Greek Narrative Research Articles

Discriminating CEFR levels in Greek L2: a corpus-based study of young learners’ written narratives

In line with cross-linguistic research aiming at identifying criterial features that discriminate the CEFR proficiency levels, the present study investigates language elements that are core characteristics of each proficiency level for Greek L2. It is based on a graded corpus of 150 written narratives produced by young L2 learners (aged 8–14) at levels A2 to B2. This corpus was annotated with respect to a set of features at both the sentence and discourse level, such as clause subordination, connectives, modifiers and grammatical accuracy. Statistical analysis identified certain aspects of these features that discriminate language proficiency levels in L2 Greek narratives and are put forward as criterial features. These include the frequency of dependent and centre-embedded clauses, the gradual decrease of additive and the emergence of contrastive and inferential connectives, the felicitous use of clitics, as well as the use of evaluative adverbs and adjectives.

Interrupted Speech in Luke-Acts

Although past scholarly attention has centered on the interruptions of Acts, the Gospel of Luke and Acts each include several instances of interrupted speech. While some interruptions by external events function simply to increase the drama of a scene (e.g., Luke 9:34; 22:47, 60; 24:36; Acts 10:44), I argue that Luke also deploys interruption as a powerful literary and rhetorical device. By setting Luke’s use of interruption alongside the use of interruption in other ancient Greek narratives, I demonstrate the unique form of Lukan interruption, which focuses on the effect of a speaker’s message on the hearers. From Jesus’s interruption by his hearers in the Nazareth synagogue in Luke 4 to Paul’s interruption by Festus in Acts 26, Luke portrays Jesus and his followers as being interrupted frequently by emotional audiences (Luke 4:28; 11:27; Acts 4:1; 7:54, 57; 13:48; 22:22; 24:25; and 26:24). The emotional and often violent character of these interruptions serves to underscore the powerful impact of early Christian preaching about the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus and about the subsequent availability of salvation to all nations.

Interrupted Speech in Luke-Acts

Although past scholarly attention has centered on the interruptions of Acts, the Gospel of Luke and Acts each include several instances of interrupted speech. While some interruptions by external events function simply to increase the drama of a scene (e.g., Luke 9:34; 22:47, 60; 24:36; Acts 10:44), I argue that Luke also deploys interruption as a powerful literary and rhetorical device. By setting Luke's use of interruption alongside the use of interruption in other ancient Greek narratives, I demonstrate the unique form of Lukan interruption, which focuses on the effect of a speaker's message on the hearers. From Jesus's interruption by his hearers in the Nazareth synagogue in Luke 4 to Paul's interruption by Festus in Acts 26, Luke portrays Jesus and his followers as being interrupted frequently by emotional audiences (Luke 4:28; 11:27; Acts 4:1; 7:54, 57; 13:48; 22:22; 24:25; and 26:24). The emotional and often violent character of these interruptions serves to underscore the powerful impact of early Christian preaching about the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus and about the subsequent availability of salvation to all nations.

EPYLLION - (M.) Baumbach, (S.) Bär (edd.) Brill's Companion to Greek and Latin Epyllion and its Reception. Pp. xxvi + 640, ills. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. Cased, €188, US$258. ISBN: 978-90-04-21432-3.

A Short Introduction to the Ancient 'Epyllion'. Manuel Baumbach & Silvio Bar Contributors Abbreviations 1. History and Development of the Term and Concept of the 'Epyllion' Before the Epyllion: Concepts and Texts Virgilio Masciadri On the Origins of the Modern Term 'Epyllion': Some Revisions to a Chapter in the History of Classical Scholarship Stefan Tilg Catullus 64: the Perfect Epyllion? Gail Trimble 2. The Archaic and Pre-Hellenistic Period The Songs of Demodocus: Compression and Extension in Greek Narrative Poetry Richard Hunter Demodokos' Song of Ares and Aphrodite in Homer' Odyssey (8.266-366): an Epyllion? - Agonistic Performativity and Cultural Metapoetics Anton Bierl Borderline Experiences with Genre: The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite between Epic, Hymn and Epyllic Poetry Manuel Baumbach Rhapsodic Hymns and Epyllia Ivana Petrovic The Pseudo-Hesiodic Shield and The Poetics of Deferral Peter Bing 3. The Hellenistic Period Pindaric Narrative Technique in the Hellenistic Epyllion Christine Luz The Hecale and Hellenistic Conceptions of Short Hexameter Narratives Kathryn Gutzwiller Miniaturizing the Huge: Hercules on a Small Scale (Theocritus Idylls 13 and 24) Benjamin Acosta-Hughes Herakles in Bits and Pieces: Id. 25 in the Corpus Theocriteum Thomas A. Schmitz Achilles at Scyros, and One of his Fans: The Epithalamium of Achilles and Deidameia (Buc. Gr. 157-158 Gow) Marco Fantuzzi 4. The Late Roman Republic and the Augustan Period epsiloniotasigmaf epsilonpieta kappaalphaiota epsilonlambdaepsilongammaepsilon alphasigmaf alphanu gammaepsiloniotanu: The Erotika Pathemata of Parthenius of Nicaea Jacqueline J.H.Klooster A Virgo infelix: Calvus' Io vis-a-vis Other Cow-And-Bull Stories Regina Hoschele The Tenth Book of Ovid's Metamorphoses as Orpheus' Epyllion Ulrich Eigler 5. The Imperial Period The Fast and the Furious: Triphiodorus' Reception of Homer in the Capture of Troy Vincent Tomasso Musaeus, Hero and Leander: Between Epic and Novel Nicola Nina Dummler 'Museum of Words': Christodorus, the Art of Ekphrasis and the Epyllic Genre Silvio Bar The Motif of the Rape of Europa: Intertextuality and Absurdity of the Myth in Epyllion and Epic Insets Peter Kuhlmann 6. The Middle Ages and Beyond 'Epyllion' or 'Short Epic' in the Latin Literature of the Middle Ages? Carmen Cardelle de Hartmann & Peter Stotz Short Mythological Epic in Neo-Latin Literature Martin Robert Burns' Tam O'Shanter: a Lallans Epyllion? Ewen L. Bowie General Bibliography Indexes General Index Index of Passages Discussed

After Auerbach: Ancient Greek Literature as a Test Case of European Literary Historiography

In the first chapter of his celebratedMimesis(1946) Auerbach discussed a specimen of Ancient Greek literature (Homer) both as the starting point of a European literary history of realism and as a comparandum to biblical storytelling. Both lines of approach have recently been given new impetuses. On the one hand there is Martin West'sThe East Face of Helicon,1which does not merely compare early Greek literature and Near Eastern literature but describes the former as largely a product of the latter. On the other hand there is the series Studies in ancient Greek narrative, edited by Irene J.F. de Jong, which describes the early development of – what will become quintessential – European storytelling devices in Ancient Greek literature. Both scholarly projects, independently, have put the same urgent question on the agenda: how exactly are we to evaluate resemblances between ancient Greek literature and contemporary Near Eastern literature and later European literature. Can we speak of some form of historical connection, i.e. one literature taking over devices and motifs from another literature, or should we rather think in terms of typological resemblances, i.e. of the same narrative universals being employed at different places and at different times? Or is there some middle way to be found in the recent cognitive turn of comparative literature? Despite the methodological problems involved, investigating the history of European literature is an extremely rewarding task. The project of Europe as an economical and political unity has at the moment reached a critical phase. Literary scholars can contribute to this issue by showing the cultural unity of Europe, a mission that is just as urgent as it was in 1946, when Auerbach published hisMimesis.

The Rhetoric of Interruption: Speech‐Making, Turn‐Taking, and Rule‐Breaking in Luke–Acts and Ancient Greek Narrative. By Daniel LynwoodSmith. BZNW, 193. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. Pp. xii + 337. Cloth, €99.95; $140.00.

The Rhetoric of Interruption: Speech‐Making, Turn‐Taking, and Rule‐Breaking in Luke–Acts and Ancient Greek Narrative. By Daniel LynwoodSmith. BZNW, 193. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. Pp. xii + 337. Cloth, €99.95; $140.00.

Greek Perception of the Balkans: Edgy Coexistence or Difficult Relationship?

