The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy

by A. A. Long

  Thus early Greek philosophers laid the foundation for one of the most persistent polemical traditions in Western poetics, denying the poets’ (implicit or explicit) claim to truthful knowledge and assigning them at most an irrational, inexplicable inspiration. But they also prepared the groundwork for the most important recuperative measure designed to protect the poets against such charges, namely allegorical interpretation.10 Like the enemy of poetry, the allegorist believes that the only true doctrine is the one the philosopher possesses; but instead of simply recognizing that the poet’s text, on its most obvious reading, is incompatible with that doctrine, the allegorist goes a step further and claims that, though the poet may seem to be saying one thing that contradicts the truth, in fact he means another thing that is entirely compatible with it. In so doing, the allegorist adopts the familiar fifth-century terminological opposition between doxa and alêtheia, “appearance” and “truth,” which had been developed to deal with epistemological problems involving sensual appearance, and reapplies it to the poetic text. After all, if Homer and Hesiod already spoke of Odysseus or the Muses saying false things that seemed to be true (Homer Od. XIX.203, Hesiod Theog. 27), why cannot the allegorist simply invert and generalize the poets’ own phrase and apply it to their poetry as a whole?

  It was Theagenes of Rhegium, towards the end of the sixth century B.C., whom later Greek scholarship credited with having been the first person to have written about Homer (Schol. Hom. B ad Il. XX.67). We can get some idea of his approach from this scholium, which reports his interpretation of the Battle of the Gods. This passage of comic relief, inserted by Homer just before the climactic duel between Achilles and Hector, opposes to one another in painless conflict pairs of gods who are a delightfully self-conscious and inextricable blend of persons and abstractions. Theagenes ignores the immediate context, the evident anthropomorphism, and the delicious humor so that he can turn the scene into a wooden set of conceptual pairs opposing to one another physical abstractions like fire and water or ethical ones like prudence and imprudence; he supports his translation of gods into concepts partly by their traditional role and character, partly by etymology of their name.

  It is easy to make fun of Theagenes’ interpretations, yet their motivation was surely quite serious. To heal a rupture that had begun to open up within Greek culture between traditional sources of poetic authority and more recent criteria of conceptual argumentation was an ambitious goal, and Theagenes’ success may be measured by the fact that allegorical interpretation continued to develop throughout this period and to become one of the basic tools of literary scholarship in and after antiquity. Anaxagoras, to be sure, who claimed that Homer’s poetry was about virtue and justice (D.L. II.11), may have simply been characterizing the ethical dimension of Homer’s narrative without subjecting it to a thoroughgoing allegorical interpretation; but Metrodorus of Lampsacus, who was said to have been his disciple (D.L. loc.cit.), certainly engaged in detailed, systematic, and rather ludicrous allegoresis, identifying for example the Homeric heroes with celestial phenomena (Achilles the sun, Helen the earth, Hector the moon) and the gods with anatomical ones (Demeter the liver, Dionysus the spleen, Apollo the bile: DK 61 B3-4).

  The most extraordinary and extended early Greek allegoresis extant has only recently come to light. This is the so-called Derveni Papyrus, in which a still-unidentified author applies various techniques of allegorical interpretation to an epic theogonic poem ascribed to Orpheus in order to demonstrate that its real message is an eclectic physical cosmogony combining elements reminiscent of Anaxagoras, Diogenes of Apollonia, and other early Greek thinkers.11 Despite the Derveni author’s deployment of a sophisticated repertoire of interpretative techniques familiar elsewhere from the allegorical tradition – homonymy, synonymy, analogies from ordinary life, parallels from ancient epic, differences among dialects, and especially etymological explanations of names – what has struck most scholars has been the apparently wild capriciousness of his exegesis. Nonetheless, most interestingly, he has not only an allegorical practice but also a theory to justify it: he claims that, given the primitive times in which Orpheus lived, he chose to avoid using obscure scientific terminology when singing about scientific matters in order not to confuse his listeners; instead, he selected the most appropriate words from the language ordinary people already used. Only now had the Derveni author finally recovered the poem’s intended meaning.

