The Greeks and the Irrational Read online

  PREFACE

  This book is based on a course of lectures which I had the honour of giving at Berkeley in the autumn of 1949. They are reproduced here substantially as they were composed, though in a form slightly fuller than that in which they were delivered. Their original audience included many anthropologists and other scholars who had no specialist knowledge of ancient Greece, and it is my hope that in their present shape they may interest a similar audience of readers. I have therefore translated virtually all Greek quotations occurring in the text, and have transliterated the more important of those Greek terms which have no true English equivalent. I have also abstained as far as possible from encumbering the text with controversial arguments on points of detail, which could mean little to readers unfamiliar with the views controverted, and from complicating my main theme by pursuing the numerous side-issues which tempt the professional scholar. A selection of such matter will be found in the notes, in which I have tried to indicate briefly, where possible by reference to ancient sources or modern discussions, and where necessary by argument, the grounds for the opinions advanced in the text.

  To the nonclassical reader I should like to offer a warning against treating the book as if it were a history of Greek religion, or even of Greek religious ideas or feelings. If he does, he will be gravely misled. It is a study of the successive interpretations which Greek minds placed on one particular type of human experience—a sort of experience in which nineteenth-century rationalism took little interest, but whose cultural significance is now widely recognised. The evidence which is here brought together illustrates an important, and relatively unfamiliar, aspect of the mental world of ancient Greece. But an aspect must not be mistaken for the whole.

  To my fellow-professionals I perhaps owe some defence of the use which I have made in several places of recent anthropological and psychological observations and theories. In a world of specialists, such borrowings from unfamiliar disciplines are, I know, generally received by the learned with apprehension and often with active distaste. I expect to be reminded, in the first place, that "the Greeks were not savages," and secondly, that in these relatively new studies the accepted truths of to-day are apt to become the discarded errors of to-morrow. Both statements are correct. But in reply to the first it is perhaps sufficient to quote the opinion of Lévy-Bruhl, that "dans tout esprit humain, quel qu'en soît le développement intellectuel, subsiste un fond indéracinable de mentalité primitive"; or, if nonclassical anthropologists are suspect, the opinion of Nilsson, that "primitive mentality is a fairly good description of the mental behaviour of most people to-day except in their technical or consciously intellectual activities." Why should we attribute to the ancient Greeks an immunity from "primitive" modes of thought which we do not find in any society open to our direct observation?

  As to the second point, many of the theories to which I have referred are admittedly provisional and uncertain. But if we are trying to reach some understanding of Greek minds, and are not content with describing external behaviour or drawing up a list of recorded "beliefs," we must work by what light we can get, and an uncertain light is better than none. Tylor's animism, Mannhardt's vegetation-magic, Frazer's year-spirits, Codrington's mana, have all in their day helped to illuminate dark places in the ancient record. They have also encouraged many rash guesses. But time and the critics can be trusted to deal with the guesses; the illumination remains. I see here good reason to be cautious in applying to the Greeks generalisations based on non-Greek evidence, but none for the withdrawal of Greek scholarship into a self-imposed isolation. Still less are classical scholars justified in continuing to operate—as many of them do—with obsolete anthropological concepts, ignoring the new directions which these studies have taken in the last thirty years, such as the promising recent alliance between social anthropology and social psychology. If the truth is beyond our grasp, the errors of to-morrow are still to be preferred to the errors of yesterday; for error in the sciences is only another name for the progressive approximation to truth.

  It remains to express my gratitude to those who have helped in the production of this book: in the first place to the University of California, for causing me to write it; then to Ludwig Edelstein, W. K. C. Guthrie, I. M. Linforth, and A. D. Nock, all of whom read the whole or a part in typescript and made valuable suggestions; and finally to Harold A. Small, W. H. Alexander, and others at the University of California Press, who took great and uncomplaining trouble in preparing the text for the printer. I must also thank Professor Nock and the Council of the Roman Society for permission to reprint as appendices two articles which appeared respectively in the Harvard Theological Review and the Journal of Roman Studies; and the Council of the Hellenic Society for permission to reproduce some pages from an article published in the Journal of Hellenic Studies.

  E. R. D.

  Oxford

  August 1950

  I

  Agamemnon's Apology

  The recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making.

  William James

  Some years ago I was in the British Museum looking at the Parthenon sculptures when a young man came up to me and said with a worried air, "I know it's an awful thing to confess, but this Greek stuff doesn't move me one bit." I said that was very interesting: could he define at all the reasons for his lack of response? He reflected for a minute or two. Then he said, "Well, it's all so terribly rational, if you know what I mean." I thought I did know. The young man was only saying what has been said more articulately by Roger Fry1 and others. To a generation whose sensibilities have been trained on African and Aztec art, and on the work of such men as Modigliani and Henry Moore, the art of the Greeks, and Greek culture in general, is apt to appear lacking in the awareness of mystery and in the ability to penetrate to the deeper, less conscious levels of human experience.

