Reasoning/Appetitive: Mythology for the Masses

One of my weak-points in my background is general Greek mythology. Although I did work with mythology in 5th grade and again in 9th, as well as discussing mythology significantly in my classes on Pindar, the Agamemnon, Greek tragedy, and Latin love elegy, I still felt a little behind in my mythological background (partially because a few of my friends and classmates were so well informed). So I decided that during my year(s) off, I would work on my mythological background. Yesterday, I finished the first book to move toward becoming a "mythite" [1], Jean-Pierre Vernant's
The Universe, the Gods, and Men: Ancient Greek Myth.

 

I found the collection of mythology told by Vernant to be extremely charming. Apparently, Vernant told these stories to his grandson when his grandson was young; he enjoyed recounting the mythology that he spent his academic life analyzing. Twenty-five years later, when on vacation on the same island where he told the stories to his grandson, he told the stories to some of his friends, who made him promise to write them down (Vernant xii). Thus, The Universe, the Gods, and Men: Ancient Greek Myths Told by Jean-Pierre Vernant, was born

I chose this to be my first mythology book of the year because I thought it would be enjoyable. I fell in love with Jean-Pierre Vernant's writing when I read his essay "Feminine Figures of Death" (JSTOR) my freshman year in college. The essay distinguishes between thanatos (θάνατος) (the clean, quick, masculine death) and ker (κήρ)(the disgusting, destructive, feminine death). Anyway, I enjoyed his writing and decided to read his retelling of the mythology.

Vernant has a distinctly Herodotean style. He tells the story in a meandering fashion and vaguely chronological order. He discusses each of the myths, indicating when there were alternative versions of the stories, and sometimes providing brief glimpses of analysis. Overall, the book is very charming and I recommend it as a very quick and enjoyable read [2].

Endnotes

1. Mythite was the term my archaeology teacher in high school called the students who were interested in mythology and joined a mythology club for a short period of time. Tyring to clean my room, I found some of the old notes from this class and it seemed that back then I had a greater mythological background than I do now, but even then I did not have significant training in the obscure that is required for poetry such as that of Propertius.
2. I almost think it would be a good set of stories for children, although Vernant mostly employs euphemism, there is a lot of sexual content in the stories. On the other hand, this is the nature of Greek mythology.

Reasoning/Spirited: A Grand Narrative Approach to Greek History #2

Although I criticized The Origins of Greek Thought on both specific points and general approach in my last blog post, Vernant incorporates a number of persuasive and thought-provoking claims in his narrative tale of the origins of Greek Rationality. One of the descriptions that caught my attention is his description of the bureaucratic royalty of the Mycenean palace culture:

"social life appears to have been centered on the palace, whose function was at once religious, political, military, administrative, and economic. In this palace-centered economic system, as it has been called, the king brought together and fused in his own person all aspects of power and sovereignty. Through the agency of the scribes, who formed a professional class established by tradition, and a complex hierarchy of palace dignitaries and royal inspectors, the king controlled and closely regulated all sectors of economic life and spheres of social activity" (Vernant 24).

This passage struck my attention because it reminded me of a passage in Herodotus on which I spent a lot of time and concentration. In Book I when Herodotus describes the founding of the Persian empire by Deiokes, he describes a similar bureaucratic palace structure, except of course that Deiokes becomes so paranoid that he no longer leaves the palace. Furthermore, the palace structure itself sounds somewhat like the image that Vernant describes for the Mycenean palace:

"the Mycenean manor, centered on the megaron [a great central hall] and the throne room, is a walled fortress, a chieftain's den, dominating and keeping watch over the plain at is feet. Constructed to withstand siege, this citadel sheltered the quarters of the king's intimate associates, the military leaders and the palace dignitaries, alongside the princely dwelling and its outbuildings" (Vernant 28)

Unlike the Persian palace that Herodotus describes [1], the Mycenean palaces were not built in concentric circles. Here is an example of the palace floorplan at Pylos [2]:

However, the fortified structure around the king and the treasury and the specialized circle of scribes to maintain a stranglehold on the life of the subject who build their homes around the palace directly follows the description that Herodotus provides. My guess would be that Herodotus saw (or heard about) the ruins of the old Persian palaces, heard the name Deiokes from local history and legend, and attributed aspects of the Greek past to the Persian past of a similar time period.