In the dominant Greek narrative,” the Balkans” has remained an ambiguous term for identification. On the one hand, large segments of the population have been ready to acknowledge Greece’s belonging to the Balkans and recognise certain cultural affinities with at least some of the other Balkan people. On the other, the political connotations of the term “Balkans” – i.e. its suggestion of the “backward” past of Greece and the institutional Other to the “West” – implicates the requirement for economic and political development in which the country has tended to lag behind. Moreover, the history of confrontations with other states of the region has impeded the acceptance of a common Balkan identity in Greece. This paper investigates how the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s have influenced the Greek perception of the Balkans and the Greek identity, per se. The first suggestion is that these conflicts, and especially the one in Kosovo with the subsequent NATO intervention, have strengthened the negative (non-western and non-Balkan) and particularistic aspects of Greek self-identification. The second suggestion is that there has been established an inconvenient ideological accommodation of the apparent discrepancy between the official policies of the Greek governments in relation to the Balkan conflicts as a member-state of NATO and the EU, and the dominant views of the Greek public. Thence, the paper contributes to the discussion of another “external” perception of the Balkans, from the point of view of a country whose own identity is in limbo between belonging and exclusion from the region.

Tracing the Line of Europa: Migration, Genealogy, and the Power of Holy Origins in Ancient Greek Narrative Knowledge and Cultural Memory

This essay explores the place of the mythical heroine Europa in the narrative knowledge and cultural memory of ancient Greece and modern Europe. Early Greek sources make reference to several women named Europa, only one of whom is Agenor's (or Phoenix's) daughter abducted by Zeus who made her the member of a divine lineage. However, during the fifth-century BCE, the diverse “Europa” figures came to be identified with the Phoenician princess; and the foundations were laid for the abduction story to take on its modern notion as founding myth of Europe. This elevation to founding myth can, in part, be attributed to Europa's membership in a family of eponymous founders. From the Archaic through the Hellenistic periods, Europa's kin gradually grew as various myths were integrated with each other—myths, which shaped identities by creating memory through storytelling. Mythical family bonds came to be seen as biological facts and served both to consolidate local identities and to affirm a Panhellenic identity in times when inner and outer boundaries had to be negotiated as a consequence of migration, colonization, or warfare. The high degree of migration and the dense genealogical network in the narratives of Europa's kin allowed many different groups to lay claim to this narrative knowledge and in doing so, created new myths and cults, interpretations and evaluations of a family well-established in the Greek mind on account of its holy origins. Thus foundation myths surrounding Europa helped to define cultural and ethnic space shaped by migration and the dialectics of unity and plurality. As such, these myths remain relevant to Europe today.

Historical legacies, modern conflicts: state consolidation and religious pluralism in Greece and Turkey

Through a comparative study of state consolidation processes and the acceptance of religious tolerance in Greece and Turkey, this piece shows that there is often a direct link between strategies of state building, the creation of state identities, and contemporary acceptance of pluralistic norms regarding religious tolerance. Tracing early examples through to the present, the paper demonstrates that state elites privileged religious categories over potential alternatives in the state consolidation process. I argue that, as a result, religious identity markers have assumed a privileged and almost ‘untouchable’ position in both the Greek and Turkish national narratives, making issues of religious tolerance and pluralism sensitive focal points in contemporary debates over Europeanizing reforms and religion-state relations in times of crisis.

When A Dolphin Loves A Boy

This article catalogues and interprets an underexplored body of Greek and Roman narratives of animals who fall in love with humans. These narratives, unlike myths and fables, purport to tell of events which occur in the real world of their day; they are stories of desire (eros), but not of copulation; and their configurations of desire are characteristically Greco-Roman (the desiring animal is almost always male, and the human object of his desire is a woman or a young man explicitly or implicitly described as beautiful). With their anthropocentric and hierarchically configured models of desire, and their emphasis on the impossibility of fulfillment, these narratives illustrate some lasting Western perspectives on the relationship between animals and humans and on desire itself. Some Native American narratives of animal-human love, emphasizing relationship and kinship, stand in suggestive contrast.