  Before taking leave of the explicit poetics of early Greek philosophy, we should note that the fifth century also saw the development of an alternative vision of literary discourses, namely rhetoric, which tended to ignore altogether the question of their truthfulness and to focus instead upon analyzing and fortifying their effect upon the audience. In particular, such figures as Protagoras and Gorgias paid close attention to the formal devices and large-scale structure of early epic as of later poetry, perhaps in an attempt to understand by what techniques the celebrated poets had achieved such success so that they would be able to teach their students how to apply them to create persuasion in their own oratorical practice.12 Gorgias’ definition of poetry as metrical discourse (DK 82 B11), for example, provided the basis for most later ancient analyses of poetic language; while Protagoras’ suggestion that an episode in Iliad XXI had been composed in order to divide the conflict into various phases, to provide a transition to the Battle of the Gods, and perhaps also to praise Achilles (DK 80 A30), is refreshingly sensitive to the articulations of a complex narrative and free of any moralizing condemnation of Homer’s portrayal of the gods.

  Such insights paved the way for important future developments but for literary criticism, not philosophical poetics.

  2. IMPLICIT POETICS IN EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY: THE HERITAGE OF EARLY GREEK EPIC

  Like most preliterate peoples, the early Greeks presumably enjoyed a wealth of different kinds of oral poetry, which functioned in their totality as an encyclopedia of history and geography and as a repertory of accumulated knowledge about nature, the gods, and human society. But at the threshold of literacy, a few poets – the Greeks called them Homer and Hesiod – managed to devise ways of employing the new techniques of writing with such success that thenceforth most audiences wanted to hear only their works and no others. The result was that, within a period that may have been as short as a generation or two, these two poets drove their more traditional competitors from the field, consigning them eventually to almost complete oblivion. How did they manage to do this? No doubt the sheer poetic excellence of the epics attributed to Homer and Hesiod played an important role in their success. But “poetic excellence” is a notoriously slippery concept: rather than appealing to the innate genius of these authors or to ineffable qualities in their works, let us consider what specific, concrete features their poems have in common with one another, on the presumption that these shared traits will show us just what the expectations on the part of their audiences were that these two poets were better able to satisfy than their rivals.

  The fundamental poetic goals that Homer and Hesiod seem to set themselves and claim, implicitly and explicitly, to attain in their epics are likely to have been identical with what most early Greek audiences expected from serious, sustained public discourse – not least because, like any great poets, Homer and Hesiod helped, by means of their works, to shape the audiences that would be able to appreciate them. These goals represent a heritage and a context of expectations that the early Greek philosophers could only have ignored at their own risk – and one that they quickly learned with considerable sophistication to exploit to their advantage.

  We may summarize these poetic goals under five heads:13

  (1) Truthfulness: We ourselves may justly admire the evident imaginative originality and inventiveness of early Greek epic poetry; but, for their own part, Homer and Hesiod claim that, on the contrary, the only validation of their poetry is that it tells the truth, conforming veridically to a real past or present state of affairs. The epic Muse guarantees a sup
erhuman knowledge of matters distant in time and space or otherwise remote from ordinary human knowledge: as Homer puts it in the opening of his catalogue of ships (Il. II.484-93) – an extraordinary geographical, onomastic, and numerical tour de force – most humans are obliged to imagine and invent, but the epic poet, sanctioned by his Muse, really knows. So too, when Odysseus praises the singing of Demodocus at the court of the Phaeacians, it is because the bard’s account of the Trojan horse is so accurate (as Odysseus, who designed the horse himself, knows well) that he seems either to have been there himself or to have heard about it from someone who was (Od. VIII.489-91). Hesiod’s Muses too inspire him so that he can sing of what will be and was and always is, and if they declare that they know how to tell lies that resemble truth or, when they wish, sing the truth (Theog. 26–28), their point is not that good poetry can be false, but that the understanding of most men is so limited that mortals, in contrast to the divine Muses, cannot tell the difference between truth and lies.14 The most magnificent symbol of this epic claim are the Sirens, who by calling to Odysseus by name as he sails by already prove their claim that they know not only everything that happened at Troy but also everything else that happens upon the broad earth, and whose promise that whoever listens to their song will go home delighted and knowing more is so irresistible that those who hear them cannot tear themselves away, but end up, spellbound, starving to death (Od. XII.39-54, 166–200). As here, so always in the early Greek epic, poetry enchants, but no enchantment is greater than that produced by truth.

