The Origins of Civilization in Greek and Roman Thought (Routledge Revivals)

Sue Blundell

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317751090
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Geschichte
• Categoria: Altertum

It has been much disputed to what extent thinkers in Greek and Roman antiquity adhered to ideas of evolution and progress in human affairs. Did they lack any conception of process in time, or did they anticipate Darwinian and Lamarckian hypotheses?

The Origins of Civilization in Greek and Roman Thought, first published in1986, comprehensively examines this issue. Beginning with creation myths – Mother Earth and Pandora, the anti-progressive ideas of the Golden Age, and the cyclical theories of Orphism – Professor Blundell goes on to explore the origins of scientific speculation among the Pre-Socratics, its development into the teleological science of Aristotle, and the advent of the progressivist views of the Stoics. Attention is also given to the 'primitivist' debate, involving ideas about the noble savage and reflections of such speculation in poetry, and finally the relationship between nature and culture in ancient thought is investigated.

Part One The Origins of the Human Race

Chapter One Mythological Explanations

DOI: 10.4324/9781315796628-1

Greek and Roman cosmogonical myths – stories which seek to explain the origins of our world through the personages and events of mythology rather than in a direct, empirical way – are derived from sources which range in time from the eighth century BC to the fifth century AD. That is not to say that they are numerous, for Greek and Roman mythographers seem more often to have concerned themselves with the problems presented by our environment as it exists now, rather than its possible ancestry. Even less common are the anthropogonical myths – the myths which account for the origins of the human race – for again it is human life in the here-and-now which is the object of concern. Explanations of human origins often make their appearance in an incidental way, and many problems are encountered when one tries to piece together any kind of consistent picture. Certain trends of thought do, however, emerge and it will be the purpose of this chapter to examine them.

A Common Life with the Gods

Homer is our earliest source, but from him we derive only the briefest of allusions. In Book 14 of the Iliad, Oceanus, the divine river which encircles the earth, is spoken of as the ‘begetter of the gods’ (line 201) and is associated in this act of creation with the water-goddess ‘mother Tethys’; in a later passage he becomes the ‘begetter of all’ (line 246). It is perhaps not absolutely necessary to read the human race into the ‘all’ of the second reference, but later authors certainly made this interpretation (¹), and if they are correct we are presented with what in Greek myth is a unique version of human origins (²). Another reference, equally brief, is to be found in Book 20 of the Odyssey, where Zeus is reproached for having no pity on men, even though he himself begets them (line 202). Obviously, there is some inconsistency here, but what is most significant about these two allusions is that human beings are seen in both cases as the offspring of the gods. The passage from the Odyssey makes the further point that though they are divine in origin, humans live a life which is not like that of the gods, since it is full of misery and pain.

The same picture emerges from a study of Hesiod, who is our oldest source for a cosmogonical myth of any detail. In the Theogony, he describes how in the beginning there was Chaos, and out of Chaos there arose broad-bosomed Gaia (or Earth) who gave birth to Ouranos (or Sky), the Mountains and the Sea. Sky then spread himself over Earth and the result of their union was the birth of the Titans, the Cyclops and the Hundred-handed Giants. So that these could see the light of day, Earth and Sky had to be forcibly separated through the agency of Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, who castrated his father with a sickle. This violent overthrow of father by son was repeated in the next generation, when Kronos insisted on swallowing his children because of a prophecy that he was fated to be overcome by his son. One child, Zeus, was rescued and lived to vanquish his father and become king of the gods (116–210, 453–506).

Implicit in this story of the struggles among the gods is an account of how an ordered cosmos gradually developed out of an original chaos. But there is no reference here at all to the creation of the human race, which in the next episode is simply assumed to exist. In the course of a crucial confrontation at Mekone, the Titan Prometheus tricked Zeus into choosing the less favourable of two portions of ox, thus ensuring that in future human beings would offer in sacrifice to the gods only the bones of an animal, not its flesh. To make human beings suffer for having gained this advantage, Zeus then deprived them of fire; when Prometheus stole fire and took it down to earth, Zeus responded by creating the first woman (535–584).

Hesiod introduces this episode with the words, ‘for when the gods and mortal men were separated (or distinguished) at Mekone…’. It seems clear that more is at stake here than a simple explanation of sacrificial practices among the Greeks. Gods and humans, it is implied, had up to this time been in the habit of dining together and had enjoyed a common life. The institution of the practice of sacrifice converted humans into meat-eaters and thus marked them off from the gods: from this time on they would be mortal, subject to hunger, pain, fatigue and death. Indeed, Zeus’ withdrawal of fire would have temporarily reduced them in status still further, since humans would have been forced to eat the flesh they had acquired in a raw and uncooked state, as animals did. When Prometheus restored fire to them, they were re-established in a position mid-way between gods and animals, and the gift of woman confirmed this position.

