Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity

368 Pages·2003·1.91 MB·English

by  Ralph Mark Rosen

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ANDREIA
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MNEMOSYNE

BIBLIOTHECA CLASSICA BATAVA
COLLEGERUNT
H. PINKSTER • H. S. VERSNEL
D.M. SCHENKEVELD • P. H. SCHRIJVERS
S.R. SLINGS
BIBLIOTHECAE FASCICULOS EDENDOS CURAVIT
H. PINKSTER, KLASSIEK SEMINARIUM, OUDE TURFMARKT 129, AMSTERDAM
SUPPLEMENTUM DUCENTESIMUM TRICESIMUM OCTAVUM
RALPH M. ROSEN AND INEKE SLUITER
ANDREIA
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ANDREIA

STUDIES IN MANLINESS AND COURAGE

IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY
EDITED BY
RALPH M. ROSEN AND INEKE SLUITER
BRILL
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2003
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This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Andreia : studies in manliness and courage in classical antiquity / edited
by Ralph M. Rosen and Ineke Sluiter.
p. cm. — (Mnemosyne, bibliotheca classica Batava. Supplementum ;
v. 238)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9004119957
1. Andreia (The Greek word) 2. Classical literature—History and criticism.
3. Greek language—Semantics. 4. Masculinity—Terminology.
5. Civilization, Classical. 6. Courage—Terminology. I. Rosen, Ralph
Mark. II. Sluiter, I. (Ineke) III. Series.
PA430.A53 A53 2003
482—dc21 2002028392
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
[Mnemosyne / Supplementum]
Mnemosyne : bibliotheca classica Batava. Supplementum. – Leiden ;
Boston : Brill
Früher Schriftenreihe

Teilw. u.d.T.: Mnemosyne / Supplements

Reihe Supplementum zu: Mnemosyne

238. Rosen, Ralph M. & Ineke Sluiter (eds.) : Andreia.

Andreia : studies in manliness and courage in classical antiquity / ed by
Ralph M. Rosen and Ineke Sluiter. – Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2003
(Mnemosyne : Supplementum ; 238)
ISBN 90–04–11995–7
ISSN 0169-8958
ISBN 90 04 11995 7
© Copyright 2003 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written
permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal
use is granted by Brill provided that
the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright
Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910
Danvers, MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.
printed in the netherlands
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
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 Ineke Sluiter and Ralph M. Rosen, General
Introduction .............................................................................. 1

Chapter 2 Karen Bassi, The Semantics of Manliness in

Ancient Greece ........................................................................ 25

Chapter 3 G. I. C. Robertson, The Andreia of Xenocles:

Kouros, Kallos and Kleos ............................................................ 59

Chapter 4 Sarah E. Harrell, Marvelous Andreia: Politics,

Geography, and Ethnicity in Herodotus’ Histories ................ 77

Chapter 5 Ralph M. Rosen and Manfred Horstmanshoff,

The Andreia of the Hippocratic Physician and the
Problem of Incurables ............................................................ 95

Chapter 6 Adriaan Rademaker, “Most Citizens are

Europrôktoi Now”: (Un)manliness in Aristophanes .................. 115

Chapter 7 Joseph Roisman, The Rhetoric of Courage in

the Athenian Orators .............................................................. 127

Chapter 8 Edward E. Cohen, The High Cost of Andreia

at Athens ................................................................................ 145

Chapter 9 Peter T. Struck, The Ordeal of the Divine

Sign: Divination and Manliness in Archaic and Classical
Greece ...................................................................................... 167

Chapter 10 Marguerite Deslauriers, Aristotle on Andreia,

Divine and Sub-human Virtues ............................................ 187

Chapter 11 Helen Cullyer, Paradoxical Andreia: Socratic

Echoes in Stoic ‘Manly Courage’ .......................................... 213

Chapter 12 Myles McDonnell, Roman Men and Greek

Virtue ........................................................................................ 235

Chapter 13 Onno van Nijf, Athletics, Andreia and the

Askêsis-Culture in the Roman East ........................................ 263

Chapter 14 Joy Connolly, Like the Labors of Heracles:

Andreia and Paideia in Greek Culture under Rome .............. 287

Chapter 15 Jeremy McInerney, Plutarch’s Manly Women .... 319

Indices .......................................................................................... 345
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1
CHAPTER ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Ineke Sluiter and Ralph M. Rosen
1. Introduction
On September 11, 2001, four American planes were hijacked and
turned into flying bombs, two of which were flown straight into the
two towers of New York’s World Trade Center. The Twin Towers
collapsed, killing and burying thousands of people in tons of debris.
In the mondial outrage over these attacks, they were condemned
time and again as ‘cowardly’ and ‘terrorist’ attacks. When celebri­
ties like Susan Sontag and Bill Maher, the host of the talk-show
‘Politically Incorrect’, went public with their view that whatever one
could say about these attacks, they could hardly be called cowardly
since the hijackers were in no way trying to get off scot-free but
knew that their actions would cost them their lives,1 the reactions
were visceral: people were appalled at the thought of justifying the
terrorists by giving them credit for courage. A spokesperson for the
White House stated that “people have to watch what they say and
watch what they do”—a statement quickly relieved of its dangerous
implications for the First Amendment by the White House dropping
its first half.2
1 Of course, the action could be called ‘cowardly’ with equal justification and
remaining within the same general descriptive framework: it is generally accepted
that not giving people a chance to defend themselves (as in hitting someone from
behind) may be called ‘cowardly’, and certainly neither the passengers on board
the planes nor the people in the WTC were given a fair chance that way. However,
it is true that embracing personal danger would certainly disqualify someone from
being called ‘cowardly’. This just goes to show that the same action may be called
cowardly or courageous depending on one’s point of view, and one therefore has
to look for other explanations of their use, in this case the performative force of
the utterance. Incidentally, Susan Sontag considers ‘courage’ a morally neutral
value.
2 Susan Sontag’s comments appeared in The New Yorker of Sept. 24, 2001. The
information in this paragraph is based in large part on an article in The New York
Times of Sept. 29, 2001 by Celestine Bohlen.
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What this incident shows among other things is how deeply polit­
ical and rhetorical language can be, and to what extent it is colored
by our perception of reality and in turn shapes that perception. If
the only criterion for courage is ‘assumption of risk’, the attacks
would be courageous—but if one looks at the actual use of such
terms, one finds that the situation is far more complex. Calling some­
one or something ‘courageous’ is to commend that person or action,
and thus has a performative force that far outstrips the merely descrip-
tive—in that sense the visceral reaction of the general public, although
unreflected, is very defensible. Conversely, calling an action ‘cow­
ardly’ as part of its blanket condemnation may hide certain aspects
of it which from a different ideological perspective could have led
to a very different description—this may have been what Susan
Sontag wanted to point out, although she picked a particularly bad
moment for making an (incomplete) philosophical point about seman­
tics. It turns out understanding what courage means is not necessar­
ily enough to understand how the concept is used.
The United States chose to describe the actions as an ‘act of war’,
and this made the discourse of courage and cowardice all the more
poignant. In fact, warfare may always have been the outstanding
opportunity for proving one’s manliness and courage. In Theodore
Roosevelt’s eyes, for example, the ideals of nationalism and national
unity were bound up with the opportunities offered by warfare.3 War
and the stress and dangers of combat formed an opportunity for
men to recover a sense of manliness that had been impaired by the
new industrial and bureaucratic order of the 1890s. “True men, he
believed, proved themselves on the battlefield, not in bureaucracies”.4
TR believed that the American nation should be grounded in racial
hybridity, and accordingly, he consciously created his famous regi­
ment of the Rough Riders as a melting pot of different ethnic back­
grounds, again to be unified by the pressures of war. There were
limits to his inclusiveness, however: no African or Asian Americans
were selected to form part of the Rough Riders. However, when the
Rough Riders engaged in their most famous exploit, the mad rush
on and conquest of San Juan Hill in Cuba in 1898, the victorious
commander found himself the leader of both white and black troops:
3 The next two paragraphs are based on Gerstle 2001, chapter 1.
4 Gerstle 2001, 27.
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3
without the help of the black Ninth and Tenth regiments, fighting
side by side with the Rough Riders, the battle would probably have
ended differently.
Gary Gerstle points out that this state of affairs could have led
TR to extend his melting pot theories to include African Americans,
but instead something else happened. Although happy to acknow­
ledge the achievements of the black soldiers immediately after
the event, TR proceeded systematically to diminish or eliminate the
African American contribution to the victory in later accounts of the
battle.5 The black troops might have been excellent fighters, TR
claimed, but “they were peculiarly dependent on their white officers”;
and they failed to stay in their assigned positions and even ran,
when, due to the high casualty rate among their officers, they were
left on their own.6 In other words, they did not behave as real men
should have, but were cowardly. Note how TR chooses to frame his
disparagement of the African American soldiers in terms of a dis­
course of courage and cowardice—the point is again a political one:
the exclusion of the black population from the all-American melting
pot. Incidentally, the doubts cast on the fighting abilities of black
soldiers, even when commanded by white officers, would lead,
e.g., to their virtual exclusion from combat in World War I (Gerstle
2001, 38).
The study of the nature and use of value terms in any commu­
nity quickly leads the researcher to core issues of cultural identity
and construction of self and society, including the behavioral norms
by which one judges the social value of others and is in turn judged
oneself. This goes for our own age as well as for earlier stages of
history. As so often, the Graeco-Roman world offers us both a rec­
ognizable set of issues and the clinical distance to appreciate its sin­
gularity, in this case in the context of studying the social function
of the discourse of manliness and courage and their opposites. It is
this route into the heart of the classical world that the Classics
Departments of the Universities of Leiden and Pennsylvania chose
in organizing the first of what will hopefully be a series of Penn–Leiden
Colloquia on Ancient Values. For this first installment, which took
5 Gerstle 2001, 35f.
6 Gerstle 2001, 36f., pointing out the tendentiousness of these statements. Notice
the emphasis on “staying in one’s assigned place” as a sign of manliness and
courage—see below on Plato’s Laches.