Georges Dumezil and the Trifunctional Approach to Roman Civilization

Abstract

Let us start by paying homage to the immense work which Georges Dumezil, who was born in 1898, has done over an immense territory, inside and outside the cultures we call Indo-European. A formidable linguist, Dumezil, as is well known, has produced enough work on the Caucasian languages to ensure for himself a permanent place in that field. He has virtually saved the evidence of a dying language, Ubykh, which about ten years ago was still being spoken in Turkish villages near the Sea of Marmara by a few dozen elderly people, the descendants of refugees from the Russian occupation of their native country. He has furthermore contributed to the comparative grammar of the northwestern group of Caucasian languages and has edited and translated texts in some of them. It is also known that Dumezil extended his linguistic and cultural interests to Chinese and to the Indian languages of America. We also owe to him most of what we know about the heroic traditions of the Ossetes, the Indo-European-speakers of the Caucasus, who have a claim to be considered the survivors of the ancient Scythian nation. While his first book on the Ossetes, Les leigendes sur les Nartes, goes back to 1930, the most recent one, at least to my knowledge, is Romans de Scythie et d'alentour which appeared in 1978. There is practically no Indo-European language with which Dumezil has not worked. Sanskrit, Old Persian, Icelandic, and Irish texts have been interpreted by him in an original way which is simply enviable. The stature of the scholar Dumezil is beyond question. But I think we have to ask ourselves whether his method is legitimate. Dumezil's extraordinary career and success are understandable only if placed where they belong: with the contrasting and not always coherent trends of French sociological and political thought from the end of the First World War to the present day. In more than sixty years Dumezil has had time to support successively the ideology of Indo-European supremacy, the school of Durkheim or rather of Durkheim's nephew Marcel Mauss the linguistics of Benveniste, and the structuralism of Levi-Strauss -and occasionally he has been supported by them. The latest paradox is that Dumezil, while remaining the darling of the extreme right, to which he may originally have belonged, has