The Folds of Olympus

Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture

Jason König

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691238494
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire de la Grèce antique

A cultural and literary history of mountains in classical antiquity The mountainous character of the Mediterranean was a crucial factor in the history of the ancient Greek and Roman world. The Folds of Olympus is a cultural and literary history that explores the important role mountains played in Greek and Roman religious, military, and economic life, as well as in the identity of communities over a millennium—from Homer to the early Christian saints. Aimed at readers of ancient history and literature as well as those interested in mountains and the environment, the book offers a powerful account of the landscape at the heart of much Greek and Roman culture.Jason König charts the importance of mountains in religion and pilgrimage, the aesthetic vision of mountains in art and literature, the place of mountains in conquest and warfare, and representations of mountain life. He shows how mountains were central to the way in which the inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean understood the boundaries between the divine and the human, and the limits of human knowledge and control. He also argues that there is more continuity than normally assumed between ancient descriptions of mountains and modern accounts of the picturesque and the sublime.Offering a unique perspective on the history of classical culture, The Folds of Olympus is also a resoundingly original contribution to the literature on mountains.

PART I

Mountains and the Divine

1

Summit Altars

Divine Presence and Human Culture

When the god Zeus comes down from Mount Olympus¹ to Mount Ida above the city of Troy in Book 8 of the Iliad, he installs himself in a space that is poised strangely between the human and divine spheres. The poet tells us that Zeus ‘came to Ida with its many springs, the mother of wild beasts, to Gargaros, where his sanctuary (τέμενος) was and his smoking altar’ (Iliad 8.47–48).² Later, in Book 14, he is seduced here by his wife, Hera. The earth on the mountain’s summit sends up a growth of new flowers as a bed for them to lie on: that passage has repeatedly been taken as an allegorical one, to describe the bounty that springs from the union of different natural forces.³ ‘Do not be afraid’, Zeus says, ‘that any god or man will see us, for I will cover us with a golden cloud’ (14.342–44). Only the poet’s divinely inspired voice can pierce that cloud and allow us to spy on the opening moments of their lovemaking, just as the voice of the poet is the only source that can give us access to the charmed life of the gods on Mount Olympus. And yet in other ways Mount Ida is a place of regular human presence. The word ‘sanctuary’ or ‘precinct’ (τέμενος) in the passage quoted earlier implies a clearly delineated, presumably human-made space surrounding Zeus’s altar on the summit. And then in the climactic battle scene of the poem, as Achilles is chasing Hector round the walls of Troy, closing in on him, the poem slows for a moment to give us a divine perspective. All the gods are watching, but it is Zeus who speaks first: ‘my heart is mourning for Hector, who has burned the thighs of many oxen in my honour on the peaks of many-valleyed Ida’ (Iliad 22.169–71). It seems that Hector has been himself, many times, to this place of divine mystery and pleasure, to sacrifice to the gods.

Those passages are typical of a tension that runs right through the long history of representing mountains in ancient Greek and Roman literature. The mountains of the Mediterranean were both divine and human places. Part I of this book explores the intertwining of those two different perspectives in a selection of texts written over a period of more than 1,000 years, from the epic poetry of archaic Greece⁴ through to the Christian pilgrimage writing of late antiquity. In order to understand those portrayals, however, we need to look first at the wider context of ancient religious practice.⁵ Mountains were dwelling places of the gods within mythical narrative,⁶ and places associated with divine epiphanies and miracles beyond human understanding, but they were at the same time places of human presence where one might gain special access to the gods via sacrifice.

