Concordia discors: Eros and Dialogue in Classical Athenian Literature.

  Scholtz, Andrew. 2007. Concordia discors: Eros and Dialogue in Classical Athenian Literature. Hellenic Studies Series 24. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_ScholtzA.Concordia_Discors.2007.


Chapter 1. Introduction

Problem

Writing to a friend, Horace describes the man as fascinated by “the discordant harmony of the cosmos, its purpose and power” (Epistles 1.12.19). Horace refers to Empedocles’ doctrine of a world order in constant flux between cohesion and fragmentation, Love and Strife, harmony and discord. Compressed into a single concept, this flux represents, in Horace’s phrase, concordia discors, a dynamic tension whose meaning offers something for Horace’s friend to ponder.

I mention Horace’s concept of concordia discors because, as I argue in this book, it will help us understand the fit between text and context, representation and reality, in literature produced under the classical Athenian democracy. For that fit is, by its very nature, susceptible to destabilization in ways described by David Konstan:

Where society is riven by tensions and inequalities of class, gender, and status, its ideology will be complex and unstable, and literary texts will betray signs of the strain involved in forging such refractory materials into a unified composition. [1]


Texts will always bear the stamp of their social-cultural-political matrix. But when they actively engage tensions within that matrix, when they reflect on what throws their world off balance, then we often find “lapses in unity at the level of plot and characterization” [
2] —ambient dissonance, one might call it, marring the harmonious unity of the literary Kunstwerk.

Symptomatic Reading

Dialogical Reading

But authors do not just respond to their seeing; they respond as well to audiences and readers. For all utterance, literary and otherwise, anticipates response, which shapes utterance already at its point of origin. Think of it this way: If thought can somehow affect other thought, influence it somehow, by whatever means, through whatever channels, then we can think of the word as the articulation of that interaction, as the shaping and reshaping of that interface—as thought in conversation with thought. But what if we allow ourselves to imagine the unimaginable: that all thought is locked up within itself, unable to make contact with its outside? For our purposes, what matters is not the reality of external consciousness, but its effect on internal consciousness, even at the purely imaginary level, where merely to imagine another is to be affected by that other. Thus when I express myself, that is, “push” thought “outward” (Latin exprimere), my effort, through its outward directedness, posits an outside and, in so doing, anticipates response. Whether or not anyone is actually listening or reading or ever will do so at whatever remove is not the point. It is, rather, that utterance, even if we view it as hermetically sealed within its own act, still feels around the edges of its act, still presses outward toward the world. For the word exists at the edge between the speaking/writing subject and that world. [22] And it is that kind of intentionality, the word as social gesture, a verbal “reaching forth” (Latin intendere) as if to shake hands, on which notions of the utterance as dialogical are founded.

Important here is the notion of the speech-act, a concept mostly associated with J. L. Austin, [25] but with a history going back to the work of Karl Bühler, whose Sprechakt consists of three stages, distinct only in the abstract: notification, representation, and triggering. To that correspond three positions of the utterance: speaker, state of affairs (i.e. subject matter), and hearer or responder. [26] Vološinov, influenced by Bühler, extends that schema in the direction of the social. Through dialogue, we set up between ourselves what Vološinov terms an “ideological chain”: we enact social bonds by sharing information, ideas, values, mindsets. [27] Meaning here is not illusory or evanescent, but neither is it stationary or absolute. Rather, it is continually re-transacted socially: it evolves. Through multiple speech-acts, a speech-community takes shape, and with that a shared consciousness grounding further dialogue. [28] Key to the process is evaluation, the attitudinal stance one takes to what one sees, hears, experiences, reads. Evaluation registered in speech Vološinov calls “evaluative accent.” Through these accents, whether expressed intonationally, lexically, or otherwise, speakers convey their response to—whether they “connect” or fail to connect with—something someone else has said or done. Evaluation thus underpins the sociality of language. And ideology is, at base, social evaluation expressed through signs: “Without signs there is no ideology.” [29]

Dialogical and Deconstructive Reading

So rather than contest the insights of an Althusser or Derrida, I hope to engage them dialogically: to explore the chemistry between discursive subjects without ignoring ruptures in the discursive continuum, to understand authorship as a process simultaneously structured and subverted by the concordia discors of social reality—as itself concordia discors. At times I shall focus on rhetoric, especially, its ideological grounding, at times, on substance. But one needs to be careful not to draw too strict a distinction; at best, rhetoric and substance are only different ways of looking at the same thing. So, too, the distinction between an author’s depiction of the world and that world’s intrusions into his or her text, between dissonance represented and dissonance reproduced, will not always hold, not if texts do neither more nor less than record an author’s struggle to grasp and convey what he or she sees.

