The Philosophical Stage

Drama and Dialectic in Classical Athens

Joshua Billings

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691211114
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Drama
• Index: Literature

A bold new reconception of ancient Greek drama as a mode of philosophical thinking The Philosophical Stage offers an innovative approach to ancient Greek literature and thought that places drama at the heart of intellectual history. Drawing on evidence from tragedy and comedy, Joshua Billings shines new light on the development of early Greek philosophy, arguing that drama is our best source for understanding the intellectual culture of classical Athens.In this incisive book, Billings recasts classical Greek intellectual history as a conversation across discourses and demonstrates the significance of dramatic reflections on widely shared theoretical questions. He argues that neither "literature" nor "philosophy" was a defined category in the fifth century BCE, and develops a method of reading dramatic form as a structured investigation of issues at the heart of the emerging discipline of philosophy.A breathtaking work of intellectual history by one of today's most original classical scholars, The Philosophical Stage presents a novel approach to ancient drama and sets a path for a renewed understanding of early Greek thought.

1

Catalogs and Culture

IN PLATO’S Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about invention:

Ἤκουσα τοίνυν περὶ Ναύκρατιν τῆς Αἰγύπτου γενέσθαι τῶν ἐκεῖ παλαιῶν τινα θεῶν, οὗ καὶ τὸ ὄρνεον ἱερὸν ὃ δὴ καλοῦσιν Ἶβιν· αὐτῷ δὲ ὄνομα τῷ δαίμονι εἶναι Θεύθ. τοῦτον δὴ πρῶτον ἀριθμόν τε καὶ λογισμὸν εὑρεῖν καὶ γεωμετρίαν καὶ ἀστρονομίαν, ἔτι δὲ πεττείας τε καὶ κυβείας, καὶ δὴ καὶ γράμματα. βασιλέως δ’ αὖ τότε ὄντος Αἰγύπτου ὅλης Θαμοῦ περὶ τὴν μεγάλην πόλιν τοῦ ἄνω τόπου ἣν οἱ Ἕλληνες Αἰγυπτίας Θήβας καλοῦσι, καὶ τὸν θεὸν Ἄμμωνα, παρὰ τοῦτον ἐλθὼν ὁ Θεὺθ τὰς τέχνας ἐπέδειξεν, καὶ ἔφη δεῖν διαδοθῆναι τοῖς ἄλλοις Αἰγυπτίοις· ὁ δὲ ἤρετο ἥντινα ἑκάστη ἔχοι ὠφελίαν, διεξιόντος δέ, ὅτι καλῶς ἢ μὴ καλῶς δοκοῖ λέγειν, τὸ μὲν ἔψεγεν, τὸ δ’ ἐπῄνει. (274c–d)

Well then, I heard that at Naucratis in Egypt there was one of the ancient gods of the place, whose sacred bird is the one they call Ibis. The name of the divinity himself was Theuth. And he was the first to invent number and calculation, and geometry and astronomy, and also draughts and dice, and best of all, letters. At that time Thamus was the king of all Egypt surrounding the great city of the upper part, which the Greeks call Egyptian Thebes, and the god they call Ammon. Theuth came to him and displayed his skills, and he said they should be given to the other Egyptians. And Thamus asked him what benefit each of them had, and when Theuth explained, as he seemed to speak well or badly, some Thamus blamed and some he praised.

What follows is the famous critique of writing, in which Thamus rejects the technology of letters on the grounds that it will serve merely as an “elixir of reminding” (275a: ὑπομνήσεως φάρμακον) rather than of memory, making humans “apparently wise” (275b: δοξόσοφοι) rather than truly so.¹ The myth is likely a Platonic invention, but Socrates emphasizes the antiquity of the events it describes: it is a story (ἀκοή, literally, “thing heard”) of “those earlier” (τῶν προτέρων), and concerns “one of the ancient gods” (274c: παλαιῶν τινα θεῶν) of Egypt, a civilization thought to be much older than the Greeks.² Despite this exotic background, the content of the story nevertheless evokes familiar Greek myths of invention, which seem to have gained a particular salience in the later fifth century, as part of a widespread interest in human skills or crafts.³ Moreover, the context of the telling points directly to the myth’s application to the contemporary practice of rhetoric, a theme from the beginning of the dialogue.⁴ Locating the myth among the Egyptian gods has the effect of placing its events outside of historical time, even as the thrust of the telling points to its timeliness as a comment on writing and rhetoric in the sophistic era.

