This essay is published at Unlikely Stories
I fought against the bottle but I had to do it drunk —Leonard Cohen
Did you miss the Interdependency Issue? Check that out, fool!
ecoarttech: An Art Project founded by Leila Christine Nadir and Cary Peppermint
The Deleted City: A New Media Project by Richard Vijgen
Images by Andrea Champlin
Strike Debt!, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, talks about the Rolling Jubilee
Shannon Hayes, organic farmer, says her prices are not too high
The IndyBay Media Collective stands up to spurious lawsuits
Gun Violence, Massacres, and 'Other Developed Countries' by David Rovics
Photography Is Easy: A Short Film by Leslie Thornton
Living Will: Interactive Fiction by Mark C. Marino
CityFish: Interactive Fiction by J. R. Carpenter
AE Reiff reviews Blood Orchid by Charles Bowden
Stick Figure Symbiosis: Frankie Metro reviews Re-positioning by Stephen Bett
An excerpt from The Diamond Kings of Clarence Checkeredfish by Brian S. Hart
The Ninth Circle: Fiction by George Sparling
The Cacophonous Croak: Fiction by U. P. Eople
Neolithic Woman: Fiction by Robin Wyatt Dunn
Ebenaezer Appies on burning South Africa's water to produce coal
Dispatches from Hurricaned NY by Cindy Milstein
Three Poems by John Dorsey
Three Poems by Clare L. Martin
Three Poems by Lyn Lifshin
Three Poems by David McLean
Three Quantum Poems by Mark Cunningham
Three Poems by Michael Mc Aloran
the surge (hurricane sandy) —: Poetry by Steve Dalachinsky
Three Poems by CL Bledsoe
Graphic Notations by Stroud
Hurricane Sandy's Austerity Lessons by Lucine Kasbarian
Yacov Ben Efrat on why Netanyahu and Hamas both hate the PA
'Asia suffers from thanatomania; Europe knows la joie de vivre.'
That parallel cultures should not, through divergent historical experience, converge in their political institutions; and that such diversity of background should seek artistic expression appears to be an axiomatic abstraction. The devil, however, conceals himself in the details. In that universal particular of the East-West schism, divergence has ever been stigmatized as deviance. Increasingly, instead of a stereoscopic view of civilisations, there is recourse to stereotypes. The sun, it is claimed, for instance, rises over a people life-denying, other-worldly, to set over one life-affirming, this-worldly.
Two heroes, representative of their respective civilisations, are often nominated to battle on behalf of the thesis. Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian, ranks senior to Achilles, the Greek, by some 2,000 years!1 Thus, the struggle dons a generational dimension as well — the youth of the world renouncing the lessons of age, or age catechising youth on the ways of the world.
The Epic of Gilgamesh tells of the odyssey of a king in quest of immortality. To humanise his tyrannical reign, the gods respond to the subjects' adjurations by creating Enkidu, a wild man, initially living among the desert animals,
Notes:
1 Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1964), p. 104
2 E.A.Speiser, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, ed. J.B.Pritchard, (Princeton, N.J., 1950), passim
The oikoumene of the ancient Middle East embraced the regions from Iran to Egypt and from Anatolia and the Aegean Sea to the Arabian Peninsula through the years 3000 to 330 BC. The word means the inhabited world and signifies a distinct historical and cultural continuum. From the dawn of civilisation the area constituted a far-flung house (oikos, house) until Alexander's empire replaced the intimacy of the ecumene. Architectural, ceramic, metallurgical and other products radiated from the first civilisations to their younger contemporaries. Just as the secular crafts were monopolised by professional guilds, so were other-worldly services concentrated in priest-guilds. The mobility of guilds disseminated ceramic as well as religious forms: sacrifice in Mycenaean (Late Bronze Age) Greece mimicked the Hebrews, its memory preserved to this day in ritual Jewish slaughter.1 Merchants and priests were equally to be found rubbing shoulders in ancient Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria as in Israel or hobnobbing at the Mesopotamian gateway at Alalakh in what is now modern Turkey. The Greek world, in the late Bronze Age, thereby, drew on the inventory of the Middle East, material, cultural and spiritual, to stock its corresponding warehouses rendered virtually native, by such exchange, to the Levant.
Thus, the consecutive occupation of the divine throne by Uranus, Cronos and Zeus, in Hesiod's Theogony, appears to be the reflex of the successive theocracies of Anu, Kumarbi and the storm god in a Hittite version of a Hurrian myth. The court of Hattusa was the royal school of chariotry for Achaean princes, and the empire, no doubt, proved equally dexterous in the art of diplomacy.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, inferring from the number of copies discovered in the Levant, enjoyed the status of a bestseller.2 And it would not be stretching a commercial analogy overmuch to suggest a parallel between the piracy on the Mediterranean and the influence of the epic on Homer. In both the odyssey of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, the representation of the joys of this-worldliness in an attempt to suspend the hero's journey to the netherworld devolves, respectively, on the divine bargirl, Siduri, lodged as inn-keeper amidst the garden of the sun-god near the ocean, and Circe and Calypso on their mythical isles. Both in the Gilgamesh epic and the Iliad, friends die their surrogate deaths for the heroes, Patroclus for Achilles, Enkidu for Gilgamesh, both to return and report on the nothingness of death.
The analogies, however, dramatise the disanalogies. Gilgamesh's monomaniacal quest for immortality cursorily dismisses the sanity of Siduri's advice, while Odysseus' uncompromising humanity spurns a goddess's gift of eternal life. The death of Patroclus has the opposite effect on Achilles as that of Enkidu on Gilgamesh: the one shuns, the other chooses, his friend's fate, to avenge it.
Without doubt, such difference in outlook, subsisting with so much similarity in execution, gives pause to thought, and occasion for reflection. Prima facie, the ineluctable conclusion stares the querying mind —the West is essentially secular, the East quintessentially other-worldly. The phenomenon thus compartmentalised, the tired mind rests from further labour. Henceforth, all subsequent surprises cease to be so, going into one of two boxes: the Greek, heroic and the Mesopotamian, pathetic view of life.
Thus, even minds belonging to such as Thorkild Jacobsen asseverate: "The Epic of Gilgamesh does not come to an harmonious end; the emotions which rage in it are not assuaged; nor is there, as in tragedy, any sense of catharsis, any fundamental acceptance of the inevitable."3 (Italics not original.)4
And H.D.F. Kitto's acquires greater catholicity by moving further east: "There can be no romantic protest — for how can we protest against the first law of our being? — nor resigned acceptance — such as we find, for example, among the Chinese, to whom the individual is only an ancestor in the making, one crop of leaves on one tree in the forest. There is instead this passionate tension which is a spirit of tragedy." (Italics supplied.)5
These observations are condensed into modern aphorisms by Edith Hamilton. "A tomb in Egypt and a theatre in Greece. The one comes to the mind as naturally as the other." And, so as not to overlook a large chunk of the orient, she stuffs India into the Grecian urn with: "As in Egypt, the priests saw their opportunity".6 One recognizes here the intellectual luggage of our latter-day psyche.
And last but not least, the Encyclopaedia Britannica pontificates: "The Mesopotamian mind never tires of expressing man's deep regret at not being immortal through stories about ancient heroes who, despite their superhuman strength and wisdom, and their intimacy with gods, failed to escape from death. A decisively different idea, however, is fundamental to the Greek heroic view of life".7 (Emphasis added.)
And politics provides the theory explaining the secular-religious split between East and West. Tyranny and hierocracy contrast with democracy, freedom from both kings and priests.
The political development of Hellas and that of the 'barbarians', indeed, diverged sufficiently to constitute two schools. Their distinguishing characteristic was a 'break of study' in the former case, and an uninterrupted curriculum in the latter. From 3000 BC, Egypt experienced uninterrupted government down to the present day, and Mesopotamia for more than 3000 years until its terminal illness - the combined canker of the absence of national, and presence of alien, government (and peoples). Their slightly younger contemporary, the Minoan, and its mainland successor, the Mycenaean, civilisations of Greece were as monarchical as their eastern sisters.10 Thus, around 1400 BC, the ecumene exhibited a sorority of monarchical states, urban or unified. The barbarian Greeks (an adjective that cannot be qualified with the use of inverted commas) descended in several waves; the first arrived in the north around 2,000 BC, descended south over hundreds of years and, inspired by Crete, engendered, in conjunction with their predecessors, the Mycenean civilisation; but the second wave - the Dorian invaders - inundated the reservoir and began the Dark Age of Greece from 1100 BC to 750 BC11 — a period of absolute anarchy unfamiliar to the East, constituting antithetical syllabi for the two schools. (The Cretan capital at Knossos was sacked and destroyed in 1400 BC for unknown reasons, though the Cretan civilisation survived, albeit as an outpost of the Mycenaean Greeks).12
How did the Greek pupil learn to look at life during this lacuna of government? The effect of government or non-government on the world-view of a people may strike modern readers, ensconced in the safety of the state, as fancied or absurd causality. We'll let the Greek, with his greater experience of anarchy, support or discredit the association, if any. He learned to value freedom above everything, setting a premium on it as a rational response to the absence of security. But he went one step further: vigilance became a habit. Eternal vigilance, it has been said, wrongly, is the price of liberty; on the contrary, liberty is the price of vigilance. And a high premium on freedom meant an equally high discount on kingship. Where every man, must, perforce, 'pack a rod', so to speak, he would be loath to relinquish the gun to another. Homer belongs to this period.
The shield of Achilles is apt symbolism for the Dark Age. Hephaestus, the 'thin-lipped armourer', saves us a thousand words by fashioning one scene (which we focus on among several, as our theory directs our gaze).
The Greeks, then, at least in Homer, hold kingship and death in contempt. The Mesopotamians, on the other hand, are in awe of both king and death. They value life and government. What does the Greek value? Freedom, as we have seen. And what does he dread? The opposite of freedom, slavery, for Homer tells us that
Notes:
1 Cyrus H. Gordon, Ancient Middle Eastern Religions, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition, pp. 60-61
2 Angus Stewart Fletcher, The Art of Literature, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 107
3 H. & H.A.Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy, (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971), pp. 227
4 Disagreement with Jacobsen over interpretation originates, in part, from his dating of the epic (page 223), which he places in the second millenium, when the state waxed mightier and juster than before; hence, Gilgamesh rebels against the ultimate injustice, death! While admitting the epic to be based on older material, he disappoints by not explaining the basis of the original. Gerard Roux places the epic fragments in the 'Heroic Age of Mesopotamia', the Early Dynastic Period (c.2700 – 2400 BC). Furthermore, the former author betrays a greater fondness for his own cultural roots by discerning a Primitive Democracy in Mesopotamia, a view rejected by the latter - as well as by S.E.Finer , The History of Government from the Earliest Times, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 111-112.
5 H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks, (Edinburgh: Penguin Books, 1952), p. 61
6 Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way to Western Civilisation, (New York: Mentor, 1960), pp. 17, 21
7 Angus Stewart Fletcher, The Art of Literature, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 108
8 Aeschylus, The Persians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, trans. G.M.Cookson, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 239-240
9 Euripides, The Bacchantes, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, trans. G.M.Cookson, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 1-41
10 Herman Aubin, Europe, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 692
11 S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 176-178
12 S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, pp. 319 - 320
13 Homer, The Iliad, trans. W.H.D.Rouse, (New York: Mentor), passim
14 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), II-65
15 J.B.Bury & Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece, (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1980), pp. 51-53
The Chambers Twenty-first Century Dictionary gives the historical meaning of 'slave' as "someone owned by and acting as servant to another, with no personal freedom"1. Presumably, the description is meant to fit the Sumerian, the Greek, the Roman, the Jewish, the American and the Spanish slave. In fact, there is no word for slave in the Sumerian or the Hebrew languages. The Greek word for slave was "doulos" — the word erected a clear linguistic boundary between slaves and free men No such boundary existed in the East. In the Sumerian cuneiform sign for slave, the word means "a man from the mountains", that is, a captive from an alien land. This vagueness infects the Egyptian word 'b'k'. The Hebrew word 'ebed' denotes anyone from 'slave', 'servant of the lord' in the phrase 'ebed Jahwe' to 'ebed al malek', the servant of the king.2
There is as much history in the meaning of a word as there is culture. Contrast Justice Taney's famous observation that Negroes had "no rights which any white man was bound to respect" (March 6, 1857),3 with the fact that the Iberian slave had access to the courts. The Anglo-Saxon 'slave' was a thing, not a person. The Spanish slave was a person without liberty. The laws and customs relating to slavery were codified in centralised Portugal and Spain as early as 1263-5. The Las Siete Partidas del Roy Alfonso specifies the rights of a slave in detail. For instance: 'If married slaves owned by separate masters could not live together because of distance, the church should persuade one or the other to sell his slave. If neither of the masters could be persuaded, the church was to buy one of them so that the married slaves could live together'.4
What, then, of the antonym of 'slavery' — 'freedom'? The meaning of this word too must be inextricably connected to the historical experience of the people. Thus, freedom and democracy mean little in the Iberian world — Spain and Portugal were both dictatorships until the other day, and Latin America has the perpetual caudillo — whereas some form of participatory government and the associated idea of liberty persisted throughout Greek, Republican Roman and Western European history as the reflex of slavery and exclusion. Centralised, absolutist states are more 'free' than democratic, decentralised polities. Where you cannot lose your freedom, the concept cannot arise. And a strong, 'despotic' state precludes slavery for it would entail loyalty of slaves to private persons, rather than, as observed, to the 'despot'.
