The Sins of the Fathers: C.A. Lobeck and K.O. Müller

Abstract

The notion of “inherited guilt,” or ancestral fault, has played a prominent role in scholarship on ancient Greek religion and literature. Although it corresponds to no clearly circumscribed ancient concept, it has acquired something of a self-evident value in philological research. Shaped by centuries of ideological involvement with the Greek material, and by the apparently equivalent Judeo-Christian notions of corporate responsibility and original sin, the term “inherited guilt” imposes a heavy baggage of assumptions and resonances on the material it is meant to describe and translate. Rather than abandoning “inherited guilt” altogether, or simply deconstructing it away, as some scholars have suggested in recent years, a new perspective grounded in a detailed understanding of its tradition is needed to make sense of the abundant and complex material at hand. A thorough engagement with the religiously charged tradition of scholarship is one of the keys to a fruitful redefinition of Greek ancestral fault. The present paper proposes to revisit the seminal discussions of the two contemporary scholars who pioneered the modern professional study of Greek religion: C.A. Lobeck and K.O. Müller.