Though Socrates is most of all interested in the invention of writing and its consequences, the myth suggests a much wider view of human culture. The inventions that Socrates attributes to Theuth constitute a minor catalog, organized from the substantial (“he invented numbers and calculation”) to the relatively trivial (“and also draughts and dice”), and capped by the most important, “and best of all [καὶ δὴ καί], letters.” Theuth’s innovations relate broadly to numeracy: with the crucial exception of letters, all the items mentioned can be understood as developments of the invention of number.⁵ As this chapter will show, the inventions of Theuth were widely attributed to the Greek hero Palamedes, and would probably have been recognizable as such.⁶ In transferring these inventions from a Greek hero to an Egyptian god, the myth places the sources of culture at a deep remove, and leaves open the question of how the Greeks gained these inventions (not to mention how writing was introduced in Egypt after its initial rejection). Thamus’ response to the inventions of Theuth suggests a general skepticism of innovation: accepting some but not others, he addresses Theuth as technikōtatos (274e: “most skillful,” or even “most inventive”), which turns out to be a rather equivocal distinction, as Thamus goes on to reject Theuth’s prized technē.⁷ Inventiveness, it appears, is not a good in itself, but must be judged by the uses to which it is put. On the whole, the myth suggests a pessimism concerning invention, a concern that advances in human technology could prove setbacks in human culture as a whole.⁸

Socrates’ skepticism concerning inventors and inventions is extreme but not unique. The Phaedrus myth emerges from a wider discourse concerning the sources of culture, which attributes lists of inventions or capacities to discrete individuals, divine or human, or to culture generally. These lists frequently express a sense of doubt or pessimism concerning the apparent advances of human culture, doubts which tend to center on the authority of the inventor, and specifically, the relation between human abilities and divine power. The myth’s suggestion that mortals are better off without certain inventions speaks to tensions within a wider effort to grasp human cultural achievement and locate humanity in relation to the gods. This chapter will trace these tensions in Attic drama, where they concentrate around the form of the “cultural catalog,” a listing of inventions, gifts, or capacities that provides an image of culture as a whole, and reflects on the sources of authority and power in human existence. So much was evident already in Socrates’ myth, which, despite its relatively simple list of inventions, set out a series of hierarchies—among the gods and between gods and humans—that determined the role of invention as an ambiguous mediation between mortals and divinity.

A central preoccupation of all the catalogs is the place of humans in the hierarchy of existence—subjected to gods on one hand, but ascendant over (nonhuman) animals on the other.⁹ The most salient conceptual differences arise from different ways of figuring relations of power—of the gods over humans, and of humans over animals. Humans’ mastery of their environment appears in the dramatic catalogs as one of the essential achievements of culture, and often as a mark of ascent from an initial, animal-like phase of existence.¹⁰ At the same time, all the catalogs retain an acute consciousness of divine power, which can be viewed either negatively, as a limitation on human capacity, or positively, as the source of human achievement. The catalogs do not take categories of “human,” “animal,” and “divine” for granted, but construct them out of observed and imagined processes. This construction yields an aporetic picture to careful reading, which throws into question the authority of the speakers and the content of their catalogs. I understand this tendency of the catalogs to undermine their own claims as revealing an anxiety, present in Socrates’ myth as well, concerning the sources of culture: whether it is an achievement of humans or the gods, and what its ultimate value is. This is an element of a much broader questioning of divinity and the role of the gods in human affairs that will be explored, in different ways, throughout the study, and is, I will argue, the major motivation behind the catalog’s attempt to fix the human place in the cosmos.

The chapter will follow different forms of the cultural catalog from the relatively simple (and probably historically prior) speeches of Palamedes and Prometheus to the more dramatically complex catalogs of Theseus in Euripides’ Suppliants and the first stasimon of the Antigone. In all these texts, I will argue, the cultural catalog seeks to grasp the essential elements of human culture and understand the relationship to divinity. Yet instead of yielding a clear picture of human and divine agency, the rhetoric and staging of the catalogs have a tendency to complicate the theological issues they raise. Finally, I turn for comparison to the “Sisyphus fragment” attributed to Critias, which shows an extreme form of such theological questioning, and also illustrates a major formal difference between the cultural catalog and developmental narratives of human civilization, which seem to have circulated around the same time. The cultural catalog emerges as a form that is at once distinctive in the intellectual work it does and informed by the most urgent questions of fifth-century intellectual culture.

Cataloguing the Human

A literary catalog is more and less than the items it contains. More, in the sense that the power...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on the Text
• Introduction: Tragedy in the Philosophical Age of the Greeks
• 1. Catalogs and Culture
• 2. Intrigue and Ontology
• 3. Agōn and Authority
• Conclusion: The Stages of Early Greek Thought
• Works Cited
• Index