SARA FORSDYKE. Slaves Tell Tales: And Other Episodes in the Politics of Popular Culture in Ancient Greece.

Abstract

This book is a laudable yet not entirely successful attempt at understanding “the ways that ordinary farmers, craftsmen, and slaves in ancient Greece made sense of their world and their place in it” (p. 3). Sara Forsdyke contends that “diverse forms of popular culture such as festival revelry, oral storytelling, and the spontaneous collective punishment of social offenders” (p. 3) have been overlooked by modern scholars (the present reviewer included [pp. 167, 233]), even though they played a vital role in regulating the relationships between elites and masses and masters and slaves, and despite their consistent and meaningful operation “at different times and places,” “alongside, within, and sometimes even in opposition to the formal institutions of the Greek city-state” (p. 4). Four case studies designed to illustrate these points form the book's most valuable sections. The first, “Slaves Tell Tales: The Culture of Subordinate Groups in Ancient Greece,” concerns a fictitious tale preserved in Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae, according to which the slave owners on the island of Chios established a hero-cult for Drimakos, even though he, as head of a band of runaway slaves, had tormented them for a long while (albeit “fairly” and “justly”). The second case study, “Pigs, Asses, and Swine: Obscenity and the Popular Imagination in Ancient Sicyon,” purports to reinterpret the description, preserved in Herodotus, of some bizarre reforms introduced by the tyrant Cleisthenes in sixth-century b.c.e. Sicyon. Cleisthenes allegedly banned recitations of the Homeric poems, suppressed the cult of a beloved hero, and gave the city's “tribes” (i.e., territorial divisions) names that could be interpreted as abusive. The third, “Revelry and Riot in Ancient Megara: Democratic Disorder or Ritual Reversal?,” concerns the riotous behavior of the masses that allegedly took place in sixth-century b.c.e. Megara. The fourth, “Street Theater and Popular Justice in Ancient Greece,” assembles and analyzes, under the heading of “popular rituals” (p. 144), a long series of incidents involving the public humiliation and punishment of offenders, especially adulterers, in cities other than Athens. The book's first and last chapters are devoted to problems deriving from the application of the special method of analysis adopted here, styled “modular” (p. 179), to the ancient evidence.