Contextual Considerations: Erôs and polis

What, then, to make of erôs as a specifically political emotion? Arguing that “eros is not merely a metaphor for politics but also its object and arena and part of the mechanism of its operation,” [40] Victoria Wohl aptly borrows from Lacan the term “quilting point” to describe how both erôs and politics cut across the same psychic territory, a plane on which dominance, subjection, and desire all come into play. [41] But I would return to a point to which Wohl alludes: that erôs provided Greeks with metaphors through which to talk about politics. I would expand that point as follows: erôs, sexual erôs especially, provided a shared consciousness upon which to ground political discourse, if not always the discourse of politics itself (we shall see that erôs-language shows up but little in assembly rhetoric and related evidence), then discourse about politics. Take, for instance, Socrates in Plato’s Gorgias. Commenting on shared emotion as a dialogical bridge, a point of recognition between speaker and listener, Socrates might as well be describing the forging of that first link in Vološinov’s ideological chain. As it turns out, Socrates is not just offering a random observation. For he uses erôs to open a channel to a skeptical Callicles. Both he and Callicles have loved, so Callicles must know what Socrates means. But Socrates also uses those commonalities as a way to accentuate areas of difference, to size up his—Socrates’—own love for philosophy against Callicles’ for politics (481c–d).

Of course, Socrates’ point is not just that he and Callicles love differently, but that Socrates, because he loves wisdom, not the Athenian body politic (the dêmos), loves better. Thus he uses erôs as an evaluative grid to show that Callicles’ conduct does not, in fact, measure up. But erôs here represents more than an instrument by which to gauge same and different, better and worse. Through erôs, Socrates taps into the Athenian imaginary, that great sea of images and feelings swimming within the Athenian unconscious. In so doing, Socrates exteriorizes and reifies feeling; he seeks to create a sense that all who share certain basic notions of masculine dignity and civic autonomy have their eye on Callicles and do not like what they see.

Self-Assertive erôs

We have seen that, for Athenian citizen-men, Aristogeiton’s victory over his rival could carry political resonance. But what if we reverse the terms? Does, in other words, this narrative and its reception suggest a sexual side to the average citizen’s sense of his autonomy, privileges, and powers? Since others have already argued as much (p. 11n43 above), I shall leave it at that. But I would still like to elaborate on the erotics of civic empowerment and self-actualization, though in contexts outside the Tyrannicide legend.

Put simply, tyranny posed a threat to the polis and to the citizen’s franchise—a threat from within. That schema, tyranny as systemic dysfunction, finds expression in one Presocratic thinker’s metaphor for bodily health. We are told that Alcmaeon described physical illness as “monarchy” (monarkhia, “rule by one”), where just one of the body’s elements or “powers” (the hot, the cold, etc.) rules over the others. Health, by contrast, he explained in terms of equality or isonomia, a balanced mixture of those same powers (fr. 4 D-K). Again, Alcmaeon will have been addressing bodily health, not politics. But his language—dunameis (“powers”), isonomia, monarkhia—suggests he was working from a political analogy.

To sum-up, Aristogeiton, lover and supposed tyrant-slayer, became a touchstone for a civically and sexually empowered masculinity, a cynosure for social dialogue expressing male-Athenian desire. Still, desire as one might, to actualize empowerment in self-interested ways, to be seen using one’s right of free speech to push policy benefiting not the many but just a few or even one—that prospect summoned misgivings lest ambition develop into a rapacious kind of erôs. For individualism, once it entered the public sphere, found itself face to face with a rival value: communitarianism.