According to W. V. Quine, nothing can count as the unique meaning of a word or expression; meaning is indeterminate. Why? Because meaning is inextricably connected with behaviour, which in turn is connected to a world-view. Thus, words acquire meaning only in relation to their place in the language and the world-view. "...people feel drawn to a mentalistic account of language, despite the conspicuous fact that language is a social enterprise...."5 Thus we cannot translate the English words slave or free into other languages: the differing world-views, that is, historical experiences, would not permit such translation.
The same conclusion is reached via the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Wittgenstein's stress on the connection between linguistic activity and a 'way of life'.6
Notes:
1 'slave', The Chambers Twenty-first Century Dictionary (New Delhi: Allied Publishers (India) Ltd, 2000)
2 William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1955), p. 43
3 'Dred Scott decision', Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol.4, p. 218
4 Eric Dunning, 'Race Relations', in Geoffrey Hurd (ed.), Human Societies, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 158, 165 - 166
5 W.V. Quine, "Mind and Verbal Dispositions", Meaning and Reference, p. 81
6 'translation', A Dictionary Of Philosophy, ed. Antony Flew (London: Pan Books, 1979)
Every culture has its antipodes, and for the Greeks it was freedom-unfreedom, for the Near East, government-anarchy, where slavery was insignificant.1 The ratio of slaves to free citizens, in the wealthiest period and part of Greece, Periclean Athens, was 3:2,2 and yet her wealth paled next to the oriental states. The very meaning of freedom derived from its antithesis — slavery. In Asia, large-scale slavery had never been practiced.3 Egypt had no concept of slavery and slaves, in any recognisable form, never appeared until the Egyptian Empire — yet were still a minuscule part of the labour force4; household slaves were easily assimilated5. In China, slaves comprised only 1% of the total population and had a very different status from that of Greco-Roman slaves!6 The corresponding ratio for Attica around 431 BC is between 25-33%.7 However, in Greece, too, Hellenistic despotism entailed the disappearance of slavery8 — and its re-emergence with the Roman Republic and, again, its disappearance with the Empire9. Freedom has no meaning unless the possibility of losing it is real. A monarchy, or centralized state, tolerates only a minimum of slaves, being jealous of their loyalty, which, if it is directed at all, will be directed towards the master. Likewise, it will set a high premium on stability, and a high discount on freedom, as the Greeks knew it ('eleutheron'),10 being habituated to government, unlike the Greeks, and unused to anarchy.
Homer, by rendering anarchy romantic, rendered death beautiful; Gilgamesh, by assuming government, achieved the reverse. Both affirm life. The Greek affirms life through the Other, as togetherness, the Mesopotamian through the Third, the state, as separateness. The Greek other may be free or a slave, necessarily, for Otherness implies either equality or subordination. The obsessive pursuit of 'glory', also, betrays the Other taking notes: 'arete', excellence, resides as much in the self as the non-self. The earthly immortality of fame, the life-in-death, contrasts with slavery, the death-in-life. Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel, not only over a slave-girl, but over a prize: the Iliad commences with the conflict between life-in-death, the prize, and death-in-life, the slave. With the Ego and the non-Ego so inextricated, without the extricating Third, the Iliad becomes a monument to the ideas of moira (fate) and hybris (excess). A man should stay within his moira, the kingdom of his self, and not transgress it through hybris, where the non-egos reside: though Ate (Folly, personified as a goddess) inveigle him thither, yet will he be visited by divine vengeance, personified as Nemesis.
The Third, in Gilgamesh, appears as the tyrannical king, who meets his alter ego, a wild man civilised. The humanised brute remonstrates with the dehumanised king, and Enkidu and Gilgamesh become one, the best of friends. When Enkidu gets into a funk before the terrible Huwawa, it is the other's turn to remonstrate.
But orientalists must sorely be missing the priest-ridden society amidst this scene of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They must, I am afraid, content themselves with the initial piety of the drama. Weary, not of this world, but of a king's misrule, his subjects raise their voices in prayer, and the gods are not deaf to their plea.
To satisfy, and silence, the clamorous demand for priests, once and for all, we shall adduce the Egyptian example, the hierocracy par excellence. The absence of hardly any evidence of personal religion during the Old Kingdom disappoints expectation. The moment anarchy reigns in the Pharaoh's stead, in the First Intermediate Period, the worst suspicions regarding the thanatomania of the East are confirmed. The universalisation of posthumous identification with Osiris, hitherto only a pharaonic prerogative, coupled with the vulgarisation of the Pyramid Texts on common coffins, signals the dispersion of sovereignty among the populace.
The Dispute of a Man, Weary of Life, a poem born of anarchic conditions, betrays a terribly disappointed reliance on the Third. It is an internal debate regarding suicide, 'to be or not to be'.
Notes:
1 Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, (London: New Left Books, 1974), p. 21
2 Ibid., p. 22
3 Ibid., P. 21
4 William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, p. 47
5 John R. Baines, Egypt, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 146
6 S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, p. 502; Jacque Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilisation, trans. J.R.Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 150
7 William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, p. 9
8 Ibid., pp 39-41
9 Ibid., pp. 63, 101 – 102, 113 - 117
10 .E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, pp. 323 – 324: Two centuries divide Homer and the innovation of chattel slavery; yet, the political conditions of the Homeric period were fecund with hints of the coming bondage of the masses. Indeed, this article's central argument is that political conditions caused the psychological preparedness for the coexistence of democracy and slavery.
11 The Odyssey, Book V, trans. Samuel Butler, The Internet Classics Archive
12 V.Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself, (London: Watts & Co., 1956), p. 154
13 Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), pp. 141-144
14 Ibid., p. 86
15 J.B. Bury & Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece, p. 194
16 John Richard Thornhill Pollard, Ancient European Religions, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 912
17 J.B. Bury & Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece, p. 113
18 Alfred Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth, 5th ed. (New York: Random House, 1931), p. 116-121
19 Russell Meiggs, Classical Greco-Roman Civilisation, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 274
I fought against the bottle but I had to do it drunk —Leonard Cohen
Did you miss the Interdependency Issue? Check that out, fool!
ecoarttech: An Art Project founded by Leila Christine Nadir and Cary Peppermint
The Deleted City: A New Media Project by Richard Vijgen
Images by Andrea Champlin
Strike Debt!, an offshoot of Occupy Wall Street, talks about the Rolling Jubilee
Shannon Hayes, organic farmer, says her prices are not too high
The IndyBay Media Collective stands up to spurious lawsuits
Gun Violence, Massacres, and 'Other Developed Countries' by David Rovics
Photography Is Easy: A Short Film by Leslie Thornton
Living Will: Interactive Fiction by Mark C. Marino
CityFish: Interactive Fiction by J. R. Carpenter
AE Reiff reviews Blood Orchid by Charles Bowden
Stick Figure Symbiosis: Frankie Metro reviews Re-positioning by Stephen Bett
An excerpt from The Diamond Kings of Clarence Checkeredfish by Brian S. Hart
The Ninth Circle: Fiction by George Sparling
The Cacophonous Croak: Fiction by U. P. Eople
Neolithic Woman: Fiction by Robin Wyatt Dunn
Ebenaezer Appies on burning South Africa's water to produce coal
Dispatches from Hurricaned NY by Cindy Milstein
Three Poems by John Dorsey
Three Poems by Clare L. Martin
Three Poems by Lyn Lifshin
Three Poems by David McLean
Three Quantum Poems by Mark Cunningham
Three Poems by Michael Mc Aloran
the surge (hurricane sandy) —: Poetry by Steve Dalachinsky
Three Poems by CL Bledsoe
Graphic Notations by Stroud
Hurricane Sandy's Austerity Lessons by Lucine Kasbarian
Yacov Ben Efrat on why Netanyahu and Hamas both hate the PA
'Asia suffers from thanatomania; Europe knows la joie de vivre.'
That parallel cultures should not, through divergent historical experience, converge in their political institutions; and that such diversity of background should seek artistic expression appears to be an axiomatic abstraction. The devil, however, conceals himself in the details. In that universal particular of the East-West schism, divergence has ever been stigmatized as deviance. Increasingly, instead of a stereoscopic view of civilisations, there is recourse to stereotypes. The sun, it is claimed, for instance, rises over a people life-denying, other-worldly, to set over one life-affirming, this-worldly.
Two heroes, representative of their respective civilisations, are often nominated to battle on behalf of the thesis. Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian, ranks senior to Achilles, the Greek, by some 2,000 years!1 Thus, the struggle dons a generational dimension as well — the youth of the world renouncing the lessons of age, or age catechising youth on the ways of the world.
The Epic of Gilgamesh tells of the odyssey of a king in quest of immortality. To humanise his tyrannical reign, the gods respond to the subjects' adjurations by creating Enkidu, a wild man, initially living among the desert animals,
With the gazelles he feeds on grass,later civilised into urban life, and finally befriended by the king. This epilogue introduces us to their swashbuckling and derring-do, such as the killing of Huwawa and the 'bull of heaven'. The latter had been sent by Ishtar, the goddess of Uruk and 'a woman scorned', to kill Gilgamesh for repudiating her fickle love with a set of unflattering similes:
With the wild beasts he jostles at the watering places,
With the teeming creatures, his heart delights in water.2
"Thou art but a brazier which goes out in the cold,From this pinnacle of brotherhood, juxtaposed against the habitual infidelity of the goddess, the twain are dashed by the gods to the depths of division. Their united actions recoil on their unity, as Enkidu dreams of the 'house of dust', falls ill and dies. The fact of death transmitted so intimately to Gilgamesh for the first time, the invincible hero doubles up under grief and terror, and begins his quest for eternal life.
A backdoor which does not keep out blast and windstorms,
A waterskin which soaks through its bearer,
A shoe which pinches the foot of its owner!'
"Fearing death I roam over the steppe;En route to meet Utnapishtim, the only mortal to attain immortality, he meets Siduri, 'the barmaid who dwells on the edge of the sea', who, notwithstanding her calling, gives him sober advice.
The matter of my friend rests heavy upon me. How can I be silent? How can I be still?
My friend, whom I loved, has turned to clay.
Must I, too, like him, lay me down
Not to rise again for ever and ever?"
"Gilgamesh, fill your belly -Unsurprisingly, the content of a barmaid constitutes the despair of a king and a hero. Gilgamesh sails over the waters of death to confer with the Sumerian Noah, Utnapishtim, who once played a role similar to his biblical counterpart, for which service to gods and creatures he received his boon, both event and gift not permitting replication. Yet Utnapishtim holds out one last, forlorn hope - a rejuvenating, underwater plant. Like a pearl-diver, Gilgamesh plunges for the priceless treasure of the deep; only to lose it to a serpent when he stops at a pool on the warm journey back to Uruk, having left it on the bank. Henceforth, snakes, rather than Gilgamesh, were to endure forever, sloughing off their bodies when old to renew youth. To Urshanabi, Utnapishtim's boatman who had piloted him over the Persian Gulf to find the plant of youth, he communicates his 'incommunicable woe'.
day and night make merry,
let days be full of joy,
dance and make music day and night
And wear fresh clothes,
And wash your head and bathe.
