Personification in the Greek World

From Antiquity to Byzantium

Judith Herrin, Emma Stafford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351911771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Personification, the anthropomorphic representation of any non-human thing, is a ubiquitous feature of ancient Greek literature and art. Natural phenomena (earth, sky, rivers), places (cities, countries), divisions of time (seasons, months, a lifetime), states of the body (health, sleep, death), emotions (love, envy, fear), and political concepts (victory, democracy, war) all appear in human, usually female, form. Some have only fleeting incarnations, others become widely-recognised figures, and others again became so firmly established as deities in the imagination of the community that they received elements of cult associated with the Olympian gods. Though often seen as a feature of the Hellenistic period, personifications can be found in literature, art and cult from the Archaic period onwards; with the development of the art of allegory in the Hellenistic period, they came to acquire more 'intellectual' overtones; the use of allegory as an interpretative tool then enabled personifications to survive the advent of Christianity, to remain familiar figures in the art and literature of Late Antiquity and beyond. The twenty-one papers presented here cover personification in Greek literature, art and religion from its pre-Homeric origins to the Byzantine period. Classical Athens features prominently, but other areas of both mainland Greece and the Greek East are well represented. Issues which come under discussion include: problems of identification and definition; the question of gender; the status of personifications in relation to the gods; the significance of personification as a literary device; the uses and meanings of personification in different visual media; personification as a means of articulating place, time and worldly power. The papers reflect the enormous range of contexts in which personification occurs, indicating the ubiquity of the phenomenon in the ancient Greek world.

PART I

ORIGINS AND VARYING MODES OF PERSONIFICATION

1

Hesiod in context: abstractions and divinities in an Aegean-Eastern koiné

Walter Burkert

Personification is a meeting of linguistics, morality and religion in the house of rhetoric. Such a statement is, of course, highly rhetorical in itself. Personificatio is a post-medieval translation of the Greek προσωποποιία, which forms a chapter in the schoolbooks of rhetoric.¹ It used to enjoy high esteem and produced characteristic texts, from the Pinax of Kebes and the Psychomachia of Prudentius down to The Pilgrim’s Progress of John Bunyan (1678), and baroque iconography. In consequence it has suffered from the general debunking of rhetoric. In the age of romanticism, at the threshold of the modern world, rhetoric appeared ‘cold’, simplistic and superfluous. In recent decades, though, it has been recovering as it gradually becomes part of the advertising industry and the selling business.

In Classical studies it has always been clear that personification could not be disregarded, and that it was not secondary or ‘late’ by any standards. Personification is right there with Homer and Hesiod, it constitutes an integral part of poetic craft in Pindar, it dominates the pronouncements of wisdom, and it is hardly less productive in later poetic and philosophical texts; it expands into public manifestations of iconography and cult. It demands respect on any count.

Personification is a complex phenomenon which unfolds at several levels, linguistic and poetic, speculative and religious; it is the interaction or confusion of these aspects that makes it fascinating. On the linguistic side, personification has to do with abstracts, and this may hurt romantic feelings about religion; so there has been a tendency to search for deeper roots. Hermann Usener, in his book Göttemamen, posed the question whether language originally had any abstracts: should we not think of gods or demons instead, powers experienced in some primitive ‘mentality’?² The idea of demons prior to abstracts has been taken up now and again.³ Yet while the constructs of primitive mentality have lost favour in more modern anthropology, linguistics leaves no doubt that there are abstracts not only in Indoeuropean, but also in Semitic, and in Egyptian, with explicit linguistic forms to characterize them. For Indoeuropean, think of the formations on -tus and -tas, -τυς and -της in Greek – φιλότης, sanitas – and the forms in -ία, such as φιλία, ὁμόνοια, concordia. In Semitic there are other equally well-established suffixes or prefixes for abstracts; even the preponderance of female forms for abstracts is characteristic in both language groups, Semitic and Indoeuropean. To search beyond abstracts means to go beyond attested and reconstructable linguistics. The emergence of human language lies far back in the mists of prehistory, and the creation of gods, too, antedates Homer and Hesiod by several thousand years. Usener’s question about how a personal god originated had already been firmly answered by the Egyptians and Sumerians. Thus the questions surrounding personification will be less about the origins of either abstracts or gods than about forms and functions of a widely accepted usage.

Max Miiller spoke of mythology as a ‘language disease’. It is possible to approach personification from such an angle: language has substantives of various categories, and verbs which are normally based on human activities: to give, to get, to go, to come, to run, to hit, to have sex, to give birth. ‘Personification’ occurs if abstracts meet with anthropomorphic verbs: fear has stricken me, or sorrow eats my heart, while time is running by. As abstracts come alive, a fantasy world of roaming significations comes into being which makes its impact on mentalities, and on religion in particular. Personifications of natural forces are parallel and often overlapping, as is the introduction of plants and animals into tales commonly called ‘fables’. But we shall keep to personifications of abstracts here. Note that the abstract meaning does not disappear in these cases (whereas etymological meaning does disappear in a personal name); it stays there. Thus language keeps pursuing a delicate path between normal reality and linguistic fantasy, and risks plunging into either the abstruse or the ridiculous. There are restrictions of compatibility in natural language, which are sometimes debatable: ‘the foot of time’, a metaphor of Euripides, seemed ridiculous rather than sublime to Aristophanes;⁴ ‘the tooth of time’, ‘der Zahn der Zeit’ is common in English and German, though absent from Greek, it would seem.⁵ The secret of personification is that a clash of semantics should produce new sense, not nonsense.

