The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

« Previous Entries in Category | Next Entries in Category »

Classics: Greek Sacrifice

Vernant (The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks) writes of Greek sacrifice, “Because it is directed towards the gods and claims to include them with the group of guests in the solemnity and joy of the celebration, it evokes the memory of the ancient commensality when, seated together, men and gods made merry day after day at shared meals.  However, if in its intent sacrifice hearkens back to these far-off times of the golden age when, sharing the same food, men still lived ‘like gods,’ far from all evils, work, disease, old age, and women, it is no less true that sacrifice is a reminder that these blessed times when men and gods sat down together to feast are forever ended.  The ritual sets the incorruptible bones aside for the gods and sends them, consumed by the flames, on high in the form of fragrant smoke and gives men the meat of an already lifeless animal, a piece of dead flesh, so that they may satisfy for a moment their constantly awakening hunger. . . . The alimentary rite that brings men into contact with the divine underscores the distance that separates them.  Communication is established by a religious procedure that in reminding men of the Promethean fault emphasizes the insurmountable distance between men and gods.”

Not unlike Israel, whose repeated sacrifices are a constant reminder that the blood of bulls and goats does not take away sin, a constant reminder that only animals transformed into smoke are capable of crossing the barriers into the presence of Yahweh.  Yahweh did not leave the Greeks without a witness.

Classics: Heroes and Ancestors

Greeks also seem to have practiced some form of ancestor cult and, perhaps related, a cult of heroes.  In a detailed discussion of the archeology of the cult of the dead in early Greece in the American Journal of Archeology, Carla Antonaccio summarizes the evidence that she wishes to test by archeological evidence:

“Although the Greeks did speak of ancestors using a variety of terms, there is less written evidence for a cult of ancestors than for hero cult. In the historical period, the Greeks practiced what Humphreys calls ‘memorialism’ rather than ancestor worship; they were motivated (at least when they write down their thoughts on the subject in the Archaic period and after) by a desire to be remembered by family and passersby. The Greeks of historical periods, however, did not routinely immortalize or divinize their family dead. Moreover, for most Greeks genealogies did not articulate the generations of the dead or structure the relations of the living. Yet, as discussed already, several scholars have proposed that ancestors were local and familial, the founders of a clan, for example, and that their descendants maintained a cult at their graves. Famous figures could receive worship as both ancestors (family) and heroes (community), either in the same or different places. Ancestor cult was suggested as the original model; when some ancestors became heroes, the practice became more general, or some originally unheroic ancestors were elevated to heroic status after the cult of heroes had taken hold. Heroes, then, could be considered as ancestors, especially when claimed by members of an elite; Nagy, too, observed that heroes could be the completely unhistorical ancestors of a kinship group, like a genos, and he proposed that hero cult grew from worship of ancestors; hero cult was a ‘revival of a continuous heritage.’ For Farnell, the earliest clear-cut evidence for ancestor cult was only sixth century in date, and he denied that the Greeks generally worshipped the dead. Since the early work of Rohde, Farnell, and others, ancestors all but dropped out of the discussion until the last 10 years. For this the extension of hero cult to Mycenaean tombs with the increase of archaeological evidence is largely responsible.”

Classics: Cult of the dead

In a 1973 article in the journal Iraq, Miranda Bayliss reviews the evidence for a cult of the dead in ancient Assyrian and Babylon

Little evidence survives a general “cult of deceased kin” except among royal families.  For others, most of the evidence involves dealing with ghosts that torment their kin and others.  “Just as the Mesopotamian cult of the gods entailed the provision of their ‘physical’ needs, particularly the provision of regular meals placed as offerings in front of their images, so also the ghosts of the dead required provision of their needs.”  Ghosts were believed to have superhuman powers like those of demons, and ghosts and demons are sometimes compared in the incantation texts.  Given their powers, ghosts were capable of affecting the living.  Propitiatory rituals were needed to keep ghosts under control and to protect the living from their attacks.  There were also, apparently, funerary cults, but these did not extend any further back than grandparents.

Continue reading…

Classics: Greek idols

Though the Greeks built temples for a variety of reasons, housing and serving the cult image of a god was one of the motivations for building a temple in the first place.  John Pedley (Sanctuaries and the Sacred in the Ancient Greek World) writes that some temples “seem to have been purpose-built as houses for ancient venerable images with special powers, or for sheltering new cult images; both temples and images were costly offerings from the city to the deity concerned,” a kind of corporate sacrifice to the god.

Among the celebrated images were the Athena Parthenos that was in the fifth-century Parthenon, and the Zeus of Olympia, both by the sculptor Pheidias.  Pedley writes, “These were gigantic statues, gigantic in scale and in cost – the Athena was about ten meters tall and used about a ton of gold – intended to strike awe into the visitor, and sending messages about skill and power and wealth.  The materials, the ivory and gold, of which these statues were made spoke of the height of luxury, and of the great investment of wealth that had gone into them.”  Earlier status had been made of wood, and even later some temples made wood figures: “Pausanias saw several, including an over-life-size Hermes in Arkadia, made of juniper.”  In a temple on Crete, a “local community built a small one-room temple with an interior hearth and a low stone bench against the back wall.  On this bench they placed a trio of bronze and wood figures that have been interpreted as cult statuettes.”

He offers a number of other specific examples of civic dedications of cult figures to the gods: “In the sixth century the Naxians dedicated a marble sphinx atop a tall marble column in the sanctuary at Delphi, and the Argives two kouroi; in the fifth the Messenians dedicated the marble Nike, the work of the sculptor Paionios, in the Sancutary of Zeus at Olympia.  In the fourth, the Knidians dedicated the stunning Aphrodite . . . , a work of Praxiteles.  This statue presented a fullscale female nude for the first time . . . She stands naked, caught in an apparently defense pose, and it is her commanding sexuality open stated, her nakedness, that caused such a stir.  The original stood in an open shrine visible from every side.  Now for the first time her beauty became accessible and tangible, a far cry from the austerity of classical Heras or Demeters.”

Classics: What Would Thucydides Say?

Maybe better: What did he say?  Mary Beard’s review of Simon Hornblower’s final volume of commentary on Thucydides, and Robert Kagan’s recent book on the same, complicates matters.  Thucydides wrote in sometimes incomprehensible Greek, and some of the most memorable and historically important lines come not from Thucydides himself but from the 19th-century translation by Richard Crawley, who tended to transform Thucydides Finnegans Wake-ish prose into Jane Austen.

One example: Beard writes: “Take, for example, perhaps the most favorite of all Thucydidean catchphrases, repeated in international relations courses the world over, and a founding text of “realist” political analysis: ‘The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.’ It is taken from the famous debate that Thucydides evokes between the Athenians and the people of the island of Melos. The Athenians had demanded that the neutral state of Melos come over to the Athenian side in the war between Athens and Sparta; when the Melians resisted, the two sides debated the issue. The representatives of imperial Athens put forward a terrifying version of “might is right”: justice only existed between equals, they asserted—otherwise, the strong rule the weak and so the power of Athens could always ride roughshod over the aspirations of a small island. . . . The famous slogan about the strong and the weak comes, obviously, from the Athenian side of the argument, and its current popularity owes much to the nice balance between the powerful doing ‘what they can’ and the weak suffering ‘what they must’—as well as that iron law of inevitability (or realism, depending on your point of view) that is introduced by the phrase “what they must.” But that is not what Thucydides wrote. As Simon Hornblower (a classicist and historian who has taught at Oxford and London) correctly acknowledges in the third and final volume of his monumental, line-by-line commentary on the whole of Thucydides’ History, a more accurate translation is: ‘The powerful exact what they can, and the weak have to comply.’ Even that exaggerates the idea of compulsion on the weak: to be precise, what Thucydides claimed was only that ‘the weak comply’—no necessity was introduced at all. And Hornblower’s commentary also raises the question of exactly what the action of the strong was supposed to be; it could equally well be translated from the original Greek as ‘do’ or ‘exact’ or even (as one Renaissance scholar thought) ‘extort.’ ‘Do what they can’ and ‘extort what they can’ conjure up very different pictures of the operation of power.”

Classics: Justice of Zeus

Taking up and extending the argument of Hugh Lloyd-Jones’ The Justice of Zeus, William Allan argues that, contrary to common opinion, there si no real contrast between the operations of justice in the two Homeric epics.  Nor is “popular picture of ‘amoral’ or ’frivolous’ Homeric gods” accurate.

He argues that “simply to say of ‘divine justice’ in the Homeric poems that ‘this seems an unlikely role for the ‘time-seeking Olympians’ risks creating a false dichotomy, since the gods can be (and are) interested both in their own time and in wider issues of justice. Indeed, . . . any attempt to separate matters of time from wider issues of justice, whether among gods or humans, represents in itself a false dichotomy. . . . This is particularly true of such institutions as the oath and guest-friendship, where the gods’ concern for their own time is simultaneously a concern for justice.”  He argues further for “basic continuity between divine and human values: as social beings shaped by the relations among themselves, the gods value justice as much as humans do and are equally ready to assert a basic entitlement to honour and fair treatment, and to support the sanctions that ensure justice and punish its violation. Thus values such as justice are . . .  socially constituted on both the divine and human planes, and each level displays not only a hierarchy of power (and the resulting tensions), but also a structure of authority.”

Classics: Limited justice

In a 1982 article on justice in the Oresteia in the American Political Science Review, Peter Euben observes that the dualism of passion and action, violence adn renewal, obliteration and revelation that stymies politics and ethics in Argos seem to be overcome in the just city of Athens: “Certainly the Athens we see on stage at the end of the Eumenides shows (or at least indicates) men and women as partners in sustaining a whole which gives identity and dignity to each, rather than as victims of each other’s actions. Similarly young and old are not warring factions but mutual participants in a collectivity that communalizes the burdens of action while providing object and limit for passion. In Athens the deeds of children do not murder those of parents but enlarge them.  Freed from the mechanical cycle of revenge and the life-destroying passins which paralyzed action in the Agamemnon, these Athenians will participate in framing their own destiny in conjunction with the gods.”

But this is only a partial victory: “Yet even a just city is composed of mortals and thus of potentially warring forces.  Athens too must rely on those passions and actions whose destructiveness we have seen in the Agamemnon. Though the just polis does offer respite from injustice and corruption it is only a respite. Even if it can turn ruinous forces toward good, the dual capacity of passion and action remain.   That is why all resolution is but temporary.”  This is the best Aeschylus can offer; there is no city of the blessed, no permanently just city, no city of God.

Classics: Shame and Guilt

Ruth Benedict gave classic formulation to the contrast of shame and guilt cultures: “True shame cultures rely on external sanctions for good behavior, not, as true guilt cultures do, on an internalized conviction of sin.  Shame is a reaction to other people’s criticism.  A man is shamed either by being openly ridiculed and rejected or by fantasying to himself that he has been made ridiculous.  In either case it is a potent sanction.  But it requires an audience or at least a man’s fantasy of an audience.  Guilt does not.  In a nation where honor means living up to one’s own picture of oneself, a man may suffer from guilty though no man knows of his misdeed and a man’s feeling of guilt may actually be relieved by confessing his sin.”

Douglas Cairns (Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature) is skeptical.

Continue reading…

Classics: Women and Honor

In the Greek honor system, men prove themselves honorable and virtuous by defending women.  Explaining Achilles’ reaction to Agamemnon, Peter Walcot writes that “The law of reciprocity applies: when insulted or injured the man of honour must retaliate in at least equal measure if his personal prestige is to be upheld, and the man of honour is at his most sensitive when a woman from within the family group is in any way threatened.  Athenian law, for example, regarded homicide as justified if a man engaged in illicit sex and was caught in the act with a wife or even with other female dependents . . . of the killer.”

Crucial as women are to the honor system, the system is constructed in a way that excludes women from a share of honor.  Honor is won in competitive settings.  Walcott notes: ““Greek society was intensely competitive at every level, whether those engaged in competition were athletes, dramatists, statesmen, or soldiers.  And it was the relentless pursuit of honour, often at other’s expense, that made society so agonistic and, therefore, unstable.”  These agonistic settings are precisely the settings in which women have to place.  Honor is publicly bestowed; it is bestowed on public actions, and women cannot act in public.  For women, virtue is not found in honor but in shame.  Not even a woman’s name should come up in the public world of men: “Women especially must exhibit shame, keeping well out of the way of men: the great glory of a woman, Pericles claims in the Funeral Speech, is to be least talked about by men whether they are praising or criticizing her.”

Classics: Jenson on Greeks

In the first volume of Jenson and Braaten’s Christian Dogmatics 2 Vol Set, Jenson highlights five features of Hellenistic religion, which he says also characterizes Greek philosophy.  Of course, for Jenson, the central issue is time.

First, the crucial question is, “Can it be that all things pass?”  The myths (Hesiod) told of Chronos devouring his children, but the myths told of the overthrow of Chronos by later gods, ultimately by Zeus who establishes justice, order, fixity.  “Their religion was the determination that ‘Time;’ not be supreme, that he be overthrown by a true ‘Father of gods and men.’  Greek religion was a quest for a rock of ages, resistant to the flow of time, a place or part or aspect of reality immune to change.”  The one thing that distinguished gods from men is their “immortality, immunity to destruction.”  So too philosophy: Aristotle assured Athens that “Being as such neither comes to be nor perishes.”  Both mythically and philosophically, there’s something that resists the flow of time.

Continue reading…

Classics: Greek Purity

We typically think of Greeks as Apollonian and rational.  We don’t think of Greeks as people concerned with pollution and purity.  Like all ancient peoples, though, they were, as Robert Parker details in his wonderful Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Clarendon Paperbacks).

Early on, Parker cites from Hippocrates (the physician), who wrote a book On the Sacred Disease, and said this about Greek religion: “we mark out the boundaries of the temples and the groves of the gods, so that no one may pass them unless he be pure, and when we enter them we are sprinkled with holy water, not as being polluted, but as laying aside any other pollution which we formerly had.”  Greeks, in other words, mapped out the world into sacred and profane, permitted only the pure to cross into sacred territory, and used washing rites to cleanse pollution.

Since the Greek city was a religious as well as a civic order, purity and sanctity rules also governed the approach to the sacred city center.  Parker writes:

Continue reading…

Classics: Quiz

Who is being described: “a man of abnormally emotional temperament, with a solicitous goddess for a mother and a comrade to whom he is devoted,” who “is devastated by the latter’s death and plunges into a new course of action in an unbalanced state of mind, eventually to recover his equilibrium.”  Through his experience, he is “brought face to face with issues of life and death, railing against mortality but coming to understand and accept it.”

Achilles?  Yes, but as M.L. West points out (The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth), also Gilgamesh.  West argues that “the Gilgamesh complex . . . accounts for major elements in the Iliad‘s plot, structure, and ethos.”

Did Homer read Gilgamesh?  Did Plato read Moses?

Classics: Odysseus’ wisdom

The idea of Odysseus as a hero of mind or thought has an ancient pedigree.  The Pythagoreans interpreted Odysseus as a thinking man who passed through the underworld on a path of denial of the flesh and escape from the eternal round of reincarnation.

Proclus wrote, “Many are the wanderings and circlings of the soul: one among imaginings, one in opinions and one before these in understanding. But only the life according to nous has stability and this is the mystical harbor of the soul to which, on the one hand, the poem leads Odysseus through the great wandering of his life, and to which we too shall draw ourselves up, if we would reach salvation.” (The harbor of soul is Odysseus’ inland journey after his return to Ithaca.)

That doesn’t get the genius of the Odyssey, the great humanist epic that begins with the word andra and tells the story of the hero’s progress toward humanity in this world.  There is no transfiguration.  His road leads home toward wife, father, family, kingdom, and, ultimately, death.  It is the deepest wisdom, and the broadest humanity possible – in a world without resurrection.

Classics: Why We Needed Nietzsch

Jane Harrison begins her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Mythos Books) with a quotation from Ruskin regarding the “genius of the Greeks”: “there is no dread in their hearts; pensiveness, amazement, often deepest grief and desolation, but terror never. Everlasting calm in the presence of all Fate, and joy such as they might win, not indeed from perfect beauty, but from beauty at perfect rest.”

Harrison comments sardonically that “the Greek, the favoured child of fortune yet ever unspoilt, was exempt from the discipline to which the rest of mankind has been subject, never needed to learn the lesson that in the Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom.”

Ruskin shows that if there had been no Nietzsche, we’d have to invent him.

Classics: Cult of the Greeks

David Gress’s excellent From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents shows that classics programs, the discipline of classics, great books programs, are founded on a highly questionable “grand narrative” of Western civilization. According to this narrative, Western history is a series of magic moments, beginning with Athens, the “magic moment of magic moments,” and that it is a continuous development from that Athenian beginning.

Gress finds this unconvincing for several reasons:

Continue reading…

Classics: Libido dominandi

David Potter confirms Augustine’s claim that the foreign wars of Rome were an extension of a lust for domination and honor: Roman “thinking [about the outside world] involved terms such as gloria, the glory that was won in battle, the ability to compel a foreign people to do something. That which was to be preserved was decus, or ‘face,’ fastigium, dignity, or the maiestas, ‘majesty’ of the empire. Foreign peoples who challenged the gloria or decus of Rome suffered from superbia, or arrogance, which led them to do iniuriae, injuries, to Rome, which needed, above all, to be avenged.”

Classics: Early Archaeology

David Stone Potter again: “Homeric archaeology did not begin with Calvert or Schliemann.  It was a feature of life in the second and third centuries AD, when ancient monuments were recognized as such and attached to the world of the poems.  There is no reason to doubt that the scepter of Agamemnon that Pausanias reported as being the most revered object at Chaeronea in Boeotia was still there in the time of Philstratus, or that the spear of Achilles had departed from its privileged position at Phaselis in Lycia.  So too we may well suppose that the letter that Sarpedon sent from Troy to Xanthus and Lycia was just as readily available for inspection by famous people as it had been in the first century AD, when Vespasian’s associate, Mucianus, saw it.”

Everything fit perfectly: “The spear that was at Phaselis was of bronze, and so was the sword of Memnon that was in the temple of Asclepius at Nicomedia, proving that Homer was correct to say that the heroes fought with bronze weapons.  The tomb of Ajax in the Troad was huge, as befitted the hero, and the tomb of Agamemnon said to be within the ruined walls of Mycenae was said to be rich in gold.”

Classics: Magnanimity

Aristotle defined magnanimity or “great-mindedness” as a proper estimate of one’s merits: “The Great-minded man is then, as far as greatness is concerned, at the summit, but in respect of propriety he is in the mean, because he estimates himself at his real value (the other characters respectively are in excess and defect). . . . Honour then and dishonour are specially the object-matter of the Great-minded man: and at such as is great, and given by good men, he will be pleased moderately as getting his own, or perhaps somewhat less for no honour can be quite adequate to perfect virtue: but still he will accept this because they have nothing higher to give him. But such as is given by ordinary people and on trifling grounds he will entirely despise, because these do not come up to his deserts: and dishonour likewise, because in his case there cannot be just ground for it.”

For Aristotle, “this virtue of Great-mindedness seems to be a kind of ornament of all the other virtues, in that it makes them better and cannot be without them; and for this reason it is a hard matter to be really and truly Great-minded; for it cannot be without thorough goodness and nobleness of character.”

Christians continued to use the word, but radically redefined it.

Continue reading…

Classics: Holding Hands

Judith Evans Grubbs notes that the Antonine Roman emperors pursued a pro-family agenda, employing pro-family numismatic symbols for that purpose: In addition to the use of the goddess Pudicitia, “also celebrated on Antonine coins is the concordia (sense of harmony, agreement) shared by the emperor and his wife, symbolized by the dextrarum iunctio (joining of hands) of the imperial couple.  Previously employed to represent political agreement between male members of the ruling family, from the second century on the dextrarum iunctio came to symbolize marital concord especially.  Many sarcophagi of the late second and third centuries portray the deceased standing hand in hand with his or her spouse, sometimes in an iconographic context suggesting the marriage ceremony itself.”

Classics: Athens’s success

Danielle Allen has a fascinating review of Josiah Ober’s Democracy and Knowledge in the TNR (3/18).  Allen notes that eighteenth century thinkers, including the American founders, considered Athenian democracy a failure, and concluded that “pure democracy devolved into either anarchy or rule by a corrupt managerial elite.”  

Ober’s volume, the capstone of a trilogy on Athenian democracy, argues otherwise, and asks why made Athens a success.  One question Allen raises is why the American Founders seem to have gotten Athens so badly wrong.  Her answer is that “the entire evidential base for this discussion has changed in the last two hundred years.”  We simply know a lot more about Athens than they did, and that’s because of sustained classical study on a number of fronts:

Continue reading…

« Previous Entries in Category | Next Entries in Category »