  (2) Essentiality of content: The objects of Homer and Hesiod are not minor themes, but the largest and most important subjects available to their communities. For heroic epic, war is the supreme form of human interaction, and the Trojan war mobilized and destroyed vaster resources of men and materials than any other war in memory (Thucydides I.10.3). Homer’s two epics focus upon the two complementary heroes and stories that, together, make up the essence of that subject: the one hero who prefers to die young and famous on the battlefield far from home rather than living on into an inglorious old age, the other who achieves fame precisely for his ability to survive and for his final restoration to family and kingship; the one hero who is best of the Achaeans in strength and speed, the other in shrewdness and speech. As for Hesiod, his complex panoply of divinities and precepts focuses on the most important features of the universe he describes. On the one hand, the gods who always are, viewed not only in their systematic familial relations to one another but also and above all in terms of the development of the religious and moral structure of the universe from its earliest beginnings in strife and violence to the just and ordered reign of Zeus to which all powers are now subject; and on the other, the fundamental conditions of human existence, involving toil and anxiety, within a world which, sooner or later, punishes injustice and rewards piety to man and god, analyzed in terms both of valid precepts and admonitions and of mytho-historical explanatory models that set the lot of mankind as a whole into a larger and more intelligible framework.

  (3) Comprehensiveness of content: Given the exigencies of oral production, it is likely that most performances of traditional oral epic in early Greece presented only relatively brief episodes, manageable excerpts from the vast repertory of heroic and divine legend which, implicitly present as tacit knowledge, bound together early Greek communities of singers and their listeners but could only rarely, if ever, be recited as a whole. Homer and Hesiod themselves, by contrast, recognized in the new technology of writing an opportunity for creating works which brought together within a single compass far more material than could ever have been presented continuously in a purely oral format. Homer still focuses upon relatively brief episodes excerpted out of the full range of the epic repertoire (Achilles’ wrath, Odysseus’ return), but he expands his poems’ horizons by inserting material belonging to other parts of the epic tradition (the catalogue of ships, the view from the wall) and by making frequent, more or less veiled allusions to earlier and later events; moreover, the epic similes and Achilles’ shield open up this tale of bloody-minded slaughter by inserting it into the larger horizon of the world of peace and daily cares. In his Theogony, Hesiod brought together within a single, richly complicated genealogical system as many as possible of the local divinities acknowledged in various places throughout the Greek world; then, in his Works and Days he went on to consider the conditions of human existence, including a large selection from popular moral, religious, and agricultural wisdom. The result is that the works of both Homer and Hesiod, though neither comes even close to exhausting the latent repertory of oral epic knowledge, both point beyond themselves to include by implication vaster segments of that knowledge and to make a pan-Hellenic claim for more than merely local validity.15 This is what audiences wanted to hear.

