Space, Time and Language in Plutarch

Aristoula Georgiadou, Katerina Oikonomopoulou, Aristoula Georgiadou, Katerina Oikonomopoulou

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110538113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia antica

'Space and time' have been key concepts of investigation in the humanities in recent years. In the field of Classics in particular, they have led to the fresh appraisal of genres such as epic, historiography, the novel and biography, by enabling a close focus on how ancient texts invest their representations of space and time with a variety of symbolic and cultural meanings. This collection of essays by a team of international scholars seeks to make a contribution to this rich interdisciplinary field, by exploring how space and time are perceived, linguistically codified and portrayed in the biographical and philosophical work of Plutarch of Chaeronea (1st-2nd centuries CE). The volume's aim is to show how philological approaches, in conjunction with socio-cultural readings, can shed light on Plutarch's spatial terminology and clarify his conceptions of time, especially in terms of the ways in which he situates himself in his era's fascination with the past. The volume's intended readership includes Classicists, intellectual and cultural historians and scholars whose field of expertise embraces theoretical study of space and time, along with the linguistic strategies used to portray them in literary or historical texts.

1Moving through space and time in Plutarch

Christopher Pelling

Space travel and time travel in Plutarch

Abstract: One important insight of recent scholarship has been the importance of figuring space ‘hodologically’, as a lived experience as one travels through it, rather than (or, occasionally, as well as) through the vision of a bird’s-eye map. Plutarch’s own use of the Delphic Sacred Way in On the Oracles of the Pythia is a particularly clear and evocative hodological account, exploiting the suggestions of ‘place’ as well as ‘space’ (to adopt another useful modern distinction) to stimulate reflection on the entire course and rhythm of Greek history, with memories of internecine Greek conflict giving way to the calm of the Roman present: the move from combativeness to more tranquil conversation also mimics this process. The chapter then explores Alexander and the differences made as the narrative moves eastwards and then back towards the west. Outlandish experiences certainly cluster towards the edges of the world, as we might expect, but is there evidence that these generate any change in Alexander himself? The chapter argues that the perceptible change in Alexander’s character has little to do with the east entering his soul; lieux de mémoire are however relevant, again prompting reflections on the whole of Greek history and provoking the sense of melancholy and even macabre that pervades the final chapters. Life as a journey: that particular cliché began its journey a long time ago.

Space travelling is all the scholarly rage. There has been a lot of interest recently in how ancient authors figure space in their narratives; or ‘place’ rather than ‘space’, in the favourite theoretical distinction. Space is a matter more of nature, place of culture: space is what is given us by geography, the facts of the physical landscape; place is what humans have done to it, building their cities and their monuments, endowing particular localities with associations and human liveliness. Spaces are covered by air, places embedded in ‘atmosphere’. It is important too that ancient texts often treat place and space in a ‘hodological’ way: that is, a journey tends to be described by the impressions as one goes, by visualising each stage in turn, rather than with the take-it-all-in-with-a-single-view image that we get from a bird’s-eye map. There were of course such bird’s-eye maps in antiquity: there is the famous story of Aristagoras wielding one in front of Cleomenes in Herodotus (5.49). But Cleomenes is bewildered by it all, and it needs to be explained to him. It may be second nature to us to cry out for a bird’s-eye map to go with, say, a narrative like Caesar’s Gallic Wars, or even to start mapping one out mentally for ourselves on to that vague shape of France that we already have in our head. The ancient visualising equivalent would be more like a sat-nav reconstruction, once again seeing place as something travelled through sequentially. (Equally, one should not overstate the difference: if one is asked to describe a journey one knows well, say from one’s home to one’s office, one typically figures it in a hodological way, and may be quite surprised by a later bird’s-eye view of the curves in a familiar road.)

Another interest has been metatextual, seeing how journeys in the text may have analogies in the way the text itself works, turning the reader into a sort of narrative journeyer. Purves (2010), in particular, took that approach a long way. The textual grounding for such an approach is of course secure, however far we decide to push it. The ‘path of song’ is familiar from archaic times;14 many will think too of how Herodotus promises to ‘go forward’ (προβήσομαι) ‘journeying through’ (ἐπεξıών) cities big and small alike (1.5.14), covering them in his text as earlier he had in his travels.15 Herodotus has indeed been the focus of a project in which I have been involved myself, the Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Image Archive (HESTIA):16 Among other things, that has been concerned with alternative ways of digitally ‘mapping’ the place-names appearing in Herodotus’ text. During that project we noticed how often questions of space or place overlap with questions of time. It might be a question of distance: did things happen in the same way, following the same physical rules, in the distant past as they do today, and do they happen in the same way in distant lands in the present? (Compare Thucydides’ use in the Archaeology of distant practices in the present to cast light on his reconstruction of practices in the distant past, 1.6.5–6.) But it is also striking how often local disputes over place —whose territory should this be?—become disputes over the past, over traditional claims and legends echoing back into time immemorial.17

Not that this overlapping of space-questions and time-questions is any surprise. One need only think of the way that Aeschylus’ Persians is so unusual among Greek tragedies, but replaces distance in time with distance in space. And that same early programmatic chapter of Herodotus goes on to explain how his travels have given him an insight into human mutability, into big cities becoming small and small cities becoming big: travel through space, or rather through places (for ‘cities’ are quintessentially places), has given him insight into time (1.5.3–4)—just as, a little into his narrative, the much-travelled Solon will have such insight into human change and vulnerability.

