Return to the Land of the Sun: in Homage to Jean-Pierre Vernant (1914–2007)

Abstract

Return to the Land of the Sun: in Homage to Jean-Pierre Vernant (1914–2007) FROMA I. ZEITLIN proem This piece was was originally commissioned for an issue of the literary revue, Europe (N° 964–965, 2009) devoted to the scholarly career of the renowned French Hellenist, Jean-Pierre Vernant. Member of the Collège de France, and founder of the so-called “École de Paris” whose work from the 1960s on transformed our approaches to the literature, society, and anthropology of ancient Greece. As I looked now to publish my original text in English, I discovered that I was by no means alone in my desire once again to honor his memory and assess his continuing impact on our field. To my surprise, I found a recent volume, entitled Relire Vernant, published in 2018 that included, among others, a collective piece organized by Oswyn Murray on Vernant’s influence, both professional and personal, in the English-speaking world (United States and Britain), to which I contributed my own evaluations.1 In the present text that follows, it was not my intention to offer any comprehensive overview of Vernant’s work. Rather I chose a single text, Heliodorus’ novel, the Ethiopiaka (Ethiopian Tale). This late Greek narrative tour-de-force, dated probably to the 4th century ce, was, to my knowledge, never mentioned by Vernant in his very sizeable oeuvre. All the more tempting therefore to revisit Vernant’s ideas about myth, religion, society, art, and the question of Hellenism, more generally, from the standpoint of the vastly different worldview of late antiquity. arion 27.3 winter 2020 146 return to the land of the sun la cuisine de sacrifice: the cuisine of sacrifice in a brief but influential essay, entitled “Manger aux pays du soleil,” Jean-Pierre Vernant examined two stories connected with Helios (the Sun god).2 The first takes place on the mythical Island of the Sun in book 12 of the Odyssey (260– 402) and the second in the land of Ethiopia, as recounted by Herodotus in his Histories (3.17–26). The link between these two sites, as Vernant sees it, is justified, not only because the locale in each case is a “land of the Sun,” but because they are concerned with modes of nourishment and their proper protocols. From a structuralist point of view, it is argued, these two locations occupy extreme ends of a spectrum, when it comes to determining the rules, according to Greek thought, for maintaining the proper equilibrium essential to the human condition between animals and gods. By their contravention of these norms, each narrative defines, in its own way, the acceptable middle, which involves the foods that men are permitted to eat and the circumstances of their procurement. In the first instance, Odysseus’ crew, despite his severe injunctions to the contrary, slaughter and eat the inviolate cattle on the island of Helios, which may not be touched by men, neither for work and certainly not as a source of food. This remarkable herd of cattle, 350 in number, never increases or decreases and never ages, in keeping with their immortal status as possessions of the god. The men’s transgression consists not only in their using these animals as nourishment, but in the manner in which they unlawfully pursue, kill, and consume their quarry. As Vernant notes, the crew mixes up all the categories, especially when it comes to the preparation and consumption of meat, which is strictly regulated by sacrificial procedures. They hunt the cattle as if they were wild beasts, which are not led to the altar but are massacred, without any accompanying ritual gestures. “Homer employs the ordinary sacrificial vocabulary but stresses the double anomaly that, with the reversal of the values of the rite, makes the cooking Froma I. Zeitlin 147 a sacrilege and its products uneatable” (“Manger,” 243). These violations produce terrifying supernatural effects: The skins crawled, and the meat that was stuck on the spits bellowed, Both roast and raw, and the noise was like a lowing cattle. (Od. 12.395–96) “The distinction now between raw and cooked disappears along with the line between the living and the dead, when the...