Look at the child that is holding your hand,
and let your wife delight in your embrace
These things alone are the concern of men."
For whose sake, Urshanabi, have I strained my muscles?
For whose sake has my heart's blood been spent?
I brought no blessing on myself -
I did the serpent underground good service."
Notes:
1 Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1964), p. 104
2 E.A.Speiser, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, ed. J.B.Pritchard, (Princeton, N.J., 1950), passim
The oikoumene of the ancient Middle East embraced the regions from Iran to Egypt and from Anatolia and the Aegean Sea to the Arabian Peninsula through the years 3000 to 330 BC. The word means the inhabited world and signifies a distinct historical and cultural continuum. From the dawn of civilisation the area constituted a far-flung house (oikos, house) until Alexander's empire replaced the intimacy of the ecumene. Architectural, ceramic, metallurgical and other products radiated from the first civilisations to their younger contemporaries. Just as the secular crafts were monopolised by professional guilds, so were other-worldly services concentrated in priest-guilds. The mobility of guilds disseminated ceramic as well as religious forms: sacrifice in Mycenaean (Late Bronze Age) Greece mimicked the Hebrews, its memory preserved to this day in ritual Jewish slaughter.1 Merchants and priests were equally to be found rubbing shoulders in ancient Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria as in Israel or hobnobbing at the Mesopotamian gateway at Alalakh in what is now modern Turkey. The Greek world, in the late Bronze Age, thereby, drew on the inventory of the Middle East, material, cultural and spiritual, to stock its corresponding warehouses rendered virtually native, by such exchange, to the Levant.
Thus, the consecutive occupation of the divine throne by Uranus, Cronos and Zeus, in Hesiod's Theogony, appears to be the reflex of the successive theocracies of Anu, Kumarbi and the storm god in a Hittite version of a Hurrian myth. The court of Hattusa was the royal school of chariotry for Achaean princes, and the empire, no doubt, proved equally dexterous in the art of diplomacy.
The Epic of Gilgamesh, inferring from the number of copies discovered in the Levant, enjoyed the status of a bestseller.2 And it would not be stretching a commercial analogy overmuch to suggest a parallel between the piracy on the Mediterranean and the influence of the epic on Homer. In both the odyssey of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, the representation of the joys of this-worldliness in an attempt to suspend the hero's journey to the netherworld devolves, respectively, on the divine bargirl, Siduri, lodged as inn-keeper amidst the garden of the sun-god near the ocean, and Circe and Calypso on their mythical isles. Both in the Gilgamesh epic and the Iliad, friends die their surrogate deaths for the heroes, Patroclus for Achilles, Enkidu for Gilgamesh, both to return and report on the nothingness of death.
The analogies, however, dramatise the disanalogies. Gilgamesh's monomaniacal quest for immortality cursorily dismisses the sanity of Siduri's advice, while Odysseus' uncompromising humanity spurns a goddess's gift of eternal life. The death of Patroclus has the opposite effect on Achilles as that of Enkidu on Gilgamesh: the one shuns, the other chooses, his friend's fate, to avenge it.
Without doubt, such difference in outlook, subsisting with so much similarity in execution, gives pause to thought, and occasion for reflection. Prima facie, the ineluctable conclusion stares the querying mind —the West is essentially secular, the East quintessentially other-worldly. The phenomenon thus compartmentalised, the tired mind rests from further labour. Henceforth, all subsequent surprises cease to be so, going into one of two boxes: the Greek, heroic and the Mesopotamian, pathetic view of life.
Thus, even minds belonging to such as Thorkild Jacobsen asseverate: "The Epic of Gilgamesh does not come to an harmonious end; the emotions which rage in it are not assuaged; nor is there, as in tragedy, any sense of catharsis, any fundamental acceptance of the inevitable."3 (Italics not original.)4
And H.D.F. Kitto's acquires greater catholicity by moving further east: "There can be no romantic protest — for how can we protest against the first law of our being? — nor resigned acceptance — such as we find, for example, among the Chinese, to whom the individual is only an ancestor in the making, one crop of leaves on one tree in the forest. There is instead this passionate tension which is a spirit of tragedy." (Italics supplied.)5
These observations are condensed into modern aphorisms by Edith Hamilton. "A tomb in Egypt and a theatre in Greece. The one comes to the mind as naturally as the other." And, so as not to overlook a large chunk of the orient, she stuffs India into the Grecian urn with: "As in Egypt, the priests saw their opportunity".6 One recognizes here the intellectual luggage of our latter-day psyche.
And last but not least, the Encyclopaedia Britannica pontificates: "The Mesopotamian mind never tires of expressing man's deep regret at not being immortal through stories about ancient heroes who, despite their superhuman strength and wisdom, and their intimacy with gods, failed to escape from death. A decisively different idea, however, is fundamental to the Greek heroic view of life".7 (Emphasis added.)
And politics provides the theory explaining the secular-religious split between East and West. Tyranny and hierocracy contrast with democracy, freedom from both kings and priests.
Subject they are not unto any man:
They say "slave" sorts not with "Athenian".8
Lydia's glebe, where gold abounds, and Phrygia have I [Dionysus] left behind; o'er Persia's sun-baked plains, by Bactria's walled towns and Media's wintry clime have I advanced through Arabia, land of promise; and Asia's length and breadth, outstretched along the brackish sea, with many a fair walled town, peopled with mingling race of Hellenes and barbarians; and this is the first city in Hellas I have reached.9The average barbarian, therefore, is a religious sycophant.
