorption to the bewitching powers of ditionally excerpted as an independent naturalistic illusionism.25 The most precise work of art history avant la lettre–are em- imitator of the natural world, it turns out, bedded within a work of natural science, is natura herself. By materializing a sub- and arranged according to raw materials stance that had eluded the painter’s at- (metals, earth, and stones). Pliny’s story tempts at depiction, the sponge’s imprint of art conforms to a materialist, Stoic model is both a representation of the dog’s drool of all-encompassing natura, presenting a (by virtue of its formal parallels with foam) narrative of man’s acquisition of the skills and an instantiation of it (through its trans- necessary to work material resources into mission of liquid), while the artist must higher-order objects.22 Here, it is the pro- himself experience dog-like rage (ira) in cesses of extracting, manipulating, trans- order to depict the dog correctly. The an-

74 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences ecdote offers, in effect, an alternative ontol- between natural marvel and marvelously Verity ogy of the image to that of mimesis, a form contrived illusion, is suggested by a paint- Platt of “truth” (verum) rather than “truthlike- ed shrine from a house in Pompeii, contem- ness” (verisimile), bypassing Platonic con- porary with Pliny himself (see Figure 2). cerns about the deceptive illusionism of Here, red and white pigments are used to representation in order to celebrate the rep- imitate variegated marble, creating a grand licative potential of matter itself. Here, trompe l’oeil structure for the household’s painting is not presented as an inferior im- gods. Traced within the marble veins is a itation of reality, but as contiguous with human face, hinting at the painter’s art (and it; the artist plays the role not of transfor- artifice) while suggesting that marble con- mative genius, but of nature’s unwitting tains an art of its own, that natura is herself agent. That such a complex aesthetic con- a painter. Viewing with Pliny in mind, we cept is spun out in relation to a panting might note that the pigments employed dog is typical of the paradoxographical for painting are themselves derived from Hellenistic literature that likely formed stones, metals, and organic substances, Pliny’s source, in which the most striking, including finely ground marble. The im- entertaining, and confusing aspects of im- plication of such illusionism is that artist- age-making and viewing–or the most “ir- ic representation is just one of a continu- rational” aspects of ancient art–are often ous series of processes by which one sub- the most effective conveyors of its ontologi- stance might be transformed into another, cal and phenomenological complexities.26 shaped by the constraints and affordanc- es of matter. What are art historians to do with such This sense of both material continuity a text? Like most such anecdotes, its au- and dramatic metamorphosis is also con- thenticity is impossible to verify: no works veyed by the sponge’s act of impression. by Protogenes, nor any other Greek old This models a form of image-production masters, survive, painted as they were on that was vital to ancient practices of art- wooden panels vulnerable to fire and de- making, including the processes of stamp- cay. Nor, to my knowledge, do ancient fres- ing, molding, and casting employed in the coes or vase paintings make use of sponge sealing of signatures, the minting of coins, impressions, although the conceit can be the mass production of terracotta figur- found in other literary sources. Neverthe- ines, and the lost-wax technique of bronze- less, Pliny’s account raises important ques- casting. As forms of “mechanical reproduc- tions about ancient attitudes toward the tion,” such methods were key to the cre- artist’s relationship with his materials, and ation, use, and circulation of objects that models of perception and representation were worn on bodies (as engraved seal- that were common at the time. Rather than rings), displayed in homes, and beheld in offering us a Pygmalionesque fantasy in public spaces. As techniques of replication, which image dissolves into prototype, Pliny these methods exist in a continuum with gives us the object at its most tangibly pres- the replicative processes that are so critical ent and its most enigmatic: Protogenes’s to Roman art, and invite us to view rath- painting is at once embedded in the materi- er differently the practice of “copying” al world of which it is part and stands on its the Greek old masters, denigrated for so own as a wondrous object that reveals na- long by the inheritors of classicism. In ture’s internal structural consistencies. Pliny’s Protogenes anecdote, the ability to A similar fascination with the slippage transfer an image from one medium to an- between medium and representation, and other does not imply an ethical, aesthet-

145 (2) Spring 2016 75 The Matter Figure 2 of Classical Lararium of the Household Gods Art History

Lararium located in the peristyle of the House of the Gilded Cupids, Pompeii, dated circa 50–79 ce. Note the human profile (right image, center, facing left) incorporated into the veining of thetrompe l’oeil breccia marble. Source: Verity Platt.

ic, or ontological compromise, but quite By combining the imitation of nature the opposite: it is the bearer of “truth.” with its direct impression, Protogenes’s This is in keeping with the Stoic under- painting juxtaposes two critical models of pinnings of Pliny’s project, a material- image-making. While inviting the reader/ ist model of sense perception, in which viewer to consider how familiar objects knowledge is acquired through impres- might combine figural representation with sions (phantasiai) made upon the soul. its mechanical replication, the painting ma- The Stoics, following Aristotle, used the terializes conflicting philosophical models image of a seal-ring’s impression in wax of knowledge-acquisition: the dualism of as a key metaphor in their philosophy of the Platonic school, with its deep suspicion mind.27 Like the sponge, the seal-ring is of mimesis, versus Stoicism’s validation the bearer of truth, the transfer of its ma- of the senses. Pliny’s anecdote is a remind- trix from one medium to another guaran- er that while we may work to master or teeing the endorsement of its owner in an transcend matter, we are also agents and unbroken sequence of matter. components of it, with all the responsi-

76 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences bility (and humility) that should entail. relationship to both philology and archae- Verity As the “material turn” continues to dom- ology, and its long tradition of analyzing Platt inate work in the humanities, it is worth how artifacts were designed and manufac- considering not only the materialist mod- tured, viewed and handled, desired and dis- els of ethics and epistemology that antiq- cussed, can demonstrate that although they uity has bequeathed us–which can be sur- lack voice, such objects nevertheless work prisingly familiar as well as refreshingly to materialize thought: as “vibrant” com- strange–but also the thoughtful and so- ponents of antiquity, they still have the ca- phisticated ways in which these were ex- pacity to move and surprise, while invit- plored in ancient literary and material cul- ing their viewers to think beyond the lim- ture.28 Classical art history, with its close its of the self.29

endnotes 1 Eric R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951). 2 “Edle Einfalt und stille Größe,” first stated in Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauerkunst (Dresden and Leipzig: G. C. Walther, 1756). 3 Joan Breton Connelly, The Parthenon Enigma (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). 4 Jeremy Tanner, The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Verity Platt and Michael Squire, eds., The Art of Art History in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Special Issue of Arethusa) 43 (2) (2010). 5 Christopher Wood, “Envoi: Reception and the Classics,” in Reception and the Classics: An Inter- disciplinary Approach to the Classical Tradition, ed. W. Brockliss, Pramit Chaudhuri, Ayelet Haim- son Lushkov, and Katherine Wasdin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 171. 6 Katherine Harloe, Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: History and Aesthetics in the Age of Al- tertumswissenschaft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Klause-Werner Haupt, Johann Winckelmann: Begründer der klassischen Archäologie und modernen Kunstwissenschaften (Wiesbaden: Weimarer Verlagsgesellschaft, 2014). See also a monumental new three-volume edition, with commentary, of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, ed. Adolf H. Borbein, Thomas W. Gaethgens, Johannes Irmscher, and Max Kunze (Mainz am Rhein: Ver- lag Philipp von Zabern, 2002–2007). 7 See, most recently, Elizabeth Prettejohn, The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Winckelmann to Picasso (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012). 8 Anthony Kaldellis, The Christian Parthenon: Classicism and Pilgrimage in Byzantine Athens (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 9 See Tanner, The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece; Richard Neer, The Emergence of the Clas- sical Style in Greek Sculpture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and Milette Gaifman, Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 10 Jennifer Trimble, Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Jaś Elsner, “Classicism in Roman Art,” in Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome, ed. James I. Porter (Princeton, N.J.; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), 270–296. For an exercise in comparativism, see the essays on Chinese and Roman sarcophagi in RES: The Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 61/62 (2012), guest edited by Wu Hung and Jaś Elsner. 11 Tonio Hölscher, The Language of Images in Roman Art: Art as a Semantic System in the Roman World, trans. Anthony Snodgrass and Annemarie Künzl-Snodgrass (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 2004).

145 (2) Spring 2016 77 The Matter 12 For an alternative view, see Michael Squire, The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae of Classical Iliacae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Art History 13 Shane Butler, The Matter of the Page: Essays in Search of Ancient and Medieval Authors (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011); and Laura Jansen, ed., The Roman Paratext: Frame, Texts, Readers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 14 See Jaś Elsner, “Art History as Ekphrasis,” Art History 33 (1) (2010): 24. 15 See the seminal new five-volume revision and commentary of Johannes Overbeck’s 1868 classic, Der Neue Overbeck: Die Antiken Schriftquellen zu den Bildenden Künsten der Griechen, ed. Sascha Kansteiner, Klaus Hallof, Lauri Lehmann, Bernd Seidensticker, and Klaus Stemmer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). 16 See Elizabeth Marlowe, Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art (Lon- don and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). 17 Richard Neer, “Connoisseurship and the Stakes of Style,” Critical Inquiry 32 (1) (2005): 1–26. 18 R. R. R. Smith, with Sheila Dillon, Christopher H. Hallett, Julia Lenaghan, and Julie Van Voorhis, Roman Portrait Statuary from Aphrodisias: Aphrodisias II (Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern Verlag, 2006); and Kathleen Lynch, The Symposium in Context: Pottery From a Late Archaic House Near the Athenian Agora (Princeton, N.J.: The American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 2011). 19 See Jennifer Stager, The Embodiment of Color in Ancient Mediterranean Art (Ph.D. diss.: University of California, Berkeley, 2012). 20 Vinzenz Brinkmann and Andreas Scholl, eds., Bunte Götter, Die Farbigkeit Antiker Skulptur (Mu- nich: Hirmer, 2010). 21 As explored in the new series The Senses in Antiquity, ed. Mark Bradley and Shane Butler (Lon- don and New York: Routledge, 2015). 22 Tanner, The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece, 236–246. 23 Pliny the Elder Natural History 35.103. 24 Pliny the Elder Natural History 9.148, 32.47. 25 Yves Klein, quoted in Nan Rosenthal, “Assisted Levitation: The Art of Yves Klein,” in Yves Klein 1928–1962: A Retrospective (Houston: Institute for the Arts, Rice University, 1982), 111. 26 A term defined as “an ancient literary genre devoted to descriptions of mirabilia, marvelous or mi- raculous objects.” From Oxford Reference, “Paradoxography,” http://www.oxfordreference .com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100305169 (accessed December 21, 2015). 27 Verity Platt, “Making an Impression: Replication and the Ontology of the Graeco-Roman Seal Stone,” Art History 29 (2) (2006): 233–257. 28 James I. Porter, The Origins of Aesthetics in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Ruth Bielfeldt, ed., Ding und Mensch in der Antike. Geg- enwart und Vergegenwärtigung (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014). 29 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).

78 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Materializing Ancient Documents

Roger S. Bagnall

Abstract: Two materially oriented revolutions have transformed the study of ancient documents in recent decades: first, a new interest in the ancient production of written artifacts; and second, the concern with the archaeological contexts, and more particularly the taphonomy–that is, the processes at work in the burial–of those same objects. The first, largely driven by the availability of digital images, has given life to the study of ancient writing as a cultural and social phenomenon and to the social life of written objects. In the process, connections between literary and documentary texts have come to the fore and distinctions between these categories have eroded. The second revolution began with an interest in what archaeological contexts of excavated papyri could tell us about the history of the texts, but it has evolved to see the texts themselves as artifacts engaged in an iterative dialogue with both the contexts and other objects found in them.

Two materially oriented revolutions have transformed the study of ancient documents in recent decades: first, a new interest in the ancient production of written artifacts; and second, the concern with the archaeological contexts, and more particularly the taphonomy–that is, the processes at work in the burial–of those same objects. The first of these has to do with both the raw materials of writing and the act of writing itself, and has been brought to life in the last twenty years by the increasing availabil- ROGER S BAGNALL . , a Fellow of ity of high-resolution digital images. These revolu- the American Academy since 2000, is the Leon Levy Director and Pro- tions have had major effects on the practice of epig- fessor of Ancient History at the raphy (the study of texts on stone and metal), pa- Institute for the Study of the An- pyrology (the study of texts on papyrus, potsherds, cient World at New York Univer- and wooden tablets), and are now beginning to af- sity. He is also Director of the Am- fect numismatics (the study of coins and medals) heida Project. His many publica- as well, though the effects have reached these disci- tions include Early Christian Books plines in unequal measure: Papyrology, from which in Egypt (2009), Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East (2011), and I shall draw my examples, is far ahead of epigraphy A Sixth Century Tax Register from the on the digital imaging front. Epigraphy, on the oth- Hermopolite Nome (with James G. er hand, has long been more closely tied to archae- Keenan and Leslie MacCoull, 2011). ology and is only slowly getting traction on digital

79 Materializing images. Numismatics is now starting to (Advanced Papyrological Information Sys- Ancient catch up to the others.1 tem) consortium and in part by many in- Documents Before turning to these materializing dependent projects around the world.4 revolutions, let us acknowledge that they These online collections have made it pos- are not the only major changes that the sible to replace volumes of selected paleo- documentary disciplines in classical stud- graphic examples, the limited but expen- ies have undergone in recent decades.2 The sive guides of a few decades ago, with tools other two are probably more familiar, but like the remarkable PapPal site created by they are of enormous importance nonethe- Rodney Ast in Heidelberg, where visitors less. The first, and older, is the digitization can look at images of hundreds of papy- of the papyrological textual corpus and ri, arranged by date or other criterion, in a the consequent ease of searching through gallery format.5 Through this medium the its seventy thousand texts. The greatest re- user has a broad, near-objective view of the sult of this development, as Michael Mc- range of handwritings found in any given Cormick has stated about the study of the period that its highly selective print prede- early medieval economy, is the luxury of cessors could have never hoped to achieve. being able to “fail cheaply, to risk our pre- The initial impact, for me, was to destroy cious time on uncertain but potentially re- any remaining confidence in the precision warding questions.”3 We can invest tiny of paleographic dating. amounts of time and minimal cost in many The first work to use large numbers of probes into the data; only a small fraction images to powerful effect was a disserta- need to turn up useful patterns for the ex- tion based on analog images written in ercise to be intellectually profitable. Four the years just before apis began its work: decades ago, we would not have bothered Raffaella Cribiore’s Writing, Teachers, and to ask these questions; the transaction Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt (1996).6 By costs were too high to be wagered on the gathering and analyzing hundreds of pho- slim chance of a useful outcome. tographs of so-called school texts, Cribio- The other major development is the in- re was able to reconstruct the handwritings ternationalization of the discipline. Papy- of both teachers and students in Greco-Ro- rology was always a relatively global field, man Egypt, and the processes by which in large part because it was so small. But students advanced in learning. In effect, today it is largely integrated across nation- she showed what such a quantity of images al lines, such that local “schools” of papy- could do, making the utility and urgency of rology are no longer conceivable. Nation- digitization that much more obvious. als of one country receive their graduate By contrast, when she and I later began training in another, and their job in a third, to work on Women’s Letters from Ancient Egypt almost as a matter of routine. When I was (2006), most of the photographs were dig- starting out, this was hardly thinkable. It ital, and the online version of the book is is still more a European than an American illustrated with hundreds of them.7 We phenomenon, but even that is changing. sought, on their basis, to move beyond the debates about literacy launched by William There are now tens of thousands of im- Harris’s book Ancient Literacy one-quarter ages of papyri, ostraca, and tablets avail- century ago.8 Harris’s low general estimate able on the Web, although probably more of literacy rates had led to a host of stud- than half of the published artifacts are still ies seeking to identify the extent to which not digitized. This work has been carried different groups in ancient societies were out in part by the multi-institutional apis able to read and write. As we examined

80 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences how women used writing, both their own ed for in the toolkit we use for digitizing Roger S. and that of those around them, it became documentary texts. Bagnall clear that identifying women’s hands was But the new focus on materiality goes far from the straightforward matter we had well beyond ink and how it is laid on the imagined. We concluded that there were page. It goes also to the recognition of the no visible differences between men’s and importance of materials other than papy- women’s handwriting. This kind of study rus itself, most importantly ostraca, the depends on the large-scale provision of potsherds used for a wide variety of ephem- images, and it gives a type of information eral texts not only in Egypt but in much of about every aspect of not only handwrit- the rest of the ancient world.9 In winter ing, but organization, layout, and key ele- 2015, Clementina Caputo, one of the ceram- ments–in short, diplomatics–that could icists working at our excavations at Amhei- not have been had until now; or at least not da–a buried Egyptian city in the Dakhla without superhuman energy and endur- Oasis–completed a study of the sherds used ance, not to speak of a lot of money. Once for the nearly nine hundred ostraca discov- again, the investment required for scholar- ered at our site so far, with remarkable and ly inquiry has been reduced to more man- unexpected results. Contrary to the prevail- ageable levels. ing belief that a person needing a sherd to Such possibilities and successes also in- write on simply picked one up at random, troduce a need for changes in the style of Caputo has shown that the ceramic fabric editing documents. Jean-Luc Fournet has was chosen because it could easily be bro- called attention to the presence in late an- ken into suitable pieces by a blow or two tique documents of a series of character- from a flint or a hammer; other fabrics istics, including handwriting, layout, and shatter. Second, what ceramicists call diag- the use of diacritical marks, drawn from nostic sherds, like necks and bases, are al- the usage of literary papyri and from most never used for writing. Rather, some- teaching practices in schools. These are one who needed ostraca picked the large what he calls part of a literarization of pieces of vessel walls, which are relative- documentary practice, visible mostly in ly flat, and then broke and shaped them as the documents produced by those at the needed. Third, the shapes are not random top of the socioeconomic and cultural either; people hacked vessel walls up into ladder, to be sure, but which also trick- pieces of standardized shapes for particular led down to much humbler documents. purposes, like the labels stuck into mud jar We can also see a comparable migration stoppers on top of wine jars (see Figure 1). of habits from the less literary and more Made possible largely by digital images business/administration-oriented parts of and databases, this work–and much more the educational system into less exalted I have not mentioned–has tended to re- levels of document-writing, notably in construct the ecosystem of writing as a private letters of people of more modest whole: who wrote; how they were edu- station, even monks and estate managers. cated in different types of writing com- These observations led Fournet to point petence; what materials they used when, out that the editing and digital presenta- where, and for what purposes; how they tion of papyrus texts do not support such displayed their education, importance, and inquiries into the physicality of the papy- concern for their correspondents by the ri. Not only do editors not always record way they laid out, wrote, and marked up features like layout in their editions, but what they wrote. In this way, the materi- these characteristics are not well provid- al characteristics of writing materials and

145 (2) Spring 2016 81 Materializing Figure 1 Ancient Ostracon Used as Label on Wine Jar Documents

Source: Photo Excavations at Amheida. Trimithis (Amheida), third-to-fourth century ad.

writing itself have come to support inqui- We may trace the roots to Peter van Min- ry into the entire social dimension of the nen’s 1994 article “House-to-House En- technology of writing in ancient society. quiries: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Roman Karanis.”10 Van Minnen’s recog- This seems to me the more easily digested nition that papyri were artifacts, that they of our two revolutions, even though it has could be, at least where the records were obviously brought significant change to adequate, traced to the depositional units scholarly investigation. More complicat- in which they were found, and that these ed is the developing relationship between units belonged to actual houses in which papyrology and archaeology: in particu- other artifacts had been found, represent- lar, the growing interest in the archaeolog- ed a genuine breakthrough in the field. He ical contexts of documents. From a docu- was at pains to argue that the papyri he mentary point of view, this has started out identified as belonging to the tax collector mainly from asking: what can we learn Sokrates of Karanis were found in a pri- about our documents from their context? mary context: namely, Sokrates’s house. But we may also ask what we can learn The article received little criticism at the about our archaeological contexts from time, in part perhaps because readers not the texts found in them, just as we might in proximity to the Kelsey Museum at the from any other artifact. This is, in fact, the University of Michigan did not have access direction things are going. to the full data on which the case rested. In