  This fragment of conversation stuck in my head and set me thinking. Were the Greeks in fact quite so blind to the importance of nonrational factors in man's experience and behaviour as is commonly assumed both by their apologists and by their critics? That is the question out of which this book grew. To answer it completely would evidently involve a survey of the whole cultural achievement of ancient Greece. But what I propose attempting is something much more modest: I shall merely try to throw some light on the problem by examining afresh certain relevant aspects of Greek religious experience. I hope that the result may have a certain interest not only for Greek scholars but for some anthropologists and social psychologists, indeed for anyone who is concerned to understand the springs of human behaviour. I shall therefore try as far as possible to present the evidence in terms intelligible to the nonspecialist.

  1 For notes to chapter i see pages 18-27.

  I shall begin by considering a particular aspect of Homeric religion. To some classical scholars the Homeric poems will seem a bad place to look for any sort of religious experience. "The truth is," says Professor Mazon in a recent book, "that there was never a poem less religious than the Iliad."2 This may be thought a littlesweeping; but it reflects an opinion which seems to be widely accepted. Professor Murray thinks that the so called Homeric religion "was not really religion at all"; for in his view "the real worship of Greece before the fourth century almost never attached itself to those luminous Olympian forms."3 Similarly Dr. Bowra observes that "this complete anthropomorphic system has of course no relation to real religion or to morality. These gods are a delightful, gay invention of poets."4

  Of course—if the expression "real religion" means the kind of thing that enlightened Europeans or Americans of to-day recognise as being religion. But
if we restrict the meaning of the word in this way, are we not in danger of undervaluing, or even of overlooking altogether, certain types of experience which we no longer interpret in a religious sense, but which may nevertheless in their time have been quite heavily charged with religious significance? My purpose in the present chapter is not to quarrel with the distinguished scholars I have quoted over their use of terms, but to call attention to one kind of experience in Homer which is prima facie religious and to examine its psychology.

  Let us start from that experience of divine temptation or infatuation (atē) which led Agamemnon to compensate himself for the loss of his own mistress by robbing Achilles of his. "Not I," he declared afterwards, "not I was the cause of this act, but Zeus and my portion and the Erinys who walks in darkness: they it was who in the assembly put wild ate in my understanding, on that day when I arbitrarily took Achilles' prize from him. So what could I do? Deity will always have its way."5 By impatient modern readers these words of Agamemnon's have sometimes been dismissed as a weak excuse or evasion of responsibility. But not, I think, by those who read carefully. An evasion of responsibility in the juridical sense the words certainly are not; for at the end of his speech Agamemnon offers compensation precisely on this ground—"But since I was blinded by ate and Zeus took away my understanding, I am willing to make my peace and give abundant compensation."6 Had he acted of his own volition, he could not so easily admit himself in the wrong; as it is, he will pay for his acts. Juridically, his position would be the same in either case; for early Greek justice cared nothing for intent— it was the act that mattered. Nor is he dishonestly inventing a moral alibi; for the victim of his action takes the same view of it as he does. "Father Zeus, great indeed are the atai thou givest to men. Else the son of Atreus would never have persisted in rousing the thūmos in my chest, nor obstinately taken the girl against my will."7 You may think that Achilles is here politely accepting a fiction, in order to save the High King's face? But no: for already in Book 1, when Achilles is explaining the situation to Thetis, he speaks of Agamemnon's behaviour as his ate;8 and in Book 9 he exclaims, "Let the son of Atreus go to his doom and not disturb me, for Zeus the counsellor took away his understanding."9 It is Achilles' view of the matter as much as Agamemnon's; and in the famous words which introduce the story of the Wrath—"The plan of Zeus was fulfilled"10—we have a strong hint that it is also the poet's view.

  If this were the only incident which Homer's characters interpreted in this peculiar way, we might hesitate as to the poet's motive: we might guess, for example, that he wished to avoid alienating the hearers' sympathy too completely from Agamemnon, or again that he was trying to impart a deeper significance to the rather undignified quarrel of the two chiefs by representing it as a step in the fulfilment of a divine plan. But these explanations do not apply to other passages where "the gods" or "some god" or Zeus are said to have momentarily "taken away" or "destroyed" or "ensorcelled" a human being's understanding. Either of them might indeed be applied to the case of Helen, who ends a deeply moving and evidently sincere speech by saying that Zeus has laid on her and Alexandras an evil doom, "that we may be hereafter a theme of song for men to come."11 But when we are simply told that Zeus "ensorcelled the mind of the Achaeans," so that they fought badly, no consideration of persons comes into play; still less in the general statement that "the gods can make the most sensible man senseless and bring the feeble-minded to good sense."12 And what, for example, of Glaucus, whose understanding Zeus took away, so that he did what Greeks almost never do—accepted a bad bargain, by swopping gold armour for bronze?13 Or what of Automedon, whose folly in attempting to double the parts of charioteer and spearman led a friend to ask him "which of the gods had put an unprofitable plan in his breast and taken away his excellent understanding?"14 These two cases clearly have no connection with any deeper divine purpose; nor can there be any question of retaining the hearers' sympathy, since no moral slur is involved.