Communal erôs

Prior to that, did Aphrodite or Peitho play a similarly political role? Whatever the official status of such cult in earlier times, by the early fifth century, Peitho was bridging the political and the sexual-matrimonial spheres in the city’s public poetry, which is to say, in its drama. Thus in Aeschylus’ Suppliants, the goddess makes two appearances: once as sponsor of persuasive speaking in the Argive assembly, once in the company of deities—Pothos (“Yearning”), Peitho, Harmonia (“joinery,” “harmony”), the Erotes (“Loves”)—assisting Aphrodite in her sponsorship of marriage. That dual appearance, suggests Froma Zeitlin, draws attention to parallel roles for persuasion, along with compromise and consent, in both marriage and politics. [72] In the same playwright’s Eumenides, a sexy sort of peithô helps Athena conciliate a disgruntled group of Furies threatening to inflict blight and discord on her favorite city. [73] So effective does Athena’s peithô prove that those same Furies, far from blighting Athens, pray instead for blessings on the city’s behalf—the blessings of civic harmony founded on mutual love and, interestingly, shared hate:

May faction (stasis), insatiate of ill, ne’re raise her loud voice within this city….Rather may they return joy for joy in a spirit of common love and may they hate with one accord; for therein lieth the cure of many an evil in the world.

Aeschylus Eumenides 977–987, trans. Smyth


Mutual love, shared hate for a common foe, “therein lieth the cure of many an evil”—or so Aeschylus’ Furies would have us believe. For when we think and feel alike, then are we liable to feel empowered to defeat our enemies and achieve our desires. Let us not, then, mistake this “spirit of common love” for some sort of philanthropic compassion. Again, it is just as aggressive as its self-assertive erôs counterpart. Only now, “team spirit,” consensus and cooperation, outweigh individualism.

This tension between free speech and consensus, each treasured by the Athenian democracy, [75] seems mostly to have been ignored by Athenians, though not by every Athenian. In their respective accounts of the Sicilian Debate, deliberations leading to the invasion of the island in 415 BCE, Aristophanes and Thucydides address the power of a passionately felt consensus to control the discourse. In Thucydides’ version (6.8–26), as in Aristophanes’ (Lysistrata 387–398), an individual speaker plays a key role in swaying opinion. Yet that speaker ultimately proves no more than a conduit for something else: Aristophanes’ Demostratus, for an ecstatic mania that had assemblymen voting unreflectively for an unwise proposal; [76] Thucydides’ Alcibiades, for an “erôs to sail” that, like a hostile force or a fit of laughter, “fell upon (enepese)” its victims “all alike” (6.24.3). This erôs left Athenians feeling empowered and confident, but it also exercised power over them, a power so forceful that nothing Nicias could say would deter support for the invasion. On the contrary, his attempts at reverse psychology only reinforced the city’s resolve (Thucydides 6.24.2). Nor were those opposed to the motion willing to vote their convictions, since to do so would have involved appearing hostile to the city’s interests (kakonous…têi polei, 6.24.4; cf. 6.13.1). Thucydides’ point? Among other things, that consensus, when it gains the kind of momentum this “erôs to sail” did, can create a social-discursive atmosphere hostile to the free exchange of ideas, to dialogue.

This coercive side to consensus shows clear affinities with a dynamic Bakhtin terms “centripetal discourse,” speech that literally “seeks the center,” that tries to force the whole conversation onto one track—normative discourse intolerant of a plurality of views. Its opposite is “centrifugal” (center-fleeing) or pluralistic discourse, [77] a dynamic evident in the democratic exercise of free speech. Hence paradox underlying democratic consensus, where the discourse of the many effectively suppresses all discourses but one. Part of that has to do with the ideological environment, how it provides common ground necessary to dialogue, yet in so doing, limits dialogue, too. But we need also to keep in mind specifically political factors: politicians jockeying for power and influence over the dêmos. In such a setting, the whole idea is to win assent to one’s views, to create consensus. Thus in the moment of the persuasive act, to foster consensus and impose one’s will become objects of a single desire. But no democracy can allow every citizen to have his or her way all the time. In the end, individual voices and desires have to yield to a single voice like the one proclaiming, “The people have resolved” (edoxe tôi dêmôi) in Athenian decrees. That voice we may understand as notional or actual, however we please. [78] Either way, it shows how consensus, that indefinable point at which the many seem, but only seem, to coalesce into one, represents no fixed state but a dynamic process, a concordia discors.

