October 14, Greek and Roman Religions

Greek and Roman Religions, Fall 1999

October 14, 1999

WEEKLY ASSIGNMENT DUE TODAY:

Skim Hesiod, Theogony (entire), online if you like
You've read about half of this already, so this shouldn't take long.

Read selections from the Rig Veda (copies of these will be on reserve in the Rosengarten Reserve Room):

1) "The Usas Hymns of the Rgveda", A. A. Macdonell, trans., Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1932.
2) Some Hymns on Cosmogony: RV 1.32, 1.160, 2.12, 10.90, 10.121, 10.129.

PREPARATION:

Hesiod is the most important part of the assignment, since this is not a course on Indian religion. If you get a chance, though, try to look over the selections from the Rig Veda before class; if not, at least bring a copy to class, because we will talk about them.

SESSION LEADER #1:

Read Ch. 1 of M. L. West's The Orphic Poems (1983); be prepared to summarize it in class and to connect it to our reading of the Theogony.

SESSION LEADER #2:

Read William Dwight Whitney, "The Vedas", pp. 1-45 in Oriental and Linguistic Studies, New York: Scribner, 1873 (P27.W5 1972) and be prepared to summarize for the class. This is certainly a dated work, but it provides a good introduction to the sources nevertheless.

LECTURE NOTES:

Review of Last Week

Think about oral-formulaic composition in the context of Vedic hymns to Ushas.

Hymns:

1.32
1.160
2.12
10.90
10.121
10.129

Indra
Sky and Earth
Indra
Purusha
Prajapati
Creation (Ka)

Outline of Hesiod's Theogony

See Dr. Joseph Farrell's outline of the Theogony.

Sections and issues to consider:

1) Proem (see below)

2) Titanomachy (617-820)

3) Genealogies

4) How is narrative fit into a genealogical organization?

Greek Cosmogonies and Theogonies

Terms:

Cosmogony: account of the creation of the world
Cosmology: account of the world (how it is structured and operates)
Theogony: account of the creation of the gods (or God)
Theology: account of the gods (who they are, what they do)

Early verse theogonies attributed to: Orpheus, Musaeus, Aristeas, Epimenides

Prose theogonies attributed to: Abaris, Dromocrides, Pherecydes

Homeric Hymn to Hermes (text in Perseus):

Hesiod

see the Perseus summary description and text

Hesiodic Debt to Western Asia

Hesiod and Pen-hellenism

Hesiod and Homer

Hesiodic poems are like and unlike Iliad and Odyssey in genre: they are hexameter poems, but not epic; rather, they are 'didactic'.

Common source of diction and other aspects of 'poetic language'

Common stories that both draw on: Homer, for example, is aware of theogonies; examples:

1) Il. 14.198-213 presents a different theogony than Hesiod: it presumes that Ocean and Tethys, not Earth and Heaven, are primordial parents; parallels:

1) Orphic theogony
2) Certain Western Asian theogonies, like Babylonian Enuma Elish, Biblical Genesis 1, Alcman fr. 5 = Miller #?.
3) Rigveda: see below.

2) (more subtle) Il. 15.19 Zeus tells story of how he hung Hera from the sky, her feet weighted down with anvils; compare Theogony 717-725, where the time-rate of fall of an anvil measures the distance between earth and heaven. An argument that this preserves imagery / language from earlier story in some way related to theogony: anvil represents sky ().
3) Il. 15.185-193 and the division of timai (offices) among Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. This is a cosmogony of sorts.
4) Il. 18.481-608, the "shield of Achilles" (there is also a Hesiodic Shield of Heracles).