Those practices are in many respects quite alien to what we are familiar with from modern Western culture. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did see an increase in ‘sacralisation’ of the mountains, for example in the increasingly common use of religious language to describe mountain experience.⁷ In many cases that involved seeing divine presence in nature through an encounter with the sublime.⁸ Mountains have a power to inspire awe and astonishment that can transport us momentarily beyond our usual human perspective on the world. This idea in itself had ancient precedents.⁹ From the very late eighteenth century onwards it became common to erect crosses on peaks in the Alps and elsewhere in Europe,¹⁰ partly in imitation of earlier practices of mountain pilgrimage which had their origin in the Christian culture of late antiquity. But those strands of religious thinking in postclassical culture do not help us much in entering into the experience of those involved in the processions and sacrifices that wound their way to the hilltops and peaks of the Mediterranean over many hundreds and even thousands of years. It takes a certain effort of the imagination, along with close attention to the still patchy and inaccessible archaeological record, to be able to understand what that might have been like.

Let us go back first to Mount Lykaion to look a little more closely at what lies on the slopes beneath the summit. This was a site that mattered for Arkadian identity.¹¹ It must have been viewed as significant partly because it stood beyond the boundaries of normal human civilisation. We should probably imagine hundreds of people travelling out from the cities to the mountain for fairly short periods for festival occasions, before returning to their homes. Sacrifice at this kind of location was a way of integrating wilderness within the culture of the city and a way of asserting control over the whole of a city’s territory (or in this case cities in the plural, since Mount Lykaion seems to have been a focus for the region of Arkadia as a whole). And the idea of encountering space outside civilisation may have had a particular significance in an Arkadian context. The Arkadians had a reputation in the ancient world, like many mountain communities, for being a very ancient people, and for being distant from the norms of urban civilisation, not least because of the poverty of the region—for example in the common image of them as ‘acorn eaters’. That image of a wild culture took on a more idealised form in the poetic stereotype of Arkadia as a pastoral paradise.

FIGURE 1.1. Ruined columns from the temple of Zeus Lykaios, with the summit of Mount Lykaion behind. Photo: author.

And yet we need to be cautious about an excessively romanticised view of the ancient Mount Lykaion as wilderness. The peak itself was very far from being wild, especially in the later centuries of its history. This was a built environment. Just below the summit stood the precinct of Zeus, which seems to have been more than 100 metres in length and 50 metres wide. Two column bases still stand there (figure 1.1), not far from the base of the summit cone.

Zeus was not the only god worshipped here: we know from the second-century CE travel writer Pausanias (who will feature again in a later chapter) that there were two other sites, in honour of Pan and Parrhasian Apollo, also on the mountainside.¹² Close to the latter was a place thought by some to have been the birthplace of the god Zeus.¹³ Large numbers of surviving coins produced in the fifth and then again in the fourth century BCE show images of Zeus Lykaios, perhaps a depiction of a throned statue of Zeus which stood as a cult object in the shrine. These coins seem to have acted as expressions of Arkadian identity, although the political unity of the region as a whole was always fragile.¹⁴ Further down, at a height of roughly 1,200 metres on the mountainside, is the stadium and the hippodrome (figure 1.2), roughly 300 metres long, the only fully visible example of a horse-racing track in the whole of Greece; also a row of stone seating or steps, a fountain house, a bathhouse, a stoa 67 metres in length, and another building commonly identified as a hotel, but which is more likely to have been an administrative building for the sanctuary and a venue for dining, with a partly subterranean passage leading from it towards the stadium and hippodrome.¹⁵ Most of these buildings date from the second half of the fourth century BCE; by this stage the summit altar seems to have dropped out of use as a place of sacrifice, as the main focus for ritual activity shifted a little way down the mountainside. They were constructed primarily for the great festival of the Lykaia, which had been held there (probably every four years, but perhaps every two) also through much of the archaic and classical periods.¹⁶ Some scholars think that it may even have predated the games at Olympia, just over 20 miles to the west (in line with the claims of the Elder Pliny, who describes Mount Lykaion as the site of the very first athletic contests in Greek history).¹⁷ It was a famous festival. Pindar refers to the Lykaia repeatedly in his victory odes, in lists of the festivals where his patrons have won victories.¹⁸ Two inscriptions recovered from the site, both dating from the late fourth century BCE, list victors in the standard range of ancient Greek athletic and horse-racing events—the majority of them local athletes from Arkadia, but also including a number of famous competitors from much farther afield, as far away as Macedonia and Rhodes and Sicily.¹⁹ Like all ancient athletic festivals it would have been viewed as an opportunity to celebrate the communal identity of the city or region that hosted it. In the victory lists from the festival we find unusually frequent use of the regional identifier ‘Arkas’ (‘Arkadian’), in contrast with the usual custom of identifying oneself with one’s city, which suggests that Mount Lykaion was viewed as a particularly appropriate place for displaying Arkadian identity.²⁰ Presumably hundreds or even thousands of spectators attended. It is hard to think of a more vivid illustration of the fact that going up mountains could be a regular and important activity for the inhabitants of the ancient world.