Hesiod’s story, then, tells us nothing about the physical process of creation, but confirms what Homer has said about the original status of the human race. Human beings were once the equals of the gods, but are now condemned to a life of misery and pain. Like the story of the Fall of Man in the Old Testament, it explains why human beings cannot be free from suffering.

This notion of a common life shared by gods and humans is confirmed by other passages from Hesiod. In the Works and Days we are told that ‘gods and mortal men are born from the same source’ (line 108), and that the first race of mortals, the Golden one, ‘lived like the gods’ (line 112); while a fragment of Hesiod’s verse recalls a time when ‘banquets then were shared, seats were shared by immortal gods and mortal men’ (³). Other myths tell a similar story. Up until the fateful day when the Arcadian mortal Lykaon sacrificed a human baby to Zeus, the men of that time were the guests of the gods and ate at the same table (⁴); and another human Tantalus used regularly to dine on Mount Olympus, before being repudiated by the gods because when returning their hospitality he cut up his own son Pelops and served him up in a stew. (⁵) Again, sacrifice marks the point when the human race becomes distinguished from that of the gods and ceases to enjoy divine privileges.

Trees and Stones

In Hesiod’s Theogony, Earth is pictured both as the parent of the gods and the starting-point for the development of cosmic order. There is no suggestion here that the human race was created out of the earth or indeed that it was created in any way at all. Nevertheless, some evidence does exist for a mythical tradition going back beyond Hesiod which traced the origin of humankind to products of the earth, to trees or stones. When in Book 19 of Homer’s OdysseyPenelope asks the disguised Odysseus about his ancestry, she adds ‘for you are not sprung from an oak of the ancient story, nor from a stone’ (line 163). This is a proverbial expression which occurs in other ancient works (including Iliad 22.126) and which in this context at least appears to refer to a myth about the origin of the human race. Of the trees, it is the oak-tree that seems to have been most favoured as a possible progenitor of human beings. Among the mythical peoples who have tree-connections are the Dryopes, whose ancestor Dryops had been concealed as a new-born baby in a hollow oak-tree (drus), from which he took his name (⁶). Echoes of a similar myth are to be found in later Latin authors, among them Vergil, who makes Evander recount to Aeneas the story of a local people ‘born from tree-trunks and the hardy oak.’ (⁷) But the ash-tree too might be a contender: in the Works and Days, Hesiod tells us that Zeus made a bronze race ‘sprung from ash-trees’ (145); and the mythographer Palaephatus records the belief that ‘the first race of living men was born from ash-trees’ (36). The notion seems a homely one, although it is perhaps not altogether inconsistent with a belief in the divine origins of the human race, since trees had certainly been regarded as sacred in prehistoric Greece, and may, as in Crete, have been worshipped as deities (⁸).

The ‘stone’ element in Homer’s proverb finds support in the well-known story of Deucalion and the flood, for which a fragment of Hesiod is our earliest source (⁹). Deucalion and his sister/wife Pyrrha were the sole survivors of a great deluge (¹⁰), sent by Zeus as a punishment for a range of variously specified acts of impiety on the part of the human race. After the waters had subsided, the favoured pair managed to recreate human beings out of stones. There is, of course, a geophysical link between stones and the earth, a connection which is made explicit in the version of the story given by Ovid. When Deucalion and Pyrrha, gazing on an empty world, prayed to the goddess Themis to tell them how they might restore their race, she replied that they must throw behind them the bones of their great mother. Horrified by such a suggestion, Pyrrha begged to be excused; but Deucalion eventually realised that their great mother was none other than the earth and that the bones of her body were stones. So they did as they were told, ‘and in a short time by the will of the gods the stones thrown by the man’s hand took on the form of men, and women were created from those thrown by the woman’ (411–413). A similar theme, with similar earthy connections, emerges from the localised story of King Aeacus, whose prayers for the repopulation of his island Aegina, devastated by a plague, were answered when a shower of ants fell from the branches of an oak-tree onto the ground and rose up again as human beings (¹¹).

