In the beginning…

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In the beginning…

It was of course the ancient Greeks who gave the Western world (at least) its distinction between story and history and who first also showed (and showed an endless fascination with) just how permeable the boundary between them was. Nowhere is that boundary more permeable than in (hi)stories of beginnings, a ‘genre’ in which Greek literature and culture revelled. Being explanatory, narratives of beginning are constructed post-factum and are inherently teleological; they are both muthos and logos . In Sections 1.2 and 1.3 of this paper I look at a couple of aetiological moments to consider some of the different ways in which the very idea of a ‘beginning’ is used and how these raise important general issues for the theme of this panel. In Section 1.1, however, I range more widely across very familiar material and across more than one type of ‘explanation’, simply to suggest the scope of the subject for anyone interested in what we have learned from the past and how we can take forward our dialogue with it. Let us begin, then, at (almost) the beginning.

At the opening of the Iliad Homer asks the Muse to sing of Achilles’ wrath and its consequences, i.e. this will be the subject of his song, but he tells us that there will be a telos , an end: ‘and the plan of Zeus ἐτελείετο ’, ‘was being fulfilled, reached its telos ’. The beginning is already looking to the end, is indeed determined by the end, but it is clear that Homer is also concerned with a beginning: More is at stake here, of course, than how strongly we should punctuate after ‘fulfilled’. Homer’s method of slowly releasing information as he leads us into his story is very familiar, but it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves what the tradition learned from him.

Ancient scholars could not agree what Zeus’ plan was nor whether ‘from the time when…’ referred to that plan (whatever it was) or the point from which the Muse should start her song or both (and modern scholars have produced a third alternative), but what is important in the present context is that Homer’s chain of causation is anything but pellucid at this point. Much depends—as modern scholars have increasingly come to acknowledge—on what we are assumed to know. If, like many ancient readers, we know that there was a story, also celebrated in epic song, that the great wars of the Bronze Age were the result of a wish by Zeus to alleviate the over-population of a suffering world, then it is going to be very difficult to separate out the ‘cause/beginning’ of the Trojan War from the ‘cause/beginning’ of the wrath of Achilles, whatever ‘the plan of Zeus’ in v. 5 is taken to refer to. The ‘many deaths’ caused by Achilles’ wrath will, in such a reading, also serve Zeus’ greater plan(s), or—to put it another way—the wrath of Achilles will be one mechanism through which Zeus works his will. Behind each ‘beginning’ stands another explanatory narrative with the power to seep out and complicate, if not in fact undermine, the subsequent narrative. Against this background, the apparently pressing need, expressed in some fairly strong language, felt by both ancient and modern scholars (see, for example, the now standard German-language commentary on Book 1) to choose just one reference for ‘the will of Zeus’, to the exclusion of any ‘excess’ of meaning, casts interesting light on the nature of some forms of scholarly territorialism and scholarly insecurity.

The father of modern narratology, Gerard Genette, wrote of ‘the unavoidable difficulty of beginning’, and we now see that ‘Where do I begin?’ is not just a (very difficult) literary question, though it is that too. When in Book 9 of the Odyssey , at the start of his narrative to the Phaeacians, Odysseus poses the question, and then proceeds, quite literally, to begin at the beginning, ‘From Ilium the wind carried me…’ (9.39), he draws our attention (once again) to the poet’s very different manner of proceding in the larger structure which envelops Odysseus’ tale. Indeed ever since Homer, in other words for the Western world ‘always’, questions of ‘origins’ have been almost indissoluble from issues of where literary accounts of ‘origins’, ‘histories’ in fact, begin. Making choices about one almost always implies a choice about the other; we find it increasingly difficult to separate ‘history’ from ‘historical narratives’ and/or ‘stories’, whether we look to why such narratives are told or their effect in the world.

To digress slightly, it is worth reminding ourselves, in the context of ‘the Athens dialogues’, that it was an Athenian who for us is probably most closely associated with this whole nest of issues. As Thucydides tells us, he began his history of the Peloponnesian War, as the war began—a fact used as an example of the possibility of, or in Thucydides’ own case ability to, reason about the future on the basis of the evidence of the past. Here, implicitly, as he is later to do explicitly, he distances himself from all his predecessors, including Homer, whose work was avowedly about the past; Thucydides clearly uses the contemporaneity of his writing and what it describes as a claim to authority (cf. 1.21), a claim that extends to ‘origins’, though even here he puts (slightly murky) water between himself and the tradition. Odysseus had praised the blind Demodocus for ‘singing of the fate of the Achaeans … as though you yourself were there or heard from another [who was there] ’ ( Od. 8.491). The events at Troy were indeed only some ten years in the past, and Odysseus’ lavish praise of the bard who manifestly was neither there nor had had a previous eyewitness account nevertheless evokes a perfectly possible scenario in the world beyond Phaeacian society. Thucydides, however, shows himself aware of the dangers that attend eyewitness reports (1.22.2–3): you cannot believe all you hear from such informants. Anyone who watches the news on TV, particularly from the world’s really troubled places, rather than the parochial in-fighting of Western politicians, will appreciate Thucydides’ claim that eyewitnesses ‘do not all give the same account of events, but what each says is determined by their partiality or their memory’ (1.22.3). Many of us may think first of the modern Middle East, but unsettling examples lurk closer to home also. So too, where something ‘began’ is also, of course, not a neutral question; again, the world around us is full of painful illustrations, which again require no listing, of the truth which lurks behind the fact that Greek uses the same word for ‘responsible for’ and ‘at fault (for)’. ‘Beginnings’ are used to explain whole stretches of complex, tortuous history and their celebration in, for example, festival, public holiday and cult reinforces the historical narratives which they enshrine.