The political development of Hellas and that of the 'barbarians', indeed, diverged sufficiently to constitute two schools. Their distinguishing characteristic was a 'break of study' in the former case, and an uninterrupted curriculum in the latter. From 3000 BC, Egypt experienced uninterrupted government down to the present day, and Mesopotamia for more than 3000 years until its terminal illness - the combined canker of the absence of national, and presence of alien, government (and peoples). Their slightly younger contemporary, the Minoan, and its mainland successor, the Mycenaean, civilisations of Greece were as monarchical as their eastern sisters.10 Thus, around 1400 BC, the ecumene exhibited a sorority of monarchical states, urban or unified. The barbarian Greeks (an adjective that cannot be qualified with the use of inverted commas) descended in several waves; the first arrived in the north around 2,000 BC, descended south over hundreds of years and, inspired by Crete, engendered, in conjunction with their predecessors, the Mycenean civilisation; but the second wave - the Dorian invaders - inundated the reservoir and began the Dark Age of Greece from 1100 BC to 750 BC11 — a period of absolute anarchy unfamiliar to the East, constituting antithetical syllabi for the two schools. (The Cretan capital at Knossos was sacked and destroyed in 1400 BC for unknown reasons, though the Cretan civilisation survived, albeit as an outpost of the Mycenaean Greeks).12
How did the Greek pupil learn to look at life during this lacuna of government? The effect of government or non-government on the world-view of a people may strike modern readers, ensconced in the safety of the state, as fancied or absurd causality. We'll let the Greek, with his greater experience of anarchy, support or discredit the association, if any. He learned to value freedom above everything, setting a premium on it as a rational response to the absence of security. But he went one step further: vigilance became a habit. Eternal vigilance, it has been said, wrongly, is the price of liberty; on the contrary, liberty is the price of vigilance. And a high premium on freedom meant an equally high discount on kingship. Where every man, must, perforce, 'pack a rod', so to speak, he would be loath to relinquish the gun to another. Homer belongs to this period.
The shield of Achilles is apt symbolism for the Dark Age. Hephaestus, the 'thin-lipped armourer', saves us a thousand words by fashioning one scene (which we focus on among several, as our theory directs our gaze).
A crowd was in the market-place, where a dispute was going on. Two men disputed over the blood-price of a man who had been killed: the other refused to accept anything; but both were willing to appeal to an umpire for decision.13Throughout later (post-Mycenaean) Greek history, the umpire was never a king. The Greek, gradually, reluctantly, out of a sense of anangke (necessity), surrendered a sufficient moiety of his sovereignty to render Hephaestus' handiwork passé; but until Alexander wrested the remainder with brute force, he preserved a limpet hold on his individuality, making him, according to Thucydides, well-nigh ungovernable.
Pericles, indeed, by his rank, ability and known integrity was enabled to exercise an independent control over the multitude —in short, to lead them instead of being led by them;...what was nominally a democracy became in his hands government by the first citizen. With his successors it was different. More on a level with one another, and each grasping at supremacy, they ended by committing even the conduct of state affairs to the whims of the multitude.14Unlike the Mycenaean rulers, the power of the Homeric kings was girt by the council of nobles and the assembly of commoners. The council could debate in parliamentary fashion, but the assembly could only listen and consent or dissent by acclamation, as in a modern referendum. Unlike their predecessors and contemporaries, the Greeks practiced some form of limited constitutional government.15 Indeed, they recognized degrees of kingship, and while Achilles addresses Agamemnon as 'most kingly', he does not restrain his tongue from the liberal use of expletives: "You drunkard, with eyes like a bitch and heart like a fawn!" Rude language, admittedly, but not subversive!
The Greeks, then, at least in Homer, hold kingship and death in contempt. The Mesopotamians, on the other hand, are in awe of both king and death. They value life and government. What does the Greek value? Freedom, as we have seen. And what does he dread? The opposite of freedom, slavery, for Homer tells us that
Zeus takes away from a man half of his manhood if the day of enslavement lays hold of him.And of womanhood? We're not told what percentage accrues to Zeus, but from Hector's speech to Andromache we can infer, darkly, that the ratio was quite considerable.
But my grief is not so much for the Trojans, nor for Hecuba herself, nor for Priam the king, nor for my many noble brothers, who will be slain by the foe and will lie in the dust, as for you, when one of the bronze-clad Achaeans will carry you away in tears, and end your days of freedom.And yet Homer, unlike another, later, blind poet who juxtaposes servitude in heaven with dominion in hell (a preference eloquent of an acquired, elder penchant for old-fashioned oriental dominus), affirms that
It is better to be a slave on earth than a king of Hades.
Notes:
1 Cyrus H. Gordon, Ancient Middle Eastern Religions, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition, pp. 60-61
2 Angus Stewart Fletcher, The Art of Literature, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 107
3 H. & H.A.Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, Before Philosophy, (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971), pp. 227
4 Disagreement with Jacobsen over interpretation originates, in part, from his dating of the epic (page 223), which he places in the second millenium, when the state waxed mightier and juster than before; hence, Gilgamesh rebels against the ultimate injustice, death! While admitting the epic to be based on older material, he disappoints by not explaining the basis of the original. Gerard Roux places the epic fragments in the 'Heroic Age of Mesopotamia', the Early Dynastic Period (c.2700 – 2400 BC). Furthermore, the former author betrays a greater fondness for his own cultural roots by discerning a Primitive Democracy in Mesopotamia, a view rejected by the latter - as well as by S.E.Finer , The History of Government from the Earliest Times, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 111-112.
5 H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks, (Edinburgh: Penguin Books, 1952), p. 61
6 Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way to Western Civilisation, (New York: Mentor, 1960), pp. 17, 21
7 Angus Stewart Fletcher, The Art of Literature, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 108
8 Aeschylus, The Persians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, trans. G.M.Cookson, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 239-240
9 Euripides, The Bacchantes, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, trans. G.M.Cookson, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), 1-41
10 Herman Aubin, Europe, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 692
11 S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 176-178
12 S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, pp. 319 - 320
13 Homer, The Iliad, trans. W.H.D.Rouse, (New York: Mentor), passim
14 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), II-65
15 J.B.Bury & Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece, (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1980), pp. 51-53
The Chambers Twenty-first Century Dictionary gives the historical meaning of 'slave' as "someone owned by and acting as servant to another, with no personal freedom"1. Presumably, the description is meant to fit the Sumerian, the Greek, the Roman, the Jewish, the American and the Spanish slave. In fact, there is no word for slave in the Sumerian or the Hebrew languages. The Greek word for slave was "doulos" — the word erected a clear linguistic boundary between slaves and free men No such boundary existed in the East. In the Sumerian cuneiform sign for slave, the word means "a man from the mountains", that is, a captive from an alien land. This vagueness infects the Egyptian word 'b'k'. The Hebrew word 'ebed' denotes anyone from 'slave', 'servant of the lord' in the phrase 'ebed Jahwe' to 'ebed al malek', the servant of the king.2
There is as much history in the meaning of a word as there is culture. Contrast Justice Taney's famous observation that Negroes had "no rights which any white man was bound to respect" (March 6, 1857),3 with the fact that the Iberian slave had access to the courts. The Anglo-Saxon 'slave' was a thing, not a person. The Spanish slave was a person without liberty. The laws and customs relating to slavery were codified in centralised Portugal and Spain as early as 1263-5. The Las Siete Partidas del Roy Alfonso specifies the rights of a slave in detail. For instance: 'If married slaves owned by separate masters could not live together because of distance, the church should persuade one or the other to sell his slave. If neither of the masters could be persuaded, the church was to buy one of them so that the married slaves could live together'.4
What, then, of the antonym of 'slavery' — 'freedom'? The meaning of this word too must be inextricably connected to the historical experience of the people. Thus, freedom and democracy mean little in the Iberian world — Spain and Portugal were both dictatorships until the other day, and Latin America has the perpetual caudillo — whereas some form of participatory government and the associated idea of liberty persisted throughout Greek, Republican Roman and Western European history as the reflex of slavery and exclusion. Centralised, absolutist states are more 'free' than democratic, decentralised polities. Where you cannot lose your freedom, the concept cannot arise. And a strong, 'despotic' state precludes slavery for it would entail loyalty of slaves to private persons, rather than, as observed, to the 'despot'.
According to W. V. Quine, nothing can count as the unique meaning of a word or expression; meaning is indeterminate. Why? Because meaning is inextricably connected with behaviour, which in turn is connected to a world-view. Thus, words acquire meaning only in relation to their place in the language and the world-view. "...people feel drawn to a mentalistic account of language, despite the conspicuous fact that language is a social enterprise...."5 Thus we cannot translate the English words slave or free into other languages: the differing world-views, that is, historical experiences, would not permit such translation.
The same conclusion is reached via the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Wittgenstein's stress on the connection between linguistic activity and a 'way of life'.6
Notes:
1 'slave', The Chambers Twenty-first Century Dictionary (New Delhi: Allied Publishers (India) Ltd, 2000)
2 William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1955), p. 43
3 'Dred Scott decision', Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol.4, p. 218
4 Eric Dunning, 'Race Relations', in Geoffrey Hurd (ed.), Human Societies, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 158, 165 - 166
5 W.V. Quine, "Mind and Verbal Dispositions", Meaning and Reference, p. 81
6 'translation', A Dictionary Of Philosophy, ed. Antony Flew (London: Pan Books, 1979)
Every culture has its antipodes, and for the Greeks it was freedom-unfreedom, for the Near East, government-anarchy, where slavery was insignificant.1 The ratio of slaves to free citizens, in the wealthiest period and part of Greece, Periclean Athens, was 3:2,2 and yet her wealth paled next to the oriental states. The very meaning of freedom derived from its antithesis — slavery. In Asia, large-scale slavery had never been practiced.3 Egypt had no concept of slavery and slaves, in any recognisable form, never appeared until the Egyptian Empire — yet were still a minuscule part of the labour force4; household slaves were easily assimilated5. In China, slaves comprised only 1% of the total population and had a very different status from that of Greco-Roman slaves!6 The corresponding ratio for Attica around 431 BC is between 25-33%.7 However, in Greece, too, Hellenistic despotism entailed the disappearance of slavery8 — and its re-emergence with the Roman Republic and, again, its disappearance with the Empire9. Freedom has no meaning unless the possibility of losing it is real. A monarchy, or centralized state, tolerates only a minimum of slaves, being jealous of their loyalty, which, if it is directed at all, will be directed towards the master. Likewise, it will set a high premium on stability, and a high discount on freedom, as the Greeks knew it ('eleutheron'),10 being habituated to government, unlike the Greeks, and unused to anarchy.
Homer, by rendering anarchy romantic, rendered death beautiful; Gilgamesh, by assuming government, achieved the reverse. Both affirm life. The Greek affirms life through the Other, as togetherness, the Mesopotamian through the Third, the state, as separateness. The Greek other may be free or a slave, necessarily, for Otherness implies either equality or subordination. The obsessive pursuit of 'glory', also, betrays the Other taking notes: 'arete', excellence, resides as much in the self as the non-self. The earthly immortality of fame, the life-in-death, contrasts with slavery, the death-in-life. Agamemnon and Achilles quarrel, not only over a slave-girl, but over a prize: the Iliad commences with the conflict between life-in-death, the prize, and death-in-life, the slave. With the Ego and the non-Ego so inextricated, without the extricating Third, the Iliad becomes a monument to the ideas of moira (fate) and hybris (excess). A man should stay within his moira, the kingdom of his self, and not transgress it through hybris, where the non-egos reside: though Ate (Folly, personified as a goddess) inveigle him thither, yet will he be visited by divine vengeance, personified as Nemesis.
The Third, in Gilgamesh, appears as the tyrannical king, who meets his alter ego, a wild man civilised. The humanised brute remonstrates with the dehumanised king, and Enkidu and Gilgamesh become one, the best of friends. When Enkidu gets into a funk before the terrible Huwawa, it is the other's turn to remonstrate.
"Mere man - his days are numbered,As expected, the reversal of Agamemnon and Achilles' roles as inextricated egos appears as the love of Gilgamesh for Enkidu. The non-ego does not threaten the ego, because both egos reside in the Third, Gilgamesh. Whereas Achilles retains his identity, moira and all, Gilgamesh relinquishes his individuality to become a relationship: king-and-friend. The demise of the non-ego buries hopes of immortality through fame, an exposé of its counterfeit existence, life-in-death. Death, in Gilgamesh, appears, not as the end of existence alone, but the end of a relationship. He'd been more than willing to brave it when the Other had been alive, to live on in the Other. The Third extricates egos so completely, as to leave no hope for immortality. In the Iliad, the Other has been thoroughly internalised, so that Achilles appears as his own spectator, choosing death, as much for himself, as for Others-in-him. Odysseus, rejecting immortality,11 affirms life, through the Other (his wife), by refusing to relinquish their common, extricated humanity, their togetherness. Gilgamesh finds no Other within him. The enjoyment of life was inextricably connected with the enjoyment of Others, not in-him, but in-the-state, outside him. Yet he is the state, and as the very principle of Otherness incarnate, must, since anarchy is intolerable, wish to continue ad infinitum, as immortality denied externally, that humanity may be affirmed internally, for one never witnesses one's own death, only others do. Thus life is affirmed through the Third, as separateness, not through the Other, as togetherness.
whatever he may do, he is but wind.
