Logoi and Muthoi

Further Essays in Greek Philosophy and Literature

William Wians

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438474908
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

In Logoi and Muthoi, William Wians builds on his earlier volume Logos and Muthos, highlighting the richness and complexity of these terms that were once set firmly in opposition to one another as reason versus myth or rationality versus irrationality. It was once common to think of intellectual history representing a straightforward progression from mythology to rationality. These volumes, however, demonstrate the value of taking the two together, opening up and analyzing a range of interactions, reactions, tensions, and ambiguities arising between literary and philosophical forms of discourse, including philosophical themes in works not ordinarily considered in the canon of Greek philosophical texts. This new volume considers such topics as the pre-philosophical origins of Anaximander's calendar, the philosophical significance of public performance and claims of poetic inspiration, and the complex role of mythic figures (including perhaps Socrates) in Plato. Taken together, the essays offer new approaches to familiar texts and open up new possibilities for understanding the roles and relationships between muthos and logos in ancient Greek thought.

1

Xenia, Hiketeia, and the Homeric Language of Morals

The Origins of Western Ethics

KEVIN ROBB

In memory of Walter Donlan

Two social proprieties (themistes, established ways, customs, “laws”) depicted in the action of the Odyssey are, it could be argued, the most prominent in Homer: xenia, or “guest-friendship,” and hiketeia, or “supplication.” One or the other, and often both, are found in every book of the Odyssey, and widely in the Iliad as well. Yet there is an oddity about their modern reception. The scholarly literature devoted to them had remained notably scant, especially in English, until fairly late into the twentieth century.

The reasons are no doubt complex, but a contributing factor may have been that both had long been institutions of Greek oral life, finding their way at some unknown date to an early written text of Homer, but unquestionably emerging from pre-alphabetic Greece. They have a strangeness about them, with features considered “odd” even by sympathetic scholars. Admittedly, both proprieties involved forms of ritualized behavior of a sort commonly found in oral societies, but is alien to modern readers, as it surely was not to the ancient hearers of “Homer.” The latter must have participated in, or at least observed, both rituals hundreds of times, especially among aristocrats.

Two works of serious scholarship published in the second half of the last century signaled the promise of change. In 1954 Moses Finley published The World of Odysseus,1 a book that was well-received but was not initially recognized for one of its most original contributions, a short treatment of the supreme importance of xenia in Homer and in pre-state Greece. In time, this treatment would become influential indeed, notably for Gabriel Herman in his Ritualized Friendship and the Greek City,2 published in 1987. Herman’s book began its life as a doctoral dissertation at Cambridge University supervised by Sir Moses Finley.

In 1973, John Gould published “Hiketeia,” a rich resource of nearly eighty pages that, like Finley’s notice of xenia, initially was somewhat neglected.3 Early in his text, Gould observed that, from Homer to the fifth century and well beyond, hiketeia as a social and religious institution “figures prominently both in the traditional, mythological themes of Greek literature and in the historical record.” Despite these facts, it was “all the more surprising that it is almost totally ignored in what is written in standard works on the social and religious institutions of ancient Greece and hardly better treated in discussions of Greek literature.”4 Both Finley and Gould would, in time, become powerful catalysts for later scholarship on xenia and hiketeia, and both lived long enough to see early oversights handsomely remedied.

Gould’s treatment emphasized, rightly, the close parallelism between the proper or prescribed treatment of the hiketês, Gould’s primary focus, and the proper treatment of the xenos; both, he notes, were familiar figures in Homer and in later Greek literature and society. Gould identified both as “a ritualizing of behavior” that, among other social functions, “constitutes a powerful factor in keeping the tensions of existence within tolerable limits” in what were, undoubtedly, tense times.5 Gould acknowledged debts to the anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers for his own understanding that Greek hiketeia (and xenia) belonged to a wider category of “ritualized relationships” of a sort anthropologists had discovered in many societies. Pitt-Rivers in 1968 had published the insightful paper, “The Stranger, the Guest, and the Hostile Host.”6 Gabriel Herman, in turn, preferred the designation “ritualized friendship,” as, following him, xenia came to be widely known. Such terminology is preferable to the awkward neologism “guest-friendship,” but the latter, because much used, is unavoidable. Xenia is also sometimes equated with “well-known Mediterranean hospitality,” and effectively dismissed from serious discussion.

In recognizing that xenia and hiketeia are supremely important expressions of moral, social, and political behavior in Archaic Greece (and into even the Christian era, as Herman demonstrated), classicists, and interested anthropologists, are mainly on board. The same cannot be said for all philosophers, however, even historians of ethics. At a recent gathering, some connected part-sentences from Herman’s book were read aloud, followed by similar statements from Walter Donlan on the heroic ethos, and were greeted with dumbfounded stares. The quotations from Herman stressed that for the Homeric hero, “the obligation of guest-friendship should be set above all other obligation” and that this was “a part of the natural order of things,” a fact of aristocratic life, or the heroic ethos. Furthermore, “adherence to the code of guest-friendship was a supreme manifestation of the hero’s free exercise of his prowess. There was, in his world, neither overlord to demand feudal allegiance, nor communal group to claim social responsibility.” Nevertheless, with the eventual rise of the polis, “the community tamed the hero, and transformed him into a citizen.”7

The last remark was in sympathy with Finley’s view that “no trace” of the classical polis in a political sense could be found in the text of Homer. That view is controversial, but is repeatedly asserted by Herman, relying on Finley.8 What is not controversial is that poleis were widely dispersed in Hellas by the middle of the seventh century. From the sixth century onward, the surviving literature is increasingly filled with examples of aristocratic xenoi with loyalties that were far stronger toward each other than toward their own polis and its laws. That much Herman’s book proved with intriguing examples.

In what follows, I propose to concentrate on the first eight books of the Odyssey as representative of the whole, and to argue that xenia and hiketeia dominate much of the action of the major characters, as well as the moral language they use. I will focus on how that language works “emotively” to prescribe adherence to the Hellenic proprieties (and decry the violations), an essential task of epic singers before the advent of written law.

Book 1 of the Odyssey deserves close attention because it is especially revealing once the modern reader recognizes that eighth-century Greek listeners would initially perceive the suitors as arrogant, badly misbehaving xenoi. Gradually listeners learn that long before the suitors should have departed for other households (oikoi) to do their feasting, “going oikos to oikos,” as Telemachus repeatedly pleads (Od. 1.375, passim), and the rules of xenia required. This loutish behavior in the house of an absent Odysseus has been recognized as a “corruption of xenia” scene, the first of many in Greek literature.9

The institution of hiketeia becomes a theme of the epic starting in Book 5, where a naked, half-drowned Odysseus must become a helpless hiketês and supplicate a nameless river-god, or else loose his homecoming and his life. Books 6 and 7 reveal Odysseus, the ragged, helpless suppliant, being transformed back into the proud, handsome xenos, clothed in a prince’s garments and supremely competent. Book 8 is a triumphant celebration of all the obligations and special joys that belonged to Homeric xenia, where at the finest of feasts, with games, dance, epic song, and much wine, the xenos is welcomed and incorporated into the group as “spiritual kin.”

In a word, xenia and hiketeia are found everywhere in the Odyssey. If they, and the moral vocabulary deployed to support them, were confined to the epos and did not carry over into Greek life in ensuing centuries, then just possibly the proprieties and moralities of Homer were merely stunning literary invention after all. But, of course, the opposite is the case.

Two Definitions

Xenia denotes a highly ritualized, reciprocal relationship in which unrelated persons from different social units voluntarily agree to exchange certain goods and services. The goods are mainly gifts of diverse sorts that are valuable in a pre-money economy; the value of the gift is proportionate to the physical abilities of the giver, but must be, for him, extravagant. The sorts of services involved are diverse but uniformly welcome and socially of great utility. They will be described below as discovered in Books 1 through 8 of the Odyssey.

Hiketeia is a highly ritualized act initiated by one person, a suppliant (hiketês), who is usually in great distress or need, often a life-or-death type crisis. By a series of precise actions and words that involve ritualized self-abnegation, the suppliant seeks a reciprocal, favorable action from a person in a position to alleviate his need, or provide him with what he seeks. If the suppliant adheres strictly to all the requirements of the hiketeia ritual, what I will call “full physical supplication,” maximum moral and social pressure is brought to bear on the supplicated person to respond favorably. This outcome is the normal expectation in Homer, and, indeed, will remain so for centuries.10

The “great” or spectacular supplications, such as those that open and close the action of the Iliad, are uniformly successful in Homer. Thetis, mother of Achilles, successfully supplicates Zeus on Mount Olympus and changes the course of the Trojan War; a defeated King Priam successfully supplicates the victorious Achilles on the plain of Troy and recovers for burial the body of his son, Hector, the last Prince of Troy.

Xenia and the Catalyst of The World of Odysseus

In The World of Odysseus, Moses Finley early observed that no detail in the life of the heroes “receives so much attention in the Iliad and the Odyssey as gift-giving, and always there is frank reference to adequacy, appropriateness, and recompense.”11 Not every example of gift-giving in the poems is a component of xenia, of course, but when two powerful heroes are involved, many are. Later Finley observes that, however psycholo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• From Logos and Muthos to …
• 1. Xenia, Hiketeia, and the Homeric Language of Morals: The Origins of Western Ethics
• 2. The Muses’ Faithful Servant: Moral Knowledge in Homer, Hesiod, and Xenophanes
• 3. How Philosophy is Rooted in Tradition: Stories Describing the Appearance of Man and Woman in Ancient Greece
• 4. Muthos and Logos on New Year’s Day: Trial and Error in Anaximander’s Seasonal Sundial
• 5. Tragic Values in Homer and Sophocles
• 6. Sketches of Oedipus in Sophocles’s Play about Tyranny
• 7. Helen and the Divine Defense: Homer, Gorgias, Euripides
• 8. The Hero and the Saint: Sophocles’s Antigone and Plato’s Socrates
• 9. Myth and Argument in Glaucon’s account of Gyges’s Ring and Adeimantus’s Use of Poetry
• 10. Myth Inside the Walls: Er and the Argument of the Republic
• 11. Priam’s Despair and Courage: An Aristotelian Reading of Fear, Hope, and Suffering in Homer’s Iliad
• 12. Poets as Philosophers and Philosophers as Poets: Parmenides, Plato, Lucretius, and Wordsworth
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover