Classification from Antiquity to Modern Times

Tanja Pommerening, Walter Bisang, Tanja Pommerening, Walter Bisang

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110537277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del antiguo Egipto

The volume presents phenomena of classification and categorisation in ancient and modern cultures and provides an overview of how cultural practices and cognitive systems interact when individuals or larger groups conceptually organize their world. Scientists of antiquity studies, anthropologists, linguists etc. will find methods to reconstruct early concepts of men and nature from a synchronic and diachronic comparative perspective.

Part I:Classification in Ancient Times

Jochen Althoff

Categorization and Explanation of the World in Hesiod’s Theogony

Summary: Hesiod (ca. 730 BC) in his hexametric poem Theogony describes his known world in terms of a widespread genealogy, starting from Chaos in the beginning, unfolding in a series of sexual encounters and births and ending with the god Zeus and his kingship in heaven. Natural structures (earth, mountains, rivers etc.) are covered as well as basic human emotions (love, strife, anger etc.) and actions (war, deceit etc.) and all kinds of gods (partly identical with geological structures, like Earth and Sky). By grouping these phenomena as parents and offspring, brothers and sisters etc. he categorizes them by allocating groups to certain parents and tells us a lot about their characters, values and relations to each other. This mode of structuring works for concrete gods as well as for more abstract phenomena who thus all appear as anthropomorphic figures. The genealogical model is transferred from heroic poetry, where it serves a different purpose, to the fundamental entities of the world. It always needs interpretation, because common features and characteristics are hardly ever spelled out explicitly and the meanings of genealogical descent can be manifold. The term genos (‘race, stock, kin’) and its cognates (genealogia and the like) have later been used in the classificatory systems of Aristotle’s biology and thus found their way into modern classificatory efforts (Linnaeus and in a different sense Darwin). Hesiod seems to have prepared the way for a powerful explanatory tool of natural science.

Most modern handbooks on Ancient Greek Literature list Homer as the first poet of Europe and Hesiod as a younger contemporary, and this has long been the standard dating.8 Some time ago M. L. West9 and recently W. Blümer have checked the few and complicated arguments and have come to the opposite conclusion. According to them, Hesiod probably is the earliest Greek (and European) poet and Homer wrote about 50 years or even more after him.10 I am convinced by Blümer’s arguments and follow his tentative dating of the Theogony to the last three decades of the 8th century BC.11 We are, then, dealing here with the oldest poet of European culture.

Since ancient times Hesiod has been taken to be the first natural philosopher who, in many ways, influenced the thoughts and writings of the early Presocratics.12 Aristotle names him in Metaphysics A 4. 984 b 23–25 together with Parmenides as the inventor of a kind of ‘principle of movement’ (ἀρχὴ κινήσεως), which is a prominent factor in his set of the four causes.13 Hesiod assumes the god Eros, who comes into being very early in his Theogony (line 119, see shortly), as his basic moving cause. Even the literary form of the epic hexameter, which Hesiod uses, was adopted by such famous Presocratics as Parmenides and Empedocles.14

Although many aspects of the close relation between the Presocratics and Hesiod have been detected and well described, little has been said about the effort of systematization and categorization which Hesiod undertakes by using a genealogical model.15 This will therefore be the focus of the following pages.

After a long and famous proem, Hesiod begins the main part of his Theogony in line 116 with the very first elements of the world. He writes:

ἤτοι μὲν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ’· αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα

Γαῖ’ εὐρύστερνος, πάντων ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεὶ

ἀθανάτων οἳ ἔχουσι κάρη νιφόεντος Ὀλύμπου,

Τάρταρά τ’ ἠερόεντα μυχῷ χθονὸς εὐρυοδείης,

ἠδ’ Ἔρος, ὃς κάλλιστος ἐν ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖσι,

λυσιμελής, πάντων τε θεῶν πάντων τ’ ἀνθρώπων

δάμναται ἐν στήθεσσιν νόον καὶ ἐπίφρονα βουλήν.

And really as the very first thing Chaos came to be, and then

Gaia, broad-breasted, the ever secure seat of all the immortals who dwell on the peaks of snowy Olympus,

and the realms of dark Tartarus in a corner deep in the broad-pathed earth

and Eros who is the most beautiful among the immortal gods,

slackening (their) limbs, and the mind of all the gods and all the mortals he overpowers and their thoughtful counsel as well.16

The absolute starting point of the world is Chaos. Quite amusingly, Hesiod uses the superlative of the (already superlative) adverb πρῶτος ‘at first’: πρώτιστα ‘at the very first time’. Hesiod does not say where Chaos came from or from what it developed. It was just the very first thing to come to be. Nor does he say what Chaos is, and it is important not to confuse this first entity with what we nowadays understand as chaos. To us, chaos means a disordered, unorganized jumble of matter, but this is only a later development of the word’s meaning.17

In Hesiod’s cosmogony, however, Chaos has to be understood as the animal metaphor it originally was. The word is connected with the verb chasko (χάσκω), which means ‘to open one’s mouth wide while yawning or looking at something very strange or awful’. The basic idea seems to be one of a cosmogonic animal that opens its mouth to produce a space into which things can be placed. Nevertheless, Hesiodic Chaos already contains features of the dark, murky, undifferentiated and unordered state of the primeval world which the later use connotes, as becomes clear from Chaos’s immediate offspring.

It follows quite naturally that, after empty space, there have to come into being some firm and steady foundations for further cosmogonic activities.18 These are provided by the earth, Gaia, who is described as ‘broad-breasted’. Quite concretely, Hesiod only speaks of all the immortal gods, who find their place on earth.19 But obviously he takes the perspective of human beings for whom the most solid bottom and basis of everything is the earth on which we stand. It is only because humans have not yet been created that he at first focusses on immortal gods. And, of course, all the next entities to come into being are conceived of as immortal gods. The earth is ‘broad-breasted’ because it stretches far into every direction. Earth is ‘broad-breasted’ and not ‘broad-backed’ or the like, because she is also – as mother earth – the nurturing ground of all the living beings. It becomes clear at once, that Earth, like Chaos, is conceived of as an animal or human being, because only animals and humans have a breast.

Once again Hesiod does not tell us where Earth comes from. It is just the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• Classification and Categorization through Time
• Part I: Classification in Ancient Times
• Part II: Classification in Modern Times
• Part III: Tools
• Index
• List of Contributors