Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
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So when we speak of the Dark Age in Greece, we should be aware that the centuries from 1200 to 800 were dark in much of the Near East outside of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian heartlands. Palestine from 1200 to 900 is as obscure as Greece. If we can speak of “retribalization” among the early Israelites, so can we among the Dark Age Greeks: both were responses to the breakdown of the great Bronze Age palace cultures of the second millennium BCE. What happened not long before 800 that would shake up the entire region was the rise of a new kind of efficient military empire, the NeoAssyrian Empire (934-610 BCE), which in the late ninth and eighth centuries reached the Mediterranean and, as we have seen, played a significant role in the history of ancient Israel. Unlike the case of Israel, the impact of Assyria on Greece was indirect; it was nonetheless powerful.
The mediator of Assyrian influence to the Greeks was primarily the Phoenicians, though some of the inland Anatolian kingdoms may also have been involved. It was the increasing demand of the Assyrians for tribute, especially metals, but for a variety of other goods as well, together with the desire to escape their immediate control, that sent the Phoenicians into the far reaches of the Mediterranean, leading to the foundation of Carthage in 814 BCE, but of many other cities in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Spain. In Cyprus, Crete, and perhaps other places as well the Phoenicians came in contact with the Greeks, stimulating them in a variety of ways (the Greeks adapted their alphabet from the Phoenicians in the eighth century), but particularly offering them a market for a variety of goods ultimately demanded by the Assyrians. Mogens Larsen has spoken of the “grand Assyrian vacuumcleaner.” 32 It was this “vacuum cleaner” that set both the Phoenicians and the Greeks in motion, but the motion became self-propelling once begun. From about 750 to 600 the Greeks emulated the Phoenicians in establishing outposts all over the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts.33
What is remarkable in this burst of activity beginning in eighth-century Greece is that a growing cultural unity34 (overlying but never replacing local heterogeneity) was not linked to political unity: the increasing numbers of poleis retained their autonomy with great tenacity, so much so that Greek expansion cannot except metaphorically be called colonization. The newly established poleis had only a sentimental attachment to their cities of origin and were not politically subordinate to them. Societies that were, in a sense we will be examining shortly, politically primitive, were becoming increasingly culturally advanced. It is this early archaic period to which the term “Orientalizing” is most frequently applied, though I have tried to indicate that Greece was part of the Near Eastern oikumene from the second millennium on, and that contact, as the Lefkandi site indicates, was never lost.35 It is clear that we are not faced here with an either/or: that the Greeks were isolated innovators or that they got it all from Asia and Africa. To the contrary, they were innovators indeed-that is the subject of this chapter-but they would never have achieved what they did if they had been isolated, small, retribalized societies. Much of what is remarkable about them derives from the fact that they were cosmopolitan, small, retribalized societies, in one sense closed in on themselves, in another open to the whole wide world.
I have described early Greek society as “ranked,” with a distinction between nobles and common people (slaves were probably few until the seventh or even sixth centuries BCE, but the distinction between slaves and free was sharper than that between nobles and commoners). Still, from the earliest times, the pride of a self-styled nobility was always matched by a strong sense of egalitarianism, and the notion that all free citizens were full participants in society. Our earliest texts, Homer and Hesiod, give evidence of the existence but also the fragility of the ranking system in early Greek society. The Iliad has been described as “conservative” or even “reactionary,” but it is hardly a simple celebration of the Greek nobility. From the beginning something is very wrong among the aristocrats. Richard Martin has seen Achilles as the figure with whom the poet identifies, and through whom he relentlessly criticizes Agamemnon and by implication the hierarchy of the Greek leadership, such as it was.36 Achilles attacks Agamemnon as selfish, as taking more than he deserves while leaving the hard fighting to others. Peter Rose sees the conflict between the two as reflecting the resistance of an older culture based on reward of merit (Achilles) and a newer one based on material wealth (Agamemnon).37 Though Martin and Rose tend to see “Homer” siding with Achilles, Achilles is hardly portrayed as an unblemished hero. When overcome by irrational anger, he is far from reflecting the virtues of Greek aristocrats. And when he tells Patroclus that he wishes all the Trojan and Greek warriors would die and only the two of them survive, he is revealed as more selfish than Agamemnon.38
Greek political organization is far from clear in the Iliad, but on important occasions an assembly of all the troops had to be called. Normally only the leaders spoke, and the one occasion where a commoner (Thersites, a real kakos, not only abusive in speech but ugly and deformed as well) speaks, only to be beaten and humiliated by Odysseus, is often given as an example of Homer’s aristocratic prejudice. It is worth remembering, however, that Thersites was allowed to conclude his speech-the text indicates that this was not the first time he had spoken-and that the content of his remarks, a strong criticism of Agamemnon’s selfishness and near-cowardice, was very similar to that of Achilles. The Thersites incident, thus, cuts two ways and is not as “reactionary” as it might at first seem.
Our other earliest author, Hesiod, clearly does not speak for the aristocracy. We have quoted his nostalgia for the good basileus, but, particularly in the Works and Days, the basileis of his own day, again leaders more than kings, are subjected to merciless criticism and Hesiod’s denunciation of their oppression of the poor rivals that of his near contemporary, Amos. Those whom the self-styled good (agathoi) styled as the bad (kakoi) would more likely think of themselves as the middling (mesoi)-small farmers, able to fight in the ranks, and unwilling to take abuse from anyone. From the point of view of the mesoi, the privileges of the agathoi had to be earned, and abuse from them was unacceptable.39 Those without property, the thetes, had less standing, but the boundary between them and the poorest farmers was permeable and their claim to dignity-less easily heard than that of the mesoiwould not ultimately be ignored.40 Thus, it was possible for the members of the emerging polis of the eighth century to see themselves as a community (koinonia), composed, in spite of status differences, of political equals (homoioi). It is this situation that allows Ian Morris to make the following remarkable statement:
I will argue that in the eighth century the Greeks developed a radically new concept of the state, which has no parallels in any other complex society. The Greeks invented politics, and made political relationships the core of the form of state which they called the polis. The essence of the polis ideal was the identity of the citizens with the state itself. This had two important results. First the source of all authority was located in the community, part or all of which made binding decisions through open discussion. The second consequence was that the polis made the definition of the state as the centralized monopoly of force tautologous; force was located in the citizen body as a whole, and standing armies or police forces were almost unknown. The polis’ powers were total: there were no natural rights of the individual, sanctioned by a higher authority; the idiom of power was political, and there was no authority beyond that of the course in practice there were contradictions between the plurality of the citizen society and the unity of the state, but the contrast between the ideal of the polis as a political community of citizens and the ideals of the states of ancient Mesoamerica, Mesopotamia and even China could hardly be greater. The ethic of the polis was almost a stateless state, autonomous from all dominant-class interests by being isomorphic with the citizen body. The citizens were the state.41
Of course, if the citizens were the state, that puts the very meaning of “state” in question. It is this situation that has led Runciman to say that the polis wasn�
�t a “city-state” but a “citizen-state,” in that the citizens indeed were the state, and necessarily, from Runciman’s point of view, a fragile and ultimately nonviable It is this situation that led Paul Cartledge to write that “with the partial exception of Sparta ancient Greek poleis were technically `State-less political communities.’” 41 Finally, Christian Meier, quoting Thucydides saying that to the Greeks “the men were the polis,” asserts both that the polis was a citizen-state and that that very idea called in question the notion of a state at all: “There was no way in which anything resembling a state could establish centralized power or state institutions that were divorced from society.“44
But if we take the statement “the citizens were the state” literally, then the assembly of (in principle) all of the citizens must have been the ruling body.45 I take it that Morris’s point is that such an assembly already effectively existed in the eighth century and could not be ignored, but not that it actually governed because that would have meant the emergence of democracy much earlier than Morris or other specialists have argued. Early poleis were governed by groups of nobles (oligarchies) but always contingent on the explicit or tacit approval of the assembly. That is what makes the citizens the state even in this early period (eighth to fifth centuries BCE). Morris sees a drift toward ever greater participation of the whole citizen body in most of the poleis during these centuries.4’ Athens made a significant start in the eighth century, but then reverted to older oligarchic patterns during much of the seventh century, only to undergo the first of several major reforms under the leadership of Solon in the early sixth century. Of that we will have more to say below.
Although most of the poleis had popular participation through the assembly, genuine democracy was a late and relatively rare achievement. Oligarchy, the effective rule of noble families, was the dominant form of government, but these oligarchies were, except for Sparta, usually weak, permeable, and unstable. We have already noted that tyrannies were transient, and often served to include the previously excluded rather than to establish strong central control. In short, it is only from the polis, visible first in the eight century, that Greek democracy, that rare and remarkable phenomenon, could, in fifth-century Athens, find its first full development. So far we have looked at early Greek society primarily in structural terms; to understand it adequately we need to consider its cultural, indeed religions, dimension.
Poetry and Its Ritual Context
I have used texts such as those of Homer and Hesiod as sources of information, which, of course, they are; we must also consider what kind of texts they are: first of all they are poems. Poetry is common in oral cultures for works of any length because poetry is easier to memorize than prose. Few would dispute that the texts of Homer as we have them are the written results of a long history of oral recitation. One need not argue that writing had no effect on them-they were probably to a degree consciously transformed as they were written down-but oral traces are not hard to detect in them. Hesiod’s poems, although most believe that Hesiod himself wrote them down, were also clearly intended for recitation, and could at first have been composed orally. “Bards” are already described in Homer-Demodocus in the Odyssey-as performers in ritual or semiritual situations. In sixth-century Athens the Iliad and the Odyssey were “performed” in their entirety as part of a major festival. Performance in this case points to the mimetic nature of the event: the bard was an actor, making the tales he recounted become real for his audience. The poet might be called a “singer,” and though the Homeric poems were probably not sung, they may have been chanted, emphasizing the rhythmic nature of the
But what was the content of the tales? In our analysis of cultural evolution, following Merlin Donald, we have largely identified the mythic with the narrative: myths are stories, as the Greek word mythos, from which our word comes, implies. But, as we know from Vladimir Propp, Claude LeviStrauss, and others, stories are eminently migratory-the same stories can appear in many different cultures, some of them with close to worldwide distribution. There is no reason to search for one ultimate meaning in such stories: it is how they are used in particular societies at particular times that makes them effective myths of those societies. Thus Walter Burkert’s definition is useful: `Myth is a traditional tale with secondary, partial reference to something of collective importance. `8 It is the tale as applied that does the work of myth. We can go on to make a problematic but significant distinction between tales about powerful beings or gods and their interaction with human beings as opposed to tales about what human beings did in the past, that is, in the narrow sense, between “myth” and “history.” I put the terms in quotation marks because they can be distinguished only analytically-in practice they always 49
If Homer and Hesiod deal in myths in both the wide and the narrow sense, they also share a source of authority, common to many early poetsone that ultimately became conventional, but that has to be taken seriously in early times-namely, that it was the muses, daughters of Zeus and goddesses themselves, from whom the poetry came. Thus, such texts, if not “revealed,” were certainly “inspired.” In contrast to the Hebrew scriptures, however, what the muses reveal is not necessarily reliable. Early in his Theogony the muses tell Hesiod:
The poet himself may know what is true and what isn’t, but he is reticent to say so. Hesiod (and perhaps Homer?) addresses himself to “the wise.” How to understand him may not always be obvious, may require interpretation. In this respect poetry shares something with the character of oracles, such as those received at Delphi, notoriously ambiguous and in need of interpretationeven dangerous because a wrong interpretation could be disastrous. Marcel Detienne in The Masters of Truth in Ancient Greece has reminded us that Aletheia (truth) and apate (deceit) are not to be taken in a positivist sense, that is, simply as contradictory, in these texts. Truth may be veiled; deceit may have a truthful purpose. We are in the realm of efficacious, not testable,
Poetic speech, long after writing had come into use, was performative, even creative; we could say it created its own “truth.” It certainly created a world. Eric Havelock in his Preface to Plato has spoken of the “Homeric encyclopedia,” the sense in which Homer conveys all that is worth knowing in the oral tradition.52 Jenny Strauss Clay speaks of the two Homeric epics as having a kind of “totality,” and quotes Gregory Nagy as saying, “Between the two of them, the Iliad and the Odyssey manage to incorporate and orchestrate something of practically everything that was once thought worth preserving from the Heroic Age.“53 Although in the Homeric encyclopedia, as Havelock calls it, almost every kind of knowledge can be found, what was most important, what made Homer the “teacher of Greece,” was the form of life that it described, the paideia (education, culture, Bildung) that it modeled. It was this that aroused Plato’s hostility, continuing a line of criticism of Homer that began at least with Xenophanes (late sixth, early fifth centuries), for Plato wanted to replace Homer, to make Socrates the teacher of Greece.
Havelock turns to Hesiod to describe the core of the poetic teachings. He finds the content of what the muses, through the poets, taught in lines 66-67 of the Theogony, which he translates:
The first line contains the words nomoi and ethea, which Havelock says can also be translated as “custom-laws” and “folk-ways.“54
If in Hesiod the emphasis is relatively explicitly on nomoi and ethea, Homer, where the word nomoi (or the singular form nomos) is not to be found,55 is more indirect, closer to the mythical systems of tribal and archaic societies, in depicting a moral world in which both gods and men act sometimes badly, sometimes well. If Homer and Hesiod are still primarily mythic in form, they are not merely expressions of “dominant ideology.” Hesiod is quite explicitly critical of the nobility from the point of view of the “middling”; but Homer is quite critical as well: in the Iliad neither Agamemnon nor Achilles, nor even the gods, are wholly admirable; in the Odyssey the suitors, representatives of the nobility of Ithaca and neighboring islands, are depi
cted as almost wholly despicable. To the extent that Hesiod explicitly and Homer implicitly are critical of existing society and suggest that it could be different than it is, there is a hint of the axial already in these earliest Greek
So far we have been considering the form and content of the earliest Greek texts to emerge from a previously entirely oral tradition. To the extent that we have emphasized that these texts were performed, we have already set them in a mimetic/ritual context. We must now consider the religious changes that were occurring as these texts were first written down and that provide their larger context. One such context is the centrally important ritual of sacrifice that we have noted usually appears only in archaic societies. Sacrifice is old in the Greek world, and is probably one of the features it shares with the larger Near East of which it was a part. Modest sacrificial altars are to be found in Greece well back in the Dark Age, possibly continuous with Mycenaean usage. It is likely that these altars were used by the leader-priest of the noble household (oikos) for sacrifices that were shared with members of the oikos, their dependents and their guests (there are Homeric examples of such sacrificial feasts), on such occasions as weddings, funerals, or days appointed for worship of a particular deity.57