  At this point, however, the reader may naturally ask whether we are dealing with anything more than a façon de parler. Does the poet mean anything more than that Glaucus was a fool to make the bargain he did? Did Automedon's friend mean anything more than "What the dickens prompted you to behave like that?" Perhaps not. The hexameter formulae which were the stock-in-trade of the old poets lent themselves easily to the sort of semasiological degeneration which ends by creating a façon de parler. And we may note that neither the Glaucus episode nor the futile aristeia of Automedon is integral to the plot even of an "expanded" Iliad: they may well be additions by a later hand.15 Our aim, however, is to understand the original experience which lies at the root of such stereotyped formulae—for even a façon de parler must have an origin. It may help us to do so if we look a little more closely at the nature of ate and of the agencies to which Agamemnon ascribes it, and then glance at some other sorts of statement which the epic poets make about the sources of human behaviour.

  There are a number of passages in Homer in which unwise and unaccountable conduct is attributed to ate, or described by the cognate verb aasasthai, without explicit reference to divine intervention. But ate in Homer16 is not itself a personal agent: the two passages which speak of ate in personal terms, Il. 9.505 ff. and 19.91 ff., are transparent pieces of allegory. Nor does the word ever, at any rate in the Iliad, mean objective disaster,17 as it so commonly does in tragedy. Always, or practically always,18 ate is a state of mind—a temporary clouding or bewildering of the normal consciousness. It is, in fact, a partial and temporary insanity; and, like all insanity, it is ascribed, not to physiological or psychological causes, but to an external "daemonic" agency. In the Odyssey,19 it is true, excessive consumption of wine is said to cause ate; the implication, however, is probably not that ate can be produced "naturally," but rather that wine -has something supernatural or daemonic about it. Apart from this special case, the agents productive of ate, where they are specified, seem always to be supernatural beings;20 so we may class all instances of nonalcoholic ate in Homer under the head of what I propose to call "psychic intervention."

  If we review them, we shall observe that ate is by no means necessarily either a synonym for, or a result of, wickedness. The assertion of Liddell and Scott that ate is "mostly sent as the punishment of guilty rashness" is quite untrue of Homer. The ate (here a sort of stunned bewilderment) which overtook Patroclus after Apollo had struck him21 might possibly be claimed as an instance, since Patroclus had rashly routed the Trojans but earlier in the scene this rashness is itself ascribed to the will of Zeus and characterised by the verb Again, the ate of one Agastrophus24 in straying too far from his chariot, and so getting himself killed, is not a "punishment" for rashness; the rashness is itself the ate, or a result of the ate, and it involves no discernible moral guilt—it is just an unaccountable error, like the bad bargain which Glaucus made. Again, Odysseus was neither guilty nor rash when he took a nap at an unfortunate moment, thus giving his companions a chance to slaughter the tabooed oxen. It was what we should call an accident; but for Homer, as for early thought in general,25 there is no such thing as accident—Odysseus knows that his nap was sent by the gods "to fool him."26 Such passages suggest that ate had originally no connection with guilt. The notion of ate as a punishment seems to be either a late development in Ionia or a late importation from outside: the only place in Homer where it is explicitly asserted is the unique passage in Iliad 9,27 which suggests that it may possibly be a Mainland idea, taken over along with the Meleager story from an epic composed in the mother country.

  A word next about the agencies to which ate is ascribed. Agamemnon cites, not one such agency, but three: Zeus and moira and the Erinys who walks in darkness (or, according to another and perhaps older reading, the Erinys who sucks blood). Of these, Zeus is the mythological agent whom the poet conceives as the prime mover in the affair: "the plan of Zeus was fulfilled." It is perhaps significant that (unless we make Apollo responsible for the ate of Patroclus) Zeus is the o
nly individual Olympian who is credited with causing ate in the Iliad (hence ate is allegorically described as his eldest daughter).28 Moira, I think, is brought in because people spoke of any unaccountable personal disaster as part of their "portion" or "lot," meaning simply that they cannot understand why it happened, but since it has happened, evidently "it had to be." People still speak in that way, more especially of death, for which has in fact become a synonym in modern Greek, like in classical Greek. I am sure it is quite wrong to write Moira with a capital "M" here, as if it signified either a personal goddess who dictates to Zeus or a Cosmic Destiny like the Hellenistic Heimarmenē. As goddesses, Moirai are always plural, both in cult and in early literature, and with one doubtful exception29 they do not figure at all in the Iliad. The most we can say is that by treating his "portion" as an agent—by making it do something— Agamemnon is taking a first step towards personification.30 Again, by blaming his moira Agamemnon no more declares himself a systematic determinist than does the modern Greek peasant when he uses similar language. To ask whether Homer's people are determinists or libertarians is a fantastic anachronism: the question has never occurred to them, and if it were put to them it would be very difficult to make them understand what it meant.31 What they do recognize is the distinction between normal actions and actions performed in a state of ate. Actions of the latter sort they can trace indifferently either to their moira or to the will of a god, according as they look at the matter from a subjective or an objective point of view. In the same way Patroclus attributes his death directly to the immediate agent, the man Euphorbus, and indirectly to the mythological agent, Apollo, but from a subjective standpoint to his bad moira. It is, as the psychologists say, "overdetermined."32