Homeric Hymns

What does 'Homeric' mean in this case? 1) Attributed to Homer in antiquity, 2) of same genre (hexameter) as epics

How do they differ from the epics? 1) composed later (based on linguistic evidence), though in same tradition; 2) not epic: in fact, they have a structure similar to both epic (Homer) and lyric (esp. Pindar), and no doubt related to the structure of worship in the context of cult

Formally, structured as proemia to hexameter works of different nature; in content, addresses to gods, and praise of them (hence, in standard Greek prayer form)

extant Iliad and Odyssey don't begin with such prayers

Hesiod's Theogony does

Vedic Literature

Vedic is the earliest dialect of classical language of India, Sanskrit

Two senses of 'Vedas'

1) any of four collections of lyric poetry, the so-called mantras: Rig, Atharva, Sama, and Yajur

2) the traditions based on these collections, which includes primarily the commentary literature, or brahmanas

Why were commentaries needed? Because of age of mantras, and the changes in language and culture between early and late Vedic.

Dating: Take a guess. No direct evidence (i.e., no historical references useful for dating) and no indirect evidence beyond 1) hypotheses about evolution of Indian literature, 2) cognate Indo-European literature (Iranian Avesta, Indo-Iranian evidence from Mitanni, in north Syria), 3) hyptheses about date of breakup of Indo-Europeans. At a rough approximation, 1200-900 BC. There are clearly different chronological strata within and between the mantras.

Current recension of Rigveda clearly the result of editorial activity as regards organization, but not of Books 1 and 10 appear to be latest ; book 8 hymns only to Agni, etc.

Vedic Cosmogonies

Earliest strata: Indra and Vritra; stories related to theogony.

Rgvedic Theogonies: A number of theogonies are to be found in the later stratum of hymns, esp. in Book 10. Generally, it appears that we might call 'proto-philosophical' views begin in Book 10, whereas 'philosophical' approaches to creation begin with the (late Vedic) early Upanishads.

Indra and Vritra: According to Norman Brown, the earliest creation myth in the extant Vedas can be recontructed with some success by looking at the various myths that allude to it (found throughout the hymns of RV). This myth has several stages:

1) Some things always existed: god Tvastir, who is 'one born at the beginning' or 'first-going'; and the Waters (apas), or brute matter. He made earth and heaven, and the first gods.

2) Two inital groups of gods: asuras and devas. Asuras divide into two groups (named after their mothers): Danavas and Adityas. The former are infernal and their names are associated with the notion of binding (esp. the arch-villan of RV, Vritra). The latter have names associated with unfettering, and are the heros of the myth.

3) The climax comes when Indra, born after the earlier gods failed, succeeds in killing Vritra, freeing the celestial waters, and thus creating the rest of the known cosmos. This is taken as separating earth and heaven, and releasing the sun, also called an embryo.

Whether this is the right construal of RV is open to debate. Most scholars now are inclined to view the separation of heaven and earth and the freeing of the waters as coming from different myths.

According to a now-popular scholarly view, there is Indo-European ancestry to the Indra-Vritra myth; for a copious analysis of it, see Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford University Press, 1995).

Later, more philosophical traditions (books 1 and esp. 10)

Indo-European Religion

Just as the language of the Indo-Europeans before their dispersal can be reconstructed through the methods of comparative linguistics, so (many scholars believe) the same methods can be used to reconstruct other aspects of social life, for example religious forms.

Sociological Background: 1) Application of comparative methods allows the reconstruction of various aspects of social life, whenever the words that refer to a particular arena of social life survive in enough daugher languages. See Emile Benveniste, Indo-European language and society (University of Miami Press, 1973) for the best general attempt at reconstruction. 2) Theories of Dumezil are still quite popular. These hold that IE society was composed of three distinct classes, pretty much analogous to the three (four) basic castes in India; in fact, Indian castes are in practice the model for IE classes, since the former are taken to be the most pure reflexes of the latter. The key to this theory is the idea of ideology, which for Dumezil means a structural pattern that replicates itself in a wide variety of social forms, including most notably both social and religious forms.

Reconstructed Myths: A number of myths have been reconstructed for the Proto-Indo-Europeans. For good introduction, see esp. Bruce Lincoln, Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice, Chicago, 1991. Also idem, Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European Themes of Creation and Destruction, Harvard UP, 1986.

Myth and Ritual: Rituals can be reconstructed in the same way that other forms of social life are, but of course any correlation between myth and ritual will then be largely a result of theoretical assumptions, since all known IE myths and rituals are theoretical constructs.