Antonio Gramsci and the Ancient World

Emilio Zucchetti, Anna Maria Cimino, Emilio Zucchetti, Anna Maria Cimino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032021317
• eBook ISBN: 9780429513787
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Antonio Gramsci and the Ancient World explores the relationship between the work of the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci and the study of classical antiquity.

The collection of essays engages with Greek and Roman history, literature, society, and culture, offering a range of perspectives and approaches building on Gramsci's theoretical insights, especially from his Prison Notebooks. The volume investigates both Gramsci's understanding and reception of the ancient world, including his use of ancient sources and modern historiography, and the viability of applying some of his key theoretical insights to the study of Greek and Roman history and literature. The chapters deal with the ideas of hegemony, passive revolution, Caesarism, and the role of intellectuals in society, offering a complex and diverse exploration of this intersection.

With its fascinating mixture of topics, this volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of classics, ancient history, classical reception studies, Marxism and history, and those studying Antonio Gramsci's works in particular.

1Negotiating hegemony in early Greek poetry

Laura Swift

Gramsci's ideas regard cultural production as inextricably bound up with the political and economic forces that influence a given period. In Gramscian discourse, this process of mutual exchange and interaction is a hegemonic process, and is central to understanding the relationship between culture and political power.¹ The essential concept that texts and artists cannot be understood in isolation, but must be viewed in the context of wider social and political forces, is one with which scholars of early Greek literature are nowadays well familiar, though the terminology we use (‘Sitz im Leben’, ‘performance context’) differs from that used by Gramscian theorists. Thus, despite the obvious differences between the XX century state and its institutions, and the communities of the archaic Greek world, Gramsci's approach to culture can shed light on the literature of that period. In fact, Gramsci's writings place a great deal of emphasis on the role of ‘common sense’ and shared values in creating a cultural and social ideology which upholds the power of the ruling elite.² For Gramsci, ‘common sense’ is an aggregated set of beliefs, which is not systematic or coherent, but reflects the conglomeration of what most people believe.³ ‘Common sense’ is intrinsically fragmentary and inconsistent, even within the mind of an individual, but it holds great power as a seat of popular morality, and it forms the backdrop to the decision-making processes and life choices of people born and socialised within that system. Engaging with it is thus the starting point for any attempt at social transformation. Far from seeing ideology as something externally imposed, Gramsci's analysis perceives it as a shared and lived experience, rooted in ordinary people's core assumptions.⁴ The importance of poetry in Greek culture as an educational and moral tool means that it can be well understood through this theoretical framework. Early Greek poetry often draws on a shared set of normative tropes and assumptions, which are not the invention of any particular thinker, nor do they represent a systematic philosophy. Nevertheless, they are presented by the poets (and by later Greek writers who quote them) as embodiments of wisdom and accepted belief within the community. Thus, the early Greek poets offer us, in Gramscian terms, a rich collective expression of their society's ‘common sense’, as well as highlighting the cultural power that such prescriptions can hold.

This chapter will argue that Gramscian approaches can offer scholars of Greek literature an insightful way to investigate the political and socio-economic affiliations of the texts they study, and that reading them through this lens can help us to better understand the cultural values they propagate, and how and why they might do so. It will examine how early Greek poetry represents the relationship and tensions between dominant and subordinate social groups, and how the morality proffered by poetry can be understood as a battleground in that struggle. It will do so with particular reference to three authors: Homer, Hesiod, and Archilochus. The ideological weight attached to them in the Hellenic tradition invites such a selection: each of them is identified by later authors as possessing particular cultural authority and a claim to represent accepted morality. For example, Homer and Hesiod are ascribed authority (whether this is accepted or challenged) by several ancient authors on matters ranging from religion to how to lead a good life.⁵ Similarly, ancient sources frequently liken Archilochus to Homer and Hesiod, establishing these three poets as particular exemplars of a moralising tradition.⁶ Their possession of authority is also attested by traditions that present this as contested between them, ranging from the story told in the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, where Homer and Hesiod compete to be recognised as the wisest poet, to Dio Chrysostom's remarks on the rival traditions of praise and blame represented by Homer and Archilochus (Or. 33.11–12), or Cratinus’ comedy Archilochoi (‘Archilochus and his followers’), which staged a competition between Archilochus and Homer and Hesiod.⁷ In these accounts, what is at stake is not merely the quality of the poetry, but also the social values represented by each poet. Thus, in the Contest, the prize is awarded to Hesiod, despite a recognition that Homer's poetry is superior, because his poetry deals with peaceful rather than warlike activities. It is tempting to see this victory as reflecting not only on the superiority of peace to war, but also on the values of the humble and dikē-(or justice-)loving farmer over those of the quarrelsome aristocratic heroes. Similarly, it is likely that the contest between Archilochus and the other poets in Cratinus was not simply aesthetic but took account of the civic benefits of different types of poetry, a topic that Dio addresses in his comparison of Homer and Archilochus, where he argues that criticism fulfils a more useful social role than praise. From a Gramscian perspective, this makes their work valuable, since the texts were already in antiquity considered politically charged and linked to particular social structures and ideologies.

