Myth and Thought among the Greeks Jean-Pierre Vernant BiLIM VE SANAT VAKFI KUTOPHANESI DEMIRBAS NO ZONE BOOKS - NEW YORK 2006© 2006 Urzone, Inc. Zone Books 1226 Prospect Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11218 Alll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, includ- ing electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except for that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the Publisher. Printed in the United States of America. Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England First published in French as Mythe et pensée chez les Gres (Paris: Librairie Frangois Maspero, 1965). The English translation was originally published by Routledge & Kegan Paul in 1983. This edition © Editions La Découverte, Paris, 1996. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vernant, Jean-Pierre. [Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs. English] Myth and Thought among the Greeks / Jean-Pierre Vernant. pcm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-890951-60-9 1 Philosophy, Ancient. 2. Mythology, Greek. 1. Title. B178.N413 2005 1Bo-de22 2005042024Part ONE I Il Part Two Part THREE VI vil VII TX Contents Preface to the 1985 Edition 9 Introduction 13 MytH STRUCTURES Hesiod’s Myth of the Races: An Essay in Structural Analysis 25 Hesiod’s Myth of the Races: A Reassessment 53 Structural Method and the Myth ofthe Races 89 Myrtuicat ASPECTS OF MEMORY AND TIME Mythic Aspects of Memory 115 The River Amelés and the Meleté Thanatou 139 THE ORGANIZATION OF SPACE Hestia-Hermes: The Religious Expression of Space and Movement in Ancient Greece 157 Geometry and Spherical Astronomy in Early Greek Cosmology 197 Geometric Structure and Political Ideas in the Cosmology of Anaximander 213 Space and Political Organization in Ancient Greece 235Part Four x XI XI XII Part Five XIV XV Parr Six XVI Part SEVEN XVII XVII Worx anp TECHNOLOGICAL THOUGHT Prometheus and the Technological Function 263 Work and Nature in Ancient Greece 275 Some Psychological Aspects of Work in Ancient Greece 293 Some Remarks on the Forms and Limitations of Technological Thought among the Greeks 299 Tue PsycHOLocicaL CATEGORY OF THE DOUBLE The Figuration of the Invisible and the Psychological Category of the Double: The Kolossos 321 From the “Presentification” of the Invisible to the Imitation of Appearance 333 PERSONAL IDENTITY AND RELIGION Some Aspects of Personal Identity in Greek Religion 353 From MytH To REASON The Formation of Positivist Thought in Archaic Greece 371 The Origins of Philosophy 399 Notes 409 Index 497To Ignace MeyersonPreface to the 1985 Edition Twenty years have passed since Myth and Thought among the Greeks first appeared. It was published in France in 1965 by Fran- gois Maspero, in the series edited by Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and was one of the books that helped inaugurate the study of historical psychology in reference to ancient Greece. In 1971, a second, revised and enlarged edition gave a some- what newer face to the work, which then appeared in two small volumes in the Petite Collection Maspero series, The work was reprinted nine times (three times for the first edition, six for the second), and thus has endured for over twenty years. In the introduction to the first edition, I expressed a wish that my undertaking would not remain isolated. I hoped that the paths opened by the Hellenist Louis Gernet and the psychologist Ignace Meyerson would lead to further investigations into the internal history of the Greek individual in terms of his mental organiza- tion and the changes that, from the eighth to the fourth century sce, affect the entire picture of his activities and psychological functions: perspectives on space and time, memory, imagination, the individual person, the will, symbolic practices and the manip- ulation of signs, modes of reasoning and argumentation, cate- gories of thought. My wish has been fulfilled. I could cite many scholars who have carried out brilliant work along these lines. At present, the historical anthropology of ancient Greece has ac- quired citizen’s rights within classical studies as well as among 9MYTH AND THOUGHT AMONG THE GREEKS historians, sociologists, and anthropologists engaged in compara- tive research. The present edition returns to the format of the first, in that it includes all the essays within a single volume. It enlarges the sec- ond edition still further, with the addition of three new contribu- tions written since that time. It seemed clear to me that these essays had their place here as well.! As for the study of Hesiod’s myth of the races, its inclusion in this work is in a way self-evident. Hesiod’s account provided an example that allowed me to show what I thought the structural analysis of a mythical text could and ought to be. In the second edition, I included a response to some objections that a philolo- gist had made to the essay. This time, I am including a response to Victor Goldschmidt, whose work inspired the study, although I did not follow him in every respect. In his last writings, Gold- schmidt returned to our respective readings to provide a general formulation of the problem of structural interpretation in the his- tory of thought. I in turn was led to reflect on my own work and to interrogate the way the modern interpreter, if he wants to pre- cisely situate what Goldschmidt calls “the author's intentions,” must bring together and create an intersection, as it were, of struc- tural analysis and the historical perspective. In the case of the myth of the races, new findings in archaeology concerning the appear- ance and development of the hero cult in the eighth century led me to reconsider my previous analyses and to modify them on some important points. Since then, the method of structural analysis has been applied with much success, in France and elsewhere, to many other Greek myths or sets of myths by a number of scholars, particularly Mar- cel Detienne. As for my own work, if 1 now had to choose the most characteristic example of this interpretive procedure from among my writings, I would gladly refer to my interpretation of the myth of Prometheus in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece and, in a more precise and developed form, in The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, under the title “At Man’s Table: Hesiod’s Foun- dation Myth of Sacrifice.”PREFACE The second study added here traces out the passage, in the plastic practices of the Greeks, from an attempt to figure the invisible to an art that imitates appearances. This study is a direct continua- tion of the chapter on the psychological category. of the double and the kolossos. Or, rather, it clarifies the earlier essay by render- ing its ambitions and scope more explicit. In effect, it determines the place occupied by the category of the double within a mental transformation leading to the emergence of the image, properly speaking, in fifth-century Greek culture: we move from the eidolon as a phantom double and as the earthly presence of a supernatural reality to the eid6lon as an imitative artifice, a false semblance, in the sense put forth by Plato. These two texts are closely connected to a third, first published in the Journal de psychologie under the title “Imitation et apparence dans la théorie platonicienne de la mimésis,” and reprinted in Religions, histoires, raisons in the chap- ter “Naissance d’images.”? This question, to which I devoted the majority of my teaching at the Collége de France, is particularly important to me, and I hope to return to it at greater length in the future. The final addition to the volume, “The Origins of Philosophy,” sums up the somewhat more meandering approach of Part Seven, “From Myth to Reason,” by giving it nuance and partially modify- ing its orientation. In this picture of the Greeks and their inner adventure —a domain in which even what seems most assured can only be pro- visional, as | well know—there are many blank spots and empty spaces. Some of these I have tried, elsewhere and later, to fill in. This is the case, for example, with the question of the will, which is not addressed in this book but which I study in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, written with Pierre Vidal-Naquet.* We try to show that in fifth-century Attic tragedy one finds the first hesitant sketches of the man-agent, master of his actions and responsible for them, possessing a will. The problem is taken up again from a more general viewpoint in the article “Catégories de l'agent et de l’action en Gréce ancienne” in Religions, histoires, raisons. iMYTH AND THOUGHT AMONG THE GREEKS From myth to reason: these ‘were the two poles between which, in a panoramic view, the destiny of Greek thought seemed to play out at the end of this book. Since the first edition was pub- lished, Marcel Detienne and I have carried out a joint investiga- tion into métis, in which we attempt to follow the avatars of this particular form of cunning intelligence (so typically Greek).5 Em- ploying every kind of ruse, shrewdness, craftiness, deception, and resourcefulness, it is a practical form of thought that struggles ‘against obstacles and faces every opponent in an ordeal of strength whose outcome appears both decisive and uncertain. For the wise and sensible man, an expert in many twists and turns, métis brings success precisely in situations where at first it seemed impossible. This intelligence put to use in action has its own functional rules, its own ends and purposes, and its own models of operation. From the Archaic period to the Hellenistic Age, it follows a dis- tinct and continuous line through Greek culture, alongside or in the margins of the great theoretical forms of knowledge, in- cluding philosophy. Whether one calls it trickery, wiliness, skill, ingeniousness, or prudence, this Greek métis follows a path of its own (with Odysseus as its spokesman and hero), and today I tend to think that it belongs neither entirely to myth nor alto- gether to reason. I would like to express my warmest gratitude to Frangois Lis- sarrague, who corrected and completed the index of this edition.Introduction Ihave chosen to collect these studies in a single volume — even though their subjects may appear to be rather different — because they were conceived as parts of the same inquiry. For ten years, Ihave attempted to apply to the field of Greek studies the methods in historical psychology that Ignace Meyerson initiated in France.! The subject matter for these investigations is material that has been worked on by specialists — scholars of both Greek and an- cient history. However, I shall consider it from a different perspec- tive. The material in question includes religion, with its myths, rituals, and illustrated representations; philosophy; science; art; social institutions; and technical or economic data. But whatever we are dealing with will be considered as a work created by humans, as the expression of organized mental activity. By study- ing these phenomena, we shall seek to understand the individual in ancient Greece, a being inseparable from the social and cultural environment of which he is at once the creator and the product. The task is difficult because it is necessarily indirect in charac- ter, and it runs the risk of being unfavorably received. In dealing with the evidence, the texts, the archaeological data, the realities that we too must use, the specialists are all faced with special prob- lems requiring specific techniques. In most cases, they see the study of the individual and his psychological functions as foreign to their own particular fields. Psychologists and sociologists, on the 13MYTH AND THOUGHT AMONG THE GREEKS other hand, are too involved in the contemporary world to be in- terested in a study of classical Antiquity, so they abandon it to what they take to be the somewhat outdated curiosity of the humanists. And yet, if there is a history of human interiority [I’homme intérieur] to complement the history of civilizations, we must again adopt the slogan first advanced by Zevedei Barbu in his Problems of Historical Psychology: “Back to the Greeks!”