82 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences more recent years, as a new generation of To return to the more pressing questions Roger S. scholars has pushed deeper into the Kara- of papyri in the proximate context of dis- Bagnall nis archives and assessed the excavation covery: Traianos Gagos, Jennifer Gates, and recording practices of the 1920s and and Drew Wilburn have provided a good 1930s–which were state of the art at that summary of the history of thinking, or lack time–doubts have grown about the reli- of thinking, about this problem.12 They ability of the data on which van Minnen have shown how the ambitious goals with based his arguments. These doubts have which the Karanis excavations began were sometimes been expressed in the context lost in the postwar period, and that most of a broader skepticism about our ability to papyri in collections came onto the market relate texts and their places of discovery, as without any kind of context; we will nev- in Lisa Nevett’s demonstration of the un- er be able to reconstruct most of what has certainty that can beset such inquiries even been lost. Even if papyri come from exca- with more recent and better-documented vations, as is the case of much of what was excavations, like at ancient Kellis, modern- found at the ancient Egyptian sites Tebtu- day Ismant el-Kharab, Egypt.11 nis and Oxyrhynchos, the archaeological In the same period, an interest in sec- record is inadequate to support a detailed ondary contexts began to grow, driven reconstruction. Yet work on bringing to- in large part by the excavations conduct- gether the different finds and approaches ed by an international team first at Mons can still help recreate the larger context, Claudianus, an important quarry site in even if the microcontexts are mostly lost. the Eastern Desert of Egypt, and then in If the 1990s were the era of optimism the series of explorations carried out un- about what was possible with Karanis, then der the direction of Hélène Cuvigny, with the past decade has been an era of caution. Jean-Pierre Brun leading the archaeolog- Robert Stephan and Arthur Verhoogt’s ar- ical work, at the forts along the desert ticle “Text and Context in the Archive of roads, as well as by a team working at the Tiberianus” is exemplary of this.13 In it, port of Berenike on the Red Sea. In these they show, through meticulous analysis of sites, almost all of the material found– the records, that with respect to a papyrus well more than ten thousand ostraca in dossier, the excavators did not actually dis- all–came from dumps; hardly a sherd was tinguish finds in two successive levels in found where it was originally received and their reporting, but attributed them all to read. House-to-house inquiries, or room- the earlier level, even in the case of a physi- by-room, were out. The only important cal space said not to have been in use in that question was whether the dumps were period. But Stephan and Verhoogt do not themselves primary or secondary dumps: despair; rather, they argue cogently that a nearby rubbish bin or a dump where rub- one may reattribute the particular group bish was carted away from place of first found in a particular space to the later level. tossing. The close collaboration of the pap- But there is a catch: these papyri apparent- yrologists with the archaeologists in the ly were cleared away and put in the space fort excavations produced an acute inves- where they were found not as part of their tigation into the formation of dumps, and primary use, but when the house was being the consequent pursuit of stratigraphy renovated. If not exactly a dump, the space within the dumps, in which dating infor- can be seen as a place of secondary storage mation in the ostraca was used in a kind of or disposal. The conclusions drawn about virtuous feedback loop to help refine the the actual use of the house by the persons stratigraphy and its chronology. involved in the documents are restrained

145 (2) Spring 2016 83 Materializing but not defeatist: patient reconstruction– ual’s name, in locations breathing aban- Ancient reengineering the Karanis database, one donment and discarding, in good contexts, Documents might call it–is not a completely hopeless sometimes with associated datable coins, errand. above floors and below collapse. In the But it is far from simple. The pessimist’s small house, the far fewer ostraca offered case was made convincingly in Tom Land- no such hooks and were rarely found even vatter’s paper presented at the 2013 papy- in good contexts of abandonment. I do rology congress in Warsaw on the so-called not have any doubts that the rich house is House of the Nilometer at Karanis.14 The that of a man named Serenos, who, we de- excavators again seem to have attribut- duced from one of the letters found in the ed papyri to the highest level that had un- house, was a member of the city council. I dergone alteration; again the papyri in the would not hazard identifying the owner of house were not found in their lifetime lo- the small house except in the most generic cation of use, but in a place that represent- fashion. And it does matter. To know that ed storage or discarding. This conclusion a city councilor had Homeric scenes on his is reinforced by the fact that some of the wall, and a graffito with a line from a now- supposed archive was found in the street lost play of Euripides, is not trivial knowl- outside, with even individual papyri di- edge. vided between house and street contexts. Their place of finding is thus not necessar- Let us now turn back to the question of ily even their point of discarding, let alone dumping. This does not, as my colleagues their place of lifetime use. Rodney Ast and Paola Davoli have shown, With Karanis and the Nilometer archives, reflect a single, straightforward phenom- this argument seems impossible to refute; enon, but rather several possible stages in the gulf in dating is too wide, even if the ce- the use and reuse of materials.15 Not all of ramic chronology might be open to chal- these apply to any one object–here we are lenge. But I would not go beyond this to talking mainly about ostraca–but they adopt a nihilistic approach to attributing make up a coherent sequence. documents to occupation levels, or to aban- Consider an ostracon that is inserted into don all hope that we may speak of a house a mud jar stopper, which is slapped on top as belonging to an individual or family. of a jar of wine, with a vine leaf protecting I say that on the basis of comparing two the wine from the mud (see Figure 2). The houses excavated by our team at Amheida. jar travels from farm to city, its contents are One of these belonged to a rich man; it was consumed, and the mud stopper, still with a large house, with spacious rooms, sever- ostracon in place, is thrown away, proba- al of them painted in high Roman style. bly at no great distance. The unfired stop- The central room, with a dome, had myth- per normally disintegrates relatively quick- ological scenes in bands above a dado im- ly, leaving the ostracon separated from its itating polychrome stonework. The other original frame: instant decontextualization. house is more middling, being half the size At some point, soon or late, the debris and, as far as we can see, rather plain. The is carted away and dumped elsewhere; large house was well preserved, up to and this is now a secondary dumping action. above the height of doorways; the small At Amheida, unlike the desert forts, this house, in a location more vulnerable to the is the abandoned parts of a Roman bath, wind, was highly eroded and had less se- which were used in the late third and early cure contexts. In the rich house, we found fourth century as a place to dump all sorts numerous ostraca with the same individ- of material, from construction debris and

84 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Figure 2 Roger S. Vine Leaf on Underside of Mud Jar Stopper Bagnall

Source: Photo Excavations at Amheida. Trimithis (Amheida), third-to-fourth century ad. ashes to jar stoppers with their ostraca (or also tertiary in character, the sherds begin the two now separated). Some decades go a new life. Someday, the vaults collapse, by, and the debris-filled area of the former and perhaps the walls fall over as well, as baths is sold off as building lots. The pur- the weight of external sand pushes against chasers take some of the accumulated gar- them. The brickwork breaks apart, the bage and spread it around the whole area sherds are released from captivity, and to level it for building. The dumped mate- they enter a layer of collapse debris, often rial is now in a third-stage use. A street is difficult to tell apart from occupation de- laid out over it, and next to it a mansion bris that was on the last floor of the house is built. A little to the north of the house a or walking surface of the street. school is added on. Use and reuse thus take many forms. In the course of construction, thousands When we excavate these contexts, we find of sherds are needed for chinking; they are ostraca and transcribe and edit them. Since placed in walls and in vaults between bricks, most of them have no independent means partly as spacers, partly to help turn rect- of dating–and even the regnal years on angular bricks into curving vaults. Some some could belong to multiple reigns, with of these sherds are ostraca; all come from no imperial names being given–the stra- previously dumped material, whether in tigraphy is of the utmost importance. At the the baths (as seems most likely) or perhaps same time, as ostraca are dated, they help, partly from elsewhere. In this use, which is in company with coins, to anchor their

145 (2) Spring 2016 85 Materializing strata. This is an iterative process: the os- script fragments found in Old Cairo–with Ancient traca as texts and the ostraca as artifacts are which papyrology shares a massive range Documents mutually reinforcing. Understanding the of shared concerns, including diplomatic ostraca in a stratigraphic unit can help the and paleographic challenges and the twin archaeologist reconstruct the formation of problems of the taphonomy and the non- that unit, not simply its place in time. stratigraphic excavation of these written This history was intelligible to us only artifacts. I am certain that similar common because the contents of the ostraca pos- ground exists with all sorts of other ancient sessed an internal coherence that allowed and medieval documentary contexts, and I the archaeologist to refine the initial de- am equally certain that there will be many scription of the process of formation of the rewards in exploring these commonalities. physical record. From the papyrologist’s There are, of course, plenty of limits and point of view, understanding this process cautions. For example, even if we can be of formation makes it possible to connect confident that we have identified the house ostraca found in similar contexts with the of Serenos at Trimithis, the ostraca from same kind of formative processes, even if that house are not the kinds of discursive they have not a trace of the verbal links, documents that tell us much about the fam- like shared names or official titles, that ily that lived with him in it, except to men- usually allow papyri and ostraca to be con- tion the mistress of the household. Other- nected into an archival mass. The strati- wise, the ostraca speak more to the house- graphic information in effect functions as hold and its economy than to the family, a kind of meta-verbal text for the ostracon. behaving–oddly–much more like the ar- The two revolutions thus connect at an in- chaeological side of the ledger than like the teresting juncture: where they complicate textual. It will undoubtedly be exception- the notions of texts and archaeology as al, especially in an era of expanding settle- separate domains with different types of ments and rising water tables, to have it all. information that can scarcely be brought But that does not mean we should lose sight together. The focus on the artifactual char- of the desirability of that goal. acter of writing emphasizes what we might We should recognize that these direc- call the nontextual side of textual witness- tions are not neutral or accidental. They es; and the careful exploration of stratig- represent the results of a secular shift in raphy can lead to archaeological contexts the makeup of the field of papyrology and providing a kind of meta-textual charac- in the kind of training that papyrologists terization that ties directly into the textual have received, away from the mostly liter- analysis of the documents. ary and philological approaches and education prevalent a generation or two ago Much of what I have said is, in a sense, and toward history in a very broad sense, inward-looking. It argues for the advantag- including particularly religion and archae- es that documentary studies and archaeol- ology. One might say that we have moved ogy can both draw from the artifactual turn from being interested only in the text of in papyrology, despite the many hazards a new fragment of Sappho to wanting to and pitfalls along the way. But there is also know who was copying and reading Sap- a case to be made that this approach is more pho.16 I am overschematizing and exag- likely than traditional philology to help us gerating, of course; a more traditional kind connect with other fields. One example is of literary papyrology still goes on as be- the study of the Cairo Geniza–a mass of fore, sometimes seemingly untroubled by three hundred thousand Jewish manu- statements like “provenance unknown.”

86 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences And papyrologists still have to know the away from disembodied canonical texts. Roger S. languages well to do what they do. But in- This neither is, nor should be, the end of Bagnall terest has undeniably shifted in the direc- philology. But if it were the end of an iso- tion of the broader cultural horizons of the lated philology, that would be no bad thing. ancient world in their embodied form, and

endnotes 1 See, for example, Online Coins of the Roman Empire (ocre), http://numismatics.org/ocre/. 2 Space constraints prevent me from discussing the comparable developments in other parts of the ancient world, but whether dealing with cuneiform tablets or inscriptions from medieval Vietnam, similar changes are visible throughout the study of antiquity. 3 Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick, eds., The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Di- rections in Early Medieval Studies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 83. 4 See the Papyrological Navigator and the Papyrological Editor–produced by several partner- ing institutions, including apis, the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing, and Co- lumbia University Libraries–at http://papyri.info. 5 See http://pappal.info. 6 Raffaella Cribiore, Writing, Teachers, and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996). 7 Roger Bagnall and Raffaella Cribiore, Women’s Letters from Ancient Egypt, 300 BC–AD 800 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). 8 William Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). 9 I discuss this in chapter six of Roger S. Bagnall, Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 2011). 10 Peter van Minnen, “House-to-House Enquiries: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Roman Ka- ranis,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 100 (1994): 227–251. 11 In Beryl Rawson, ed., A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman World (Malden, Mass.: Wiley- Blackwell, 2011). 12 Traianos Gagos, Jennifer Gates, and Drew Wilburn, “Material Culture and Texts of Graeco- Roman Egypt: Creating Context, Debating Meaning,” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrol- ogists 42 (1–4) (2005): 171–188. 13 Robert P. Stephan and Arthurt Verhoogt, “Text and Context in the Archive of Tiberianus (Karanis, Egypt; 2nd Century ad),” Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 42 (1–4) (2005): 189–202. 14 See Thomas Landvatter, “Archaeological and Papyrological Inquiry at Karanis: Problems and Potentialities,” paper presented at the 27th International Congress of Papyrologists, held in Warsaw, Poland, July 29–August 3, 2013. 15 My reflections here grow out of conversations with Amheida Project field director Paola Davoli, and with Rodney Ast, my papyrological colleague in the excavation; their thinking may be found in Rodney Ast and Paola Davoli, “Ostraka and Stratigraphy at Amheida (Dakh- la Oasis, Egypt): A Methodological Issue,” paper presented at the 27th International Con- gress of Papyrologists, held in Warsaw, Poland, July 29–August 3, 2013. 16 For the former, see Simon Burris, Jeffrey Fish, and Dirk Obbink, “New Fragments of Book 1 of Sappho,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 189 (2014).

145 (2) Spring 2016 87 Memory, Commemoration & Identity in an Ancient City: The Case of Aphrodisias

Angelos Chaniotis

Abstract: The ancient Greek city of Aphrodisias in Asia Minor presents abundant source material–inscriptions and images–for the study of memory and identity from the late second century BCE to the seventh century CE. These sources permit the study of overlapping civic, social, and religious identities, the expression of changing identities through name changes, the significance of memories of war and foundation legends for the transmission of collective and cultural memory, the agency of elite benefactors and intellectuals, the role played by inscriptions in the construction and transmission of memory, and the adaptation of identity to changing contexts, including emerging contacts with Rome, competition with other cities, an elevated position as provincial capital, and the spread of Christianity. In late antiquity–when the importance of religious conflicts increased–personal names, religious symbols, and acclamations became an important medium for the expression of the identity of competing religious groups.

New impulses in the study of Greek and Roman history come from various sources: the discovery of new and important documents in the forms of inscriptions and papyri; the dialogue with other his torical disciplines and with the social sciences; and ANGELOS CHANIOTIS is Ancient both new theoretical models and modern experi History and Classics Professor in ences and challenges. In the last six decades, new the School of Historical Studies at epigraphic finds have significantly changed our un the Institute for Advanced Study. derstanding of ancient religion. Papyri, such as the He is the author of War in the Helle- nistic World: A Social and Cultural His- Qumran texts and the Judas evangelium, have revo tory (2005) and is Senior Editor of lutionized the study of early Christianity. Quanti the Supplementum Epigraphicum Grae- tative methods in the social sciences have contrib cum (with Thomas Corsten, Niko- uted to the study of ancient demography, and the laos Papazarkadas, and R. A. Ty- study of ancient democracy has profited from input bout). He is also the editor of Un- from the political sciences, anthropology, and so veiling Emotions II. Emotions in Greece ciology. Performance theories and theories on ritu and Rome: Texts, Images, Material Cul- ture (with Pierre Ducrey, 2013) and als have inspired new research of the political cul Unveiling Emotions: Sources and Meth- ture of Greece and Rome. The feminist movement ods for the Study of Emotions in the gave new directions to the study of gender and soci Greek World (2012). ety; dialogues with the neurosciences, psychology,

88 and modern history have generated vivid At the time of their original use, these Angelos interest in the study of emotions and so monuments were truly memorials. But Chaniotis cial memory in classical antiquity. a semiotician should forbear saying that The study of some of the subjects men the Aphrodisians fortified their city with tioned above, including religion, memory, stones preserving memory. The inscribed demography, and democracy, has a long stones were used as building blocks be tradition in ancient history; but in recent cause they had become irrelevant and ob years, research has been exploring new her solete as memorials; the families who meneutic paths. Subjects such as gender would have cared for the memory of the and sexuality were novelties in the 1970s ancestors had gone extinct, or had left the and 1980s, but now belong to the thematic city, or were indifferent to such memory. canon of ancient history. Other subjects, Aphrodisias is not the only city in the such as theatricality, performativity, and Roman East that recycled old monuments emotion, have only been introduced into and carefully selected what was to be pre the field in the last decades. Identity, the served in order to reshape its public mem subject discussed in this essay, belongs to ory and identity. It is an ideal case study the latter category. It has emerged as an because of the abundance of artifacts, in important research object in the last de scriptions, and other sources from the late cades in part through dialogue with the so second century bce to the seventh century cial sciences, and partially because of the ce. These sources allow for a study of trans significance of identity in communities formations of identity, their agents, and facing the challenges of globalization and their historical contexts, over the course multiculturalism. of a millennium. This study addresses sub jects that have been at the forefront of con Around 360 ce, a fortification wall was temporary ancient studies.2 completed at Aphrodisias. Old material was recycled for its construction: parts of We can define identity as the response older buildings, blocks of funerary mon to the question who are you? or to whom do uments, and statue bases, many of them you belong? When Herakleides, a traveler inscribed. Most of the texts honor mem from the third century bce, visited Plataia, bers of the elite, mentioning their services the place of the Greeks’ decisive victory to the city, the offices they had occupied, over the Persians in 478 bce, he described the honors bestowed upon them, and the its citizens as having “nothing to say except achievements of their ancestors. A post that they are colonists of the Athenians and humous honorific inscription for a wom that the battle between the Greeks and the an, from the first or second century ce, is Persians took place in their territory.”3 This a good example: was the Plataians’ answer to the question The council and the people buried and hon- who are you? Such an answer involves a his ored Apphia, the daughter of Menestheus, torical narrative, real or imaginary–“we son of Eumachos, wife of Hermias Glykon, are colonists of the Athenians,” or “the Per son of Hermias, who belonged to one of the sians were defeated in our land”–and an first and most prominent families, one of association or affinity with another group those who together built the city, a woman (“we are Athenians”). What defines iden who also herself excelled in prudence and tity is the context in which the question is modesty, lived a life worthy of her ancestors asked: Who wants to know? What consequenc- and her husband, and was honored many es will the answer have? The context of com times through decrees.1 munication leads to different–sometimes