Men from the Earth

References to trees or stones as the progenitors of the human race are scanty, but suggest a long-established tradition. Even more scanty are the hints received from early myth that the earth may have been responsible in a more direct way for the original production of the human race: in book 7 of the Iliad, the curse uttered by Menelaus ‘May you all turn to water and earth’ (line 99) seems to be a prayer for dissolution into constituent elements; and Hesiod’s statement that ‘gods and men are born from the same source’ could be seen as reference to the earth. But these may be compared with a large number of stories about particular individuals or groups of people being born from the earth. A full account of these earth-born men has been provided by W.K.C. Guthrie (¹²) and it will be sufficient here to mention just a few instances. One such is Pelasgus, the legendary ancestor of the Pelasgians, the earliest inhabitants of Greece: the poet Asius, writing in the seventh or sixth century BC, says of him that ‘the black earth brought him forth, so that the race of mortals might exist’ (¹³). Similarly Aeschylus, who makes Pelasgus an early king of Argos, calls him gegenes (born from the earth) (¹⁴). Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, was said to have stocked his new settlement with inhabitants when he planted a serpent’s teeth in the ground and there sprang up from these a crop of armed men (¹⁵); and one of the early legendary kings of Athens was Erechtheus, whose links with the earth are established by the significant chthon (earth) root in his name: Homer tells us that ‘the grain-bearing ploughland gave him birth’ (Iliad 2.547), and Euripides describes an end which echoes his beginning, for the earth swallowed him alive when Poseidon struck it with his trident (Ion 281–2).

Many of these stories of earth-born men seem to be connected with the early history of various of the Greek peoples, and the point has often been made that they more than likely should be assigned to the category of ‘charter’ myths, that is, myths that validate the customary practices or institutions of the society that produces them (¹⁶). One’s claim to the land on which one was living, the argument goes, would be proved beyond doubt if one could provide oneself with an earth-born ancestor, for then one would be autochthonous in the literal sense of the word, ‘sprung from the earth itself’. It does indeed seem quite reasonable to suppose that such myths reflect an attempt to provide a pseudo-historical justification for an existing state of affairs. One can see a comparable process taking place on a conscious level in the historical period, when myths about earth-born ancestors are exploited as the basis for a quite blatant patriotism_ in the case of Socrates, who tells us that when the earth was giving birth to creatures of every kind, the land of Athens concentrated its activities on man, as he was the most intelligent of the animals (¹⁷), the attempt is a facetious one; but the orator Isocrates is being perfectly serious when he argues that the Athenians’ forbears ‘were not of mixed origin, nor invaders, but on the contrary, alone among the Greeks, were autochthones, possessing in this land the nurse of their very existence and cherishing it as fondly as the best of children cherish their fathers and mothers’ (Panathenaicus 124–125).

But the myths of earth-born men are too complex for us to believe that they were purely and simply the product of a desire to assert one’s territorial claims. That, once invented, they were used, consciously or unconsciously, to promote this end we may well imagine; but the proliferation of motifs, and the existence of ‘earth-born’ myths which have no apparent charter function, suggest a more profound origin. What one can certainly say is that these myths demonstrate the currency from quite an early date of ideas about the earth as the generator of human beings. Moreover, these ideas do not necessarily conflict with the notion, derived from Hesiod, of the original divine status of the human race, since Earth was the ultimate parent of all the gods.

By the fifth century BC at the latest, it had become a poetical commonplace to speak of Earth as the human race’s mother and Sky as its father. Usually this was just a metaphorical expression of our dependence on the earth’s productivity and on the rainfall which promotes it (¹⁸); but Euripides takes it a stage further, when he writes, ‘the tale is not mine, but my mother’s – how Sky and Earth were one form. But when they had been separated apart from each other, they brought forth all things, and gave them up into the light: trees, birds, beasts, the creatures nourished by the salt sea, and the race of mortals’ (¹⁹).

The Creation of Woman

As we have seen, the cosmogonical myth in Hesiod’s Theogony does nothing to reinforce these suggestions of an account of human origins linked to the productivity of the earth. In the Theogony human beings are just assumed to exist; in Hesiod’s other major work, the Works and Days, the author in recounting the story of the Five Races merely mentions in passing that the Golden and Silver Races were created by the Olympian gods collectively, and the Bronze and Heroic Races by Zeus himself (109–158), adding the hint about ash-trees already noted. No further information is vouchsafed to us; but on the other hand both the Theogony and the Works and Days do provide us with quite a detailed account of the creation of the first woman. In the Theogony Hesiod describes how when Prometheus presented his gift of stolen fire to men, Zeus retaliated by masterminding the invention of the first woman, who was moulded out of earth by the craftsman-god Hephaistos, and adorned in glittering raiment by Pallas Athene. Thus he contrived for men a ‘beautiful evil’, for from her are descended all the generations of woman, who through their greed and laziness cause men nothing but grief and misery (lines 570–612). In the Works and Days we are treated to the more familiar version of the story. After the theft of fire, Zeus ordered Hephaistos to mingle earth and water and to create the lovely shape of a woman. Other deities showered her with attributes, both mental and physical, and she received the name Pandora, or ‘All-gift’, because all the Olympians presented her as a gift to men (²⁰). Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus, then foolishly agreed to accept the gift on behalf of mankind. Up to this time, men had lived free from evil...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• PART ONE: THE ORIGINS OF THE HUMAN RACE
• PART TWO: PATTERNS OF CULTURAL HISTORY
• CONCLUSION
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX