Metadata
- Author: Teddy Fassberg
- Full Title: I Am an Article About the Speaking Objects of Ancient Greece
- URL: https://psyche.co/ideas/i-am-an-article-about-the-speaking-objects-of-ancient-greece?utm_source=rss-feed
Highlights
- We must imagine a world in which writing is new, in which it is unclear what kind of conventions govern written communication. In such a world, the use of the first person would have allowed the novel technology of writing to simulate the most fundamental form of communication in an oral society: conversation. Numerous epitaphs, through their use of the second person too, suggest that this was their author’s intent. (View Highlight)
- Consider an epitaph composed by the poet Simonides in honour of the celebrated 300 Spartans slain in the battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE:
O stranger, report to the Lakedaimonians that here we lie, obedient to their words. (View Highlight)
- Objects employing the first person to identify humans with whom they were associated would easily be interpreted, then, as messengers, ventriloquising them in their absence. (View Highlight)
- Interestingly, the model of messenger underlies much of early Greek literature. Take the opening of the Iliad: ‘Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus.’ (View Highlight)
- The story of Achilles is not presented here as Homer’s; Homer is merely the mouthpiece of the Muse. The Odyssey is similarly set in motion by the singer’s appeal to the Muse to tell him of ‘a man of many devices’. The 5th-century lyric poet Pindar sings: ‘me, as her chosen herald of wise words, the Muse has appointed for Greece.’ (View Highlight)
- But there is a problem. Pindar’s staggering skill would have convinced his audience that, indeed, he was blessed by the gods, but why should anyone believe an Italian oil flask that it belongs to a woman named Tataie, not to mention the threat that its thief would go blind? On what authority could the flask make a legal claim, even if we should not imagine it to be made entirely seriously? (View Highlight)
- As we might expect in view of its novelty, the authority of writing was a problem in Greek culture. Nowadays written documents are usually understood as more dependable than fickle humans, but, for centuries after writing’s inception, it was the other way around: oral testimony was considered more reliable than a written record. In contemporary literature, writing was likened to a helpless child. In Aristophanes’ comedy Clouds, the figure of the author speaks of a play he composed but didn’t produce as being like a child he was forced to abandon. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates warns his eponymous interlocutor that a written text ‘needs the support of its father’. If it is criticised, he explains, it will not be able to stand up for itself. (View Highlight)
- Homer worked to establish his authority in other ways, too. Narrating the apparently dry catalogue of ships was, in fact, a delicate affair; the Athenians were later accused of tampering with the text in an attempt to establish their historical claim to the neighbouring island of Salamis. It is therefore important – and not incidental – that nothing about Homer’s personal circumstances can be gleaned from his poetry. He is a man without qualities, which allowed multiple Greek cities to lay claim to him, and all of them to identify with his work. It is because he achieved Panhellenic status that the catalogue was used as historical evidence in the dispute over Salamis. (View Highlight)
- Homeric poetry drew on venerable oral traditions, and certainly was not designed for readers, but the strategies of authorisation he employed offered themselves to early writers faced with the problem of crafting messages which did not require ‘paternal’ support. Like Homer, the authors of our speaking objects put their words in the mouths of more commanding authorities: the objects themselves. As the expertise of the Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (‘Memory’), with regard to the past was unquestionable, so too no one was better placed to speak of the legal status of the oil flask or kylix than the objects themselves. Korax’s kylix was not, after all, simply the medium of its owner’s message, but also its subject. They were able to inspire greater confidence because, like Homer and other messengers of the Muse, they were reliably impartial. It is no mere pun to say that their object-ivity granted them the authority that interested human parties could never have. (View Highlight)