The starting point for my analysis of these poets will be the interplay of consent and coercion in the maintenance of hegemonic power, which represents one of Gramsci's most important contributions.⁸ In Gramsci's thought, this is vividly expressed through his redeployment of Machiavelli's image of the centaur, where the combination of beast and man in a single creature represents “the levels of force and of consent, authority and hegemony, violence and civilisation”.⁹ This concept is often discussed with reference to the mechanisms of the modern state: for example, the coercive elements of a modern democracy such as the police or army, which operate alongside the consensual power embedded in the electoral system. Yet the dialectic between consent and coercion is equally applicable to early Greek political thought and is an idea we find regularly in Greek poetry, which has much to say on how the power of elite groups is maintained.

Coercion and consent among Hesiodic beasts and men

Perhaps the most explicit engagement with the interplay between consent and coercion is found in Hesiod's ainos (or fable) of the hawk and the nightingale in Works and Days. On the face of it, the story seems a troubling account of how the tyrannical coercion exerted by the powerful is used to suppress those weaker than them (202–12):

νῦν δ’ αἶνον βασιλεῦσιν ἐϱέω φϱονέουσι καὶ αὐτοῖς·

ὧδ’ ἴϱηξ πϱοσέειπεν ἀηδόνα ποικιλόδειϱον

ὕψι μάλ’ ἐν νεφέεσσι φέϱων ὀνύχεσσι μεμαϱπώς·

ἣ δ’ ἐλεόν, γναμπτοῖσι πεπαϱμένη ἀμφ’ ὀνύχεσσι, (205)

μύϱετο· τὴν ὅ γ’ ἐπικϱατέως πϱὸς μῦθον ἔειπεν·

“δαιμονίη, τί λέληκας; ἔχει νύ σε πολλὸν ἀϱείων·

τῇ δ’ εἶς ·æó σ’ ἂν ἐγώ πεϱ ἄγω καὶ ἀοιδὸν ἐοῦσαν·

δεῖπνον δ’, αἴ κ’ ἐθέλω, ποιήσομαι ·º†ὲ μεθήσω.

ἄφϱων δ’, ὅς κ’ ἐθέλῃ πϱὸς κϱείσσονας ἀντιφεϱίζειν· (210)

νίκης τε στέϱεται πϱός τ’ αἴσχεσιν ἄλγεα πάσχει.”

·Ω£ς ἔφατ’ ὠκυπέτης ἴϱηξ, τανυσίπτεϱος ὄϱνις.

And now I will tell a fable to kings who themselves too have understanding. This is how the hawk addressed the colorful-necked nightingale, carrying her high up among the clouds, grasping her with its claws, while she wept piteously, pierced by the curved claws; he said to her forcefully, ‘Silly bird, why are you crying out? One far superior to you is holding you. You are going wherever I shall carry you, even if you are a singer. I shall make you my dinner if I wish, or I shall let you go. Stupid he who would wish to contend against those stronger than he is: for he is deprived of the victory and suffers pains in addition to his humiliations.’ So spoke the swift-flying hawk, the long-winged bird.¹⁰

The fable opens by stressing the physical coercion applied by the hawk to control his social inferior: we are told twice in two lines that he grips her with his talons (ὀνύχεσσι, 204, 205), and the second occurrence heightens the sense of overweening force as we are told that the claws not only restrain but also pierce the flesh of the nightingale.¹¹ The hawk's speech posits a model whereby the weak are powerless against their superiors, and he upbraids the nightingale even for crying over her fate (207). Whether she lives or dies is entirely at the hawk's whim, and he warns her that any attempt to overthrow this order will simply lead to further physical punishment (211). The hawk frames resistance not merely as futile but as ‘stupid’ (ἄφϱων, 210), literally lacking mind or sanity, thus suggesting that the hierarchy from which he benefits is ‘common sense’, which it would be madness to rebel against. This parable is framed as a piece of advice to the kings (202), whose social status makes them the most likely analogues to the hawk...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figure and table
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The reception of Gramsci’s thought in historical and classical studies
• 1 Negotiating hegemony in early Greek poetry
• 2 Upside-down hegemony? Ideology and power in ancient Athens
• 3 Gramsci and ancient philosophy: Prelude to a study
• 4 A Gramscian approach to ancient slavery
• 5 The Etruscan question: An academic controversy in the Prison Notebook
• 6 Polybios and the rise of Rome: Gramscian hegemony, intellectuals, and passive revolution
• 7 Antonio Gramsci between ancient and modern imperialism
• 8 Plebeian tribunes and cosmopolitan intellectuals: Gramsci’s approach to the late Roman Republic
• 9 Between Caesarism and Cosmopolitanism: Julius Caesar as an Historical Problem in Gramsci
• 10 Gramsci and the Roman Cultural Revolution
• 11 Caesarism as stasis from Gramsci to Lucan: An “Equilibrium with catastrophic prospects”
• 12 Hegemony in the Roman Principate: Perceptions of power in Gramsci, Tacitus, and Luke
• 13 Gramsci’s view of Late Antiquity: Between longue durée and discontinuity
• 14 Cultural hegemonies, ‘NIE-orthodoxy’, and social-development models: Classicists’ ‘organic’ approaches to economic history in the early XXI century
• Afterthoughts
• 1 The author as intellectual? Hints and thoughts towards a Gramscian ‘re-reading’ of the ancient literatures
• 2 Hegemony, coercion and consensus: A Gramscian approach to Greek cultural and political history
• 3 Hegemony, ideology, and ancient history: Notes towards the development of an intersectional framework
• General index
• Index of the ancient sources
• Index of Gramsci’s texts