There has been quite a tradition of reflections on and profound studies of personification from Jacob Grimm and Hermann Usener onwards. Pride of place still goes to Ludwig Deubner’s magisterial article in Roschers Mythologisches Lexikon of 1903.⁶ Theoretical discussions are not to be pursued here. Instead this study aims to demonstrate something less well known, namely that Hesiod, in his use of personifications, is neither isolated nor an absolute beginning, but rather part of a Near Eastern-Aegean koiné. Parallels are clearly attested in adjacent cultures of the ancient world. Personification thus proves to be older than expected, and more common, common even to quite different languages in comparable forms.

I shall adduce, first, some parallels in what I call the rhetoric of wisdom, and some examples of more elaborate imagery; there will be a brief look at the interplay of symbolism and iconography in allegorical representation, and finally the religious history of personifications will be explored to some extent.

The rhetoric of wisdom

To begin with Mesopotamia: in Sumerian, Akkadian and Hittite, the Sun God, Shamash, is a great god, celebrated in various hymns and rituals; his constant companions are Kittu and Misharu, which mean ‘Order’ and ‘Right’. The evidence covers more than a millennium.⁷ Both kittu and misharu are common Akkadian words, clearly understandable, derived from roots in common use meaning ‘to stabilize’ and ‘to set in order’ respectively; both are marked as abstracts by common, if different, suffixes and prefixes. Misharu is the ‘beloved messenger’ or ‘satellite’ of Shamash,⁸ even Ishtar ‘loves Misharu’,⁹ and Kittu is also called ‘the daughter of the Sun God’.¹⁰ It can also be said that Kittu is the Sun God’s satellite to the right, and Misharu is his satellite to the left.¹¹ Satellites characterize a ruler, as he processes or drives his chariot with the appropriate retinue. That the Sun God, who sees everything and brings light to everything, is linked to Right and Order, and Right and Order thus have their supreme guardian, this is the continuing message; of course this can be expressed in other forms of discourse too.¹²

As a first parallel, an Old Testament Psalm may be quoted, addressing Jahweh:¹³ ‘Justice (ṣädäq) and Right (mishpat) are the props of your throne, Grace (chäsäd) and Faithfulness (ämäf) go before your face.’ Here Justice has Grace as its complement, and the image of the throne is added to the image of the procession; the common rhetoric is unmistakeable, even if ‘objectification’ is added to personification.

Now take the solemn proclamation in Plato’s Laws (715e): ‘God, comprising beginning, end and middle of everything, according to an ancient logos, is proceeding on his straight way, pursuing a natural circle; Justice (Dike) follows him, meting out punishment to those who fall behind the divine Law.’ Plato’s God assumes the characteristics of a celestial body, following a ‘natural circle’ – we know the image from Plato’s Phaedms, where the gods move across the cupola of heaven. The Cretan city to be construed in the Laws is to worship Apollo-Helios as their central god. And Dike is seen moving in the retinue of the heavenly god. I am not arguing for influence. At least there is Orpheus in between: we know that the ‘ancient logos’ referred to by Plato is the theogony of Orpheus; the Derveni papyrus has restored just the relevant verse about beginning, middle and end.¹⁴ Instead of ‘God’ Orpheus has ‘Zeus’; the Orphic verse about Dike is extant, too, from another quotation: ‘Upon him Dike, much-punishing, was following, asserting right for all’ (τῶι δε Δίκη πολύποινος ἐφέσπετο πᾶσιν ἀρωγός).¹⁵ Note that we get the past tense, as befits a theogony of the Derveni type. The verse is echoed in the proem of Parmenides (B 1.14), as he describes the Gate of Day and Night: ‘of these, Dike, much-punishing, holds the alternate bolts’ (τῶν δε Δίκη πολύποινος ἔχει κληῖδας ἀμοιβούς) – opening and shutting the gate in the ‘just’ rhythm of day. Justice personified, in Parmenides as in Orpheus and in Plato, appears within a cosmic scenery. I am not arguing for direct dependence of Orpheus’ on Akkadian literature either, nor would I totally exclude it. The common background is the ‘going forth’ o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• List of Figures
• Editors’ Introduction
• Part I Origins and varying modes of personification
• Part II Personification in myth and cult
• Part III The poet and his work
• Part IV Looking at personifications
• Part V Images of power, time and place
• Consolidated Bibliography
• Index
• Index of Modern Authors