The Rhetoric of Interruption: Speech-Making, Turn-Taking, and Rule-Breaking in Luke–Acts and Ancient Greek Narrative. BZNW 193

The Rhetoric of Interruption: Speech-Making, Turn-Taking, and Rule-Breaking in Luke–Acts and Ancient Greek Narrative. BZNW 193

Tim Whitmarsh: Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel. Returning Romance.

Tim Whitmarsh: Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel. Returning Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 2011. XII, 299 S. (Greek Culture in the Roman World.) 60 £.

Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative (review)

Reviewed by: Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative Stephen Scully Alex C. Purves. Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. pp. xi, 273. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-521-19098-5. Purves explores narrative perspectives of space and time from archaic epic to fourth-century prose. Contrary perspectives are already evident in Homer: the Iliad looks down upon human events synoptically from on high while in the Odyssey events tend to be viewed from a human, ground-level, perspective. The Iliadic bird’s-eye orientation is exampled both in the Muses’ comprehensive overview and in Zeus’ summary narratives, and shared—for a brief time—by Achilles, as suggested by the composite vision of the world on Hephaistos’ shield. The temporal and spatial dimensions of the Odyssean narrative, by contrast, are most evident in Odysseus’ description of events as they unfold piecemeal and sequentially in books 9–12. Purves applies this mode of analysis most effectively when describing Odysseus, carrying an oar, on his inward journey to appease Poseidon’s wrath. From the Odyssean earthly perspective, the hero appears “lost,” until he plants his oar in the ground, a turning point in the journey and in self-definition as he regains a sense of direction and heads homeward. Prior to that moment, Odysseus had become a “nobody” among people who know nothing of the sea—and thus nothing of epic either. Other Odyssean passages, however, fit Purves’ schema less effectively, in my view. Aspects of Odysseus’ narrative in books 9–12 suggest a Muse-like overview, as when the traveler-poet, like the Muse at Od. 1.10, asks himself what he should say first, what last (9.14), or when he juxtaposes one adventure with another (9.47–49, 12.200–204), a small-scale example of the Odyssean narrator doubling Odysseus’ story with Agamemnon’s. [End Page 150] Comparison of these contrasting epic narrative perspectives leads to interesting questions when discussing prose writers. Unbounded by metrical constraints, they must discover their own stylistic forms and, deprived of divine guidance, they must map out their own narrative strategies. Purves first looks at prose writers who were either mapmakers as well (Anaximander and Hecataeus) or designers of cosmic order, as was Pherecydes when describing Zas’ marriage cloak for Chthonie as an emblem of the earth/Ge. Purves then turns to Herodotus, who explicitly rejects Hecataeus’ schematized map (4.36), preferring instead a “countercartographic” narrative that meanders like an itinerant traveler from place to place. That narrative meandering is echoed stylistically in Herodotus’ “strung-along” style, seemingly without telos. Delphic oracles and prophecies (portents and dreams should be added) offer a “cognitive map of the whole,” providing a divine-like authorial overview that keeps the reader from getting lost. Purves’ last two examples come from Xenophon, whose Anabasis presents an extreme example of narrative meandering, as Xenophon, the author, captures the off-trail disorientation of Xenophon, the person, and of the leaderless and mapless march of the Ten Thousand making their way step by confused step through an unknown landscape to a familiar Sea. Purves likens the experience to Odysseus’ inland travels with the oar, but an opportunity seems to be lost when she might also have compared it to the “lost” Odysseus on Ogygia, where at the navel of the sea he could also lose his name. In contrast to the Anabasis’ meandering, in the Oeconomicus Xenophon describes the meticulous arrangement and implacable cataloging in the mind’s eye of every last item in the house. This recalls an Iliadic synoptic perspective, but, unlike the Iliad, this well-shaped and remembered “world” is static and paralyzing, “lack[ing] the dynamic paths of narrative.” Comparison of contrasting narrative orientations in epic to prose narrative perspectives and styles makes for compelling reading: how do prose authors navigate their way without divine guidance; how might we compare efforts at mapmaking to narrative attempts to situate humankind in the scheme of things; what correlations might we find between cartography and travel literature and prose style; how do authors combine a synoptic and primarily aerial view with close-up attention to specifics and life’s experiences (a...

