October 7, Greek and Roman Religions

Greek and Roman Religions, Fall 1999

October 7, 1999

WEEKLY ASSIGNMENT DUE TODAY:

If you have it,
Read BNP Chs. 3-4: pp. 114-210

If not,
Read "Religion in Republican Rome"
by J.A. North in CAH, v. 7, pt. 2 and
Read "The Place of Religion: Rome in the Early Empire"
by S.R.F. Price in CAH, v. 7, pt. 2

SESSION LEADER #1:

Provide a brief summary of the key points in BNP for those who haven't read it.

SESSION LEADER #2:

Provide a brief summary of the key points in the North and Price readings for those who read BNP instead.

LECTURE NOTES:

A Few More Authors

In general, if you encounter any interesting names in your secondary readings and want to learn more, check out the references on the library resources page, esp. OCD.

Pausanias (fl. 150 AD)

"Description of Greece" in 10 books. Treasure trove of information about myths and antiquities from all over the Greek world. Pausanias was an ancient classicist, if you will.

Plutarch (c. 50-120 AD)

priest at Delphi in time of Trajan and Hadrian

works:

Parallel Lives: Greek and Roman biographies, intended to show the Romans by example the virtues of Greeks, and how these compared to Roman virtues

philosophical works

works on religious topics: on Egyptian religions, on oracles, etc.

rhetoric and belles lettres

Varro (116 - 27 BC)

Roman scholar (see also November 4 lecture). Rose to praetor. Sided with Pompey; after civil war, became full-time scholar.

Author of:

On the Latin language (25 books): part extant

Of rustic things (3 books): Book 3 extant

Of human and divine antiquities (41 books)

Hebdomades (15books): biographies of Greeks and Romans

Logistoricon (76 books): on various topics

Of the liberal arts (9 books)

Orality, Literacy, and the Growth of Literature

Problems in the Study of Literacy in the Ancient World

Evidence for orality: since our direct evidence is literary, we hypothesize oral tradition (partly as a result of ancient testimony, partly from intuition and our knowledge of comparable societies); specific examples like oratory

Accuracy of oral traditions

method of transmission

purpose / function of transmission (the latter allows for subconscious or accidental factors)

Problem: what is worthy of memory?

misrepresentations of facts resulting from genre conventions

ancient views of truth, falsehood, fiction, etc.

influence of standard issues, like the psychology of memory

Orality and Mentalities

The basic problem: how does the use of writing in a society affect the way members of that society think?

Subsidiary problem: how does the availability of writing influence the forms of language used in a society?

See below on formulaic composition for the prime example of how these issues get cashed out in archaic Greece.

Questions to be answered by historians of literacy

How widespread was literacy in a particular society?

In what ways was it literate?

What to make of feedback of writing on the still oral aspects of culture

Oral-Formulaic Composition

Why oral poetry?

No poet ever tells the same tale twice in the same words

Notion of the formula

Background: Greek dialects

Dating of dialect spread unclear, as is arrival of Greek-speakers in Greece, but all are clearly mutually intelligible in classical period

position of Mycenaean Greek in classical picture a little unclear, but there it differs far more from classical dialects than they differ from one another

East Greek

Attic-Ionic: Athens; Greek Islands; central Asia Minor
Aeolic: north Asia Minor; north Greece

West Greek

Northwest Greek
Dorian: Sparta and Peloponnese; south Asia Minor

Map of geographic distribution

Theories of evolution of oral, heroic poetry in Greece depend on theories of dialect spread, at least to some extent

Prototypes of the formula: noun + epithet combinations

godlike Odyseus
noble Odysseus
(daughter) of a mighty father (obrimopatre)
Pallas Athena
godlike Achilles
fleet Achilles
counsellor Zeus
far-seeing Zeus

Two components to a system of formulas: simplicity and extension

simplicity: "corresponding dialectical or artificial elements are of unique metrical value" (p. 7); i.e., when different but exactly comparable forms of language (endings, particles, etc.; often they come from different dialects), they almost always have different metrical values.

extension: "lies in the great number of cases in which, to a given element of one dialect, one can oppose the corresponding element of another" (p. 7); hence, the artificiality and force of the language.

In the case of an original, literate poet, such a system would not be liable to occur.

Another formulation: "The length of the system consists very obviously in the number of formulas which make it up. The thrift of a system lies in the degree to which it is free of phrases which, having the same metrical value and expressing the same idea, could replace one another." (p. 276)

Art of Traditional Poetry (acc. to Milman Parry, pp. 334-5)

Goal of archaic poet: "to make a poem like the poems he has heard"

"He strives not to create a new poem but to achieve that which everyone knows to be the best."

"The good poet will keep what is striking, or even add, on the pattern of older poems, lines which he knows will please . . . his poetry remains throughout the sum of the longer and shorter pasages that he has heard."

Problems with the Oral-Formulaic Theory

Problems with the notion of the formula

How do we verify sameness of the idea? Doesn't the definition become circular?

Given a finite and small corpus, how can we verify conjectures? How can we separate out selection biases?

Can the noun + epithet model be extended to all the language of a story? Or is this not a small part of the total text?

What is the connection between language, plot, and new/old ideas?

The Periodization of Classical Literature: Traditional, Personal, and Imaginative Components

Cosmogonies

In Greece

Earliest extant cosmogony is Hesiod; some cosmogonic information in Homer

evidence for cosmogonies in verse and prose from 7th/6th centuries BC, to be discussed next week

In India

examples for next week from Rig Veda (c. 1200-900 BC). In time, this begins around the close of the Greek Bronze Age and ends around the start of the archaic period (just before the time of oldest alphabetic Greek texts). In other words, this is the time of the evolution of epic style.

Extensive theorizing in later works, from Upanishads and Brahmanas up to Itihasa and Tantric literature and beyond. We won't talk about this, though.

The Indo-European Problem and Historical Explanation

Questions: (1) are there useful similarities between Greece and India, and if so can these be derived from common ancestry? (2) what is the value of purely comparative (non-genetic) evidence?