And what of Plutarch? I shall take two texts, On the Oracles of the Pythia and the Life of Alexander, seeing how place works on people and does so sequentially and ‘hodologically’, and in particular tracing that interaction of place and the past, of space and time.

On the Oracles of the Pythia

If one wants an example of hodologicality in Plutarch, Delphi, the scene of the conference from which this book springs, is the place to look. On the Oracles of the Pythia, particularly the dialogue’s first half, describes the conversation as the group wind their way up the Sacred Way, and the climb is described in terms of what they see and the effect this has on them: ‘place’, indeed, and all that this very holy and very special place can suggest. As always with Plutarch conversations, it ranges widely and learnedly. The first topic centres on the rusting process: what can it be that gives those statues of the navarchs their peculiar blue-green tinge, appropriate as it seems for those old sea-dogs, ‘standing there with the true complexion of the sea and its depths’ (395B)? Then the conversation turns to matters of religion and history, with one prompt or another given by whatever they are passing: that statue of Hieron the tyrant—could it be coincidence that it fell down on the very day he died, any more than it was coincidence that the statue of a certain Spartan lost its eyes just before his death at Leuctra (397E–398A)? A little later we get to the treasury of Cypselus: why Cypselus, and not the Corinthians as a whole … (400D–F)? Next, those statues of courtesans (401A): are they not shaming? Yet ponder the history of Greece: isn’t it better to commemorate the odd prostitute than all those infamous battles of one Greek against one another? And so it goes on, until their guest suggests it might be time to sit down and get back to the question they had originally raised, why oracular answers are now given in prose when the famous cases of the old days were given in verse (ch. 17). Here too place matters:

Boëthus immediately observed that the place itself helped to solve our visitor’s problem. ‘There used to be a shrine of the Muses here,’ he said, ‘near the outlet of the stream … Simonides speaks of the place…’ (De Pyth. or. 402C)18

Admittedly, how the place helps is not clear, as the text is defective: it is probably something about how the place used to inspire, not just because of its beauty and the presence of Apollo, but also because of that cult of the Muses that ‘used to be’.19 But, somehow, it matters.

Arguably, place matters a good deal more: this is not a dialogue that could be happening just anywhere. That atmosphere of Delphi has its effect. This is initially the case in the most literal way: the air here is particularly thick, and it has affected that rusting process (396A). But this discussion in those early chapters also introduces other themes that are going to come back in interestingly different registers: how far, for instance, purely physical explanations are enough to explain those things that look like coincidences, like the sea-colouring of the navarchs—but are they, really, just coincidences, when there are so many of them and there is so much of a godly presence in the air? And it is not just religion that is in the air, but history, all that Greek history that is commemorated there, for good or for ill.

Do you not feel pity for the Greeks as you read the inscriptions of shame on these beautiful dedications: ‘Brasidas and the Acanthians, from Athenian spoils’; ‘The Athenians from Corinthian spoils’; ‘The Phocians from Thessalian spoils’; ‘The Orneates from Sicyonian spoils’; ‘The Amphictyons from Phocian spoils’. (De Pyth. or. 15.401C–D)

That is a favourite theme of the Lives as well, of course, where Plutarch several times dwells on the senselessness of the Greeks throughout their history in fighting one another, so that eventually it had to be left to the Roman Flamininus to give them that peace that their own bickering had denied them for so long (Flam. 11). (Admittedly, not all of that emphasis carries across to the dialogue: Roman memorials, including those of Flamininus, are not mentioned either.20 There may be a reason for that as well, as we will later see.) Once more, then, though in a rather different way from Herodotus, Plutarch’s hodological moving through space encourages insight into time: these lieux de mémoire are dripping with memory, the wrong sorts of memory. Too many battles, too many tyrants, too much Greek blood … . Notice the memories that do not figure here: no Marathon, no Salamis, no Plataea (though Plataea does figure in the sister dialogue On the Decline of the Oracles, and the climbers must have passed the Tripod of Plataea just before getting to Hieron); no, it is the Peloponnesian War and Leuctra and Lysander fighting Thebans that get the space. The Persian Wars figure only once—in the mention of the statue of Apollo carrying a spear set up by the Megarians ‘in consequence of the victory that expelled the Athenians from the city after the Persian Wars’ (402A). So even there it is Greek against Greek. The silence is echoing.

Still, times change: the second half of the dialogue is concerned with that, as Theon—a real person,21 but still a significant name—gives his explanation of why the oracles no longer ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Reading Plutarch through space, time and language
• 1 Moving through space and time in Plutarch
• 2 Time manipulation and narrative signification
• 3 Religious locales as places of reflection on language, discourse and time
• 4 Models of the past I: configurations of memory and history for Plutarch’s imperial readers
• 5 Models of the past II: Plutarch and the classical era
• 6 Philosophy and religion between past and present
• 7 Space, time and notions of community
• 8 Sympotic spaces: forging links between past and present
• 9 Space, place, landscape: symbolic and metaphorical aspects
• Bibliography
• Index of subjects
• Index of ancient and modern authors
• Index of passages