? If we approach the matter from the point of view of historical psychol- ogy, there seem to be several reasons why a return to the Greeks is unavoidable. The first is of a practical nature: documentation of life in ancient Greece is more extensive, more varied, and more thoroughly researched than that in many other civilizations. We have at our disposal a large number of substantial and detailed original works relating to the social and political history and the religion, art, and thought of ancient Greece. To this practical ad- vantage can be added more fundamental reasons. The writings that have come to us from ancient Greek civilization embody ideas different enough from those expressed in the framework of our own intellectual universe to make us feel that we are in for- eign territory, to give us not only a sense of a historical distance but also an awareness of a change in man. At the same time, these ideas are not as alien to us as are some others. They have come down to us through an uninterrupted process of transmission. They live on in cultural traditions to which we constantly refer. The Greeks are distant enough for us to be able to study them as an_ external subject, quite separate from ourselves, to which the psy- chological categories of today cannot be applied with any pre- cision, and yet they are sufficiently close for us to be able to communicate with them without too much difficulty. We can un- derstand the language used in their writings and reach beyond their literary and other documents to their mental processes, their forms of thought and sensibility, their modes of organizing will and action — in sum, to the structure of the Greek mind. There is one final reason why the historian of human interiority should turn to classical Antiquity. Within a few centuries, Greece underwent decisive changes in both its social and its mental life. 14INTRODUCTION The city was born, and with it, law. Among the first philosophers, emerged rational thought and the progressive organization of knowledge into a body of clearly differentiated disciplines — on- tology, mathematics, logic, natural sciences, medicine, ethics, and politics. New forms of art were created and different modes of expression were invented in response to the need to validate hith- erto unknown aspects of human experience: in literature, lyric poetry and tragedy, and in the plastic arts, sculpture and painting, conceived as imitative artifacts. These innovations in so many different fields indicate a change in mentality so marked that it has been seen as the birth of “West- ern man,” a true flowering of mind and spirit in every sense of the term. These transformations do not relate only to progress in intellectual matters or techniques of reasoning. From the homo religiosus of the archaic cultures to this political, reasoning indi- vidual (referred to in Aristotle’s definitions, for example), these transformations affect the entire framework of thought and the whole gamut of psychological functions: modes of symbolic ex- pression and the manipulation of signs, ideas of time and space, causality, memory, imagination, the organization of acts, will, and personality —all these categories of the mind undergo a funda- mental change in terms of both their internal structure and their interrelationships. Two themes in particular have fascinated Greek scholars dur- ing the last fifty years: the progression from mythical to rational thought and the gradual development of the idea of the individual person. These two questions are treated somewhat unequally in the present collection. I have approached the first in a more gen- eral way, whereas in dealing with the second I have concentrated on one particular aspect. In order to avoid misunderstandings, I feel that I should attempt to explain my position with regard to each of these two problems. The title of the last section of this book is “From Myth to Reason.” However, by this I do not mean that I am considering mythical thought in general, any more than I admit to the existence of rational thought in an immutable form. On the contrary, in the closing remarks of Chapter Seventeen, I WSMYTH AND THOUGHT AMONG THE GREEKS emphasize that the Greeks invented not reason as such, but a type of rationality dependent on historical context and different from that of today. Similarly, I believe that in what is known as mythical thought there are diverse forms, multiple levels, and different modes of organization and types of logic. In the case of Greece, intellectual evolution appears to have followed two main lines of development between the time of Hesiod and that of Aristotle. First, a clear distinction was made between the world of nature, the human world, and the world of sacred powers. These categories are more or less connected or intermingled with one another by the mythical imagination, which sometimes confuses the different areas, sometimes oper- ates by slipping from one plane to another, and sometimes estab- lishes a network of systematic correspondences among all these aspects of reality. On the other hand, “rational” thought tends to ignore the ambivalent or extreme notions that play so important a part in myth. Rational thought avoids the use of associations by means of contrast and does not couple and unite opposites or pro- ceed through a series of upheavals, On the principle of noncon- tradiction and unanimity, it condemns all modes that proceed from an ambiguous or equivocal basis. Stated in such a general form, the conclusions | offer are provisional, aimed above all at outlining a plan of inquiry. They call for more restricted, more precise studics focusing on a partic- ular myth recounted by a particular author or on a particular body of myth having variants in different Greck traditions. The only way to trace the transformations in mental processes, techniques, and logical procedures is to undertake concrete studies to deter- mine just how the vocabulary, syntax, modes of composition, and choice and organization of themes evolved from Hesiod and Phe- recydes through the Presocratic philosophers. Thus the last part of this book should be read with reference to the first. I have carried the structural analysis of a particular myth, Hesiod’s myth of the races, as far as I could, in order to describe a manner of thought that is anything but incoherent, but whose movement, rigor, and logic have their own particular character; the structure 16