Secondly, it is Thucydides who famously thematises the issue of where something really begins, and who nudges us towards the realization that ‘cause’ and ‘beginning’ are not (always) synonyms; this he does, of course, by his distinction (1.23.4–6) between when and how the war ‘began’, with—on the one hand—its aitiai and ‘differences’ between the sides which explain ( ἐξ ὅτου ) the war, and—on the other—the ‘truest prophasis ’ which was growing Athenian power and the fear provoked by this in Sparta (another Thucydidean argument which strikes us as very modern, and very terrifying, indeed). This complex aetiology for the war, ‘arguably Thucydides’ greatest single contribution to later history-writing’ (Hornblower 1991:65), is, presumably, written in response to Herodotus’ equally famous opening claim that he will set out ‘for what reason ( δι᾽ ἣν αἰτίην )’ the Greeks and the barbarians fought each other, a claim which is then followed by various claims of responsibility ( aitios ) on both sides, but going back into the deepest recesses of history. Whatever one thinks of Herodotus’ assessment of causes, he—more than anyone else—taught us to take the long view; it is worth remembering that, in matters such as hostility between peoples, it is indeed the long view, usually enshrined in popular memory, which is paramount and which determines which stories and histories are told. The very scale of Herodotus’ undertaking points us towards an important truth.

One other (Athenian) aetiology of war is also worth mentioning here. Herodotus’ narrative has always been seen as a prime target of the account which Dikaiopolis gives in Aristophanes’ Acharnians of the origins of the war between Athens and Sparta in the mutual abduction of prostitutes between Megara and Athens: Parody of Herodotus (and Euripides) there may well be, but the passage presumably also reflects heated discussion, to which Thucydides might also be thought to allude, precisely about causes; trivialisation casts an ironic light upon the whole ‘historical’ discussion, and may therefore—with all the necessary caution—be used as evidence for that discussion. The speech also bears classic witness to the truth of Thucydides’ observation about the influence of ‘partiality’ on the account that ‘eyewitnesses’ give (‘Why do we hold the Spartans responsible ( αἰτιώμεθα )?’, but noteworthy too is Dikaiopolis’ careful chronology, which still has modern scholars scratching their heads. Here is a summary of vv. 524–539: We can, if we like, look for nuances of difference between the various usages of ἐντεῦθεν and/or see a reflection of a particularly ‘popular’ narrative style, but it also seems hard not to sense an amusing ‘take’ on how the chronology and causal connection of even quite recent events so quickly get ordered into very neat structures, usually of course more than one, and on the realization of that fact and its dangers. No doubt these things were the subject of endless conversations and disputes in the agora , but—as often—Aristophanes may also point us to debate of a rather higher order and of a kind which is still very much with us.

This is certainly not the place to discuss these famous passages of Herodotus and Thucydides at any length (even if I were qualified to do so), but it is worth recalling that Thucydides is formalizing, though this word does him an injustice, [1] what is of course inherent in very many narratives before him. If we return to Book 1 of the Iliad , we will see (because Homer makes us see) that whereas Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel over, and Achilles’ wrath can be traced to, Briseis, the truest prophasis of the quarrel and the wrath lies far deeper, in the nature of the two men and the system of values in which they find themselves embedded. At the beginning of Greek literature there is a problem of beginnings and causation, or—perhaps more important—a recognition that this is a problem.