You are - already now - afraid of death.
Where is the fine strength of your courage?
Let me lead,
and you (tarrying) call out to me : 'Close in, fear not!'
And if I fall, I shall have founded fame.
'Gilgamesh fell (they will say) in combat with terrible Huwawa'."
But orientalists must sorely be missing the priest-ridden society amidst this scene of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They must, I am afraid, content themselves with the initial piety of the drama. Weary, not of this world, but of a king's misrule, his subjects raise their voices in prayer, and the gods are not deaf to their plea.
"Gilgamesh leaves not the son to his father;The oriental dichotomy of government-anarchy appears as life-death, while the Greek antithesis freedom-unfreedom assumes the form of life-in-death, death-in-life — he becomes otherworldly only when he's disappointed in the Third, the Greek being both-worldly at the same time. The Epic belongs to the Early Dynastic Period, between 2700 — 2400 BC, the Heroic Age of Mesopotamian literature, just as Homer (800 BC) belongs to the Late Dark Age, the Heroic Age of Greece. In both cases, a process of secularisation was taking place, to culminate soon in city-states, but in the one instance to be ruled by kings (such as Gilgamesh of Uruk), in the other to be 'ruled' by the many. The passing of the sceptre from the gods to their temporal potentates occurs at the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period, a turning away from the other world.12
Day and night are unbridled his arrogance.
Yet this is Gilgamesh, the shepherd of Uruk.
He should be our shepherd: strong, stately and wise!
Gilgamesh leaves not the maid to her mother..."
To satisfy, and silence, the clamorous demand for priests, once and for all, we shall adduce the Egyptian example, the hierocracy par excellence. The absence of hardly any evidence of personal religion during the Old Kingdom disappoints expectation. The moment anarchy reigns in the Pharaoh's stead, in the First Intermediate Period, the worst suspicions regarding the thanatomania of the East are confirmed. The universalisation of posthumous identification with Osiris, hitherto only a pharaonic prerogative, coupled with the vulgarisation of the Pyramid Texts on common coffins, signals the dispersion of sovereignty among the populace.
The Dispute of a Man, Weary of Life, a poem born of anarchic conditions, betrays a terribly disappointed reliance on the Third. It is an internal debate regarding suicide, 'to be or not to be'.
To whom can I speak today?Other variations harp on the same theme, being of the same age, The First Intermediate Period:
The gentle man has perished,
The violent man has access to everybody.
To whom can I speak today?
There are no righteous men,
The earth is surrendered to criminals.
. . . . . . . . .
Death stands before me today
Like the recovery of a sick man,
Like going outdoors again after being confined.
Death stands before me today
As a man longs to see his house,
After he has spent many years held in captivity.
. . . . . . . . .
Nay, but he who is yonder
Shall be a living god,
Inflicting punishment upon the doer of evil.
Nay, but he who is yonder
Shall be a man of wisdom,
Not stopped from appealing to Re when he speaks.13
Men shall fashion arrows of copper, that they may beg for bread with blood. Men laugh with a laughter of disease.14The fact that Hellas had been schooled in anarchy must not tempt us to infer an insouciant disregard for political unrest. During the Dark Ages, anarchy in the political sphere found a complementary anarchy in the spiritual, the pre-Homeric orgiastic cult of Dionysus.15 To regard the Homeric epics as a civilising passage to more settled times strains our credulity today, but they were a penultimate progression towards a secular view of existence.16 The deus ex machine of the Delphic oracle and the Eleusinian mysteries were psychic poultice during the revolt of the underprivileged against the nobles. Tellingly, it was the coincidental tyrannies17 which, as auxiliary to the aphoristic endeavours of the oracle enjoining one to 'Know thyself' and 'Be moderate', succeeded in mending the fracture sociale — the nearest approximation of Hellas to oriental despotism and piety.18 More telling was the ultimate secularisation of society under the Athenian Empire, when the gods were perceived as otiose at best, and inimical at worst.
There is no Zeus.The execution of the epitome of rationality, Socrates, for impiety, startles us into recognition of the subterranean existence of religious feeling,19 proclaiming that Greece and the Near East share a dual view of life and death, without monopoly over this-worldliness or other-worldliness. A political chasm indeed there was, which contributed, and still contributes, through a belief in the superiority or inferiority of one system over another, to viewing civilisations across the gulf as decadent or dignified.
Young vortex reigns, and he has turned out Zeus. —(Aristophanes)
Notes:
1 Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, (London: New Left Books, 1974), p. 21
2 Ibid., p. 22
3 Ibid., P. 21
4 William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, p. 47
5 John R. Baines, Egypt, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 146
6 S.E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, p. 502; Jacque Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilisation, trans. J.R.Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 150
7 William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, p. 9
8 Ibid., pp 39-41
9 Ibid., pp. 63, 101 – 102, 113 - 117
10 .E.Finer, The History of Government from the Earliest Times, pp. 323 – 324: Two centuries divide Homer and the innovation of chattel slavery; yet, the political conditions of the Homeric period were fecund with hints of the coming bondage of the masses. Indeed, this article's central argument is that political conditions caused the psychological preparedness for the coexistence of democracy and slavery.
11 The Odyssey, Book V, trans. Samuel Butler, The Internet Classics Archive
12 V.Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself, (London: Watts & Co., 1956), p. 154
13 Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), pp. 141-144
14 Ibid., p. 86
15 J.B. Bury & Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece, p. 194
16 John Richard Thornhill Pollard, Ancient European Religions, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 912
17 J.B. Bury & Russell Meiggs, A History of Greece, p. 113
18 Alfred Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth, 5th ed. (New York: Random House, 1931), p. 116-121
19 Russell Meiggs, Classical Greco-Roman Civilisation, Encyclopaedia Britannica, p. 274
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