For anyone who reads Ancient Greek: 1.97-1.100 in Herodotus was one of my favorite passages (when I find my notes, I will do a translation of this section) in any Greek text I have read. The nested structure of the sentence that describes the concentric circles is so incredibly cool. I highly recommend it.

Endnotes

1. I believe that Herodotus does describe an actual Persian type of architecture, although I do not believe that there were ever seven concentric walls surrounding this type of palace. I would cite the source for this belief, but unfortunately I cannot find the paper that I wrote on Deiokes' palace (which is also the reason that I have not taken the time to do my own translation of the passage from the original Greek). I do believe, however, that this was the book that provided me with the information about the archaeological evidence for Persian architecture: Culican, William. The Medes and the Persians. New York: Praeger, 1965. 
2. This image comes from the Brown website. More awesome images of this type can be found at the Bryn Mawr website.

Reasoning: A Grand Narrative Approach to Greek History #1

I just finished re-reading Jean-Pierre Vernant's The Origins of Greek Thought, which entertained me during my recent jury duty.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed it, the book did not have quite the same impact as the first time I read it. I believe that this is because my most recent book before this was Early Greece, which is a much more current and detailed account of Greek History than The Origins of Greek Thought. Unfortunately, not only am I out of the loop on the current understandings of archaeology and I have no idea how to tell what is out of date and what is not. Is there some kind of community somewhere?

Apparently I have some modernist tendencies that college (and two wonderful literary theory classes) did not strangle out of me, because I still like the grand narrative approach to history. However, I think that Vernant's narrative leaves out a lot of details (from what I've gleaned from Murray) about the development of Greek politics.

One of the problems that I notice with Vernant's narrative is that he constructs a development from Mycenean kingship (which Vernant refers to as devine-kingship) to isonomia (an alternate term for democracy that is less aggressive than and predates democracy). His narrative seems to go straight from Mycenean kingship to aristocracy of the basileus (in the Homeric use of the term as a lord, opposed to wanax, the high king) class. However, Vernant seems to place too little emphasis on the age of tyrants in the city states. For example, Peisistratos's reforms in Athens (such as, among many others, the changes to the Panathenia and the invention of the Greater Dionysia (Murray 270-272)) which created some of the civic institutions that would later become a forum for dialogue and democracy. Also, some of Sparta's power, as well as the hoplite-class-lead constitutions coming about through Sparta's removal of tyrants from power (Murray 263). To be fair, Vernant does provide a chapter on the sages (Chapter Five, The Crisis of the City: The Earliest Sages) some of whom were tyrants, but it places its emphasis too early and does not account adequately for the later tyrants, like the Peisistratidai.

Furthermore, Vernant blurs the distinction between the concept of equality in the citizens as homoioi (equals) in the hoplite state and the citizen equals in isonomia that appears so radically important in Murray's assessment of the development of Athens into a democracy (Murray 265-284). Murray explains that after Kleomenes dethroned the Peisistratidai, Kleisthenes' reforms were so radically different from the eunomia (good order) that the Spartans intended to impose, Kleomenes and a small band of Spartans attacked Athens for a second time, and were repulsed by the Athenians (Murray 265).

It feels a little strange, to me, criticizing Vernant's book. Ever since, my freshman year in college when I read Feminine Figures of Death (which is available on jstor for anyone whose school/library/etc has access), I have adored Vernant and his writing. However, The Origins of Greek Thought was written in 1962, so I do have almost 50 years of scholarship and archaeology on him.