  (4) Narrative temporality: It is perhaps not surprising that early Greek epic should demonstrate a keen interest in narrative – storytelling is as good a candidate for an anthropological universal as any. But nonetheless the refinement and ingenuity in the deployment of narrative techniques demonstrated by early Greek poetry is quite remarkable. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey use suspense, surprise, foreshadowing, flashback, interruption, and repetition with extraordinary skill and wit; the latter epic, in particular, sets up complicated parallel stories that reflect and comment upon one another, inserts smaller tales ironically within larger ones, and demonstrates a sophisticated recognition of the exigencies of various kinds of point of view. Even Hesiod narrativizes his own material as far as possible. In his Theogony, he temporalizes his account of the divine structure of the world by adopting the genre of theogony-fully understanding a god’s quality requires knowing where he or she came from. What is more, he does not present his theological system in the form of a static catalogue but instead establishes relations of consanguinity, alliance, and hostility among his gods so that they can both enter into smaller narrative relations with one another and also form part of the larger story of the successive generations and wars of the gods and of the gradual, difficult, but finally successful establishment of Zeus’ rule. In the Works and Days, then, Hesiod invents a myth of races of men in order to confer some of the same temporal substantiality upon human beings as well, and inserts his reflections upon justice and work within the framework of a highly dramatic story of contention between his brother and himself. Evidently, the Greeks liked a good story, and they preferred poets who could give them one.

  (5) Looseness of macroscopic form vs. precision of microscopic form: Despite this sensitivity to the possibilities of narrative structures, early Greek epic tends to privilege local stylistic phenomena over larger formal considerations. Both of Homer’s poems focus upon a single topic, named in the opening verses, Achilles’ wrath and Odysseus’ return; yet, the signs of large-scale formal organization and of rigorous subordination of all parts to this one central theme are so few and subtle that many scholars have missed them altogether. Thus the Iliad does not stop with the end of Achilles’ wrath against Agamemnon but continues with his wrath against Hector and concludes with his partial reconciliation with Priam, including along the way many episodes, military and otherwise, not fully indispensable for this theme; indeed, in some ancient copies of the poem the canonical last line was followed by the first line of another epic, which was thereby continuously linked to it. In Hesiod’s epics, formal organization seems to be even more strikingly lacking: the progression of thought from section to section, and in some cases from sentence to sentence, is sometimes so hard to determine exactly that many scholars have been misled into denying that the poems have any logical coherence whatsoever. Both ancient and modern scholarship have been quite puzzled about just where his two poems ended; and even about the exact point at which the Works and Days began, there was some uncertainty in antiquity. But on the other hand, both poets display an extraordinary mastery of all the techniques and resources of the artificial language and complex meter of traditional Greek oral epic. Homer’s an
d Hesiod’s remarkable ability, from verse to verse, to make inventive and original use of the traditional stock of epic formulae, and to squeeze old and new words and phrases into the tight corset of the dactylic hexameter, meant that every line they composed provided the well-trained listener with just that mixture between the relief of familiarity and the tingle of surprise without which their poetry would have been either boringly predictable or unintelligibly novel.

  Significantly, all five of these criteria survive their origin in early Greek poetry and go on to remain fully and centrally relevant for the early Greek philosophers:

  (1) From its very beginning, Greek philosophy identifies itself as a discourse of truthfulness, rather than, for example, as one of beauty or persuasiveness. Among the earliest generations of Greek philosophers, to be sure – at least judging on the basis of the scanty surviving fragments – this identification seems to have been implicit rather than explicit, to have accompanied and tacitly legitimated statements about the fundamental nature of the world rather than to have been thematized and justified as such; but starting with Xenophanes, the problem of whether, and if so how, human beings might attain the truth, moves to the forefront of the philosophers’ attention, and they all proclaim that, while it is difficult or impossible for all (other) mortals to know the truth, they themselves know both this particular truth, and many other ones, without any uncertainty at all. In Xenophanes, this paradox is still somewhat attenuated. When he writes, “No man knows, or ever will know, the truth about the gods and all that I say about all things; for even if one chanced to say the complete truth, yet oneself knows it not; but seeming is wrought over all things [or men]” (DK 21 B34, cf. B35), he claims absolute truth not for his particular views about the gods and other matters, but only for the underlying principle that no man can attain absolute truth – about this principle he is quite certain.16 After Xenophanes, such early Greek philosophers as Heraclitus, Pythagoras, and above all Parmenides and Empedocles will go on to claim that truth is the privileged domain of the philosopher, and will bequeath this prerogative to the rest of Western philosophy.