The mysterious ‘plan of Zeus’ is almost immediately followed in the opening of the Iliad by the apparently much less mysterious claim (in the mouth of the Muse?) that ‘the son of Leto and Zeus brought [the two Greek leaders] together to fight in strife’. The verb ( ξυνέηκε ) is rare in this sense, but what is important in the current context is that, though Homer tells us that Apollo (not yet named) was angry at Agamemnon for his treatment of his priest and hence caused the plague (or, rather, the plague was the deadly shooting of his arrows), he does not say that Apollo ‘caused’ the wrath; there is, as we have seen, more than one ‘explanation’ for that, or rather more than one way of looking at it. If we ask whether, despite Homer’s silence, Apollo ‘caused’ the wrath (or even the quarrel) in any significant sense, we merely come up against issues of causation with which Aristotle and those who followed him were to wrestle. Apollo was appeased when Chryseis was returned to her father; the cause of his anger no longer existed, and that anger could have been halted without any quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon. That anger and its manifestation (the plague) was, however, the setting in which the two leaders clashed; without it, we cannot say what would have happened, though we have seen that Homer almost makes us believe that they would have clashed at some time. If Apollo cannot be blamed, can Zeus? We can— pace many modern scholars—hardly fail to pay attention to the close juxtaposition of ‘the son of Leto and Zeus’ to ‘the plan of Zeus’; just what is the connection between that plan and Apollo’s anger?

One reason which Homer makes us ask these questions is that he is constructing a polytheistic world for us, as well as a heroic society. In such a world ‘which god?’ is always a potent and important question, the answer to which one gets wrong at one’s peril; in his great aetiological poem on Greek rites and cults, the Aitia , Callimachus seems several times to have addressed just this issue. From the perspective of later literature, we can see that there is probably no god who, as we would say, works so closely with Zeus and whose dispensations form so integral a part of the overall dispensation of his father as Apollo. In Pindar’s First Pythian , a poem for a very particularly Apolline victory, it is the power and threat of Zeus which dominate the opening of the poem, and in Pythian 3, the central myth of which is the fate of Coronis, who slept with a mortal though she had already been impregnated by Apollo, the vengeance that Apollo and his sister wreak is glossed by ‘the anger of the children of Zeus is not empty’ (v. 11), a claim that takes us straight back to the first book of the Iliad .

I have belaboured, but also greatly simplified, this small point for so long, because the opening of the Iliad is not normally discussed when modern scholars turn to the Greek fondness for narratives of beginning and the discontents which attach to the analysis of causes. It may be objected that, though Homer is indeed interested in ‘causation’, this is restricted to the events of his narrative, and his tale is not properly ‘aetiological’ as that word is normally used, i.e. of a tale which explains a (repeated) phenomenon of our own world by reference to the past. From the early period it is the poetry of Hesiod of which we most think in this connection. Why is life so hard and so subject to disease? Because Prometheus (‘Forethought’) stole fire which the gods had hidden to try to help mankind and, in retaliation, Zeus and his fellow-gods created an enticingly beautiful woman (‘Pandora’) whom the foolish Epimetheus (‘Afterthought’) received into his house: The mode of this kind of story, inconsistencies and all, is very familiar. A one-time event in the past explains something fundamental about our contemporary world. There are three important characteristics of such a story; it is truly ’cosmic’, i.e. often involves the gods (including the greatest god), the change brought about is not trivial, and the ‘one-time event’ itself conforms to some extent already to the realities which it seems to explain. Thus ‘Pandora’ is clearly an avatar of all (contemporary) women, and the fact that it is a jar which she opens and from which she ‘scatters [the contents]’ is clearly relevant to the agricultural world of Hesiod and his audience. Explanation and description seep into each other, and this is to remain a fundamental feature of certain forms of aetiological narrative throughout antiquity, and one which has been much studied, for example in connection with Ovid’s Fasti . We might think of the Platonic Aristophanes’ account of the reason why love is what it is, which is also a description of what it is; once again, the beginning is modeled on the end. The differences between this kind of story and the aetiological narratives of Callimachus, in which, for example, chance plays an important role, suggest much about the internalization of narratives of causation in the centuries intervening between Hesiod and Callimachus.

Nevertheless, I think one can argue that the special place that the Iliad has always held in the Western tradition, and more specifically held in Greek culture, gives Book 1 of the Iliad an ‘aetiological’ slant: it is not, of course, that we live out a version of the quarrel of Achilles and Agamemnon, but they are a part of the mental furniture from which we build our sense of ourselves. Book 1 of the Iliad was the most studied text in Greek schools: pupils learned it and its lessons by heart, and (at rather higher levels) argued precisely about who was ‘at fault’; the pattern that it projected was indeed lived out (and one could, of course, say similar things about parts of the Odyssey ). Perhaps this explanatory function is actually part of being ‘a classic’.

E.R. Dodds began The Greeks and the Irrational , one of the most influential books in classical scholarship of the twentieth century, with an anecdote: A very 'classical' situation—two serious men, one a distinguished professor—in a very distinguished Museum (probably on a typically wet London Sunday). The young man knew that what he was looking at was the ‘real thing’, but he felt nothing twitch in his psyche ; for him, contemplating the beautiful, or indeed 'the classical', was not a classical, or even classicising, experience, or rather we might say that he felt that 'the classical' really was a foreign country, a place of distance and strangeness. The Augustan critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus says that in the last analysis decisions about which literary works really are classical and which are forgeries have to be left to the 'irrational' feeling of the competent judge (such as himself)—what is in and what is out, what is to be classical, and what is to fall short…? Dodds' young man too looked to his ‘irrational’ reaction, and is both surprised and somewhat ashamed that it does not match what he knows it is supposed to be, because he knows the crushing weight of tradition and of the judgement of his betters about these works of art. The sculptures are already in the Museum, safely labelled objects of admiration; they have long since passed every test that matters, but they do not pass the test for the young man.

This is an aetiological story, a story of origins. How did Dodds come to write The Greeks and the Irrational ? Answer: ‘This fragment of conversation stuck in my head and set me thinking. Were the Greeks in fact quite so blind to the importance of nonrational factors in man’s experience and behaviour as is commonly assumed both by their apologists and by their critics? That is the question out of which this book grew’ (p. 1). This is a first-person story of an incident said to have happened ‘some years’ before the telling ( how many we would like to know); on the surface, we have no (good) reason to doubt its essential veracity, even if it makes no reappearance in Dodds’ second aetiology for The Greeks and the Irrational in his autobiography, Missing Persons :

Dodds’ two aetiologies for his book are of course readily compatible, should one be concerned about how they fit together.[2] The suspicious might point out that the young man’s observation happily coincides with one of Dodds’ long-standing interests, as he himself tells us in Missing Persons , and as may be seen from, e.g., the appearance in 1929 of his essay ‘Euripides the irrationalist’. Nevertheless, the competing modes of aetiological narrative are not without interest, particularly in the context of the aetiological structures of ancient myth, poetry and historiography. On one hand, a one-time chance encounter with significant consequences; on the other, a gradual process, almost itself ‘irrational’ (‘without any planning on my part’), but clearly rooted in Dodds’ long-standing interest in ‘odder by-ways’, an interest amply documented in Missing Persons . The two aetiologies in fact are striking instances of some of the difficulties which beset the pursuit of historical causation, in antiquity as much as now; I am reminded of the endless pursuit in British schools of ‘the origins [or should that be ‘causes’] of the First World War’—does one look at much of European history since 1850 or so, or focus on a single assassination? The ‘Megarian Decree’ used, I believe, to hold a similar position in discussions of the Peloponnesian War (cf. above on Aristophanes’ Acharnians ). As ancient philosophers above all knew, the ‘Why?’ question is never easy to answer, and—as we have seen—it is probably to Herodotus and Thucydides that the Western world owes the first serious attempts to wrestle with this problem as far as the structures of power are concerned.

If Dodds’ story of the British Museum does not deliberately invite our disbelief—as many ancient, particularly poetic, aetiologies of cultural phenomena do—it is also a story which seems to advertise its gaps. Who was this young man and why did he pick out Dodds to unburden himself to? Was he one of Dodds’ Oxford students? If so, why does Dodds not tell us? We are, moreover, used to stories of this kind. The second-century AD novel of Achilles Tatius similarly begins with a first-person narrative; I paraphrase: ‘I was in Sidon looking at a picture of the abduction of Europa; on the picture Eros was depicted and I exclaimed “How the child rules over heaven and earth and the sea!”. As I said this, a young man, who was also there, said “I know that only too well – so many are the insults I have suffered at the hands of Love”’. And the rest is history, or story in fact. The painting of Europa and the bull is subsequently written into the fabric of Achilles’ narrative in various ways—it foreshadows much of what is to come, in fact. What emblematic function do the Parthenon marbles serve in Dodds’ book? At one level, the answer is ‘none’; Dodds never returns to them, and indeed never returns to the question of rationality and its discontents in art at all. At another level, they are crucial. Dodds wants to pick away at the bland and constructed facade of rational Greek culture to reveal a living, breathing organism where dark forces are at work, or at least where much is not susceptible to easy explanation. To represent the alleged view of Greek culture which he wants to unpick he could hardly have done better than choose the Parthenon marbles, celebrated as (literally) untouchable masterpieces, the highest expression of Greek genius, set out on display as timeless, changeless—indeed mummified in the Museum—objects of wonder, ‘classical’ in every sense. Dodds’ young man in fact is, at an unknown number of removes, descended from Nietzsche who, in The Birth of Tragedy , conjures up the Olympian gods of ‘Apolline culture’ ‘who stand on the gables … and whose deeds adorn the friezes in brilliant reliefs visible from a great distance’ (chap. 3, trans. Douglas Smith, adapted).For the young man’s ‘rational’ we could easily substitute ‘Apolline’, as Nietzsche’s use of the term has frequently been misunderstood, but has been extremely influential; [3] sculpture was, of course, for Nietzsche the Apolline art par excellence , as the well educated young man may be supposed to have known.

Be that as it may, there is another text which lurks behind Dodds’ anecdote. Anyone with a little classical learning (and this is (probably) post-war Britain where there was still quite a bit of that about) will almost inevitably think of the ‘funeral speech’ which Thucydides places in the mouth of Pericles as the textual manifestation of the same view. If the ‘Funeral Speech’ continues to be read (as I am informed) by every generation of Greek schoolchildren as a hymn to democracy and the Greek past, it was also read in this way countless ‘British’ schools, both in Britain and in the far-flung empire (or what was left of it). When Pericles tells his audience that he wants them to ‘look every day at the power of Athens and become her lovers’ (Thucydides 2.43.1), he set out a model for the education of generations of young men and women in schools a very long way from Athens: they did ‘fall in love’ with an idea, and the sight of the Parthenon marbles was, as Plato would have had it, the visible beauty which was to trigger the memory of that ideal beauty which was stored in their minds and kept alive by sentiment. Fortunately for us, Dodds’ young man was made of sterner stuff.

There is, of course, another (hi)story here. It is probably impossible to read Dodds’ anecdote now without thinking of the decades of bitter dispute about the Parthenon marbles, a dispute very often carried on (on all sides) with as much ‘irrational’ passion as with ‘rationality’; perhaps indeed the Parthenon sculptures are objects about which one cannot be (completely) rational, and one need not necessarily feel apologetic about that. If Greek art is so fundamentally rational, our relationship to it, of course, is anything but. At the very least, moreover, the existence of the new Acropolis Museum has changed the parameters of debate. We no doubt all have views about this subject (mine of course are entirely rational…), but what is important here is how the meaning for us of Dodds’ anecdote has changed over a comparatively short, though extraordinarily frenetic, space of time. Dodds’ story now ‘means’ in ways that we may be sure he did not intend. The phenomenon is not an isolated one.

Near the opening of the seventh book of Lives of the Philosophers , the book devoted to the Stoics, Diogenes Laertius tells how Zeno of Cypriot Citium, who was to found the School, came to philosophy: These anecdotes have been very much discussed, [4] and my focus will be strictly limited to my principal interest, which is how we view and use the past in our lives and imaginations. Some differences from Dodds’ anecdote are immediately apparent. The first anecdote is explicitly ascribed to sources at least a century and a half (and probably more) after the reported event; the more important way to put this, of course, is ‘after a century and half of developed Stoicism’. Both anecdotes, whatever their relationship (cf. further below), are manifestly ‘charter myths’ about ‘how it all began’; their starting-point is the present of Hecaton and Apollonius, not the past of Zeno. Secondly, there are rival versions of these anecdotes or, to put it more neutrally, these motifs turn up in more than one anecdote about how Zeno came to philosophy; Diogenes himself preserves some of these alternatives (cf. 7.4-5, 31-2). I shall here, however, restrict myself almost entirely to the passage cited above, as it is crucial to see how a particular story works in a particular place. Let me begin with the consultation of the oracle.

Zeno shows himself, as has long been noted, as having a natural bent for philosophy through the choice of question which he puts to the god. It has also long been noted that this story is, at an unknown number of removes, a descendant of the story which Socrates tells in Plato’s Apology of how Chairephon asked the Delphic oracle, which we might also think is the oracle implied by the Zeno anecdote, whether anyone was wiser than Socrates and received the answer that no one was (21a2–7); Socrates’ puzzlement at this started him on his ceaseless questioning of his fellow Athenians, i.e. on his philosophical mission, as Plato describes it. There are important differences (not least of course that Zeno himself questions the oracle and asks a suitably modest question), but the story shows Zeno ‘following Socrates’, that is, modelling himself upon the past master; to anticipate, links with Socrates will be found to be one of a number of features which draw the two anecdotes together. ‘How should one live?’ is of course the key ethical question of all Hellenistic philosophy, but the anecdote has Zeno specifically fashioning himself after Socrates. A famous ancient description of Plato’s Apology , in its current form no earlier than the second or third century AD but certainly going back before this, notes its generic complexity: In patterning himself on the Socrates of the Apology , Zeno is acting ‘as a philosopher should’. Secondly, in asking how he should live ‘best’, the anecdote evokes a whole tradition of poetic and philosophical debate about what a ‘good’ life might be, but we are, I think, entitled to think (again) specifically of Socrates. At the end of Plato’s Gorgias Socrates tells Callicles that they should follow the lead of (lit. ‘use as our guide’) the argument as it has emerged, namely that the just and virtuous life is ‘the best way to live’ ( ὁ τρόπος ἄριστος τοῦ βίου , 527e3) and indeed die. We should follow where that argument leads us, just as in the second anecdote Zeno is instructed to follow after Crates.