145 (2) Spring 2016 89 The Case of overlapping, sometimes contradictory– the celebration of festivals; the gymna Aphrodisias expressions of identity. sium, an exclusive place of athletic train ing where bonds of friendship were made; The elementary identity of a member the council of elders; age classes for boys of an ancient community was his civ and girls; the clubs, including profession ic identity, the identity of a man as a citi al and cult associations; and (in late antiq zen of Athens or Ephesos, for instance. In uity) the circus factions.5 In certain his Aphrodisias, even this simple civic iden torical periods, especially in late antiqui tity evolved: when the city first acquired ty, religious identity could become more the status of an independent polis circa important than any other form of allegi- 188 bce; when it joined the neighboring ance.6 community of Plarasa in a sympolity, like Various media were drawn upon for ly around the mid-second century bce; the expression of identity. They includ when the city absorbed all neighboring ed ethnic, civic, or geographical designa communities under the name Aphrodisias tions (such as “Greek,” “Aphrodisian,” in the late first century bce; when it could or “Karian”), personal names, commem proudly declare that it was “the most glo orative anniversaries, peculiar rituals and rious city of the most distinguished People cults, symbols, attire, comportment, lin of the Aphrodisians, allies of the Romans, guistic choice, and even culinary prefer friends of the emperor, free and autono ences. Which identity was displayed and mous”; and when it became the provin how it was expressed depended on the cial capital, “mother-city of Karia.”4 context of its manifestation: a festival, a Civic identity was occasionally overlaid commemorative anniversary, a meeting by other forms of consciousness, solidari of the assembly, a religious celebration, ty, and loyalty. Since the earliest times, the an internal conflict, an external threat, or Greeks held the feeling of belonging to a perhaps a diplomatic mission. group broader than that of their civic com munity. The three most widespread forms Regarding memory, we should take care of such identity were the culturally defined to distinguish between things remembered Hellenic identity, based on language, cus because they have been collectively ex tom, and common cultural memory; the perienced, also known as collective memo- regional identity, as in the case of the Cre ry, and things transmitted orally, in writ tans; and kinship with another group of ing, or through rituals and monuments, cities, as illustrated by the Dorians, or with known as cultural memory.7 Inscriptions settlements claiming to have had the same were the most important media for the founder. construction and transmission of collec Within the community, civic identity tive and cultural memory in Aphrodisias, could be overlaid, and at times under and in most cities during the Hellenistic mined, by social identity, loyalty to a politi and imperial periods.8 Public inscriptions cal group, or adherence to a religion that re referring to the past are based on an exist quired initiation or the acceptance of a set ing version of the past, which is selective of principles. Social identity, in turn, was and constructed. How the act of inscription shaped through participation in various changes the character of a text is illustrated types of communal organization and per by a letter Octavian sent to Samos around formance. In Hellenistic/Roman Greece 31 bce. When the letter was inscribed in and Asia Minor, such organizations in Aphrodisias more than two hundred and cluded civic subdivisions, important for fifty years after its composition, it was no

90 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences longer an administrative document, but No matter how identity is defined, a Angelos part of historical commemoration: name constitutes its most elementary ex Chaniotis Imperator Caesar Augustus, son of Divus pression. Before it was renamed around Julius, wrote to the Samians underneath 200 bce, the city of Aphrodisias must have their petition: you yourselves can see that been named Nineuda. The artificial name I have given the privilege of freedom to no Aphrodisias, “the city of Aphrodi te,” high people except the Aphrodisians, who took lighted the cult of an Anatolian war god my side in the war and were captured by dess the Greeks associated with their Aph storm because of their devotion to us. For rodite. Then, in the second century bce, it is not right to give the favor of the great- Aphrodisias joined Plarasa in a sympolity, est privilege of all at random and without forming one community whose official cause. . . . I am not willing to give the most name was “the people of Plarasa and Aph highly prized privileges to anyone without rodisias”; but before the end of the first good cause.9 century bce, Plarasa disappears from the record. And, finally, by the mid-seventh The recipients of Octavian’s hand-writ century ce, Aphrodisias was renamed ten response certainly did not inscribe it Stauropolis (“the City of the Cross”). These on stone; successful petitions were re changes of name reflect changes in the corded in inscriptions, not failures. The very way this community wanted to pre Aphrodisians, who probably received a sent itself to citizens and foreigners. copy through a citizen in Octavian’s ser Another important element of identi vice, selected it as part of a dossier of doc ty is the commemoration of a group’s or uments evidencing the relations between igins. By the early second century ce, dif Aphrodisias and Rome, and the privileg ferent traditions about Aphrodisias’s ori es awarded to their city: freedom, auton gins coexisted. The foundation (see Figure omy, exemption from taxes, and the invi 2) was attributed to the mythical hero Bel olability of Aphrodite’s sanctuary. This lerophon, who was believed to have built dossier was inscribed on a wall of the the it long before the Trojan War; this tradi ater around 230 ce.10 (See Figure 1.) The tion made Aphrodisias one of the oldest compilers of the dossier also intervened cities in Asia. At the same time, the city’s in the document’s content; they omit foundation was attributed to Ninos, the ted the petition and only published the spouse of the legendary queen Semiramis, response. And since Octavian was better a long time after the Trojan War; this ex known as Augustus, a name he received a plained Aphrodisias’s early name, Ninoe few years after he had sent the response in (a variant of Nineuda). More plausibly, 27 bce, they also added that name. When some elite families claimed that their an the document was inscribed, the sacrific cestors founded Aphrodisias in the sec es of Aphrodisias were no longer collec ond century bce.11 A city having multiple tive memory; they had become cultural founders is not unparalleled in history. memory, an abstract symbol of heroism Just as Aeneas and Romulus could coexist and loyalty. as founders of Rome, so, too, could the his Such inscriptions construct and con torical founders of Aphrodisias coexist trol memory. They present a curated ver with the legendary ones; this added pres sion of the past intended to become the tige to the descendants of the families that authoritative version of past history. The founded the city. places they were displayed were places of These different versions of the city’s ori commemoration. gins reflect both a complex history and ad

145 (2) Spring 2016 91 The Case of Figure 1 Aphrodisias Public Documents Evidencing the History of Aphrodisias Inscribed on a Wall of the Theater, circa 230 ce

Source: Photo by the author.

Figure 2 Relief Panel in the Civil Basilica of Aphrodisias

This panel features Bellerophon, the mythological founder of the city, together with Apollo and his horse Pegasus. It dates from the late first centuryce . Source: New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, Aphrodisias Archive. Photo: Mehmet Ali Döğenci.

92 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences aptations of identity to changing contexts. of Hellenic culture, and connected the Ro Angelos Aphrodisias was a city with a population man emperors with Greek mythology.15 Chaniotis of diverse origins.12 The indigenous inhab Although Aphrodisias had a predom itants must have been speakers of Karian, inantly Hellenic identity, the survival of an extinct Anatolian language. A new pop local culture can still be observed in re ulation arrived when the successors of Al ligious practices. The public dedications exander the Great settled soldiers serving were addressed to Aphrodite, but when in their armies: primarily Greeks, a few simple people sought divine protection, Iranians, and most likely a number of Jews. they did not address their prayers and And to these military settlers, we can attri- vows to the public patron of the city; rath bute the initiative to have their city rec er, they addressed their prayers to local ognized as an independent city-state, pro gods, whose epithets derive from Karian bably after 188 bce. In a world dominat place names: Nineuda, Spaloxa, Plyara, ed by Greek culture and political institu (Zeus of Nineuda, Zeus of Spaloxa, and tions, the public image of Aphrodisias was “the Virgin of Plyara,” respectively).16 Greek. In the inscriptions of the late Hel Non-Greek heroes also featured among lenistic and imperial periods, the indige the mythical founders, and the local his nous population is almost invisible, ex torian Apollonios referred to early Aph cept for a few personal and place names. rodisias as a city of Leleges, a non-Greek Not a single Jewish name is attested in population. In late antiquity, long after one of the hundreds of surviving epitaphs the last speaker of Karian had died, the earlier than the fourth century ce; only Aphrodisians labeled themselves as Kar a single grave monument decorated with ians, because their city was the capital of a menorah was found in a necropolis at the province of Karia. In the Roman East, Gök Tepesi.13 The Jews either lived in the a Hellenic identity could easily coexist countryside, distancing them from the in with a regional “barbarian” one. Which scriptions and cemeteries of the better- identity was displayed through the use of preserved urban center, or, upon death, mythological themes depended on Aph were buried in a still-unexcavated ceme rodisias’s relations to others: to Rome as tery or interned without a clear indication an ally, to other Greek cities as a peer, or of their religious identity. to Karian cities as their metropolis.17 The Aphrodisians participated in the “assembly of the Greeks” of Asia, and their Among the stories that ancient commu Greekness is explicitly mentioned in a let nities commemorated, two were more im ter sent by Hadrian in 119 ce.14 Built in the portant than others: foundation legends mid-first century ce to serve the imperial and wars–preferably victorious ones. A cult, the Sebasteion displayed one hundred defeat was commemorated when it could and ninety relief panels with cult scenes, be connected with a sacrifice that served engaging with themes connected with either as an exemplum or as a new begin Greek and Roman mythology: Bellero ning: Aeneas’s flight from Troy, for in phon and Pegasus, Orestes at Delphi, Achil stance, represented in the Sebasteion tem les and Penthesilea, centaurs, the deeds ple complex, alluded to the destruction of of Herakles, Aeneas’s flight from Ilion, one great city and the foundation of an Romulus and Remus, and allegorical rep other. Although Aphrodisias is primarily resentations of the first Roman emperors. known for its urban development and its This iconographical program displayed statuary, built in a period of undisturbed Greek education, stressed the significance peace, war memories were also an impor

145 (2) Spring 2016 93 The Case of tant element of memory and identity. The dressees of their diplomacy. The Athe Aphrodisias citizens were descendants of military set nians had allegedly learned this lesson in tlers; military training was part of civic 87 bce, when Sulla besieged their city and identity until the third century ce. Their their envoys confronted him with stories privileges were justified by their sacrific of their past military glory: es during war. Aphrodisias was a loyal ally When they made no proposals which could of the Romans in the wars against Mithri save the city, but proudly talked about The- dates VI in 88 bce; the city fought against seus and Eumolpos and the Persian Wars, the renegade general Labienus around 40 Sulla said to them: “Go away, blessed men, bce; and it supported Octavian (Augus and take these speeches with you; for I was tus) in the last civil wars of the Roman Re not sent to Athens by the Romans to fulfill public. For centuries, war was the most love of knowledge, but to subdue rebels.”20 important component of local commemo ration. Thus, the Aphrodisian declaration The consideration of Roman attitudes and to a Roman proconsul in 88 bce was, cen priorities affected the Aphrodisian identi turies later, inscribed as a reminder of ty promoted by the city’s elite. their self-sacrifice: Our entire people, together with the women Changes in name and memories of a and the children and all the property, is will- city’s origins, such as those sketched above, ing to risk everything for Quintus and for are evidence for a conscious and continu the Roman interests, for we do not wish to ous reshaping of identity. In some cases, live without the leadership of the Romans. we may identify the agents of these chang es as members of the elite. One of them The dramatic situations the Aphrodi was Apollonios, high priest of the impe sians faced, along with their loyalties and rial cult and author of a local history.21 their sufferings, were evidenced by docu Another was the poet Longianus, honored ments inscribed on a wall of the city’s the for the recital, in 127 ce, of his poems in ater in the early third century ce (see again Halikarnassos, a “relative” city of Aph Figure 1). Surprisingly, the one theme that rodisias. The foundation of both cities by we would expect to find in this documen Bellerophon may have been a subject of tation–kinship–is absent. Aphrodite was his poems.22 But magistrates and benefac the mother of Aeneas; consequently, her tors also shaped memory: when they ini city should be regarded as a kin of the Ro tiated or funded the construction of build- mans. In a period in which many commu ings decorated with mythological imag nities stressed kinship, based on myths, es, when they published old documents the Aphrodisian leaders chose a different describing Aphrodisias’s relations with strategy, recalling war exploits and the Rome, when they built statues and au foundation of the city by their ancestors.19 thored inscriptions that expressed target And they had good reasons to do so. Aphro ed values, and when they engaged in the disias was not the only city of Karia with an commemoration of their own families.23 important sanctuary of Aphrodite; many One of the first images that the classi other places could have claimed kinship cal visitor of the Sebasteion saw–after with the Romans. In a competitive envi descending from the podium of the tem ronment, the city needed a distinctive ple of the emperors–was that of Aeneas’s achievement. More important, the Roman flight from Troy. The family that funded authorities, who were interested in prag the building selected this image because matic arguments, were the primary ad it highlighted the relation between the

94 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences city of Aphrodite and the son of Aphro- had been depicted in a similar way to com Angelos dite, the founder of Rome. Many members memorate victories over the Persians and Chaniotis of the elite were named Aeneas for precise the Gauls. ly this reason.24 The memory promoted A dedication by “the demos” was paid by the elite also concerned recent histori for by public funds; consequently, these cal personalities. Kallikrates, for instance, works were subject to approval by the as in the mid-first century ce, restored the sembly. What we see today is the outcome statue of an ancestor who had excelled of successful proposals. We simply do not in the wars of the late first centurybce ; know how many times a mythological he inscribed a copy of a decree praising theme may have been rejected as inappro him as a warrior and benefactor; and he priate, but such discussions did take place. restored a statue of Nike that linked his The actions of the elite depended on nego family with Octavian.25 tiations with the Roman emperors, the cit Representations of myth and history izens whose support had to be won in the presuppose “agency”: of authors, of pro assembly, competitors among their peers, moters, and of interpreters. As they all and rivals in Asia Minor. The surface of competed with alternative reconstruc concord and homogeneity conceals ten tions of the past, they were subject to ad sions and conflicts. justments and reinterpretations. In some cases, we know why a theme was cho Although issues of identity may have sen. Aeneas’s flight from Ilion, for exam been debated, there is no indication that ple, reminded viewers that the founder such debates undermined the city’s co of Rome–and of Rome’s ruling dynas hesion. This changed dramatically in late ty–was the son of the local civic goddess. antiquity, when the importance of reli The mythological representations in the gious identity increased over other forms Sebasteion evoked the world of Greek of self-representation. Only then–in re culture and religion, into which the Ro sponse to the aggressive spread of Christi man emperors were to be incorporat anity–did the strong community of Jews ed; further, they reconciled imperial rule in Aphrodisias express their own sepa with Greek culture. The reliefs that dec rate identity by using biblical names and orated the civil basilica included images incorporating Jewish religious symbols alluding to local foundation legends. As into public buildings.27 noted before, Semiramis and husband Ni A small Christian community must have nos recalled the earlier tradition of Ninoe. existed at Aphrodisias as early as the third Gordios was the mythical founder of Gor century. Enjoying the support of the em diou Teichos, a neighboring community perors, but divided as a result of dogmat- incorporated in Aphrodisias; Bellerophon ic conflicts, Christianity advanced in Aph- was the founder of cities in Karia and Lykia rodisias as it did in the rest of Asia Minor, (see again Figure 2). Mythological reliefs but not without resistance. A strong Jew from the Agora Gate, dating from the late ish community existed in late antiquity, second century ce, represented battles be as well, confidently displaying its religious tween Greeks and barbarians, and prob symbols in public buildings. Even anti- ably glorified recent imperial victories pagan legislation failed to stop pagan rit against the “new barbarians,” the Parthi ual practice; the resistance of the last Hel ans.26 In the past, fights between Greeks lenists lasted until 529 ce, when Justinian and symbolic representatives of barbarity ordered the conversion of all inhabitants and chaos (such as Amazons and centaurs) of the Empire.

145 (2) Spring 2016 95 The Case of Figure 3 Aphrodisias Representation of Double Axes on the Pavement of the Tetrapylon

These symbols of the Karian Zeus can be found on the gate to the sanctuary of Aphrodite, dating from late antiquity. Source: Photo by the author.

Figure 4 A Partly Erased Representation of a Menorah and Shofar on a Column of the Sebasteion, Aphrodisias

Source: Photo by the author.

96 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Figure 5 Angelos A Public Document on a Wall of the Theater Chaniotis

The pagan name Aphrodisias, in the fourth line, was erased by the Christians. Source: Photo by the author.

Christians, Jews, and a strong group of for Pytheas, a prominent statesman, be philosophically educated followers of the gan with the words “City of the Paphian polytheistic religions all competed in Aph goddess and of Pytheas,” provocatively rodisias for the support of citizens who reminding the reader that his fatherland were asking the same questions: Is there a was still the city of Aphrodite. At the same god? And how can we attain a better afterlife? time, a flourishing group of philosophers, Before imperial legislation awarded vic under the leadership of Asklepiodotos, de tory to Christianity, a long period of reli fied anti-pagan legislation. Even in the last gious dialogue and mutual influence–but years of the fifth century ce, pagans per also of violent conflict–dominated life formed sacrifices anticipating the resto in Aphrodisias.28 Inscriptions and graffiti ration of the old cults. reflect this religious atmosphere, and the In the context of a religious competition, predominant role religious identity played the construction of identities becomes the in the city. While the Christians engraved predominant concern of religious groups. their religious symbols (the cross, fish) Rituals, liturgical texts, names, symbols, and and acclamations, the pagans engraved the use of specific religious terms served theirs, such as the double axe (see Figure as the means by which specific identities 3). Representations of menoroth in the Se were constructed and expressed. In a deeply basteion indicated that shops in respec divided community, personal names were tive areas were owned by Jews (see Figure instrumentalized in order to express re 4). Around 480 ce, an honorary epigram ligious identities. Two Jewish donor in

145 (2) Spring 2016 97 The Case of scriptions in Aphrodisias preserve the luded to baptism, Athanasios referred to the Aphrodisias names of members of a particular group; immortality of the soul, and Anastasios, to both inscriptions present an abundance the hope of resurrection. of names in closed contexts. Thirty-nine We know the winner of this conflict. The of one hundred Jews recorded had Biblical Christians occupied the temples, erased or Hebrew names such as Benjamin, Zach the names of the Jews in the town hall and arias, Judas, and Samuel; another large a menorah engraved in the Sebasteion, group had rare names related to religious and destroyed the statues of Aphrodite. values, often translations of Hebrew names. The embarrassing name Aphrodisias was The Jews in Aphrodisias used their names the victim of damnatio memoriae: the city as a means of identity and separation. Sim- was renamed to Stauropolis, the city of the ilarly, the majority of Aphrodisian Chris cross. The old name was erased from pub tians bore names that revealed their reli lic inscriptions (see Figure 5) in a case of gious identity, including names of apostles, collective amnesia–not without parallel evangelists, and angels, and a name relat –that aimed to support a new Christian ed to the Lord, Kyriakos. Their names also identity. revealed their religious values: Iordanes al

endnotes 1 “Funerary Honors for Hermias Glykon, His Wife Apphia, and Their Daughter Apphia,” in Inscrip- tions of Aphrodisias, ed. Joyce Reynolds, Charlotte Roueché, and Gabriel Bodard (London: Cen- ter for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London, 2007), 12.306, http://insaph.kcl .ac.uk/iaph2007. 2 For a few representative approaches to identity in the ancient world, see Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Richard Miles, Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity (London and New York: Routledge, 1999); Hans-Joachim Gehrke, “Myth, History, and Collective Identity: Uses of the Past in Ancient Greece and Be- yond,” in The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus, ed. Nino Luraghi (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2001), 286–313; Nino Luraghi, The Ancient Messenians: Constructions of Ethnicity and Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Angelos Chaniotis, “European Identity: Learning from the Past?” in Applied Classics: Constructs, Comparisons, Controversies, ed. Angelos Chaniotis, Annika Kuhn, and Christina Kuhn (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2009), 27–56. On the importance of myth and foundation legends, see Guy Maclean Rogers, The Sacred Identity of Ephesos: Foundation Myths of a Roman City (London and New York: Routledge, 1991); Tanja S. Scheer, Mythische Vorväter. Zur Bedeutung griechischer Heroenmythen im Selbstverständnis kleinasiatischer Städte (Munich: Editio Maris, 1993); and Ruth Lindner, Mythos und Identität. Studien zur Selbst- darstellung kleinasiatischer Städte in der römischen Kaiserzeit (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994). 3 See Fragment 11 in Friedrich Pfister, ed., Die Reisebilder des Herakleides. Einleitung, Text, Übersetzung und Kommentar mit einer Übersicht über die Geschichte der griechischen Volkskunde (Vienna: Rohrer, 1951). 4 On the historical development of Aphrodisias, see Joyce Reynolds, Aphrodisias and Rome (Lon- don: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1982); Angelos Chaniotis, “New Evidence from Aphrodisias Concerning the Rhodian Occupation of Karia and the Early History of Aph- rodisias,” in Hellenistic Karia, ed. Riet van Bremen and Mathieu Carbon (Bordeaux: Ausonius, 2010), 455–466. 5 On elite identity, see Eckhard Stephan, Honoratioren, Griechen, Polisbürger. Kollektive Identitäten in- nerhalb der Oberschicht des kaiserzeitlichen Kleinasien (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2002). On age classes, see Andrzej S. Chankowski, L’éphébie hellénistique (Paris: De Boccard, 2010). For athletics, see Onno van Nijf, “Athletics, Festivals and Greek Identity in the Roman East,” Pro-

