Monstrosity and Philosophy Radical Otherness in Greek and Latin Culture Filippo Del Lucchese 66144_Del144_Del LLucchese.indducchese.indd i 224/08/194/08/19 112:332:33 PPMM Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Filippo Del Lucchese, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10.5/13 Goudy Old Style by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5620 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5623 4 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5622 7 (epub) The right of Filippo Del Lucchese to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). 66144_Del144_Del LLucchese.indducchese.indd iiii 224/08/194/08/19 112:332:33 PPMM Contents Acknowledgements v Introduction 1 1. The Myth and the Logos 8 Order and Chaos 13 Mythical Battlefi elds: Monstrosity as a Weapon 19 Causality and Monstrosity: Challenging Zeus 35 2. The Pre-Platonic Philosophers 56 Anaxagoras: A Material Origin for Life and Monstrosity 56 Empedocles: Wonders to Behold 63 Democritus: Agonism within Matter 70 3. Plato 78 4. Aristotle 93 5. Epicurus and Lucretius 130 An Immanent Causality for an Infi nite Universe 130 Zoogony, Monstrosity and Nature’s Normativity 140 Concourses of Nature 153 Lucretius’s Impact on the Augustan Age 161 6. Stoicism 170 Nominalism 172 Good and Evil, Beauty and Ugliness 181 Providence, God and Teleology 205 7. Scepticism 223 The Tropes and the Critique of Essentialism 228 To What Purpose? 239 66144_Del144_Del LLucchese.indducchese.indd iiiiii 224/08/194/08/19 112:332:33 PPMM iv MONSTROSITY AND PHILOSOPHY 8. Middle and Neoplatonism 248 The Material World and the Rediscovery of Transcendence 249 Demons 278 The World Order 287 Bibliography 326 Index Locorum 394 Index Verborum 408 Index Rerum 415 Index Nominum 417 66144_Del144_Del LLucchese.indducchese.indd iivv 224/08/194/08/19 112:332:33 PPMM Acknowledgements I am grateful to Brunel University, London, which granted me two semesters of research leave, an increasingly rare luxury and one that was sorely needed to accomplish a task of this magnitude. I am particularly grateful to Mark Neocleous, who has not only followed my research since its inception, but also wrote one of the fi rst books I encountered on monstrosity, and to Justin Fisher, who provided me with me the institutional fl exibility I needed to accomplish this research. I am also grateful to my colleagues and students in the Master in Teoria critica della società at the University of Milano Bicocca and the Collège International de Philosophie, who hosted me as a Directeur de programme from 2012 to 2019, and where I presented my work as it progressed. I began working on monstrosity as a recipient of a Marie Curie fellow- ship that allowed me to spend two years at Occidental College, Los Angeles and one at the Université de Picardie, Amiens. During that time, I benefi ted immensely from my connection with Warren Montag and Laurent Bove, who offered not only academic supervision, but friendship and human and political solidarity beyond the boundaries of academic work. At different stages and in different measures I have received support and invaluable criticism from several colleagues: Andrea Bardin, Luca Basso, Laura Cremonesi, Oliver Feltham, Marco Fioravanti, Alain Gigandet, Augusto Illuminati, Susanna Mezzadri, Vittorio Morfi no, Gabriele Pedullà, Fabio Raimondi, Tania Rispoli, Hasana Sharp, Martha Shulman, Bruce Tindall, Oreste Trabucco, Dimitris Vardoulakis, Stefano Visentin, Elia Zaru. With their questions and curiosity, Djalal and Rahma helped me think about monstrosity in ways I could not have imagined before meeting them. Without them, this book’s writing would have been . much faster, but also much sadder! I am most grateful for their challenging presence in my life. This book is dedicated to Kady, who supported me in times of wrestling with worse monsters. She has been the shield without which I could have not faced them, and I will never forget. 66144_Del144_Del LLucchese.indducchese.indd v 224/08/194/08/19 112:332:33 PPMM Un commencement de monstres est possible. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables 66144_Del144_Del LLucchese.indducchese.indd vvii 224/08/194/08/19 112:332:33 PPMM Introduction Monsters abounded in the ancient world. They proliferated on and around Phidias’s lost sculpture of Athena Parthenos, one of the most renowned cult images of ancient Greece:1 amazons and giants were depicted on her shield, which hid the snake Erichthonius, centaurs adorned her sandals; Medusa was represented on her peplos, and the Gorgoneion decorated the aegis. Finally, a Sphinx and two winged gryphons stood on her crest. Athena, endowed with skilful wisdom and warrior virtue, subjugated the monsters who had tried to subvert the Olympian order and who are shown here tamed, thus confi rming her might. The Greeks praise the gods, celebrating their fi nal victory over chaos and monstrosity. Today’s prevailing cosmological theories on the birth and evolution of the universe teach that chaos will indeed, ultimately, swallow it. Theoretical physics explains that the universe has two possible destinies, monstrously necessary in their remote and yet eternal presence: the fi nal catastrophic collapse of the universe on the one hand or its slow exhaustion in an unstop- pable increase of entropy on the other. I wonder whether the widespread interest in monstrosity that characterises scholarship today is dictated by the intriguing yet unconscious feeling that, in some way, the ancient monsters of chaos have never been fully defeated and, contrary to the Greeks’ belief, will ultimately win the fi ght. The specifi c interest in monstrosity in this book, however, derives not so much from its hypothetically eschatological sense, but rather from its con- cretely ontologico-political meaning. I am interested in monstrosity as radical otherness, as the provoking alterity that challenges – sometimes by its mere 1 Paus. I.24.5–7. With few exceptions, abbreviations of classical works follow those in the Diccionario griego-español (DGE): <dge.cchs.csic.es> or the Oxford Latin Dictionary (OLD) and, when the DGE or the OLD does not provide them, I have used the abbre- viations conventionally adopted. 66144_Del144_Del LLucchese.indducchese.indd 1 224/08/194/08/19 112:332:33 PPMM 2 MONSTROSITY AND PHILOSOPHY presence, sometimes with open defi ance – the norm’s power to signify.2 In exploring the history of ancient thought, I have tried to show how monstros- ity’s challenge often comes in the form of a scandalous ontological project, immanent and material. This project is both ontological and political, since every metaphysical framework is at the same time determined by, and has implications for, the concept of the human and her role in the world. Equally, every vision of social, economic and political relations, like every idea of the self and the other, is grounded on and determines, explicitly or implicitly, a certain notion of being. Every ontology is produced by and produces, in the last instance, a politics; every politics conceives itself and is conceived, in the last instance, through an ontology. My aim in this book is to reconstruct the concept of monstrosity in clas- sical thought from its earliest beginnings, through pre-Platonic and Attic philosophy to the Hellenistic systems, arriving fi nally at Neoplatonism. I want to follow the discourse about monstrosity – mostly but not entirely – as it appeared in philosophy, and show how an apparently peripheral concept is in fact central to understanding how each of the above systems explains nature, its functioning and its anomalies. Although monsters have attracted their fair share of attention in the past, no attempt has been made to analyse the topic extensively throughout antiq- uity. Articles and monographs on similar topics exist in recent scholarship, such as Morgan’s unpublished PhD thesis (1984), the essays in Atherton (1992) or the enquiry on Roman monsters by Cuny-Le Callet (2005), the studies of Jones (1993) and Morfi no (2013) on Lucretius, of Johnson (1987) on Lucan, of Louis (1975) and Yartz (1997) on Aristotle, and I have benefi ted greatly from them. A more comprehensive reconstruction, however, seems to me indispensable for a better understanding of ancient thought as a whole. Furthermore, it is crucial for the study of more recent historical periods in which the heritage of antiquity becomes a battlefi eld that mirrors modern and – albeit more indirectly – contemporary philosophical debates on the ques- tions of nature, the divine, the relation between normality and abnormality, and, perhaps most importantly, the construction of identity and otherness. In this sense, this book, devoted to the ancient world, is self-contained and autonomous, yet it can also be read as a necessary introduction to the study of monstrosity in the middle ages, the Renaissance and modernity. It is easier to say what this book is not and what it does not aim to be than to say what it is and what I hope it can do: it is not an exhaustive handbook on a specifi c topic, such as the classic monograph on fate by Chase Green (1944), 2 See Foucault (1999). 66144_Del144_Del LLucchese.indducchese.indd 2 224/08/194/08/19 112:332:33 PPMM INTRODUCTION 3 Cotter’s work on miracles (1999), the seminal study on Hermetism by Festugière (1949–54), Jaeger’s seminal study on Paideia (1934–47), or the less well known but exhaustive enquiries on destiny by Magris (1984) and the concept of nature by Naddaf (1992), all of which I have learnt from.