The god’s answer to Zeno seems quite as puzzling as the Delphic answer to Chairephon seemed to the Platonic Socrates; Zeno asked about life and he was referred to the dead. Zeno’s interpretation of the oracle—he took up Classics—is perhaps not one that we should use to encourage the study of Greek and Latin; ‘dead languages’ they may be, but we try not think of our subject as ‘corpses’. Philosophers, and especially Stoics, took oracles very seriously, and so, like Socrates, Zeno took the trouble to try to ascertain what the god meant. But what did the god actually tell Zeno to do, and we must ask that in the knowledge that ambiguity and polyvalency of meaning are both the very stuff of the literary representation of oracles and at the heart of Stoic (if not necessarily Zenonian) theories of language; once again, the anecdote encompasses the teaching of the School which Zeno was to found. Secondly, it is of some general interest for the ancient conception of ‘periods’, and of the stories that were told about them, that, for a story set in the late fourth century BC, the great writers were ‘the dead’; it is of course Aristophanes’ Frogs from a century or so earlier which seems to us the key text for such a conception, though there have (rightly) been modern protests at any inference from the Frogs that, with prophetic insight, Aristophanes was marking the passing of ‘classical drama’ as a whole. Less difficult, however, is the inference from the story of Zeno that Stoicism itself, like all the great schools of so-called ‘Hellenistic philosophy’, was a secondary creation, built on a ‘classical’ past. There was, after all, no doubt that Socrates really was dead.

Two interpretations of συγχρωτίζοιτο are current in modern scholarship. One connects the verb with χρῶμα ‘colour’: Zeno ‘should take on the colour/complexion of the dead’. If this is correct—and the verb is rare enough that it can hardly be ruled out—then Zeno’s interpretation is itself double. He takes on the colour of death by reading. Despite the standard picture of Socrates arguing in the agora and streets of Athens, all intellectual activities were, in the Greek popular imagination, conducted indoors, and so ‘intellectuals’ lacked a healthy outdoor tan; the best known example happens to be Socrates again, but this time the comic Socrates and his followers (Aristophanes, Clouds 103, 120, 1112). Secondly, Zeno ‘takes on the colour’ of the dead by making himself like them, and the only way that one can discover what they were like is by reading, an activity that is (again) picked up in the second anecdote; Zeno is, in effect, to become as like them as possible, and as we have seen, anyone who wishes to be a philosopher must become as like Socrates as possible. Behind Zeno’s reaction to the oracle lies a long tradition of reflection upon the purposes of reading and ζήλωσις ; as Dio Chrysostom was to put it, ‘The person who emulates ( ζηλῶν ) someone surely properly understands what he was like and by imitating his acts and his words he tries to make himself as like to that person as possible’ (55.4).

The second broad interpretation connects the verb with χρώς ‘skin’ and understands something like ‘come into close contact with’; the idea would be suitably paradoxical for an oracle, because normally one would avoid contact with corpses and the pollution that they carry with them.[5] The simple verb χρωτίζεσθαι (‘do some body work’?) is certainly found at least once in the Hellenistic period with the meaning ‘have sex/fuck’ ( Fragmentum Grenfellianum 36) and, for what it is worth, Eustathius, the twelfth century Bishop of Thessaloniki, twice uses συγχρωτίζεσθαι of ‘sleeping with’ (cf. Hom. 1069.2 with Van der Valk’s note). Could this be one possible interpretation of the divine word?[6] The apparently outrageous injunction to ‘couple with the dead’ would offer Zeno in fact a chance to smash conventional morality, just as the second anecdote highlights the Cynic background of Zeno’s Stoicism; just, however, as we will be told that Zeno in fact lacked the ‘shamelessness’ for the Cynic life (7.3), so he finds an interpretation of the oracle which is anything but scandalous.When we look back at the anecdote from the time of Hecato and Apollonius, we realize that Zeno and Chrysippus were in fact attacked for seeming to advocate, with an almost Cynic enthusiasm, practices such as incest and necrophagy, even if the corpses were those of one’s parents; [7] necrophilia would seem quite at home here. The god’s answer is (again) then not innocent of the future.

Is reading classical literature like ‘sleeping with the dead’? Well, yes and no, we might be tempted to respond. What we seem to have here is a humorously simplified version of a complex of ideas which had a profound effect in ancient rhetorical theory and which go back to Plato’s metaphysics and theory of inspiration.[8] Diotima’s teaching in the Symposium that erōs is ‘ erōs of procreation and of giving birth in the beautiful’ led eventually to the idea that close and prolonged association ( συνουσία perhaps) with the great writers of the past would lead those of us who are ‘pregnant in our souls’ (and Zeno was certainly one of those) to a productive mimesis of them, whether that be in our lives or in our own writings. In On the Sublime ‘Longinus’ famously compares Homer’s influence upon those who came after him, above all Plato, to the manner in which the Pythian prophetess at Delphi is made ‘pregnant with divine power’ by the vapour that comes up from the earth beneath the tripod on which she sits (13.2). For ‘Longinus’ Plato’s (almost Bloomian) struggle with Homer is a hallmark of his whole career and a principal reason why he himself became a figure whose writings were now inspirational models. Zeno is being told by the god to take the great figures of the past as his models, but he is also being offered the chance himself to become a model, as indeed, as ‘Founder of the School’ ( αἱρεσιάρχης ) he did.

There is another way too in which the god’s injunction foretells the future. It has been noted that virtually all of the stories of how Zeno came to philosophy stress ‘the bookish nature of Zeno’s acculturation’.[9] In the two stories with which we are here concerned Zeno devotes himself to the great literature of the past, and the serious Stoic engagement with poetry and the poetic heritage is one of the most distinctive things about their writing. Zeno himself was to write a ‘On listening to poetry’ ( περὶ ποιητικῆς ἀκροάσεως ), as well as five books of ‘Homeric Problems’ (Diog. Laert. 7.4 = SVF I 41). It is, however, Chrysippus, the prolific head of the school in the latter part of the third century, who is most associated with the poetry of the past. In addition to ‘How to listen to poems’ ( περὶ τοῦ πῶς δεῖ τῶν ποιημάτων ἀκούειν ) he wrote a book ‘On Poems’, and became notorious for his lavish use of poetic citation; Apollodorus of Athens scoffed that if you took the citations out of Chrysippus’ work, there would be nothing left (Diog. Laert. 7.181). For the Stoics, as indeed for others, poetry—particularly the popular classics of Homer and the Attic stage—could both give ‘starting-points’ ( ἀφορμαί ) for philosophical investigation and also provided a large body of illustrative material which was accessible to both experts and laypeople. We must not assume that the ‘ancients’ whom Zeno started to read in obedience to the god’s instruction were just prose-writers and/or philosophers.

The anecdote set in Athens might seem to be positioned chronologically after the oracle consultation; this is suggested both by the reference to Zeno's age (‘now thirty’) and to the fact that we find him doing, at the first opportunity which the story allows him, what he understood the god had told him to do in the first anecdote.[10] Two patterns seem to determine the movement of the narrative.One is the striking role of chance (shipwreck near Athens, chance encounter with Crates), [11] and explanations may well be sought for that in Stoic views of the operation of this ‘cause’ in the world. The second is the pointed contrast between Zeno as a merchant of luxury purple dye with which the narrative starts and the near-Cynic which he is at its close; there are obvious contrasts not just between ‘ways of life’ and between a concern with profit and a concern with virtue, but also between the ease with which wealth is lost by shipwreck and the permanence of the virtuous way of life. The Socratic model shows us of course that πενία is not something that the philosopher should be concerned about (cf., e.g., Plato, Apology 23c1), and Zeno himself was soon to declare it a matter of ‘indifference’ ( ἀδιάφορον ). If chance here plays an important part, whereas Zeno had deliberately sought out the oracle in the first anecdote, the bookseller’s curt (and amused or malicious?) response ‘Follow this man’ takes us back to the oracle, for the narrative follows a familiar pattern of oracle-consultation narratives.[12] In Aristophanes’ Plutus the old and poor Chremylos consults the Delphic god to see whether his son should ‘change his ways and be wicked, unjust and good-for-nothing’ as this seemed to be the way people got rich (vv. 32–38); in one sense Chremylos is asking a version of Zeno’s question, ‘how should one live?’, but on his son’s behalf. The god’s response was to tell him to follow after the first person he met on leaving the shrine and to persuade that person to come home with him (vv. 40–43); that person turns out of course to be the god Wealth.

Why is Zeno made to read the second book of Xenophon’s Memorabilia ? The most obvious answer lies in the conversation which opens that book between Socrates and one of his younger followers, Aristippus, a man given over too much (in Socrates’ view) to pleasure, and certainly believed in antiquity to be the Aristippus of Cyrene to whom the later Cyrenaic school of philosophy looked back. The whole episode at the head of Memorabilia 2 was obviously well known in antiquity: Diogenes Laertius reports that ‘Xenophon was ill disposed towards Aristippus, and for this reason he directed Socrates’ discourse against pleasure ( ὁ κατὰ τῆς ἡδονῆς λόγος ) against him’ (2.65). Certainly, the pleasure-seeking Xenophontic Aristippus is an obvious anti-model for the future founder of the Stoic school; Diogenes Laertius has him mocked by Diogenes the Cynic (2.66), Crates’ teacher. In Xenophon, Aristippus tells Socrates that his aim in life is to live ‘as easily and pleasantly as possible’ ( ῥᾶιστά τε καὶ ἥδιστα , 2.1.9); Zeno had asked the oracle in the first anecdote how to live ‘best’, not ‘most easily and pleasantly’, and again we see the two mutually explicative stories seeping into each other, filling out the picture. A number of details from Socrates’ conversation with Aristippus might resonate in the Zeno anecdote; when, for example, Socrates decries the foolishness of adulterers (2.1.5), he is very close to the Cynic tradition of Diogenes and Crates. Above all such details, however, is the famous story from Prodicus which Socrates tells Aristippus (2.1.21–34); this was one of the most imitated of classical texts, and the anecdote directs us to it.

The young Heracles was at the age at which young men show whether virtue or vice is to govern their lives, literally ‘by which path they will approach life’—another version of Zeno’s question to the oracle, and he went out to sit down in a quiet spot to think over precisely this question of which road he is to take: The two ladies, Virtue and Vice, then make their respective ‘pitches’ to the young hero; Virtue’s speech on the necessity of hard work and effort and on the control of bodily appetites is almost a foundational mission statement for certain trends in more than one area of Hellenistic philosophy, including Cynicism and Stoicism, but need not be pursued in detail here, though it has an obvious resonance in the case of Zeno who was himself to become a by-word for simplicity of living, physical hardness and self-control ( Diog. Laert. 7.26–27). More important in the present context is the fact that Socrates concludes by placing Aristippus in the role of Heracles: As he reads the words of Socrates/Xenophon/Prodicus at an Athenian bookshop, Zeno is both an Aristippus, but one who needs to turn not from pleasure but from money-making mercantile activity, and the young Heracles, pondering on his future, and it was Heracles who was also to be a crucial role-model in the future that lay ahead of him. As he reads, he is confronted ‘in the flesh’ not by the two ladies whom Socrates brought before Aristippus, as Prodicus had put them before Heracles, or even by the two types of life which Socrates had so sharply distinguished at the end of the Gorgias , but by just one of them, Crates, i.e. by living, breathing Virtue, and at that moment his future path is decided.

Just as the story of Chaerephon’s enquiry of the Delphic oracle and of Socrates’ response to the god’s answer embodies much of what was thought to be most characteristic of Socrates, so Zeno came to philosophy in a thoroughly emblematic way. It will, of course, be no news to anyone that accounts of ‘how it all began’ are not innocent of what they seek to explain, but it may be that a focus on such narratives is one way of trying to find a proper use for the distinction between ‘story’ and ‘history’. Whether that be so or not, there can be no doubt that Athens is the right place to begin the search.

Bibliography

Brunschwig, J. 2002. ‘Zeno between Kition and Athens’. In The Philosophy of Zeno (ed. T. Scaltsas and A. S. Mason). 13–27. Larnaka.

Hahm, D. E. 1992. ‘Diogenes Laertius VII: On the Stoics’. In Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II 36.6:4076–4182. Berlin.

Hornblower, S. 1991. A Commentary on Thucydides. Vol. I, Books I–III. Oxford.

Hunter, R. 2009. Critical Moments in Classical Literature. Cambridge.

Lloyd-Jones, H. 1982. Blood for the Ghosts. London.

Parker, R. 1983. Miasma. Oxford.

Footnotes

Note 1
Cf. Hornblower 1991:65.

Note 2
I hope that it will not need spelling out that I am here not concerned with the actual 'origins' of Dodds' concerns or with the history of scholarship's engagement with the 'irrational', cf., e.g., Lloyd-Jones 1982:174-5 on the 'great movement' to be traced from Nietzsche to Dodds.

Note 3
Cf. further The Greeks and the Irrational pp. 68-9 on Nietzsche’s ‘“rational” religion of Apollo’. For Nietzsche's more general influence on Dodds cf. Missing Persons 19-20.

Note 4
Guidance and bibliography in Hahm 1992:4088-4105; cf. also Brunschwig 2002:16-17. I am very grateful to David Sedley for his guidance here.

Note 5
Cf. Parker 1983:32–48.

Note 6
A standard ancient gloss (e.g. Suda 1313) for χρωτίζεσθαι is πλησιάζειν ‘to draw close to, associate with’, which can also have a sexual sense as the context requires; another such verb is ὁμιλεῖν .

Note 7
Relevant texts are gathered in SVF I 253–256, III 746–753. One of the most interesting and virulent of such attacks is that in chap. 7 of the surviving text of Philodemus, On the Stoics (Dorandi 1982).

Note 8
What follows draws on my analysis in Hunter 2009:110–112, which should be consulted for a fuller account.

Note 9
Brunschwig 2002:17.

Note 10
Of itself, of course, this could be a further element of ‘chance’ in the narrative (cf. below), but a different meaning is imposed by the shape of the text as a whole.

Note 11
Hahm 1992:4090.

Note 12
The answer is of course also dramatized in Diogenes’ arrangement of his work, whereby the Stoics led by Zeno ‘follow’ the Cynics.