98 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences ceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 45 (1999): 176–200. For material on the gymnasium, see Angelos Daniel Kah and Peter Scholz, eds., Das hellenistische Gymnasion (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, Chaniotis 2004). For associations, see John S. Kloppenborg and Stephen G. Wilson, eds., Voluntary As- sociations in the Graeco-Roman World (New York: Routledge, 1996); and Vincent Gabrielsen, “Brotherhoods of Faith and Provident Planning: The Non-Public Associations of the Greek World,” Mediterranean Historical Review 22 (2) (2007): 183–210. 6 Robert M. Frakes and Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, eds., Religious Identity in Late Antiquity (Toron- to: Edgar Kent, 1997); and Isabella Sandwell, Religious Identity in Late Antiquity: Greeks, Jews, and Christians in Antioch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 7 A small selection of relevant studies include: James Fentress and Chris Wickham, eds., Social Memory: New Perspectives on the Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Maurice Halbwachs, La mémoire collective. Édition critique établie par Gérard Namer (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997); Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Harald Welzer, Das kommunikative Gedächtnis. Eine Theorie der Erinnerung (Munich: Beck, 2002); and Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On the distinction between collective and cultural memory, with further bibliography, see Angelos Chaniotis, “Travelling Memories in the Hellenistic World,” in Wandering Poets in Ancient Greek Culture: Travel, Locality, and Panhellenism, ed. Richard Hunter and Ian Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 249–269. 8 Angelos Chaniotis, “Mnemopoetik: die epigraphische Konstruktion von Erinnerung in den griechischen Poleis,” in Medien der Geschichte. Antikes Griechenland und Rom, ed. Ortwin Dahly, To- nio Hölscher, Susanne Muth, and Rolf Schneider (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 132–169. 9 “Subscript of Octavian(?)/Augustus to Samos,” in Inscriptions of Aphrodisias, ed. Reynolds, Roueché, and Bodard, 8.32, http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/iAph080032.html. 10 Joyce Reynolds, Aphrodisias and Rome (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1982). 11 On mythical founders, see Bahadir Yildirim, “Identities and Empire: Local Mythology and the Self-Representation of Aphrodisias,” in Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, ed. Barbara Borg (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2004), 23–52; and Angelos Chaniotis, “Myths and Con- texts in Aphrodisias,” in Antike Mythen: Medien, Transformationen und Konstruktionen, ed. Ueli Dill and Christine Walde (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 313–338. On the “founders’ families,” see An- gelos Chaniotis, “New Inscriptions from Aphrodisias (1995–2001),” American Journal of Archae- ology 108 (2004): 382. 12 On military settlers, see Chaniotis, “New Evidence from Aphrodisias Concerning the Rhodian Occupation of Karia and the Early History of Aphrodisias.” On Jews in Karia, see Paul R. Tre- bilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). On Jews in Aphrodisias, see Angelos Chaniotis, “The Jews of Aphrodisias: New Evidence and Old Prob- lems,” Scripta Classica Israelica 21 (2002): 209–242. 13 Chaniotis, “The Jews of Aphrodisias,” 239. 14 “Decree of the Koinon of Asia,” in Inscriptions of Aphrodisias, ed. Reynolds, Roueché, and Bodard, 2.503, http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/iAph020503.html. See also “Letters from Hadrian to the city,” in ibid., 11.412, http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/iAph110412.html. 15 R. R. R. Smith, “The Imperial Reliefs from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias,” Journal of Roman Studies 77 (1987): 88–138; R. R. R. Smith, “Myth and Allegory in the Sebasteion,” in Aphrodisias Papers: Recent Work on Architecture and Sculpture, ed. Charlotte Roueché and Kenan T. Erim (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series No. 1, 1990), 89–100; and R. R. R. Smith, The Marble Reliefs from the Julio-Claudian Sebasteion (Darmstadt: Philipp von Zabern Verlag, 2013). 16 Angelos Chaniotis, “Aphrodite’s Rivals: Devotion to Local and Other Gods at Aphrodisias,” Cahiers du Centre Gustave Glotz 21 (2010): 235–248.

145 (2) Spring 2016 99 The Case of 17 Christopher C. Jones, “Multiple Identities in the Age of the Second Sophistic,” in Paideia: The Aphrodisias World of the Second Sophistic, ed. Barbara Borg (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2004), 13–21. 18 “Decree of Plasara/Aphrodisias,” in Inscriptions of Aphrodisias, ed. Reynolds, Roueché, and Bod- ard, 8.3, http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/iAph080003.html. 19 Christopher P. Jones, Kinship Diplomacy in the Ancient World (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 1999). 20 Plutarch Sulla 13. 21 Angelos Chaniotis, “Vom Erlebnis zum Mythos: Identitätskonstruktionen im kaiserzeitlichen Aphrodisias,” in Stadt und Stadtentwicklung in Kleinasien, ed. Elmar Schwertheim and Engelbert Winter (Bonn: Habelt, 2003), 79–80. 22 “Honours for C. Julius Longianos, Poet,” in Inscriptions of Aphrodisias, ed. Reynolds, Roueché, and Bodard, 12.27, http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/iAph120027.html. 23 R. R. R. Smith, Roman Portrait Statuary from Aphrodisias (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern Verlag, 2006). 24 See numbers 138–142 in Ioulia Bourtzinakou, Die Prosopographie von Aphrodisias (Heidelberg: Uni- versität Heidelberg, 2012), http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/13639. 25 “Restoration of the honours for his ancestor by Kallikrates,” in Inscriptions of Aphrodisias, ed. Reynolds, Roueché, and Bodard, 12.402, http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/iAph120402.html. See also “Funerary inscription for Dionysios, Descendant of Diogenianos,” in ibid., 13.106, http://insaph.kcl.ac.uk/iaph2007/iAph130106.html. 26 Pascale Linant de Bellefonds, “The Mythological Reliefs from the Agora Gate,” in Aphrodisias Papers 3: The Setting and Quarries, Mythological and Other Sculptural Decoration, Architectural Development, Portico of Tiberius, and Tetrapylon, ed. Charlotte Roueché and R. R. R. Smith (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series No. 20, 1996), 174–186. 27 Chaniotis, “The Jews of Aphrodisias.” 28 Angelos Chaniotis, “The Conversion of the Temple of Aphrodite at Aphrodisias in Context,” in From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity, ed. Johannes Hahn, Stephen Emmel, and Ulrich Gotter (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 243–273.

100 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences The Environmental Fall of the Roman Empire

Kyle Harper

Abstract: Global environmental history is currently being enriched by troves of new data, and new models of environmental variability and human impact. Earth scientists are rapidly expanding historians’ knowledge of the paleoclimate through the recovery and analysis of climate proxies such as ice cores, tree rings, stalagmites, and marine and lake sediments. Further, archaeologists and anthropologists are using novel techniques and methods to study the history of health and disease, as revealed through examination of bones and paleomolecular evidence. These possibilities open the way for historians to participate in a conversation about the long history of environmental change and human response. This essay considers how one of the most classic of all historical questions–the fall of the Roman Empire–can receive an answer enriched by new knowledge about the role of environmental change.

On the twenty-first day of April inad 248, Rome celebrated her one thousandth birthday. For three days and three nights, the haze of burnt offerings filled the streets. An exotic menagerie befitting the seat of a tricontinental empire was presented to the people, and massacred: thirty-two elephants, ten elk, ten tigers, sixty lions, thirty leopards, six hippopot- ami, ten giraffes, the odd rhinoceros, and innumer- able other wild beasts, not to mention one thou- KYLE HARPER is a Historian and sand pairs of gladiators. The ludi saeculares (“century Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma, games”) summoned forth a host of archaic memories, where he is also Senior Vice Presi- “skilfully adapted to inspire the superstitious mind dent and Provost. He is the author with deep and solemn reverence,” in the words of of From Shame to Sin: The Christian Edward Gibbon.1 The celebration still carried shad- Transformation of Sexual Morality in owy associations with the underworld; the rituals Late Antiquity (2013), which won encouraged the diversion of pestilence. Despite the the Award for Excellence in the deliberate primitivism of the rites, the ludi saeculares Study of Religion, from the Amer- ican Academy of Religion, Histor- could be credited, like so much else, as a creative re- ical Studies, and Slavery in the Late discovery of the imperial founder, Augustus. The Roman World (2011), which won ludi saeculares were in every sense an imperial affair, the James Henry Breasted Prize. a stage-crafted display of the awesome power that

101 The Rome enjoyed, unbroken for centuries on in a truly alien world. The serene confi- Environ- end. Little did contemporaries know they dence of the empire had been rudely shak- mental Fall of the were witnessing a sort of valediction: the en. Hulking stone fortifications, the Aure- Roman last secular games of Rome. lian Walls, went up around a city in which Empire It is easy, from our distance, to imagine distance and mystique had so recently that there was some measure of denial in seemed protection enough. The silver had such an exuberant celebration of the Ro- dissipated from the empire’s coins, which, man millennium–as if the inhabitants of now spewed in super-abundance from the Rome were enjoying the ancient equiva- mints, more resembled crude wafers. A new lent of cocktails on the deck of the Titan- kind of man–the Danubian soldier with ic. But perhaps we are blinded by hind- little time or awe for the urbs–had irrevers- sight. The Rome of ad 248 offered much ibly wrested control of the state from the to inspire a sense of familiarity and confi- moneyed senatorial aristocracy. Careers dence. The pomerium, or urban boundary, were made and unmade in the barracks of remained a construct of the imagination northern garrison towns, rather than in the in an unwalled city that sprawled over into old capital. Beneath the imperial city itself, its hilly countryside. The coins minted to in the honeycomb of burial caverns known honor the games maintained a ponderous as the catacombs, there is evidence that texture of true silver; to hold one of these the obscure cult of Christianity was, for the coins even today is to feel the combination first time, making uncanny strides toward of precious metal and public trust that becoming more than a marginal curiosity. steadied the value of the imperial money. In short, in the space of a single genera- The Romans’ ancestral polytheism, nest- tion, the lineaments of the period we now ed in the very fabric of their civic life, gave call late antiquity had come into view. No pe- historical assurance that the city’s place riod of Roman history is so screened from was written in the stars. Presiding over our gaze as the generation that passed be- the spectacle was Emperor Marcus Ju- tween Philip and Aurelian; and few were so lius Philippus, also known as Philip the momentous. How we imagine the changes Arab. Though he hailed from the south- that occurred in those tumultuous decades, ern reaches of Syria, he was not a conspic- often beyond our ken, will decisively shape uous outsider in an empire whose integra- how we view that fathomless historical epi- tive capacities are virtually unmatched in sode: the decline and fall of the Roman Em- history. Early in his reign, he had shown pire. impressive energy: he attempted administrative reforms in Egypt, oversaw a great Gibbon described the subject of his fa- burst of road improvements in places as mous history as the triumph of “barbarism removed as Mauretania and Britain, and and religion.” This was a vantage formed in enjoyed a satisfying victory over north- the heady world of Enlightenment letters. ern barbarians. Above all, as Philip clear- Gibbon’s genteel disdain for superstition ly recognized, the city herself demanded nurtured a sense of remote affinity for the obeisance, being the critical, central node Romans. And his ravaging critical faculty, of power at the nexus of people, army, and turned against the partisan ancient and ec senate. In Rome, campaigns were planned, clesiastical histories, made his Decline and careers plotted, fortunes decided.2 Fall of the Roman Empire a landmark then Philip’s Rome would have felt familiar (in the late eighteenth century) and a mon- to Augustus, its first emperor. And yet, ument still. In its sources and preoccupa- just one generation on, we find ourselves tions, Gibbon’s text is resolutely a prod-

102 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences uct of its own age. Indeed, every genera- time-scales with razor precision.4 The cold Kyle tion looks upon the past through the eyes season became the frosted decade; the dry Harper of the present. It is no surprise or disser- year became the arid century. The discov- vice for us to return anew to the Roman ery of Holocene variability, on a scale and past, awakened to the fact that the environ- at speeds significant enough to influence ment can be a protagonist in human histo- human fortunes, has been a revelation. ry, armed with radically new tools for reconstructing the relationship between hu- The history of human health and disease manity and nature.3 While explanations is also a story of environmental change. The for the fall of Rome have never lacked, it physical testimony of human bones, the might seem surprising that environmental stories frozen in their isotope chemistry, change has nonetheless remained such a and the expansive possibilities of gene se- marginal candidate. The sudden assimi- quencing are enabling historians to trace lation of environmental history into the deep transformations in human health and mainstream of our historical conscious- disease in ways that were previously incon- ness is a testament to just how quickly we ceivable. The patterns of change emerg- have come to know the drama of environ- ing from the bioarchaeological record are mental instability in times past and pres- both stark and surprising. For instance, ac- ent. cumulated skeletal evidence has inescap- The environment is not an inert back- ably shown that the Romans were short drop to human history: from the cold win- in stature, unimpressive relative to their ter to the dry year, we experience seasonal Iron Age predecessors and Dark Age suc- and interannual variation. We are trained cessors.5 (Julius Caesar, reputed to have to notice and to respond to climate vari- been tall, may have stood imposing only ability on annual scales. Most of us are also among a population in which the average at least dimly aware that the hospitable man stood five feet, five inches.) Achieved clime we currently inhabit–the Holocene, stature is a function of both genes and en- circa 10,000 bc to the present–is really an vironment, and the environmental contri- interglacial, a periodically friendly inter- bution, in turn, is the result of net nutrition, lude between ice ages. The Holocene has or the income of nutrients during devel- been an epoch of relatively warm and sta- opment minus the expenditures of labor ble climate relative only to the jagged Pleis- and disease. For the Romans, the heavy tocene, when snowcaps could blanket the burden of infectious disease drained their mid-latitudes, and vast tracts of the earth’s bodies’ metabolic resources and stunted surface became uninhabitable in the geo- their growth. logical blink of an eye. The clinching evi- Deciding how to integrate environmen- dence for natural climate variability during tal change into the story of Rome’s de- the Holocene has come principally from a cline and fall will intersect with some al- new kind of physical archive. Natural ar- ready well-worn tracks in the historiogra- chives, like ice cores, tree rings, marine de- phy. Gibbon set a pattern that many have posits, and cave minerals, can stretch back followed since: he looked inward, to the thousands to tens of thousands of years. flaws inherent in the very constitution of Over the last few decades, glaciologists, empire, to find the cause of Rome’s fall. dendrochronologists, and other intrepid He wrote: “The decline of Rome was the explorers of the earth’s past have submit- natural and inevitable effect of immod- ted to historians the possibility of recon- erate greatness. Prosperity ripened the structing climate history on civilizational principle of decay; the causes of destruc-

145 (2) Spring 2016 103 The tion multiplied with the extent of con- the Pleistocene, the mechanics of our or- Environ- quest; and as soon as time or accident had bital journey around the sun create icy mental Fall of the removed the artificial supports, the stu- spells lasting millennia. Within the Holo- Roman pendous fabric yielded to the pressure cene, solar cycles of shorter periodicity al- Empire of its own weight.”6 The environment tered the amount of heat received by the might well have a place within this in- earth, while volcanic eruptions coughed ternal chain of causes. Just ten years af- up clouds of sulfates that prevented enter the final volumes of Gibbon’s history ergy from reaching the planet’s surface. were published, the mother of all endog- The oceans and the atmosphere form a enous models appeared in the first edition coupled system, and the circulation of of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Princi- heat through the deep, interconnected, ple of Population. Malthus’s core insight and variously salty waters of the earth is was simple, and remains elegant: because responsible for pulses of climate change, of the limits on food production, popula- whose rhythms and effects are far from tion and well-being stand in an intrinsic completely understood. Until the very re- and inverse relationship to one another. cent past, the climate system has varied Growth, if not forestalled by some con- on its own tempo and terms, blissfully in- straint, inevitably recoiled back upon it- different to human endeavors. self, as “sickly seasons, epidemics, pesti- However, to lay the patterns of epidem- lence, and plague, advance in terrific ar- ic disease exclusively at the feet of na- ray, and sweep off their thousands and ten ture would too easily exonerate humani- thousands. Should success be still incom- ty in coaxing along the evolutionary his- plete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in tory of our own microscopic rivals. Quite the rear.”7 The reverend’s theory makes unawares, we humans have had a deter- ecological catastrophe the ironic fate of mining part in the evolutionary destiny human development. of the very bacteria and viruses that, until Conversely, environmental catastrophe recently, were the most important agents does not have to be self-induced. Power- of human mortality. The niches we con- ful exogenous determinism has its advo- struct for ourselves have inadvertently cates. As John Brooke writes in Climate shaped the evolutionary conditions of the Change and the Course of Global History, microbes that haunted our forebears. The “Until the onset of modern accelerated role of infectious disease has been exog- population growth, no pre-modern soci- enous, only in the narrowest neoclassical ety of consequence occupying a reason- sense of the term, which predicts that ably adequate biome suffered a purely mortality rates are determined by real- endogenous ‘Malthusian crisis’; rather, wage levels.9 Malthus can inspire more ca- adversity, crisis, and collapse were funda- pacious readings that urge us to look for mentally shaped by exogenous forces: the other pathways of feedback between civi- impacts of drought, cold, and epidemic lization and environment. Even in the case disease drove episodic and abrupt rever- of climate variability, it will benefit us to sals in societal complexity and the human give special attention to the precise means condition.”8 Up until the Industrial Revo- through which environmental turbulence lution, climactic fluctuation was unmoved sometimes did–and sometimes did not– by human stimulus, and climate variabil- stretch societies beyond their capacity to ity was driven foremost by changes in the endure. As with any good story, the drama amount of radiative energy entering the of environmental history lies in the inter- atmosphere. On geologic timescales like play between structure and contingency.