FIGURE 1.2. View from the summit of Mount Lykaion looking northeast towards the stadium and hippodrome. Photo: author.

Memory and Embodied Experience

Mountains like Mount Lykaion were thus places of memory. They were widely viewed as ancient places, linked with pre-human events in mythical narrative.²¹ It seems likely that those involved in mountain rituals would have felt a sense of engagement with that past in their ascents, a thrill at being momentarily close to the places of myth, even as they knew that that old world of divine presence was hard to access in everyday experience. Equally important, however, was the way in which the mountains linked communities with their own human pasts, as locations of repeated sacrifice over many generations. One function of mountain ritual was to assert control over the edges of a city’s territory, and to win divine support for the city’s land and institutions.²² For many cities the visibility and proximity of their mountains would have helped to maintain those links. It was not only the view from the summit that mattered in mountain ritual, with its ability to encompass the territory down below, but also the view upwards from the city. When you see the smoke of sacrifice on the mountain you know that you are seeing a view that generations of others have seen before.

These were also places of bodily engagement. As we have seen already in the preface, there has been a reaction over the past few decades against approaches that envisage landscape as terrain viewed from a distance, with their implications of an outsider or elitist viewpoint. Some scholars have emphasised instead the way in which human experience of landscape involves a bodily immersion appealing to all of the senses, where landscape and the body are mutually intertwined and give meaning to each other. Tim Ingold has used the phrase ‘taskscape’ to describe the way in which particular spaces become marked by repetitive human actions, often over many generations, and in turn give meaning and direction to those who pass through them in their day-to-day lives.²³ The mountains of the Mediterranean must have been taskscapes in exactly that sense—not only their lower slopes, which were used for farming and other kinds of productive activity, as we shall see further in part IV, but even their remote summits, with their paths and their altars, where worshippers toiled their way upwards in procession, and where the detritus of centuries of sacrifice was piled together, as a feature of the landscape that was fixed but also nevertheless grew year by year with each sacrifice. The physical experience of the mountain’s slopes and summit must have helped to make the experience of memory and the sense of access to the divine more intense and more personal. At the same time these mountains were places of performance, associated with kinds of bodily engagement set apart from normal day-to-day life, as mountains still are, albeit in different ways, in the present, not least in the cultures of mountaineering.²⁴

Of course it is difficult to reconstruct those experiences precisely. That is the problem we face. Detailed accounts of involvement in mountain ritual from the ancient world are very rare. There has been a tradition over the past two centuries of interpreting that absence in rather patronising terms as a sign of the relatively primitive nature of Greco-Roman interactions with landscape, on the assumption that people who live close to mountains are less likely to describe them and engage with them with the sophistication that comes from elite detachment.²⁵ It is easy to see why that is a tempting view, but in some manifestations it can lead us to endorse a self-congratulatory exceptionalism, which sees modern engagement with landscape as uniquely sophisticated. How do we move beyond that explanation? Seeing these places for ourselves can help. You get a sense of the scale of the mountains, a sense of what it might have been like to move through them on paths that in some cases must be largely unchanged today, of their proximity to and intervisibility with communities on the plain and with each other, and even something of the thrill of standing in places where others have stood before over many millennia. But we also need to be...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Map
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I. Mountains and the Divine
• Part II. Mountain Vision
• Part III. Mountain Conquest
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index Locorum
• General Index