Overview of Book

In what follows, we shall look at that process and its reflection in the literature of classical Athens. Our focus: the dissonance between communitarianism and individualism, consensus and conflict, in the works of authors for whom erôs, passionate, destabilizing desire, symbolized that dissonance with a powerful expressiveness. Thus in chapter two, we explore the Periclean Funeral Oration as response to a crisis in persuasion, a way to unite a fractious and fragmented citizenry behind a controversial war policy. To that end, Pericles bids listeners “gaze upon the city’s power and become lovers—erastai—of it.” But does he mean lovers of the city or of its power? That, I suggest, Pericles leaves unclear. And so this image of the citizen as lover, while it encourages patriotic self-sacrifice, also appeals to the self-centered motivations of citizens. But that dissonance works in the orator’s favor. In telling listeners to become lovers of the city (or of its power), Pericles calls on them to abandon the logic of day-to-day for the “logic” of erôs. That logic lifts them up and out from routine deliberation and puts them in touch with a higher discourse-community, the heroic dead, whose self-sacrifice becomes not just commendable but positively irresistible, the fulfillment of a citizen’s deepest desires.

Turning from funeral oratory to comedy, I argue in chapter three that the politician-as-lover conceit in Aristophanes’ Knights presents us with a comic twist on the “demophilia topos,” the charge that one’s opponent in court or assembly is trying to seduce listeners with specious claims of affection. Staging demophilic politics as sexual courtship, Aristophanes foregrounds tensions between benevolence and its “evil twin,” flattery, in the leadership-styles of the city’s politicians. But Aristophanes does not stop there. Demos, the Athenian people personified and a virtual prostitute complicit in his leaders’ efforts to con and “bugger” him, pursues self-interest no less passive-aggressively, cynically, or covertly than they do. Hence value-reversals suggesting stasis, “strife” or “discord,” in relations between leaders and led.

In chapter four, we consider how the “music” of democratic consensus, antidote to stasis, plays against that of civic-phallic autonomy, bulwark against antidemocratic hubris, in Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen. That counterpoint, I suggest, builds on similar themes in the same playwright’s Lysistrata, likewise a drama in which women take on the male establishment. Both comedies play the ideal of homonoia and koinônia, concord and fellowship, off against fears of civil strife and socio-political emasculation. And both press the dissonant implications of civic erôs—its integrative aspects versus its divisive aspects—to their illogical extreme.

In chapter five, we turn to Socrates’ literary portrait, how it models the dialogical self as a sort of boundary phenomenon, a negotiation between speaker and listener, teacher and pupil, leader and led. That view may come across as counterintuitive. Socrates’ apologists pay tribute to the sage as one-of-a-kind, a man so uncompromising in his morality and habits, a lover so resistant to the temptations of love, as to seem utterly apart, what the Greeks called atopos (“place-less,” “strange”), in relation to his fellow human being. Yet Alcibiades’ image of the man as god in a satyr’s skin (Symposium 215a–222b) suggests a more complex creature, one whose outer layers express connection with, as well as disconnection from, the outside world. That complexity, I argue, finds expression in works manifesting tension between the simple, singular Socrates privileged by Plato, Xenophon, and Aeschines Socraticus, and a more multi-faceted and ambivalent Socrates deviously working his way into Socratic apologetic.

In closing, I consider the methodological and ethical implications of my findings, and their relevance for today’s world.

Footnotes

[ back ] 1. Konstan 1995:5.

[ back ] 2. Konstan 1995:6.

[ back ] 3. So Brock 1986.

[ back ] 4. “Tyranny”-despotism of the people, “slavery” of tyranny: Aristophanes Knights 1111–1114, 1330; Wasps 518, 548–549; Thucydides 2.63.2; Plato Republic 572e–573b; Aristotle Politics 1292a11–17; Wohl 2002:105–123, 215–269; McGlew 1993:183–212.

[ back ] 5. Cf. Darius on the instabilities of oligarchy and democracy: Herodotus 3.82. Thucydides on the shape of Athenian democracy after the death of Pericles: 2.65.10, with Rusten’s note, 1989:211–212. Thucydides on stasis: 3.81–84. See also Rosenbloom 2004b; Rosenbloom 2004a on the stasiastic atmosphere at Athens in the post-Periclean period; chapter 3 below for Aristophanes’ Knights.

[ back ] 6. Aristophanes compares the challenges of comedy producing to “having a go at,” and seeking “gratification” from, a sexual love object: Knights 517, for which LSJ s.v. πειράω A.II.2 citing the scholiast ad loc.

[ back ] 7. Wohl 2002; Monoson 2000:21–50; Konstan 1995.

[ back ] 8. See Wohl 2002:20–29; Konstan 1995:3–11.

[ back ] 9. Althusser and symptomatic reading: Montag 2003:82–84; Payne 1997:74–75; Althusser 1977:28–30.

