3. Odysseus among the Philologists* The Controversy An outdated practice Classical philology, the dominant discipline in higher education until the early twentieth century, has an ambiguous status; a definition of that status could explain why the field has never produced a theory of meaning, although it has produced numerous methodological works on which the other literary disciplines are based. On the… Read more
4. Reflections on the Practice of Philology* I To edit a page of Aeschylus or Plato, to separate these authors’ sentences or their lines of verse—to understand, in a word—is to discover that, to a considerable degree, the composition obtained by a lengthy and coherent tradition, but also by modern science, heir to that tradition, is different from the text that has… Read more
5. Reading Myths* Research on the cycle of becoming had to be linked with cosmology. Speculation on ordered movement and the birth of time occupied a central place. The refutation of the thesis that there were two parallel and opposite cycles in Empedocles, under the headings of Love and Hatred (or Strife), was a decisive preliminary condition for the reconstitution of Empedocles’ system. Read more
6. Purifications* God on Earth A subversive action Purifications (Katharmoi) marks a complete break with the cultural tradition, one that could equally well be called literary or religious. The poem [1] invents a myth, a new story that purports to replace all the other stories that have ever been told, from Homer and Hesiod to the… Read more
7. An Anthropological Fiction* Freud used the word “historical” on several occasions to characterize what he set out to describe in Moses and Monotheism; [1] the word implies that he was referring to events that had actually happened, that were not arbitrarily constructed. He could rely on psychoanalysis to assure him that this was the case. On the… Read more
8. Reading Drama* During an earlier phase in my career my great passion was Epicureanism, but over the last twenty years I have devoted most of my scholarly work to the field of Greek tragedy, often in collaboration with Pierre Judet de La Combe. Perhaps I should try to explain how this shift occurred. The path from the pre-Socratic thinkers to the tragedians… Read more
9. An Act of Cultural Restoration: The Status Accorded to the Classical Tragedians by the Decree of Lycurgus* The measures concerning drama have pride of place among the laws promulgated by Lycurgus, according to the Lives of the Ten Orators (included in Plutarch’s Moralia, 841F): these measures include the institution of competitions for the selection of dramatic actors and public honors awarded the… Read more
21. Syro-Cilician Approaches Kinnaru of Ugarit, I have argued, was probably but one regional manifestation of a more widespread pattern. Kinnaru himself, of course, belongs to a Syrian milieu. We also saw that material from the Hurrian sphere, stretching across Syria and into Cilicia/Kizzuwatna, documents both its second-millennium kinnāru-culture, and divinization of cult tools and objects (see Chapter 6). This background can help explain the curious… Read more
Appendices Appendix A. A Note on ‘Balang’ in the Gudea Cylinders The balang was the usual instrument of the gala’s song. But the description of Ušumgal-kalama in the Gudea Cylinders shows that, in the third millennium at least, a balang could also appear in the hands of the nar. [1] The identity of the balang has long been controversial. But… Read more
Appendix B. Ptolemy Khennos as a Source for the Contest of Kinyras and Apollo The Novel History (Kainḕ Historía) by the early imperial wondermonger Ptolemy ‘The Quail’ Khennos is known mainly from a terse epitome by Photios, but was equally available to Eustathios, who reproduces a dozen episodes in fuller detail without naming his source (n.b.). [1] That Eustathios could have seen… Read more