Obedience and Disobedience/Rebellion in Biblical Versus Greek Narratives: Toward a Biblical Psychology

Contemporary psychology and psychiatry have been explicitly or implicitly based on an ancient Greek view of life. Even pastoral psychologists have been influenced by this view. The present article calls for a paradigm shift toward a biblical psychology. Illustrations of these contrasting worldviews are presented around the issue of obedience versus disobedience/rebellion. Three narratives are compared in this regard: 1) creation stories, 2) “flood” stories, and 3) father-son stories. Freud’s dependence on a Greek worldview is discussed, as is his disregard of biblical narratives. Pastoral psychologists, take heart! It is time to level the playing field.

The Paradox of Sovereignty from Pindar to Byzantium

This essay traces the contradictory nature of sovereignty from its initial statement in Pindar's controversial ode in fr. 169 (Nomos basileus) to its medieval manifestation in the Greek novels surviving from medieval Byzantium, namely, Rhodanthe and Dosikles, Drosilla and Charikles, Aristandros and Kallithea, and Hysmine and Hsyminias. To unravel the paradoxical nature of Byzantine kingship in the novels, the author draws on two influential paradigms of sovereignty, Pindar's nomos basileus and Giorgio Agamben's bio-political paradox of homo sacer. The iconography of desire as it emerges in the medieval Greek narratives showcases the repression of a quasi-legitimate sovereign that mirrors Pindar's nomos basileus and Agamben's sovereign exception. Both posit Eros as a formidable ruler, revered and abhorred for his violent interventions, who stands simultaneously within and outside the law. This striking figuration of Eros as tyrannos and basileus is the byproduct of powerful patrons' propagandistic aspirations and the ingenuity of the authors of the novels themselves. In their narrative exploration of passion and sovereignty, Byzantine court writers in twelfth-century Constantinople reconcile the political interests of their patrons with the civic concerns of their times.

Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative by Alex C. Purves (review)

Reviewed by: Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative by Alex C. Purves Louis L’Allier Alex C. Purves. Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. XI + 273. US $85. ISBN 9780521190985. L’étude brève mais profonde de Purves analyse les relations entre les thèmes du chemin, de l’espace et du temps dans la littérature grecque. Comme en témoigne le titre gagnant du dernier Goncourt, cette matière, riche et touffue transgresse les genres et les époques, et se prête bien à une étude diachronique comme celle de Purves. Son travail repose sur un classement de la représentation de l’espace en deux catégories. Cette représentation peut être d’abord « cartographique » (ou « proto-cartographique »), si l’espace est envisagé de façon synoptique et que l’auteur embrasse l’ensemble et le détail d’un seul coup d’œil, généralement grâce à l’inspiration des Muses; d’un autre côté, elle peut être « anti-cartographique », lorsque l’espace est un trajet que l’on découvre à mesure que la marche ou la navigation progresse. À partir de ces prémisses, l’auteure analyse le spectre de la littérature grecque entre ces pôles que sont, d’un côté, l’Iliade et l’Odyssée et de l’autre l’Anabase et l’Économique de Xénophon. Elle conclut qu’en dernière analyse, seule la dernière œuvre offre une vision synoptique du monde, libérée de toute assistance divine. Ainsi, la venue de la prose annonce un nouveau paradigme où l’écriture synoptique de la Muse est remplacée par le chemin de la prose, une prose à travers laquelle le lecteur va d’un mot à l’autre, sans savoir ce qui l’attend au prochain détour, ou bien découvre le monde jusque dans ses moindres détails. L’ouvrage est divisé en six chapitres : 1. The Eusynoptic Iliad: Visualizing Space and Movement in the Poem 2. Paths and Measures: Epic Space and the Odyssey 3. The World in the Hand: Anaximander, Pherecydes, and the Invention of Cartography 4. Map and Narrative: Herodotus’s Histories 5. Losing the Way Home: Xenophon’s Anabasis 6. Finding (Things at) Home: Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. L’introduction, rappelle l’importance des nombres, ou plutôt celle de leur indicibilité qui se manifeste par l’impossibilité pour l’auteur, qu’il soit [End Page 439] poète, conteur ou historien, de connaître à la fois l’ensemble et le détail, ou encore l’individu et le nombre total. Ceci est illustré, entre autres, par la description de la Pythie que fait Hérodote dans les Histoires (I, 47). De par son inspiration divine, celle-ci connaît l’ensemble et le détail, elle sait même compter les grains de sable, tandis qu’Hérodote lui-même peine à mesurer la Mer Noire empiriquement. Dans un deuxième temps, Purves se demande à la suite d’Aristote (Rhétorique 3.12.1414a–b) comment la trame littéraire se compare à un territoire et comment la forme et le style poétique se rattachent à un objet qui possède des dimensions physiques. Purves en vient à formuler trois questions qui lui serviront de fil directeur : 1. Comment l’Iliade peut-elle être perçue de façon synoptique, à la façon des Muses ? 2. Comment pouvons-nous envisager la littérature comme si elle avait une forme perceptible par « l’œil de la pensée » ? 3. Comment ces interrogations s’insèrent-elles dans une relation diachronique entre l’espace et la trame narrative ? Les deux premiers chapitres se concentrent sur l’Iliade et l’Odyssée. Purves explique d’abord comment l’Iliade offre une vue synoptique (ou protocartographique) du monde. À travers des exemples qui vont de l’évocation du catalogue des vaisseaux jusqu’à celle du bouclier d’Achille, l’auteure nous rappelle que la présence constante de la Muse permet au poète de percevoir l’ensemble et le détail du panorama. Il en est tout autrement de l’Odyssée qui ne présente pas un monde clos et...

Thomas E. Jenkins, Intercepted Letters: Epistolarity and Narrative in Greek and Roman Literature., Pp.xvi+162, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2006., $60.00.

Thomas E. Jenkins, Intercepted Letters: Epistolarity and Narrative in Greek and Roman Literature., Pp.xvi+162, Lanham, Lexington Books, 2006., $60.00.

Gods, German Scholars, and the Gift of Greece

This article argues that the abundance of Greek figures and scenarios in Kittler’s recent work points to a shift in his oeuvre, which, however, does not represent a radical break with his ‘hardware studies’. At the turn of the 21st century, Kittler champions an emphatic notion of culture as a necessary supplement to science and technology. This conceptual marriage mediates grand historical narratives of cultural identity. Specifically, Kittler’s texts provide us with narratives of Greek origin which serve to re-capture collective identities in the age of globalization. On the explicit level, this identity is predominantly European, but the search has national components as well. With his turn to culture, the organizing trope of 19th-century German nationalism, Kittler has also embraced the legacy of German philhellenism, which articulated national identities through the theme of ‘elective affinity’. Kittler’s Greece occupies the very structural place it had in 19th-century German philhellenism: It stands in for both the foundation of European civilization and its virtual better self, a realm of sensual culture untainted by modern capitalism and Empire. Most of the figures inhabiting this realm are familiar from 19th-century discourse as well, but these discursive loops are fueled by contemporary feedback. Kittler’s Greek narratives have developed out of postwar academic discourses and connect to other post-unification Greek fantasies.

Cú Chulainn and Il'ya of Murom: Two Heroes, and Some Variations on a Theme

Cú Chulainn and Il’ya of Murom can be identified as emblematic heroes of the old (or early medieval) Irish and the medieval Slavo-Russian narrative contexts. They are drawn together most particularly because both are intimately involved in the scenario we call the “Father-son conflict,” a widely occurring Indo-European theme where the hero (knowingly or unwittingly) kills his heroic son. In terms of this theme both of these figures resemble one another because of the violence of the combat and the un-warrior way in which it is resolved; Cú and Il’ya also show other resemblances: in physical size, ferocious temper, and some other characteristics. Il’ya is shown (by de Vries, e.g.) to have found a place in the German medieval narratives; the direct Celtic connection may not be far to seek. However, this paper is most concerned with that combat of father against son, and here I must extend (and complicate) the context and bring in the Greek mythic material, most obviously the “Oedipal shift,” where son slays father. How can this shift be explained? The most believable explanation would seem to point to the “political” development of Greek society; the archaic mobility of the old (archaic) hero is caught and stabilized in the polis (heroic foundation of this or that city-state is widely seen — the hero's death is fatal but not final, and it “fertilizes” civic society). Oedipus may not be as important here as, in mythic terms, a pivotal figure such as the hero-king Theseus or (less pertinently) Herakles. Another movement away from the archaic, pre-civic (pre-political) IE pattern might have to do with the importance of the Sovereignty Goddess figure: she is explicit in the Irish material (most famously, Queen Medb) and implicit in the Russo-Slavic context, while in ancient Greek myth Hera, surely a sexually potent Sovereignty Goddess if only in vestigial form, significantly gave way to the virginal Political Goddess, Athena. My conclusions will necessarily be tentative, but will have to do with the complex interplay of individual, family, tribe (or community) and proto-polity as dramatized in hero-tales from the Celtic, Slavic, and Greek narrative contexts; we will see the “Father-son conflict” re-plotted (and re-cast) and we will look for further illumination here, where the importance of absolute temporal identification (we are dealing with different time periods as they generate our three groups of sources) gives way to thematic congruence — or variation.