104 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences At this moment, as new models of en- service, open pathways to citizenship, Kyle vironmental change and human impact co-optation of local elites, and, of course, Harper gather momentum, the watchword is resil- civil engineering nonpareil–meant that by ience: the capacity of human societies to re- the time Augustus brought the last signif- spond to the shocks of nature, to draw on icant stretches of Mediterranean shore- batteries of stored energy to fund the re- line under Roman dominion, it was no covery from the lashes of climate change idle boast for Romans to refer to the sea as and disease.10 Resilience is not infinite, mare nostrum, “our sea.” however, and to look for it in ancient soci- What kind of empire did the Romans eties is also to be alert for the signs of per- build? Foremost, it was an agrarian trib- sistent stress, and the realization that just utary empire. A comparative framework beyond the threshold of endurance lies trains our eyes to see the all-important cascading change and systemic reorgani- annual cycle of tax gathering as the cen- zation. Resilience asks us to consider the tral dilemma of Roman statecraft. It also ecological specificity of a social system, in threatens to flatten out the real unique- which lie its reserves of strength, as well ness of Roman ecological and economic as its tensions and vulnerabilities. The no- achievements, which constituted the true tion of resilience lets us look anew at Rome source of Rome’s vulnerability, and its ul- in the middle decades of the third centu- timate demise. This distinction begins with ry and allows us to see, perhaps, not a soci- the obvious–but extraordinary–fact that ety waiting for its “principle of decay,” as the Romans stand as the only people ever Gibbon phrased it, to unfold in course, but to unify the basin into a single political or- one whose depleted stores left it exposed ganism. Yet this fails to capture the full to the unforeseeable strokes of environ- geographical accomplishment of Roman mental misfortune. imperium, whose deep continental annex- es reached north across the 56th parallel, If you could go back in time from the sec- while the southern edges dipped below ular games of ad 248 to the very founda- the 24th parallel north. “Of all the contig- tion of the city of Rome–nearly ten “ages uous empires in premodern history, only of man”–you would have found an in- those of the Mongols, Incas, and Russian auspicious, but typical, Iron Age agglom- czars matched or exceeded the north-south eration of huts along the hilly banks of range of Roman rule.”11 Few empires, and the Tiber River. The eighth century bc none so long-lived as the Roman empire, was an age of beginnings, but for a long grasped parts of the earth reaching from time, the western reaches of the Mediter- the upper mid-latitudes to the fringes of ranean stood in the shadow of the Aege- the tropics. an and Near Eastern experiments. Centu- This empire was a network of cities ries elapsed before there were any signs looking toward the waters, and there is no of the coming Roman miracle; when it doubt that the Mediterranean Sea was at did arrive, it seemed sudden and inexora- its core. The Mediterranean basin is one ble. The Romans stepped forcefully into of the globe’s most complex climate re- the imperial space created by Hellenistic gimes. The delicate, moody features of kingdoms and, after razing the Carthagin- the Mediterranean climate–arid summers ians, their only western rival of any impor- and wet winters against a relatively temp tance, seized hegemony of the Mediterra- erate backdrop–are recognizable around nean. The Roman package–aggressive col the world. But the Mediterranean itself onization, assimilation through military is unique; the dynamics of a giant, inland

145 (2) Spring 2016 105 The sea, combined with the crenellated texture goods with ease. The high Roman Empire Environ- of its inland terrains, pack extreme diver- is notable for the distinct absence of se- mental Fall 13 of the sity into miniature scale. The region is a vere food crisis. Dearth is always relative, Roman patchwork of microclimates.12 And be- but Malthus’s “gigantic inevitable famine” Empire cause of its position at the juncture of the seems not to have stalked the Romans, so subtropics and mid-latitudes, the Mediter- much as periodic bouts of high prices. ranean zone is crossed by an array of dis- The Roman economy defied the dour tinct climate processes. The western terri- logic of Malthusian pessimism, accord- tories are subject to the influence of Atlan- ing to which the teeming populations of tic patterns, in particular North Atlantic the empire should have crunched the food pressure gradients, which decide wheth- supply. The high empire stands as one of er the storms carrying all-important rains the most significant phases of econom- will pass into the Mediterranean or spin ic “efflorescence” in the centuries before north over the European continent. The industrialization. In this period, the gains controls on the Eastern Mediterranean are from trade and the diffusion of technolog- even more complicated, still including the ical improvements allowed a large-scale sweep of westerlies from the Atlantic, but society to forestall the real and overarch- also hypersensitive to other mechanisms ing limits of the land’s productivity. The that influence the levels of winter precipi- Roman economy achieved growth, even tation. And Egypt, the breadbasket of the on a per-person basis, straight into the empire, plugged the Romans into wholly teeth of population expanse. The best ev- other climate regimes; the life-bringing idence comes from the dry sands of mid- Nile floods originated in Ethiopian high- dle Egypt: recovered papyri enable frag- lands, watered by the Indian Ocean mon- mentary reconstructions suggesting that, soons. here in a province subjected to heavy fis- Control of grain production along the cal extraction, the wages of the most or- Nile’s verdant flanks gave the Romans a dinary laborers (diggers, donkey drivers, natural insurance policy to buffer against dung haulers) increased across the first the vagaries of the Mediterranean climate. two centuries of Romanization.14 And this was only one of many. The Romans Trade and technology let the Romans had the advantage of building an empire outrun the Malthusian reaper for no short atop countless indigenous risk-manage season. But the success of the imperial econ ment strategies, a stock of peasant knowl- omy seems to have had another accom- edge accreted over millennia. Over that plice: the climate. The “Roman climate ground cover of local wisdom, the engi- optimum” emerges from a range of prox- neers of the Roman empire built a ma- ies as a distinct phase of late Holocene cli- chinery of food provision and water man- mate. In the Mediterranean, it was a pe- agement that was political in nature, and riod of unusually hospitable alignment: monumental in scale. Despite the renown warm, wet, and stable. Levels of total solar of the aqueduct and the grain dole, what is irradiance were consistently elevated, and truly striking is the extent of the imperial there was a striking absence of signatures food system left to the market. Public gra- of major volcanic eruption. Of the largest naries provided a margin of protection, and twenty-five eruptions in the last two and in times of acute crisis, the government in- a half millennia, none occurred between serted itself. But the best insurance poli- the death of Julius Caesar and the year ad cy was the network of roads and sea lanes, 169.15 Proxies of warm temperature, like along which private merchants moved bulk the glaciers that retreated up the Alps,

106 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences stand in affirmation. Heat was matched ents. In the letters of Marcus, we catch Kyle with moisture in the West; Spain and It- glimpses of the fevers and diarrheas that Harper aly appear to have been well-watered. The laid low so many little scions of the im- effects in the East were uneven, although perial line. Yet the reign of Marcus was the Levant enjoyed a persistent cycle of the apex of what Gibbon, with justifica- humidity, for which the most concrete tes- tion, called “the period in the history of timony is the evidence of shoreline settle- the world, during which the condition ments high above the Dead Sea. And the of the human race was most happy and sacred floods of the Nile River revealed a prosperous.”18 Today we might look back period of astonishing dependability.16 on the happiest age and see not a lurking principle of decay waiting to unwind, but Climate, then, stood in alliance with a society in which cumulative ecological commerce and technical progress, as the pressure was entailed by the very terms Roman efflorescence defied or deferred of development. Such a perspective pre- the paradoxical laws of premodern de- pares us for what happened next: in the velopment. People crowded the basin. If middle of the ad 160s, a pestilence arose there is a sign, though, that quietly points in the immediate wake of an eastern mil- us toward a qualification of this optimis- itary campaign. The Romans believed the tic picture, it is the Romans’ short stat- soldiers who impiously sacked the city ure. Biological well-being remained as– of Seleucia on the Tigris had unlocked a or more–elusive than ever for the in deadly vapor. In reality, the unfamiliar habitants of the imperial Mediterranean; pathogen was probably introduced into life expectancy was low, even by ancient the virgin populations of the Mediterra- standards. The inadvertent consequence nean via Rome’s bustling Red Sea trade. of more people was a more insalubrious It was smallpox.19 environment.17 In Rome, the dog days of The Antonine Plague, as it is known, summer brought on an awful tide of gas- can claim to be considered the world’s troenteric illnesses, with an autumn surge first pandemic; it is the prime exhibit for of malaria following on its heels. Malthus, what William McNeill called the conver- we might say, was right for the wrong rea- gence of the civilized disease pools of Eur- sons. The poor health of the Romans was asia.20 Highly communicable and highly unmediated by food shortage or low wages. lethal, the disease was conducted along In a scenario not unlike the “antebellum the very networks that held the empire paradox,” when American stature suffered together. Signs of the plague, both giant a setback in the mid-nineteenth century and subtle, are ubiquitous. Building vir- despite the arc of development, urban den- tually ceased. Mass graves provide chill- sity and imperial connectivity in the Ro- ing testimony, and confirm literary reports man Empire were as conducive for micro- of unprecedented mortality. Invocations bial ecology as human prosperity. Thanks to Apollo, the diverter of plague, appear to their imperial ecology, the Romans across the empire. Emergency military were rich, but sick. conscriptions were levied. The price of Wealth offered no escape from the bru- goods leapt. Although the scale of the An- tal facts of life and death. The wife of the tonine Plague’s impact is hotly debated at emperor Marcus Aurelius bore him at least the moment, it is not unreasonable to be- fourteen children–six girls and eight boys lieve that the pandemic was as devastat- –yet only one of the girls and one of the ing and consequential as the introduction boys verifiably outlived both of their par- of smallpox into the New World. Marcus

145 (2) Spring 2016 107 The himself succumbed, probably, to the dis- pulsory purchases to its own advantage, Environ- ease. was grabbing wheat at prices that were mental Fall of the In a cruel coincidence, the pacific re- shockingly high even for the fair market, Roman gime of the Roman climate optimum end- implying acute desperation. One papyrol- Empire ed almost simultaneously with the advent ogist sensitive to the nuances of these data, of the great mortality. A massive volcanic has deemed this a sign of “unusual sever- eruption in ad 169 spelled the inevitable ity.”23 The contemporary bishop of Alex- end of an unusually stable chapter of cli- andria, the great metropolis at the mouth mate history. The climate of the next cen- of the Nile Delta, described the Nile riv- turies would be disorganized and indeci- erbed as drier than a desert.24 The rever- sive, before a sharp and unmistakable de- berations of a catastrophic food crisis in scent into what is starting to be known as Egypt could be felt empire-wide. Worse the “late antique little ice age.” While the was yet to come. If one purpose of the sec- Roman Empire was never quite the same ular games was to ward off the evils of pes- after the appearance of the smallpox pan- tilence, the millennium celebration was demic, the reality is that the empire did shortly to prove a stupendous failure. persist, and in recognizable form. A new The weather can induce famines or fan dynasty of Libyan and Syrian heritage the movements of people that stir sick- held sway for nearly half a century. If they ness. The weather can also upset the hair- failed ever to please the Roman Senate en- trigger ecological equilibria that some- tirely, there is no disguising the basic suc- times control the reproduction of disease cess of their restorative enterprise. Ro- vectors like mice or mosquitos. We can- man citizenship was made universal, and not say if the volatility of the mid–third Roman law entered its classical heights. century climate contributed to the out- It was in these years that the sour church- break of epidemic disease that again visit- man Tertullian proclaimed, “Everywhere ed the empire. Contemporaries noted the there are households, everywhere people, coincidence of drought and pestilence, but everywhere cities, everywhere life!”21 To to their ancient eyes, this was a sign of di- use the terms we have laid out before, the vine wrath rather than environmental dis- imperial system, with the Roman people turbance. Whatever the cause, just a few and the Senate at its center, endured with- generations after they had recovered from out fundamental reorganization, though the first attacks of the smallpox virus, the stressed by new levels of environmental Romans experienced what might be con- turbulence. The populace reveling in the sidered the second wave of pandemic dis- secular games of ad 248 was not deluded ease in global history. The Plague of Cyp to think that Rome would still be the cen- rian, named after the bishop of Carthage ter of the world after another age of man whose sermons provide our most detailed had passed. description of the disease, ravaged Alex- andria in ad 249. By ad 251, the plague had In ad 244, the Nile waters failed to rise. reached the Western capital. For nearly Two years later, they failed again. These pat- twenty years, it blazed sporadically across terns are inferred from haphazard scraps the Roman world. of papyri. In March of ad 246, a provin The Plague of Cyprian has managed to cial official in the Oxyrhynchite district evade serious attention from historians.25 of Egypt ordered that all private stocks of But if we look anew at the period, with our grain be registered.22 The provincial gov- eyes open to the power of environmen- ernment, which usually set prices in com- tal fury, the pandemic can be seen every-

108 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences where. It is far better supported than the the spiral of inflation. The ageless civic pa- Kyle Antonine Plague, despite appearing at the ganism of the Mediterranean seemed to Harper worst-documented moment in imperial sputter, losing ground to an obscure, if vo- history. Pagans and Christians, from both cal and highly organized, rival that seized East and West, independently and unan- the mission field opened by the deep social imously insisted on the plague’s devas- dislocation and painful inefficacy of the tation. While the crisis summoned forth ancestral gods. Although late Roman rul- the full range of our witnesses’ rhetorical ers loved to advertise their “restoration of virtuosity, it also inspired some crucially the times,” this was clearly special plead- detailed reportage, from Cyprian’s exciting. What was ultimately to emerge from ed account of the disease’s hemorrhagic the wreckage in the later third century has presentation to Dionysius’s surprisingly rightly been called “a new empire.”28 specific claims about its demographic impact. Alexandria had lost 62 percent of its Human societies are embedded in their urban population, judging from the num- natural environment, and the challenge ber of recipients on the public grain dole. for historians is how to assimilate the Five thousand corpses a day were wheeled mountains of new knowledge about the out of Rome. According to the pagan his- past environment rising up around us. torian Zosimus, the Plague of Cyprian in- For centuries, historians have been able fested both towns and villages, and “de- to explain the transformations of the later stroyed whatever was left of mankind. No Roman world, including the crisis of the plague in previous times wrought such de- third century, without needing to consid- struction of human life.”26 er the blunt factors of climate change and The Plague of Cyprian did not cause the disease. It takes patience, as well as some fall of the Roman Empire, but it did insti- imagination, to go back and pretend we gate a phase of crisis that pushed the impe- do not know the ending. The proud urban rial system beyond the threshold of resil- people who cheered in the circus, or sang ience. When it struck, the fabric of empire in the processions of the ludi saeculares in unwound. The Romans had faced challeng- ad 248, could little have imagined that es before: dynastic conflict, external inva- dynamic cycles in our proximate star, or sion, class violence, and–yes–famine and the chance mutation of a virus in a far-off plague. Even in the sunniest days of An- forest, would rattle the foundations of the tonine rule, these adversities were not unfamiliar world they inhabited. That was familiar.27 But their concurrence and in- the revenge of the giant imperial ecol- tensity in the ad 250s induced cascading ogy they created, at the very moment in change. Barbarians no longer just menaced history they chose to create it. It is exhil- the frontier; they pillaged unwalled towns arating, if also a little daunting, for us to in the imperial interior. The struggle for be confronted with the evidence of glob- dynastic legitimacy turned into imperial al environmental history, which is just dissolution. beginning to let us reimagine the human The coinage of the period is a perfect ob- past, while allowing, always, an occasion- jective correlative: its fiduciary value with- al and wary glimpse to the present. stood repeated debasement of the precious metal content, until it did not. In this crisis, its value finally collapsed, and only the reorientation of the entire currency system around gold lifted the economy from

145 (2) Spring 2016 109 The endnotes Environ- 1 mental Fall Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1 (London: William of the Strahan and Thomas Cadell, 1776), ch. 7. Roman 2 Empire For more about Philip the Arab, see Clifford Ando, Imperial Rome AD 193–284: The Critical Cen- tury (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 115, 121. 3 Of course, newer environmental history builds on the pioneering efforts of the Annales school, as well as scholars like Hubert H. Lamb and William H. McNeill. For an exciting conspectus of new approaches and tools, see Michael McCormick, “History’s Changing Climate: Climate Science, Genomics, and the Emerging Consilient Approach to Interdisciplinary History,” Jour- nal of Interdisciplinary History 42 (2) (2011): 251–273. 4 For an overview of what is possible, see the studies collected in Piero Lionello, The Climate of the Mediterranean Region From the Past to the Future (London: Elsevier, 2012). 5 Although this is the conclusion of several studies, the most methodologically sophisticated study to date is Monica Giannecchini and Jacopo Moggi-Cecchi, “Stature in Archeological Samples from Central Italy: Methodological Issues and Diachronic Changes,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 135 (3) (2008): 284–292. 6 Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, ch. 39. 7 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church- yard, 1798), ch. 7. 8 John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey (New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 2014), 9. 9 John Landers, Death and the Metropolis: Studies in the Demographic History of London, 1670–1830 (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 10 Carl Folke, “Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social–Ecological Systems Analy ses,” Global Environmental Change 16 (3) (2006): 253–267. 11 Walter Scheidel, “The Shape of the Roman World: Modelling Imperial Connectivity,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 27 (2014): 7–32. 12 Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Ox- ford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). See also Cyprian Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 13 Peter Garnsey, Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 14 Kyle Harper, “Peoples, Plagues, and Prices in the Roman World: The Evidence from Egypt” (under review). 15 M. Sigl, M. Winstrup, J. R. McConnell, et al., “Timing and Climate Forcing of Volcanic Erup- tions for the Past 2,500 Years,” Nature 523 (7562) (2015): 543–549. 16 For a recent summary of what we know (which is already becoming outdated), see Michael McCormick, Ulf Büntgen, Mark A. Cane, et al., “Climate Change during and after the Roman Empire: Reconstructing the Past from Scientific and Historical Evidence,” Journal of Interdisci- plinary History 43 (2) (2012): 169–220. 17 Walter Scheidel, Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 18 Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, ch. 3. 19 See the essays collected in Elio Lo Cascio, L’impatto Della “Peste Antonina” (Bari: Edipuglia, 2012). The identification of the pathogen will remain uncertain until it is genetically se-

110 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences quenced, but a strong scholarly consensus has emerged around smallpox, as Lo Cascio’s vol- Kyle ume makes clear. Harper 20 William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, 1st ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1976). 21 “Ubique domus, ubique populus, ubique respublica, ubique vita,” from Tertullian De Anima 30.3. 22 P. J. Parsons, ed., P. Oxy. 42.3048, “Proclamation of Iuridicus and Registration of Corn” (Ox- ford: Sackler Library, 1974). Low- and high-resolution images of the papyri are available at http://163.1.169.40/cgi-bin/library?e=q-000-00---0POxy--00-0-0--0prompt-10---4------0-1l-- 1-en-50---20-about-3048--00031-001-0-0utfZz-8-00&a=d&c=POxy&cl=search&d=HASH5412a0c- 44c9708ca044ded. 23 Dominic Rathbone, “Prices and Price Formation in Roman Egypt,” in Économie antique: prix et formation des prix dans les économies antiques, vol. 2, ed. Jean Andreau, Pierre Briant, and Raymond Descat (Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges: Musée Archéologique Départemental, 1997), 194. 24 Eusebius Historia Ecclesiastica 7.21. 25 For a full treatment, with detailed discussion of the sources cited here, see Kyle Harper, “Pan- demics and Passages to Late Antiquity: Rethinking the Plague of c. 249–70 Described by Cyprian,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 28 (2015): 223–260. 26 Ibid., 236. 27 C. P. Jones, “Aelius Aristides, ΕΙΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕΑ,” The Journal of Roman Studies 62 (1972): 134–152. 28 Timothy D. Barnes, The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1982).