[ back ] 10. Quoting Althusser 1979:231.

[ back ] 11. Althusser 1972:162; also 127–186; Montag 2003:77–80; Althusser 1979:231–236.

[ back ] 12. Interpellation: Althusser 1972:170–186.

[ back ] 13. Althusser 1972:154–155.

[ back ] 14. Instabilities in Thucydides’ Sicilian and herm-mutilation narrative: Wohl 2002:21–25, 152–158, 203–214. Cf. Parry’s and Dover’s comments quoted p. 212n80 and p. 213.

[ back ] 15. Bakhtin 1990:4–256, where the term “aesthetics” (Russian estetika) draws close to Greek aisthêtika, “things pertaining to perception.” In an intertextual model of authorship, that “seeing” additionally involves an author’s confrontation with, and assimilation of, other texts; see Edmunds 2001.

[ back ] 16. Bakhtin 1981:178.

[ back ] 17. Polyphony: Morson and Emerson 1990:231–268.

[ back ] 18. Bakhtin 1981:291, describing language generally. Cf. ibid. on prose fiction, where today’s and yesterday’s ideological languages are often given “embodied representation…in unresolvable dialogues.” The preceding, from Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” (1934–1935), does not square with the same critic’s 1961 notes for the second edition of his Dostoevsky study: “Discord is poor and unproductive. Heteroglossia is more essential, in effect, it gravitates towards concord, where the voices are always preserved as different and unmerged” (trans. Plaza 2005:220). Bakhtin’s own dialogue with discord produced no satisfying resolution.

[ back ] 19. Hall 1997:118. Bakhtin himself was careful to distinguish polyphony from heteroglossia (raznorecie, literally “multi-speechedness”): Morson and Emerson 1990:232. In Hall’s “polyphonic tragic form,” the two ideas operate simultaneously yet independently.

[ back ] 20. Bakhtin 1990; Vološinov 1986; Bakhtin and Medvedev 1985; Vološinov 1983; Bakhtin 1981. The Bakhtin circle: Brandist 2002a; Brandist and Tikhanov 2000.

[ back ] 21. Dialogue and architectonics (the structuring of authorial seeing): Holquist 1990; Morson and Emerson 1990 passim.

[ back ] 22. All speech-acts, including monologue and “inner speech,” presume a respondent, notional or actual: Vološinov 1986:38, 95.

[ back ] 23. Vološinov 1983:10.

[ back ] 24. Brandist 2004:108–111; Brandist 2002a:62–66; Vološinov 1983:10–13.

[ back ] 25. Austin 1975.

[ back ] 26. Here I closely paraphrase the summary provided by Brandist 2002a:63–64.

[ back ] 27. “Ideological chain”: Vološinov 1986:11.

[ back ] 28. Edmunds 2001:23–34 questions whether literature generally, and poetry in particular “does things” in the Austinian sense (e.g. the marriage formula “I do!”). Dialogical theory holds that, at the social level, all speech does something: it reaches out. For speech-community, cf. “discourse community” in Schiappa 1992; Lakoff and Johnson describing the socio-linguistic maneuvering involved in bridging cultural divides, 1980:231–232.

[ back ] 29. Vološinov 1986:9 (author’s emphasis). See generally Neuman and Tabak 2003:266; Bakhtin 1990:15–16, 41, 103–104; Bakhtin 1986:69; Vološinov 1986; Bakhtin and Medvedev 1985. Language as social was Saussure’s breakthrough insight; meaning as social evaluation, that of the Bakhtin circle.

[ back ] 30. Gardiner 1992:7. Bakhtin and Gramsci: Brandist 1996.

[ back ] 31. “…each living ideological sign has two faces, like Janus. Any current curse word can become a word of praise, any current truth must inevitably sound to many other people as the greatest lie,” Vološinov 1986:23. Cf. revalorization of “bad,” “ill,” and “sick” in popular usage.

[ back ] 32. For an overview, Derrida 1991:3–139.

[ back ] 33. Absence as necessary precondition for communication: Derrida 1982:314–318.

[ back ] 34. See Derrida 1982:1–27.

[ back ] 35. Dentith 1995:98–99; Bakhtin 1981:417–422.

[ back ] 36. Dialogue versus deconstruction, de Man’s deconstruction of dialogue: Morson and Emerson 1990:324–325.

[ back ] 37. Cf. LSJ s.v. ἔρως; Dover 1989:43.

[ back ] 38. Weiss 1998:49–50; see also Ben 1986:10–11. Cf. himeros in the “Nestor’s Cup” inscription: SEG xiv 604; GHI #1, on which Weiss 1998:50–51; Faraone 1996.

[ back ] 39. Erôs overcoming one from the outside: Sappho 47 L-P; Ibycus 286 PMG; Aeschylus Agamemnon 341; Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis 808; Thucydides 6.24.3. Erôs = madness (mania): Plato Phaedrus 241a, 244a–245c, etc.; cf. Archilochus 191 West; Theognis 1231, for which Müller 1980:163, 149–199; Euripides Iphigenia at Aulis 1264–1265. Erôs (sexual and non-sexual) as pathological, incapacitating: Hippocrates De mulierum affectibus i–iii 177; De virginum morbis 1; De humoribus 9; Thucydides 3.45.5; Erasistratus 25–27 Garofalo; Winkler 1991:222–223. Erôs as fortified epithumia (“desire”): Xenophon Memorabilia 3.9.7; Prodicus fr. 7 D K; cf. Isocrates 10.55. Erôs sharpened by separation: Thucydides 6.13.1; Carson 1986:30. Satisfaction leads to intensification: Foucault 1990:49–50, 66. See generally Ludwig 2002:121–157; Wohl 2002; Thornton 1997; Dover 1989:42–49; Carson 1986.

[ back ] 40. Wohl 2002:26–27.

[ back ] 41. Wohl 2002:2.

[ back ] 42. The problem is well articulated in Dougherty and Kurke 1998:1–6; Derrida 1982:322–327.

[ back ] 43. Hipparchus, brother of the reigning tyrant Hippias, had courted, but was rebuffed by, Harmodius, already the beloved of Aristogeiton. The jilted lover insulted Harmodius and his family; Harmodius and Aristogeiton plotted against Hipparchus and (of necessity) Hippias. Hipparchus, Harmodius, and Aristogeiton were killed; Hippias and his tyranny survived. But there is no single, canonical version: Herodotus 5.55, 6.109.3, 123; Thucydides 1.20.2, 6.54.1–59.1; Aristotle Constitution of the Athenians 18; Plato Hipparchus 229b–d; Wohl 2002:3–10, 210–213; Monoson 2000:21–50; McGlew 1993:150–156; Pomeroy 1975:75–76.

[ back ] 44. E.g. 893–896 PMG; cf. Plato Symposium 182c. For these commemorations, including hero cult, a famous sculpture group in the Agora, and a grand tomb in the Ceramicus, Monoson 2000:22–28 with notes, citations, and bibliography.

[ back ] 45. Dover 1989 remains the chief source.

[ back ] 46. See passages collected and discussed in Dover 1989:54–57.

[ back ] 47. Aristophanes Wasps 1025–1027; Cohen 1991:196–197.

[ back ] 48. Herodotus states that both Aristogeiton and Harmodius came from the same aristocratic clan of Gephuraioi (5.55, 57.1, 62.1), but Thucydides’ version, in which only Harmodius appears to be aristocratic, arguably reflects popular tradition.

[ back ] 49. Wohl 2002:7–8. The mesos, the “middle-class” peasant farmer, from about the 420s on, seems to have been adopted as poster-child by moderate democrats and oligarchs: Euripides’ Suppliants 244–245; cf. the Herald’s abuse (implicitly suspect) targeting democratic bumpkins at Athens, 417–422; see Carter 1986:88–98.

[ back ] 50. Herodotus 5.78; cf. Eupolis fr. 316 PCG; Pseudo-Xenophon 1.6–7; Demosthenes 15.18; 60.28; Monoson 2000:56–60; Ober 1989:296–298.

[ back ] 51. Halperin 1990:88–112. Cf. the Eurymedon vase, ethnic-military dominance expressed sexually: Smith 1999; Davidson 1997:180–182; Cohen 1991:184; Dover 1989:105; Pinney 1984; Schauenberg 1975. Also Eupolis’ Poleis, where subject states figure as desirable women: Rosen 1997. Debate over the (a)symmetries and symbolics of ancient Greek sexuality, p. 54n41 below.

[ back ] 52. Erotics of tyranny: Archilochus 19.3 West; Sophocles Oedipus the King 587–8; Herodotus 1.96.2, 3.53.4; 5.32; Isocrates 8.65, 113; Plato Republic 572e–573c; Wohl 2002:215–269; McGlew 1993:183–212; Rothwell 1990:39.

[ back ] 53. Herodotus 6.107.1–2; Plutarch Caesar 32.9; Suetonius Julius 7.2. Cf. Artemidorus 1.78, where the dreamer arkhei (“rules”) over a “willing” partner in incest, just as he “will stand at the head of the affairs of his city.”

[ back ] 54. In Suetonius, Caesar’s mother—Mother Earth—is subiectam in his dream. subigere in sexual contexts ordinarily refers to the male-active role: Adams 1982:4, 155–156; cf. subegit in Suetonius Julius 49.4.

[ back ] 55. The catchphrase for the early democracy seems to have been isonomia, “equality”: frr. 893, 896 PMG; Herodotus 3.80.6; Ober 1989:74–75.

[ back ] 56. Tyranny and democratic sovereignty, tyrannical surfeit and lack: p. 2n4 above.

[ back ] 57. See pp. 73–74, 78 below.

[ back ] 58. See Wohl 2002:124–170.

[ back ] 59. Cratinus fr. 258 PCG; cf. Telecleides fr. 45 PCG; Thucydides 2.65.9; Plutarch Pericles 16.1–3; see Schwartze 1971:11n13.

[ back ] 60. Thucydides 2.65.10. For the post-Periclean stasis, Rosenbloom 2004a; Rosenbloom 2004b.

[ back ] 61. See pp. 65–66 below.

[ back ] 62. See especially Wohl 2002:5; Monoson 2000:25–26, 31–32 on the elements of erotic male bonding and democratic-phallic threat embodied in the fifth-century statuary group of the Tyrannicides.

[ back ] 63. As e.g. in Aristophanes’ famous myth in Plato’s Symposium (189c–193e), on which Ludwig 2002:27–118.

[ back ] 64. See West 1966:195 on Hesiod Theogony 120. Cf. Acusilaus 2 F 6 FGrH; Parmenides fr. 13 D K; Plato Symposium 178a–180b.

[ back ] 65. Empedocles frr. 17–36, 59 D K. Cf. the “bridal of Heaven and Earth”: Aeschylus fr. 44 Nauck; Euripides fr. 898 Nauck.

[ back ] 66. Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics 1171a11–12; cf. Euripides fr. 358 Nauck; Suppliants 1088.

[ back ] 67. Xenophon Symposium 8.32–34; cf. Plato Symposium 178e–179a. See Leitao 2002 (Theban Band’s erotic character as philosophical fiction); DeVoto 1992; Dover 1989:190–192.

[ back ] 68. “To Aphrodite Hêgemonê tou dêmou and to the Graces,” late third-century BCE dedication from an altar found near Aphrodite Ourania’s sacred area in the Athenian Agora: IG II2 2798; Pirenne-Delforge 1994:39.

[ back ] 69. See Rosenzweig 2004:13–28 with bibliography; also political, Pirenne-Delforge 1994:26–40. (Possibly) political Pandemos at Ionian Erythrae: Merkelbach 1986. On Cos: Dillon 1999.

[ back ] 70. See Scholtz 2002/3.

[ back ] 71. Peitho cult at Athens: Isocrates 15.249; Demosthenes Exordia 54. Peitho as goddess: Buxton 1982:31–48. Peithô and democracy: Lysias 2.18–19.

[ back ] 72. Aeschylus Suppliants 523 (goddess or quasi-personification?), 1040, on which Zeitlin 1988.

[ back ] 73. Aeschylus Eumenides 885–891, 970–972, on which Kambitsis 1973 (Athena’s love for Peitho’s eyes). Persuasion in Greek culture, politics, literature: Worthington 1994; Buxton 1982.

[ back ] 74. Ober 1989:298.

[ back ] 75. See Ober 1989:299 on homonoia and isêgoria as “good, valuable to state and society, and attainable” in popular ideology.

[ back ] 76. See Henderson 1987:117–120 on the passage from Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.

[ back ] 77. Bakhtin 1981:275–288.

[ back ] 78. Dêmos could mean “the voting collectivity as a whole,” “the assembly,” “the poor” (this implied by Aristotle Politics 1279b21–22). As cited in decrees, dêmos designated the collectivity as a whole, though that collectivity would not typically come together in its entirety for assembly meetings. See Ober 1994:109–110.