Things of the Past: Objects and Time in Greek Narrative

Things of the Past:Objects and Time in Greek Narrative Karen Bassi I. Seeing the Past Wolfgang Ernst begins a 1999 article by asking, "Should the past, that fragmented landscape of data, always be described in stories?" (Ernst 1999.53). Ernst's question invites us to think about the interrelation of three contested terms: the past, data, and stories. If we agree, for example, that the past is constituted in stories, then what is that "fragmented landscape of data" that, in Ernst's metaphorical usage, pre-exists those stories?1 In the writing of history, these data occupy what de Certeau has called the "position of the real," defined as that to which the historian has only mediated access.2 This appeal to the "real" in conceptualizing the past seems both necessary and unremarkable. But its abstract (or philosophical) character also raises the question of predication: "real" what? This is the question that I'd like to think about in this paper: the referential quality of visible or material remains in the Greek narrative tradition. How do these remains-as objects of verbal description and emplotment-create and mediate the ancient past? And what can this kind of analysis tell us about the division between classical philology and archaeology (words and things) as past-making disciplines? Two premises frame the discussion. First, the questions of evidence we find in the texts we study-for example, how visible or physical objects [End Page 1] give meaning to the past in ancient narrative-are formative of the questions we ask in our own work. And second, our questions are necessarily producedn out of the culture of evidence in the West at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In her recent book titled Herodotus in Context, Rosalind Thomas cautions against "assuming that what [Herodotus] 'saw' was exactly what we would see if transported suddenly to the same spot" (Thomas 2000.196, emphasis in the original). This cautionary note is symptomatic of the predicament in which we find ourselves as contemporary readers of ancient texts and viewers of ancient objects. We can never see what Herodotus (or any ancient author) saw, although this is often the implied aim of our research. And when we see the remains of ancient objects, whether in situ or in a museum, their temporal distance seems more-not less-apparent. This distance pertains not only to a history of temporal relations in the broadest sense, but also (as suggested above) to the disciplinary boundaries that divide classical philology and archaeology (Morris 2000.41-48). These boundaries are policed by, among other things, what Hal Foster refers to as the difference between "vision and visuality," or between "the datum of vision and its discursive determinations."3 In the history of science, theories about the mechanics of seeing and, by extension, the "data" of positivist historical scholarship are the domains of what Foster means by "vision." "The social, ideological, and rhetorical effects of "the visual" and "the gaze" in the fields of art history, literary theory, gender studies, and film studies are the domains of what he calls "visuality." These two categories are not entirely satisfactory, of course, since they collapse a multitude of perceptual variables and privilege the observer over the observed. They are also mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive; whatever their ontological status, visible data are both the cause and effect of visuality as a discursive phenomenon. In fact, the counter-intuitive notion that visual data are the effects of visuality is relevant to understanding how these effects are produced in the context of particular narrative forms. We can ask, for example, whether the visible objects featured in ancient epic or drama have a different relationship to time-or to a concept of the past-than those described in ancient history writing.4 [End Page 2] As an example of "vision," the appeal to autopsy or eye witnessing in history writing is well known.5 But autopsy in narrative history is only an effect of a larger field of inquiry that might be called the materialization of the past. For contemporary writers and thinkers, this materialization is principally produced in visual media that rely on photographic technologies...