145 (2) Spring 2016 111 The Scientiﬁ c Study of Antiquity

Sudden dramatic breakthroughs in archaeological science, intertwined with new approaches to the understanding of classical texts and of depictions in various media, promise major new insights into both the physical realities and the mentalities of the classical world. DNA analysis of humans, animals, and pathogens; strontium isotope analysis of movements of individuals over the course of their lives; source analysis of clays and metals; plus technical studies of the chaîne opératoire of pottery manufacture establishing whether the inspiration, the pot, or the potter moved illustrate the rapid advance of archaeological science. A recent DNA study of a corpse from the time of Justinian revealed a pathogen of the same strain of bubonic plague as that which ravaged Europe from AD 1347–1351. Holistic analysis of the 430–426 BC burials in the Kerameikos of Athens during the Great Plague, including DNA and strontium isotope analysis, paleopathological and histological analysis, dietary pattern and dental microwear studies, plus calculus biomolecular and biodistance analysis will add much new information, while new approaches to the study of texts and funerary rituals will shed light on how the survivors in classical Athens understood and reacted to the disaster. Understanding how societies respond to catastrophes is as relevant to our likely future as to our comprehension of ages past. The study of the fi fteen hundred skeletons from the rescue excavation of the recently discovered cemetery in the deme of Phaleron in Athens, covering the period c. 750–470 BC, some with hands bound and showing evidence of torture before death, combined with the study of the pottery and other objects buried with the bodies, will provide a vast amount of new information about the history of Athens, including the identity, behavior, and beliefs of its inhabitants. In all such interdisciplinary efforts, a thorough grounding in the relevant texts and archaeological evidence is essential to avoid error and understand the historical signifi cance of the information recovered. Similarly, the very recent presentation of strong scientifi c evidence regarding the burial of Philip II of Macedon in Tomb I rather than Tomb II at Vergina, accompanied by what are believed to be the bodies of his wife and newborn daughter who, although murdered after Philip’s death, are now thought to have been interred beside him, sheds dramatic new light on the dynasty that produced Alexander the Great. The wealth of new categories of data becoming available and new approaches to the interpretation of the past will require interdisciplinary skill sets. A number of universities are rising to the challenge. For example, Sheffi eld University has long combined the study of archaeology with archaeological science; Cambridge University, at the behest of its vice chancellor, is considering how the new age of the storage and organization of “big data” can be brought to bear on the vast amount of material recovered by archaeological excavation; Harvard University has begun a program on the Science of the Human Past (SoHP) and entered into a collaboration with MIT and the Max Planck Institute in Jena to study ancient DNA; and the University of Arizona has created a new interdisciplinary program via a Center for Mediterranean Archaeology and the Environment (CMATE) offering joint degrees for comajors in one area of Mediterranean archaeology and one fi eld of archaeological science. The state-of-the-art Laboratory for Archaeological Science will open this spring at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. The future belongs to those prepared to cross narrow academic boundaries. Interdisciplinarians, arise!

MALCOLM H. WIENER, a Fellow of the American Academy since 1999, is President and Founder of the Institute for Aegean Prehistory and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

112 What is Ancient History?

Ian Morris & Walter Scheidel

Abstract: Every society has told stories about ancient times, but contemporary ancient history was the product of two main developments. The first was the invention of writing, which made scholarly study of the past possible, and the second was the explosion of knowledge about the world from the eighteenth century on- ward. Europeans responded to this explosion by inventing two main versions of antiquity: the first, an evolutionary model, was global and went back to the origins of humanity; and the second, a classical model, treated Greece and Rome as turning points in world history. These two views of antiquity have competed for two hundred and fifty years, but in the twenty-first century, the evidence and methods available to -an cient historians are changing faster than at any other time since the debate began. We should therefore expect the balance between the two theories to shift dramatically. We close by considering some possible areas of engagement.

Ancient history is the study of beginnings, and is thus organized around two central questions: 1) how to define the subject matter whose beginning is being studied; and 2) what that beginning means for the world that the studiers live in. Across the centuries, the answers ancient historians have offered to these questions have changed significantly, largely in response to new evidence and new methods. But now, in the twenty-first century, the evidence and IAN MORRIS is the Jean and Re methods available are changing faster than at any becca Willard Professor of Clas sics at Stanford University and a time since the eighteenth century, and we should Fellow of the Stanford Archaeol expect the answers ancient historians offer to do the ogy Center. same. Ancient history has always been with us because, WALTER SCHEIDEL is the Dick ason Professor in the Humanities so far as we know, every society has had stories about and Professor of Classics and His its beginning. In the absence of writing, howev- tory at Stanford University. He is er, ancient history could never be much more than also a Catherine R. Kennedy and myth-making. Such stories usually describe the Daniel L. Grossman Fellow in Hu- world’s creation and peopling, as well as the origins man Biology. of the particular group telling the myth. Since most (*See endnotes for complete con adults in the world were still illiterate as recently tributor biographies.) as 1960, for most of our time on earth, these hazy,

113 What is once-upon-a-time worlds–worlds which of radicals, especially in France and Scot- Ancient Aboriginal Australians describe with the land, were responding to the anomalies by History? wonderfully evocative term “the dream- proposing a new paradigm. time”–were the only ancient history pos- What if, they asked, the hunter-gather- sible. ers and herders that missionaries, traders, Writing introduced vastly superior evi- and conquerors had met in other conti- dence for antiquity, and every literate civ- nents were actually survivals of how every- ilization has produced its caste of ancient one had once lived? What if, rather than historians. Remarkably, though, almost all representing the beginning, Jesus and the of these groups did much the same as other moral exemplars of antiquity were their predecessors with the available data, really just actors within one stage of histo- choosing a particular piece of their own ry? And what if history had really begun ancient history and pronouncing it exem- with a worldwide state of nature and had plary. The best example of this is proba- then improved, until humanity reached bly the case of China, where, by the first the heights of enlightened Paris and Ed- century bce, scholars had already nom- inburgh? inated the sage Confucius, who lived in This wild new theory, which its cham- the fifth century bce, as an ancient par- pions called philosophical history, shook up agon of virtue. This anointing took place salons all over Europe. But by the 1750s, it even though–or perhaps because–Con- was already generating a backlash. Philo- fucius himself claimed merely to be reviv- sophical history, its many critics (particu- ing the virtues of a still earlier paragon, larly in Germany and England) observed, the Duke of Zhou, of the eleventh cen- had not actually proven that humanity had tury bce: “I transmit but do not create,” climbed from foraging, through herding Confucius wrote, “I am an admirer of an- and farming, on to the current age of com- tiquity.”1 Confucius’s popularity went up merce. To them, the whole endeavor should and down, but until well into the twenti- really be called conjectural history, not philo- eth century, the texts attributed to him re- sophical history. mained at the center of elite education in What was needed, these critics argued, China. was not just-so stories about civilization’s emergence from so-called “savagery,” but In this way, each civilization produced its serious scholarship–like that being done own version of exemplary ancient history, at the time on the literature and sculp- and until the eighteenth century, no seri- ture of ancient Greece and Rome. Faced ous challenge to this way of thinking about with the mass of new facts being generat- the distant past appeared. Only then, and ed by philologists and connoisseurs, con- only in Western Europe, did new facts jectures about hunter-gatherers were remake such stories of beginnings seem in- vealed as not just unprovable, but also un- adequate, and thinkers responded by com- important. What really mattered to these ing up with two new ideas that have dom- reformers was that two-and-a-half-mil- inated ancient history ever since. The ba- lennia earlier, the Greeks had invented a sic problem–and opportunity–was that unique civilization based on the princi- ever since Marco Polo came back from ples of reason, freedom, and beauty. The Cathay in 1295, evidence had accumulat- towering intellects of ancient Greece– ed that there were things in heaven and Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides–had earth that just did not fit into Europe’s ex- wrenched humanity out of its long slum- emplary history; and by the 1720s, groups ber. This, and not conjectures about Am-

114 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences azonian hunters, was the beginning we never existed, human life, and the right Ian should be studying. conduct of it, would have been in their es- Morris 5 & Walter sentials exactly what they are now.” Scheidel In one sense, classicists of the eighteenth Many evolutionists, including Marx and century could legitimately be accused of Weber, granted Greece and Rome a big- trying to go back to an exemplary mod- ger place in the story than this. However, el of antiquity, but in another sense, they by 1900, it was clear that cultural evolution, were moving far beyond it. They accept- as the theory came to be known, was not ed the emphasis of conjectural historians going to collapse like conjectural history; on comparison with the new data coming it was able to organize far too many facts, in from other continents, but insisted that and its theoretical frameworks were far too what that comparison actually showed was robust for that. The invention of radiocar- that the Greeks and Romans were incom- bon dating in the 1940s and the calibration parable. When Johann Joachim Winckel- revolution of the 1970s provided a global mann in 1755 contrasted the “noble sim- framework for comparisons, and fossil and plicity and quiet grandeur” of the Greeks dna data pushed the story of mankind’s with the decadence of Etruscan and Egyp- beginnings back millions of years. tian art, he saw it as evidence for the com- Despite the high quality of much of plete superiority of the Greeks; and by the scholarship being done on Greece and 1808, Wilhelm von Humboldt was ready to Rome, the twentieth century was one go much further.2 “Our study of Greek his- long retreat for the classical vision of an- tory,” he wrote, is “a matter quite different cient history, in part because evolutionism from our other historical studies. For us, the proved vastly more exportable on the world Greeks step outside the circle of history. . . . stage. Herbert Spencer was one of the first We fail entirely to recognize our relation- English-language nonfiction writers to be ship to them if we dare to apply the stan- translated into Chinese and Japanese, and dards to them which we apply to the rest his work quickly spawned Asian imitators. of world history. . . . [F]rom the Greeks we European classical scholarship did have take something more than earthly–some- a significant impact on the methods of thing godlike.”3 Asian ancient historians (China’s “Doubt- Unable to compete with classicists’ meth- ing Antiquity” movement and Japan’s To- odological sophistication and weight of kyo and Kyoto Schools all drew inspira- data, conjectural history collapsed in the tion from European Quellenforschung, the early nineteenth century. However, it is philological analysis of sources) but its hard to keep a good theory down, and as in- core claims about Greco-Roman excep- formation from other fields of scholarship tionalism were largely ignored. continued to accumulate, it soon came Within Western education, evolution- back revived and revised. In the 1850s, ary and classical approaches to beginnings Herbert Spencer, the first theorist to use coexisted, the former mostly colonizing the word “evolution” in something like its the new social science disciplines, and the modern sense, argued that every field, latter dominating the older humanities from geology and biology to history and fields. But even within the humanities, the metaphysics, could be tied together in a classical vision steadily lost ground. The single story of “the advance from the sim- University of Chicago, where both the au- ple to the complex.”4 Classical civilization thors of this article once taught, is a good was just one stage in a larger story, Spen- example. The university is probably best cer asserted, and “had Greece and Rome known for its commitment to the social

145 (2) Spring 2016 115 What is sciences, but it has also been a staunch de- tion of Political Society (1967), read by tens Ancient fender of the classical heritage. When the of thousands of college students, Greece History? university was founded in 1892, it orga- and Rome each show up on just three of nized separate departments of Greek and the 270 pages. They fare better in David Latin, because classics was too important Christian’s hugely influential world his- a field to confine within a single unit; the tory Maps of Time (2004), each cropping Classics Building, which opened its doors up sixteen times–but that book has 642 in 1915, is still one of the finest structures pages.7 on campus. However, by the time we ar- And yet at Stanford, where both of us rived in Chicago (Morris in 1987, Scheidel now teach, nineteen of the twenty-seven in 2000), Greek and Latin had been con- professors whose research focuses on any densed into a single classics department, aspect of humanity before ad 600 work and its denizens had been penned into chiefly on Greece and Rome. Our casual one corner of the second floor. There were survey of websites suggests that Stanford rearguard actions, to be sure: In 1948, the is in no way unusual; many American uni- history department began offering a wild- versities devote twice as many faculty to ly popular course on the history of West- Greece and Rome as they do to the rest of ern civilization (which both of us once the ancient world combined. Even if the taught). This year-long sequence, running lopsided distribution of resources is, in –as student wisdom put it–from Plato large part, a matter of institutional iner- to nato, was required for all undergrad- tia, the battle over beginnings that opened uates for decades. Even in the 1980s, by in eighteenth-century Europe is clearly far which time the course was optional, most from over. students took it anyway, and some still That said, it might be time to take the camped out overnight to get into their battle in a new direction. preferred sections. In 2003, however, the university closed it down. One of the most remarkable things about In the mid-2010s, the sheer bulk of ar- the 250-year-long back and forth between chaeological evidence organized by evo- evolutionary and classical models of an- lutionary models, the elegance of evolu- cient history is how little each side has en- tionary theory, and the rhetorical power gaged with the other’s arguments. This is of narratives like Jared Diamond’s Guns, most obvious in the classical model, which Germs, and Steel (1997) or Yuval Noah Ha- willfully ignores millions of years of histo- rari’s Sapiens (2011) seem to have won over ry along with most societies that have ever educated opinion.6 Now, the origin story existed. A century ago, classical historians that seems to matter most began not in regularly claimed that Greece and Rome first-millennium-bce Greece and Rome, were the beginning of the history that mat- but with the invention of agriculture in the tered, but nowadays the very few who do Middle East more than ten thousand years so tend to be dismissed as reactionaries or ago, or the evolution in Africa of modern racists. Most classicists seem to be getting humans more than one hundred thousand on with careful research, without worry- years ago, or of the genus Homo nearly ing too much about the wider significance three million years ago. of their work, even though this seems like- Given this view of history, Greece and ly to ensure the classical model’s contin- Rome might be interesting topics, but they ued retreat. just are not very important ones. In Morton However, a similar dynamic is at play Fried’s anthropological classic The Evolu- within the evolutionary model. No one

116 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences familiar with conventional history could torians far beyond the field’s established Ian fail to be struck by the way that evolution- comfort zone. Deep knowledge of particu- Morris & Walter ary histories tend to have a lot to say about lar cultures and mastery of their languag- Scheidel the agricultural revolution and the origins es will remain important, but perhaps no of states, and about the integration of the more so than broad knowledge of world world in the early-modern period and the archaeology, quantitative methods, the so- subsequent industrial revolution, but very cial sciences, linguistics, and evolutionary little about anything that transpired in theory. Conventional boundaries between between. The geographer Alfred Crosby prehistory and ancient history, ancient and apparently speaks for many when he says, medieval history, and cultural traditions in his wonderful book Ecological Imperial- will lose much of their meaning. ism, that “between [2500 bce] and [the] Equally important, engaging with the time of development of the societies that evolutionary vision will have consequences sent Columbus and other voyagers across for how ancient historians are taught. Cur- the oceans, roughly four thousand years rently, in most institutions of higher learn- passed, during which little of importance ing, ancient history is part of a humanistic happened.”8 curriculum, emphasizing languages and This flyover zone, of course, includes the details of a specific literary, historical, almost all of recorded history. It saw the artistic, and philosophical tradition. Sim- world’s population increase one hundred- ply adding more requirements to graduate fold, the largest cities grow twentyfold, and programs that are already too long does not writing, markets, money, wealth, inequali- seem like a very good solution, but neither ty, empires, war, institutional capacity, and does turning training on its head, and aban- the stock of knowledge each transform the doning the knowledge of primary sources human experience. A version of history and particulars that has always been classi- with a blind spot that obscures all of these cal history’s strength in favor of the train- changes is arguably little better than a ver- ing that comparativists receive in the social sion that cannot see anything outside the sciences. history of Greece and Rome. Possibly the least poor compromise It seems to us that this peculiarity of would be to approach ancient history in a evolutionary history confronts classical manner similar to how anthropology used historians–whichever part of the world to be taught. A graduate student inter- they may work on–with both an opportu- ested in, say, how politics functioned in nity and an obligation to respond. Evolu- prestate societies was not expected to learn tionary historians often seem to imply (or, everything that could be known about ev- in Crosby’s case, state explicitly) that once ery acephalous group on earth. He or she agriculture began in the Near East after might, instead, combine a broad cross cul- 9600 bce, everything else followed auto- tural survey with immersion in one spe- matically, with cultural differences count- cific group, learning its languages, living for little. This is a huge claim to make, ing among its people, eating its food, and with enormous implications for where the catching its diseases. Insights, the anthro- world might go in the centuries to come; pologist Clifford Geertz once suggested, and no one is better placed than classical are not made by “regarding a remote lo- historians and archaeologists to find out cality as the world in a teacup or as the so- whether it is true. ciological equivalent of a cloud chamber,” Rising to the challenge and obligation, but by recognizing that “small facts speak however, will necessarily take classical his- to large issues . . . because they are made

145 (2) Spring 2016 117 What is to.”9 Studies of the size of ancient Greek consciousness), dao (Zhuangzi’s “way”), Ancient houses or Athenian worker’s wages or the or to kalon (Plato’s “good”) was a matter History? cost of raising foundlings as slaves in Ro- of self-fashioning, looking for the answers man Egypt do not have to speak to broad- within rather than waiting for kings or er theories of how premodern economies priests to provide them. The secret, how- work–but they can be made to.10 ever, always involved compassion. Do un to others as you would have them do unto So far, the topic that has attracted most you, the Axial Age founders said, and you attention of this kind is probably the “Ax- will change the world. ial Age,” which lends itself to a variety of For some decades, social scientists approaches that could potentially combine seemed to find the Axial Age more inter- classical and evolutionary thinking about esting than humanists did, perhaps be- ancient history. Struggling in the 1940s to cause the roughly simultaneous appear- come to terms with the moral crisis of his ance of similar intellectual systems in such own day, the German philosopher Karl Jas- distinct cultures, without much evidence pers coined the phrase to describe the mid- of diffusion, was easier to analyze in evo- dle of the first millenniumbce because, he lutionary terms than within the culture- said, this had been the axis around which specific rameworksf that classical histori- the world’s history had turned. From Chi- ans favored.12 There were exceptions, but na to the Mediterranean, the centuries on in the last few years classical scholars have either side of 500 bce saw an explosion of begun claiming the topic as their own.13 moral thinking, producing Confucianism Few scholars have the talents to master the and Daoism in China, Buddhism and Jain- relevant skills thoroughly enough to be- ism in India, and Greek philosophy and the come experts on the primary sources from Hebrew Bible in the Mediterranean region multiple Axial Age civilizations (the emi- and Near East. This really was the begin- nent historian of ancient science Geoffrey ning of the history that counted, Jaspers Lloyd is the obvious exception), but there asserted, because this was when “man, as are other ways to approach the problem.14 we know him today, came into being.”11 For instance, scholars might set focused Jaspers did not gloss over the deep differ- studies of the Presocratics, Upanishads, or ences between Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Mencius against the larger Axial back- Israelite, and Greek thought; after all, no ground, or, more broadly, ask why there one could possibly mistake Plato’s Apology was no Axial Age in the second millenni- for Confucius’s Analects. He observed, how- um bce, or the New World.15 ever, that all the way from Greece to the In their teaching and research, ancient Yellow River, intellectuals began debat historians deal with one of the most con- ing similar questions at roughly the same sequential phases of human cultural evo- time. The new thinkers tended to be sim- lution, a time when modestly sized local ilar kinds of people, usually coming from groups of people–villages, towns, chief- the lower ranks of the elite and from doms, and the like–were increasingly ab- small, marginal states rather than from sorbed into ever-larger networks of coop- great empires. They also tended to reach eration and, more often than not, control. the conclusion that while the nature of Models of social organization differed con- goodness was indefinable, people could siderably, from small but cohesive inde- still transcend the evils of this world. At- pendent communities to large but hetero- taining ren (Confucius’s “humaneness”), geneous and highly hierarchical empires. nirvana (the Buddha’s “snuffing out” of The ancient Mediterranean produced both

118 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences of these outcomes in paradigmatic form: within a few centuries by new empires, Ian the Greek city-state culture, the largest of no comparable behemoth ever again took Morris & Walter its kind in all of history, and the Roman over all of temperate Europe. The Roman Scheidel Empire, the biggest empire ever to exist in state and the Chinese Qin and Han Dynas- that region, which, in an added twist, had ties had built huge empires that became grown out of a small city-state. more similar as they matured, and yet Eu- For several reasons, these developments rope and China embarked on very differ- are best studied from a comparative per- ent trajectories once these early super- spective. Since empires tended to appear states had failed.19 The subsequent diver- wherever ecological conditions allowed, gence between the periodic restoration the driving forces behind the rise and fall and abatement of universal empire in East of any one of them cannot properly be as- Asia (and elsewhere) and enduring poly- sessed in isolation. That modern scholars centrism in Europe requires explanation, have managed to propose more than two a task only made possible by systematic hundred different reasons for the fall of comparison. the Roman Empire strongly suggests that Global contextualization of this kind conventional academic focus on just a forces ancient historians to reformulate single case is simply a dead end, and that their own questions: If the Roman Empire comparative analysis of a process that oc- was unique, why did it appear in the first curred so many times in history promises place? By privileging its decline and fall far more compelling results.16 over its rise, have we trained our sights on Moreover, the tension between city-state the lesser challenge? Are there specific envi- and empire as competing and complemen- ronmental obstacles to empire that the Ro- tary forms of sociopolitical organization mans somehow overcame–and how could throws light on a very big problem of his- we possibly hope to know them unless we tory more generally: the relationship be- also look at other parts of the world? Most tween state formation and human welfare. importantly, does the lasting disappear- Our colleague Josiah Ober has powerfully ance of the Roman Empire help explain one argued that the pluralism of the Greek city- of the most momentous historical transfor- state culture delivered important benefits, mations, the Industrial Revolution, and the especially when it sustained participatory resultant “Great Divergence” between the democracy, as it did in classical Athens.17 At West and the rest of the world? The rea- the same time, one of us has found that hu- sons for this breakthrough remain contest- man social development peaked whenev- ed, with some scholars favoring relatively er some of the largest premodern empires recent or contingent factors and others ar- were at the height of their power.18 guing for the relevance of more deeply entrenched, long-term causes.20 By foster- Understanding the costs and gains asso- ing competition and preserving alternative ciated with different forms of macrosocial pathways of development, did the absence cooperation has been a major challenge of anything like the Roman Empire in the across academic disciplines, and ancient West prepare the ground for modernity?21 history has much to contribute. After all, However one chooses to approach these the modern West grew out of a highly com- big questions, both the Axial Age and the petitive state system that had gradually successive political and economic diver- emerged from the wreckage of the Roman gences between Europe and the rest of the Empire. Unlike in other parts of the globe, world strike us as areas where twenty- where failed empires were often replaced first-century classical historians have im-

145 (2) Spring 2016 119 What is portant things to say about the begin- torians want to make contributions to ex- Ancient nings of the world we occupy and where it plaining beginnings, we will need to raise History? might be going next, as classical and phil- our game, master new evidence, meth- osophical historians alike tried to do in ods, and questions, and recognize that the the eighteenth century. But just as both ancient world was much bigger–and an- these groups of scholars did a quarter of cient history much longer–than our pre- a millennium ago, if today’s classical his- decessors made them seem.

endnotes * Contributor Biographies: IAN MORRIS is the Jean and Rebecca Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford University and a Fellow of the Stanford Archaeology Center. He has excavated in Brit ain, Greece, and Italy, and published fourteen books, including Foragers, Famers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve (2015) and Why the West Rules–For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (2010). WALTER SCHEIDEL is the Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Classics and History at Stanford University. He is also a Catherine R. Kennedy and Daniel L. Grossman Fel low in Human Biology. He is the author of Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt (2001) and editor of Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States (with Andrew Monson, 2015), State Power in Ancient China and Rome (2015), and The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean (with Peter Bang, 2013). 1 Confucius Analects 7.1, 12.1. 2 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, trans. Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987), 33. 3 Wilhelm von Humboldt, “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Greek Republics” (1808), sec. 1, as cited in Humanist Without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, ed. Marianne Cowan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), 79. 4 Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” Westminster Review 67 (1857): 465. 5 Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, vol. 2 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1904), 43. 6 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); and Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: HarperCollins, 2015). 7 Morton Fried, The Evolution of Political Society (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967); and David Chris tian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 8 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, 2nd ed. (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 42. 9 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 23. 10 We have immodestly chosen examples from our own work and that of Richard Saller, our col league and collaborator, formerly at Chicago and currently at Stanford. See Ian Morris, “Eco nomic Growth in Ancient Greece,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 160 (4) (2004): 709–742; Walter Scheidel, “Real Wages in Early Economies: Evidence for Living Standards from 1800 bce to 1300 ce,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 53 (3) (2010): 425–462; and Richard Saller, “Human Capital and Economic Growth,” in The Cambridge Com- panion to the Roman Economy, ed. Walter Scheidel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 73, 85. 11 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953), 1.

120 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 12 See Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State Uni Ian versity of New York Press, 1986); Johann P. Arnason, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock, Morris eds., Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden: Brill, 2003); Robert Bellah, Religion in Human & Walter Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2011); and Rob Scheidel ert Bellah and Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and its Consequences (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2012). 13 See especially Dædalus 104 (2) (Spring 1975), “Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium B.C.” 14 Geoffrey Lloyd, Adversaries and Authorities: Investigations into Ancient Greek and Chinese Science (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Geoffrey Lloyd, The Ambitions of Curiosity: Under- standing the World in Ancient Greece and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Geoffrey Lloyd, Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Science and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin, The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002). 15 For the thoughts of one of us on the latter questions, see Ian Morris, Why the West Rules–For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 254–263; and Nicolas Baumard, Alexandre Hyafil, Ian Morris, and Pascal Boyer, “Increased Affluence Explains the Emergence of Ascetic Wisdoms and Moralizing Religions,” Current Biology 25 (1) (2015): 10–15. 16 See the 210 factors identified in Alexander Demandt, Der Fall Roms: Die Auflösung des Römischen Reiches im Urteil der Nachwelt (Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1984), 695; and Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vols. 4–6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939). Toynbee’s work embraced a global vision of the fall of civilizations, but we have since come a long way in terms of both methodology and factual knowledge. 17 See, most recently, Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015). 18 Morris, Why the West Rules–For Now, especially pages 281, 332, and 385 for notes on the period up to 1500 ce. 19 Walter Scheidel, ed., Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); and Walter Scheidel, ed., State Power in Ancient China and Rome (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 20 Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Peer Vries, Escaping Poverty: The Origins of Modern Economic Growth (Vienna: Vienna University Press, 2013). Vries offers the most com prehensive survey of the debate. 21 One of us very much thinks so. See Walter Scheidel, Escape from Rome: The Death of an Empire and the Birth of the Modern West (forthcoming Princeton University Press).

145 (2) Spring 2016 121 Classics: Curriculum & Profession

Peter T. Struck

Abstract: The challenges currently facing classicists are not so different from those our profession has faced for the last one hundred and fifty years, and with each challenge, a discipline sometimes imagined by out- siders to be slow to embrace the new has shown itself naturally disposed to experimentation. The discipline’s agility derives from the unique degree of variegation in the modes of thinking required to thrive in it: from interpretive, to quantitative, to those relying on knowledge of culture and context. As the value of education is increasingly judged in terms of workforce development, we stand our best chance to thrive by sticking to our strengths, and anchoring our curricular goals and messages to the value of the liberal arts as a whole, as well as the intellectual dexterity that it fosters.

The shape of undergraduate training in the classics has changed dramatically. Up through the 1970s, it would be fair to say that our departments modeled curricula with the goal of producing the next Wil- amowitz. We have since instituted programs with a wider view of desirable outcomes, and most of us have even allowed that some students could earn degrees in our field without any knowledge of Greek or Latin. That is a profound shift, but it is not the only dramatic change of its kind; in fact, it’s not the half of it. A snapshot from one hundred years ago PETER T. STRUCK is the Evan C. shows how far down this path we have come. In the Thompson Associate Professor of May 1912 issue of The Classical Journal, Ellsworth D. Classical Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University Wright of Lawrence College was taken aback by the of Pennsylvania. He is the author results of his survey of 155 of the most reputable and of Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers representative American universities and colleges at the Limits of their Texts (2004) and (public and private), with regard to the study of editor of the Cambridge Compan- classical languages.1 (He excluded technical schools ion to Allegory (with Rita Copeland, and colleges for women “for obvious reasons.”) The 2010) and Mantikê (with Sarah Iles requirement for ancient languages across the coun- Johnston, 2006). His next book, ti- tled Divination and Human Nature: try had shrunk to an average of only five years. It is A Cognitive History of Intuition in An- eye-opening that this would appear to be a regres- tiquity, will be published by Princ- sion. But it is downright stunning that Wright was eton University Press in 2016. surveying the language requirements not just for

122 those specializing in classics, but for any elor’s degrees awarded had quadrupled, Peter T. Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) degree from these increasing at almost twice the pace of the Struck institutions. increase in population. Of particular con- Wright’s discussion is poignant. He cern for him was the rate at which state uni- speaks of a past, only forty years prior versities were multiplying. These schools to his day, during which there was wide were charting a different course, in which agreement about what a B.A. degree ancient languages were less consistently meant. Training in the classics was so cen- required. The land-grant schools were– tral a component of it that he wondered by law, after all–mandated to provide whether it would be “fair or honorable training in “such branches of learning as to label with a B.A. that which is devoid are related to agriculture and mechanic of the classical element.” To Wright, the arts. . . . in order to promote the liberal classical element provides rigorous and and practical education of the industrial systematized training in logical think- classes.”3 Certain other newcomers, such as ing, language use, and oratory; further, Leland Stanford Junior University (which it grants us a “gallery of lives” through Wright knew by this lengthier name) were which to contemplate virtue. Citing his supported by business money, and they no recent commencement address at the longer valued the classics at their cores. University of Michigan, Wright points to Charles Francis Adams, the son and grand- the decline in study of the classics as the son of the Adams presidents, gave voice chief reason for “the declining love of no- and form to a new idea of college training: ble letters and noble art–the declining on June 28, 1883, he told the Harvard chap- respect for tradition and authority, for ter of Phi Beta Kappa that the attachment the heritage and the faith–the declining to the classics was an outmoded “fetich.”4 splendor of the ideal.”2 While we have Minds were changing; and the idea of col- toned down our language in the last hun- lege as exclusively a finishing accultura- dred years, it is harder to claim we have tion into an aristocracy of the learned (an much departed from the general senti- idea that was itself inflected by the earli- ment: ardent, defensive, a bit hectoring, er core goal of training clergy) was being and ultimately appealing to our better left behind. Universities were now tasked angels. All of which is justified, knowing to prepare a broader cross-section of the what our discipline can do for those that public in the practical arts. take it up. What classicist wouldn’t of- It is not too far a stretch to see an anal- fer some kind of defense during such re- ogous change taking place in our own retrenchment? But, then again, the familiar cent past. The percentage of the popula- ring of this concern gives pause, particu- tion that has a B.A. has continued to swell. larly to our academic tribe. One wonders, It crossed 5 percent in 1940 and sits now how many men of 1912 would it have tak- at 30 percent, a number unimaginable one en to move a boulder lightly thrown by hundred years ago. Just as the land grant one man from the earlier time? expanded the notion of what training for There were reasons–apart from a de- the B.A. could look like, so, too, most of the clining respect for our heritage–for the increase since the 1970s has been attrib- changes made during Wright’s time. Uni- utable to the addition of students pursu- versities were undergoing a massive ex- ing formerly unknown college paths. The pansion at the turn of the twentieth cen- fields of criminal justice, basic business, tury. Their numbers had doubled over the and health support, which used to rely on forty years prior, and the number of bach- on-the-job training, now require the B.A.

145 (2) Spring 2016 123 Classics: as standard, entry-level certification.5 Not most advantageous approach, or set of Curriculum so different from a century ago, we are now approaches, to a particular problem. The & Profession at a point at which huge new populations liberal arts as a whole expects such an out- of students are aiming for a B.A., and are in come, but rare is the curriculum that takes turn changing the larger picture of what specific steps to promote it. The classics purpose the degree serves. We are still right thrive by bringing these methods together, to be concerned about how to position our and classicists stand to benefit from being field most advantageously with this chang more self-conscious and deliberate about ing student body. this task, especially given the rapidly increasing complexity and interconnectivity Appeals to shape the minds of moral of the wider world, in which nimble minds men, while not irrelevant to what classi- are ever more valuable. cists now do, are probably no longer cen- To some extent, our recent openness to tral to their work. In terms of its general a variety of ways of thinking has been an shape, our curriculum is not unlike oth- accommodation of necessity. In response er core disciplines in the liberal arts–em- to the changing definitions of the univer- phasizing critical thinking, clear expres- sity, some of which were inclined to define sion, and careful use of evidence–with a us out of existence, we felt a particular ur- certain added intensity deriving from the gency to reach out to other disciplines. But study of the languages. But with respect this impulse resides in another deep legacy to method, and to a degree unmatched by of the field. In fact, a certain restlessness of any of the other liberal arts, our field ex- method has been characteristic of the dis- pects us to engage in an extraordinarily cipline from its modern beginning, and wide range of discipline-based modes of marks some of its greatest contributions. thinking, varying from the literary, histor- It was no accident that a classicist, Walter ical, and topographical, to the linguistic, Burkert, first harnessed developments in philosophical, and art historical. We are early cognitive psychology and develop- as interested in strictly quantitative prob- mental biology for humanistic gain; nor lems of measurement as we are in broad- that George Walsh, of the classics depart- ly interpretive questions of meaning and ment at the University of Chicago, was questions of context through thicker un- among the first to realize the possibilities derstandings of culture and history. of computer technology for digital texts in While our degree of breadth is atypical the humanities; nor that an ancient histo- among the disciplines, it is emblematic of a rian like Walter Scheidel has advanced our core strength of the liberal arts as a whole. discipline through conversation with de- Liberal arts have traditionally produced mography, genetics, and geospatial imag- intellectual agility through a distribution ing. It took a discipline attuned to the an- of engagement across domains of knowl- thropology of religion, to the power of the edge. The breadth of the classics epito- concordance, and to the insight provided mizes this. Further, by housing these vari- by measurable quanta–of the earth and ant methods under one disciplinary tent, the human organism–to realize the possi- we move beyond the paratactic aggrega- bilities in these cases. tion of skills, and contribute to the devel- Even in the case of Wilamowitz himself, opment of a different kind of intellectual the Wortphilologie of his predecessors was aptitude. We sharpen our students’ abil- not enough; he sought to advance, from ities to move between these methods, Welcker, the importance of a larger inves- along with their judgment in selecting the tigation, the Totalitätsideal.6 After gaining

124 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences praise for his philological method, Wila- New modes of teaching online, through Peter T. mowitz famously remarked: “There sim- massive open online courses (moocs) of- Struck ply isn’t any–any more than a method to fer promise here. The medium (an inven- catch fish. The whale is harpooned; the her- tion of pure research, by the way) has low- ring caught in a net; flounders are stomped ered the barriers for reaching a wide audi- upon; the salmon speared; the trout caught ence. By now, many universities have made on a fly.”7 Finally, it is also no surprise that a version of their teaching, fit to the pa- the linguistic turn–probably the single rameters of the delivery system, available most consequential intellectual develop- for free to anyone with an Internet con- ment in the last century of the human- nection. Such offerings in our field have ities–arguably emerged from the ascesis included Gregory Nagy’s Harvard Univer of philology with Wilamowitz’s school- sity course “The Ancient Greek Hero,” and mate and bête noir, Nietzsche, whose On my own “Greek and Roman Mythology” Truth and Lying in the Extra-Moral Sense was at the University of Pennsylvania. No other published in 1873, when Saussure was bare- development has such potential for mak- ly sixteen years old. ing our case to the broader public, promot- ing our larger message, and conveying the The urgency our field faced four decades value of what we do on our own terms. As ago is felt now to an increasing degree of this writing, two hundred thousand po- across the liberal arts. What does it mean tential students have at least signed up for to pursue knowledge for its own sake, my class, over four iterations. First, this given the dramatic expansion of pre-pro- represents a substantial public interest in fessional attitudes among our students, our field, irrespective of how many follow dramatically shrinking research budgets, through. We should do more, as a field, to and increased calls for accountability from satisfy it. And when one finds out that twen- outside the academy? Each of these in ty thousand have done all the work to fin- stitutional factors presents a headwind; ish the course, that gives one pause as well. all three taken together form an incoming tide. The liberal arts, as a whole, need to With respect to our own classrooms, press the case for pure research with more such developments also have a place. Calls intensity, and should be at the forefront for caution are appropriate, of course, since of making the case for disinterested Wis- some boosters of the delivery system have senschaft. Our colleagues in the sciences their sights set on increasing economies are ahead in this mission, having advanced of scale through a more efficient transfer a tradition of popularizing books, and even of knowledge. Such a narrowing of the television shows, to help engage the pub- teaching mission would be a disaster. But lic through the raw power of discoveries in when harnessed to supplement and not their fields. Such avenues have mostly not to replace a traditional classroom, these been pursued by classicists. A more delib- courses offer a growing and rich array of erate approach here–making specific ef- teaching materials similar to no-cost text- forts to disseminate our knowledge and books. Some of these materials will be bring the public along through our pro- better than others, as classroom teachers cess–is a pressing need. The classics, as a will determine. At that point, further ad- core piece of the humanities, has contrib- vantages to this development will accrue uted to the development of new ideas that directly. It will go some steps toward mak- continue to reshape the world in which ing our teaching a public good, and help to we live. bring the level of scrutiny of it closer into

145 (2) Spring 2016 125 Classics: line with the kind of scrutiny we expect piece of creating the modern shape of the Curriculum in our research lives. Our system of pub- discipline. And further attention to our & Profession lication and peer review has been enor- potential advantages in claiming a central mously effective in motivating our best re- position in liberal learning is not so far search work, and one can imagine a future afield from the position of classics about in which an amplified public dimension which Ellsworth Wright was concerned will help shape our best teaching. one century ago. The outcome is as much Much of this is already mappable onto in doubt now as it was then, which makes long-standing currents in our fields. At- the deliberate actions we take to shape it tention to the traditional strength of our all the more urgent. methodological catholicity has been a core

endnotes 1 Ellsworth D. Wright, “Foreign-Language Requirements for the A.B. Degree,” The Classical Journal 7 (8) (1912): 323–337. 2 Ibid. 3 Morrill Act of 1862, Public Law 37-108, 37th Cong., 2nd sess. (July 2, 1862). Found in United States Statutes at Large, Volume 12, https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=012/ llsl012.db&recNum=534. 4 Charles Francis Adams, Jr., A College Fetich: An Address Delivered Before the Harvard Chapter of the Fraternity of the Phi Beta Kappa, in Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, June 28, 1883 (Boston: Lee and Shep- ard, 1884). 5 While the percentage of students in this larger pool who major in the humanities has gone down, the number, when measured against the whole college-aged U.S. population, has not. In fact, it has gone up, more than doubling since 1950. See Ben Schmidt, “A Crisis in the Hu- manities?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 10, 2013, http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/ edgeofthewest/2013/06/10/the-humanities-crisis/. 6 William M. Calder III, “How Did Ulrich Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff Read a Text?” The Classical Journal 86 (4) (1991): 344–352. 7 Quoted in ibid.; see also Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Erinnerungen 1848–1914, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Koehler, 1928), 233.

126 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Greco-Roman Studies in a Digital Age

Gregory Crane

Abstract: What is the audience for the work that we professional researchers conduct on Greco-Roman culture? If the public outside academia does not have access to up-to-date data about the Greco-Roman world, whose problem is it? Frequently heard remarks, observed practices, and published survey results indicate most of us still assume that only specialists and revenue-generating students really matter. If we specialists do not believe that we have a primary responsibility to open up the field as is now possible in this digital age, then I am not sure why we should expect support from anyone other than specialists or the students who enroll in our classes. If we do believe that we have an obligation to open up the field, then that has fundamental implications for our daily activities, for our operational theory justifying the existence of our positions, and for the hermeneutics (following a term that is still popular in Germany) that we construct about who can know what.

Many traditional humanists have objected–quite correctly–that digital humanists focus too much of their attention on questions of how we should ex- ploit new forms of technology in our teaching and research and not enough on questions of why. Of course, in many cases, such criticisms underestimate the immense challenges that humanists face as they attempt to implement universally desired capacities in a digital space that require far more expertise than amateur digital humanists can usually acquire. GREGORY CRANE is the Alexan (The production of annotations that we can man- der von Humboldt Professor of Digital Humanities at Leipzig Uni- age across different editions of a text and over many versity and Professor of Classics years is one such deceptively simple but essential and the Winnick Family Chair of task.) Of course, even if there is much that requires Technology and Entrepreneurship the attention of us digital humanists (in which we at Tufts University. He is also the can justifiably focus upon the question ofhow ), the Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus Dig- most important questions always return to our mo- ital Library at Tufts University. He tivations for using technology in the first place. is the author of The Blinded Eye: Thucydides and the New Written Word The digital question now before all academics is (1996) and The Ancient Simplicity: the extent to which the shift from print to a digi- Thucydides and the Limits of Political tal space changes how our particular fields can con- Realism (1998). tribute to society as a whole. From a Darwinian per-

© 2016 by Gregory Crane Published under a Creative Commons cc-by license doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00383 127 Greco-Roman spective, we need to reflect upon the de- are reversed, with roughly 90 percent cit- Studies in a gree to which new forms of technology ing strong research and 50 percent citing Digital Age may alter the social contract upon which strong teaching as essential. But at both our departments, our positions, our place sorts of institution, faculty agree on one in the curriculum, and our research fund- factor for tenure: only 1 percent of those ing (such as it is) depend. When we ask surveyed consider “public humanities why we might use new methods (digital (making the humanities and/or human- or otherwise), the first question is not how ities scholarship accessible to the general these methods can improve specialist-on- public)” essential for tenure. By contrast, specialist discourse or even the experienc- in both cases, 70 percent of respondents es of our tuition paying students, but why asserted that making the humanities ac- our particular discipline should exist at cessible to a general public was either un- all. We cannot insist upon theorizing the important or marginally important for humanities in a digital age or demand a tenure. About 30 percent stated that such new hermeneutics for them unless we ex- work was important or very important, plicitly consider as well how our new the- but the final figure shows (in my view) the orizing and hermeneutics affect the rea- true value of such work: 99 percent of sons why professional academics should those polled agreed that making the hu- exist. manities and/or humanities scholarship accessible to the general public was not an Figures published in the American Acad- essential part of a tenure dossier. And given emy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities In- the pressure on junior faculty to win ten- dicators demonstrate the degree to which ure, they understandably can only afford professional academics explicitly exclude to focus on those essential parts of their from serious consideration the hard ques- work. tion of how our fields contribute to the in- For Greco-Roman studies (as well as En- tellectual life of society as a whole. That glish and History, the two biggest human- exclusion stands out when we observe the ities majors), the figures were even more factors that faculty consider important for striking; the respondents were unanimous: tenure: the most important single judg- 0 percent considered it essential that hu- ment to which faculty are subject. Even the manists demonstrate an ability to explain initial hire to a tenure-track line is subor- the humanities or humanities research to dinate to the subsequent tenure decision, a wider audience.2 Anyone who has spent and most departments are careful only to time as a faculty member, especially a fac- hire those candidates who have shown ulty member in the argumentative human- that they will (or at least can) meet the re- ities, will recognize how hard it is to get any quirements for tenure.1 group of professors to agree on anything The Academy’s data show predictable (other than, perhaps, the belief that they and remarkably complementary perspec- should be paid more, given more research tives about the importance of teaching and support, enjoy more general respect, and research at both teaching- and research- teach less). When 100 percent of the facul- oriented institutions: at primarily under- ty from three major humanities fields in- graduate institutions, roughly 90 percent dependently agree that a mission is not es- of the respondents report that good teach- sential, we have an extraordinarily telling ing is essential for tenure, as opposed to 50 piece of data. percent who cite strong research as essen- By contrast, the stem disciplines (sci- tial; at research institutions, the figures ence, technology, engineering, and mathe-

128 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences matics) maintain a steady marketing cam- dents of Latin in Germany. That American Gregory paign to justify the support they receive professors of Greco-Roman studies cannot Crane on the basis of the economic, medical, rely upon a comparably steady stream of and other tangible goods that they deliver majors makes their life anxious, but also to society as a whole.3 Scientists are chal- challenges them. lenged to reflect on the general importance Although the number of students en- of what they do: reviewers for the Nation- rolled in foreign language courses inal Science Foundation (nsf) are formally creased from 1 million in 1968 to 1.6 mil- charged to evaluate every proposal on the lion in 2009 and the relative percentage of basis of two criteria: “intellectual merit” Greek and Latin students declined in this and “broader impacts.”4 period, the number of students in Greek Scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity are and Latin had, at least in absolute terms, not producing new drugs; we are not pi- remained essentially the same (there was oneering ways of better harnessing solar a disturbing 20 percent dip from 2009 to energy, or creating new forms of mathe the figures released for 2013, but this may matics that may, in the future, revolution reflect a short-term anxiety about more ize some branch of scientific inquiry. In- transparently practical measures after the stead, we advance the intellectual life of financial crisis).5 Also, although precise fig- society, and we can do that only if we make ures are not available, the big classics Ph.D. the public humanities a central focus of programs seem to be basically as large as our work. If there are potential dangers in they were in 1985–perhaps up or down by popularization, the humanities suffer even one faculty position, but essentially the more damage from overspecialization and same. In Germany, by contrast, we can inbred scholasticism. point to fifty-one chairs of Greek, Latin, Fields like Greco-Roman studies recog- ancient history, and Greco-Roman archae- nize only three sources of input: specialists ology listed as gestrichen (cut) in the same in the same university (the need for ser- time period.6 It may well be that the lack vice), specialists in the same field (the need of a guaranteed clientele has benefited the for research), and students (the group that field in the United States by pushing us to ultimately pays for most humanities-fac- address the needs of a wider and mobile ulty salaries). The need to attract students prospective student base rather than serv- is the one saving force that subjects those ing a captive audience. of us who teach Greco-Roman culture to But the focus on serving these revenue- the judgments of nonprofessionals and generating students has left not only Greco- challenges us to view the field itself and its Roman studies but the humanities as a purposes from at least one different–and whole exposed. The National Endowment arguably broader–perspective. In this, we for the Humanities (neh), for example, enjoy in the United States an odd advan- provides almost three times as much sup- tage over colleagues in a country like Ger- port to its federal/state partnerships for many. In Germany, ancient historians and public humanities ($42.5 million out of a Greek and Latin philologists teach a steady total budget of $146 million in 2015) as it stream of prospective primary and second- does to its traditional research programs ary school teachers who must have a back- ($14.5 million, or about 10 percent of the ground in ancient history to teach Europe- overall budget).7 Even if we include invest- an history, or to join the ranks of the nine ments in preservation and access ($15.4 thousand Latin teachers needed to teach million) and in digital humanities ($4.4 the seven hundred thousand–plus stu- million), the overall funding for research

145 (2) Spring 2016 129 Greco-Roman remains relatively modest and accounts under an open-access license would be a Studies in a for less than one-quarter (23.5 percent) of necessary, though by no means sufficient, Digital Age the 2015 neh budget. And even that mod- condition for reaching beyond this closed est support attracts sometimes virulent academic network. criticism from members of Congress and Second, we need a new theoretical foun- from political candidates. Unfortunately, dation for Greco-Roman studies in a dig- insofar as professional humanists care on- ital age, one that takes into consideration ly about other specialists and revenue-gen- our new ability to advance the intellectual erating students, they undermine their life of society as a whole. When we speak claim to support from public funding. If of advancing human understanding, we we are subject to attack, we have, for the may imagine an idealized expert who has most part, brought it on ourselves. On the internalized all the primary and secondary other hand, if we can manage to shift our literature and who has gained a new per- focus and assert, seriously and tangibly, a spective (notice that I carefully avoid posi- commitment to advancing the contribu- tivistic references to knowledge). Such an tions of the humanities and of humanities idealized expert provides, however, only research to society as a whole, we have a one perspective. If there is no plausible chance of reestablishing, over time, the so- pathway from the impact of that profes- cial contract by which various aspects of sional to anyone beyond other specialists, the humanities justify their existence. then I am not sure how strongly we can argue for the value of that new perspective. So, what does this mean in practical We need a theoretical foundation that ac- terms for Greco-Roman studies? We can counts for what happens in the brains of take several steps now, and for some of many different people, starting with stu- these, digital technology has a crucial role dents but extending to nonspecialists as to play. First, if we are to advance the intel- well, including not only members of the lectual life of society as a whole as effective- general public but also professors in oth- ly as possible, we need to shift not only to er disciplines. Such a theoretical founda- open access (resources available to the pub- tion will help us prioritize the unbounded lic free of restriction or charge) but to open range of research topics that we can pur- data (source data available to the public for sue. If we assume that the most important their own use and manipulation). An anal- case is the idealized, all-knowing expert, ysis of 780 websites for German and U.S. we will prioritize in one way; if, by con- faculty in Greco-Roman studies revealed trast, we primarily wish to advance under- that perhaps fifteen of these researchers standing beyond specialist circles and see were actively contributing to the funda- idealized expert knowledge as a means to mental task of creating open resources and this larger end, then we will have very dif- building the sort of open infrastructure ferent priorities. needed for study of Greco-Roman culture Third, we need to ponder what informa- in a digital age. A handful of faculty, for ex- tion we wish to represent, given the very ample, have made an effort to make their different capabilities of born-digital publi- work available under an open-access li- cations. For me, the classic case is the dig- cense, and a handful of publications (such ital edition: I think we should as a matter as the now venerable Bryn Mawr Classical of course encode morpho-syntactic inter- Review) do make their content freely avail- pretations, geospatial and social network- able. But making the thousands of publi- ing data, our interpretations of where one cations cited on these websites available text references another, and explicit align-

130 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences ments–on the word and phrase level–be- Wissenschaft). This is necessary in part be- Gregory tween our source texts and translations cause we just have too much data for a Crane into multiple languages. What we choose handful of advanced researchers and pro- to encode, of course, depends upon both fessional scholars to process. But we also our research objectives and the audienc- need to do this because opening up the field es we wish to reach. But one fundamental transforms the contributions that Greco- change is clear. In print culture, there was Roman studies can make to society: inso- pressure to distinguish scholarly editions, far as our fellow citizens can join us, not just with elaborate textual notes aimed at pro- as anonymous members of a crowd, but as fessional scholars, from bilingual editions, individuals who can develop increasing- with (for the most part) much briefer tex- ly sophisticated skills as they contribute tual notes, but with facing translations into over time, we thus advance the intellectual English, French, German, Italian, or some life of society beyond academia and attack other modern language. In a digital space, the intellectual scholasticism that is doc- we can personalize the data that we pre- umented in our commercial publications sent to different audiences, and include and in the data collected by the American many more kinds of data, including much Academy of Arts and Sciences. more expressively encoded textual notes Sixth, we cannot in a globalized world and translations into multiple languages. continue to use the term classics as synon- Fourth, there is the challenge of “big ymous with ancient Greek and Latin lan- data,” which in this case is largely textu- guage and literature or classical civilization al data. This challenge appears not only as coextensive with Greco-Roman culture. as we begin to grapple with the billions of I still find it hard to believe that my profes- words of Greek and Latin already available sional association in the United States re- in the millions of digitized documents now cently changed its name from the Ameri- available, but also as we begin to work with can Philological Association to the “Soci- proliferating categories of automatically ety for Classical Studies,” formally assert- generated annotations (including, as men- ing in the early twenty-first century that tioned above, linguistic annotations, geo- professors of Greco-Roman culture repre- spatial and social networking data, text re- sented classical languages and literatures use detection, general optical character rec- as a whole. The department from which ognition [ocr], and topic modeling). We I received both of my academic degrees have to understand how to work with error still defines itself as the “Department of rates. We need to integrate distant and close the Classics” (italics mine), with the defi- reading and we need to understand how to nite article driving home the point that sample our data and to consider how cer- other classical languages including classi- tain we can be of our conclusions. We need cal Sanskrit, classical Chinese, classical Ar- to think algorithmically and we need to un- abic, and classical Persian are free to find derstand the implications of text mining space elsewhere in the university, but they and visualization for the ways in which we are not the classics. I do not know anyone, conceptualize our sources; these new me- however conservative, in our profession dia rewire our brains and we need to study who would actually advance such a posi- that as best we can. tion. But somehow we have simply accept- Fifth, we need to open up the field and to ed past usage (just as we continue to pub- engage citizen scholars (or citizen scien- lish articles and monographs in the same tists as they are called in Germany, where basic formats, through the same commer- Greco-Roman studies and physics are both cial channels, and for the same specialist

145 (2) Spring 2016 131 Greco-Roman audience). The equation of classics with guages and customized for different cul- Studies in a Greek and Latin comes from a very prob- tural perspectives. Here, the growing cov- Digital Age lematic tradition of European hegemon- erage of non-English versions of Wikipe- ic thought, and emerges from shared as- dia provides a better model than any of the sumptions of European privilege that are rigid workflows from conventional West- neither acceptable nor realistic in a world ern academia.10 where nations such as China and India are global powers. Those of us who have the privilege to earn And so, the final step we can take is to a living as students of the Greco-Roman evolve from a regional discipline, conduct- world have a decision before us about the ed almost entirely in a handful of European field we wish to build. We can continue languages and focused on Greco-Roman producing publications to which only oth- culture, to one that participates in a glob- er specialists have intellectual or (because al network of historical languages and cul- we hide them behind paywalls) practical tures, many of which are now considered access, doing what we need to attract and classical (as of 2014, India had six official hold revenue-generating students, and ig- classical languages: Tamil, Sanskrit, Telu- noring (if not disdaining) members of so- gu, Kannada, Malayalam, and Odia,8 with ciety as a whole. We can continue writing some arguing that Pali should be includ- and teaching in much the same way we al- ed as a distinct language in this group).9 ways have, exploiting new digital methods To do this, we need to redesign our de- as ancillary tools by which we compose partments, forming strategic partnerships more traditional articles and books, rath- with colleagues in our universities (such as er than asking ourselves what the purpose with professors of Sanskrit or classical Ar- of our research and teaching should be abic, if we are lucky enough to have them), and then exploring new forms of intellec- and making creative use of new commu- tual activity and production. We can even nications technologies to work with col- continue to conflate the idea of classical leagues not only in other universities but with Greco-Roman and, in so doing, define in universities beyond Europe and North ourselves as, at best, a parochial commu- America. We need students in Tehran and nity. Deviating from any of these paths Texas reading classical Greek and classical will be difficult: it entails redefining our Persian together, establishing in the pro- field and thus inevitably challenges estab- cess dialogues across boundaries of space, lished structures of authority and institu- languages, and culture. Bilingual editions tional power. But the potential benefits are that face Greek and Latin texts with transla- immense, and there will be opportunities tions into English (Loebs), French (Budés), for anyone in the field, at whatever level German (the Tusculum editions), or Lat- of seniority, to contribute to and flourish in (older series like the Patrologia Graeca in within the world we collectively fashion. France or the Bipontine Editions in what is now Germany) are not enough. We need editions that can support readers of non- Western languages like Mandarin and Ar- abic, while also offering much better support for Spanish and Portuguese readers. We need serious research into the limits of what ideas we can represent in formats that can be quickly translated across lan-

132 Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences endnotes Gregory Crane Author’s Note: Some of the ideas expressed in this essay were first disseminated in 2015 as blog posts; see Gregory Crane, “Essays on Digital Classics and Digital Humanities,” Perseus Digital Library Updates, http://sites.tufts.edu/perseusupdates/2015/07/28/essays-on-digital-classics -and-digital-humanities/. I would like to express my thanks for the comments I received at that time, as well as for the editorial suggestions I received in submitting this piece to Dædalus. 1 Humanities Indicators, 2012–13 Humanities Departmental Survey (HDS-2) (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2014), http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/content/ indicatordoc.aspx?i=457; and Susan White, Raymond Chu, and Roman Czujko, The 2012–13 Survey of Humanities Departments at Four-Year Institutions (College Park, Md.: Statistical Research Center, American Institute of Physics, 2014; study conducted for the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ Humanities Indicators Project), “Table 7: Considerations in Tenure Deci sion Made by Humanities Departments (All Disciplines Combined), by Institutional Type, Fall 2012,” 14, www.humanitiesindicators.org/binaries/pdf/hds2_final.pdf. 2 Humanities Indicators, 2012–13 Humanities Departmental Survey, 65 (English), 97 (history), and 185 (classical studies). 3 See, for example, Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, and National Academy of Engineering, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Eco- nomic Future (Washington, D.C.: The National Academies Press, 2007); and American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Restoring the Foundation: The Vital Role of Research in Preserving the American Dream (Cambridge, Mass.: American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2014). 4 National Science Foundation, “Merit Review Facts,” http://www.nsf.gov/bfa/dias/policy/ merit_review/facts.jsp#1. 5 David Goldberg, Dennis Looney, and Natalia Lusin, Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education, Fall 2013 (New York: Modern Language Associa tion of America, 2015), 19 for the overall rates, 23 for Latin, 24 for Greek, https://www.mla .org/content/download/31180/1452509/2013_enrollment_survey.pdf. 6 See the Arbeitsstelle Kleine Fächer (Johannes Gutenberg–Universität Mainz), www.kleine faecher.de. 7 National Endowment for the Humanities, Appropriations Request for Fiscal Year 2016 (Washing ton, D.C.: National Endowment for the Humanities, 2015), 9, http://www.neh.gov/files/ neh_request_fy2016.pdf. In fiscal year 2015, out of a total budget of $146,021,000, $14,784,000 went to research programs, but $42,528,000 went to the federal/state partnership, “the liai son between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the nonprofit network of 56 state and jurisdictional humanities councils.” 8 “Languages of India–Classical Languages,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India #Classical (accessed January 22, 2016); for the press release on Odia, the most recent language de clared classical, see the Press Information Bureau of the Government of India, “Classical Status to Odiya Language,” August 14, 2013, http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=98244. 9 Binay Singh, “Removal of Pali as upsc Subject Draws Criticism,” The Times of India, May 5, 2013, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/varanasi/Removal-of-Pali-as-UPSC-subject-draws -criticism/articleshow/19890980.cms. 10 My colleagues at Tufts led the way for me. Steve Hirsch has taught ancient China and the Gre co-Roman world for years. Anne Mahoney has relentlessly maintained a curriculum in San skrit–an array of courses that will finally appear as formal offerings in our course catalog. We were able to bring Maxim Romanov, an expert in classical Arabic, and, thanks to Vickie Sulli van, Riccardo Strobino, an expert on the intimate relationship between Greco-Roman and Is lamic Cultures and the debt that the West still owes to its Islamic brethren, into our department of classics. If we could do more, we would. At Tufts, I am a professor of classics and work in a department of classics, and I say so now with assurance and invitation: my colleagues have been true leaders in developing a field that we can truly call classics or classical studies.

145 (2) Spring 2016 133 Board of Directors Don M. Randel, Chair of the Board Jonathan F. Fanton, President Diane P. Wood, Chair of the Council; Vice Chair of the Board Alan M. Dachs, Chair of the Trust; Vice Chair of the Board Jerrold Meinwald, Secretary Carl H. Pforzheimer III, Treasurer Nancy C. Andrews Louise H. Bryson Ira Katznelson Nannerl O. Keohane Venkatesh Narayanamurti Pauline Yu Louis W. Cabot, Chair Emeritus

Inside Back cover: Pablo Picasso, Spanish (worked in France), 1881–1973. Rape of the Sabine Women, 1963. Oil on canvas 195.3 x 131.1 cm (76 7/8 x 51 5/8 in). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Juliana Cheney Edwards Col- lection, Tompkins Collection–Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund, and Fanny P. Mason Fund in memory of Alice Thevin. 64.709. Photograph © 2016 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. © 2016 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York.

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